Ghosts in Standalone Novels by Jo Nesbo and Peter Robinson

A scene from Headhunters (2011), based on Jo Nesbo's novel

Authors of a substantial corpus of popular police procedurals or featuring a homicide detective must relish the opportunity to leave the dictates of the genre and experiment with freestanding fiction. The internationally best-selling Norwegian crime writer, Jo Nesbo, who has churned out nine Harry Hole (pronounced Hurler) thrillers, has drawn upon some of his familiar trademarks – gruesome scenes, black humour, fast pacing and intricate plotting – to produce a pared down caper story Headhunters (2008, translated into English 2011, Vintage Canada). The British Canadian writer, Peter Robinson, best known for his successful nineteen novels about Chief Inspector Alan Banks of the Yorkshire police force, has recently released his third standalone, Before the Poison (McClelland & Stewart, 2011), a worthy winner of the 2013 Pilys Award for best mystery. Despite the vast differences in structure, style and narrative, what is similar about these novels is the function that ghosts play in propelling the narrative.

In My Humble Opinion: Competing Visions of the American Folk Music Scene

The Kingston Trio, performing in concert in 1965

The Conscience of the Folk Revival: The Writings of Israel "Izzy" Young, edited by Scott Barretta (Scarecrow Press, 2013)

 

Greenback Dollar: The Incredible Rise of The Kingston Trio, by William J. Bush (Scarecrow Press, 2013)

These two books, published at the very same day, by the same publisher, continue Scarecrow Press’ extraordinary series entitled American Folk Music and Musicians.  I’ve read five of them so far, and each one has been well-researched, carefully written, illustrated with fascinating photos, all bound together in attractive covers.  The two titles under review today are interesting because they present opposing views of folk music, in general, and of the Kingston Trio in particular.  In order to try to understand both sides of the story, I began by reading half of Izzy Young’s writings, then read Greenback Dollar cover to cover, before going back and completing The Conscience of the Folk Revival.   Then I picked up a CD called The Best of the Kingston Trio put it all in musical context.  I played Kingston Trio tunes in the car during a long drive home from Ottawa.

Who wins?  We’ll get to that!

Wild in the Country: Mud

Matthew McConaughey stars in Jeff Nichols' Mud

Jeff Nichols, the writer-director of Shotgun Stories (2007), Take Shelter (2011), and the new Mud (which played at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, but has only opened in theatres in the past few weeks), would have been called a “regional filmmaker” before 1989 or so, when “independent filmmaking” caught on as both shorthand for a movement and a marketing term. “Regional filmmaker,” a label that got stuck on directors as dissimilar as Richard Pearce (Heartland) and the late Eagle Pennell (The Whole Shootin’ Match), may have had its uses as a descriptive term for filmmakers working in parts of the country that weren’t often visited by film crews, but it was also a little condescending, based as it was on the assumption that any place outside Los Angeles or New York was the boondocks. (Being an independent filmmaker is more of a boast, since no one who’s ever been to a multiplex needs to be told what the indie filmmakers mean to be independent of.)

Still, it has a special resonance for someone like Nichols, who grew up in Little Rock, studied film in North Carolina, and whose early films came across as self-consciously, even ostentatiously about life as it’s lived far from the urban centers. I wasn’t as taken with Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter as much as some critics were, and I wonder how much that might have to do with the fact that I grew up in Mississippi and don’t see anything especially exotic about working-poor guys living in Arkansas. Nichols has talent, but in Shotgun Stories especially, he also had a beginner’s clumsiness, and just enough pretentiousness leaks through his film’s plain, rough-hewn surfaces to let the viewer see that he’s a conscious artist, not just some lug with a camera who won the service of Michael Shannon in a poker game. This is a combination that speaks directly to the kinds of critics who get very excited when they have the rare chance to acclaim a movie as a work of “folk art.” Mud has its clumsy moments, too, but I like it much more than Nichols’ earlier films. Part of that has to do with its being more alive visually; it was shot by his usual cinematographer, Adam Stone, but the camera work is more active than before, sometimes circling the action as if Stone had been binging on classic De Palma. A lot of it has to do with Matthew McConaughey.

Broadchurch: ITV's Answer to The Killing

David Tennant and Olivia Colman star in Broadchurch

We are very pleased to welcome a new critic, Sean Rasmussen, to our group.

From ITV, the network that produces Downton Abbey, comes Broadchurch, an eight-part crime drama/mystery. It is set in present-day (fictitious) Broadchurch, an English seaside tourist town nestled by a dramatic cliff on the Dorset coast. In the opening episode an 11-year-old boy is found dead on the beach, under mysterious circumstances. The series follows the investigation of the boy's murder through all eight episodes.
 

