When They Were Young: A Coming-of-Age Saga

In any category for failed films with a fascinating premise and stellar cast, 2008’s Flashbacks of a Fool deserves a spot at the top of the list. Although the title perfectly describes the narrative structure and the protagonist, it creaks with obviousness. Daniel Craig plays the fool, a British actor named Joe Scot who has destroyed his once-enviable career with booze, drugs and non-stop anonymous sex – a role model for Charlie Sheen! He lives in a sterile California mansion, where his black housekeeper, Ophelia (American rapper Eve), seems to be the only person who cares enough about him to say: “You’re a disgrace to white folks.”

When his agent drops him around the same time Joe learns that an old chum has died back in the United Kingdom, he hits bottom by getting drunk and wading into the surf off Malibu. Suicide? Apparently not. That watery sequence provides an awkward segue, as the script by writer-director Baillie Walsh suddenly lands on the English coast 25 years earlier. The Scot family – Joe’s mother Grace (Olivia Williams), his Aunt Peggy (Helen McCrory) and little sister Jessie (Mia Clifford) – lives on the beach in a sprawling, slightly funky cabin. The nearest neighbor is a cranky busybody, Mrs. Rogers (Miriam Karlin). Two doors down: the flirtatious Evelyn Adams (Jodhi May), her rarely-seen husband and their neglected daughter Jane (Jodie Tomlinson), who is about eight.

Win Win: Thomas McCarthy’s Moving, Memorable American Tale

Paul Giamatti and Alex Shaffer in Win Win.

Win Win, the latest film from writer-director Thomas McCarthy continues in the same pleasing vein of his two previous movies, The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitor (2007). It, too, is concerned with the lives of ordinary people who sometimes do extraordinary things, much like the recluse (Peter Dinklage) in The Station Agent who affects a motley group of people when he moves to their neighbourhood; to the lonely college professor (Richard Jenkins) in The Visitor who changes lives, not least his own, when he befriends a pair of illegal immigrants in New York. Win Win revolves around Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), a lawyer/wrestling coach in New Jersey, who reluctantly takes in Kyle (Alex Shaffer), a young man  who has left his Ohio home to be with his grandfather Leo (Burt Young). The only problem is that said relative, suffering from early-onset dementia, is now in a nursing home, which leaves Kyle with few options but to move in with Flaherty and his family. What McCarthy does with this seemingly thin tale is nothing short of miraculous.

Eye of the Tiger: In Defense of Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

As a relatively new mother, I was unable to escape the hype surrounding Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Penguin, 2011). For weeks, my eyes inadvertently wandered to reviews, mostly scathing, of this alleged “Freudian nightmare” treatise on parenting. While Chua is a successful law professor at Yale, has authored numerous articles and two compelling books on political history and economic issues, she is recognized in most households as mean mommy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother shocked a nation of parents and non-parents alike over Chua’s “Chinese” method of parenting. Her philosophy encompasses strict rules such as: no TV, no video games, no drama class, and no sleepovers. Children must honour their parents, play either the piano or the violin (perfectly), and they must never receive a grade less than an A. Before the book hit the stores, endless tear-stained reviews poured into the media, many accused Chua of taking her tough-love tactics too far, of being abusive, of being a fanatic and worst of all, of stealing the childhood of two innocent girls.

While the hype seemed very entertaining, I had no intention of reading another parent’s latest musings, mainly due to my strong aversion to the rise of mommy-literature and mommy-bloggers. I feel no need to publicize my child-rearing methods, nor do I have a desire to read the same philosophies of mass-marketed pseudo-intellectuals. Alas, my efforts to avoid the debate came to an end one evening when one especially cheeky rascal tossed a copy of the book in my lap over dinner. As he sat there quite proud of his gag gift, I managed an underwhelmed “thanks,” while I struggled to decipher whether it would fit in my purse with my more important books. When I finally committed to reading –  what I was expecting to be sanctimonious garble – I was incredibly surprised. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was frustrating, inspiring, thought-provoking and above all entertaining. It was not filled with the mere tirades of a matriarchal maniac, but instead featured the courageous journey of one tremendous woman determined to create the best life for her daughters as humanly possible. I found myself wanting to defend Amy Chua to the bleeding heart masses.

