The Light Fantastic – The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug & The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The middle part of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug, is terrifically enjoyable, and its two hours and forty minutes move with alacrity. It’s the ideal Christmas entertainment, though it’s now fashionable to deride Jackson, who was – justifiably – everybody’s hero between 2001 and 2003, when he turned out the three Lord of the Rings pictures. The general feeling seems to be that he returned to Tolkien with his tail between his legs because his two intervening movies, King Kong and The Lovely Bones, were disasters and it was the only thing he could do – as if nearly-three-hour fantasy adventures with enormous casts were so easy to pull off that they no longer merited any respect. And then it turns out that The Hobbit movies are piddling achievements because they’re not in the same class as The Lord of the Rings.

Well, backlashes don’t make sense except as expressions of envy, but I feel duty bound to correct the record. The Lovely Bones was indeed a disaster: Jackson didn’t have the sensibility or the style for Alice Sebold’s delicate novel, which is the damnedest coming-of-age story I’ve ever read (the heroine, who narrates it, has been murdered by a predatory neighbor). Jackson compensated by overproducing it in a kind of storybook lushness probably meant to mimic Maxfield Parrish or maybe the 1940s output of the English filmmaking team Powell and Pressburger. And it was all wrong – the way Spielberg’s The Color Purple was all wrong. Talented directors sometimes fall flat on their faces. But King Kong was another story. Yes, it went on for hours, but there were splendid things in it right alongside the scenes that fumbled, and if you stuck around for the last section, in New York, which focused on the love story between the ape and Naomi Watts, your patience was rewarded. A former student of mine theorized cannily that it was way too long because Jackson loved the material so much he couldn’t bear to let it go – a charge that might be made about his Lord of the Rings movies, too, if it weren’t for the fact that there was nothing in them you’d want to cut (and that includes the roughly half an hour of additional footage he restored to each for the director’s-cut DVDs). You can call King Kong a folly, but it’s hardly fair to call it a waste.

When Magic Isn't Magical: Lev Grossman’s The Magicians

Lev Grossman's The Magicians was described to me as “a grown-up Harry Potter,” and while that makes for glib description in retrospect, that’s pretty much what it is: a team of teenagers attend a magical college called Brakebills, with plenty of colourful characters and adolescent debauchery to populate it. It’s an easy sell. Here's what was missing from the Harry Potter universe: copious sex and drinking.

The Magicians is in reality an odd duck, a novel which confused me not through plot intricacy, difficult language, or even authorial incompetence, but through a mismatch between my expectations and reality – namely, the expectation that had been bred in me that The Magicians was going to stand up to scrutiny against Harry Potter. Oddly fitting, too, considering that the protagonist, a young Brooklyn wizard named Quentin Coldwater, struggles with this very dichotomy in what becomes the novel’s major theme. Quentin is unwittingly enrolled in a secret school of magic, which fulfills his every escapist fantasy. He comes to learn, however, that fantasies aren’t necessarily much better than reality. In its handling of these so-called “mature themes” – what it calls “the horror of really getting what you think you want” – The Magicians is canny, providing more than a few moments of hungover cynicism that struck rather too close to home. But though I’m inclined to say that its angsty insight trumps Harry Potter’s storybook naiveté, The Magicians’ fundamental storytelling is where the comparison falls flat.

Gutter Balls: Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Martin Scorsese’s three-hour, head-crushing The Wolf of Wall Street stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker who loses his job with a big Wall Street firm after the 1987 crash and re-invents himself as a dealer in penny stocks, making a fortune (and soon setting up his own firm) by pitching shares of virtually worthless businesses to strangers on the phone. There is a real Jordan Belfort; the screenplay, by Terence Winter, takes it title and many of its characters and events from Belfort’s autobiography, which describes his rapid rise in the 1990s, his party-hearty lifestyle, and his eventual arrest for stock fraud. At the end of the movie, he has remade himself, yet again, as a motivational speaker. It’s easy to imagine a worse outcome for a guy like this, but when DiCaprio is standing in front of a roomful of shmucks, half-heartedly inviting them to show them what they’ve got and handing around a pen to use as a prop, he has the same dead-eyed, cast-out-of-Eden look as Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill at the end of GoodFelllas.

