Podcast: Interview with Umberto Eco (1983)

On February 19, author, philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco passed away at the age of 84.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) 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. 

One of those interviews was with Italian novelist, philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco. On February 19, Eco passed away at age 84. When we sat down together in 1983, his soon-to-be bestselling first novel, The Name of the Rose, had just been translated into English. 

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Umberto Eco as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1983.

Tom Fulton was the host and producer of On the Arts for CJRT-FM in Toronto for 23 years, beginning in 1975. 

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.  

Local Girl Doesn’t “Get” Deadpool, Can’t Understand Fuss

Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool in Deadpool.

This is it. This is the moment where people are going to read something I wrote and tell themselves that I dislike the thing they love because I just don’t understand. “She just doesn’t get it,” they’ll say, “she’s a girl/doesn’t read comics/probably drinks pumpkin spice lattes; Deadpool goes over her head.”

While that characterization isn’t totally accurate, it’s also not entirely wrong. I don’t get Deadpool. I’m putting it out there and I’m not taking it back. I’ve never read a Deadpool comic and I had no idea what he was about until I started researching for this piece. All I know is that my nerdiest male friends were raving about this movie and I had to see it. My critical opinion is that… it was alright, I guess.

Cultural Musings: Son of Saul, Jacques Rivette, Downton Abbey and The Mindy Project

Géza Röhrig in Son of Saul.

Son of Saul: I can see why the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences chose László Nemes’ Hungarian Holocaust drama Son of Saul as the Best Foreign Language Film of the Year. It’s a grim and uncompromising art house movie that easily personifies the perceived intelligent non-Hollywood virtues of movies made in other countries. However, the story of Saul (Géza Röhrig), a concentration camp inmate in Auschwitz, who becomes determined to see that a boy he says is his son be given a proper Jewish burial, also possesses the problems of so many foreign language movies. It’s emotionally dry, quite arid in its execution and in terms of its storytelling, more than a little monotonous.

Toppling Pretensions: The National Ballet of Canada's Mixed Program

Artists of the National Ballet of Canada in Cacti. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)

At the risk of Swedish choreographer Alexander Ekman rolling his eyes, I will now self-consciously pass comment on Cacti, the prickly but popular work which the National Ballet of Canada performed last week as part of a mixed program at Toronto's Four Seasons Centre. A delicious parody that had the audience laughing start to finish, his 30-minute dance is a critique on art criticism, especially the kind of arid discourse that gives the discipline a bad name. First created in 2010 for Nederland's Dans Theatre 2 and now performed by companies around the world drawn to its irreverent sense of humour, Cacti erupts beneath a pompous voice-over teeming with cringe-worthy pronouncements comparing artistic creation to ant hills and dancers to emotionally stunted delinquents. The verbal drone culminates in the dead-end question, what does it all mean? Answer at your peril. This isn't to suggest that Cacti, a co-production shared by the National Ballet, the Boston Ballet and the Atlanta Ballet, is immune to criticism. It's more that this physically daring piece, set to live musical accompaniment and the dancers' own percussive poundings on large Scrabble-like ivory tiles serving as mini stages, makes meaning take a back seat to sheer enjoyment. Give it up for the needle in your side.

Cacti – so named because dancers actually perform with potted plants in hand – made its Canadian debut last week as the fantastically refreshing finale to a three-part program dominated by two modernist ballets by the late George Balanchine. The Four Temperaments, created in 1946 to Paul Hindemith's commissioned score, and Rubies, a dazzling excerpt from 1967's full length Jewels set to Igor Stravinsky's rollicking Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, complimented the Ekman work by similarly challenging perceptions and toppling pretensions.

Children, Behave: 10 Cloverfield Lane

John Gallagher, Jr., Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Note: This review contains major spoilers for 10 Cloverfield Lane.
 
The title of 10 Cloverfield Lane shouldn’t have the word “Cloverfield” in it. Its original title, "The Cellar," would have been just as mysterious and gripping as the film itself – but it wouldn’t have put butts in seats the way an association with the 2008 Matt Reeves film would. Trailers for Lane popped up only two months before release, to everyone’s surprise (“What? There’s a new Cloverfield movie? Wow… okay!”). I can’t help feeling, however, that slapping a recognizable title on a film that – spoiler – has pretty much zero to do with Cloverfield was an incredibly disingenuous move, one that is made that much more irritating because Lane is a great film in its own right whose branding only weighs it down.

The Color Purple: Voices

Cynthia Erivo in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

When Cynthia Erivo opens her mouth to sing in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple, she looks as if she’s been touched with grace, and the music that pours out is honeyed gospel. I can’t remember the last time I heard a musical-theatre performer who commanded so much unfiltered power and possessed such purity of tone. The songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray were obviously written to be delivered with this kind of full-throated intensity – singing that carries the force of the north wind behind it. (I didn’t see the original production, which starred LaChanze and opened in 2005.) The first ensemble number, “Mysterious Ways,” a hymn by a black Baptist preacher (Lawrence Clayton) in small-town Georgia and his congregation, practically rips the seats out of the theatre. It’s in the tradition of “Leavin’ Time” from Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s St. Louis Woman and “Walk Him Up the Stairs” from Gary Geld and Peter Udell’s Purlie.

Of Wire and Wood: Two New Albums from Borealis Records

Tom Taylor, Shari Ulrich and Barney Bentall, a.k.a. BTU, have a new album with Borealis Records, Tightrope Walk.

"...a guitar is made of wire and wood ...it’s just a tool when pushing comes to shove..."

Those lines come from a song I wrote a few years ago, but in essence it’s a true statement of how I feel about guitars. They are tools to make music with. In the hands of a gifted player, a guitar can bring an almost endless variety of emotions from both player and listener. On Friday night, Feb. 26, at St. Catharines FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, Ron Sexsmith used his Taylor to display his incredible skill at songwriting. The following Monday night, Feb. 29, at Hugh’s Room, Simon Townshend owned the small stage, passionately attacking three different axes and a mandolin, and he had The Who’s guitar tech on hand to tune up. There’s no denying it: a guitar is a potent instrument, and probably the one thing that gives me the most pleasure in life apart from my family. That’s why these two new albums from Borealis Records are worth having around.

BTU is not British Thermal Units. It stands for Bentall-Taylor-Ulrich. That’s Barney Bentall, ex-Legendary Hearts, who after spending a few years as a cattle rancher has recently been hyperactive on the Canadian folk scene. Last year saw him release a solo album Flesh and Bone and take part in The High Bar Gang (a gospel bluegrass band whose debut album was one of the year’s highlights. Shari Ulrich was also part of the High Bar Gang, and she released a quality solo CD last year as well.) Tom Taylor hails from Vancouver where he was part of the band She Stole My Beer. Together Bentall-Taylor-Ulrich have crafted a folky new CD entitled Tightrope Walk.

The End of Downton Abbey and the State of Prestige TV

Hugh Bonneville and Michelle Suzanne Dockery in Downton Abbey.

The end of Downton Abbey was hardly the sort of dramatic, divisive event that has characterized the conclusions of so many shows from the so-called Golden Age of Television. There was no climactic shootout with neo-Nazis, no ambiguous ending scored by Journey, no revelation that ended in a Coca-Cola ad. Instead, we got a glimpse of a happy family, still completely intact from the start of the season (if not the series) and enjoying a moment of happiness amid Christmas decorations and falling snow. The finale, which aired on Christmas in the UK and this past Sunday in the States, was upbeat to an almost absurd degree, pairing off almost all of the potential romantic couplings and avoiding virtually anything that would darken the mood. In this regard, it was a fitting end to a series whose initial success and enduring popularity eventually sat at odds with general dismissal from critics.

What about this Place: Louis C.K's Horace and Pete

Steve Buscemi and Louis C.K. in Horace and Pete.

Sometimes I wonder why do we tear ourselves to pieces / I just need some time to think / Or maybe I just need a drink / At Horace & Pete’s.

– from the theme song to Horace and Pete, written and performed by Paul Simon. 

On January 30, without fanfare, press release, or social media campaign, Louis C.K. sent out a mass email to his fans: “Hi there. ‘Horace and Pete’ episode one is available for download. $5. Go here to watch it. We hope you like it. Regards, Louis.” (Subsequent episodes were downloadable at a lesser cost: $2 for episode two and $3 for each episode after that.) For the past six years, C.K.'s Louie has been the standard bearer for indie TV within the network model, so this move to direct-to-consumer series distribution seems, though maybe only in retrospect, like a natural next step for him. Unlike Louie, which remains a comedy (albeit a dark and sometimes surreal one), Horace and Pete is a drama, in every best sense of the word: both in that it has the deliberate texture of a stage production and that it lands with a surprising weight of reality.

What a Charlie Foxtrot: Tina Fey and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Tina Fey in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

“I’m starting to feel like this is normal. You know it isn’t, right?” says reporter Kim Baker (Tina Fey) to Scottish photographer Iain MacKelpie (Martin Freeman), reflecting on her three years as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan. From her subject position as a 40+ single New York copywriter, the statement is accurate. For the 30.5 million people who live in Afghanistan, however, “this,” a life marred by war, violence, unstable politics and pervasive patriarchy, is normal. Such is the irredeemable problem that can’t be, shouldn’t be, overlooked at the heart of a frustratingly enjoyable film.

Based on an assuredly less egregious memoir called The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by New York Times reporter Kim Barker, dramedy Whiskey Tango Foxtrot follows Tina Fey as Kim Baker (that pesky “r” omitted in the screenplay presumably to avoid confusing a fake woman with a real woman in Google searches), a bored, desk-bound writer who jumps at an offer to be an on-camera war journalist in Kabul, Afghanistan. Despite having zero experience in front of a camera, Baker is offered the position precisely because she is childless, unmarried, and over 40 – in others words, because she is “expendable” by North American standards. An eye roll worthy epiphany at the gym causes her to view her suggested shortcomings as an opportunity for change. Leaving a house key for her “mildly depressive” boyfriend (Josh Charles) so that he can water her plants, Kim ships out to Afghanistan for a brief stint that inevitably stretches into three years. 

Sounds from the Pacific Coast: The Seattle Symphony Performs Charles Ives

The Seattle Symphony conducted by Ludovic Morlot, performing Charles Ives' Symphony No. 4.  (Photo: Brandon Patoc)

When the American composer Charles Ives died in 1954, the Associated Press, in a very short obit, stated that many of his compositions were not performed in his lifetime due to their “difficulty.” AP goes on to say that “critics [have described] his compositions as half-a-century ahead of their time.” For members of the Seattle Symphony under conductor Ludovic Morlot, that half-century is now. The orchestra has just released recordings of Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” “Central Park in the Dark” and Symphonies No. 3 and No. 4. (In 2014 they released a performance of Ives’ Symphony No. 2, also on their own label.)

This Movie's Got Sand: Gods of Egypt

Gerard Butler in Gods of Egypt.

I don’t know the exact moment Gods of Egypt won me over. It might have been when Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) awakes amongst the remnants of last night’s orgy and we see that, like all gods, he’s twelve feet tall, with a giant-sized Jacuzzi to match. It might have been when it became clear that Gerard Butler (as desert god Set), in true Connery fashion, was going to make no effort whatsoever to mask his Scottish brogue. It might have been when we meet Ra (Geoffrey Rush), god of the sun and father of creation, who chills on his celestial catamaran, pulling the sun on a long chain over the edge of the flat, disc-shaped earth (and occasionally firing off a casual bolt from his laser spear at Apophis, the ever-encroaching demon-worm of chaos, represented by a cloud of swirling teeth and smoke). Or, honestly, it might have been watching the trailer, long before I sat down for the main event, which promised a perfect storm of unconscionable casting and absurd CG shenanigans, and delivered to a degree I never dared hope was possible. If those late-winter blues got you down, there is truly no better cure than a flamboyant, excessive, cocksure trashterpiece like this.

Hughie: Hotel Ghost

Frank Wood and Forest Whitaker in Hughie, directed by Michael Grandage. (Photo: Marc Brenner)

Hughie is an oddity in the Eugene O’Neill canon. He wrote it in the early forties, around the time he was turning out his glorious – and lengthy – late-career masterpieces, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, but Hughie is a two-hander with a running length of merely an hour. It doesn’t read like an excerpt from a longer work, but it has a tossed-off quality, and I don’t mean that as a put-down. It’s like something O’Neill might have penned in an afternoon to clear his head while he was working on Iceman: the main character, a solitary fellow named Erie Smith who lives in an antiquated, mostly abandoned Manhattan hotel, isn’t very different from the has-beens who inhabit Harry Hope’s saloon, except that his vice is gambling (of all sorts) rather than alcohol. The other character is the night clerk Erie strikes up a conversation with in the wee hours, in what feels like an increasingly desperate effort to forge the same kind of bond with him that he had with his predecessor, Hughie, who has recently died.

Upending Clichés in Outlander

Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe in Outlander, adapted from the novels by Diane Gabaldon.

I likely would not have read Diane Gabaldon’s gargantuan 1991 novel Outlander if I had not seen the Starz television series, a faithful adaptation of the novel in which large swathes of dialogue are directly transposed to the script. I surprised myself by watching the entire 16-episode first season, since I haven't paid much attention to the multi-genre of historical fiction/romance and time travel/fantasy. Stephen King’s 2011 Kennedy assassination thriller 11/22/63 was gripping, but to make a substantial investment of time about the life of a twentieth-century woman who stumbles back into eighteenth-century Scotland? My interest was piqued by a few positive notices and a news report that the Irish actress, Caitriona Balfe, had been nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in playing Claire Beauchamp. I am pleased to report that the Outlander series, supplemented by reading the source novel, has been an emotionally powerful and aesthetically-satisfying experience. We are treated to luscious cinematography of the Scottish Highlands (inspired by the television drama, Trafalgar Tours is sponsoring a trip to the Highlands), haunting Scottish folk music created by Bear McCreary, the creation of a complex believable world, strong performances from actors who inhabit three-dimensional characters and scripts that allow them to grow and develop.

History as Mudpie: HBO's Vinyl

Multiple raptures: Bobby Cannavale as Richie Finestra in Vinyl.

HBO has aired only three episodes of Vinyl, its musical comedy-drama about the struggle of record-company boss Richie Finestra to resuscitate his failing label in the shifting rock market of 1973. But it is so far from being a clear success on any level – a smear of silliness and effrontery, of blatant intent and thudding execution – that no one is to be scolded for being disappointed with it. Even its more enjoyable aspects, of which there are several, haven’t come into focus. Yet I’ve decided, after the initial turn-off, that I like the show.

Come Fly With Me: La Sylphide Soars at the National Ballet of Canada

Jurgita Dronina and Harrison James in La Sylphide, at Toronto's Four Seasons Centre until March 6. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)

La Sylphide is the quintessential Romantic ballet, brimming with light-as-a-feather ballerinas on satin pointes, a central male character probing the meaning of existence, a misty landscape ruled by supernatural beings that flit across the imagination and a theme of doomed love. Its historical importance can’t be overstated, and yet Toronto audiences for the most part stayed away in droves when the rarely seen work opened at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on Wednesday for a limited five-day run.

Rows upon rows of seats lay empty for the North American premiere of Johan Kobborg’s remake of August Bournonville’s iconic 1836 work, which is a great pity because this production soars. With a stellar cast lead by dynamic newcomer Jurgita Dronina, a Russian-born principal dancer steeped in the Bournonville style from her years dancing with the Royal Danish Ballet, plus a trendy mad-for-plaid design by the legendary Desmond Heeley and appropriately moody lighting by Robert Thomson, La Sylphide is a high from start to finish.

You’re Only as Old as You Feel: The X-Files Season One, 23 Years Later

Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny in "Ice" from The X-Files' first season.

