Vinyl Nirvana: Do Not Sell at Any Price by Amanda Petrusich

I am a collector who has a room filled with vinyl records, those 33s and 45s of my youth—and it turns out that they’re coming back. So when I discovered Amanda Petrusich's Do Not Sell at Any Price (which is subtitled The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records), I was hooked. I had to read it. Not that I’m a collector of 78rpm records, although I do have one or two in my collection, but I fondly recall shuffling through the batch my grandparents had stored under their record player. They had none of the “rarest” things that Ms Petrusich talks about, but instead some big bands and The Happy Gang which were all neatly packaged in albums that truly looked like big bound books with page after page (envelopes really) of heavy black discs. My mother had a bunch, too: Stan Kenton, Artie Shaw, and Rosemary Clooney. She only started listening to blues music later when 78s had been replaced by 33s and 45s. Southwestern Ontario was not a place to go searching for old Paramount blues records. Oh, sure, Richard Newell (King Biscuit Boy) had some (probably brought in from Buffalo), but in our neck of the woods it was mainly jazz. The first 78 that I bought myself was a Duke Ellington record, “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” It wasn’t that I was so much a fan of the Duke’s but I had read a very interesting story about his receiving a royalty cheque for this record, and when I saw it at a flea market I just got carried away.

Death Becomes Him: ABC's Forever

Ioan Gruffudd stars in Forever, on ABC

This review contains minor spoilers for the first episode of Forever. 
 

The premise of Forever, starring Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd and Alana de la Garza (Law & Order), and airing this fall on ABC, is outlandishly fun to describe (it is the story of "an immortal medical examiner" who consults for the NYPD). It is also oddly familiar – reminding attentive TV viewers of FOX's (ironically) short-lived New Amsterdam (2008), about an immortal New York City homicide detective (and starred Nikolaj Coster-Waldau long before Game of Thrones was a twinkle in HBO's eye), and  Canada’s Forever Knight, the tale of a 800-year-old Toronto police detective/vampire that aired on CTV and CBS back in the 90s. There are a lot of things about Forever that are familiar in fact. It falls firmly into the "consulting detective" genre, which pairs up a by-the-book cop with an idiosyncratic outsider who boasts unorthodox methods and surprising abilities of detection. This list should always begin with Sherlock Holmes – and his two current incarnations, BBC's Sherlock and CBS's Elementary – but really has almost uncountable variations on American TV: from Monk, to The Mentalist, to Numb3rs, to Castle, and beyond. They often share a sense of fun, as the police officer (or FBI agent) balances the frustrations that comes from having an untrained advisor – with all of their emotional and interpersonal quirks – with the undeniable fact that cases keep getting solved with their help. For all its metaphysical conceits, Forever is probably more appealing on these terms to fans of Elementary or Castle, than say Supernatural or Sleepy Hollow. But if you are like me, and a fan of both light crime procedurals and fantasy, you might want to check out Forever, because it's doing a lot right.

At Home in the Fun House: Pee-wee's Playhouse

To no small great degree, the 1980s were an ugly, depressing time when the secret to pop-culture success lay in congratulating the mass audience on its shallowness and taste for blatancy. Enough time has passed by now that there are actually people who feel some nostalgic affection for Top Gun and The Goonies, and Sylvester Stallone has somehow concocted an entire franchise out of the notion that there’s something old-school lovable about terrible, badly-made action movies in general and himself in particular, but these are lies, and most of what played in the multiplexes during the Reagan years could be safely pitched down the memory toilet and flushed away forever at no loss to anyone. As for the gallery art of the period—the actual art, art that is meant to provide a more exalted alternative to whatever scraps the groundlings are content to munch on—the most typically “80s” work of that time was created by the kind of people—your Schnabels, Basquiats, and Salles—who appear to be charlatans before you read their interviews and realizes that they’re sincere folks who just aren’t that talented or intelligent. Then there’s Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, a little half-hour Saturday morning children’s show that ran on CBS from 1986 to 1991, and which is the exception to both rules.

If It Bleeds, It Leads: Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler

Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom, in Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler

In Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut, Nightcrawler, there’s a moment in which Lou Bloom (an emaciated, wide-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal) brushes aside a strand of greasy hair and spouts one of his practiced canned phrases: “I like to say, if you’re seeing me, you’re having the worst day of your life.” His grin is skeletal. He isn’t joking, and it’s not just because he sells footage of grisly crime scenes to low-rent Los Angeles news stations, and if you’re seeing him, you’re probably the victim of an armed robbery or a head-on collision. It’s because of the lengths to which he is willing to go in order to acquire that footage.

