Take a Gamer's Holiday: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One

Author/filmmaker Ernest Cline

Whether you recall the 1980s with a laugh, a cringe, or a roll of the eyes, it’s hard to help smiling at the joyful nostalgia that permeates Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. Written by the director of the 2008 film Fanboys, the novel speaks to that demographic in its native tongue, presenting a vision that will appeal to those with a taste for cyberpunk, oddball grail quests, flying DeLoreans, or old school gamer lore.

The premise seems simple: in the near future, a billionaire game developer leaves his entire fortune to whomever can solve a series of puzzles within his massively multiplayer virtual reality game, known appropriately as the OASIS. Since the challenge is open to all, everyone from basement dwellers to multimedia conglomerates clamor for a chance to control this digital universe, which has become the preferred platform for socializing, schooling, and marketing for much of the first world.

Enter Wade Watts, named in the alliterative tradition of such nerdy heroes as Clark Kent and Peter Parker. A teenager gamer living atop a stack of RVs, his family life and aspirations were decimated by the socio-economic collapse of the United States. To escape, he dreams of finding success and glory in the OASIS. Seeing the contest as his opportunity, he begins his hunt through the series of clues left by the game developer – who, it turns out, obsessed over 1980s popular culture. In this way Ready Player One takes a paradoxical approach to speculative fiction: in a bleak future, advanced technology seems unable to stop humanity’s steady decay, yet provides refuge in the form of retro gaming and classic movies.

A Delectable Pastry: Soulpepper Theatre Company's Parfumerie

Oliver Dennis & Patricia Fagan in Parfumerie by Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company

Recently, I apologized to an actor friend of mine because I'd missed a play he was in. He laughed and said, “Oh, don't worry about it. It's just a pastry; a confection. It's nothing that serious.” I thought, but didn't say, “A piece of frothy fun, done well, can be as good and as important as a great tragedy.” That thought came to mind as I left Soulpepper Theatre Company's 2011 Christmas show, Parfumerie by Miklós László: it's frothy fun with a serious edge (it's playing until December 30th in Toronto's Distillery District). Parfumerie may be unknown to most people, but it is actually the basis for not one, not two, but three movies, plus a Broadway musical. Do the movies The Shop Around the Corner (1940), In the Good Old Summertime (1949) and You've Got Mail (1998) ring a bell? They're all based on this obscure Hungarian play written in 1937 by Miklós László (the musical was 1963's She Loves Me).

The Shop Around the Corner, starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and directed by comic master Ernst Lubitsch, is one of my favourite movies. So when I heard in 2009 that Soulpepper had found and resurrected the original play, (the new translation was created specifically for Soulpepper by Adam Pettle and Brenda Robins) I was intrigued. I waited too long and it was sold out. Last year, Soulpepper remounted their fine production of A Christmas Carol, so I thought I was out of luck. Fortunately, Parfumerie did so well in 2009 that they have decided to alternate it every second year with A Christmas Carol

Less is More: This One's For Him – A Tribute to Guy Clark

In November 2011, Guy Clark turned 70. All our heroes are turning 70, or 75; I guess that means I’m ageing too. I don’t feel like it, except when I try to do the same old things I always did. Like stand up, or bend over! To celebrate Guy’s birthday, his friends, led by Tamara Saviano, created the tribute album, This One's For Him. Now Guy Clark is one of those heroes who needs to be celebrated, although I’m pretty sure he’d be uncomfortable with the attention.

Last time I saw Guy Clark was at Guelph’s marvellous River Run Centre. I had an appointment to meet with his accompanist and pal Verlon Thompson. Guy was asked from the audience if he was going to come out and sign CDs after the show, and he said, “Well,” in his slow Texas drawl, “do ya want me to?” And sure enough he came out, and stood quietly against the wall, looking ever so much like he couldn’t figure out what all the excitement was about. He took the gushing compliments with an “aw shucks” attitude, and scribbled his signature on a dozen or two CD inserts. He’d done his job, sung his songs and played his guitar, told his stories and entertained us for a couple hours. It was time to go, but the “Master Songwriter” (as his web site calls him) schmoozed for our benefit. He was the old pro.