Malfunction: Spike Jonze’s Her

Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson (on table) in Her

He’s only directed four features in all since his 1999 debut with the startling and brilliant Being John Malkovich. But nothing in Spike Jonze’s oeuvre, which also includes the clever and witty Adaptation (2002) and the moving Where the Wild Things Are (2009), prepared me for his latest film, Her (2013), a failure on pretty much every level but also a science fiction movie singularly lacking in originality, thought or vision. Considering it’s Jonze's solo debut as a screenwriter, he may want to consider letting others write his movies for him. He certainly displays no facility for crafting screenplays on his own that entice and reward the viewer.

Set in the near future, Her revolves around one Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Pheonix), an introverted man still reeling from the breakup of his marriage to his childhood sweetheart Catherine (Rooney Mara). He spends his days in a job that involves writing love letters for people who lack the facility or time to do so but he is lonely himself, resorting to Internet porn to get through his nights. But one day, he’s told about a new invention, a particularly intelligent Operating System (OS) that is all the rage. He buys one and soon the OS (voiced by Scarlett Johansson, Don Jon), who has chosen her own name, Samantha, becomes a permanent fixture in his life, first as a friend and then as something much more, a girlfriend with whom he falls deeply in love. It’s not the worst idea for a movie but it’s also not the revelatory concept Jonze and many critics – the film has (inexplicably) received its share of awards, including being picked best movie of 2013 by the National Board of Review – seem to think it is.

Past as Prologue: Patty Griffin's Silver Bell and American Kid

Patty Griffin on NPR

Last year Patty Griffin released two albums that could be considered long, lost companions reunited. Even though the releases span 13 years, they offer insight into Griffin’s maturity as a singer and songwriter.

In the brief liner notes to Silver Bell, Griffin writes about this previously unreleased record as "the last of many things". But to my ear it’s as much a “beginning” as an "ending" because Silver Bell is a fine album of transition, from Griffin’s edgy rock sound to her current recording, American Kid [New West] that is refined and inspired from her past. To me, Silver Bell is the gateway to American Kid.

A Hopeless Mess: The Commons of Pensacola

Blythe Danner and Sarah Jessica Parker in The Commons of Pensacola (Photo by Joan Marcus)

The actress Amanda Peet has an earthbound vivacity and an unpredictable way of attacking a line; I loved watching her on Aaron Sorkin’s TV series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and as Mark Ruffalo’s wife in a terrific little movie called What Doesn’t Kill You that went straight to DVD (when the company that produced it went bankrupt on the verge of its intended release). But her playwriting debut, The Commons of Pensacola, which the Manhattan Theatre Club is producing off-Broadway at MTC Stage I at City Center, is a hopeless mess. It’s set in a retirement condo in Pensacola, Florida, where Judith (Blythe Danner), the wife of a Bernie Madoff-like Jewish financier who victimized Holocaust survivors, now lives on the restricted income allowed her. It’s Thanksgiving, and she’s visited by her daughter Becca (Sarah Jessica Parker), an actress on her uppers who arrives with a younger boyfriend (Michael Stahl-David), self-described as a guerilla journalist. On their heels come sixteen-year-old Lizzy (Zoe Levin), Judith’s granddaughter, and finally Lizzy’s mother, Ali (Ali Marsh), who hasn’t spoken to Judith for a year but flies down when a fall lands her, unconscious, in the hospital.

It’s a good assumption that the subject of a play with this plot premise is the fallout from a front-page scam for the family of the sociopath who engineered it, but Becca’s financial desperation – when her agent calls, it isn’t to offer her work but to find out if she’s available New Year’s Eve to babysit her daughter – is unrelated to what her father did, and so is her boyfriend Gabe’s having sex with Lizzy while Becca is at the hospital with her mother. The narrative feels as though Peet thought it up, episode by episode, on a caffeine jag. There are individual scenes that don’t make sense on their face. Left alone with Judith hours after meeting her for the first time, Gabe pitches the idea of a documentary series he and Becca have conceived that would allow her to talk about her husband’s crime and show some sympathy for the people he bankrupted. When she finds the idea repugnant, he makes it clear that he doesn’t believe she could possibly have been ignorant of what her husband was up to. It’s a fact about notoriety, like any other kind of celebrity, that complete strangers feel emboldened to proclaim their point of view, but is it likely that a man meeting his girlfriend’s mother for the first time, a guest in her home, would insult her?