Paradoxical Sojourn: Bruce Cockburn's Rumours of Glory

Back in 1970, when Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn launched his first eponymous solo album, he happily celebrated the virtues of rural life in songs like "Going to the Country" and "Thoughts on a Rainy Afternoon." On his album covers, Cockburn was occasionally seen perched under a tree with his acoustic guitar surrounded by a gentle sprinkling of snow, or maybe next to a warm fireplace, as he was on his third record, Sunwheel Dance (1972).His songs were both poetic and spiritual – at times, even mystical – yet richly evocative and intelligent. Bruce Cockburn seemed content to personify the quiet comforts of Canada’s untamed landscape. But then, in the late Seventies, he moved to the urban enclaves of Toronto. Suddenly, rock, reggae, jazz and electronica would not only bring an untamed sound to his music, but add a harder edged political sensibility to his work, which would sometimes be heard as romantically poetic ("Lovers in a Dangerous Time"), stridently controversial ("If I Had a Rocket Launcher") and didactic ("Call it Democracy"). Today his memoir Rumours Of Glory (HarperCollins) — which chronicles of his Christian faith and activism — arrives in stores to join a Cockburn curated 9–disc CD and DVD companion box set of what you might call a musical biography to serve as a soundtrack to the book. The mammoth CD set, released on his career spanning label, True North, also includes a 90–page book featuring rare photos, extensive track information and new liner notes written by Canadian music critic and author Nicholas Jennings. Because the songs aren't necessarily chronological, as in a traditional box-set, Rumours of Glory contrasts the rustic romanticism in Cockburn’s music along with his growing sensuality and political fervour.

Screen to Stage: Holiday Inn

Tally Sessions (centre) and the cast of Goodspeed's Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn (Photo:Diane Sobolewski)

Nine years ago Walter Bobbie mounted a stage version of the Irving Berlin holiday favorite, White Christmas, with a book by David Ives and Paul Blake and spiffy choreography by Randy Skinner. It was a charmer – more light-fingered and economical than the overscaled 1954 movie – though in one aspect it erred in not being extravagant enough. At the end, after the two protagonists (the characters played by Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye on screen) dedicated their show to their beloved old army general and the company settled in for the reprise of the title song, the set should have opened up for a real snowy finale. It was a missed opportunity – but a lovely production.

Now the Goodspeed Opera House has put up another theatrical adaptation of an Irving Berlin movie musical, that earlier holiday classic, 1942’s Holiday Inn, the original source of the Oscar-winning song “White Christmas.” Holiday Inn isn’t a great movie, but it’s pleasantly low-key, it stars Crosby and Fred Astaire, and the score also features “You’re Easy to Dance With,” “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” and “Happy Holiday,” which gets stuck in your noggin. The screenplay by Claude Binyon and Elmer Rice, from an idea by Berlin, is agreeable piffle. Crosby and Astaire are two-thirds of a show-biz trio, and Crosby’s Jim Hardy is engaged to marry the third member, Lila Dixon (Virginia Dale) – or so he believes. The night before he leaves the stage to retire to a Connecticut farm he’s bought, Lila tells him that she’s sticking with Astaire’s Ted Hanover – professionally and romantically. Within a year, farm living defeats Jim; he comes up with a plan to open his new home as an inn-cum-theatre that operates only on holidays, and he lucks onto a leading lady, Linda Mason (the unremarkable Marjorie Reynolds), with whom he falls in love. Then, predictably, Ted shows up, having been jilted by Lila (for a Texas millionaire), in search of a new female dancing partner.

True Believers: Two Novels Inspired by Historical Actors

Canadian diplomat Herbert Norman and his wife, Irene, in 1956 (Photo courtesy of UBC Library archives)

In April 1957 the distinguished Canadian scholar and diplomat, Herbert Norman, committed suicide by jumping from a roof in Cairo. Canadian-born to missionaries working in Japan, he joined External Affairs in 1939, and during the crazed atmosphere of the early 1950s, he was subjected to a thorough security inquiry by the RCMP, largely because of his left-wing sympathies when he attended Cambridge University during the 1930s. Even though he was vindicated, the Mounties passed on his file to the FBI. His name came up in testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) and again he was given a clean billing. His boss at External Affairs, Lester Pearson, appointed him as Ambassador to Egypt to serve as a conduit between Gamal Abdel Nasser and the West during the Suez Crisis. SISS revived the Norman “case” and to avoid another humiliating security inquiry, Norman took his own life setting off a firestorm of anti-American feelings in Canada.