Produced and Abandoned: The Soloist (2009)

Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr in The Soloist

I was just about ready to give up on Jamie Foxx. Everything he'd done since his rightly celebrated turn as Ray Charles was utterly forgettable. It’s not that he'd been necessarily giving bad performances, but that his acting was begining to resemble doing chores. For example, while playing a composite of Berry Gordy in Dreamgirls (2006), he was so dull that it was hard to believe that the founder of the exuberant Motown Records could have been so dour. Portraying the homeless schizophrenic musician Nathaniel Ayers in The Soloist, however, brought Jamie Foxx back to life.

Beauty in Simplicity: Buddy Miller's The Majestic Silver Strings

Americana has become the fashionable label for music that's defined as too country for L.A. and too pop for Nashville. But long before the new definition entered the vernacular, Buddy Miller had already established a sound and feel to his music that was at once a blend of those two different musical sensibilities. On his new release, The Majestic Silver Strings, Miller (with fellow guitarists Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz) has re-imagined the music while still remaining true to its roots.

Miller's new album is his first since hooking up with Robert Plant a few years ago and it is a beautiful sounding work that defines "Americana" without paying lip service to the genre. Sure, The Decemberists put out a decent record last month (The King is Dead), but this is the real deal. An album equally at home in the traditions of American roots music, The Majestic Silver Strings sways from the traditional country heard in "Cattle Call," to the rockabilly of "No Good Lover," to cowboy songs such as a tasteful version of the Lefty Frizzell hit "I Want To Be With You Always," sung by guest vocalist, Patty Griffin. Like most of the music on this album, the song is long on charm and short on pretense. Everybody plays with a casual approach that brings out the considerable talent in the band.

Talking Out of Turn #15: Heather Robertson on MacKenzie King (1984/86)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM 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 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

One genre that came into prominence in the eighties was the pop biography. Due to the growing influence of celebrity shows on television and tabloid journalism, the pop biography transformed the literary form into an open field of speculation where we could imagine aspects of the life told, not just read about the facts in the subject's life. If Christina Crawford's shrill and exploitative examination of being Joan Crawford's daughter represented one pole of this change, there were other writers who brought a playful and more thoughtful perspective to biographical journalism.

 

author Heather Robertson

In the chapter Icons Revisited, I included a number of writers who re-examined iconic figures in styles less formal than previous work. Some of the writers included Barbara Branden on Ayn Rand, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on the Kennedy family, former leftist David Horowitz on the Ford family, John Malcolm Brinnin on Truman Capote and Heather Robertson's fictionalized biographies on former Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (Willie: A Romance in 1983, Lily: A Rhapsody in Red in 1986, Igor: A Novel of Intrigue in 1989).

Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King

King, a member of the Liberal Party who was first elected Prime Minister in 1921, came under scrutiny in the eighties for his claim to having clairvoyant powers and the rather bizarre relationship he had with his mother. Rather than skirt the claim, Heather Robertson's trilogy, drawn out of both fact and fiction, delved into the psychological underpinnings of the Canadian leader without exploiting any of the prurient fascination in the subject. In this interview, I've cheated somewhat by editing together two different conversations with Robertson in order to provide a wider scope of her perspective on King.

An Unexpected Problem: Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific

The touring production of the 2008 Tony-winning revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's South Pacific wrapped its second Toronto production in a year yesterday (it's part of the local company's, Dancap, subscription series). Normally, I wouldn't bother reviewing a show that has closed, but since it will likely set up tent in another city soon (though that city has not yet been announced), I felt there was an issue I had to address.

Full disclosure: I've never been a fan of musical theatre, whether it's on stage or on film, with the exception of Singin' in the Rain (1951), so I attended a little reluctantly. Based on James A. Michener's World War Two-set Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, or rather series of linked stories, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), the musical tells the story of Ensign Nellie Forbush, an American nurse stationed on a fictitious island near the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. She's attached to a Navy command post located there. The military men and nurses have not seen combat and while away their time flirting, falling in love and carousing. Well, the men do the carousing, in such songs as “There's Nothing Like a Dame” and “Bloody Mary.” Nellie has fallen in love with an ex-expatriate French man, Emile de Becque. De Becque is a plantation owner on the island who has more than one secret. She's conflicted because de Becque's mysteries are irritating and he's a lot older than her. They sing about their love, break up, fall back in love, break up, make up, bicker, are separated and then finally reunite. The subplot features a navy flier, Lieutenant Cable, who has fallen in love with a local Polynesian girl.