What I Did Last Year!: 2013 Concerts in Review

Stephen Fearing performed at The Pearl Company in Hamilton on April 19, 2013.

Do you remember the assignment you had back in school? Write an essay called ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’? I’m sure you wrote several such essays. Well, at the end of a year I like to look back over the past 12 months and just see what happened. Where did I go, what did I see, how many CDs and books did I buy? A complete list would take up more space than I have today, but I thought it might be interesting to look back at the concerts I attended.

The Damned Hurt: Albert Maltz’s The Journey Of Simon Mckeever

While writing about Henry Fonda a few years ago, I learned about a movie project he desired to make late in his life, but never did – an adaptation of a novel called The Journey of Simon McKeever, written by Albert Maltz and published in 1949. I’d never heard of the book. But I got a copy, and read it. It haunted me for days, and I've wanted ever since to tell people about it.

Simon McKeever is seventy-three and lives meagerly in a Sacramento nursing home; his wife and child, both killed in an explosion, are long dead. Born in Ireland and raised in America, he has labored all his life, and now suffers from crippling arthritis. Yet he resolves to hitchhike, by himself, 400 miles of highway to find the doctor someone says will cure him. Simon is a sober, sensible man who accepts pain and even death, but not uselessness; he’s also a man of great complexity and sensitivity who is plagued by Kafkaesque nightmares in which he finds himself to be “a cockroach after all; not a man, a bug.” But above all, Simon is profoundly, rebelliously alive.

Anyone who has read about the McCarthy-era blacklist knows Albert Maltz’s name, even if they can’t quite remember his work. Born in Brooklyn in 1908, he was one of the Hollywood Ten – a group of screenwriters who, called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during its 1947 investigation of Communist influence in the movies, refused to answer questions, and were subsequently banned from the industry and jailed for contempt. Prior to the HUAC hearing, Maltz had been a playwright in the WPA-era Theater Union; an award-winning short story writer and respected novelist; and a screenwriter who, answering Hollywood’s siren call à la his compatriot Clifford Odets, chalked up some decent credits: This Gun for Hire (1942), Pride of the Marines (1945), Cloak and Dagger (1946), The Naked City (1948).

Hair Club: David O. Russell’s American Hustle

Amy Adams and Christian Bale in American Hustle

The very title of David O. Russell’s American Hustle (from a script credited to the director and Eric Warren Singer) announces a level of ambition that’s been missing from Russell’s movies since his out-of-control 2004 satire I Heart Huckabees. Loosely inspired by the Abscam investigations of the late 1970s, in which FBI agents worked with con men (including a bogus Arab sheik) to ensnare crooked Congressmen by offering them bribes, the new movie has some of the broad canvass and satirical edge of Russell’s masterpiece, the 1999 Iraq War movie Three Kings. But American Hustle’s driving force – what makes it one of the most entertaining movies of the swaggering awards-bait season – mostly come down to Russell’s skill with the actors and his enjoyment of putting them together and watching them cook, which is what made his comeback pictures The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook stand out. (It was also the best thing about I Heart Huckabees.)

Most of the principal players appeared in one of Russell’s two previous movies, and the performances have the confidence and experimental looseness of actors letting themselves go under the watchful eye of someone they’ve come to trust. Usually, that would be the set-up to describe how some actor has plumbed his inner depths and gone deeper into himself than he’d ever gone before, but Christian Bale – who starved himself for both The Machinist and Rescue Dawn and practiced his glower in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, before winning an Oscar for his role as a junkie in The Fighter – has been needing to lighten up for a while, and Russell has gently managed to lead him out of the strobe-lit Method torture chamber inside his head and goad him into having fun onscreen again.