In 1986 two purportedly scholarly books were published that were diametrically opposed in approach and conclusions: Innocence Is Not Enough: The Life and Death of Herbert Norman by Roger Bowen and No Sense of Evil: Espionage, The Case of Herbert Norman by James Barros. The titles tell us much about the perspective of the authors. Reviewers generally praised Bowen’s offering as a defence of Norman’s integrity and explained his death as a response to the slanders that he had to endure that left him with “no refuge but suicide.” Barros’ thesis that Norman was an agent of the Soviet state “planted in the Canadian diplomatic service” was largely excoriated. In the Canadian Forum, Reg Whittaker reviled No Sense of Evil as a “disgrace to the best tradition of scholarly inquiry” because Barros was not able to present a single piece of evidence to prove that Norman engaged in espionage, was guilty of disloyalty or treason. Yet the Norman controversy did not end here. Barros and MPs supportive of his polemic put such pressure on the government to pursue an independent inquiry that Joe Clark, then Minister for External Affairs, appointed Peyton Lynn, a former diplomat and retired academic, to conduct an investigation in which he was given access to all relevant documents. His report completely exonerated Norman of any wrong doing and proclaimed him a loyal Canadian public servant.

It Was Only a Car (And a Dog): Keanu Reeves in John Wick

I like surprises. I recognize this isn’t a universally-shared sentiment, but I think that a pleasant, well-executed surprise can lift the fog of a dreary day, and that’s enough reason to like them right there. Of course, if they’re also vehicles for the comeback of one of my favourite action stars, then they’re that much more enjoyable.

The diametric opposite to the origin story, John Wick portrays the seasoned killer character forced to come out of retirement. The film opens at the end, with a dying, post-rampage Wick (the seemingly-ageless Keanu Reeves, wearing patchy stubble and the same “whoa dude” haircut he did in 1989, except when it’s slicked back hitman-style) stumbling out of a bullet-riddled Escalade and replaying a rose-tinted memory of his wife on his iPhone.Then we run backwards in time and see his blossoming relationship, before his wife is overcome by an unnamed illness. There’s a brief funeral scene, Wick looking like a gaunt and grieving lizard all in black, and then he’s barely home again before a pet carrier is delivered to his door, with a note from his dead wife and an adorable puppy inside. Her posthumous gift is meant to allow him to grieve through the focus and love he would devote to this helpless creature, and they form an immediate bond as they shop for kibble and do therapeutic donuts in an airfield. But covetous eyes are watching, and soon, Wick’s car, dog, and peace of mind are under attack. As plots go, it’s stupid – but delightfully so. The film never lets a flimsy premise get in the way of fun or excitement. If I’m honest, I actually love the plot. This kind of film doesn’t need any more substance than “Bad guys kill Keanu’s dog; Keanu goes on murderous rampage,” and I’ll argue until I’m hoarse that a baby beagle is a much more plainly sympathetic character than some underdeveloped family-member-in-danger. If someone murdered my dog, I might feel the need for a little rampagin’ too.

Off the Shelf: The Deep End (2001)

The Deep End gives off a sweet malevolence; it softly seduces you even as it fills you with dread. Unlike some popular thrillers, The Deep End doesn't nudge you with mechanical scare tactics to provide tension. The picture is both intelligently suspenseful and an incongruously witty chamber drama. Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the co-writers and co-directors, quietly and shrewdly build our apprehension by having us slowly come to empathize with a main character who paves her road to hell with the best of intentions.

Tilda Swinton (I Am Love, The Grand Budapest Hotel) plays Margaret Hall, a lonely housewife in Lake Tahoe, who spends her days dutifully carrying out all those mundane domestic chores of motherhood. Her husband, meanwhile, is a naval officer who spends his days carrying out his duties at sea. In short time, though, Margaret finds herself at sea emotionally when she discovers that her eldest son, Beau (Jonathan Tucker), is gay. She also comes to see that his lover, Darby (Josh Lucas), is a rather disreputable character who might bring harm to her son. Margaret initially pleads with Darby to stay away from Beau, but he ignores her, and later makes a midnight creep from Reno to Lake Tahoe. When Beau gets into a skirmish with his lover on the family dock, Darby is accidently killed. In the morning, Margaret finds the body and assumes that her son has committed murder. While Beau has no knowledge of of what happened, Margaret does what any loving mother might do; she tries to clean up the mess and protect her family. Based on the little-known 1940s novel, The Blank Wall, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (which was also the source for Max Ophuls 1949 film noir, The Reckless Moment), The Deep End is largely anchored by Swinton's complexly layered performance.

