Talking Out of Turn #29: Leonard Cohen (1984)

Leonard Cohen

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, the host of On the Arts at CJRT-FM

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.

When we spoke to poet and singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, he had just come out of a relatively long period of contemplation that dated back to 1979. The culmination of that hermitage was a collection of prayers, psalms, meditations, and contemplative texts he wrote called Book of Mercy (McClelland & Stewart, 1984). Little did any of us know, perhaps not even Cohen himself, that shortly after the publication of this book, his music career would once again catapult him back into the larger public arena.

Neglected Gems #15: Palookaville (1995)

Palookaville, the title of the disarming first feature by Alan Taylor, refers to the generic state of existence shared by the three main characters. Russell (Vincent Gallo), Sid (William Forsythe) and Jerry (Adam Trese) are unemployed friends in their thirties – too old to be living the way they are, and painfully conscious of it. Russell boards with his family; he survives off the salary his brother-in-law (Gareth Williams), a cop, brings home. Russell’s girl, Laurie (Kim Dickens), lives next door, so he has to sneak through their bedroom windows to sleep with her. Sid’s wife left him ten years ago; he lives alone with her photo on the night table, and with his smelly dog. His phone is disconnected, his couch is repossessed, and he takes most of his dinners at Russell’s house (he’s a favorite of Russell’s mom’s). Jerry’s wife Betty (Lisa Gay Hamilton) works in a supermarket, where her manager paws her; when Jerry interrupts a groping session, he blows up and the boss retaliates by firing Betty. Furious, she makes Jerry go back and apologize so she can continue to support the family (they’ve got a baby).

A Lot to Be Grateful For: TV Viewers Get an Early Thanksgiving

The cast of Cougar Town

Last week’s episode of ABC’s Cougar Town opened with a scene with Jules (Courtney Cox), Laurie (Busy Philips) and Ellie (Christa Miller) suddenly wondering aloud why they didn’t get to celebrate Thanksgiving together this year. In fact, Cougar Town had an extended hiatus this year, after being bumped first from a September launch and pushed back even further in November in order to make room for some ABC’s new comedies. In the end, Cougar Town’s third season only premiered in mid-February – making a Thanksgiving or Christmas episode effectively impossible this year. Jules however offered a solution: they would celebrate Thanksgiving in May. The episode (titled “It’ll All Work Out") was one of the season's best, playing off the always surprisingly deep relationships that have developed among this handful of goofy characters, and highlighting everything that makes the show such a pleasure to watch. But more than that, it hit home for me.

May is traditionally the month when the networks firm up their schedules for the coming television season and the fates of the current shows are finally confirmed. Last year at this time, I was mourning NBC’s decision to cancel Outsourced, one of my favourite new comedies of the year. The year before, we lost Victor Fresca’s delightfully original Better Off Ted and Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. And in May 2009, NBC announced it would not be renewing Life. For an avid TV fan, in short, May is rarely a good month. But for the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling something I don’t normally feel in the month of May: grateful. And so when Jules and the rest of the Cul-de-Sac Crew sat around the table last week and reflected on how much they have to be thankful for, it was hard for me not to join in.

Kitchen-Sink Gangsters: Down Terrace and London Boulevard

Robin and Robert Hil star in Down Terrace

As I said in my post last year about the death of the DVD rental shop, one thing I would miss was the habit of walking the aisles looking at all the titles and stumbling across a gem I'd never heard of. Then after reading the plot on the back of the box, I decided whether to take a flier and rent it. The Eclipse was one such gem I discovered this way, which I've already discussed here. Now, with the announcement three weeks ago that Rogers would no longer rent DVDs, that window of discovery, for me at least (there are no independent DVD rental shops in the city north of Toronto where I live), has now closed.

However, I had one final chance this past weekend that resulted in, if not huge dividends, at least some very pleasant surprises. Three weeks ago, after Rogers announced their decision, I ventured to our one-remaining store to see what deals I could get. All DVDs were listed as buy one get one free. So, I was able to pick up about 8 or 9 recent films, such as Hugo, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2012), A Dangerous Method, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, plus others, for about $7 each. Over the next two weeks, I went a couple of more times to see if the discount got greater. It had not. But this past Friday I decided to go one more time. The discount was now buying one get two free. They had been pretty picked over, but there were still a few things of interest, such as the three discs of Season Two of The Republic of Doyle. Then just as I was about to wrap it up, the manager came out and announced they had just been informed all DVDs were now $1 each. That changed things. I bought 27 movies. Timing is everything.

Neglected Gems #14: Impromptu (1991)

Hugh Grant as Chopin and Judy Davis as George Sands, in Impromptu

It was a brilliant stroke to cast Judy Davis as the nineteenth-century French novelist George Sand in the 1991 Impromptu. Resolutely bohemian and independent-minded, Sand, who wore suits, smoked cigars and took on a series of lovers, was such a proto-modernist figure that Davis’s very contemporariness – her driven moodiness and tremulous fervor, the eroticized fullness of her presence – seems jarringly right for this woman, as it did when she played a version of D.H. Lawrence’s wife Frieda in Kangaroo. Impromptu, written by Sarah Kernochan and directed by James Lapine (Kernochan’s husband), is a farce populated by celebrities – Sand, Chopin (Hugh Grant), Lizst (Julian Sands) and his mistress, Countess Marie d’Agoult (Bernadette Peters), the playwright Alfred de Musset (Mandy Patinkin) and the painter Eugène Delacroix (Ralph Brown). And Davis’s Sand, offering her love to Chopin with an extravagant combination of sensual abandon and religious devotion, is its emotional core. She hangs outside the closed door of the study where she first hears him play, transported in every fiber of her being; she crawls into his room through the window and lies on the rug, receiving his genius like holy water; she fixes her deep, deep blue eyes on the consumptive composer and begs him to take her strength, which she has too much of. As Davis plays her, this woman is utterly fantastic. Completely conscious, completely self-possessed, she plans every attack on Chopin’s resistance (he finds her terrifying, her finds her appalling). When she thinks he’s turned off by her masculine attire, she shocks everyone by appearing in an evening gown (in the colors of the Polish flag, as a tribute to his homeland). When Marie, scheming to win him herself, cunningly advises her to play the male aggressor and win him as if he were a woman, she shows up at his tailor’s. (Jenny Beavan designed the stunning costumes.) Davis reads Kernochan’s hilarious one-liners with the sureness of a first-rank classical comic actress. What makes her performance extraordinary, however, is the emotional intensity that braces Sand’s outlandish behavior. She can segue in and out of farce on a dime, but when she tells Chopin she loves him, thrusting herself forward as if she were bouncing off some centrifugal force that’s taken hold of her, there’s an ache in her voice and an ache in her wide, naked eyes.

Gatz: Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past

The cast of Gatz (Scott Shepherd, centre). Photo by Joan Marcus

By the time I caught up with Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service’s staged reading of the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a few weeks ago, it was in the midst of a second run at the Public Theatre in New York and it had been touring. Gatz, which began performances in 2010, has been an unqualified hit for the company (whose founder, John Collins, directed it); it’s won a raft of awards and on weekends audiences are still lining up in hope of cancellations. The play runs for six hours plus three intermissions, including a ninety-minute dinner break, so it’s a considerable commitment of time and energy. I was certainly glad I’d made the investment but I’m not entirely sure what it was I saw.