Folkie Flashback: The Music Scene On Screen And Off

Washington Square Park, New York City, 1960s

Mired in controversy worthy of a folk song that laments bruised feelings, raw memories and hard travelin’, Inside Llewyn Davis is intended to capture the spirit of the times 53 years ago in Greenwich Village. The titular protagonist (Oscar Isaac) is based on the late musician Dave Van Ronk and performs his signature songs.The screenplay is loosely adapted from his posthumous 2005 memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, by co-directors Joel and Ethan Coen. Although I have yet to catch up with the movie myself, I keep hearing that the character comes across as a talented but misanthropic loser.

Van Ronk’s first wife, Teri Thal, denounced the film in a recent Village Voice story. “I didn't expect it to be almost unrecognizable as the folk-music world of the early 1960s,” she wrote. “Llewyn Davis a not-very smart, somewhat selfish, confused young man for whom music is a way to make a living. It's not a calling, as it was for David and for some others.”

Terri Thal and Dave Van Ronk

Thal concludes: “The inept Llewyn Davis arranged some of those songs? Sang them as well as Oscar Isaacs does? I don't believe it. That schmuck couldn't make that music.”

Ouch!

Inside Llewyn Davis attempts to chronicle the days just before a guy newly-arrived from Minnesota changed the entire equation after cleverly tapping into the zeitgeist. Something was happening and you did know what it was, didn’t you, Mr. Dylan? Later, his lyrics for “Tangled Up in Blue” perfectly captured the Village life he found in early 1961: “There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air...”

Critics as Readers: The Best Critics at Large Pieces of 2013

This is the time of year when critics love to make lists of their favourite things from the year that's just passed. Even though Ten Best Lists often draw attention to work that might otherwise have been overlooked and undervalued, they still tend to categorize the work rather than bring out the qualities that made it so special. So Amanda Shubert and Kevin Courrier have decided to create a Ten Best List that focuses on reviews by some of the writers at Critics at Large this past year. These are pieces that we feel brought out the love of engagement a critic can have with their subject, and in writing about them we sought to express our own love of engaging with the work our colleagues produce.

But since there are more than ten writers working at Critics at Large, we couldn't use everyone. That is not a reflection on the work of those who are missing. (Additionally, although founding editor David Churchill left us a couple of good pieces before his tragic and untimely death last April, we decided not to include him in our list because the site had already honoured him with an omnibus of our favourite pieces.) We simply wanted to focus on certain reviews that excited us, and to describe how they made us feel. These pieces are in no way listed in any particular order of preference, and are to be enjoyed with the same zeal as the critics themselves felt in writing them.

Ten Plus Three: The Best of 2013

This past year in music was significant for many things, but who would have guessed that British acts of the 1960s would be vital 50 years later? Consider the following artists who all released new albums this year: Justin Hayward, Eric Burdon, Paul McCartney, Black Sabbath, Roy Harper, Eric Clapton, Richard Thompson and David Bowie. But with the old, we also heard from new artists including Arcade Fire, Serena Ryder, The Sheepdogs and Lady Gaga, all with varying degrees of success. The jazz world had plenty of new releases showcasing the healthy state of jazz and blues music. Classical music, albeit with the smallest portion of the pie, continued to milk the old favourites (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) and the anniversaries of Verdi, Britten and Wagner, all treated with healthy and hefty CD box set re-issues. 

But the year really marked the fallout of EMI’s end in 2012. This year Universal Music Group (artists) and Sony Music (publishing) added EMI’s massive back catalogue to their rosters, which reduced the corporate ownership ranks by one. Nevertheless, smaller labels such as Dine Alone, Yep Roc and New West still managed to maintain a business plan while issuing some pretty good records. The Canadian upstart label Arts & Crafts celebrated 10 years in the business, proving it is possible to have a successful label while maintaining artistic integrity. 

The following is a list of ten previously reviewed favourites, plus three additional releases that were too good to ignore.

