Echoes of a Vanishing World: Last Landscape at Buddies in Bad Times

The cast of Last Landscape. (Photo by Fran Chudnoff.)

A droning litany of environmental crises emanates from a laptop in a cramped, cardboard-walled apartment. Outside, a dog’s incessant barking punctuates the claustrophobic atmosphere. This unsettling opening of Last Landscape at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre thrusts us into a world teetering on the brink of ecological collapse, as envisioned by Toronto-based theatre artist Adam Paolozza, the show’s creator and director.

Short Cuts

Flow. (Courtesy of Janus Films.)

Flow: This gorgeous-looking animated film from Latvia, written by Gints Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza and directed by Zilbalodis, is one of the few treasures of a disappointing holiday season. Set in a jungle in the wake of a tsunami, it seems to take place at the end of the world – there are no human beings in it, and the animals who populate it travel on a deserted sailboat. Its subject is the surprising harmony of living creatures who need to look to each other to survive. Flow has an obvious underlying melancholy, but it’s sweet and playful. The protagonist is a cat, a natural loner who is befriended by a secretary bird, a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur and a Labrador. The most striking relationship is between the cat and the secretary bird, whose attempt to reach out with an offering of freshly caught fish is met with hostility from his pack, who ostracize him and step on his wings so he can’t fly away with them. On the boat with the others, the cat reciprocates; he also figures out how to navigate the bird’s regal pride. This coming together of two solitary creatures in a strange, almost mystical friendship is the most touching element of the film but far from the only one.

Argonaut of Modernity: Impersonating Pessoa

“You are what you contemplate, so choose wisely.”

--Machado de Assis

Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.

This new entry into the modernist archive by CultureLab member Bartholomew Ryan, Critical Lives: Fernando Pessoa, sheds fresh and welcome light on one of the most mysterious and elusive figures in the annals of contemporary literary culture. He was, in fact, not only a prototypical modernist, but also a stylistic harbinger of the amorphous postmodern ethos long before it even existed. The French writer Jules Michelet once declaimed, “Each epoch dreams the era to follow it.” Pessoa seems to have been the brilliant dreamer who imagined the relativistic and quantum-drenched psychological environment in which we currently dwell. Assis certainly knew whereof he spoke, for both he and his younger countryman Pessoa may have bravely contemplated the very shaky future we all live in now as a wobbly present.

Narcissism Disguised As Altruism

I have a confession: for eighteen months, I’ve been addicted to Sixteen Tons Entertainment’s Emergency(2023, a.k.a. Emergency [Free to Play]), the latest entry in a real-time strategy (RTS) series (1998–) created by Ralph Stock. I’ve gone cold turkey twice, and every time the game has haunted my daydreams and nightmares till I downloaded it again. Now I just accept that I’ll have to spend half an hour each day on this thing.

Coming of Age as an Apologue – and the Reverse

Elliott Heffernan and Saiorse Ronan in Steve McQueen's Blitz. (Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Apple TV+.)

Steve McQueen’s film Blitz, set in September 1940, in the early days of Hitler’s incessant bombing of London, is an obvious labor of love. It takes place over just a couple of days, during which Rita (Saiorse Ronan), an armaments factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), on a train bound for the countryside with other children but he jumps out and tries to make his way back to Stepney, the working-class neighborhood where he lives with Rita and her father (Paul Weller); he never knew his father, who is African and was deported unjustly after a street fight. Production designer Adam Stockhausen’s recreations of the period are gorgeous, as is the cinematography by Yorick Le Soux, the favorite collaborator of the French director Olivier Assayas. The editing by Peter Sciberras is masterful: it actualizes McQueen’s remarkable sense of rhythm, which was showcased in his Small Axe series and especially in Lovers Rock. The film is propelled forward, moving back and forth between Rita and her wayward boy with remarkable fluidity and from one London location to another so that the continuity is simultaneously whole-cloth and fragmented. It contains a number of beautifully constructed setpieces that rank with the finest work that has been done with this period in film. And along the way McQueen takes care to pay homage to some of its predecessors: Hope and Glory, Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, Atonement. (There’s also a subplot out of Oliver Twist and a speech in an underground shelter by a left-wing character, played by Leigh Gill, who seems to have been inspired by Agate in Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty.)

Genius is Pain: A Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown. (Photo: Macall Polay. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.)

