Notes on the Problem of Tone in Recent Movies

Note to readers: This post contains spoilers.

This Pixar animated fairy tale Brave has a lot of charm; it’s one of the few movies this summer that I’ve been able to send friends to. But it takes a wrong turn in the middle that’s almost disastrous. The heroine, a bright, tomboyish Scottish princess named Merida, has reached the age to be courted, but she has no interest in any of her suitors and she bests them easily at the archery competition that’s meant to determine which one is worthy of her hand. Merida hopes that she can win her mother’s sympathy but instead the queen is furious at her unladylike behavior. So – in the film’s most inventive sequence – the princess enlists the help of a witch who promises to deliver a potion that will alter the queen’s perspective. What it does is to transform Queen Elinor into a bear. The scenes that follow, in which Elinor continues to attempt to act in a queenly manner while her body keeps working against her (and while she’s unable to communicate except through gesture), are comical, and Merida’s efforts to keep her father, a celebrated bear hunter, from seeing Elinor while trying frantically to track down an antidote underscore the princess’s imagination and resourcefulness, certainly appropriate in a coming-of-age story. The problem is what we might call tonal follow-through.

Will It Go Round in Circles: Fernando Meirelles' 360

Desperate to earn money, a downhearted young woman is about to debut with a Vienna escort service. Her family quarrels in their dingy Bratislava apartment. An Algerian dentist stalks his Russian hygienist in Paris. Two bodies writhe on a bed during an adulterous affair in London. A recovering alcoholic attends an AA meeting in Phoenix. Several miserable passengers endure a long wait when their flights are delayed by snow at a Denver airport. So much anguish, so many destinations, so little time. Actually, at 113 minutes, 360 seems twice as long while tracking the sexual encounters – or lack thereof – among various troubled characters across the globe.

The well-credentialed team of filmmakers includes director Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener, 2005) and screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, 2006) but their collaboration winds up as less than the sum of its many moving parts. The script is adapted from an 1897 play, La Ronde, that Max Ophuls covered onscreen in 1950 with star Simone Signoret; Roger Vadim did the same 14 years later with Jane Fonda but employed a new title, Circle of Love. What goes around, as everyone knows by now, comes around.

Bad Faith: The Dark Knight Rises

As fans of superhero pictures (and that’s most of the world, evidently) know, the Batman series divides into three categories. There are the Tim Burtons, Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), with their magnificent, High Romantic Anton Furst designs and Michael Keaton as a brooding, mysterious Bruce Wayne – a portrayal that, in a better world, would have made him an actor to be cherished forever. Burton put a premium on character and let the stories unravel like fairy tales. The Joel Schumacher entries, Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997), were extravagantly (but not wittily) overdesigned; they were like arcades, or gay roller discos, and they underused their stars, Val Kilmer and George Clooney respectively, so that afterwards you couldn't remember anything they’d done.

Then Christopher Nolan took over the franchise in 2005 with Batman Begins, which he also co-wrote with Davis G. Goyer. Nolan brought art-house credentials (Memento, a wildly overrated puzzle picture that didn’t make basic plot sense) and a grim relentlessness that I would have said was precisely the wrong kind of approach for a comic-book adventure. And the concept was misconceived. Bruce (Christian Bale), like the character Michael Keaton played in the Burton pictures, has never been able to move past the pointless deaths of his parents, before his eyes, at the hands of a mugger, but it isn’t grief that motivates this Bruce; it’s guilt. As a boy, Bruce was so terrified of bats as a result of falling down a well on his dad’s estate that, when his parents took him to see the operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat), the prop bats on stage distressed him and he asked to be taken home early. They encountered the mugger on a deserted street outside the opera house; if Bruce had only been able to control his phobia, his parents might be alive today. So when, years later, returning to a Gotham City overrun with gangsters and all manner of corruption, he chooses to disguise himself as a bat, it’s his way of conquering those childhood fears and doing penance for the fact that his inability to handle them led his parents to their deaths. (The real corruption – or at least stupidity of a monumental order – must have been at Warner Brothers, where this plot premise made it past the pitch stage.) But first there’s a long sequence at a Tibetan monastery, which seems to belong in some other movie altogether, where Wayne is trained in martial arts by mystics (the westerner among them is Ra’s Al Ghul, played by Liam Neeson, whose goatee is more expressive than his performance) who turn out to be the League of Shadows, fanatics with a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah God complex, dedicated to wiping out cities overrun with evil, like Gotham. So Bruce has to defeat them – temporarily, at least – and stage an escape before he can return to battle the more homegrown evil in his own hometown.