Two detectives are on the case:  Ellie Miller, played by Olivia Coleman (Rev.), and her superior, Alec Hardy, played by David Tenant (Doctor Who). Together they follow clues and turn over rocks around town – and in doing so uncover all manner of messy secrets in people's personal lives. The picturesque seaside town has drawn residents from all over the UK who want to escape their previous failures and start something new.  But, the investigation, the suspicion of fellow townspeople and the lust for vengeance starts to unravel the promise of the community.

Following a single crime for an entire series is a growing trend that has caught on with TV audiences, particularly in the UK. This spring three notable British series took this approach: Mayday (six parts), Top of the Lake (eight parts), and Broadchurch. They have a lot of similarities: they are set in small towns and all have strong female leads. And, all of them are worth watching. Mayday and Broadchurch were ratings-successes, too, followed and talked about by millions in the UK.

Recent French Cinema: On Jean Renoir, Woody Allen and Jews in the Garment Industry

Vincent Rottier and Christa Theret in Renoir

No matter the quality of French cinema, I always feel like their movies are pitched towards adults and, even at their most formulaic, attempt to get at an honest depiction of the world around them. Even when they fail to fully succeed as art, their movies almost always assume intelligence on the part of the filmgoer and usually offer something of value. Here are three recent French movies, running the gamut from art house to comedy, both character-based and geared towards broader humour.

Constructs: The Nance and The Assembled Parties

Nathan Lane in The Nance, at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre (All photos by Joan Marcus)

Douglas Carter Beane’s The Nance (at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre), set in late-Depression New York, invents a burlesque performer named Chauncey Miles (played by Nathan Lane) whose onstage persona, the “nance” or sissy in a series of revue sketches, is a way of hiding in plain sight for a gay man. Chauncey quips that “a pansy doing a pansy act is like a Negro doing blackface”; though many famous nances, like Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, were straight in real life, many were not. The play covers the demise of burlesque on the watch of New York’s puritanical, family-values mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, and his vigilant D.A., Paul Ross. It’s also about Chauncey’s inability to accept the love of a younger man, Ned (Jonny Orsini), whom he picks up at Horn & Hardart’s automat, where closeted gay men – there was effectively no other kind in 1937 – cruise, at the risk of being caught by the cops, beaten up and jailed for lewd and lascivious conduct.

Looking Back on an Era: Peter Collier and David Horowitz's Destructive Generation (1997) & Paul Berman's A Tale of Two Utopias (1997)

In a 1994 episode of Law & Order called "White Rabbit," assistant D.A. Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) is prosecuting a political fugitive from the Sixties who is found guilty in the murder of a policeman years earlier. When he shortly after reflects on the sentencing deal he offers her, he becomes rather wistful. "She'll be in jail until 2003," he comments to his younger assistant Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy). "I think the Sixties should be over by then." Now ten years after that former fugitive presumably won her freedom, it's doubtful that Jack McCoy got his wish. The decade turns out not to be so easily put to rest. Most of what we experience today politically, socially and culturally is still being measured by the turbulence of that decade. I'm not suggesting this in any paternal way to those in the present, as if it's just too bad that you weren't there. It's simply that it's hard to think of any other decade (aside from perhaps the Thirties) that has divided as many people as the Sixties did. (A new film from Robert Redford, The Company You Keep, proves the point by continuing to stir up the pot with a story about a contemporary journalist who is on the trail of a Sixties anti-war fugitive.) Nobody ever argues with any passion about the Eighties or Nineties, just as nobody really argued about the Forties and Fifties. (Although many said they were glad to have survived them.) And though history has wrought numerous contentious periods, no other decade this century seems as alive with prickly debate as the Sixties. The decade may be a half century behind us, but it isn't dead and buried as Jack McCoy had hoped.

The continued life of the Sixties is not just a matter of seeing ongoing baby boom nostalgia for oldies tunes, or occasionally seeing John Sebastian on television in a cardigan encouraging us to remember Woodstock; there are real political issues that haven't gone away. Every decade since then has seemed more like a reaction to it. Considering the current agenda of the Tea Party and its right-wing constituents, they have gained their momentum by attacking any issue that had its roots in the Sixties. Their idea of progress is the opposite of the Sixties: they choose to slash, rather than build on what came before. What I suspect also makes the Sixties so volatile a subject, even today, is that it was the last decade in which people felt the urgent promise of possibility. They had a feeling of boundaries being stretched, history being made, wrongs being addressed, and alternatives being tried. And these possibilities were being shared by diverse groups who also shared a utopian vision. It was a time, as critic Greil Marcus once said (in writing about The Beatles), when you could join a group and find your individuality.