“Acting” and Acting - August: Osage County & Philomena

In the first five minutes of August: Osage County, John Wells’s film of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tracy Letts family drama, Meryl Streep devours so much scenery that it’s a wonder there’s anything left but the foundation of the Oklahoma ranch house where Violet and Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) play out their bitter final encounter. Staggering down the stairs, her hair shorn and ragged – Violet, who has been treated for mouth cancer, has an ugly wig that she pulls off her head continually through the course of the picture – she moves from a blinking, befogged state caused by the pills she knocks down her gullet like Tic-Tac to sashaying raucousness to laughter bordering on hysteria. Her braying insults to her reflective, sweet-souled poet husband aren’t sly or compulsive with an undercurrent of ruefulness; nor are they uproarious but horrifying. That is, they aren’t complex in any way; Streep delivers them as if she were wielding a two by four. She may think that she’s channeling Bette Davis or maybe Tallulah Bankhead but she’s a lot closer to Joan Crawford here, with a touch of Claire Trevor as the alcoholic gangster’s moll in Key Largo. This is a disgraceful piece of acting, and it gets worse as the movie goes on: by the end she’s dancing by herself, yelling out the names of the family members who have finally abandoned her, weeping forlornly at the breast of the compassionate native American housekeeper (Misty Upham) who’s the only other person left on the place. Of course, Streep doesn’t need other actors around. She’d probably relish the chance to play all the roles herself.

A Treasure Trove of Cultural Delights: Duane Allman's Skydog, Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Peter O'Toole, thirtysomething, Alan Moore's Watchmen

With so much available in any given year, and numerous movies, books, TV series and CDs not yet watched from years past, I am constantly striving to catch up with everything I want to watch, read or listen to. And then there are the newly released musts in any number of fields, and the classics that bear repeat visits. Here are a few of both that I enjoyed in 2013.

Keeping Afloat: The Unique Triumph of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Black Flag is a masterclass on efficient sequel-making. Few media so skillfully borrow the positive elements from their predecessors, and so readily discard the negative ones. Gone are the endless loading screens, muddled interface, and frustrating AI of Assassin’s Creed III. No longer do I have to sit through pandering dialogue from characters I don’t care for or understand, or endure boring and buggy missions whose rewards conferred no tangible benefit. Ubisoft has very capably trimmed the fat, and replaced it with nothing but juicy prime cuts. 

They say that context is king, and in order to fully appreciate the considerable achievement that is Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, a small amount of context regarding its place within its own series (and in current gaming history) is necessary. The quality of the Assassin’s Creed series has followed a definite arc since the release of the first title in 2007. That game showcased exciting potential, even while crippled by repetitive and restrictive design. The sequel (Assassin’s Creed II) realized that potential, and raised the bar in all aspects. The follow-ups (Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood & Assassin’s Creed: Revelations) fleshed things out, and – while the series hit its peak at this point – they also began to show their age, retaining superfluous mechanics and bloating themselves with redundant or irrelevant new ones. Assassin’s Creed III marked an unprecedented low point, with oversimplified combat and missions, limp storytelling, an uninteresting setting, a weak protagonist, and a plethora of prohibitive bugs and loading screens. Since Altaïr first donned his hitman’s hood, series developer Ubisoft has consigned the franchise to an annual release schedule, meaning that we can expect a new Assassin’s Creed title every calendar year until “fans don’t want to play them anymore” (which of course is code for “until they’re so terrible we stop paying for them”). I played – or, more accurately, suffered through – Assassin’s Creed III thinking that the series had arrived at that fateful junction even earlier than anticipated. Black Flag, however, is continually showing me how wrong I was, and proving that there’s a lot a dedicated developer like Ubisoft can accomplish in just a year.

The Disney Treatment: Saving Mr. Banks

Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson in Saving Mr. Banks

The idea of a movie about Walt Disney persuading the English author P.L. (Pamela) Travers to let him adapt Mary Poppins to the screen is so tantalizing that you keep rooting for Saving Mr. Banks to work, long past the point where you can see it isn’t going to. Disney had been wooing Travers for twenty years before he finally got her to come to Los Angeles to collaborate with the screenwriter he’d chosen, Don DaGradi, and the songwriting Sherman brothers. But she kept putting off signing the contract, and her demands were plentiful and persnickety. In Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith’s screenplay, Travers (Emma Thompson) only agrees to make the trip because she hasn’t managed to write anything in years, and her agent convinces her that she badly needs the money. And still she arrives in Hollywood apparently determined that nothing Disney (Tom Hanks) can promise her will challenge her notion that he and his team are going to turn her 1934 children’s classic – a childhood favorite of Disney’s daughters – into something cutesy, sentimental and blandly commercialized.

The Waiting Room: HBO's Getting On

If ever a TV show appeared to have made for the express purpose of being buried, it’s HBO's Getting On. An adaptation of an acclaimed British series, Getting On is set in the extended-care ward of a large, Southern California hospital. It’s a workplace comedy, but set in a workplace where the medical personnel are just doing whatever they can to make things easiest on people who have exhausted modern medicine’s ability to do anything to improve their lives. Whether they’re near death or lost in dementia, they’re just waiting out the clock, and so are their caregivers. The show is a black comedy, but a dry, poker-faced black comedy, about doing a job that numbs you to the everyday tragedy of human beings coming to the end of their road.

Serenity and Perversion: On Doris Lessing and Adore

Robin Wright and Naomi Watts in Adore

The death last month of the Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing at the age of 94 drew a shower of obituaries and appreciations from across the English-speaking world. But few of those pieces talked about Adore, the movie French director Anne Fontaine and English screenwriter Christopher Hampton adapted this year from a story published in Lessing’s penultimate book, a collection of novellas entitled The Grandmothers. (It was published in 2003; Lessing’s final book, the novel/memoir Alfred & Emily, came out in 2008). As literary critics praised Lessing to the skies for her unabashed candor about female sexuality in novels like The Golden Notebook, credited as an influence to the second-wave feminist movement in the sixties, and for her revolutionary spirit, movie critics far and wide condemned Adore for its sexually transgressive subject: women who sleep with one another’s teenage sons. The movie people – largely male – who objected to Anne Fontaine’s lyrical and sensual depiction of what is, in essence, an incest story, didn’t acknowledge that the plot, tone, perspective and most of the dialogue came directly from Doris Lessing. And the literary people – often female – who eulogized Lessing didn’t rush to defend the movie. Why?

An Ear to the Ground: The Criterion Collection Release of Robert Altman's Nashville

When he died in 2006, Robert Altman was one of the most prolific and idiosyncratic of contemporary American directors. Always with an ear to the ground, he didn't follow fashionable trends, or cater expediently to public taste. Instead, he was gallantly intuitive in an open quest for authentic engagement, the quality of which was often revelatory. Most movies over time – good and bad – fit comfortably into genres with recognizable rules that defined them as genre pictures, so we could easily distinguish a film noir from a screwball comedy. But Altman defied those categorizations by delving into exactly what makes a genre tick. He did this by stripping away a movie's pedigree without losing the flavour of the genre itself. Whether he was doing a combat satire (M*A*S*H), a western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller), a detective story (The Long Goodbye), a murder mystery (Gosford Park), or stage drama (Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean), Altman keenly re-defined our idea of what makes a genre picture by treating moviegoers, as critic Paul Coates once wrote about Jean-Luc Godard, as critics rather than consumers.

Betrayal: Theatre Lite

Rachel Weisz, Daniel Craig and Rafe Spall in Betrayal

Mike Nichols’ Broadway revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal has star power and impressive production values. Ian MacNeil’s set reconstructs itself from scene to scene in geometric pieces that, suggestively, don’t quite connect. Ann Roth’s handsome costumes provide subtle commentary on the three characters, two men and one woman who form the points of a love triangle. And Brian MacDevitt’s lighting is magnificent, especially in the transitions in and out of the pivotal scene in Italy, where Robert confronts his wife Emma with evidence that she’s been sleeping with his oldest friend, Jerry; it creates ghosts behind the backdrops to suggest the idea that the third member of the trio is inescapably present, just out of reach, whenever the other two are alone together. The designs make clear, provocative statements, so Nichols must have communicated a strong vision of the play to his collaborators. Yet the production itself doesn’t seem to be about anything except three actors on a stage.