Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Talking Out of Turn: Reviews (Part Two)

Lost in Translation (Part One): E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime



Ask anyone who loves to read books and they'll tell you that there is nothing worse than seeing a good book badly mangled on the screen. I'm not talking about the literary fetishists, either – the ones who want to see every little detail of the book translated faithfully. (Those folks are already predisposed to disparage movies as a lesser art. They're prepared to hate the adaptation because films, especially if they come from Hollywood, are already guaranteed to desecrate the source material.) Nevertheless, there are books that have indeed been ruined, if not rendered unrecognizable by filmmakers – those who appear either incapable of understanding the text, or are willfully misreading it.

E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel Ragtime could well be a victim of both a misunderstanding and a willful misreading. Ragtime is a richly textured parable of American lore in which the author performs masterful tricks with the history we thought we knew. Some historical figures are disguised, others are merely alluded to, while a few others are used by name – popping up in the narrative in the most colourful way. In Ragtime, Doctorow captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the twentieth century and World War One. But rather than write a realistic account of the period, he creates a sumptuous pastiche, a flip-book chronicle that is, in many ways, already a movie. "[It was] an extravaganza about the cardboard cutouts in our minds – figures from the movies, newsreels, the popular press, dreams and history, all tossed together," wrote Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. "Doctorow played virtuoso games with this mixture – games that depended on the reader's having roughly the same store of imagery in his head that the author did." In calling the novel an "elegant gagster's book," Kael underlined how Doctorow cleverly portrayed American history as a confidence game that tested our ability to separate fact from fiction. As Voltaire once remarked, "History is a game we play with the dead."

author E.L. Doctorow

The novel opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, with escape artist Harry Houdini swerving his car into a telephone post outside the home of a white affluent family. As the story advances, seemingly random events pop up. J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford meet to exchange thoughts on the subject of reincarnation. Architect Stanford White is assassinated while his mistress, Evelyn Nesbit, becomes political ammunition for anarchist Emma Goldman. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, bickering over the role of the unconscious, turn up on the Lower East Side, with Freud desperate to find a public toilet. After visiting Niagara Falls, the fifty-three-year-old father of modern psychoanalysis has "had enough of America," and sails back to Germany. "He believed the trip had ruined both his stomach and his bladder," Doctorow wrote. All through Ragtime, Doctorow mixes historical icons like J.D. Rockefeller and Booker T. Washington with fictional creations like Younger Brother and black ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. (based on the hero of Heinrich von Kleist's 1810 literary classic, Michael Kohlhaas), who becomes the victim of a racist practical joke.

The key figure in the novel is an immigrant Jewish merchant referred to as Tateh (Yiddish for "Father"), who lives in a tenement on Hester Street with his young daughter. Tateh cuts out paper portraits of people he meets in the street, an act that develops into flip-page movie books. Eventually, he creates a new identity for himself as the Baron, a film producer. His silhouettes – metaphors for the ongoing assimilation of the immigrant emigré – become Doctorow's key American emblem. The other, of course, is the ragtime music that gives the novel its title. As a musical form, ragtime appeared in the mid-1890s, piano music defined by Irving Berlin as "virtually any Negro dialect song with medium to lively tempo, or a syncopated rhythm." In other words, it was a musical hybrid, a symbol of the American melting pot. Ragtime music may have had an African-American rhythmic style, but it also drew on the European emphasis on written-out compositions.

By the end of the novel, the Baron sheds his disguise to reveal himself as "a Jewish socialist from Latvia" and proposes marriage to the woman from New Rochelle whose telephone pole had been clobbered by Houdini. They head to Hollywood to produce the Our Gang comedies, which featured an ethnically mixed cast of characters. Drawing the ragtime era to a close just as the First World War emerges, Doctorow declares that "history was no more than a tune on a player piano." What he understood was that America remained a culture in flux, a land where the American identity was never static. Literary critic Leslie Fiedler once wrote that being an American "is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one." So Doctorow imagined a country that resembled a lively card game running long into the night, where wild stories were traded, jokes shared and anecdotes laid down with the assurance of a flush hand. His pen dipped in the well of the tall tale, Doctorow took what he knew of historical fact and imagined the outcome.