But this period also had its shadow side. The utopian promise of The Beatles was soon blighted by the Manson Family. The militant non-violence of Martin Luther King Jr. was transformed into the violent revolt of The Black Panther Party. The Students for a Democratic Society ultimately abandoned democracy, and embraced bombs, as the Weathermen. And Woodstock's peace and love would be shattered by the violence and death months later at Altamont. Promises were broken and promises were dashed. Two books from the late Nineties, Paul Berman's A Tale of Two Utopias (1997) and Peter Collier and David Horowitz's Destructive Generation (1997), are impassioned attempts to come terms with those broken promises. Both books, in their radically different ways, are important works in understanding why the decade lingered.

From the Print Room Archives: Andy Warhol in the Flesh

When I started as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, I knew I needed a part-time job. I was prepared to wash dishes. But through a combination of pure accident and prescient timing I was hired at Oberlin’s prestigious Allen Memorial Art Museum as a Print Room assistant, a position that before my job interview, knowing little about the inner sanctums of art museums, I had mixed up in my head with Copy Room assistant. I had the vague notion that I would be Xeroxing flyers for minimum wage when, reporting to the museum for my interview, I was greeted in the lobby by a young curator with a freshly-issued PhD. She took me up to a tiny office in a large, airy room that was not in fact for photocopying but for storing and displaying the museum’s exquisite collection of prints, drawings and photographs the Print Room assistant-to-be would help manage and oversee.

Gobsmacked, armed with a couple of art history survey classes and the attitude that this was ridiculously, almost surreally, better than washing dishes – better, even, than Xeroxing – I stated my case and the curator, almost as new to Oberlin as I was and without knowing any better, gave me the position without waiting to interview the mob of upperclassman art history majors who were more richly deserving, and infinitely more qualified, than I. But I was dutiful and a quick study, and perhaps more importantly, utterly in awe. Three times a week I signed in for my ring of keys that unlocked the old wooden cupboards beneath the print gallery display cases where resided the long, shallow black solander boxes filled with matted prints. I would unlatch a box and delicately pick up each print in turn, peel off the strip of glassine beneath the mat to uncover the naked image it sheathed. My job was to pull prints from storage for research visits or classes; in this way, I held etchings by Rembrandt and by Whistler, the ragged modern woodcuts of Kirchner and Nolde which seemed to me, on each viewing, both furious and sad, and a pastel of a nude woman by Matisse that electrified me with its sudden intimacy, as though, unseen by either artist or model, I had drawn back a curtain on the spongy brightness of her defiant sensuality.

Off the Shelf: Croupier (1998)

When novels or movies delve into the intensely turbulent world of gambling, it's often from the point of view of the gambler. Which makes perfect sense, dramatically speaking, since it is the gambler who daringly tries to reinvent himself by risking everything. Quite simply these nervy, often unstable individuals, who have fascinated novelists from Dostoyevsky to Dick Francis, make great protagonists because they can feel like Charles Wells one minute and one of the walking dead in the next. There have been many good movies on the subject, too – Robert Altman's California Split (1974), Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels (1963), Albert Brooks's Lost in America (1985). All of them gleefully revel in showing just how giddy and precarious the lives of gamblers can be.

Rarely, though, do we see the perspective from the other side of the blackjack table. But director Mike Hodges's Croupier, a taut, tough-minded crime drama, with a razor sharp script by Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth), shifts its focus from the guy betting the chips to the one dealing the cards. And the view, although radically different, is every bit as riveting. Where a gambler constantly flirts with the idea of losing control, the croupier always struggles with his ability to maintain it. Jack Manfred (Clive Owen) is just such a control freak. He's a budding writer in Britain whose first novel has just been rejected. While trying to come up with another idea for his publisher friend Giles (Nick Reding), Jack's estranged father calls from South Africa. He has a lead for a job as a croupier in a British casino. Jack, who was trained in the profession by his father years before, wants to escape his family past. but he also needs a job and a salary.

