Finding Home: Lion

Dev Patel in Lion

Lion is a magnificent piece of humanist filmmaking, so powerfully affecting that you carry it with you out of the moviehouse, as if the protagonist, the transplanted Indian boy Saroo, were someone you knew personally who’d shared with you his strange and improbable life story. (When I reread my notes from viewing the film almost a month ago, I started tearing up all over again.) In fact, it’s a true tale: Luke Davies’s fine screenplay adapts Saroo Brierley’s memoir, A Long Way Home. The director, Garth Davis, made his name on commercials, and directed four episodes of Jane Campion’s miniseries Top of the Lake; aside from a documentary, Lion is the only feature film he’s done. But he’s had towering role models: the early section, with the luminous Sunny Pawar as the little-boy protagonist, suggests De Sica’s neo-realist classics – especially the 1948 Shoeshine – and the transcendent films of the Indian director Satyajit Ray.

When The Music Stopped: HMV Canada Goes Under

Nearly a year ago, I wrote an impassioned post about the closing of a branch of Queen Video, one of Toronto’s few remaining DVD rental outlets, and how that limited rental choices further for film buffs. Since then, another multifaceted DVD store, 7-24 Movies & More, has bitten the dust. It had a weekly 3-for-$8 Monday-Thursday special rental price, which beat its competition but, alas, it had to move because rent at its location had gone up precipitously and its (supposedly) loyal clientele didn’t follow it to its new location. Now HMV Canada has gone into receivership and all 102 locations of the chain (which sells CDs, DVDs, vinyl and collectibles) will be extinct, officially as of April 30, but likely sooner. Coming on top of other recent closures of fine music outlets in Toronto – Sunrise’s two downtown locations in 2014 (it still has ten stores in the province of Ontario, but only one in North Toronto); Vortex Records, one of the city’s best used emporia, in 2015; Refried Beats, the other great used CD (and DVD) shop in Toronto, in 2016; and now HMV – it’s clear that for fans of CDs, and the vast repository of music available in that format, the future is going to be very different than it is now. And not in a good way.

Neglected Gem #95: The Boy and the Beast (2015)

A scene from The Boy and the Beast (2015).

The Boy and the Beast (Bakemono no Ko) is the story of Ren (Aoi Miyazaki), a nine-year-old Tokyo runaway who abandons his family life when his mother dies in a car accident. After years of living as a homeless urchin, one day Ren stumbles out of the bustling Shibuya streets into a world of humanoid beasts called Jutengai, and becomes the reluctant pupil of an arrogant, lazy, bear-like beast-man called Kumatetsu (Koji Yakusho). The reigning Lord of Jutengai is preparing to reincarnate himself as a god, and a successor must be chosen. The two candidates for the job, selected for their strength of both body and character, are the noble boar-man, Iozen (Kazuhiro Yamaji), and Kumatetsu, whose fighting prowess is extraordinary but whose personality is sorely lacking. Ren – whom Kumatetsu names “Kyuta” in reference to his young age – establishes an instantly adversarial relationship with the blustering bear-man, who lacks the patience and compassion to act as a proper teacher. Neither knows, or could acknowledge even if he were aware, how desperately they need one another – but it’s instantly plain for all to see that these two loners, hardened by years of solitary survival, are a perfect pair. Only together do they have a chance of readying Kumatetsu for his match against Iozen, which will decide who rises up as Lord, and only together can they ready Kyuta to re-enter the world he left behind.

Piety: Martin Scorsese's Silence

Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield in Silence.

No question: Martin Scorsese's religious epic, Silence, is aptly named. Unlike his last feature, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), with its frenetic, speed-freak pacing, or the pilot of the HBO series, Vinyl, where the editing rhythms were so percussive that they became assaulting, Scorsese's new picture unfolds with a quiet and solemn reverence, as if we were in church, and the atmosphere is hushed. Silence has a lulling seductiveness going for it (the cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto is both lush and vibrant), so it's clear that the asceticism of Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel has drawn the director – once again – into a sojourn in search of spiritual values and truths, but the drama itself turns out to be no more substantial than in The Wolf of Wall Street. If the sensational highs of sex, cocaine and larceny were the driving force of that picture, rather than an attempt to bring the audience to a dramatic understanding of how Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) swindled his way to the top of Wall Street, the piety of religious faith becomes the drug of Silence, substituting for a rendering of spiritual belief. Scorsese may be aiming for the formalist poetry of Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951), where a man of God gets tested by those who reject him, but the result is actually closer to Carl Dreyer's Ordet (1955) where spirituality is reduced to pedantic dogma.