Bruce Wayne and his murdered parents in Batman Begins 

The chief villain in Batman Begins, though, is the sinister Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), who, as The Scarecrow, poisons his victims with a psychotropic aerosol that maddens them and projects their worst fears onto his burlap mask. Perhaps I’m hopelessly old-fashioned, but I consider it a sign of bad faith in a director of a comic-book movie that he thinks nothing of putting his audience through the same misery as the characters entrapped in their cruelest fantasies – like the maggots foisted on a screaming Katie Holmes (as Bruce’s childhood friend Rachel Dawes, now an ADA of impressive moral fiber and courage). By the time Crane had pumped enough aerosol in the streets of Gotham in the climax to send paranoid zombies after Rachel and some unfortunate little boy, I was looking around for something to throw at the screen.

Sinfully Good: Andrea England's Hope & Other Sins

When I was a young guy, hopeful about breaking into the singer/songwriter market I wanted to call my first record Love and Other Delights.  It seemed to capture the essence of what my songs were about. Andrea England has topped that by choosing Hope & Other Sins as the title for her new release. It’s definitely more thought-provoking, and when combined with A Man Called Wrycraft’s startling and gorgeous cover art it sets an expectation for England’s third CD to dig far deeper into the listener’s subconscious and really tug at your heart and head. The production, by Blackie & the Rodeo Kings’ Colin Linden, helps fulfil those expectations.

Lennon Interpreted: Michael Occhipinti & Shine On's The Universe of John Lennon

The Universe of John Lennon (True North 2012) is the latest in a long series of tribute albums to one of the most famous songwriters in contemporary pop. According to Amazon, there are already dozens of tribute albums to the ex-Beatle, the most recent in the jazz world from Bill Frisell: All We Are Saying (Savoy Jazz, 2011).

This new recording by Canadian guitarist Michael Occhipinti and his band, Shine On, offers listeners fresh insights into Lennon's music, insights that are inventive but not necessarily imaginative. As a musician and arranger, Occhipinti takes some calculated risks with these songs that stand up well. But after repeated listens, the music often fails to match up with either the intent of the original, or even the lyrics themselves. In other words, the music is so good that it often sounds detached from the lyrics. That said, there are still a few highlights that distinguish this album from the pack.

You Want to Make a Musical Out of That? Far from Heaven, New Girl in Town

Charlie Plummer, Alexa Niziak, and Kelli O’Hara in Far From Heaven (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The biggest deal at the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer is a new musical of the 2002 Todd Haynes movie Far from Heaven starring Kelli O’Hara, who has taken a couple of weeks off from her Broadway show Nice Work If You Can Get It to perform in the Berkshires. Any chance to see O’Hara, a pure-voiced, remarkably expressive singer who is also a first-rate actress, is worth taking, and in the role of Cathy Whitaker – played on film by Julianne Moore – she sings superbly and conveys affectingly the bafflement of a quietly elegant, optimistic 1950s New England housewife who suddenly discovers that all of her assumptions about her life and her community are false. Moore, whose beauty is somehow touching and remote at the same time, brought to the part a sense of profound alienation; O’Hara, who has a gift for plumbing the depths of conventional characters, comes at it from a different perspective.

Composer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie are drawn to unusual projects, to say the least. They wrote the score for Grey Gardens, which was based on the Maysles Brothers’ documentary about those cousins of Jackie Kennedy’s, mother and daughter, who lived in poverty in a dilapidated Long Island mansion with dozens of cats; and in Happiness, which had a limited run at Lincoln Center, all the characters are dead people, the victims of a bus crash, who each have to dig into their memories for a moment of perfect happiness before they’re permitted to proceed to their eternal rest. It seems almost superfluous to point out that neither of these musicals works, though Happiness, which was directed and choreographed by the resourceful Susan Stroman, had a knockout of an opening number, and the flashback section of Grey Gardens that took up all of act one – the part of the narrative that the writers (Doug Wright supplied the book) had to invent – seemed grounded in some kind of playable narrative, unlike the ghoulish, inscrutable second act.

Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert in Far from Heaven (2002)

Possibly Far from Heaven, a collaboration with playwright Richard Greenberg, is even more of a head-scratcher. Why would anyone want to turn Haynes’s movie into a musical? It’s about a Hartford, Connecticut Mattron who discovers that her husband is gay and then falls in love with her African-American gardener. Haynes intended it as a corrective to the Technicolor soap operas of the fifties that tamped down homoerotic subplots and relegated black characters to demeaning subsidiary roles, and its ideal audience seemed to be made up of academics with a fondness for post-modern deconstruction and serious admirers of Douglas Sirk’s glossy hothouse melodramas, who have often claimed that Sirk rebelled against the social constrictions of his era in histrionic pictures like Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows. I don’t think much of Sirk, but his movies are seldom boring; Far from Heaven, by contrast, is arid and theoretical – though no less preposterous. Haynes creates an alternative version of the fifties that borders on the Martian. Raymond, the gardener (played by Dennis Haysbert), is highly cultivated and can speak articulately on a variety of subjects; the only thing he doesn’t seem to know anything about is gardening, and we never see him do any. Yet despite his intelligence, he’s shocked when his squiring a white woman around draws unpleasant attention, as if he’d never heard of racism. Haynes is so eager to show us how superior this black man is that he draws him as if he’d been dropped into New England from some sociologically advanced planet. The movie is so fanatically bent on pushing through its thesis that it winds up looking idiotic. The point of casting Dennis Quaid, an almost iconically straight actor, as a closeted homosexual is that we’d never imagine he might be. But instead we don’t believe he could be, which isn’t the same thing. Haynes’s strategies run to making the Whitakers’ little boy effeminate and their little girl a tomboy, to show us that children can sometimes elude gender stereotypes.

The Evil That Men Do: Chinatown and L.A. Confidential

Los Angeles has always had a knack for attracting men (and it's almost always men) who saw an opportunity to take the City of Angels and try to remake it in their own image. These self-made men also didn't get to that position by being kind, or by doing the right thing. In fact, they rarely possessed any kind of moral compass; often they were sociopaths if not downright psychopathic. I'm speaking of people like William Mulholland, William Randolph Hearst and other 'captains of industry.' These titans, these monstrous icons, would later have streets, buildings and cities named after them, but their crimes, the terrible things they did, would largely be forgotten. Of course, this is a familiar story of any big city. Toronto, for example, has a street and various schools named Jarvis. But you wouldn't want to pull back the veil of the Jarvis clan in the 18th and 19th centuries because you might not like what you would find. The hothouse climate of LA, though, seems to attract an inordinate number of them.

Inevitably, when these guys went about their business, other people, often innocent people, paid dearly. It is even said by some that the tragic Elizabeth Short may have been killed by famous men who used her for their own ends and then disposed of her. (Short, whose nickname was Black Dahlia, is a famous-in-death young woman who came to Hollywood in 1946 looking for fame and all she found was murder by dismemberment in 1947. Short's murder has never been solved and has become the basis of many books and films, including Ulu Grosbard's interesting, but flawed 1981 picture True Confessions and Brian De Palma's reviled 2006 The Black Dahlia.) Besides the Dahlia story, Hollywood has rarely had the cojones to tackle stories about these men right in L.A.’s own backyard. But over the years, filmmakers like Philip Kaufman – in his 1993 film Rising Sun – and Robert Altman – in his 1973 picture The Long Goodbye – have all addressed what these legendary giants do either directly, or indirectly. But it wasn’t the prime focus of those works. Two great films, however, both of which I consider masterpieces, have confronted these men straight on: Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) and Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997).

Sherlock Holmes Redux: The Great Detective Lives On

Sherlock, the recent brilliant BBC-TV series re-imagining and updating of the Sherlock Holmes stories to the present day are, of course, not the only times The Great Detective has been re-worked for television, films and books. And as a long-time aficionado of the Holmes canon – and someone who had the privilege in 1987 of writing a tribute piece in The Toronto Star to Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal hero on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Holmes’ first appearance in print – I must confess I’ve more often than not been happy with how the adaptations of Holmes’ adventures have turned out in print and on screen. These include the distinguished Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce movies (14 movies made between 1939-46); Billy Wilder’s cynical, but entertaining The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970); and Murder by Decree (1979), which cast Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Dr. Watson, investigating the murders committed by Jack the Ripper. Two other productions feature men who think they’re Sherlock Holmes: the allegorical and moving 1971 movie They Might Be Giants, with George C. Scott, and The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective, a surprisingly decent 1976 TV movie with Larry Hagman. Interestingly, both of those featured a female Watson, thus anticipating this fall’s CBS series Elementary, with Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting) as Holmes, and Lucy Liu (Charlie’s Angels) as Watson. The post Conan Doyle novels have also often been good, with Nicholas Meyer’s excellent Holmes’ pastiches, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974) and The West End Horror (1976) at the top of the heap. (Meyer's third Holmes pastiche, The Canary Trainer: From the Memoirs of John H. Watson (1993), though worthwhile, isn't as inspired.) In fact, I can only think of a few duds (though I have studiously avoided most of the Holmes in America novels as that seems to me an attempt to pander to an audience that should be content with the London- or European-set adventures of the man). I’m  not enamored of a couple of films, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975) and Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), nor of Caleb Carr’s 2005 novel, The Italian Secretary. (Carr, who wrote The Alienist, has always been better at the idea than the execution, which is a polite way of saying he’s not a very good writer.) Mostly, though, the results in bringing back Holmes and Watson have been pleasing to watch or read. The latest Holmes novel, Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk, as well as the recent DVD release of a criminally underrated Holmes movie, the 1976 film adaptation of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, bear that out.