Paternity as a Curse: The Place Beyond the Pines

Ryan Gosling in The Place Beyond the Pines

The writer-director Derek Cianfrance first attracted attention with his ambitious second feature, Blue Valentine (2010), starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a young working-class couple whose marriage is imploding. A ferocious, frustrating, exciting movie, Blue Valentine had some clunky, obvious conceits – a symbolic dog, a surreally tacky love shack of a motel room called the “Future Room,” to hammer home the irony that it was there that the couple learned that a future was what their relationship didn’t have. It sometimes felt a little like a Cassavettes-style movie in which the actors had been jacked up to the sky and turned loose, with instructions to tear into each other until some unbearable Truths had been unearthed. But Cassavettes, whose theory of art boiled down to the notion that we’re at our most beautiful when we behave like hostile babbling drunks who a suicide hotline worker would hang up on, wouldn’t have known what to do with Ryan Gosling, who is that rare actor who, in the right role, can actually make being inarticulate seem like a poetic state and make undirected animal energy romantic.

In Blue Valentine, Cianfrance scrambled the time sequence, cutting back and forth between the characters’ courtship and the last, flailing hours of their marriage, in a way that indicated that the undeniable spark they had when they met was just the start of the emotional conflagration that would eventually make their lives together unworkable. It’s a measure of the ambition behind his new movie, The Place Beyond the Pines, that this time he sticks to a linear narrative structure that somehow feels more challenging than the structure of Blue Valentine. The movie’s title refers to the Mohawk word for Schenectady, but it also suggests an urban civilization that has become a trap, both for the poor and the downtrodden, who can’t find any way to improve their lot, and the privileged and successful, who are corrupted by the system and driven insane by their power and their more luxurious distractions. It’s a film about fathers and sons, and about fate, and a movie that means to drive the viewer to outrage while at the same time adhering to the gospel of Jean Renoir, that “the terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.” It aims at being a modern American Greek tragedy. It’s uneven and it falters, but not because Cianfrance doesn’t have the talent to back up his ambitions. His real problem is that his talent is too rich and unruly to be confined within the outmoded literary models he’s using to craft his masterpiece.

When the Mystique Evaporates: Bobby Whitlock

Derek and the Dominos, 1970. From left: Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, Bobby Whitlock, Eric Clapton.

“Bobby Whitlock” is familiar as a name, if not quite an identity, to any fan of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, Derek & The Dominoes’ Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs, and Delaney and Bonnie and Friends’ On Tour with Eric Clapton; Whitlock played and sang on all of those 1970 albums. Born in Memphis, whose clubs seasoned his soul vocals and guitar and keyboard skills, Whitlock was protégé to Booker T. Jones at Stax Studios before joining the band that developed around highly-touted husband-wife soul shouters Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett. From there, he grew tight with Bramlett sidemen George Harrison and Eric Clapton – whence his recruitment as a Domino and subsequent appearance on All Things Must Pass. For a few years, Bobby Whitlock soared with the eagles; and while the getting was good, he recorded two solo albums, Bobby Whitlock and Raw Velvet, both released on ABC Dunhill in 1972.

Those two records, sans any outtakes or bonus tracks, have been reissued by the Future Days imprint of Seattle’s Light In the Attic Records under the omnibus title The Bobby Whitlock Story: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way – The ABC Dunhill Recordings. The reissue is a natural, the expectations great. Two obscure vintage releases by a key figure in some of the best rock of a fertile period; what fan wouldn’t want to hear this? Clapton and Harrison make guest appearances, as do many minor stars from the firmament of that time and place – bassists Klaus Voormann and Carl Radle; drummers Jim Gordon and Jim Keltner; horn players Bobby Keys and Jim Price; the Bramletts and the Edwin Hawkins Singers on backing vocals. Check the photos in the liner booklet: Whitlock looks like a rock star, with his flowing locks, oversize belt buckle, and flared trousers. From Memphis to LA to London to Miami and back again: the thing reeks of mystique.

Time’s Curator: Agnes Varda’s Ydessa, the Bears, and etc. (2004)

                     installation artist Ydessa Hendeles

Agnes Varda, the photographer-turned-filmmaker of the Left Bank, is a visual magician of quiet, understated intensity, but she still gets short shrift next to her peers among the French New Wave directors. It might be because, as the only notable woman director in a period that included Godard, Truffaut, Resnais and Varda’s late husband Jacques Demy, she was comparatively unmoved by the bewitching, tormenting subject that obsessed other directors: the allure of the female sex. Brigitte Bardot in Contempt (1963), Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim (1962), are not only enduring female icons of the screen; they are the philosophical objects of directors for whom the persistent mystery of women opens into a quest for the ontology of the subject always slipping beyond the camera’s gaze. Varda has always been less of a showman and more of a collector, less embroiled in the motion picture as an engine of erotic and philosophical desire and more susceptible to the camera’s romance with the everyday spectacles and wonders turned out by passing time.