A Manner of Style and a Style of Manners: Remembering Oscar de la Renta

Fashion designer Oscar de la Renta (1932-2014) 

Manners never go out of style, and for that reason Oscar de la Renta, a great fashion designer who was also big on manners, will forever be remembered as a style icon. I came to witness first-hand the man’s elegance, reflected in both his demeanour and his drop-dead gorgeous dresses, on more than one occasion. As The Globe and Mail’s fashion reporter, I interviewed him in Toronto in 2002 at Canadian launch of his fruity-floral perfume, Intrusion by Oscar de la Renta. He autographed the modernist bottle for me. I also travelled to New York several times to attend his fashion shows, writing about them for my paper’s Style section. I remember one of the them vividly, both for what went down the runway and for what was happening behind the scenes. The gossip first.

The Dominican-born designer who became an American citizen in the 1969, dressed Hollywood stars (Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Sarah Jessica Parker), American first ladies (Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama) and wealthy socialites (Nancy Kissinger and Lady Lynn de Rothschild). He was the Oscar who owned the Oscars; his gowns dominated the red carpet. Just before his death on October 20 at age 82, he had designed the wedding dress worn by Amal Alamuddin at her September wedding to heartthrob George Clooney. Oscar de la Renta was always relevant, always au courant. Which would explain why his shows were standing-room only affairs. Even to be seen at an Oscar de la Renta show was enough to make the participant seem a part of fashion. A-listers wanted to be seen in the front row to make their own stylish selves be known through association. Not that C.Z. Guest needed to have tried so hard.

Soul Mates: The Skeleton Twins

Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig in The Skeleton Twins

In director Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig play twins who’ve grown apart as adults after life’s taken them in different directions. But after a suicide attempt at the film’s outset lands Milo (Hader) in a L.A. hospital, the pair find themselves under the same roof again. Maggie (Wiig) insists that he recuperate with her back at their childhood hometown in upstate New York. She’s returned there upon marrying, and the movie charts the ways in which our place and family origin serve as both a haven from the wider world’s chaos and the ongoing cause of a different, deeper turbulence. Casting Hader and Wiig—two crack comedians—proves a stroke of genius. After seeing The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I knew Wiig could make a comic-dramatic turn. But I had no idea she was capable of the range of expression she displays here, nor the kind of psychological character study she puts on. Even more so with Hader, who has the more complex role and riskier scenes. And with Johnson and Mark Heyman’s first-rate script at their disposal, the pair is by turns hilarious and affecting. The Skeleton Twins is a funny, poignant, deeply touching look at the complicated way our siblings can become our best friends in adulthood—those who uniquely understand our pain and help us sort through the mess we make of life.

No More Home Sweet Home: Waxing Apocalyptic with the Creators of Refuge

All Hallow’s Eve is upon us, and Toronto celebrated recently with the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, which fired a volley of low-budget horror cinema at eager film audiences across the city. There was something for everyone in that abyss of genre delights, from slasher flicks to end-of-the-world mood pieces like the thriller Refuge.

Refuge is set in a grim future in which most of humanity has been exterminated by an unnamed plague, and follows a small family in their daily struggle for food, water, and safety. Father Jack (Carter Roy) watches over wife Nell (Amy Rutberg) and eight-year-old daughter Birdie (Eva Grace Kellner, Boardwalk Empire), and their existence is peaceful, if mundane – until Jack takes a wounded man named Russell (Sebastian Beacon) into their care, whose friends soon come looking for him.

Justin Cummings sat down with husband and wife scream-team Andrew Robertson (Director, Screenwriter) and Lilly Kanso (Producer) for an exclusive interview for Critics at Large.