Neglected Gem #21: Death and the Maiden (1994)

Stuart Wilson, Ben Kingsley, and Sigourney Weaver star in Death and the Maiden

In Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden, set in an unidentified South American country after the fall of a dictatorship, a woman comes across the man who tortured and raped her, repeatedly, to the strains of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Paulina is now married to Gerardo Escobar, the man who recruited her to fight in the underground against the junta – caught and imprisoned, she endured the torture rather than reveal his name – and who has just been selected to chair the newly formed human rights commission, mandated to investigated the atrocities committed under the old government. But Paulina fears a whitewash, since the only cases the commission plans to investigate are the ones that ended in death. So when Escobar, stuck with a broken-down car in a fierce rainstorm, invites into their home the stranger who rescued him with a lift, and Paulina recognizes her rapist, Miranda, she ties him up, gags him, and initiates her own kangaroo court, seeking a justice she’s certain the commission will never exact.

This script, which was produced in London with Juliet Stevenson and on Broadway with Glenn Close (and Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss as the two men), is a particularly moronic example of the social-problem melodrama. A play of this kind – another, with a similar plot, is William Mastrosimone’s Extremities – uses simplistic, easily identifiable characters to pound out its thesis, reducing complex issues to neatly carved-out slabs of narrative information labeled with little tags to explain what they mean and how we’re intended to view them. The dramatic progression, which is supposed to feel inexorable, is exasperatingly predictable, since after the first half hour or so no one shows any new sides. A play like Death and the Maiden is a corruption of the social dramas Ibsen wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, which reimagined the well-made boulevard melodramas of Scribe and Sardou to land the Victorian audience, by the end, in strange, uncharted territory, without moorings. By contrast, a twelve-year-old could read the map of a play like Death and the Maiden. And maybe that’s why these bastard children of Ibsen and the socialist playwrights of the thirties are always so popular: audiences, and reviewers, too, feel safe basking in their confirmation of the currently accepted stands on a variety of political issues. (Angels in America is the most famous, and most overblown, American entry in this genre.)

What’s So Good about Feel-Bad TV

Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston star in Breaking Bad on AMC

Television has a well-earned reputation for producing escapist fare. But the continuing popularity of shows like Grey's Anatomy, America’s Got Talent, and The Bachelorette doesn’t tell the whole story. Many of the best TV series in the past ten years – a decade of worldwide terror, multiple (and seemingly unending) wars, mortgage crises, and economic decline – are also the most challenging, darkest, and let’s just say it, depressing shows in the history of television.  While Hollywood is overrun with costumed heroes, romantic comedies, and vampire hunting U.S. Presidents, television (cable TV in particular) is taking up the social slack, addressing issues like racism, cancer, AIDS, drug addiction, mental illness, poverty, death, and dying. And its confrontation with these issues has met with both popular and critical success.

Rather than pander to a hypothetical population that wants to leave reality behind, shows like Six Feet Under, The Wire, and Dexter have found big audiences by telling difficult, uncomfortable stories, calling into question old assumptions about why and how people watch television. Notably, while there are few subjects as taboo as cancer, cable TV currently offers two shows with a lead character suffering from the disease: The Big C (Showtime’s comedy starring Laura Linney as a woman recently diagnosed with late stage melanoma), and Breaking Bad, which recently began its fifth and final season on AMC.

If you want to understand the current appeal of Feel-Bad TV, Breaking Bad is perhaps the ideal place to start. The show stars Bryan Cranston as Walter White, a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher who, after an unexpected diagnosis with terminal lung cancer, joins forces with Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), his former student turned drug dealer, and begins to cook crystal meth. The recipe for Breaking Bad’s success lies in its unflinching realism and its refusal to pull any punches: the very same ingredients which often make the show so difficult to watch are also why it is such compelling viewing. 

