Off the Shelf: Jim McBride's The Big Easy

From time to time, I'll haul down a DVD from my collection, throw it into the player and see if it still holds up. In most cases, it's been years since I've seen it, tastes change and there is always the possibility that I'll go, 'what the heck was I thinking?' The last time I did that was in February 2010, a month after we launched Critics at Large, when I looked at Toby Hooper's delightfully bananacakes film Lifeforce (1985). This past weekend I pulled down another 1980s picture, one that I actually liked, not because it was catawampus, but because, except for the predictable cop plot, it was a good, adult character piece: Jim McBride's The Big Easy (1987).

Talking Out of Turn #31: Robertson Davies (1985)

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

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

In the chapter on memoir in the Eighties, Mythologizing the Self, which includes interviews with Wallace Shawn describing the highly personal film My Dinner with Andre, D.M.Thomas exploring Freud and the Holocaust in his novel, The White Hotel and William Diehl discussing how he used pulp fiction to work out his violent impulses, the idea was to illustrate how the decade brought forth a few biographical artists who attempted to link themselves to the collective memory of the audience with the purpose of creating a shared mythology out of their experiences. Perhaps no writer could have done more to enhance that goal than the renowned playwright, scholar and novelist Robertson Davies. Besides bringing his personal fascination with Jungian psychology into his 1970 book Fifth Business (which would form the basis of The Deptford Trilogy including the 1972 The Manticore and, in 1975, World of Wonders), Davies continued to provide psychological inquiry as a means to examining academic life in The Rebel Angels (1981), the conclusion of which became the starting point for Davies's next work, What's Bred in the Bone (1985). This book which would then become part of The Cornish Trilogy, an examination of the life of Francis Cornish, an art restorer with a mercurial past, whose demons become part of a larger mythology. Since myth plays such a huge role in the dramas of Robertson Davies, we began the interview with the question of just how big a part destiny plays in shaping a character.

Remembering the Munich Massacre: One Day in September and Munich

The refusal of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists with a moment of silence at the Opening Ceremonies of the 2012 Games, is, of course, appalling and indefensible. Deborah Lipstadt states in a piece she wrote for Tablet magazine that the decision is motivated by anti-Semitism. I’m not sure I’d go that far, though anti-Semitism is never far from the surface in modern Europe, but certainly it’s a political decision. Ankie Spitzer, widow of fencing coach Andre Spitzer, one of the Israeli victims at Munich, indicated in the August 6 issue of Sports Illustrated, in a piece on the 40^th anniversary of the massacre, that Jacques Rogge, IOC head, had told her that there were more than 40 Arab delegations at the Games. Without spelling that out, his comments clearly suggested that the requested moment of silence might embarrass them as they likely would not want to observe it. (Only Jordan’s King Hussein, among all Arab leaders, actually condemned the terror attacks when they occurred. Palestinian reaction since the Munich massacre has ranged from the attendance of members of the debut Palestinian Olympic team at a memorial to the Israelis held at the 1996 games in Atlanta to recent comments by the head of the Palestine Olympic Committee that the request for the IOC to grant a minute of silence for the murdered athletes was "racist". Make of that what you will.) Whatever the actual reasons for the IOC’s slight, it puts into perspective the two most significant films made on the Munich massacre and its aftermath, Kevin Macdonald’s powerful documentary One Day in September (1999) and Steven Spielberg’s conflicted but memorable drama Munich (2005). They do what Rogge and IOC have refused to do: remember the Israeli athletes and what happened to them at the Olympics.

Ankie Spitzer is one of the main interviewees in Macdonald’s Oscar-winning film, juxtaposed for maximum effect with the compelling interview with Jamal Al-Gashey, reputedly the only surviving Palestinian terrorist from Munich (There’s some question now whether that is indeed the case.) Al-Gashey, in hiding in Africa, is matter of fact and unrepentant about what he did, but viewers of the documentary will likely be just as aghast and angry at the German authorities, who, in effect, botched the rescue attempt of the nine remaining Israeli hostages (two were killed in the initial attack in their rooms), a disaster that Ankie Spitzer, for one, blames for her husband’s and the others’ deaths.

The Non-Zombie Walking Dead: Awakened but Not Exactly Alive

When I was about 13 or so, my recently widowed grandmother told me that every night for a week she would hear the chains rattle on the front door of her Bronx apartment and footsteps in the hallway. Then, Grandpa Charlie was standing at the foot of the bed. He wanted her to find a certain key in the desk drawer of his office in Manhattan’s garment district! In relating this story, Grandma Bess laughed and sighed: “There’s a Yiddish saying the old people in Russia used to have: ‘Der toten kommen.’ The dead walk. I never believed it but I guess they were right.”

Even though my adolescent imagination had conjured up images of some vast hidden wealth, apparently there was no key to be found, no wealth to be had. Just Charlie, worrying about business affairs even after his passage into the Great Beyond. If der toten kommen, maybe it’s not necessarily for anything important. In The Awakening, a gorgeous-looking new British film, it’s possible that the dead walk, talk, threaten and perhaps even kill. But Florence Cathcart, the lead female character played by luminous Rebecca Hall (The Prestige, 2006), doesn’t think so. In London of 1921, she’s a fierce professional debunker who helps the police expose con artists. Early on, Florence goes underground to disrupt a phony seance – a terrifically staged scene in which she proclaims, “You’re charlatans!” – and reveals a kind of unspoken protofeminist sensibility.

The Thickness of a Thought: Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth

As humanity grows well past seven billion people, our small planet begins to feel smaller. Many millions of us cluster around densely packed urban centres, with personal space – let alone land – an uncommon luxury. But what if the opposite were suddenly true? Instead of one Earth, we could walk between millions, with possibility of one day waking up as the only human mind on an entire world?