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), the early masterpiece in league with the best work of the directors mentioned above, is a real-time investigation of the passage of time in the life of a French singer convinced, after a medical test and a bad omen from her tarot card reader, that she is rapidly dying of cancer. It’s a movie about what turns up when we are really looking – both for Cleo, who moves from narcissism to self-acceptance, and for the viewer, who is treated to the sumptuous details of the film. Varda’s camera can turn out the pockets of any moment in time and find among the loose change and crumpled receipts things of sudden and surprising value. That’s also the premise behind her enchanting 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I, an exploration of contemporary forms of gleaning – from dumpster diving to found art collages – that takes its premise (and its title) from The Gleaners, that ubiquitous painting by Millet. An impish bricolage, suffused with the warm light of nineteenth century rural painting but full of the jagged beats and changing rhythms of urban photography, the film disarms you with its canny curatorial vision. Nothing is lost on Varda but she preserves the fresh sense of accident and spontaneity that reveals her filmmaking itself as a gleaner’s art.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s: The Elusive Holly Golightly

Emilia Clarke and Cory Michael Smith in Breakfast at Tiffany’s at the Cort Theater.(Photo: Sara Krulwich)

Truman Capote’s fiction has a delicate sensibility – southern-poetic, like that of Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams – but an edge as hard as penny candy , and adaptors of his most famous short work, the 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, keep tripping over it. The story, set in Manhattan during the Second World War, is about a quirky, self-invented free spirit named Holly Golightly who lives on the tips the many men she dates give her for the ladies’ room. Mostly it focuses on her relationship with the narrator, an aspiring writer who lives in the apartment above hers and becomes friendly with her when she climbs through his window to escape an overly ardent admirer. She calls him Fred because he reminds her of her brother, who’s fighting overseas. Capote’s transparent inspiration was Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (the friendship between the writer and Sally Bowles in Weimar-era Berlin) and though Capote isn’t explicit about Fred’s sexuality, he plays the kind of role in her life, just as Isherwood plays in Sally’s, that a straight man clearly couldn’t.

Fred’s ambiguous sexuality was one of the many elements that director Blake Edwards and screenwriter George Axelrod sacrificed in the 1961 movie version, which many people are fond of (mostly, I think, people who don’t know the source material). Audrey Hepburn is miscast as Holly: she’s too elegant and too grounded, so her meandering life feels like a lark. Still, she’s charming and she wears the Givenchy clothes stunningly. And the movie has both enough big-budget comfort and enough engaging accessories (the cocktail party scene, Mickey Rooney’s outrageously funny revue-sketch caricature of a Japanese) to get by – until Buddy Ebsen shows up as Holly’s backwoods hubby and we’re asked to believe a back story about Holly that Hepburn can’t possibly embody. Worse, the movie turns into a romantic comedy with Hepburn paired with the colorlessly handsome George Peppard as the writer.

When Things Go Bump in the Night: The Novels of Andrew Pyper

Novelist Andrew Pyper

Lost Girls (1999), Andrew Pyper’s terrific debut novel, an updating of the nineteenth century Gothic, in the guise of a courtroom drama, contains elements reminiscent of a Henry James ghost story and to Bram Stoker’s infamous denizen from Transylvania. A Toronto law firm has dispatched Bartholomew Christian Crane, a lawyer willing to go to any length to win a case, to cottage country to defend Thomas Tripp, a former school teacher who has been charged with the murder of two young girls who have gone missing; their bodies have never been found. Crane learns that his spaced-out client attributes the girls’ disappearance to the legendary ghost of a woman who drowned fifty years ago. Crane, a loner with a cocaine problem, becomes increasingly obsessed with the legend that awakens a long-repressed personal tragedy and the aftermath he experienced twenty years before. The setting, both at the lake and in the town populated by eccentrics and the bizarre, forces him to confront that tragedy leaving the case increasingly secondary. Pyper is very good at weaving the Gothic tropes of doubling – Crane becomes a mirror image of Tripp – and the uncanny – the Goth girls who shadow Crane in his addled mind become interchangeable with the lost girls who drowned. At one point as Crane disintegrates, in part fuelled by his drug intake, he muses that he is surprised he “can see [himself] in mirrors at all anymore, the way [he has] come to live like a vampire; [doesn’t] eat regular food, awake most of the night, fingernails the yellowed sharpness of talons, a feeling a little monstrous too, in the baffled way of the walking dead.” In the end, whether Tripp is guilty seems irrelevant because it is the Gothic elements that most engage the reader.