Masters of Surface: Roy Lichtenstein in Chicago, Mad Men on TV

“Masterpiece,” Roy Lichtenstein, 1962. Oil on canvas

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Anna-Claire Stinebring, to our group.

Viewing Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective now up at the Art Institute of Chicago through September 3, I had the distinct sense that Lichtenstein’s art has, in some sense, come full circle. The AIC has chosen to primarily advertise with the cartoon strip and ad-inspired paintings (distressed blondes, impossibly serene explosions) that make “Lichtenstein” and “Pop” seem synonymous, but which are only one subset of the artist’s prolific career, as a visit to the galleries reveals. This publicity choice is reasonable – these paintings, all from the 1960s, are iconic and captivating. But it raises this question: by being inundated with reproductions of Lichtenstein’s images until they resemble their slick source material, do we now see Lichtenstein’s paintings through that snazzy consumer lens? What lesson are we as viewers taking away from the retrospective if, drawn in by the AIC banners of stunned and stunning women, we take pictures of his comic strip beauties and make them the wallpaper on our iPhones?

Maybe the simple contours of his women meet a current desire for simplicity, something vaguely recession-related. But reproducing Lichtenstein in this way diminishes the power of the way he’s laboriously and shrewdly reworked these pop-culture images. This body of work, completed in the 1960s, blew open modern art by rejecting the premium placed on originality and instead taking advertisements and comic strip frames as his starting point. Lichtenstein tweaked them and repainted them on a larger-than-life scale, in a flat, droll style without commentary. He recreated the comic-book coloring technique of Ben-Day dots by hand – a laborious undertaking – and worked to conceal his brushstrokes. It’s important to separate a museum’s publicity department from curatorial, of course. This fetishizing of the comic book material goes beyond the ad campaign and museum store. It’s in evidence in the galleries, where, when I visited, a preponderance of young women in polka-dotted dresses (some even with cat-eye glasses or cherry-red lipstick) ogled Lichtenstein’s pretty women with their Ben-Day dot polka-dotted faces.

Neglected Gem #20: Facing Windows (2003)

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 impressive debuts like Jeff Lipsky’s Childhood’s End didn’t get half the buzz that considerably lesser movies (Wendy and Lucy, Ballast) have acquired upon their subsequent release. In any case, here is the latest entry in a series of disparate movies you really ought to see.

Screen to Stage: Newsies and Dogfight

Jeremy Jordan (centre-top) and company in Newsies (Photo by Deen van Meer)

The latest Broadway hit musical from Disney is Newsies, which transfers the 1992 movie musical to the stage of the Nederlander, and the news is mostly pretty good. Kenny Ortega’s 1992 picture has a juicy plot premise: the 1899 strike of newsboys (“newsies”) peddling The New York Herald, after its publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, opts to elevate his profits by raising the price of the paper – but only to the newsies, not to the paying customers. (The newsies have to buy their papers, or “papes,” outright, and eat the cost of any copies that are left at the end of the day.) The movie has considerable period personality – the story begins in the third week of a trolley workers’ strike and contains a memorable image of a blazing trolley shooting down a Manhattan street – and Ortega and his co-choreographer, Peggy Holmes, picked a fine model, Carol Reed’s 1968 Oliver!, one of the best film musicals ever made. Newsies isn’t at the level of Oliver!, but it’s great fun, with rousing anthems by Alan Mencken (music) and Jack Friedman (lyrics), wonderful high-stepping dances, and tough, nimble-witted newsboys (led by a young Christian Bale, just five years after Empire of the Sun, as the charismatic Jack Kelly and David Moscow as David, the brains of the gang) with plenty of attitude and thick, stylized New York accents that make them sound like the Dead End Kids. The Bob Tzudiker-Noni White screenplay is crowded with incident; the movie is a very speedy two-hour ride.

Raising the Mercury on Summer Reading: The Walrus July/August 2012

Maybe we can blame the summer reading frenzy on John Keats when he said “give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors.” Never mind that for most people it’s now magazines, junk food, beer, scorching humidity and Top 40 radio on the beach; the sentiment remains. Summer is a time to relax with your literature and libation of choice. What defines ‘summer reading’ or ‘beach reads’ – is it content, style, or context? We could ask the same question of Canadian Literature (CanLit). For most definitions of both summer reading and CanLit, The Walrus July/August 2012 issue, the ‘summer reading’ edition, lives up to expectations.