This One’s For Him is a two-disc set that feels almost like one of Guy’s own records, except everybody else is singing the songs. The album was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee and Austin, Texas using a core group of musicians including Shawn Camp, Verlon Thompson, Lloyd Maines, Jen Gunderman, Glen Fukunaga, Glenn Worf, Kenny Malone and Larry Atamanuik, among others. These names will be familiar to regular listeners of Texas songwriter music. They’ve played around and are all masters of their craft. The tone is acoustic, warm, and comfortable, all the way through from the first sound on Disc One. I say first ‘sound’ because before he launches into “Old Time Feeling” Rodney Crowell says “Let’s give her a good go and make ol’ Guy proud of us…” It lends an air of honesty and intimacy to the proceedings which remains throughout both discs.

Luck: David Milch’s Return to HBO is a Sure Bet

Dustin Hoffman as Chester 'Ace' Bernstein in Luck on HBO

On January 29th, the first season of David Milch’s new HBO show, Luck, will begin – and it shows every sign that it can live up to the best that both Milch and HBO have to offer. Though we’ll have to wait six weeks to see new episodes of the show (which boasts screen legends Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte in their first regular roles in a TV series), this past Sunday HBO gave audiences a sneak peek at the new series when it aired its pilot episode.

Coming out of the gate strong, this show takes its time, and respects its audience, subjects, and characters the way that only a show which is truly meaningful to its creators can. Knowing a subject too well can be a liability when making a drama. (David Simon’s intimacy with Baltimore was an asset for most of the run of The Wire, but if the final season staggered just a bit, it was likely because Simon was just a little too close to the world of the Baltimore Sun that he introduced in that fifth season) But here, it seems, Milch’s lifelong association with the racetrack only seems to give him the confidence necessary to take it slow. A story that was basically five decades in the making, it paints a patient portrait of a unique world.

David Milch on the set of Deadwood

In December 2007, one month into the Writers Guild of America strike that would bring Hollywood to a standstill for three and a half months, David Milch – most famous as the creator of HBO's groundbreaking Western Deadwood – gave a series of impromptu lectures before a small audience of fellow writers and strikers at the WGA Theater in Beverly Hills. (An astute soul taped the talks, and they have been available online ever since. For the singular insight they offer into one of television's most creative and dangerous minds, I cannot recommend them more.) Interspersed with anecdotes about his first sexual encounter and his decades-long struggle with drugs and alcohol, the extemporaneous lectures touched on everything from Milch’s philosophy of writing, the deep ambivalence TV writers feel towards their bosses, and the essence of the creative process, to the life of St Paul and the nature of religious faith.  And Milch also spoke about two very personal television projects that he’d been kicking around for a long time, both of which were extremely personal to him, and neither of which (he implied) he expected to ever see the light of day. One was a show about the racetrack. Luck is that show.

The Rump of the Sixties: The Doors – A Lifetime of Listening to Five Wild Years by Greil Marcus

Looking over the pieces I've written in the last year, I've spent a good deal of time dealing with the troubling legacy of the Sixties. Even my next book, which I'm now writing and preparing for publication, begins with the early promise of that decade and follows the subsequent ones as if tracing the endless ripple of a pebble tossed in the sea. My preoccupation is not based on my age either (although I grew up in the Sixties), or holding on to some sense of nostalgia for better times. I'm also not locked into the glory days of my youth (they weren't very glorious to begin with) and clinging to some talisman against the bitter cold. Although there are some people I know who decided to stop listening to music, reading books, and seeing movies that didn't conform to the values they treasured when they were young, I'm not grappling with the Sixties, either as an idea or a time and place, as a means to avoid the realities of the current decade. Quite the contrary.