Skylight and Ether Dome: The Social and the Personal

Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan in Skylight (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

Much as I value the literacy, intelligence and technical finesse of the English playwright David Hare, I often find his plays heavy going. The political apparatus at the heart of most of the ones I’ve encountered, from Plenty to Stuff Happens, swings like a censer, blanketing the stage with the whiff of importance; generally I find that he needs a more elastic movement, a lighter step. But Skylight, the 1995 drama that was revived in the West End last summer – in a production by Stephen Daldry, bound for Broadway, that the NT Live series has been transmitting in HD – is a fine piece of work. Bill Nighy (in the role he followed Michael Gambon in eighteen years ago) plays Tom Sergeant, a successful restauranteur whose wife and partner Alice has died of cancer. Carey Mulligan is Kyra Hollis, who came into the Sergeants’ lives as an eighteen-year-old girl, took over the management of one of their restaurants, and became virtually a member of the family. She also became Tom’s lover; they conducted an affair for six years before Alice found out, at which point Kyra, unable to face her, walked out on them both. When Tom finds her again, a year after Alice’s death, Kyra is living in a chilly flat she’s taken over from a friend and teaching high school to working-class kids. She isn’t expecting her old lover to come back into her life, though he’s certainly on her mind: unbeknownst to Tom, his eighteen-year-old son Edward (Matthew Beard) dropped by to see her just hours earlier to beg her to rescue his lonely, rootless father. By the end of the first act, Kyra and Tom seem to have reconciled. Act two explores the reasons the reconciliation comes too late to take hold.

The Best Book to Read to Your Child, or to Yourself: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories

A hoopoe in flight

When I was about eight or nine years old, my father and I realized that our tradition of reading together had to change. We had long left behind picture books, and he had little patience for the transitional books that are suggested for children of that age – books written for children who are just learning to read for themselves, books usually remarkable for their recycled narratives and limited vocabulary. Perhaps he had came across Haroun and the Sea of Stories in the time he'd spent traveling in the Middle East, or because it was the height of the Rushdie affair, or perhaps it was because, as a parent who was often away overseas, he wanted to read me a book written by an author who was separated from his own children. Either way, that was when I met Haroun.

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.

A Rich Musical Journey: Celebrating 20 Years of Rough Guide CDs

A few years ago, I was browsing in one my favourite used CD shops in Toronto (now defunct, alas) and noticed a CD from Israel. Nothing special there necessarily, but I was struck by the fact that the disc was put out by the UK-based Rough Guide label. A British label releasing Israeli music, at a time and from a continent rife with so much anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic, attitudes intrigued me – and even more so, when after purchasing the disc, I found out that the compiler of The Rough Guide to the Music of Israel was a well-travelled Torontonian by the name of Dan (or Daniel) Rosenberg. Not knowing much about how music compilers did their work and being aware that a piece on Rosenberg would be of interest to The Canadian Jewish News, a publication I wrote for at the time, I penned an article on how the disc came to be and on the man himself. And from that moment on, I continued to pick up, buy and listen to the music released the Rough Guide label. (Rough Guide is one of four labels that makes up the World Music Network record label, which also includes Introducing, Think Global, and Riverboat Records –the latter recently celebrating its 25th anniversary) Today marks exactly 20 years since the first Rough Guide CD was released on October 25, 1994, and, now, as the possessor of most of the Rough Guide discs – more than 200 of them, with many still in print – I salute a label that has introduced me not only to so much world music I would know nothing about otherwise but has also educated me on the myriad permutations of that complex genre. It has been a musical journey well worth taking.

When the Dust Bites Back: The Clash's "1977" & The Beatles Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany (1962)

When Joe Strummer announced the arrival of The Clash in 1977, gleefully joining the Punk Revolution that was launched by The Sex Pistols a couple of years earlier, he did it in a song called, naturally enough, "1977." The purpose of punk was to clean house of the rock dinosaurs that no longer stood for the ideals they once claimed. For the British bands that came out of the rubble of the burst dreams of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and other pretenders to the throne, they were worthy of a safety pin through the cheek. Punk proudly stood for nothing, no future, just the bare necessity of pedal-to-the-metal rock. But The Clash refused a claim towards rock nihilism in favour of a new political direction, a tabloid Marxism, to address how England's dreaming had been transformed into an expedient nightmare. To do that, "1977" set out to lay waste to the pioneers of the past who made the mistake of dreaming in the first place. "No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones," Strummer announces off the top like a Depression-era newsboy bellowing the headlines of all the papers he needs to sell. It's a bald claim, one he'd reiterate a few years later in the authoritative "London Calling," when he'd bring forth an apocalypse while telling us that "phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust."