Road Tested Tales: The Low Highway by Steve Earle & the Dukes (& Duchesses)

In the liner notes to his latest album, Steve Earle beautifully articulates his mission: “There’s something calling me out there. Always has been, ever since I was old enough to stand out on the highway and stick out my thumb.” But rather than write songs that are sentimental and full of longing for the days gone by, Earle has presented us with a wonderfully balanced look at the 21st Century as he sees it. The Low Highway (New West) is Earle’s thirteenth studio album, which was recorded in Nashville last year. Its forty-plus minutes feature 12 songs, all short and to-the-point, that represent an efficient writing style describing the work of Earle in recent years. On this record, his wit is subtle and his stories of people and places are deeply personal. They are road tested and individually crafted offering deep impressions of the current socio-economic climate, particularly in the United States.

The album opens with the title track, a man on the road travelling “from the snow white crown on the mountain tall, to the valley down where the shadows fall.” It’s a song about empty factories, lost veterans and people on the bread line. It's a song so powerful as to echo the stories once told by Woody Guthrie during the Great Depression. But while Guthrie’s point was to speak for a voiceless nation of poor people, Earle’s focus is one of compassion and hope for the voiceless, “wheels turnin' round on the asphalt sing and every sound is a prophecy…and every mile was a prayer I prayed, as I rolled down the low highway.” The album proceeds like a series of rest stops on the road.

Neglected Gem #41: Groove (2000)

Hamish Linklater (left), David Turner, and Lola Glaudini (right) in Groove

At the high school where I taught in my twenties, I chaperoned the bimonthly Friday night dances on a regular basis. That meant that I was in on them from the eager appearance of the first kids, tremulous for a memorable night, through the vestiges of the event, when the disheveled Student Council students, the managers of the school, picked up the pieces of the night and then drove off for pizza and the inevitable post-mortem. In those days I learned to spot the subtle but unmistakable structure that any dance takes – the fact that it’s a drama with highs and lows built in. You could count on the volatile moments at the door (usually when someone in an altered state was denied admittance), the aura of expectation, the bonding, the heartbreak; by one in the morning, you felt you’d lived emotionally through a whole week at least. No movie I’ve ever seen has gotten the anatomy of a big party better than Groove (2000), by the director Greg Harrison (who wrote and edited as well), which is about a rave that takes place in an abandoned warehouse in San Francisco. It’s a small picture, but a true original, and its mood – celebratory, but with flashes of melancholy – stays with you afterwards.

Pure Helium: Jonathan Winters

Jonathan Winters (1925-2013)

Jonathan Winters, who died on April 11, was the funniest man in the world. That was pretty much the official consensus among the informed community of professional comics and the kibitzers in the peanut gallery who cared about comedy to an obsessive degree, and for most of his life, exempting the period from around 1969 or so when Richard Pryor found his voice to a little over a decade later (when he started to lose it), it may have even been true. I was aware of Winters for as long as I can remember, but his ascendency happened before my time, and I was in my teens before I discovered that he was a revered figure, a name to which terms like “greatness” and “genius” were often attached. At the time, that came as a bit of a surprise, like hearing that Captain Kangaroo was considered a front-runner for the Nobel Prize.

Tribute to David: Amanda Shubert

David Churchill and Kevin Courrier, circa 1987, in the offices of CJRT-FM in Toronto

Given the sad passing of our friend and colleague David Churchill, we've decided to honour him in a manner totally fitting to our memory of him. We felt strongly that we could best salute our late columnist by creating an Omnibus of David. From April 16 until April 24, we plan to publish – daily – the best of David Churchill as chosen by our writers.

Today's piece is from Amanda Shubert.

– The Editors at Critics at Large

I want to pay tribute to David through this first Critics at Large podcast – one of his creative initiatives for the website – because those who are familiar with his writing but never knew him personally will immediately recognize the cadences of his speech. The living energy and infectious pace of David’s voice permeated his prose. I think you will also hear in this podcast the open curiosity and intelligence that mark David’s best work.

David and Kevin’s podcast review of Hemingway & Gelhorn also captures the very qualities that went into the formation of Critics at Large and that continue to make this site possible: intellectual excitement for the arts, abiding integrity and respect, and the sheer pleasure of good conversation. While listening to the dialogue of two critics who can literally finish each other’s sentences, you may be reminded, as I am, that the foundational spirit of Critics at Large lies in the long-lasting friendship of colleagues who drew sustenance from each other’s imagination. May that shared imagination continue to sustain all of us who mourn David’s passing.