Director Milos Forman with James Cagney

If Doctorow's shrewdly mischievous sense of fun informed Ragtime, the story couldn't have been more ill-suited to emigré film director Milos Forman. In his Czech films, especially Loves of a Blonde (1967) and The Fireman's Ball (1971), Forman had developed a politically charged neorealistic comic style, but it had huge shortcomings. Whether he wanted audiences to identify with or laugh at the follies of ordinary people, the tone often came across as churlish. It wasn't that Forman hated his characters exactly, but he didn't trust the transformative magic of movie art to make human absurdity engaging. This may be one reason why Forman's films are not only visually drab, but his characters always seem to be pinioned in front of the camera. When Forman came to the United States, his movies developed another problem – they appeared to be largely out of touch with the culture. With the exception of his strong adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), in which he wisely eliminated some of the excesses of Kesey's parable, Forman's other American films are hollow and shrill. His adaptation of the musical Hair (1979), despite its energy, missed much of the childlike spontaneity of hippie rebellion captured in the stage version. Like many other Eastern European artists who lived under the repression of Communism, what Forman truly lacked was an appreciation for the vulgar juices that propel American popular culture – exactly what Doctorow celebrates in Ragtime.

Milos Forman wasn't the first choice to direct the film. After Ragtime was published, three things looked certain: Dino De Laurentiis would produce the movie, E.L. Doctorow would write the script, and Robert Altman would direct it. In the end, only De Laurentiis would survive the trio. Altman already had a string of films, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves Like Us (1974) and Nashville (1975) demonstrating quite convincingly why he was ideal for the project. He had an amazing aptitude for mixing genres, he worked brilliantly with large casts and he had an unparalleled intuitive grasp of the layered textures of American popular culture. Not surprisingly, he was excited about the possibilities of directing Ragtime. Maybe a little too excited; he started doing his own version of Ragtime while still directing Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), mixing and matching historical and fictional figures. But somehow Altman wasn't able to bring the Buffalo Bill myth to life and the film came across as cluttered. It bombed both critically and commercially. This turned out to be unfortunate. De Laurentiis, who had money invested in Buffalo Bill, also owned the rights to Ragtime. When Buffalo Bill tanked, he took Ragtime out of Altman's hands and gave it to Milos Forman. Since Doctorow was wedded to the Altman deal, he was pushed out and Forman chose a new script from Michael Weller, the screenwriter who worked with him on Hair.

Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians

It's hard to say just what Forman and Weller thought they were aiming for in their version of Ragtime, since the movie misses the mark in just about every conceivable way. The film doesn't even begin to approximate the themes in Doctorow's novel. Many of the historical figures – Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Booker T. Washington and Stanford White – are either tangential to the story, relegated to a newsreel, or given graceless cameos. Emma Goldman, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Emiliano Zapata don't even appear in the film. Despite the elegant casting of James Cagney (emerging from a twenty-year retirement to play Police Commissioner Waldo), Pat O'Brien as a lawyer and Donald O'Connor as – what else? – a choreographer, Forman doesn't develop their scenes; his only apparent purpose in casting the characters is simply to have them appear on screen. Ragtime is essentially reduced to one story: Coalhouse Walker Jr's.

Instead of creating a panoramic entertainment, where American history could be understood as much through our consciousness of it as it is from our grasping of facts, Forman interpreted Ragtime, with its emotionally scarred black piano player, as a solemn and literal civil rights story. In doing so, what Forman missed out on conveying was Doctorow's more spirited and wildly playful American jamboree.

-- November 14/12

Lost in Translation (Part Two): Bernard Malamud's The Natural


If Ragtime was a case of the wrong man hired for the wrong job, however, The Natural (1984) was an example of smart and talented people dropping the ball. Bernard Malamud's first novel was a canny parable written with true American gusto in which the author digs into the spirit of one of Ted Williams' famous declarations. Looking back on his storied career with the Boston Red Sox, the baseball great once remarked, "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.'" Malamud asks the question: If you were the greatest ball player who ever lived, blessed with extraordinary athletic gifts, could you just as easily piss it all away?

Malamud's 1952 novel The Natural is a vivaciously entertaining story of a thirty-four-year-old rookie named Roy Hobbs who gets a second shot at becoming a baseball star – and then blows it. Fifteen years earlier, as a can't-miss-prospect, Hobbs is almost killed by Harriett Bird, a disturbed baseball groupie who seduces and shoots him. Years later, and recovered from his injuries, Hobbs gets a new contract and arrives at the dugout of New York Knights' manager Pop Fisher to join the team. Given Hobbs' age, Pop is initially reluctant to bring him on board. His corrupt partner, Judge Goodwill Banner, has also been dumping lousy players on him all year with the purpose of decimating the team; he figures if the team finishes last, Pop will give up and sell him his share of the franchise. Hobbs changes all that by leading the Knights to a league pennant. But he's also an unbridled hedonist. When he gets involved with Pop's niece, Memo, he's distracted from his quest to be the best, just as he was earlier by Harriett, once again betraying his natural gifts. He may be a natural, Malamud reminds us, but he's still human.

As Doctorow did in Ragtime, Malamud adroitly weaves fact and fiction. For instance, as a player, Pop Fisher once committed a blunder ("Fisher's Flop") that cost his team the World Series, a faux pas loosely based on the story of the New York Giants' first baseman Fred Merkle, whose error cost his team the pennant in 1908. Malamud's sports writer, Max Mercy, is obviously based on Ring Lardner, and Walter 'Whammer' Wambold, a lumbering slugger Hobbs strikes out as a brash nineteen-year-old in the book's opening moments, is most certainly Babe Ruth. Judge Goodwill Banner has shades of former Chicago White Sox owner Charles A. Comiskey, who treated his players so badly they went into cahoots with gangsters and threw the 1919 World Series in the famous 'Black Sox' scandal. These rich associations make Malamud's novel a perfect fit for the movies, and as it happened the plot was already based on one: Elmer the Great (1933), an adaptation of a play by Ring Lardner and George M.Cohan and the second in a baseball trilogy starring Joe E. Brown as a loudmouthed rookie who attempts to break in with the Chicago Cubs.

Barry Levinson, Roger Towne and Robert Redford

The Natural, like Ragtime, was promising dramatic material. What was also promising was that Barry Levinson was brought in to direct it. Levinson had been a career screenwriter who had only recently turned to directing films. His debut behind the camera was Diner (1982), a beautifully written and directed autobiographical comedy about a group of friends in Baltimore at the end of the Fifties. The picture was remarkably perceptive, a truly fresh and honest view of sexual relations between men and women on the cusp of the sexual revolution. Diner launched the careers of a number of talented actors like Ellen Barkin, Mickey Rourke and Kevin Bacon, and featured the lone great performance by Steve Guttenberg. So with Levinson in charge, a script written by Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry, and shot by the justly acclaimed cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion, The Right Stuff), the movie seemed ripe with possibilities. But instead of being a hip, funny yarn, The Natural became an overripe and gauzy piece of nostalgic whimsy. The film totally changed the meaning of the book by becoming a hollow piece of hero worship.

Their horrible reworking of the story, in which Roy Hobbs fulfills his destiny rather than flubbing it, had everything to do with the casting of Robert Redford as Hobbs. By the 1980s, Redford, as an actor, had grown lazy being a huge movie star and his performance here was indistinguishable from a politician running for high office. Rather than portray Hobbs as a man who could not resist temptation, he plays him as a hero triumphing over adversity. Hobbs may be mythic in the novel, yet we never forget that he's possessed with human frailty. But Redford's Hobbs is a Golden Boy who is beyond temptation; an innocent country lad whom city folks try to corrupt. Once again a hopeful and spirited work of fiction became a tired formula. Redford's saintly performance has the adverse effect of turning Malamud's pointed prose into processed movie corn. As a result, The Natural becomes canned Americana.

-- November 15/12


                                                                         2013


Singer of Songs: Malik Bendjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man


Sixto Rodriguez in Searching for Sugar Man
In his 2002 documentary, Stone Reader, director Mark Moskowitz, a dedicated life-long reader of novels his entire life, goes on a quest to find Dow Mossman, the author of a 1972 novel, The Stones of Summer. The work had come to possess him in his adult years. (After trying to read it as a young man, Moskowitz gave up after a few pages. Coming back to it years later, he couldn't put it down.) In searching for Mossman, who had disappeared from the literary landscape during the Seventies with no follow-up novel, Moskowitz used the same intuitive impulses that first lead him as a boy to become such a voracious reader. With the zeal of a modern day Huck Finn, Moskowitz took off on his own American sojourn to find Dow Mossman (while simultaneously deducing the clues to his disappearance in the manner of Sherlock Holmes). Stone Reader is about how a writer's voice can come to inhabit us and the lingering pleasure of the film is in how it reinforces our own private communion with literature.

Though Stone Reader is certainly a one-of-a-kind story, it may well have found its perfect soul-mate in Searching for Sugar Man (which is coming out on DVD this month). This Swedish/British co-production, directed by Malik Bendjelloul, is also about a quest for an artist who has become lost in time. But unlike Mossman, who never caught the larger reading public's imagination, Sixto Rodriguez, an American pop artist unacknowledged in his homeland, became a near legendary figure miles away in South Africa where he turned out to be as big as Elvis. The rousing aspect of the picture comes in seeing just how Rodriguez's music unwittingly becomes part of the spirit of a people fighting for social and political justice against apartheid. What's curious, however, is that Rodriguez's work isn't the most obvious form of political agit-prop to be embraced by a cause. Instead he writes delicately poetic and engagingly impressionistic songs of social realism; tunes which stoke the imagination rather than tear down walls. Searching for Sugar Man follows the efforts of two Cape Town fans, Stephen 'Sugar' Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, who try to find him in the post-apartheid years.


Rodriguez, a Mexican-American singer-songwriter discovered in a Detroit bar in the late Sixties, doesn't possess the dynamic voice of a rabble-rouser. He sings in a light tenor that resembles a less affected José Feliciano with a literary frame of mind. His first album, Cold Fact, released in 1970, features figurative songs like “Sugar Man” (about drugs) and “Crucify Your Mind,” which for some suggest the strong influence of Dylan. But Cold Fact actually has more in common with the social protest heard a year later in fellow Detroit artist Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. (Like Gaye, Rodriguez also has a song on his record called “Inner City Blues.”) But where Gaye's landmark R&B album would have a seismic impact on both his career and on popular culture, Rodriguez's release took him down the road to obscurity. Although Rodriguez followed up with a strong sophomore effort, Coming From Reality, in 1971, with equally good material (including the song “Cause” which sounds like early Townes Van Zandt on a sunny day), he was quickly dropped from his record label and disappeared into the world of manual labour to raise his family. (His two lovely daughters are interviewed throughout the picture and they articulate with great affection their father's humble demeanour, as well as speaking with pride about how he continued to create a value for art in their lives.)

Searching for Sugar Man reveals how a mythical life can become part of urban legend, too, in the same manner as Elvis. Over the years, many have spotted the supposedly dead Elvis pumping gas, or eating burgers in some highway diner, while Segerman and Strydom thought Rodriguez had committed suicide on stage during a concert in the Seventies. (The ghost of Johnny Ace might have been impressed.) Their glee at finding him alive is only matched when they are able to convince him to journey to South Africa to perform a concert and meet his adoring fans. Instead of a recipe for failure, where this then 50-year-old artist attempts to meet an audience he never had a chance to attract at home, the show (with local musicians who memorized his bootlegged records) is a roaring success. What is maybe most surprising is just how at ease he is with the sudden acclaim. There is a Zen-like acceptance of his fate as if he believed that all things come in their time. That same Zen acquiescence seems to have influenced Bendjelloul as well. He directs Searching for Sugar Man simply, letting the beauty of the story tell itself, while never getting in the way. Bendjelloul doesn't appear awed by what he uncovers either, which benefits the film because it allows us to discover Rodriguez and his music for ourselves. (His albums, plus the movie soundtrack, are now all available on CD.)

When Lou Reed and Frank Zappa once separately traveled to the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution of Vaclav Havel, they were both overwhelmed to discover that fans in that country went to jail for owning their records. Listening to the testimonials of individuals who were beaten and tortured for listening to their music provided for them a sobering perspective on their global influence. (These two controversial performers had faced only censorship in their homeland.) Searching for Sugar Man is a whole other version of the American artist perceived from abroad. While Reed and Zappa had clearly defined personalities, Rodriguez's persona was one invented by the South Africans who came to embrace him. The more you watch Searching for Sugar Man, the less it seems like a documentary. It's more of a fairy-tale mystery – an inspirational saga without a whisper of sentimentality.

-- January 1/13

Pulped Fiction: William Friedkin's Killer Joe


Matthew McConaughey as Killer Joe

There's no written rule on what makes the best film noir. But you could say that its enduring appeal isn't simply in watching the downward spiral of desperate characters. Its attraction also lies in sharing the horror of that trip down the road to perdition. For all of Fred McMurray's tough-guy assertions in Double Indemnity (1944), for instance, we develop some empathy for him when we see that he's essentially the sap that Barbara Stanwyck takes him for. In The Grifters (1990), when Anjelica Huston chooses the money over the life of her own son, we understand in our bones her primal need to make that choice (while getting the cold shakes from knowing the death rattle chill she will forever carry within her). The darkness in film noir always works best when we can first see the light that's being snuffed out. If we can't perceive something of ourselves in its doomed characters then the genre simply becomes an empty exercise in nastiness.

William Friedkin's Killer Joe (which recently came out on DVD) is a perfect example of that kind of emptiness. This particularly vicious noir, an adaptation of Tracy Letts's celebrated 1991 play, and elegantly shot by Caleb Deschanel (The Right Stuff, The Black Stallion), takes a particular glee in rubbing our nose in nastiness. (There are quite a few pretty good noirs that have a similar nasty and sadistic tinge, like Mike Figgis's 1990 Internal Affairs, but Killer Joe has no interest in psychological nuance and dramatic colour like Figgis's work which cleverly employs the theme of jealousy in Othello.) To compensate for the emotional distance Friedkin creates here, the director provides a hip and ironic comic tone that diffuses the power of the violence in the drama. Friedkin (who made his career with brutally basic entertainments like The French Connection and The Exorcist) adopts a clever pose instead, one that makes us feel superior to the people on the screen. In doing so, he invites us to enjoy the sadism when it gets predictably turned on them. Speaking as bluntly as the action itself: he makes them too dumb to live.

Killer Joe is your archetypal noir. Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) is a young drug dealer who lives in a trailer park in a small Texas town with his virginal younger sister Dottie (Juno Temple). When he finds himself in a considerable amount of debt to the local loan shark, he figures his only way out is to murder his mother to collect her $50,000 of insurance money. (His mother's boyfriend tells Chris, in a rather inexplicit plot point, that his sister would be the sole beneficiary of the cash.) Figuring Dottie would be generous enough to split the cash, Chris involves his father, Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), his mother's ex-husband, into his criminal conspiracy. Ansel agrees to come on board as long as his current wife, Sharla (Gina Gershon), gets a cut of the cash. To accomplish the deed, Chris hires Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a police detective who is a contract killer in his spare time. When Chris ultimately can't fully meet Joe's fee, Joe proposes that Chris offer up Dottie as a 'retainer' until the insurance cash comes through. As in most noirs, nothing goes as planned and retribution becomes the story's point.

In Killer Joe, though, Friedkin (who had already adapted Letts's 1996 play Bug) focuses on punishing the characters rather than bringing out anything in the way of motivation for their behaviour. For instance, Chris is in so much debt that in such a small community it's a wonder anyone would let him get that deep into their pockets. Given his penchant for losing, too, it makes even less sense that Ansel would confidently go along with the plan. There's a bit of business of family incest as well that is never fully explored and Dottie's character is no more than a retread of Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll. What Friedkin provides instead of compelling drama is a portrait of trailer park life no more incisive than an episode of The Jerry Springer Show. According to Killer Joe, you'd think these people deserve their fate because they represent what Friedkin and Letts see as the kind of American lowlife who buys tabloids and watch junk on television. They already judge these folks for their bad taste. (The first shot of Gina Gershon, who is made deliberately unattractive here, is her opening a trailer door with her naked crotch facing the camera. Is that what constitutes nuance for Friedkin?)