Oh-So-French: Francois Ozon’s Potiche

Given Hollywood’s prolific record of remaking French comedies, any day now we’ll probably hear that someone is about to start shooting Potiche. The English translation: “decorative vase.” Idiomatically, it becomes “trophy wife,” even though the story’s middle-aged protagonist actually seems more of a grande dame in denial while her unfaithful husband routinely romps with his trophy mistress. But no need to parse words when it comes to cheating hearts. Vive la difference!

Perhaps Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon or another mature American celebrity would replace Catherine Deneuve, who stars in the original as Suzanne Pujol, the bourgeois spouse of tyrannical Robert (Fabrice Luchini). In their provincial town, he runs the family umbrella factory. Get the in-joke? The actress first rocketed to fame in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical masterpiece. She even sings again in the new film’s Bollywood-like final scene. This time around, the director is Francois Ozon, who was born in 1967 – the same year Deneuve gave another iconic performance, as a theoretically virtuous young woman who often slips away from marital bliss for anonymous, masochistic sex in Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour. Vive la difference! 

Noir Lite: Neil Burger's Limitless

There are clever visual bits littered throughout Neil Burger's sunlit noir Limitless, but the experience is noir lite. Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is an unemployed aspiring writer who is mired in inertia. He can't write a word, can't hold onto his girl (Abbie Cornish), and can't even comb his hair. When his former brother-in-law introduces him to an experimental drug NZT (before being murdered for possessing it), Eddie discovers easy access to every square inch of his brain. He recalls everything he's read, learns every language he hears, becomes a piano prodigy, wins back his girl. And he learns to comb his hair. Soon Eddie becomes a genius in the world of high finance, too, drawing the attention of business mogul Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro). Van Loon sees Eddie as a potential means to making a ton of cash. But NZT also has its downside for Eddie, giving him headaches, lost moments, forgotten homicides, attracting Russian mobsters and facing a dwindling supply of pills to keep him hopping. Luckily, he finds a way to keep his luck running and his ambitions fulfilled.

It's daring to set a film noir drama almost entirely in the daytime and Burger provides a clever subtext of linking the use of drugs to the world of high finance (high, or course, being the operative word). But Limitless still ends up being a rather limited drama. As he proved though in his dreamy and seductive The Illusionist (2006), Burger knows how to think with his eyes. In Limitless, however, it's his brain that fails him. Most good noirs show how good men make bad choices by giving in to desires that destroy their lives. Their lives, in fact, spiral downward in their attempt to succeed. Limitless shows Eddie instead creating a lot of wreckage while becoming upwardly mobile, but he's never left accountable for it. Eddie's insider trading and metaphysical manner of cheating his way to the top is presented as something victorious.

Gerald Pratley: One of the Real Guys

Gerald Pratley (1923-2011)

Before the Bell Lightbox, Cinematheque Ontario, TIFF, the Festival of Festivals, there was Gerald Pratley. Having discovered the other day that he had died from a lengthy illness in a Belleville hospital at the age of 87, I was immediately struck by the fact that I had known Gerald as both a friend and a colleague for most of my life. Over the years, we had shared a love of movie music, undervalued directors (William Wyler) and days spent at the NFB screening room watching movies destined for the Toronto Film Festival. Although I hadn't spoken with Gerald in over a year, I realized upon hearing the very sad news of his passing that I never expected a day when he wouldn't be here. For if there was one strong trait that I always admired in him, it was his ability to accept you on the grounds that you loved and cared for the work you produced.

As a film critic, it didn't really matter to him whether he agreed with you or not (as Gerald's tastes were often more conservative than mine). What mattered was your sense of integrity, or perhaps, the idea that he still had things to learn from others, just as he could impart to others much of what he knew from a different era with different values. In a profession today that has its share of poseurs and careerists, Gerald was one of the real guys. He didn't set out to be a star which may be why he doesn't have a stronger presence in contemporary film culture. (Like me, he didn't have much patience for film theory, either, which represents another pole of contemporary film culture that he's exiled from.) But Gerald Pratley did build a foundation here for film culture and Canadian movies that made possible all that we see vibrant today. Ironically, I suppose, Gerald wasn't Canadian born.