– Amanda Shubert is a doctoral student in English at the University of Chicago. Previously, she held a curatorial fellowship at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts, working with their collection of prints, drawings and photographs. She is a founding editor of the literary journal Full Stop.

Tribute to David: Kevin Courrier

Given the sad passing of our friend and colleague David Churchill, we've decided to honour him in a manner totally fitting to our memory of him. We felt strongly that we could best salute our late columnist by creating an Omnibus of David. From April 16 until April 24, we plan to publish – daily – the best of David Churchill as chosen by our writers.

Today's piece is from Kevin Courrier.

– The Editors at Critics at Large.

Three years ago, I had an idea to begin an online arts publication that we would call Critics at Large. Having watched film and other arts journalism become more compromised by survivalist careerism, ineptness and a blatant catering to consumerism, I felt the need to create an alternative. Of course, I thought of two people to include in the project, my friend Shlomo Schwartzberg, who had just been callously slandered by our editor at Boxoffice Magazine in Los Angeles; and my dear friend, David Churchill. What I couldn't foresee was how strongly David would become a peerless advocate of the website. He not only came up with ideas such as an omnibus to commemorate 9/11, but that omnibus also led to our first published e-book which was made up of those pieces. After tirelessly editing that book, he pushed for another series of pieces commemorating the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Many of our writers, including Mark Clamen, Deirdre Kelly, Bob Douglas and Steve Vineberg, came to know David best during this time because he always read their pieces and wrote to every writer encouraging them and offering critical advice. He was the abiding spirit of Critics at Large and we all know that we can’t replace him.

But David has also been my best friend for over three decades so his loss is felt by me as a deeply personal one. We both worked as film critics, disagreeing on about as many movies as we agreed on, but we quickly saw that the common ground for friendship wasn't about seeking the safety of agreement, it was about the risk of respectfully opening up a space for yourself in the person you cared for. With that in mind, I offered him the opportunity to review movies with me back in the Eighties at CJRT-FM where I produced and co-hosted an arts program (On the Arts). Although he took to the format quickly, David’s rapid-fire manner of speaking took some getting used to – even for listeners who sometimes missed his best points. (But he would also come to meet the love of his life there: his darling wife, Rose, as she was our receptionist.) 

David hadn't written criticism for some time when I invited him onboard Critics at Large, but I sensed that he might be ready for the opportunity. Given the recent tragedy of his passing, I'm eternally glad that I followed my instincts because there are now over 170 fine pieces that David contributed to the site. People all week have been, with their touching tributes, reminding me daily of what a stellar critic (and human being) that he was. Not only could he see sides of a work that might glide past you, he sometimes found interesting arguments in hailing work that most people dismissed. (For an example, simply read his fascinating appraisal of The Invasion.) Although we talked plenty on the phone, sometimes for longer than his employers would have permitted, our conversations sometimes took place between our articles. While he truly enjoyed Mad Men, for example, I found it condescendingly artful. I think it frustrated him that I wrote my piece first because he followed with not one, but two passionate and smart posts that implicitly took the underpinnings out of my critique. (Since I bailed on the show after writing my article, I have no idea if I'd agree with David, but his views are sharply argued.) His lovely piece on Last Orders came from one of my promptings for him to seek out his video shelf for ideas when he, Shlomo and myself were still the only writers at Critics at Large. We desperately needed material to continue to run daily and he always responded – sometimes out of desperation. His fun follow-up to an addendum for his Mini-Masterpieces in Bad Movies post (Cruise into Terror) became a running joke for all of us who kept seeing the damn thing become one of our most popular posts.

Today as I tried to find a post of David's to put up, I was stymied. There are so many that I admire and reading them is still a little daunting since his voice (as Shlomo reminded us in his tribute) is so much a part of what he writes. I hear him talking in almost every article and I know how deeply I'm going to miss hearing that voice. It still stings. His voice had a way, as Susan Green reminded us in her tribute, of disarming us. You can hear that disarming quality so clearly, too, in his lament for the late TV show Invasion and his passionate shot at the elitism of film critics and programmers when selecting their best film lists. One other gift David had was a sure instinct for including aspects of personal memoir when he sometimes wrote. And I always encouraged him in this area because he often didn't reveal these kinds of feelings in everyday conversation. (Just read his appraisal of Peter Jackson's misguided The Lovely Bones for a perfect example.) So I decided today to include a piece of David's which happens to be my favourite in that spirit of self-revelation, as a way of bringing his loving personality into clear focus. After his father died in 2010, I could tell he was grieving, but he was doing it quietly. I wanted him to write a tribute to his dad despite his stoicism. But his father and he weren't truly kindred spirits. They weren't rivals exactly, they just had little in common. So when I prompted him to see if there was any common ground between them, or some unexamined area of their life that he might explore, he phoned me back the next day telling me that he might have found something. Of course, he did. It was a movie that they both enjoyed. As a tribute to both men, and in dedication to their families and for those of us they've left behind, I offer David's most compassionate review. 