Emile Hirsch and Matthew McConaughey

But if the principal characters are left redundantly unappealing, Joe Cooper is the picture's ace in the hole. While everyone else is encouraged to act up a storm, Matthew McConaughey settles in and anchors a riveting performance that is perfumed in quiet menace. Although his character makes about as much sense as anything else in the film (who knows why he's a contract killer, or even how he accomplishes this task without alerting his superiors?), McConaughey plays what amounts to a vibe with about as much gravity as an actor can bring. But maybe it's the character's lack of dimension that provides a certain strategy for the star. Early in his career, when McConaughey tried to be both a serious actor and a movie star, in movies as diverse as Lone Star (1996) and A Time to Kill (1996), he couldn't provide the emotional weight to carry them off. He came across as Paul Newman with the soul of a surfer dude. But in his later career, he's taken to concentrating his characteristic lightness into something that disguises a restless darkness lurking beneath. It's as if he's found a way to use his limited range as a foil to overshadow the unacknowledged depths of a character we would normally find superficial. As Joe Cooper, McConaughey peeks beneath the genial demeanor we've come to recognize in him and he now shows us the explosive energy it was holding back. (It's a shame this performance isn't in a better movie. One of his most dynamic moments comes at the expense of sexually humiliating Gina Gershon in an ugly scene staged so poorly that it upstages a thinking actor's work – it also earned the picture an NC-17 rating in the United States.)

Perhaps what trips up Friedkin most in Killer Joe, besides his basic brutalism, is that he has no feeling for the pulpy material he's adapting. When Raymond Chandler once talked about writing detective novels, he spoke about choosing a particular vernacular that didn't pander to his audience, but instead would be in a language he knew his readers would understand. Friedkin, on the other hand, seems to feel that he's so much better and smarter than the material in Killer Joe that the film's language is deliberately mocking. So he doles out the brutality, but he can't risk identifying with the people on the screen acting it out. By condescending to the material in Killer Joe, Friedkin not only reveals the heart of a snob, he doesn't do full justice to the pulp in the fiction.

-- January 20/13

The Hindsight of Time: Ben Affleck’s Argo



There are a number of good reasons why many of the post-9/11 movies (In the Valley of Elah, World Trade Center, Reign Over Me) have failed to come to terms with the aftermath of that tragic moment and the subsequent wars that followed. Besides depicting those events through conventional melodrama employed only to stir audience empathy, these films actually leave little to the imagination.While trying to make sense of a time that is still being played out, each movie leaves scant room for reflection. This might be why Zero Dark Thirty, a movie about the mission to kill bin Laden, fails to resonate with the power the subject warrants. Despite all the heated debate about the picture’s point of view on torture, for example, director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) actually backs away from the dramatic core of that subject.

While I think it’s clear that she isn't endorsing waterboarding as a means of getting information, she also isn’t delving into why it would be a considered means of interrogation for tracking down the mastermind of 9/11. Her picture simply depicts the steps of that quest, the full facts not withstanding, but she leaves out the dramatic ambiguities that would give the story a quickening pulse. The performances in the movie are also so attenuated, so inert, that the actors can't take us into the larger, more disturbing questions which means they never get engaged (despite the media hoopla). Zero Dark Thirty fails, for instance, to even bring to light how national policy has changed significantly from the era of the Cold War (where two superpowers with the ability to incinerate the planet tried to avoid that catastrophe) to the post-9/11 period (where the enemy isn’t concerned with what happens in this world, but rather the possibility of salvation promised in the next one). These uneasy examinations of interrogation, international security and the subject of terrorism (which has a whole different cast when seen in the context of religious fundamentalism instead of the secular kind offered by Communism) are not being explored in these 9/11 movies because the thinking in them hasn't moved past the tropes of the Cold War years. They may be contemporary films about post 9/11 but they end up feeling stuck in the past.