Long conflicted on its subject, I was reluctant to see A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s biopic of the young Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet), which traces his development from a barbed-wire folksinger to the sleek provocateur who caused a near-riot at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by assailing a crowd of purists with noisy, abstract blues rock. (“Dylan goes electric” is the legendary summa, as well as the title of the Elijah Wald book on which Mangold and Jay Cocks based their screenplay.) But people I value kept saying the movie was better than they’d expected, and it turns out they were right. More than that, though. Still reeling a bit from The Philosophy of Modern Song, I've had difficulty wanting to listen to Dylan these past two years. This movie snapped me out of that, precisely by taking me past the artist and into the art, the limits of one into the free skies of the other.

Off the Shelf: Life Is What Happens to You While You’re Busy Making Other Plans: House

The cast of House. From left: Omar Epps, Olivia Wilde, Robert Sean Leonard, Hugh Laurie, Lisa Edelstein, Jesse Spencer, Jennifer Morrison, Peter Jacobson. (Photo: Joe Viles/NBC.)

I despise prestige television. Art relies on limitations, and narrative is an architecture. Thirteen hours of a single story deprives you of both, and “fleshing out” each character’s backstory is just exploring so many blind alleys. No, give me episodic television anytime.

Time Transfixed: The Momentary Music of Hemisphere

“My desire was not to compose, but to project sounds into time, free from any compositional rhetoric. Music which specifically defined pitch but allowed the temporal dimension to remain indeterminate, thus creating a sonic world where each instrument is living out its own individual life in its own individual sound world.”

Morton Feldman

To become transfixed is to be rendered motionless with wonder, to be immobilized by astonishment. To some extent it touches upon the condition which in more classical eras was associated with what was known as the sublime, a state akin to awe. The sublime is still with us, of course, but it is often sublimated since the course of modernism conducted its now well-known radical discontinuity. This was especially the case in the domain of music, which is a durational art, one occurring strictly as momentary sonic situations, relying historically on the laws of harmony in order to soothe the savage breast. The aleatory and organic flow of what became known as “new music,” however, tended to naturally embrace dissonance in a manner which celebrates time transfixed. If we try to imagine the notion of time transfixed we can also determine how frozen time might amount to space itself: to hear and see them as one in the same quantum thing, or, in Zen terms, no-thing.

New on Broadway: Eureka Day, Death Becomes Her and Swept Away

From left: Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Bill Irwin, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, and Jessica Hecht in Eureka Day. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Eureka Day premiered in a production by Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company half a dozen years ago, and it’s finally arrived on Broadway via off-Broadway (in 2019) and London (in 2022). Written by Jonathan Spector and directed by Anna D. Shapiro, it’s a sensationally funny satire of contemporary woke communities – about the impossibility of reaching consensus among progressive people who are trying painfully hard to maintain, or at least convey, sensitivity to each other’s viewpoints when reality seems to have deliquesced into a bog of ferociously held competing opinions. The characters we meet are five members of the board of a private Berkeley elementary school called Eureka Day School who find they have to meet a crisis: a mumps epidemic that divides the parents, some of whom believe in traditional medical practices and some of whom resolutely do not. The school’s middle-aged director is Don, who has a gentle manner and almost bottomless patience but whose demeanor, as Bill Irwin plays him, suggests that his desperation to keep an even keel and indicate respect toward all the other voices in the room has been eating away at him. (He’s like one of Christopher Durang’s befuddled heroes, but without the repressed anger that flares up suddenly every now and then.) Eli (Thomas Middleditch) is a tech billionaire and young father whose generosity has funded the struggling school’s various initiatives, like an all-gender washroom. Eli’s son and the daughter of another board member, Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz), are good friends, and their play dates enable the adults to engage in extramarital games of their own; though Eli claims that he and his wife have an open relationship, it turns out that either he’s misrepresented the situation to Meiko or else he and his wife don’t necessarily agree on the rules. The latest addition to the group is Carina (Amber Gray), a Black woman whose perspective, according to the longest-running member, Suzanne (Jessica Hecht), is particularly welcome. Suzanne articulates that view euphemistically, but it comes across as presumptuous and condescending – especially since Carina, like the others, comes from a comfortable middle-class background. But Suzanne is a genius at spurious apologies that sound perfectly sincere, so the colleagues who find her putting words in their mouths tend to trip over themselves when they call her out on it, or come across as more brusque than they’d intended.

There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth: An Impossibly Small Object (2017)

Director and cast member David Verbeek in An Impossibly Small Object.

An Impossibly Small Object (2017), Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek’s second feature set in Taiwan and third feature set in the Far-Eastern Sinosphere, is two stories thinly interconnected: a grade school friendship between a girl and a boy just as it’s ending, and a Dutch photographer (Verbeek) torn between homesickness and wanderlust. The first tale is an atmospheric work of magical realism reminiscent of the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, albeit with more dynamic camerawork; the second tale is little more than subtitled mumblecore. But an enigmatic third act, though brief, manages to transmute unanswered questions into mysterious ambiguities.