Tinariwen: From the Desert to our Hearts

The members of Tinariwen. (Photo: Thomas Dorn)

Mali is a land-locked country located in Western Africa – in fact, it’s the eighth-largest country on the continent. Its chief export is gold and, while its official language is French, it is also the host of over forty languages, one of which, Bambara, is generally heard on the streets of the capital, Bamako. Mali’s expansive regional diversity features a portion of the Sahara Desert to the northwest, which is the home, if you can call it that, of the Tuareg people, a partly nomadic group, often dressed in blue, that inhabits most of the Sahara from Niger to Tunisia, including Morocco, Algeria and Burkino Faso. But the Tuareg only account for about 3% of Mali’s population. Out of this tiny populace comes one of the most interesting and popular musical groups, Tinariwen ("deserts”), a nine-piece band featuring traditional Tuareg instruments mashed-up with electric guitars and percussion. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib formed the ensemble in the late seventies while living in exile in Libya. As world music started to spread across the continent and airwaves, to North American and European audiences, Tinariwen started making a strong impression. Their first album was released in 2000, with a brilliant cover featuring a photo of a red sand dune and a tiny figure with his hands in the air. By their third release, Water Is Life (World Village), we finally got a cover featuring the weathered faces of the group dressed in their native clothes. By 2012, following extensive touring away from Mali, the band released their most successful album to date, Tassili, which was recorded in a national park in Algeria without the use of electric guitars, principally to let listeners feel the Tinariwen sound as it originated around campfires and tents. That year it went on to win a Grammy for Best Album in the World Music category.

Shirley Booth: Only the Lonely

Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952).

Shirley Booth played the titular domestic on the TV sitcom Hazel for just five years, 1961 through 1966, but it so defined her that it obscured everything she had done before – twenty-five years of starring roles on Broadway and a handful of movies that included her Oscar-winning performance in Come Back, Little Sheba in 1952. It was that film that brought her to Hollywood, to recreate the role she’d played on stage two years earlier (which had won her the second of her three Tony Awards). Booth broke through in 1935 in George Abbott and John Cecil Holm’s comedy Three Men on a Horse; her stage work, varied and prolific, included The Philadelphia Story opposite Katharine Hepburn, Joseph Cotton and Van Heflin (she played the hard-boiled photographer Liz Imbrie), My Sister Eileen,Goodbye, My Fancy, The Time of the Cuckoo and Desk Set, as well as a trio of musicals: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, By the Beautiful Sea and Juno, Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. (When Hollywood optioned them, Hepburn took over the Booth parts in The Time of the Cuckoo – renamed Summertime – and Desk Set.) She had a long career – about half a century, though much of it remains inaccessible to us except through photographs.

Sliding toward Fascism in Jo Walton’s Counter-History Trilogy

Paintings of Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on display in Moscow at a party hosted by pro-Kremlin activists to celebrate Trump's election victory in November 2016. (Source: Twitter)

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

– George Orwell 

Recent events, not only in America but throughout Europe, have raised the possibility that liberal democracy, the relatively brief experiment – in terms of human history – is in trouble. For a generation, after the German Wall came down and the Soviet Union imploded, it inspired hope. Currently, however, it is threatened by the spectre of illiberal authoritarianism. Liberal democracy requires liberty and the rule of law, and celebrates pluralism based on gender, ethnic and racial equality. What knits these principles together is a respect for truth, a cornerstone principle that requires an independent vibrant media to hold power to account. Illiberal authoritarianism sanctions the powerful to define reality and possess a monopoly on truth. Rather than respect for others, authoritarian regimes set up a “we” – the ordinary, decent people – against the threatening others: “Mexicans and Muslims in the U.S., Kurds in Turkey, Poles in Britain, Muslims and Jews all over Europe, as well as Sinti and Roma, refugees, immigrants, black people, women, cosmopolitans, homosexuals, not to mention ‘experts,’ ‘elites,’ and ‘mainstream media’,” as the astute scholar andjournalist, Timothy Garton Ash, describes. He assails these developments as rampant Trumpismo.

Underpowered: NBC’s Powerless

Superheroes are ubiquitous on film and television these days. Movie studios’ production slates are full of films mining every last corner of the Marvel and DC universes, while some TV outlets, such as Netflix and the CW, have entire blocks of programming centered around serialized adaptations of comic-book properties. While many of these are well executed – the Marvel movies, in particular, have settled into a rhythm, delivering consistently enjoyable if not especially novel entertainment – there have been some unpleasant side effects. The dark, gritty tone and overbearing self-seriousness of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies have become de rigueur for many franchises, even as they seem to grow increasingly unconcerned with the CGI-rendered carnage inflicted on countless screaming extras during the inevitable climactic battle that’s become a standard plot point in virtually every film.