The setting, designed by Louisa Thompson, is a contemporary office, indifferently furnished. When the computer of one of the employees (Ben Williams, substituting at the performance I attended for the usual star, Scott Shepherd) stalls, he pulls a copy of Fitzgerald’s novel out of a drawer and begins to read it out loud, and though his reading is interrupted briefly by the passage of time (the day ends; he returns to the office at night and again the next day), it’s continuous. For a while he’s the only reader, taking not only the role of the narrator, Nick Carraway, but the other characters as well, but the positioning of some of his co-workers and the odd prop or gesture echoes the text in an almost offhand way, and eventually some of them join in. Eventually they take the other parts, usually acting them, off book while he remains a reader. However, when Jordan Baker (I saw Annie McNamara, standing in for Susie Sokol) -- the beautiful, confident golf pro whom Nick meets through his cousin Daisy Buchanan (Victoria Vazquez) and her husband Tom (Gary Wilmes) and falls into a romance with – confides in him the story of Daisy’s interrupted romance with the young soldier, bound for the Great War, who turns out to be Nick’s neighbor Jay Gatsby (Jim Fletcher), she reads it rather than acting it. And on the two occasions when Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby’s gangster associate (based on Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series), turns up, he’s invisible; Nick reads his role like a stage manager going on for an ailing actor.

Canadian Music Man: Bernie Finkelstein's autobiography True North

To paraphrase Gordon Lightfoot, “There was a time in this fair land when the music did not run…” It was not “long before the white man and long before the wheel,” but it was long before Bernie Finkelstein, and “the green dark forest was…silent.” Then Bernie heard the music, and decided to do something about it.

He’s one of the Bernies. Alongside Bernie Fiedler and Bernie Solomon, the Bernies were big in Canadian music. Fiedler ran the Riverboat Coffeehouse, Solomon was a lawyer, and Finkelstein managed Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan (among others), and their collaboration put everything under one roof: artist management, concert promotion, a record company, music publishing and a concert venue. It was genius, except, as Bernie Finkelstein says in his book True North: A Life in the Music (McClelland & Stewart, 2012), “things in the music business are never straightforward. It’s not a business for the faint of heart.”

Hit Me With Music: The Soundtrack to Kevin MacDonald's Film Marley

"Hit me with music," is Bob Marley's triumphant call in the song, "Trenchtown Rock," heard on the soundtrack to Kevin MacDonald's documentary, Marley (Island/Tuff Gong, 2012). (The film recently debuted in Toronto on May 3rd as part of the Hot Docs Festival, while Marley himself died of cancer 31 years ago, yesterday.) One thing you can say about his music, too, which is chronicled on this two-CD set from the early, ska numbers of the 1960s ("Simmer Down" and "Small Axe") to the more popular works of the 1970s, ("One Love" and "Redemption Song"), is that it never seems to go out of style. Bob Marley's work has now transcended the artist who created it. According to his widow, Rita Marley, that's "because he put his all, his heart and soul and his life, into his music, this is why it has the opportunity and the authority to live after him."

Just Another Tired Action/Superhero Movie: Joss Whedon’s The Avengers

Coming out on the heels of his inventive horror movie The Cabin in the Woods, I’d certainly hoped that writer/director Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Serenity) would work his cinematic magic on The Avengers, the much-anticipated Marvel superhero movie which brings together various characters from the Marvel universe: Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk among them, as the new crime fighting unit called The Avengers. Unfortunately, this latest superhero movie is just another tired, pedestrian film whose elaborate special effects pretty much bury anything original, witty or creative inherent in the material. In short, it’s the same old thing: an impersonal franchise movie with little entertainment on offer.

Neglected Gem #13: Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1997)

Alfonso Cuarón’s 1997 Great Expectations transposes Dickens to contemporary America without violating the spirit of the original. This is the third movie version of the beloved novel: there was an unmemorable Hollywood adaptation in 1934 (with Jane Wyatt as Estella), and David Lean made a deservedly famous one in England in 1946, paring down the book’s nearly five hundred pages but remaining very faithful to the story. His edition, an exceedingly handsome, high-style rendering, is almost a model for how to adapt Dickens: he gets so close to the way the classic scenes in Great Expectations look and feel to a reader’s imagination that, if you saw his movie when you were young enough, you may no longer be able to distinguish between his setting of the graveyard opening or Pip’s first view of Miss Havisham’s mouse-eaten wedding cake and the one you first envisioned when you read the book. But there are other approaches to adapting literature, and it’s a pity that critics were so quick to either jump on Cuarón’s or dismiss it outright when it was released. It’s a stunner.

The screenwriter, Mitch Glazer, has a nutty accuracy about his Dickens. Back in the late eighties, he wrote Scrooged, the updated Christmas Carol built around Bill Murray as an ambitious, mean-spirited, workaholic TV-exec Scrooge, and none of the many other film and TV versions of the story, except perhaps for the one from the early fifties featuring Alastair Sim, deserves to be talked about in the same conversation. Glazer brought out the best in the director, Richard Donner, who dreamed up surprising images to match the wondrous script, but in Great Expectations his collaborator came equipped with his own magic touch. In his previous picture, A Little Princess, Cuarón fitted out Frances Hodgson Burnett’s celebrated children’s story with sections – a fable within a fable – from Hindu mythology. Great Expectations is even better.

Fringe: This is the Way the World Ends (Again)

David Noble, Joshua Jackson, and Anna Torv star in Fringe

I’ve been watching Fringe for years, even since it premiered on Fox in 2008, but I’ve never written about it. Now – with the fourth season finale set to air this Friday and with the recent surprise announcement of a fifth and final season – seems like an ideal time to weigh in on a show that has grown into the most consistently entertaining science fiction series currently on network television.

Fringe is essentially a sci-fi procedural that follows a small FBI team – Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), a civilian consultant Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson, Dawson’s Creek), and his father, research scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) – in their investigation of paranormal occurrences, which often turn out to be science experiments gone awry (the results of so-called “Fringe” science.) When Fringe premiered, the comparisons to X-Files were obvious: a Fox series involving two paranormal investigators working with the FBI tracking monsters or strange diseases every week, with a slowly burgeoning romantic tension between our lead characters. The superficial parallels were self-evident – and likely intentional on the part of Fringe’s creators J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci (all of whom also worked on Alias) – but it would be several seasons before Fringe would rightly earn the X-Files banner – learning all the right lessons from the earlier series, and even exceeding it in many ways.

What Is It Really Saying? Soulpepper Theatre Company's You Can't Take It with You

Less than half of the cast of Soulpepper's You Can't Take It With You (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

Soulpepper Theatre Company's production of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's 75-year-old farcical play You Can't Take It With You is beautifully staged, immaculately acted and frequently one-liner funny.

But….

You knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn't you? Director Joseph Ziegler has made a major blunder with his production. He took the material and played at face value what, in 2012, should have been processed through some sort of 21st century critical filter. Otherwise all he's doing is staging, at best, a dusty museum piece; or, at worst, a play that verges on being mildly racist. You Can’t Take it with You is more than just dated, it’s downright misguided. In 1936, when this Pulitzer Prize-winning play first hit Broadway, it was probably considered an entertaining piece of wish-fulfilling escapist fluff; something to pass the time during the latter stages of the Depression. Two years later, Frank Capra made it into a movie which went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and Capra won for Best Director. I remember seeing the film version many years ago, and finding it endearingly funny. Not so much now.

The Lyons: Lavin the Great

Linda Lavin and Dick Latessa stars in The Lyons

Linda Lavin is familiar to long-time TV buffs as the star of Alice (for ten years beginning in the mid-seventies, she played the waitress role Ellen Burstyn had created in the movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) and as Peter Gallagher’s demanding Jewish mother, a recurring part on the appealing teen melodrama series The O.C. But New York theatre audiences know her as one of the great stage performers. Last season, in a revival of Donald Margulies’s Collected Stories, as a distinguished writer and N.Y.U. writing teacher who is betrayed by her most gifted student (Sarah Paulson), she gave the kind of performance that, in Broadway’s heyday, would have been legendary: you would have read about it in the columns of the prestigious New York theatre critics alongside the work of Alla Nazimova and Pauline Lord and Ethel Barrymore. I’ve seen only a handful of American actresses in a lifetime of New York theatregoing with Lavin’s stage technique and mesmerizing command; Blythe Danner has it, and Cherry Jones and Stockard Channing, and Donna Murphy in musicals, and after them the list starts to thin out. (There’s also Lily Tomlin, but her one-of-a-kind style and the genre she works in make her a special case.) Lavin suggests what Stella Adler might have been like in the Group Theatre productions of the 1930s – but that’s really a guess, based partly on the fact that Lavin’s combination of high-octane theatricality and emotional depth points toward the lineage of the Yiddish theatre (Adler’s father Jacob was a celebrated Yiddish actor and she got her early training working with him) and partly on the fact that the magnificent Clifford Odets parts Adler created, Bessie Berger in Awake and Sing! and Clara Gordon in Paradise Lost, could just as easily have been written for Lavin – and someone should be smart enough to let her play them. But Lavin’s also got a vaudevillian side. She’s got the force of a mature Shelley Winters (the Shelley Winters, that is, of Lolita and the Paul Mazursky pictures Blume in Love and Next Stop, Greenwich Village) and Kay Medford’s irony of Kay Medford, but she’s far more elegant than either of these women. I’d compare her to Gertrude Berg, the radio and early TV star (The Goldbergs), but that link doesn’t suggest the undercurrents of lunacy that you see in her current performance as Rita Lyons in the new Nicky Silver comedy The Lyons.

Neglected Gem #12: Nothing Personal (1995)

It’s a funny thing about movies. They may get critical acclaim, even score some box office success and years later they’re barely mentioned by anyone or even remembered. And there’s often no discernible reason for their fates. I really can’t tell why Neil Jordan’s terrific and accessible heist movie The Good Thief, which got good reviews when it came out in 2002, has pretty much vanished into the ether. Or why Steve Jordan’s powerful documentary Stevie (2002) failed to match the impact of his earlier 1994 doc Hoop Dreams. Or even why The Lord of the Rings’s Peter Jackson’s mock 1995 documentary Forgotten Silver didn’t become the cult hit it should have been. In any case, here is the latest entry in a series of disparate movies you really ought to see.

In Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, a truce was called between the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Defense Force. As Nothing Personal makes abundantly clear, peace doesn't mean old hatreds are forgotten; as exemplified by a traitorous Protestant power-broker (Michael Gambon), it can be even unclear who the opposing sides are.

John Lynch and James Frain in Nothing Personal

 At first, it's hard to tell Nothing Personal's characters apart, because director Thaddeus O'Sullivan simply picks up everyone's lives in flux, revolving around family, socializing and politicking. Of course, that's the point: the Protestants and Catholics aren't that different from one another but, like the artificial boundaries that divide their Belfast neighbourhoods, the crevice between the creeds seems insurmountable. When Liam (John Lynch), a Catholic single father, discovers his young son has entered the ‘dangerous’ Protestant sector, he sets off after him, precipitating a confrontation with his enemies – most notably with Kenny, a young Protestant hit man (Ian Hart, who's chilling).

Loosely plotted, but very visceral, Nothing Personal gets at the constant tension, fear and potential for violent outbreak that was and still, to some degree, is the Northern Irish reality. But it also allows for the presence of decency. Nothing Personal is also concerned with the sins of the fathers becoming the sins of the sons, like the similarly themed In the Name of the Father, but, to my mind, even more so than Jim Sheridan’s movie, it better balances the personal and political.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches regular courses at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute, and is currently teaching a course on American cinema of the 70s.

In Every Person A Universe: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The dream of immortality seems like the ultimate goal. It drives careers, sustains industries, and unites humanity in pursuit of that most precious of resources: time. Most of us fret over how to spend it, with some working to earn more, some wishing it would pass faster, some trying to enjoy what little we get. For one Herietta Lacks, her lifetime was trying, painful, and altogether brief – and yet in a very real way, she may well outlive us all.