Although summer reading is notoriously light and easy, The Atlantic and The Huffington Post have recently put out articles disputing this assumption. And they’re right. Why should our brains shut down just because it’s hot out? But it’s also true that although we still want to be challenged, it’s not fun reading doom and gloom with the sand between your toes. Filled with short stories by talented Canadian writers, The Walrus summer reading issue is always the perfect balance, and this year is no exception. Heather O’Neill, Joseph Boyden and Margaret Atwood all treat us to an inside glimpse into well-remembered characters from their novels. That’s not to say if you haven’t read the novels you won’t understand the stories. I’ve not read Boyden’s Three Day Road, but I was still able to appreciate the true Canadian-north setting and pitting of characters against the elements. In fact, both these things were a refreshing antidote to lying docile in a pool of sweat on the beach.

One Step Beyond: Matthew Chapman's The Ledge

The image of a man standing on the edge of building, contemplating taking his life, is one that has appeared repeatedly in film and TV shows over the decades (including the recent Season Two finale of the terrific BBC series, Sherlock). Most of these stories, with suicidal characters driven by personal or financial despair, almost always feature a cop or social worker trying to talk the person down. But what if the individual is not on that ledge of their own accord, but pressured to be there by a third party? What if they are told that they must jump by 12 noon – or someone else will die in their stead? Would you jump to save that person, or would self-interest kick in? Such is the premise of Matthew Chapman's intriguing 2011 movie The Ledge (not to be confused with Asger Leth's 2012 Man on a Ledge).

This is one of those films I picked up for $1 this past spring when my local Rogers' video store shutdown. (I had watched the trailer at the start of another movie and was intrigued by the premise.) The cast looked promising too, with Terrance Howard as the cop, Hollis Lucetti, trying to talk the guy down; and Liv Tyler as Shana Harris, the object of the jumper's affection. The jumper is Gavin Nichols, played by Charlie Hunnam, a British actor (doing American here – the film takes place in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) unknown to me though he is one of the main stars on FX's Sons of Anarchy. Patrick Wilson (A Gifted Man, Watchmen) as Joe Harris (Shana's cuckolded husband) is the one who made sure Nichols stood on that ledge. But let me rewind the story here (because that is what the picture does). It starts with Nichols stepping out on the ledge and a short time later Lucetti appears to try to talk him out of it. Lucetti has his own issues (he thinks his children are not his) which is established in a short prologue before Nichols takes his ledge stroll. Lucetti is also surprised at how casual Nichols is, not conforming to the usual attitude of the despair-filled would-be jumper. So he intuits that Nichols is not there of his own accord. Nichols soon cops to this, telling Lucetti that he has been told he must jump by noon or someone else dies (it is 10:30AM according to a large clock across the way). He then tells Lucetti his story.

Off the Shelf: Don Hannah's The Wise and Foolish Virgins (1998)

When first reading playwright Don Hannah's terrific debut novel, The Wise and Foolish Virgins (Random House, 1998), I was immediately reminded of a scene from Michael Tolkin's provocative film, The Rapture (1991), where a born again Christian tells a convert who is having her doubts about her faith that all she has to do is let God forgive her. But the convert then answers back, "Yes, but who forgives God?" In his movie, Tolkin's point is that if we look for signs of God's perfection in the world, and in ourselves, and we find instead something less noble and unholy, how do we reconcile ourselves with God? In The Wise and Foolish Virgins, a group of individuals try to seek out the sacred but are continually forced to confront the profane.

The story takes place in Membartouche, a fictional small town in New Brunswick which seems quaint, but in reality it is teeming with frustrated individuals who feel at the short end of life's very fickle stick. Sandy Whyte, a repressed homosexual, is a pillar of the local church who has suffered humiliation and tries to take refuge in Bach and the religious hymns of his childhood. But his obsession with beauty takes an ugly turn when he kidnaps and holds hostage a young boy whom he worships. Gloria is Sandy's cleaning lady, a woman once ridiculed for having laid eyes on the Virgin Mary as a child, who has a family reunion dinner in honour of her gay brother Raymond, a man dying of AIDS, which stirs up her family's concealed hostilities. Annette is a pregnant teenager who desires an abortion, but when she accidently informs Margaret, a fundamentalist Christian at a right-to-life hotline, Margaret makes it her mission to convince Annette to keep her child. But we quickly come to realize that Margaret's efforts aren't based so much on her religious beliefs, or any altruistic motives, they come instead from a desire in her to transcend her own memories of the horrible sexual abuse she suffered as a young girl.