NBC’s Powerless, which premiered on February 2 and airs at 8:30 ET on Thursday nights, pokes fun at that and many other superhero-movie tropes: at one point, a character laments that superheroes have gone from thwarting robbers to fighting massive battles against supervillains, leaving ordinary people with little to play. That sums up the fundamental premise of this sitcom, which stars Vanessa Hudgens as go-getter Emily Locke, who’s just moved to Charm City to take a new job at Wayne Security. The company (which, yes, is owned by that particular Wayne from the comic books) is supposed to devise new products that will help protect non-super civilians from the daily butchery visited upon them by titanic battles between good and evil. It’s run by Van Wayne (Alan Tudyk), Bruce’s cousin, and, perhaps inevitably for a workplace comedy in 2017, populated by a variety of quirky misfits, such as Ron (Ron Funches), Teddy (Danny Pudi), and Van’s disaffected secretary Jackie (Christina Kirk).

Podcast: Interview with Poet Lorna Crozier (1985)

Poet Lorna Crozier, in 2009. (Photo: Gary McKinstry)

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. In 1985, one of those guests was Canadian poet Lorna Crozier, who today holds the Head Chair in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria.

Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan in 1948, Crozier has authored fifteen books (The Weather, Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence) that have focused primarily on relationships and language. Alongside her partner, poet Patrick Lane, she has also co-authored No Longer Two People (1979) and the anthology, Breathing Fire (2004). In 2011, Crozier was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.

When we spoke over thirty years ago, she had just published a very personal collection of work titled The Garden Going On Without Us.

– Kevin Courrier 

Here is the full interview with Lorna Crozier as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.

Princes, Let Sleeping Beauty Sleep: Passengers

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers.

Passengers, written by Jon Spaihts and directed by Morten Tyldum, isn’t a very good sci-fi film. It’s also not a very good romance. It touches on thought-provoking themes that it doesn’t bother to explore, it wastes some lovely production design (and some talented leads) on a tepid story, and it squanders numerous opportunities to surprise and thrill its audience. Moreover, whatever improvements might have been made that could have coaxed out the film’s true potential, they would all be for naught, thanks to a single terrible decision that lies at the story’s core, poisoning the whole movie from the inside out.

Alchemy of the Image: New Inversion Paintings by Michael Burges

Michael Burges, Reverse Glass Painting No. 1. (Acrylic and plexiglass on aluminum, 2016)

“Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” – Robert Irwin

From the moment I first viewed the luminous paintings of Michael Burges I was tempted to say: in vitreous veritas. There, I’ve said it: in glass is truth. It’s a kind of truth, however, which we look through, rather than at, and it both contains and conveys a magical force that frees the eye from the interference of thoughts. It’s not that I often erupt into Latin phrases, but somehow the images seemed to invite me into a sanctified kind of realm, one requiring a new (or even ancient) tongue to adequately describe it. 

Although it is possible to say that all painting to some degree has alchemy at its core, insofar as raw pigments are transformed into fluid images in a somewhat magical manner, most painted images merely suggest in a metaphorical manner this poetic process at work. But rather than only evoking the transmutation of physical matter into mental images, the mesmerizing paintings of Michael Burges literally and actually embody the alchemical process itself. They also usher us into an archaic theatre of pure seeing. The forgetting they invite is actually more of an anamnesia, a waking up, which seems to restore our lost senses. 

Power Not Yet Realized: Sampradaya Dance Creations' Pralaya

​ A scene from Pralaya, by Sampradaya Dance Creations. (Photo: OnUp Photography)

"I am the beat of each heart and the rhythm of each breath; I am time, the brilliance of all creation." So begins Pralaya, a multidisciplinary dance presentation which seeks to be timeless despite having rooted itself in a centuries-old epic poem compiling the myths, wars and legends of ancient India. Ponderous and confusing in places, it doesn't quite succeed. 

More Kings, More Turmoil: The Return of The Hollow Crown

Benedict Cumberbatch as King Richard III in The Hollow Crown.

Extending the British television series The Hollow Crown to include all the rest of Shakespeare’s history plays (except King John) is a boon for completists, perhaps. (PBS ran all three parts of Season 2 before the new year.) But moving from the Henriad, which covers the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, to the next chronological section, from the crowning of Henry VI to the crowning of Henry VII, is anti-climactic. Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry V are masterpieces, and Henry IV, Part 2 contains some great scenes, but the three parts of Henry VI, which Shakespeare wrote – or perhaps collaborated on – at the beginning of his career, aren’t very good plays. I applauded the first act of Ivo Von Hove’s Kings of War, which cut Henry VI to the bone and made it dramatically exciting; after sitting through Dominic Cooke’s version (from an adaptation by him and Ben Power), I admire it even more.

A Very Fine Dramatization: Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Malina Weissman, Presley Smith and Louis Hynes star in Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

The following contains some spoilers for the first season of Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Adaptations of popular and widely beloved stories – especially children's books – are a tough business. And before I begin, let me be clear: I love Daniel Handler's Lemony Snicket books. The first of the Baudelaire orphans novels, A Bad Beginning, appeared in 1999 and the thirteenth and final book, The End, was published in 2006. Collected under the name A Series of Unfortunate Events, the novels are credited to "Lemony Snicket" (the books' melancholy narrator and a slowly emerging character in his own right) and tell the ill-fated adventures of a trio of young orphans – Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire – after the untimely death of their parents in a suspicious fire. As the siblings are shuffled from one incompetent guardian to the next, they struggle ably against the machinations of the scheming and larger-than-life Count Olaf, who is intent on gaining control of their parents' fortune.

The Snicket books speak to the innate intelligence of their young readers – their moral intelligence most of all – and, in the tradition of Roald Dahl and C.S. Lewis, they are as funny as they are exquisitely painful. Telling stories of love and loss, spirit and struggle, and refusing to sidestep moral ambiguity, the novels mirror, with a deliberately Gothic imagery, that dangerous time between childhood and maturity as the world beyond your parents' sheltering love reveals itself. In short, there is more moral realism in a single Lemony Snicket novel than in all the Twilight books put together – and I am thrilled to be able to say that the television adaptation (which premiered on Netflix earlier this month) not only does its source material justice but will appeal to all ages, whether you've read the books or not.

Bathed in Sorrow: Manchester by the Sea

Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges in Manchester by the Sea 

The classically framed images of the water that open Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, warmly captured by cinematographer Jody Lipes, set its leisurely pace. This is a domestic tragedy in the measured, escalating Eugene O’Neill mode, and like O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night and its fictive sequel, A Moon for the Misbegotten, its milieu is Irish-American New England. Lonergan, a playwright who turned filmmaker a decade and a half ago with You Can Count on Me, is aiming high, and though I don’t mean to suggest that he touches the heights of O’Neill’s great dramas, the movie is an impressive achievement – and a devastating one. The protagonist is Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a janitor in the Boston suburb of Quincy, who returns to his hometown, Manchester, on Boston’s north shore, when his brother Joe dies of the congestive heart failure with which he was diagnosed seven or eight years earlier. At the reading of the will, Lee is taken aback to find that, without consulting him, Joe has made him the guardian for Joe’s sixteen-year-old son Patrick (Lucas Hedges). (Joe’s alcoholic ex-wife, Elise, hasn’t been in her son’s life – since Patrick was a little boy.) Since Patrick is vehemently opposed to leaving school and friends to relocate to Boston, more than an hour away, the only alternative is for Lee to move back to the place he ran away from after an event that shattered his existence – and his marriage to Randi (Michelle Williams), who still lives in Manchester.

Torpor: Pablo Larraín’s Jackie

Natalie Portman in Jackie

In his new film, Jackie, Chilean director Pablo Larraín (Post Mortem, No) thinks he's getting behind the aristocratic facade of the former First Lady to reveal a tragic portrait of a woman trapped by an illusion. But all he does is create new illusions that fly like lead balloons. Larraín imposes lethargy on the material that's so thick the characters can't carry the weight of the myths he loads on their backs. The audience is also put in such a state of complete torpor (thanks to all the formal melancholy that is doggedly off-base and off-key) that the movie would be laughable if you could rouse yourself from the funk it puts you in. Working from a calamitous script by Noah Oppenheim, which was originally conceived for an HBO mini-series, Larraín sets a funereal mood complete with an onerous chamber score by Mica Levi that drowns the picture in lugubriousness before you can begin to ask yourself why you should be bowing your head in mourning. Jackie is so relentlessly languid and ill-conceived that it would be a camp favourite if it didn't take itself so seriously.

All Chaos on the Western Front: Battlefield 1

Battlefield 1, developed by DICE and published by Electronic Arts, was released in October 2016.

The Battlefield series of first-person shooters, developed by DICE and published by Electronic Arts, has almost always been defined by its commitment to realism – or, if not realism, at least verisimilitude. DICE is well-known for making games with impeccable sound design, visual effects, and environmental detail, even if the quality of the gameplay – from the historical scenarios of the Battlefield series to a certain galaxy far, far away – can sometimes waver. Few developers pour as much effort into recreating a “true” wartime experience, which aims to wholly immerse you in the chaos, excitement, and horror of war. And few titles achieve this more completely than last year’s Battlefield 1.

Just Before Dawn: The Life & Songs of Emmylou Harris

Emmylou Harris performing at the concert staged in her honour in Washington, D.C. in January 2015. (Photo: Paul Morigi)

As last Friday's presidential inauguration approached, I was planning on writing here about Paul Anka’s rumoured appearance and his performance of the song “My Way” – selected because it’s Donald Trump’s favourite song. (Anka and Trump have been friends for many years.) It was reported that Anka was even going to change the lyrics to reflect the new President and I was curious about which ones he would change. The song starts with “And now the end is near and so I face the final curtain”; I was keen to hear Anka steer himself around that significant line. But the singer cancelled at the last minute, citing family business. Clearly, though, Anka's decision was less about scheduling than about reputation – and I don't blame him. In my opinion, it’s not exactly a good career move for any artist to associate himself with the new President, although Toby Keith would probably disagree with me. Nevertheless, I needed an antidote to Friday's disheartening ceremony and the messy days that lay ahead for the United States and the rest of the world. I found the cure in a recent release about one of country music’s most creative and original voices, Emmylou Harris. Originally a tribute concert featuring an all-star cast whose love and affection for Harris runs as deep as her musical roots, the album is called The Life & Songs of Emmylou Harris and it was released last fall by Rounder.

Checkmate: Mira Nair's Queen of Katwe

Madina Nalwanga in Queen of Katwe

Mira Nair's exultant Queen of Katwe, based on the true story of a 9-year-old slum girl, Phiona (Madina Nalwanga), from Kampala, Uganda, who escapes her life of poverty by becoming a national chess champion in her teens, is a plucky tale of triumph – a rare inspirational film that doesn't sacrifice its dramatic integrity for easy sentiment. By letting the daily barbarity of slum life commingle with the bulging vibrancy that grows from a struggle to escape it, Nair brings forth an exuberance that's surprisingly nuanced and adds both uplift and credence to the tale of a young woman who seeks to live beyond her circumstances. Queen of Katwe is a feel-good movie that doesn't spare you the hardships that come from also feeling despair and defeat. Collaborating with screenwriter William Wheeler (whose sharp instincts help prevent the story from ever dampening) and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (who, rather than imposing oppression on the characters, uses a strikingly colourful palette to boldly illuminate their strong need to survive it), Nair gets inside the tale of an unlikely girl who becomes a champion and depicts the various means by which she makes herself one. What Nair accomplishes with an intuitive flare is to show how chess becomes a mirror for Phiona into both herself and her environment so that she can learn to see beyond it.

The Best of All Possible Worlds: Candide at the NYC Opera

Linda Lavin in New York City Opera's new production of Candide. (Photo:Tina Fineberg)

There was much upset over the closing of New York City Opera in October 2013 when its last-ditch fundraising efforts failed. (Regrettably, it did not go out in a blaze of glory: its final production, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s contemporary opera Anna Nicole at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, was fairly ridiculous.) But the company returned from the dead last week with an exuberant and often uproarious revival of Candide at Fredrick P. Rose Hall, as part of the Jazz at Lincoln Center series. This is the third time Harold Prince has directed the Leonard Bernstein musical, with its Hugh Wheeler book (adapted, of course, from Voltaire’s classic satire) and its lyrics by a variety of distinguished writers: Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim, John La Touche and Bernstein himself. I caught Prince’s first attempt, in 1975, when Eugene and Franne Lee gutted the orchestra of the Broadway Theater to permit a free-roaming playing arena. It got great reviews but I thought the reconstructed space was more interesting than anything that was going on in it. The show was manically overstaged and terminally boisterous, and a production I saw in Stratford, Ontario a couple of years later emulated Prince’s error. Candide had bombed on Broadway in an extravagant (but more conventional) version in 1956, and after two bad experiences with it, I assumed it was unplayable – until Lonny Price staged a concert version that was televised on PBS in 2004. His Candide was scaled way down but visually inventive, and the light touch seemed to free the actors (Kristin Chenoweth and Patti LuPone were in the cast), who performed as if they were guesting on Saturday Night Live.