Rest in peace, my dear friend.

– Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

Tribute to David: Susan Green

David Churchill (1959-2013) in October 2010.

Given the sad passing of our friend and colleague David Churchill, we've decided to honour him in a manner totally fitting to our memory of him. Since he was such a strong advocate of Critics at Large from the beginning, he was quick to initiate ideas. One thing he was quite fond of were omnibus projects like the Remembering 9/11 collection (which led to our first e-book) and the Titanic 100th Anniversary commemoration. Therefore, we felt strongly that we could best salute our late columnist by creating an Omnibus of David. From April 16 until April 24, we plan to publish – daily – the best of David Churchill as chosen by our writers. 

Today's piece is from Susan Green. 

– The Editors at Critics at Large.

"It’s all part of life,” David Churchill wrote to me in early December about his health crisis.

Despite the geographic distance between us – Burlington, Vermont is 400 miles from Toronto – he was certainly an important part of my life. Although we’d known each other for more than two decades, most of our communications in recent years were via email and concerned his editing of my Critics at Large pieces.

Messages from David were invariably funny, even when debating our differences of opinion or the fine points of grammar. There was once an energetic dust-up about the proper use of commas. Commas! But we were always quick to acknowledge our mutual affection and respect. His encouragement meant the world to me. His sharp wit kept me entertained.

In September 2011, I thought I could detect my own respiratory distress after seeing Contagion, about a super flu that decimates humankind but ultimately is stopped with a miracle drug developed by America’s neighbor to the north. When I sent him the review, this was David’s observation on the coincidence of my possible sniffles and a movie pandemic: “Thanks, darling. Go wipe your nose. I think it's running. And NO we aren't going to give you the antidote. We Canadians clearly aren't that nice :)” Except, of course, he at least really was.

In February, I inadvertently left a Federal passport office with a ballpoint pen bearing the U.S. State Department insignia. In response to the photo of it that I posted on my Facebook page, David commented: “Do I hear a knocking on your front door? Run, Susan, run!” I assured him the sound was merely a government drone overhead. 

David’s sense of humor, ranging from whimsical to barbed, certainly infused his own very smart postings. In a mostly negative 2011 review of The Killing, an AMC murder mystery set in the water-logged Pacific Northwest, his hilariously visceral description of a scene drenched by persistent precipitation: “while the Rain...Just...Poured...Down.” The constant drizzle bothered me, as well, although I liked many other aspects of the series.
 

David, from the shoot-out at Spadina Garden (Oct 2010)

We heartily agreed, however, about AMC’s Rubicon – a spy bleak spy thriller that began well but went steadily downhill and was cancelled after the first season. His 2010 critique suggested the drama was promising, but he began to feel increasingly repelled. In October of that year, I trekked to Ontario for the book launch of David’s excellent novel, The Empire of Death. We also were both part of a Critics at Large meal (Critics at Spadina Garden!) the night before. When talking about our mutual Rubicon disappointment, we zeroed in on an actress on the show who had been truly annoying. David perfectly mimicked her only facial expression: a combination of insipid and wounded. As I recall, nobody else at the table got the joke, but we cracked up.

A few months ago, I told David about a political journalist named Norman Cousins who reportedly had cured himself of a terminal disease in the late 1960s by taking massive doses of vitamin C and watching every Marx Brothers comedy ever made. His reply: “Need a copy of The Court Jester. The ‘vessel with the pestle has the brew that is poison’ routine always gets me laughing like a little kid.”

That little kid in David, whose giggle was memorable, had a playful nature. At the Spadina Garden gathering, he and I had a few moments of silliness attempting to out-shoot each other with our digital cameras.

When too much time went by between my pitches to him with story ideas, David would often prompt me with just two words: “Nudge. Nudge.”

In November 2011, he sent this reassurance about my confusion when it came to some formatting issues: “Any questions, your beloved editor is here to answer them.” 

Oh, how I wish. 

– Susan Green is a film critic and arts journalist based in Burlington, Vermont. She is the co-author with Kevin Courrier of Law & Order: The Unofficial Companion and with Randee Dawn of Law & Order Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion.