TIME Magazine: Sticking to the Old Ways, Fortunately

TIME magazine’s recent announcement that it has hired film critic Stephanie Zacharek to replace the late Richard Corliss, its longtime reviewer who passed away early this year, is welcome news for those of us who still buy magazines, value their continuity, and don’t want to see film critics thrown overboard in some misguided attempt to keep up with the times. When publications as diverse as Newsweek, Variety and The Village Voice canned their longtime critics, in recent years, including such stalwarts as David Ansen, Todd McCarthy and J. Hoberman , the future of film criticism, wobbly as it was in terms of overall quality, seemed even more dire. With the ascent of newer reviewers who don’t actually want to bring a real critical eye to their work (they don’t really deserve to be called film critics as they don’t/can’t criticize films but only praise them) and so many amateurs blogging their misguided, superficial and uninformed opinions on movies, there did not seem to be a place for the talented likes of Ms. Zacharek, who has toiled for the Boston Phoenix and The Village Voice, among others. Yet, here comes TIME which could have opted for a rotating slate of film critics, or no critics at all, attempting to keep the old ways going, allowing a prickly, original voice to carry the torch previously held aloft by TIME film critics, including Corliss, Richard Schickel (now retired), Jay Cocks and James Agee. Not only that, instead of routinely directing the readers of the print edition to go online to read most of the magazine’s critical reviews, as they used to recently do, they’ve of late opted to put most of those reviews in print instead and ceased tub-thumping for exclusively online content in the print publication, They still have separate online content, of course, but I no longer get the impression that it is paramount nor perceived by TIME’s editors, as more important to them then the weekly sent out to subscribers or sold on the newsstand. TIME’s decision to hire Zacharek comes on the heels of the startling announcement that Playboy magazine plans to phase out its nude pictorials, the ones that gave it cultural cachet when it was launched by Hugh Hefner in 1953. No doubt, those pictorials aren’t seen as nor are they as racy anymore in an age when mainstream pornography is aired regularly on (pay) TV (in Canada, at least), but it’s the exact opposite of what TIME has done, in terms of honouring its traditions. Playboy is turning itself into Esquire or GQ – profile pieces, interviews and lifestyle concepts geared towards an upwardly mobile male readership – while TIME tries to maintain important aspects of what it has traditionally done for decades. I think the latter has more merit and should be commended for not bending to the internet’s seemingly implacable Borg-like will.

Bridge of Spies: Phony Baloney

Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies.

The opening sequence of Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, where, in 1957, the slippery British-born Russian spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) manages to elude the FBI for the last time before he’s caught, is both excitingly and wittily filmed. Rylance, a much-lauded stage and recently TV star (he played Thomas Cromwell in the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall) who hasn’t been tapped by the movies until now, turns the tension between Abel’s hyperawareness and his calm, almost languid air into a sort of music-hall routine with a whiff of melancholy. But as soon as Abel is sent to prison to await trial for espionage and James Donovan (Tom Hanks) is urged by his law firm to act as his defense attorney, the movie flattens out. How did Spielberg and the writers, Joel and Ethan Coen and Matt Charman, manage to turn the fascinating, twisty story of Abel – the Cold War spy who ended up being traded to the Soviets for both the captured pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) and Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), an American economics student in Berlin arrested for suspicion of espionage – into a civics lesson? Somehow, instead of releasing the storytelling master in Spielberg – the director who could make the three-hour Munich so gripping – Bridge of Spies brings out his earnest, big-studio-era, socio-sentimental side. Janusz Kaminski’s period cinematography is gorgeous and vivifying, but the movie behind it is as glazed as Always, his 1989 remake of A Guy Named Joe, with Richard Dreyfuss in the Spencer Tracy part. And this time around he’s got Tom Hanks, who plays Jim Donovan as if he were Tracy.