When in Greece: The Two Faces of January

Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst in The Two Faces of January

After seeing a high-concept, A-list thriller like Gone Girl, with its pushy smugness passing for sophistication and its cynical button-pushing that’s meant to make it seem like a provocative take on contemporary male-female relations—Gillian Flynn, who did the screenplay adaptation of her own novel, launched herself onto the bestseller lists after spending a decade writing for Entertainment Weekly, and it shows—the direct, elegant perversity of a trim, stylish thriller like Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January can feel like a walk in the fresh spring air after spending a week locked in the garage. This is Amini’s directing debut, but in the ‘90s he did the scripts for Iain Softley’s Henry James movie The Wings of the Dove and Michael Winterbottom’s Thomas Hardy adaptation Jude the Obscure.

More recently, he’s been credited with the scripts of such headbanging crime movies as Killshot, from an Elmore Leonard novel, and the Ryan Gosling vehicle Drive. The Two Faces of January has a best-of-both-worlds quality. It’s based on a Patricia Highsmith novel that was first published in 1964, and is set mostly in Greece at the same time. It’s a trim, cutthroat story, but the touristy period settings give it some of the luxurious visual appeal that go with certain classic-lit adaptations. And with Viggo Mortensen, with his intimidatingly sky-scraping frame and Arrow Shirt profile swanking around the Acropolis in a light-colored suit and hat, with Kirsten Dunst as his much younger blonde wife, the atmosphere can suggest an episode of Mad Men where there’s no guarantee anyone will make it out alive.

Serial and the New Podcast Revolution

Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed (centre, top and bottom)

In radio and podcasting circles, the rather geeky milieu that I travel in, there is a bit of thing happening. It's a podcast called Serial, which follows the real-life case of the murder of Baltimore high school student Hae Min Lee in 1999, and the arrest and imprisonment of her alleged killer, ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed. Sarah Koenig, the host and executive producer of Serial, was approached by the family of the imprisoned man to look into the conviction. We follow Koenig as she picks apart the case. Koenig claims to not know where it will end. Is an innocent man in jail for a crime he didn't commit? Is the real killer still on the loose? Tune in, or rather, subscribe to Serial, and find out.

Glass Cannon: David Ayer’s Fury

Five men operate an M4 Sherman tank in the autumn of World War II, struggling to keep themselves and each other alive. Gordo (Michael Peña), Bible (Shia LaBoeuf), Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal) and their commander Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) lose their front gunner, and he is replaced by the squeaky-clean Norman (Logan Lerman), who must abandon his naïve sense of morality if he is to survive with the others. This is the setup for Fury, directed by David Ayer, which doesn’t do much of anything other than make a great deal of noise, but it does so with expertise and intensity.

Double Stoppard: India Ink and The Real Thing

Rosemary Harris, Bhavesh Patel and Romola Garai in Indian Ink  (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Indian Ink is one of the few plays by the staggeringly prolific Tom Stoppard that never made it to New York in the aftermath of its West End run, so the Roundabout Theatre’s decision to mount it in its smallest (off-Broadway space), the Laura Pels Theatre, is a happy one for theatregoers. I can’t think why it didn’t open in Manhattan in the nineties (it was staged in London in 1995), especially since Arcadia, written two years earlier, was so successful there. Perhaps potential producers thought they were too similar – though that’s not generally a reason for withholding a new play that follows a well-received one. (Quite the opposite.) In Arcadia a pair of contemporary academics try to determine the events that occurred on an English country estate in 1809 where Lord Byron may or may not have been one of the house guests, while we see what really happened, the truth that the scholars can only guess at. In Indian Ink, an English professor named Eldon Pike annotates a new edition of the work of a poet, Flora Crewe, long dead, whose younger sister Eleanor – now an old woman – constitutes her only remaining family. Hopeful about following up with a biography, he searches for one of three paintings of his subject, two of them nudes, two of them done during the few months she spent in India, mostly in Jummapur. Among the people he contacts, aside from Eleanor, are the son of the Indian painter, Nirad Das, whom Flora befriended and posed for, and the son of the local Rajah who invited her to visit him in the course of her stay. Eleanor doesn’t approve of Pike’s long-term project and in her quiet way does what she can to quietly thwart his research. “Biography,” she argues, “is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.” And Stoppard confirms her analysis by – as in Arcadia – showing us what really happened to Flora in India, in a series of flashbacks that place one fragment of information on top of another until, gradually, we see it all. (We also discover chapters in Eleanor’s life that we hadn’t suspected, and that explain how she began as a Bohemian, like her sister, and metamorphosed into a conservative colonial.)