As far as popular culture goes, for me, it still lives and breathes in the present. For instance, I'd love to write more about contemporary music; why I'm mesmerized by Matthew Friedberger's sinewy guitar that snakes its way through The Fiery Furnaces' "Two Fat Feet" from their debut 2003 album Gallowsbird's Bark; how Seattle's Fire Theft seems to effortlessly embody in their single "Chain," an emotional hailstorm, the void left by Nirvana; or, the impish joy I hear in Rachel Nagy's libidinous "very nice" that kicks off The Detroit Cobras' "Ya Ya Ya (Looking For My Baby)," a full-tilt boogie that would make John Lee Hooker smile; on how I'm moved in the most peculiar way by The Handsome Family's "Weightless Again," a song that both laments and justifies suicide in a manner as wistfully satirical about the subject as Steely Dan's "Any World (That I'm Welcome To)"; or why Okkervil River, on I Am Very Far, and the Decemberists, on The King is Dead, continue to rehabilitate our notions of what constitutes musical Americana.

As much as I continue to enjoy new music, it's still too immediate, too much of its time, for me to reflect back on it with any real authority. It has yet to trace its own path into the future where it might find a meaning for itself beyond what it represents now. What I enjoy in writing about Sixties culture is the task of putting to the test the relics that have stood the test of time, as well as the things that haven't; that is, figuring out what new meaning continues to breathe life into work that could have (and maybe should have) expired a long time ago. In a sense, that's the underlining theme of The Doors – A Lifetime of Listening to Five Wild Years (Public Affairs, 2011), where critic Greil Marcus ponders the dark magic of the L.A. group The Doors, a rock band dead for over forty years now, but hardly gone from cultural relevance. In examining what they mean today, indeed how they've endured both on the radio and as part of the embroidery of the lost Sixties, Marcus not only reveals the obvious (that they weren't really a group of their time), but that they somehow (despite this) characterized their time, and took on the leaner, meaner, violent side of that decade's demise. (As Marcus reminds us, they weren't one of the 'love' bands.) And their best music, like that pebble in the sea I mentioned earlier, continues to ripple along as if they never went away.

Grandstanding: Other Desert Cities

Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach in Other Desert Cities (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Jon Robin Baitz’s critically acclaimed new Broadway play Other Desert Cities is an American family drama with an eleventh-hour revelation. Structurally and generically it harks back to the Victorian-era well-made plays that Ibsen and Chekhov each took a hand in sabotaging but that survived nonetheless into the twentieth century, where they furnished a model for American playwrights like Arthur Miller (who added a Freudian element) and later a blueprint for TV serials. Baitz must think he’s creating something new because he’s stocked his play with political content, but it’s a screechy, grandstanding melodrama in which every hinge creaks.

The setting is Palm Springs, where Polly and Lyman Wyeth’s two grown-up children have come out to spend Christmas with them. Lyman (Stacy Keach) is a retired ambassador and he and Polly are still conspicuously active in Republican circles. (Polly is played by Stockard Channing, but I saw her understudy, Lauren Klein.) Before they entered politics both Wyeths had Hollywood lives, Lyman as a handsome leading man while Polly and her sister Silda (Judith Light), transplanted Texas girls, wrote a series of popular detective movies. The team split up when the two sisters stopped getting along well enough to collaborate, and their animosity is more apparent than ever now that Silda, a recovering alcoholic, has moved in with Polly and Lyman. Their son Trip (Thomas Sadoski) produces a TV show called Jury of Your Peers in which the jury is made up of celebrities. Their daughter Brooke (Rachel Griffiths) is a journalist who has just completed a manuscript. When the family is assembled she announces that it’s a memoir about the family, centered on the tragedy they’ve never recovered from: during Vietnam their eldest, Henry, became involved with a radical anti-war group that bombed a recruitment center, killing a homeless man, and out of guilt and despair Henry drowned himself. Brooke has never forgiven her parents for turning their coming-apart son away when he sought their help after the bombing, nor has she recovered, after all these years, from the feeling that Henry, her hero, abandoned her when she was a little girl, not even leaving a note for her when he chose to take his life. This event which almost destroyed her family haunted her into her shaky adulthood – she’s had a breakdown and spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. In researching the book she’s used her aunt as a resource. Silda has her own axe to grind: her fury that her sister and brother-in-law’s fervent loyalty to the GOP cause prompted them to see their own son, whom they struggled to bring up in their political image, as a traitor for defecting to the left wing.