Produced and Abandoned: OutKast's Idlewild (2006)

Here is another case where the critical herd mentality destroyed a film. Leading up to its release in 2006, Idlewild, the 1930s-era musical set in an African-American speak-easy/nightclub in a small town in the southern US, was already being strafe bombed by critics as an unreleasable catastrophe. Conceived by video-director Bryan Barber as a project for the two-man funk/hip-hop band, OutKast (Barber directed their videos, including their endlessly creative “Hey Ya” clip), Idlewild committed the cardinal sin of ... well, I'm not sure what.

Sure, the story is clichéd. Rooster (Antwan A. Patton – aka, Big Boi in OutKast) is the manager/singer in the aforementioned night club in the backwater town of Idlewild. Through the course of the picture, he has to contend with mobsters (especially the psychopathic Trumpy – Terrence Howard) who want to take over the club and use it for their own nefarious purposes. He is also juggling a bevy of beauties (including his wife), convincing the recently arrived girl singer, Angel (Paula Patton – no relation to Antwan), to stay, and keeping his talented but conflicted pianist, Percival (André Benjamin, aka André 3000 in OutKast), in the band. Percival is torn between helping his widowed father (Ben Vereen) in his business (Vereen's the local mortician) and composing great music that will let Percival escape the town and the club. Of course, he sees Angel, and her beautiful voice, as the final key to help him leave. Trouble happens; people die.

Showtime’s Episodes: The One Where the Brits Get Shafted by Hollywood

Some of the biggest news in TV this winter (long before Charlie Sheen began his distracting antics) was the return of some old Friends to the sitcom world: Matthew Perry on ABC’s Mr. Sunshine and Matt LeBlanc’s on Showtime’s Episodes. Since I’ve already weighed in positively on Mr. Sunshine, today we’re taking a look at Episodes.

Episodes is far more than a Matt LeBlanc comeback vehicle. Co-produced by Showtime and the BBC (and airing simultaneously on both of sides of the pond), Episodes tells the story of Sean and Beverly Lincoln (former Green Wing co-stars Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Grieg), a British husband-and-wife writing duo whose BAFTA-award winning TV series is optioned by an American network. The 7-episode first season takes place over a period of only a couple of weeks, taking us step-by-step from the couple’s disorienting arrival in Hollywood to the end of the filming of their show’s pilot. This slow corruption of the Lincolns’ professional integrity is mirrored in the concurrent decay of their relationship. The two are compelled to make compromise after compromise in the production of their show, including being forced to (mis)cast Matt LeBlanc (credibly played by Matt LeBlanc) as the show’s lead. Within hours of landing in L.A., their show’s title shifts from “Lyman’s Boys” to “Pucks!”, transformed from a genteel, if biting, boarding school comedy about an aging headmaster with a wistful crush on a middle-aged, lesbian librarian into a middle-of-the-road romcom-sitcom about a hockey coach wooing the school’s young, sexy, and very heterosexual librarian.

Tamsin Grieg and Stephen Mangan

Taking on show business from the inside raises the bar considerably for a comedy series, and so Episodes gave itself a steep hill to climb. (The gold standard will always be HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show, but Ricky Gervais’ much more personal approach in Extras comes in a close second.)  But even if making a TV show about making a TV show is as old as television itself, Crane and Klarik do bring something new to the table: the dramatization of the difficult translation of a successful UK series into the very different culture of American TV. In that sense, it could hardly be timelier. In the very same week that Episodes first aired, 3 US versions of popular UK shows premiered: Skins (on MTV), Being Human (on SyFy), Shameless, which aired immediately following the first episode of Episodes on Showtime itself. As each of these shows struggles in its own way to translate very popular (and still on-going) British series for an American audience, Episodes offers a dark and satirical look behind the scenes at a comparable, if fictional, effort. If you’ve ever seen a favourite UK series be painfully adapted to the US network model (NBC’s limp re-creation of Steven Moffat’s Coupling comes to mind), Episodes is definitely a must-see.

A Post-Modern Love Child: Tumblr

Just imagine if Wordpress were able to seduce both Facebook and Twitter one evening. And it then had a happy accident. The post-modern love child would probably look a lot like Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.com/). This free blog hosting platform has been operating in the shadows of its mainstream social media giants for four years now. While it hasn’t reached the popularity of its peers, it still proves to hold its own as an innovative blogging alternative, especially attractive to those in arts and media.