Three Musicals: Once Upon a Mattress, She Loves Me and A Wonderful World

Sutton Foster as Princess Winnifred in Once Upon a Mattress. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Once Upon a Mattress, the Looney Tunes alteration of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” with book by Jay Thompson, Marshall Barer and Dean Fuller, music by Mary Rodgers and lyrics by Barer, opened on Broadway in 1959 and has been playing high schools and children’s theatres ever since. This musical is so familiar to stage kids and their loyal parents that it’s easy to forget how jovial and funny it is, and how tuneful and witty the score is. So it was a boon to New York theatregoers that Encores! opted to stage it early in the year with Sutton Foster as Princess Winnifred – a production, adapted by Amy Sherman-Palladino and staged by Lear de Bessonet, that wound up in the current Broadway season, with most of the Encores! cast, for a limited but enthusiastically received run. (There was a revival in the late nineties starring Sarah Jessica Parker.)

The Big Carnival: Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951)

Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. (All movie stills courtesy of Paramount Studios.)

“The biology of the shadow has yet to be fully explored.”

Andrei Biely, 1913

“We are a nation of hecklers. The most hard boiled, undisciplined people in the world.”

Billy Wilder, 1950

I think it’s fair to say, at least from my perspective, that someone has finally come along and fully studied the biology of the shadow. After their divorce as filmmaking partners, both Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder went on to make solo efforts that pushed film noir even further towards an unexpected edge. Brackett produced Niagara with Marilyn Monroe in 1953, and Wilder created Ace in the Hole (a.k.a. The Big Carnival) with Kirk Douglas in 1951. By a strange coincidence, unless it was synchronicity, just after writing the section of the tumultuous story having to do with their final noir masterpiece as collaborators, Sunset Boulevard, I happened upon a TCM broadcast of Wilder’s first independent effort after their break-up. I had seen Ace in the Hole several times previously; however, it had seldom resonated in quite the same way as it did while I was watching it from a retrospective point of view. So I sat back with a glass of wine and my notebook, prepared to venture once again into Billy’s post-Brackett domain. My instinctive initial response was even more severe than my first viewings had been.

Edges of Ailey: A Personal Reflection on Legacy and Movement

Alvin Ailey, circa 1960. (Photo: John Lindquist/Whitney Museum of American Art)

In mid-November, unaware of the poignant irony that would soon unfold, I found myself wandering through the vibrant halls of the Whitney Museum of American Art, eyes scanning the Edges of Ailey exhibition for glimpses of Judith Jamison. The legendary dancer, who led the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as artistic director after its founder’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1989, had been my original dance idol and a beacon of inspiration throughout my life. As a teenager with dreams of dance, I had her majestic image from Ailey’s Cry pinned to my fridge, praying daily to channel even a fraction of her grace and power. Now, I searched for her influence, her indelible mark on the company, hoping to reconnect with that youthful adoration.

Toil and Trouble: Wicked, Part I

Bowen Yang, Ariana Grande, and Bronwyn James in Wicked, Part I.

Unbelievably, I have seen the stage musical Wicked three times. I saw the pre-Broadway tryout in San Francisco, with Idina Menzel, Kristen Chenoweth, a young Norbert Leo Butz, and Robert Morse (replaced by Joel Grey on Broadway). At more than three hours, it was bloated and unfocused, but I liked two of composer Stephen Schwartz’s songs, “Popular,” which does everything a musical comedy song should do, and the pretty and affecting “I’m Not That Girl.” And Chenoweth was hilarious. (I didn’t much care for Menzel; of course she won the Tony.) I saw it again several years later on tour in SF, when I took a friend’s daughter to see it for her birthday. Dramaturgically (we’ll get into more about dramaturgy later), it was fascinating to see how they had tightened the show up and how solid its construction now was. It still didn’t make it a great show, but there are any number of far worse musicals out there that have become hits, The Outsiders among the latest. The third time a friend, the talented Jason Graae, played the Wizard, charmingly.

Still Nuts About The Nutcracker: Celebrating a Holiday Tradition at the National Ballet of Canada

Heather Ogden and Christopher Gerty in The Nutcracker. (Photo: Karolina Kuras. Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada)

As the curtain rose on the 29th anniversary of James Kudelka’s Nutcracker at the Four Seasons Centre, you couldn’t help but feel a frisson of excitement. This wasn’t just another night at the ballet; it was a celebration of a production that has become as much a part of the holiday season as last-minute shopping and the towering Christmas tree illuminating Nathan Phillips Square.