In Darkness: A Harrowing Tale of Enlightenment

Milla Bankowicz and Robert Wieckiewicz in In Darkness

My mother and her closest kin came to America from Poland, a nation that was invaded a dozen years later by the Nazis. In 1942 virtually all Jewish residents in the shtetl of her little hometown, Goniadz, were killed outright or sent to the gas ovens of the Treblinka death camp. Their homes were ransacked by Catholic anti-Semites, who rejoiced with the local priest as they helped the Gestapo wipe out an entire community.

She’s not around any more but I wonder what her opinion would have been of In Darkness, about a sort of proletarian Polish version of Oskar Schindler named Leopold Socha. With his help, ten people survive for 14 months (beginning in May 1943) in the filthy, rat-infested sewers under Nazi-occupied Lvov, where fellow Jews are systematically obliterated by the Gestapo. This sort of topic was always raw for a woman who could never concede that there might conceivably be such a thing as a good Pole.

A Wordless World: Shaun Tan’s Approach to the Silent Graphic Novel

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Catharine Charlesworth, to our group.

Opening Shaun Tan’s The Arrival feels like cracking the spine on an old, treasured photo album. Both written and illustrated by the Australian artist, the entire book looks as if aged by time and travel: from the cover, with its seemingly-tattered binding and leathery texture to the washed-out sepia tones of the illustrations. This motif is entirely appropriate, as The Arrival reflects on immigration, of the wonder and confusion of making a new life in a foreign land. The narrative follows a nameless protagonist: a young father, who leaves his wife and daughter in their monster-ridden homeland to travel overseas in search of work, in hopes of making enough money to bring his family to live with him. The Arrival tells a classic immigrant story, and Tan’s design choices help him to convey it in a way that appears both familiar and fantastical.

Unlike most graphic novels, The Arrival tells its story entirely in illustrations. A wordless graphic novel, it contains no speech bubbles, no textual narration – no real written language of any sort. Because of this, the characters lack – in the traditional sense – any explicit internal dialogue or distinctive voice. Yet Tan has done this intentionally. His lack of detailed personality makes Tan’s hero a sort of Everyman: a character onto whom the audience can project their own experiences of immigration and transnationalism. The story at the heart of The Arrival has been told before, in many different tongues. To make this fantastical version accessible to cultures worldwide, Tan tells it in the transcendent language of images. The only written “words” in the book are in a made-up alphabet. These represent, rather than any particular phrases, the idea of writing, and its ability to baffle, humble, and alienate one who does not understand it.

Not Quite Magical: Martin Scorsese’s Hugo

Hugo, the film adaptation of Brian Selznick’s modern children’s classic The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is both an impressive achievement and a disappointing movie. On the one hand, it marks something of a return to form for director Martin Scorsese, who’s floundered of late with choppy films like Gangs of New York (2002) and The Departed  (2006), and superficial ones like Shutter Island (2010). Yet, while he directs the picture with supreme self-confidence, he doesn’t quite bring the right light and airy tone to the movie's subject matter.

That story owes something to the magic of early cinema, and also to the recent steampunk genre, which marries Victorian attitudes to advanced technology to create alternate worlds that are similar but not quite like our own. (It’s a pallid genre that usually leaves me cold, but in Hugo it actually possesses some frisson and verve.) It’s also a classic tale of a boy finding himself, growing up and learning that life contains both hardships and joys.