The Long Earth springs such an event on us one not-so-distant tomorrow, with the consequences explored by two renowned British imaginations: Terry Pratchett, known for his other, more fantastic alternate world in the Discworld series; and Stephen Baxter, a science fiction author with several trilogies under his belt (you may also have heard of his previous co-author, some fellow named Arthur C. Clarke...). Their first collaboration, The Long Earth brings out some of the best elements of each author's style – although those expecting the sillier, more outlandish aspects of Pratchett's fantasy won't find it here. Instead the novel follows a solid, if somewhat predictable science fiction exploration of how humans cope with the technological development of "Steppers": devices that allow instantaneous – if slightly nauseating – shifts from one version of planet Earth (and surrounding universe) to another. When the designs for such a machine get posted online, everyone from tech geeks to inquisitive children start building a way out of our congested world. With gold and natural resources now aplenty – but un-Steppable iron suddenly needed – the traditional ideas of value and wealth get turned on their heads. In search of both, people set out across a line of Earths that are much like ours, but with one small difference... none of them appear to have humans.

Juicing Up the Classics: The Importance of Being Earnest at Williamstown

The Importance of Being Earnest

The only hard-and-fast rule about refurbishing a classic play should be that any new production has to be true to the spirit of the text. And that’s a broad requirement: to my mind, Michael Almereyda’s 2000 film of Hamlet, set in New York at the millennium, and Alfonso Cuarón’s 1997 Great Expectations, where the hero becomes a young painter from the Gulf Coast whose mysterious mentor sets him up in a studio in Manhattan, both fit it. But some plays are so tied to the period in which they were written that removing them from it throws them into limbo.

I think that’s true of Chekhov’s dramas, in which the relationship between the women and men on stage and the culture that produced them is so specific. That’s one of the reasons that the Sydney Theatre Company’s touring production of Uncle Vanya, adapted by Andrew Upton and directed by Tamás Ascher, didn’t work at all for me. Actually I’m not sure when this version is meant to take place – as Yelena, Cate Blanchett (Upton’s wife) seems to be, from her costumes, living in the 1950s but the men’s suits look to be circa World War I – but the setting feels like the Australian outback, and though I imagine Upton and Ascher have sound reasons for making a connection between it and turn-of-the-century provincial Russia, I didn’t buy the switch, so instead of making a play that is timeless (in terms of theme and character) more relevant – a pointless aim – ironically it ends up being less convincing.

Uncle Vanya at the Sydney Theatre Company

So does the coarsening of Astrov’s language (he suspects the Professor, with his aches and pains, of bullshitting rather than shamming, as most translations, have it, and so forth). Ascher’s production is impressively staged and quite handsome, but I found it so uninvolving that I ducked out at intermission, right after the reconciliation scene between Yelena and her stepdaughter Sonya (Hayley McElhinney), which Ascher chose to stage as a drunken revel between a pair of schoolgirls, with a lot of eruptive laughter and flopping about the stage. It’s a serious liability in a Chekhov play when you don’t care about a single character. So I guess there’s another hard-and-fast rule after all: you have to give the audience an emotional reason to come back after intermission.

Pioneers Making History: Criterion's Release of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps & Chaplin's The Gold Rush

A few years ago, when I was working on my book Artificial Paradise, about the dark side of The Beatles' utopian dream, I was speaking to a friend who was a clerk in a Toronto music store. In the midst of our conversation about my work, he described to me his own experience hearing The Beatles' music. "The first album I really discovered was Revolver," he told me. "Then I went back to With The Beatles and later found Rubber Soul." What was jarring, of course, was that he began his quest with one of their later 1966 albums, arguably their best, before jumping back to their second record in 1963, a fiercely eclectic songbook primer of hard rock, balladry and R&B, before landing in 1965 on the band's most radical reinterpretation of American rhythm and blues and folk. What startled me most was his seemingly arbitrary dance through history. And it left me wondering how he could ever begin to make sense of it.

For me, I had heard those records as they were being released so the history was clear. I followed each new innovation as a daring, breathtaking leap into this future that was always in the process of being imagined. For him, being much younger, it was all about looking back. Therefore he had to create some new way to hear what that history was, maybe even figure out why it happened in the way it did, and perhaps discover his own way to understand why it mattered. What he did was create his own context for hearing the music, a means to escape the official history which had by then become received wisdom rather than fresh experience. By scrambling time, he made The Beatles music seem new again. He felt as if this great music had finally been freed from the pedigree of its own history.

Alfred Hitchcock directing The 39 Steps

Recently watching Alfred Hitchcock's cleverly entertaining and satisfying 1935 spy thriller The 39 Steps and Charlie Chaplin's comedic gem The Gold Rush (1925), newly re-released in sparkling remastered DVD prints by Criterion, I thought back on that conversation with the clerk. Like him with The Beatles, I didn't live through the era of Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin. Both artists were already legendary by the time I was old enough to even go to the movies. So how could I possibly experience their work as it was first seen by audiences? (A friend of mine once lamented that he regretted not being able to see Robert Altman's Nashville with fresh eyes. How could he, he complained, when he had already read all the many reviews that gave it a certain stature before he ever got to lay his own receptors on it?)  By the time I saw my first Hitchcock picture, he was already regarded as the Master of Suspense. Charlie Chaplin was firmly established as the personification of the Little Tramp, an iconic figure who was hanging on posters proudly in people's bedrooms. Their reputations seemed larger than the work they created.

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.