In 2007, David Karp, a New York City entrepreneur, founded Tumblr. With the help of lead web developer Marco Arment, the site quickly expanded from friends and family members to a community of millions. The latest member tally, as posted on Tumblr on March 12, 2011, reflects 3.8 billion posts and 14.9 million blogs. Not too shabby, especially considering the current Web 2.0 oligopoly. Even more impressive is Tumblr’s loyalty rate, preserving 85% of its users, in comparison to Twitter’s 60% retention rate. So what is it about this little platform that could that makes it so attractive to both social media junkies and traditional bloggers alike? The answer lies in one’s Tumblr account.

To the Next Level: Joe Lovano & Us Five’s Bird Songs

Be-bop music occasionally sounds tight and tense. In some cases, of course, it's supposed to. Be-bop jazz reflected the post-war times in which it developed. Then, it was new, challenging and difficult for audiences to appreciate on a wider scale, probably because you couldn't dance to it. Now, some 50 plus years since the death of Charlie Parker, Joe Lovano & Us Five, one of the great ambassadors of be-bop, has channeled Bird and taken him to the next level on Bird Songs (Blue Note, 2011). It's exciting music arranged in such a fresh way that it gives us a whole fresh perspective on the form. For Joe Lovano, Bird Songs captures the past with a lighter, intellectual touch. Everyone in the band is listening and following while simultaneously moving forward. They create a dynamic sound that has an inner-strength easily accessible to the listener.

Not willing to simply play Charlie Parker’s music in a straight-ahead fashion, Lovano shapes the compositions to reflect Bird but not to copy him. His arrangement of "Barbados" is a perfect example of keeping the basis of the tune but mixing it up rhythmically to become something other than an outdated be-bop tune. In other words, it takes on a shape of its own.

Off the Shelf: Lantana (2001)

The Australian psychological thriller Lantana, like Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997) and P. T. Anderson's Magnolia (1999), is a movie that examines the emotional torpor and malaise of an ensemble. But this drama by director Ray Lawrence (Bliss) and screenwriter Andrew Bovell (based on his play Speaking in Tongues) doesn't make its individuals such easy targets of scorn and moral judgment (like The Ice Storm). It doesn't provide condescending views of spiritual bankruptcy either (as did Magnolia). Lantana, which is named for a spiky weed that covers Australia, is thought-out in more dramatically compelling and complex ways than Magnolia. It develops the connections between these disparate characters rather than imposing those connections for the sake of its own conceits.

Leon (Anthony LaPaglia) is an unhappily married detective who is having an affair with Jane (Rachael Blake), a recently divorced woman. Leon's wife, Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), is seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey), because she suspects that Leon is seeing someone else. Dr. Somers, meanwhile, is still recovering from the shock of the murder of her daughter. She even has her own suspicions that her emotionally remote husband (Geoffrey Rush) is being unfaithful. The only happy couple appears to be the unemployed but genial Nik (Vince Colosimo) and his sturdy wife Paula (Daniela Farinacci). But when a disappearance and possible murder takes place, everyone's life becomes affected and altered.

Carrey's Triumph: I Love You Phillip Morris (2009)

Over the years, Jim Carrey has been the most exhausting of prodigious talents. From Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) to The Cable Guy (1996), Carrey could quickly wear a viewer down. With his vast collection of quick-witted jack-in-the-box character masks, he was the Tasmanian Devil of comic actors, spinning madly out of control and wiping out everything in his path. But he wasn't just some dervish comedian chewing the scenery. Carrey became the scenery. Often loudly dominating the action, he left his co-stars (especially poor Matthew Broderick in The Cable Guy) looking like they were desperately trying to escape the picture to avoid being run over.

To me, Jim Carrey always worked best served in small doses (as he was brilliantly on TV's In Living Color); or perhaps, had he been around in the thirties, he would have been perfectly electrifying featured in those review skit comedies like The Big Broadcast of 1932. But most of his feature films were either broadly aggressive burlesque comedies, or painful attempts to make him into a normal guy (The Majestic); broaden his appeal (The Truman Show), or sanctimoniously tame him (Liar Liar). Except for his perfect pairing with Jeff Daniels in the hilarious Dumb and Dumber (1994), Jim Carrey has been an overheated comedy machine rather than an actor. But in his latest film, I Love You Phillip Morris, Carrey has finally found a part that integrates with perfect precision his multiple character roles into one coherently whole person. It's Carrey's triumph. Unfortunately, due to its subject matter, distributors have done their damnedest to make sure an audience never discovers it. Don't make their mistake.