Released in 2009, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks charts a remarkable history that is at once deeply personal and of global consequence. The book begins with a series of historical flashbacks to Henrietta’s life, as a black woman living in a small Virginia community in 1951 and finding herself diagnosed with cervical cancer. Skloot alternates these with chapters of her own journey of research decades later, as a journalist determined to learn about the donor of the HeLa (‘Hee-la’) cells used in biological research around the world.

The Man Who Made Us Listen Outside Our Comfort Zone: Dick Clark (1929-2012)

“I played records, the kids danced, and America watched.” - Dick Clark (1929-2012)

Dick Clark said his job had been simple, “I played records, the kids danced, and America watched.” And it looked simple too. Watching a series of interviews a day or two after his death on April 18, 2012, I was struck by how completely ordinary he was. There was no flash, no attempt to show off any deep research; as he spoke with Creedence Clearwater Revival, or Abba, he appeared to be a regular guy talking to other regular guys (or gals, as the case may be). He might insert a little joke but for the most part it was, “How are things?” or, “What do you do in your spare time?” The fun came from the answers. Van Morrison mumbled, “I go for walks…”

Dick Clark was part of the music scene for most of my life. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, in the Non-Performers category, he joined such luminary managers, producers, and businessmen as Alan Freed, Sam Phillips and Ahmet Ertegun. Does he belong in their company? You’re darn right he does.

Disappearing Act: Cindy Sherman at MoMA

"Untitled #92" - Cindy Sherman, from Centerfolds, 1981, chromogenic color print

The Cindy Sherman retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, on view through June 11, surveys 35 years of work by a master of postmodern photography. Throughout her career, Sherman has steadily mined photographic portraiture for its feminist subversions of how we look and what we take for truth. Her pictures are performances: with the exception of two mid-career series, all of her photographs are portraits of herself in disguise, reflections on gender and stereotype, voyeurism and fantasy, in the era of Hollywood and mass culture. From her groundbreaking Untitled Film Stills, the series that launched her career in the late 1970s, to her 2008 society portraits, Sherman has distinguished herself as a kind of ventriloquist of image and identity, for whom popular and consumer culture are not the subject of her works but the raw material of her perpetual self-transformation.

Not all of this work is equally powerful. The Cindy Sherman of Untitled Film Stills quickly became a celebrity herself – and celebrity, so often the tipping point between the avant-garde and the status quo, seems to have dulled the sharp edge of Sherman’s aesthetic, as well as her social critique. The irony of the retrospective is precisely that it cashes in on the art world celebrity of an artist who became famous for her critique of popular culture. But Sherman has made herself an easy target for such irony. Her early work, singularly haunting and unshakeable, used photographic self-portraiture as a kind of disappearing act: she made herself so visible she disappeared into the work completely. After 1985, her work took on the sickly sheen of a magic trick performed self-consciously, one too many times. It grows cynical about illusion: the mechanism by which the trick was performed became the subject of the art.

When Movies Still Mattered: 1970s American Cinema

Al Pacino and Marlon Brando in The Godfather

Years ago, I remember watching Rancho Deluxe (1975) – a modern day comedy western starring Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston – and marveling how this rather middling, but entertaining, Hollywood movie was still smart, adult and honest. In fact, even a second-tier movie, such as Rancho Deluxe, from 1970s American cinema (the last Golden Age of American movies) was considerably more worthwhile than almost anything coming out from Hollywood, or American independent cinema, in the 21st century. As I prepare to teach a course on this decade in cinema history, it’s worth speculating on why movies turned out so consistently good and gratifying during that time.

Much has already been written, and showcased, about the era in documentaries such as Easy Rider, Raging Bulls (2002, based on Peter Biskind’s provocative 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood) and A Decade Under the Influence (2003). Both looked at how the younger set of Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, as well as their elders Robert Altman (who didn’t begin his movie career until he was in his 40s) and Paul Mazursky were given the filmmaking reins in a failing and geriatric Hollywood that was out of touch with '60s American culture. Fearing complete failure, the ageing Hollywood had no choice but to take chances with whom it allowed to make movies. Also remarked upon was how a new breed of (often identifiably ethnic) actors and actresses (ordinary looking folk, and not gorgeous looking movie stars: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson) were allowed to play front and centre in movies that worked off of their eccentricities and plain appearances. But I’d argue that the dominant factor in why the movies were so good and relevant in the '70s was trust. The studio executives generally trusted (to a point) that these maverick moviemakers would still make films that had cachet and appeal and, more significantly, audiences could be expected to follow them in whatever endeavours they undertook in that regard. (The '30 and '40s movies, the last Golden Age before the '70s, did the same in an assumption of literacy on the part of the filmgoing audiences.)

Deceits and Deceptions: Linden MacIntyre's Why Men Lie

Why do we lie? Is it to make ourselves look better? To reinstate emotional boundaries? To hide secrets? To protect ourselves? To protect others? More importantly why do we tend to tell the greatest lies to those closest to us? And, given that this is true, do we ever really know someone? The theme of deception, among other affairs that tend to complicate personal relationships, is deftly explored through Linden MacIntyre’s latest novel Why Men Lie (Random House Canada, 2012). Why Men Lie is the the third installment in a trilogy beginning with his 2006 piece The Long Stretch. (His last book, The Bishop’s Man, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. MacIntyre is also the co-host of the CBC’s flagship news documentary program the fifth estate.)

Why Men Lie examines the life of Fay (Effie) MacAskill Gillis, originally from Cape Breaton Island, now longtime Toronto resident, professor of Gaelic Studies, and department head at a major university. She is the ex-wife of John Gillis, protagonist from The Long Stretch, and sister to Duncan MacAskill, the priest from The Bishop’s Man. (Both characters appear in the third installment.) As an independent, confident, and successful middle aged woman, Effie is well aware of disappointments that accompany romantic relationships. She is also attuned to the innate ability of men to lie. When Effie is introduced she is writing off her second (and most philandering) husband Alexander Sextus Gillis after she hears of his latest illicit liaison. This fallout is diverted by a chance encounter with a handsome, seemingly well-adjusted, old acquaintance JC Campbell. JC and Effie begin, what seems like, a healthy, mutually respectful relationship. The novel becomes an open examination of her three past relationships and a dissection of her most recent romance with this gentleman from her past.

The Deep Blue Sea: Reduced Rattigan

Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz in Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea

Among the various revivals staged to pay tribute to the English playwright Terence Rattigan around his 2011 centenary, possibly the most unwelcome is his countryman Terence Davies’ film of Rattigan’s 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea. Davies is a pictorialist, not a dramatist; the movies that made his reputation, Distant Voices, Still Lives in 1988 and The Long Day Closes in 1992, were art-house chotchkes, with images that looked too much like tableaux and characters he hadn’t bothered to fill in. You could see the influence of the Brechtian-Freudian writer Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven, The Singing Detective), especially in Distant Voices, Still Lives, which contained a number of pub sing-alongs, but he didn’t move through his ideas to any sort of life underneath. Davies is the filmmaker equivalent of the Robin Bailey character in John Boorman’s Catch Us If You Can, who collects pop mementos that, lovingly preserved in an airless setting, removed from any context that might have given them meaning, have become a kind of living dead.

Davies moved on to adaptations with his 2000 version of the Edith Wharton novel The House of Mirth, and Gillian Anderson’s portrayal of the tragic heroine, Lily Bart, gave that movie a raison d’être. But except for her and a few of the supporting players (especially Eleanor Bron and Elizabeth McGovern) it had no more life in it than his previous efforts. You watched the actors parading around in impeccable costumes against impeccable sets, and you didn't believe who they said they were or that they represented the society Wharton wrote about. Most of the actors seemed miscast, and implausible in an early twentieth-century setting, and since Davies encouraged them to read their dialogue with a mannered crispness, you got the sense that he didn't want us to believe them in period. The movie came across as a semi-post-modern take on the novel – which really deserved better. (And it had already received it, in a 1981 television edition starring Geraldine Chaplin.)