A Lesser Lear, and a Greater

Kenneth Branagh in King Lear. (Photo: Johan Persson)

You can see the problem with the imported two-hour-without-intermission King Lear, co-directed by Kenneth Branagh, Rob Ashford and Lucy Skilbeck, in the opening scene. Lear (played by Branagh) sweeps onto the stage of The Shed and dives into the love contest among his three daughters. Goneril (Deborah Alli) recites her stock speech declaring her bottomless love for her father, but when the invisible baton is passed to Regan (Saffron Coomber), her outpouring of affection has been cut so drastically that all she seems to be saying is “Ditto.” So when Cordelia (Jessica Revell) refuses to “heave [her] heart into [her] mouth” and Lear’s response is to divide her intended portion of his land between her elder sisters, you wonder why he’s more put out than he was by Regan’s spare offering. In fact, the king seems angrier at Kent (played, bafflingly, as a woman, by Eleanor de Rohan) than anyone else. The scene has no weight; it feels like a plot set-up.

Silent Heartbreak at the National Ballet Of Canada

Harrison James and Svetlana Lunkina with Artists of the Ballet in Giselle. (Photo:Aleksandar Antonijevic)

Giselle is more than just a ballet; it explores themes of love, betrayal, and redemption that have enchanted audiences for nearly two centuries. Originally choreographed by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot in 1841, this latest production of Sir Peter Wright’s acclaimed interpretation by the National Ballet of Canada, performed at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on November 20, brought this classic tale to life with remarkable artistry.

Liquid Moonlight: The National Ballet of Canada’s 2024 Winter Season

Christopher Gerty and Hannah Galway in Silent Screen. (Photo: Bruce Zinger)

Last Saturday night, the National Ballet of Canada launched its winter season at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre with a triple bill featuring works new to the company. Running until November 16, the two-hour program included Sol León and Paul Lightfoot’s evocative Silent Screen, Frederick Ashton’s sparkling Rhapsody, and Guillaume Côté’s introspective Body of Work. Côté’s solo piece expressed his personal connection to dance as he prepares for retirement at the end of the 2024/25 season.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Five for One and One for All

Nathan Darrow in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson wrote two of the most enchanting children’s adventure novels, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, as well as the ineffable A Child’s Garden of Verses, a collection of sixty-four poems for the young. But his most celebrated literary work is most emphatically not for kids. His 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which a scientist obsessed with the human capacity for holding both good and evil within one personality devises a potion to isolate the two impulses and ends up turning himself into a monster – evil unchecked by restraint – shares with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, written half a decade later, the distinction of being the quintessential portrait of the repressed Victorian Age. Jekyll and Hyde is, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a work of conceptual genius framed as a great horror story. And like Frankenstein it’s continued to excite the cultural imagination without interruption since its publication. It’s been filmed repeatedly, notably on three occasions: as a silent picture with John Barrymore in 1920; by Rouben Mamoulian in 1931 with a famous Oscar-winning performance by Fredric March; and in 1941 under Victor Fleming’s direction with Spencer Tracy in his most surprising – and possibly his finest – performance. (The Fleming version is the real gem; it’s one of the best literary adaptations in Hollywood history.) Stevenson’s narrative has generated countless replicas and parodies, the most delightful of which is surely Motor Mania (1950), the Disney cartoon in which Goofy plays the placid pedestrian Mr. Walker and his demonic alter ego Mr. Wheeler, whom Walker morphs into as soon as he gets behind the wheel. At this juncture, sad to say, probably most people know the Stevenson story through the wretched Frank Wildhorn-Leslie Bricusse-Steve Cuden musical.

Cries in the Night: Children of Film Noir – Nocturnarama, A Noir Childhood

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‎BearManor Media (June 2023).

“Nailing down a coffin lid is far easier than nailing down a universally agreed upon definition of the term film noir.”  – Robert Strom

Every so often a book comes along that somehow manages to evoke our childhood and our love of films at the same time. Robert Strom’s Cries in the Night: Children in Film Noir is just such a book.

I grew up in a place I used to call Shadowland, a quiet suburb of Toronto known officially as Don Mills (the first formally designed suburb in North America) where there wasn’t much to do but listen to music and watch movies. Luckily I was also a kid in the 1960’s, a time when the best of both of those pursuits was available to us in abundance. When I was about ten years old my life was changed forever by a secret practice I used to engage in when the rest of my relatively normal suburban family was fast asleep at night. Back in those days, after midnight the public broadcasting system in Canada used to transmit overnight classic movies across the airwaves and into our homes, and I would quietly go out into our dark living room, turn on the television and start watching old films long into the wee wee hours. That was my initial and probably too young exposure to dark movies I would never have been allowed to watch in theatres or during the daylight.