Revisiting The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

What is a Witcher? With the roaring success of this year’s medieval fantasy The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, most gamers know all about Geralt of Rivia and his flair for demon hunting, but it wasn’t too long ago that we were asking ourselves this question. In 2011, Polish video game developers CD Projekt RED released their first crack at a console game, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. Assassins of Kings took a relatively unknown story from a relatively unplayed PC game (simply titled, The Witcher) and ran with it. Obviously, CD Projekt RED had a lot of narrative gaps to fill in for their rapidly growing fanbase.

Acclimatizing the Pontar Valley’s sudden influx of Xbox 360 gamers to The Witcher 2‘s environment was no easy task but CD Projekt RED delivered. With the help of gorgeous cinematics (my favourite, an introductory one titled “What is a Witcher?”), a detailed inventory menu, and the expansive journal entries favoured by the best lore-heavy RPGS, Projekt RED rendered playing The Witcher 1 almost entirely unnecessary. For newcomers looking to immerse themselves in The Witcher 3’s award-winning open world, however, Witcher 2 is a crucial starting point –  not just for the backstory it offers but also because it’s a really phenomenal game in its own right.

The Winter's Tale: A Riveting Reinterpretation

Piotr Stanczyk and Hannah Fischer in Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter's Tale. (Photo: Karolina Kuras)

In choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s riveting reinterpretation of The Winter’s Tale, a new full-length ballet which the National Ballet of Canada presented this past week at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre, the dancer portraying King Leontes, the troubled and troubling monarch at the heart of Shakespeare’s brilliantly convoluted story, collapses the palm of his hand and ripples the fingers in imitation of a spider. It’s not a move typically associated with ballet but on this occasion it serves as a fluent example of the art form’s ability to communicate powerful emotions and universal themes without the use of words.

The expressionistic gesture renders in physical terms the metaphor of the spider conjured by Leontes in the play when describing an onslaught of jealousy. Suspecting that his good wife, Hermione, is having an affair with his best friend, Polixenes, King of Bohemia, the suddenly sick-at-heart King of Sicilia says he feels as though he has drunk a cup “with a spider steep’d” and this has cracked “his gorge, his sides,/With violent hefts.”

Leontes’ deluded belief that an infidelity has indeed occurred is the pivot on which the rest of the play turns, veering sharply from a scene of domestic bliss to one of tragedy. Shakespeare’s late career problem play will later shift back to comedy mode once the King, in a sense, kills the spider gnawing at his sanity. The antidote will be love and forgiveness whose powers of redemption Leontes rediscovers in due time. These are large ideas, fundamentally Christian in nature, and the wonder of The Winter’s Tale is that they endure even when translated into the mute art of dance.

Falling for Dance, Canadian Style

DanceBrazil performed Jelon Vierira’s Malungos at Toronto's Fall for Dance North festival. (Photo: Andrea Mohin)

Toronto fell big time for the inaugural Fall for Dance North festival that took over the city’s Sony Centre earlier in the autumn. An initiative of artistic director Ilter Ibrahimof and executive director Madeleine Skoggard, the two-part program showcased exciting new dance creation from across Canada, and other points around the world including New York where the Fall for Dance franchise launched in 2004. Like the original, Fall for Dance North (so-called because of the event’s revamped presence north of the 49th parallel) offered up a variety of dance styles at a cost of $10 a ticket. The Sony Centre, which seats approximately 3,200, was sold-out for each of the three performances that took place from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 – proof that if you make dance affordable the people will come. But that wasn’t the only reason the festival packed them in.

Steve Jobs: Turn It Off

Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs in Steve Jobs.

In Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, released a couple of months ago, you can feel the documentarian Alex Gibney struggling to find a shape for the story of this icon – a way of bridging the gap between his narcissism and callousness and the heroic status he occupies in the minds of millions of people. And the impossibility of building that bridge becomes the focus; the tone of the doc is as quizzical as it is critical and astonished. I found the movie’s ambling approach a little frustrating, but mostly I admired its refusal to pretend to have worked out a finished portrait of Jobs, and the material Gibney comes up with is fascinating. By contrast, the dramatic feature Steve Jobs, written by Aaron Sorkin (based on Walter Isaacson’s biography) and directed by Danny Boyle, exudes an air of gleaming confidence and it has a carefully groomed look – I’d say vellum-bound. (The production design is by Guy Hendrix Dyas and the cinematography is by Alwin Küchler; Elliot Graham edited it.) But these two A-list filmmakers and their A-list star, Michael Fassbender, don’t even get close to creating a convincing portrait of Jobs or of the empire he created, was exiled from, and eventually returned to as its reigning monarch.

Talking Out of Turn #39 (Podcast): Doris Kearns Goodwin (1987)

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin at her home in Concord, Massachusetts in 2014. (Photo: Steven Senne/AP)

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

1+ – The Beatles on Video: What They Are, What They Are Not

 The Beatles filming “Hello, Goodbye” in 1967. (Apple Corps Ltd.)

Under the collective title of 1+, the promotional music videos made by or for the Beatles, both during their career and since, are now reclaimed, refurbished, and gathered in one place. It’s a marvelous place, and its provenance is only moderately confusing. Though a definitive collection of these videos would seem to have some historical, cultural, and archival importance of its own, it’s appearing as a kind of mega-bonus to the reissue of 1, the compilation of Beatles chart-toppers first released in 2000, which itself topped the charts of 35 nations. And the bonus DVD, with a video for each of the 27 original songs, comes with its own bonus – 23 additional videos including alternate versions, outtakes, and post-Beatle creations.

Brother's Keeper: Bob Zappa's Memoir Frankie & Bobby

Bob Zappa (right), with his brother Frank (left) and his son Jason (centre). (Photo courtesy of Bob Zappa.)

Memoirs can be tricky to write. The reader is at the whim of the author who is empowered to reveal as little or as much about themselves and other people as they want to. A memoir provides a writer with the opportunity to scorn some people, praise others and to embellish their own history. As Canadian writer Farley Mowat once said to Michael Enright on CBC Radio, “why ruin a good story with the truth?” For Robert (Bob) Zappa, younger brother of Frank Zappa, who recently published his own memoir, telling the truth was painful yet rewarding, “it was a cathartic experience; it has given me a tremendous sense of relief from the sadness that I have felt on so many occasions over the years since his [Frank’s] death.” Bob Zappa’s book is called, Frankie & Bobby: Growing Up Zappa. It was self-published in September and it’s one of the most revealing books about Frank Zappa that I have read.

Songs of the Earth: Canadian Art Song Project and The Living Spectacle

Photo by Karolina Kuras.

Art song is a centuries-old musical practice that the Canadian Art Song Project has made avant-garde. The Living Spectacle, the first in a series of recitals that the Toronto-based organization is presenting as part of its 2015/16 season, was a startlingly original show whose experiments with the art song genre resulted in a polyphonic experience which engaged all the senses.

The performance that took place within the mirrored walls of downtown Toronto dance studio, The Extension Room, showcased the individual talents of a small group of artists who came together on the night of November 7 with the shared intent of reviving tradition with a jolt of electricity down the spine.

Talking Out of Turn #38 (Podcast): Clive Barker (1987)

Author and filmmaker Clive Barker, circa 1987.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s.

With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

By Iron and Fire (and CGI): The Last Witch Hunter

Vin Diesel in The Last Witch Hunter. (Photo: Scott Garfield/Lionsgate)

I’m stepping into the ring for The Last Witch Hunter. There is a large demographic of people who will be baffled, annoyed, or bored to tears by this out-of-the-blue fantasy action picture, but I am not one of them. I am part of the small subset of moviegoers who are thrilled by weird, brave, original material like this, and who are excited by the idea of a Vin Diesel action vehicle that doesn’t involve souped-up Detroit muscle cars and product placement for shitty beer. Is The Last Witch Hunter a perfect movie? Hell no. Is it an unabashedly dorky fantasy adventure that delivers exactly what it advertises? Absolutely. You can hate this film all you want, but you can’t call it dishonest.