The Amazing Spider-Man: Adolescent Hero

Andrew Garfield stars in The Amazing Spider-Man

As Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield wears his sensitivities – crippled pride, a sense of abandonment, guilt and anger, and especially romantic fervency – like open wounds.  You don’t wonder that the leading jock bully at his high school, Flash (Chris Zylka), targets Peter:  emotionally he’s the perfect punching bag.  Peter’s parents (played, in flashbacks, by Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz), a distinguished geneticist and his wife, were killed in a suspicious plane crash when Peter was a little boy, and though the uncle and aunt who raised him (Martin Sheen and Sally Field) have worked hard to give him both a loving upbringing and a strong moral foundation, his orphaned state has left him incomplete, and you can see it in his face, which is pocked with anxiety and etched with loneliness. Garfield is gifted but he hasn’t always been used well:  neither Never Let Me Go nor Red Riding Trilogy did a thing for him, and he was all wrong as Biff Loman in the Mike Nichols revival of Death of a Salesman last season – and when he isn’t cast right he goes phony.  But he showed a talent for mining adolescent feelings in The Social Network, and as Peter, a genius loser in whom a bite from a genetically enhanced spider in the lab of his dad’s old partner, Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), releases both a physical prowess he never dreamed of possessing and an accompanying sexual confidence, he’s magnificent.  Garfield locates the vulnerabilities of an ostracized teenage boy with unerring precision and then uses the fantasy narrative to build on them – and employs his gangly body to suggest at first awkwardness, isolation and masochism and then athleticism and physical invention.  One friend made a brilliant comparison between Garfield and the young Anthony Perkins of Friendly Persuasion and Fear Strikes Out, and I can’t think of an actor since Perkins who’s been able to go quite so far with the bruised emotional palette of a young man who feels way too much.

Martin Sheen, Sally Field and Andrew Garfield

I had a wonderful time at this latest Spider-Man picture, which was directed by Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer), but I don’t understand the Beatles-vs.-Stones arguments it seems to have generated. Many fans of it feel compelled to put down the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, while many Raimi apologists pronounce it extraneous because it replays much of the plot of the 2002 Spider-Man. Both positions seem silly to me. Raimi’s movies were steeped in comic-book mythology and his visual style was ideal for the material; Spider-Man 2 in particular contained sequences (like the one in which Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man stops a subway train from falling into space and the grateful passengers reciprocate by succoring his exhausted body) in which the pop imagery had an almost miraculous emotional resonance, the way it does in the 1976 King Kong and in Tim Burton’s Batman – the only two comic-book movies I can think of that are even better.  Wittily, in Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 the sticky webs Parker generated stood in for his sexual coming of age, simultaneously confusing and embarrassing and powerful.  The scenes between Maguire and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson came straight out of romantic comedy.  Spider-Man 3 was an amalgam of mostly lousy ideas, but it was the kind of mistake almost every franchise makes at least once; it showed, perhaps, that Raimi had outgrown the series, but I don’t think he should be crucified for it.  The Amazing Spider-Man, which was designed by J. Michael Riva and shot by John Schwartzman, looks lovely, and the action sequences are very entertaining, but Webb doesn’t have Raimi’s consistency at creating marvelous images, and there’s no controlling metaphor. Moreover the villain isn't very interesting. It's Connors who is emotionally scarred from having been born without his right arm and obsessed with fixing human weaknesses, including his own. Under the effects of a serum he develops from mutant lizards using Dr. Parker's research (which Peter finds and makes available to him), he turns into a giant reptile. The best thing about the Lizard is his look: the artists who designed him had the cleverness to make him look like something the great special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen might have come up with.  (When the Lizard chases Peter down at school, bursting out of the sewers through a toilet in the boys’ bathroom, fans of TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer may remember how much more effective the Sunnydale High School graduation scene was, where the Mayor transformed himself into a huge, voracious snake.)  But playing opposite the disarming Emma Stone (as Gwen Stacy, Peter’s classmate and the daughter of the chief of police), who has crack comic timing and a voice like a hollowed-out bubble, Garfield is able to paint a portrait of an adolescent hero that both goes deeper than the Raimi-Maguire Parker and spans a broader spectrum.