The earliest parts of the film fare the best as Scorsese, screenwriter John Logan (Rango) and cinematographer Robert Richardson (Shutter Island, Inglourious Basterds) craft a unique world, mostly set in the main train station in Paris in the early 1930s. Shot in 3D, Hugo is a live action movie with a lovely animated, fantastical look and feel. I’m still not a fan of the process, but this is one case where it nevertheless adds something to the whole.

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a young, sensitive boy who lives in the train station where he makes sure the giant clocks run on time, and does his level best to stay out of the clutches of the station’s police inspector, Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen) – a disaffected war veteran who loves to catch the boys who hide out at the station and send them to (presumably nasty) orphanages. When Hugo is caught stealing by toy shop owner Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), events are set in motion whereby he will find out who the mysterious Georges really is, meet Georges’ goddaughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) and discover where the broken automaton brought to him by his inventor father (Jude Law) actually came from. (It was his attempt to steal parts for the robot which saw him caught by the store owner.) That journey is compelling and richly depicted, but also emotionally flat.

Stealing Voices & Naming Names: Tim Riley's Biography of John Lennon

Just about the only scene I enjoyed in Walter Hill's action comedy 48 Hrs (1982) was when Nick Nolte's bleery-eyed cracker cop reluctantly visits prison to spring the slick hustler Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy) to help him capture Hammond's former partners in crime. As Nolte approaches the cell, Murphy is listening to his Walkman, oblivious to Nolte – hell, oblivious to the world – while lost in the falsetto notes of Sting's affected soul strutting in The Police's hit song "Roxanne." Murphy is singing along, note for note, not only matching Sting, but surpassing him. What comes across initially as parody quickly takes hold as the only true version of the song. The notes Murphy hits are exactly the same as Sting's, but you actually believe Murphy's tale of a streetwalker. He may be thinking of someone he loves, or perhaps, a broken girl that he left on the outside before he started doing time. (Sting never convinces you that he even knows a streetwalker. He merely convinces you that he walks on the street.)

While it's hardly an example of divine retribution, of stealing back what Pat Boone once stole from Little Richard, but whenever I now hear The Police singing "Roxanne," I crack up. I can't hear Sting anymore. It's Eddie Murphy's voice that replaces him in my mind. No need to Bring Me the Head of Gordon Sumner, as Howard Hampton put it once in one of his delightfully cranky essays, Sting's no longer worthy of being a trophy. In 48 Hrs, a film that shrewdly exploited racial tensions for cheap laughs, and provided what critic Pauline Kael rightly called "an eighties minstrel show," Eddie Murphy came to own "Roxanne," turning it from a minstrel number into a real soul song. (Nick Nolte, who could care less, rips the headphones from Murphy's head before he can even finish the song.) Yet that's the sheer beauty of getting to test the worth of an artist's voice, to see if you can steal what they've claimed as their own. It's partly what drives cover bands, too, who try to both emulate their idols and – potentially – steal the thunder of the idols they adore. But you can't steal someone's thunder if it's not put there to steal.

Ridley Second Guessing Ridley: Ridley Scott's Director's Cut of Kingdom of Heaven

I was tempted to label this particular post as “Produced and Abandoned,” but I couldn't quite justify a film that cost $130 million to make and grossed $211 million worldwide as being “abandoned.” And yet, on the basis of the theatrical cut which was released in 2005, Ridley Scott's crusader epic, Kingdom of Heaven was, pun intended, sacrificed on the altar of commerce. Released at 145 minutes, the theatrical cut of Kingdom of Heaven is a god-awful mess. Incoherent and simplistic, the film faded from my memory pretty quickly after I saw it on DVD in 2006. In fact, the only things I remember from the film were some good action scenes and two reasonably credible performances: one by Orlando Bloom in the lead; and the other, uncredited, by Ed Norton as King Baldwin (his character is a leper and so we never see his face as it is hidden by a silver mask).