Phyllida Lloyd's Henry IV: A Paucity of Ideas

Clare Dunne (as Prince Hal) and Jade Anouka (as Hotspur) in Henry IV at St. Ann’s Warehouse. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

The Donmar Warehouse’s all-female Julius Caesar, which St. Ann’s Warehouse brought over from London two years ago, was an exciting and provocative reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but Henry IV, from the same venue and the same director, Phyllida Lloyd, has little to recommend it. The production, which runs for two hours and fifteen minutes (without intermission) but feels much longer, is really Henry IV, Part I with three scenes added from Part II, and like Lloyd’s Caesar it’s set in a women’s prison. Seriously? That was an illuminating way to stage Caesar, which is about power. Henry IV is a male coming-of-age story, and secondarily it concerns the burden of kingship; all that the omnipresence of tough women in the roles does is to underline and render ironic the notion of machismo, which isn’t a theme of the play. And you really have to wonder: doesn’t Lloyd have any other ideas?

The Power of Art to Mobilize: The Wind in the Reeds

J. Kyle Manzay and Wendell Pierce in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, Lower 9th Ward in 2007. (Photo: Paul Chan)

“At this place, in this moment in time, all mankind is us… Let us do something while we have a chance.”

– Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

 

“Art is not a sideshow for the real business of life, it is at the heart of what it means to live as a human. At its best and highest, art changes people’s hearts, minds and even their lives.”

– Wendell Pierce, Wind in the Reeds (Riverhead Books, 2015) 

Rarely does a memoirist write so passionately and eloquently as actor Wendell Pierce does about the power of art in his The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, A Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken. His subtitle reveals the one of its two interrelated subjects: the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that barrelled into a vulnerable New Orleans in August 2005 turning what should have been only a natural disaster into a social, political and environmental tragedy killing fifteen hundred people. The second is a poignant love letter of sorts to his mother and father, both towering influences in his life and who owned a “modest little house” since 1953 in the Pontchartrain Park neighbourhood, the first African American middle-class subdivision in New Orleans, and the site of some of the worst damage.

Two Movie Movies: The Martian and Shanghai

Matt Damon in Ridley Scott's The Martian.

Ridley Scott has a reputation for making engrossing large-scale entertainments, but most of his movies are somber and bloated in almost equal parts. The somberness seems to be a pass at seriousness, but movies like Gladiator, American Gangster and Prometheus are humorless blockbusters that substitute layers of mass for layers of meaning. (At least his last, Exodus: Gods and Kings, had John Turturro camping it up Old Testament drag as Pharoah Seti, but the film killed him off early, Joel Edgerton inherited the throne, and any chance at fun went out the window.) Only occasionally does Scott turn out something I care about. Black Hawk Down is a conventional war picture but visceral and affecting; A Good Year, which got little attention, is a vivifying, sun-drenched comedy about an investment broker who inherits a vineyard in Provence and recalibrates his misdirected life. A Good Year is in the mold of the marvelous early-eighties Bill Forsyth movie Local Hero, where a corporate type sent by his Houston-based company to purchase an island off the Scottish coast falls in love with it, and Russell Crowe, as the main character, is supple and animated (his performance in Gladiator was paralytic); he seems turned on by both the bronzed light and all the beautiful women Scott has surrounded him with. Sensuality isn’t generally Scott’s forte, so you keep pinching yourself – and he’s done nothing remotely like it since. (It sank at the box office.) And I had a terrific time at The Martian, Scott’s latest, based on the Andy Weir bestseller about an astronaut on an exploratory trip to Mars (played by Matt Damon) whose crew abandons him on the mistaken assumption that he’s been killed in the sudden storm that leads NASA to abort the mission and send them back into space.

Southern Charm: Aziz Ansari's Master of None

Aziz Ansari and Noël Wells in Netflix's Masters of None.

There are a long list of reasons why you should check out Aziz Ansari's new Netflix original series, Master of None. In addition to its patient and low-key storytelling, the comedy also offers a host of charming and genuinely human characters, refreshing and pointed takes on race, identity, and gender, not to mention some very funny things to say about texting. But the best reason why Master of None is en route to become the sleeper comedy hit of this fall television is Aziz Ansari himself.

MTV’s Catfish Might be Fake and I Don’t Care

Machine Gun Kelly, Nev Shulman, and Hundra in a recent episode of MTV's Catfish: The TV Show.

November: the days are shorter, the nights are colder, and, especially for those of us who pay our bills by working retail, life gets a little bit more stressful as the December holiday season rapidly approaches. At the end of the work day, when my brain has inevitably turned to mush, sometimes bad reality TV is the only thing that speaks to me. We all have our vices. On one such occasion this week, I threw caution to the wind and indulged in my pet favourite garbage television show: MTV’s Catfish: The TV Show. I regret nothing.

Rock x 3: New Albums from The Sheepdogs, Los Lobos, and Keith Richards

Future Nostalgia (Warner), The Sheepdogs new album, could be considered classic rock for the 21st Century. It’s an album that has borrowed the template of classic Seventies rock music and re-fashioned it for a new audience. All the elements of Seventies music are on Future Nostalgia, minus the dread power-ballads. The Sheepdogs have written an album close to their musical hearts: a hybrid of Southern rock and Canadian mainstream rock once served by groups such as April Wine and The Guess Who.

Future Nostalgia launches with "I'm Gonna Be Myself," a song destined to express the freedom with which this band operates artistically. It's a healthy attitude uninhibited by corporate and critical expectations. Remember when this band appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine? They hit the mainstream rock audience with the five-track EP, Five Easy Pieces, released in 2011. At that time the band made frequent appearances on television (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon) and opened for Kings of Leon on their 2011 tour across North America. The following year they made a strong appearance at the South By South West (SXSW) music festival in the spring and released their third full-length album by the end of the summer. In 2012, the band won three Juno Awards including Best New Group and they even played the roof of the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto.

Back To Basics: SPECTRE

Daniel Craig as James Bond in SPECTRE.

This review contains spoilers for SPECTRE.
 
SPECTRE is not a great Bond film. It’s a decent standalone spy thriller, but that’s too charitable, as no Bond film exists in a vacuum. As the newest and “freshest” installment in Daniel Craig’s run as 007, it’s strangely discordant and slow. It discards nearly all of the audience goodwill and story momentum generated by Craig’s energetic reboot of the character, content to hit all the expected notes and attempt nothing new or challenging with the character or his world. It feels regressive, rather than classic – the most like an Old Bond movie of any of the Craig entries, but in all the worst ways.

Dada Woof Papa Hot: Gay Men, Married with Children

John Benjamin Hickey and Patrick Breen in Dada Woof Papa Hot. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

New plays deal so infrequently with the tensions of contemporary American life in any way that might be called complex that Peter Parnell’s Dada Woof Papa Hot, which is being given a fine production under Scott Ellis’ direction at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, makes you sit up a little straighter in your seat. I don’t want to overpraise this play and set up grandiose expectations: it’s small-scale and in a more exciting theatrical scene for new work, its intelligence and sensibility would be laudable but not extraordinary. But nowadays a new play in which the characters are well drawn and clearly differentiated by their dialogue, the themes are not only developed but dramatized, the point of view is fresh and the observation of human behavior is witty as well as precise really does seem extraordinary. I decided to check out the play because the selection committee at LCT seems to do a better job than that of any other theatre in Manhattan (both When the Rain Stops Falling and Blood and Gifts had their American premieres there) and because – having had no previous exposure to Parnell’s plays aside from his unfortunate rewrite of the already unfortunate book of the Alan Jay Lerner-Burton Lane musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever in 2012 – I was curious. (The play he’s known for, QED, was a one-man piece that starred Alan Alda; LCT produced it following its run at the Mark Taper Forum.)