I was four years old when Chris Carter’s iconic science fiction television series, The X-Files, premiered on Fox in September of 1993 and thirteen by the time it ended. Although I’m retrospectively marvelling at my mother’s parenting, I remember actually watching some of the show during its original run. I came to it well steeped in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel but, while vampires with tortured souls were my jam as a pre-teen, X-Files was still too much for me. I found it creepy – and I was far too young to appreciate David Duchovny’s weird, unexpected sex appeal. The launch of the show’s much anticipated tenth season this year got me thinking that it was high time I revisited the series as a horror-loving, cynical adult with a soft spot for blue-eyed men. But how does its first season hold up after more than two decades?

Risk and Reward: The Unique Perils of TV Criticism

Bobby Cannavale and Olivia Wilde in Vinyl on HBO.

If there is one huge difference between being a film critic and reviewing network and cable television it's about time and commitment. After two hours, I can quickly dismiss something like the dramatically inept and politically naive Trumbo, which treats the Hollywood blacklist – yet again – in an apolitical style that turns the story into an easy-to-digest morality tale between innocent idealists and HUAC, while shrewdly ignoring how Stalinist policies actually infected and divided the American left. It wouldn't have been quite so easy to write it off had it been a TV mini-series. I would have had to give it more time. You can usually tell after a half-hour whether a film will hold together, come to life, or turn turtle. But it's not so easy with a television series.

Film of Mediocrity – Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny

Michelle Yeoh (centre) in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny.

I was never as big a fan of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) as everyone else was (and that includes the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, as well as the film’s director, Ang Lee). I appreciate it for introducing the majority of Western moviegoers to the wuxia genre, and doing so in a way that was palatable to our sense of aesthetics and storytelling while still remaining (mostly) true to the original form. But compared to classic examples like the Shaw Bros’ The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) and more highly-evolved entries that would follow like Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (2004), I found Lee’s film to be a laboured, overwrought affair whose action sequences (choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping) were like a microcosm of the whole picture: beautiful, but ephemeral and mostly empty.

Imagine the crushing sense of ennui that enveloped me, then, when it became clear that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny, the Netflix-produced, American-Chinese follow up to Lee’s Oscar-winning original, was just the opposite: an undercooked knockoff with cheap CG effects, connected to the first film seemingly in name only. I won’t be one of those who condemn Sword of Destiny for not being as “brilliant” as its predecessor – I’m knocking it because it couldn’t even manage to be coherent on its own terms.

Buried Child: Sam Shepard and Ed Harris

Ed Harris and Paul Sparks in Buried Child, at the Pershing Square Signature Center. (Photo: Monique Carboni)

When you watch Ed Harris as Dodge, the contrary, irascible patriarch of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, in the current revival at New York City's Pershing Square Signature Center, you realize he was born to play this role – or more aptly, that the role has been waiting around for him to get old enough for it. I didn’t see Joseph Gistirak, who created the character at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in 1978, or Richard Hamilton, who took it over in the original off-Broadway production, but I did see James Gammon in the 1996 Broadway version, and, playing the old man as a kind of ghost sniping at everyone around him as he continues to haunt the dilapidated Illinois family farmhouse, he performed marvels with that whiskey-soaked, hollowed-out voice. It didn’t occur to me that I’d ever see a better Dodge. But Harris injects the character, who’s stationed in front of his TV set, sneaking hits of apple jack until his son Tilden (Paul Sparks) makes off with his bottle while he’s asleep, with a hilariously mean-spirited life force that makes him seem unkillable, even if you know the play and realize he fades out at the end. Harris became famous for playing a straight-arrow American hero, John Glenn in Philip Kaufman’s 1983 The Right Stuff, but he’s sometimes used his classical American looks, that rangy cowboy handsomeness, as a starting point for an in-depth portrait – perhaps most vividly as Charlie Dick, husband to Jessica Lange’s Patsy Cline in the 1985 Sweet Dreams. He’s also used it ironically, as he did, also early on in his career, as the conscienceless mercenary in Under Fire. His performance in Buried Child belongs in the ironic category. You look at this ornery old codger, who doesn’t have a kind word to say about anybody – except, perhaps, his grandson Vince’s girl friend Shelly (Taissa Farmiga), whose obstinacy he can appreciate (he certifies her “a pistol”) – and see the corruption of the whole frontier legacy. It’s Harris’ scheme to make that corruption richly funny.