Stand and Deliver: Soulpepper's Production of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow

Ari Cohen & Jordan Pettle star in Soulpepper's production of Speed-The-Plow (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

“They’re only words; unless it’s true” – Charles (Speed-The-Plow)

Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company obviously loves the words of David Mamet. They've already produced a first-rate Oleanna and a solid Glengarry Glen Ross in recent years, proving the American playwright’s work is still relevant. Speed-The-Plow can now be added to that list of productions Soulpepper does with great energy and efficiency. Mamet’s plays feature smart, fast-talking characters with razor sharp wit and a focused point of view. In Speed-the-Plow, which debuted in 1988, we get a layered work that’s about loyalty, personal integrity and morality set in the one place that least values those attributes: Hollywood. In Soulpepper’s efficient and uncluttered production, we’re given just the right amount of hope to believe that Hollywood is still about making good films, regardless of the ego-driven executives who produce them.

The play opens with the main characters, Bobby Gould (Ari Cohen) and Charlie Fox (Jordan Peddle), agreeing to produce a movie that will put “asses in seats” and provide them with enough money “to piss on.” Gould was recently promoted in the fictional studio, to produce movies with a budget under 30 million dollars. Fox, who’s worked for Gould for over ten years, is the highly ambitious junior looking to join the Hollywood elite with the new film. Cohen and Peddle work extremely well together bashing each other with pseudo-compliments and the kind of “buddy-buddy” language Hollywood-types like to speak. Both actors relish the language and their timing is excellent. At no point in the play did I ever doubt their strong relationship.

It’s About You (or is it about John Mellencamp? Or is it about Kurt Markus?)

John Mellencamp in a scene from It's About You

On John Mellencamp’s most recent tour, the “opening act” was an edited-down version of the film It's About You. I didn’t see the tour when it played near here because ticket prices were pricey. This is an ongoing problem: Premium prices put some artists beyond the reach of their fans. I had only recently joined the throngs of Americans (and Canadians) who list John Mellencamp as one of the favourites. Johnny Cash, for instance, called him “one of the 10-best songwriters working today” (or, at least that’s the story filmmaker Kurt Markus tells, quoting bassist Dave Roe who heard it from the Man in Black himself). I wish that Markus had got Roe to tell that story on film!

It’s About You was released on Blu-Ray and DVD last week, and it makes a tidy little package. Only 80 minutes long and shot on super8 by photographer Kurt Markus and his son Ian, and then processed to look aged, it is a thing of beauty for those viewers who like raw and intimate studies. It’s like looking into a personal photo album, but with live action and music added. There are moments when there is no light in the room, as producer T-Bone Burnett closes the drapes in the Sun Studio. But Markus keeps the camera rolling anyway to capture pixels moving amongst darkness but no subject to be clearly seen. As frustrating as that might be to the viewer in one way, it is a moment of clarity in another. Mellencamp’s guitar and voice become central, and the moving pixels simply accompany the song. Then the curtains open and there he is.

Peter and the Starcatcher: Handmade Vaudeville

Christian Borle (far right) and the cast of Peter and the Starcatcher (All photos by  Sara Krulwich)

The entrancing Peter and the Starcatcher, adapted by Rick Elice from the Dave Barry-Ridley Pearson novel, is an origin story for James Barrie’s Peter Pan, just as the blockbuster musical Wicked imagines the origins of the two witches in The Wizard of Oz. The complicated plot, which is set out quickly in the opening minutes (you have to listen sharply), involves two ships, the Neverland and the Wasp. The first carries a trio of orphans who are, unbeknownst to them, due to be sold into slavery, as well as Molly (Celia Keenan-Bolger), the feisty, adventure-loving daughter of Lord Aster (Rick Holmes), who is on the second ship, discharging a mission for Queen Victoria to hurl a trunk full of “star stuff” – highly dangerous stardust (its ability to make wishes come true can transform ambitious men and women into tyrants) – into the world’s oldest active volcano. (The writers were obviously thinking of The Lord of the Rings.) Molly, trained by her father to be a starcatcher, befriends the most sensitive of the orphans, a nameless lad (Adam Chanler-Berat) who doesn’t trust adults – in his experience, they always lie – yet cherishes a dream of home and mother. It is only in the second act, when the action moves to an island, that he acquires the name Peter Pan (first Peter and then Pan). Here he tangles with the pirate known as Black Stache (Christian Borle), before he’s become Captain Hook. You recognize other elements of the Barrie tale: Smee (Kevin Del Aguila) is Stache’s inseparable second-in-command, there’s a ticking crocodile, and the Indians are islanders called Mollusks. Nana the dog has her counterpart in Molly’s nanny, Mrs. Bumbrake (played in drag by Arnie Burton), who speaks in stiff-upper-lip English clichés and wears her hair in a bun that looks oddly like a dog’s ear.