Nothing New Here: And Everything is Going Fine

Spalding Gray: And Everything is Going Fine (2010)

I was lucky enough to see the late monologist Spalding Gray on three different occasions when he came to Toronto with his shows, Gray’s Anatomy (1994), It’s a Slippery Slope (1997) and Morning, Noon and Night (1999), where he wittily expounded on a wide variety of subjects ranging from the pains of aging to becoming a father late in life. (I still remember with relish his encounter with the elderly Richard M. Nixon in a doctor's office and his initial thought that someone was wearing a Nixon mask in the waiting room.) His monologues were fast-paced, insightful and cleverly laid out, especially considering that they were in effect just Gray usually sitting behind a desk and talking for 90 minutes or so. And yet, despite his frankness on stage, particularly about his mother’s suicide and his own thoughts and worries that he, too, would end up doing the same, his finally ending his life in early 2004, at age 62, still came as a shock to me. I figured, as I’m sure so many other people did too, that Gray was successfully utilizing his monologues as a therapeutic catharsis to help keep his demons at bay. And truth be told, for many years, he did. Of course, no one could have foreseen the 2001 car accident in Ireland, which left him with physical and mental injuries and eventually drove him to the permanent despair that is suicide. Critics at Large’s Susan Green got a taste of what was troubling Gray when she interviewed him in 2002.

Last year, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies and videotape, Ocean’s Eleven), who had cast Gray in King of the Hill (1993), playing ironically enough a suicide victim, and directed the film adaptation of Gray’s Anatomy (1996), premièred his documentary on Spalding Gray, entitled And Everything is Going Fine at the Slamdance Film Festival. It’s now in general release, but sad to say, it likely won’t please Gray’s legion of fans, or Soderbergh’s for that matter.

A Tale of Two Alfreds: Fiction and Fact

The most curious object I inherited from my late father is a skeleton key attached to a round metal tag that reads “Bates Motel,” along with the room number 1. I’m not sure how he came to own this movie memento, although his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock – they shared the same first name – predated the 1960 release of Psycho by at least two decades, with big-screen thrillers such as Suspicion (1941).

Beginning in 1955, every Sunday night Dad was glued to our black-and-white Zenith with a round picture tube for the half-hour anthology program Alfred Hitchcock Presents on CBS. A year later, he began subscribing to the legendary director’s monthly Mystery Magazine. 

My father would have been happy to learn that there’s a plan afoot for a film based on the 1990 nonfiction book by Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. Anthony Hopkins reportedly is in talks to star as the portly filmmaker; Sacha Gervasi (Anvil! The Story of Anvil) might direct from a script by John McLaughlin (Black Swan). An earlier attempt to launch this project, with Helen Mirren playing Hitchcock’s wife Alma and Ryan Murphy (Eat Pray Love) at the helm, failed to come together for some reason.

Saturday Matinee Redux: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer's big-budget extravaganza Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) is a throwback to Saturday matinee adventure movies. I didn't catch up to it on the big screen because the thought of sitting through a sprayed-on copper-skinned, muscled-up Jake Gyllenhaal (usually a scrawny actor in indie films) in an action film was not on the top of my list. It didn't help that the critics had been generally unmerciful in their attacks. What I had forgotten, though, is that there is a herd mentality amongst some film critics. Not wanting to appear unhip, or not with it, too many of them thrust their, um, thumbs into the sky to see which way the wind is blowing. The early critical opinion was not good, so those upraised thumbs quickly turned down and the film's fate was sealed.

Talking Out of Turn #14: Richard Ford (1989)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM 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 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

One of my favourite books of criticism is D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1924) in which he addresses the varied works of American writers James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In this panoramic and illuminating study, Lawrence examines how a number of gifted authors came to terms with the experience of a young country still in the process of finding its identity. "The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything," Lawrence wrote in the opening chapter. "It can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their very own selves." What he was describing was the elusive spirit of place invoked in the American literary experience. Some sixty years later, another American writer, Richard Ford, was also trying to invoke some idea of the American identity in the bleak landscape of Montana. It was there that he explored the sensation of being rootless and what that revealed of the American character in the eighties.

author Richard Ford

This particular chapter of Talking Out of Turn, curiously enough, was the only one to feature only writers (it also included Timothy Findley and poet Daphne Marlatt). As for Richard Ford, in one of my last radio interviews at CJRT-FM, we discussed that spirit of place in a series of short stories titled Rock Springs.