All of which was too bad, since the premise was promising. Balian (Bloom) is a blacksmith in a small French village who one day is approached by Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson). Godfrey reveals to the pauper Balian that he is in fact Godfrey's abandoned bastard son. Godfrey convinces him to join him and his men as they travel to Jerusalem to defend the city they, the crusaders, have held for 100 years. En route, they are set upon and Godfrey is critically wounded. Balian takes over and, after a shipwreck and other travails, arrives in Jerusalem. As the heir to Godfrey, Balian inherits villa and land outside of Jerusalem that appears to be infertile. Using his knowledge of landscape, he and his servants find water and make the property thrive. At the same time in Jerusalem, he is introduced to the ongoing political turmoil of the city. King Baldwin is a Christian king respected by the Muslims and Jews as he has always treated all three religions with equal respect. Behind his back, the Templars and others are plotting to overthrow him and seize the city for themselves. Prime villains here are Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) and Reynald de Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson). Through their villainy, the 100-year long peace between the Christians and the Muslims implodes. The Muslim leader, Saladin (Nasser Memarzia), is an honourable man, and after a great conflict, allows the remaining crusaders and their families, including Balian, to leave Jerusalem unharmed. There's more, but that's the basic premise.

Trailer Park Tragedy: Hume Baugh's Crush

Crush, at the Factory Theatre Studio in Toronto from December 1-11.

As my theatre going consort predicted prior to our viewing of Hume Baugh’s Crush, “I’m prepared for dark, dark, dark.” Let's just say he was well-prepared. Originally debuted at Summerworks in 2008, the freshly revised “trailer park tragedy” about “love, loneliness, and the lies we tell ourselves” opened at the Factory Theatre on December 1st under the director Mark Cassidy. It is indeed dark. Until December 11th, theatre goers can be both frustrated and entertained by the self-inflicted sadness of three characters.

Jazz Babies: Cotton Club Parade

In the 1920s and especially the ‘30s, the Cotton Club in Harlem represented the intersection of white and black popular culture – talented white songwriters like Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields wrote material for extraordinary African American performers like Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Lena Horne, Avon Long, and Duke Ellington and His Orchestra (who also, of course, performed Ellington’s own compositions and those of his collaborator Billy Strayhorn). The club was on the corner of Lenox and 142nd Street; originally the Club Deluxe, it was opened by Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, in 1920, and when it failed a white gangster, Owen “Owney” Madden, and his syndicate bought it up, renamed it and staged a flamboyant reopening in 1923. The bitter irony was that, for the next seventeen years – as long as the Cotton Club operated – it welcomed white audiences only; even the families of the performers were denied admission. Yet for a black musician or dancer, appearing there meant you had catapulted into the white show-business world. (If you want to find out more about The Cotton Club Revues, Jim Haskins’s The Cotton Club: A Pictorial and Social History of the Most Famous Symbol of the Jazz Era, published in 1977, is helpful. Stay away from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 movie The Cotton Club, which is fiction – and lousy fiction at that. And of course you can get the original recordings remastered on CD, some of which come from live broadcasts. One you don’t want to skip is Fields and McHugh’s “On the Sunny Side of the Street” by Ellington’s band, sung by his favorite vocalist Ivie Anderson, she of the bourbon-and-water contralto, and featuring a tasty solo by soprano sax player Johnny Hodges at the beginning a truly sublime one at the end by trumpeter Lawrence Brown. It’s heaven.)

The Windmills of His Mind: Remembering Paul Motian 1931-2011

Paul Motian (1931-2011)

On November 22, 2011 the jazz world lost Paul Motian, one its best musicians. The drummer, who was born in 1931, was still active in his 80thyear with a recent gig at the famed Village Vanguard in New York. It was a testament to his endurance as one of the most important players of the Modern Jazz era.

Born in Philadelphia and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Motian started playing the drums at the age of twelve. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War moving on to the Manhattan School of Music in 1954. His early professional years were spent in the company of Lennie Tristano, the innovative be-bop pianist that led to a meeting with Tristano’s student, Bill Evans. It was an important era in the post-bop, modern era of jazz which was suddenly interested in expanding the palette beyond Charlie Parker’s ideas. The music was becoming more introspective and harmonically sophisticated. In 1957, he made his first record with Evans and bassist Teddy Kotick called, New Jazz Conceptions (Riverside).

Opening Your Ears: Stan Rogers' Fogarty’s Cove

First time I met Stan Rogers I was watching my friend John play at a little coffeehouse at the Jewish Community Centre in Hamilton. John was in the middle of a song, probably “If I Was a Carpenter,” when the door swung open and a giant silhouette back-lit by the streetlights proclaimed, “hi! I’m Stan Rogers, just back from playin’ little honky-tonks and bars all across northern Ontario…and I’d be happy to play for you!” John never quite recovered.

Next time I met Stan was at Bill Powell’s third floor apartment just off Gore Park in downtown Hamilton. I was there to audition for a folk festival. I knocked on the door, heard a voice call, “come on in; it’s open!” Stan was listening to a young duo. I took my guitar out of its case to tune up. The duo left. Stan said, “Before you start, I have to show you something.” We walked the length of the apartment to the front bedroom. Bill Powell, painter, head of Creative Arts, founder of Festival of Friends, and all 'round local legend, lay stark naked, passed out on the bed not unlike Santiago at the end of The Old Man & the Sea. 

Not So Jolly: Cinematic Carnality and Corruption

Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan in Shame

Profoundly damaged men are the focus of two new films with one-word titles and bleaker-than-bleak outlooks. Just in time for the holidays! In Shame, the troubled New York City protagonist is Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender), addicted to anonymous and increasingly rough, grim sex. The central character in Rampart, Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), is a longtime Los Angeles cop whose lies, brutality and arrogance have begun to erode his very being. Joy to the world!

While both movies are hard to watch, Shame provides some measure of compassion for the handsome Brandon as he navigates between his upscale office job and a secret life of compulsive seduction, masturbation, hookers and porn. Director Steve McQueen, who co-wrote the screenplay with Abi Morgan and gives the dire proceedings a deceptively stylish look, does not provide any examination of what early experiences might have dragged a person into such self-destructive lower depths.

On Courage and Cowardice: Criterion’s release of The Four Feathers (1939)

The Four Feathers – the classic 1939 Alexander Korda production recently released by Criterion in a spanking, spiffy new digital restoration – is an uneven, but entertaining movie; one that doesn’t entirely balance its large scale and very impressive battle sequences with its quieter, dialogue-driven scenes. More significantly, it sends out a mixed message about courage, cowardice and doing what one believes in.

Based on A.E.W. Masons’ 1902 novel, and brought to film an extraordinary seven times, this version, directed by Zoltan Korda, Alexander’s brother, is the most famous one, an adventure film cast in the spirit of Rudyard Kipling’s lauding of all things British, including its imperialistic adventures abroad. The latter is the subtext of The Four Feathers, which centres around Harry Faversham (John Clements), a sensitive young man whose family tradition  has seen all its men serve in the military. When his unit is sent to Egypt – to engage the Sudanese in an attempt to retake Khartoum, captured by Arab armies a decade earlier – he resigns his commission. That act, which he carries out because of a fervent wish to concentrate on his home life, such as his impending marriage to Ethne (June Duprez), a daughter of a general, has him labelled a coward by his three closest friends. They each send him a white feather as a sign of their disapproval of his ‘cowardice.’ (White is the colour of peace, of course, but that option doesn’t seem to exist in the gung-ho build-up to war.) But it’s the final feather, the fourth one, given to him by Ethne, albeit not without him daring her to do so, that prompts him to take drastic action to regain his honour.

Message Meets Medium: Collecting Digital Art Through s[edition]

Although I am neither a collector of art, nor a frequenter of social media, somehow s[edition] intrigued me. Launched a few weeks ago, s[edition] is not just a digital art gallery, it’s a gallery for digital art. Here’s the difference: the art you can browse, buy and collect through s[edition] is not a digital representation of artwork, it is art using the digital medium. Like a traditional print, there is a limited number of pieces available. Unlike a traditional print, you can view the creation you purchase in a variety of ways and sizes on your iPad, Blackberry, PC, TV, digital photo frame, or any other connected device. You can store your artwork in s[edition]’s digital vault and access it anytime, anywhere – provided you have the proper hardware and internet connection.

Each piece in your vault is yours and yours alone. It is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and can be “identified, verified and traced.” Skeptics among us might wonder what all the fuss is about. There is a myriad of images you can find for free online and use similarly. Naturally, this begs the age-old question: what makes art, Art? Some say art is anything that's made with love or intention, or simply a thing of beauty. Others say art is something that challenges the way we think about the world. Whatever your definition, s[edition] for certain challenges the way we think about art itself.

To Die For: 50/50 & The Walking Dead (Season Two)

Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 50/50.

The French existentialist philosopher and novelist Albert Camus once wrote that the real injustice of life is our recognition that everyone we know and love one day will die. It's what, he said, makes our life truly absurd. But you'd never know this from most of the movies made on the subject. The idea of death – its very final reality – might be the subject of many stories, yet rarely is its injustice (or absurdity) ever fully acknowledged. When Cary Grant and Irene Dunne lose their adopted child in George Stevens' popular 1941 melodrama Penny Serenade, for example, our sympathies don't concentrate on the dead infant but on the grieving parents instead. We're made to feel for their loss and pain, not the cruel and random taking of a child. It's as if the idea of death – a subject that gnawed hungrily at Camus in books like The Plague – was too terrifying to confront so movies concentrated instead on the moral struggles of the living.

Terms of Endearment

In pictures like Penny Serenade, the drama isn't worked out so that we come to terms with death, but instead with our trying to avoid it. Melodramas in particular always repress the notion of death, recognizing that our greatest fear of death, besides losing loved ones, is in our own terror of having not lived fully enough, of having perhaps pissed away valuable time that we can't get back. So this is why, especially when you add a recognizable disease like cancer to the mix, the stories resolve with the living having finally learned life's important lessons and then becoming better people. When you watch tear-jerkers like Love Story (1970), Brian's Song (1971), and especially, Terms of Endearment (1983), the survivors settle all rifts, resolve painful grievances, and improve their behaviour. These movies maybe even give us the impression that we can live forever, if we'd just improve our character. They make us feel edified, thanks to those who've died on our behalf, so that our own mortality gets comfortably buried with the bodies being grieved over. However in the recent dramatic comedy, 50/50, not only does death get stared directly in its face, but the picture also dares to laugh at it. Like Camus, 50/50 sees the absurdity in the subject. And it does so without cheapening or avoiding death's victories and temporary losses.

Captors: Eichmann – The Nazi Monster as Performer

Louis Cancelmi & Michael Cristofer in Captors

Evan M. Wiener’s new play Captors (at the Boston University Theater until December 11th) manages to be both emotionally and intellectually engrossing. It tells the story of the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960 by three Mossad agents who held him in a safe house outside the city while devising a plan to transport him to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. Their success was dependent on getting him to sign a release form permitting them to take him out of Argentina, where, under an assumed name, he was a legal resident. Wiener’s narrative, which is based mostly on Eichmann in My Hands, a memoir by one of the agents, Peter Malkin (co-authored with Harry Stein), is divided in two parts. In the first act Eichmann (Michael Cristofer) struggles to reassert power over his captors – mainly Malkin (Louis Cancelmi), the youngest of the three – by reaching across the enforced barrier between captive and captor and getting him to engage in conversation. In the second act Malkin throws over entirely the device of objectivity and uses their relationship to manipulate Eichmann into not only accepting the idea of a trial but welcoming it.