During the Vietnam era, American directors couldn't depict the war in Southeast Asia, so they sought instead to capture the country’s mood indirectly through period pieces (Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather), horror films (Night of the Living Dead) and earlier wars (M*A*S*H*). Those pictures (and many others, good and bad), didn’t make declarative statements about their time; they were deeply felt impressions of a tumultuous period in political and cultural history. All these years later, many of them still have the power to resonate (whereas Zero Dark Thirty, with its lack of urgency, seems to be already disappearing from public memory). However, when considering Ben Affleck’s equally controversial, yet highly entertaining, Argo, you can see more interesting dramatic ideas at work. Looking back at the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, Affleck gives his story (despite its various inaccuracies) something of an arc that takes us to the present. And even if Argo is consciously designed as a commercial crowd-pleaser there is still a deeper story under the thrills. Argo also says something about the decade that followed the period that this movie covers. Perhaps proving that not all commercial projects created for a mass audience get corrupted by corporate culture, Argo displays the presence of an artistic sensibility that lurks under its clear desire to entertain.

John Goodman, Alan Arkin and Ben Affleck

Based on an article by Joshuah Bearman (“How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran”) in the April 24, 2007 issue of Wired, Argo is a nimble dramatization of how CIA operative Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) led the rescue of six U.S. diplomats from Iran during the revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini and his medieval brand of Islamic fundamentalism to power. More than 50 of the embassy staff were taken as hostages, but six escaped and hid in the home of the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor, here played by Victor Garber. After exhausting a number of possible plans for extracting the hostages, Mendez creates a cover story inspired by a television viewing of Battle for the Planet of the Apes with his son. He tells his supervisor Jack O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston) to get him in touch with Hollywood makeup specialist John Chambers (John Goodman) who has often prepared disguises for other CIA operatives. Through him, they contact film producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), who sets up a fake studio that publicizes a plan to make a science fantasy film in the style of Star Wars called 'Argo.' The idea is to enter Iran and provide the six escapees with false Canadian passports and identities depicting them as the film crew for this fantasy picture which is scouting Iran for the possibilities of shooting it there. The tension in the story derives from the contrast of the revolutionary government’s attempts to find the missing embassy workers (by having children putting together the shredded paper containing their identities) and Mendez inspiring trust in the group that his plan will work.

Some of what truly happened during the hostage crisis has been jettisoned here, especially the role of Ken Taylor (who did way more than just open and close doors). And this particular thorny point has taken up most of the debate about the film (as well as ideologically flavoured accusations of racism towards the film's depiction of the Iranians). But rather than damn Argo because of the typical American ignorance about Canada, or its inability to provide a more nuanced understanding of the Iranian people, it might be more worthwhile drawing as much attention to just how well crafted the picture is. As a director, Ben Affleck has already shown a keen and intelligent eye for popular storytelling. His first picture, Gone Baby Gone (2007), was not only a crackerjack procedural but it was also a terrific chamber ensemble for a number of the performers. (He even miraculously elicited the first wide-awake performance from his brother Casey Affleck.) His follow-up picture, The Town (2010), had an inferior, less-believable script, but the direction was swift and the actors – especially Jeremy Renner who brought a bit of James Cagney’s balletic intensity to his role – made the movie worth seeing.

Argo might be his strongest, most confident picture yet because it has more going on than just a desire to whip up enthusiasm (despite the invented climax of a last minute airport escape which is too derivative of other action pictures). Affleck’s Mendez isn't a typical hero, despite his success rate as a CIA operative, because he performs his duties with a self-effacing precision. Despite his height and handsomeness, Affleck always looks as if he’s in the process of finding his own feet (much like the equally bearded Warren Beatty did as the frontier town dreamer in Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller) which makes him a more appealing saviour because he doesn’t act out of self-righteousness. (When he returns from his mission, he’s told that President Carter called him a great American. “A great American what?” he asks. “He didn’t say.”) But this underplaying of heroism is germane to the general theme of the film.

Affleck directs Argo

Argo takes place towards the end of the Seventies, a decade when American heroism was tainted by the assassinations of the Sixties, plus the dirty tricks of the Nixon years and Watergate; and on the cusp of the Eighties, when Ronald Reagan became President, and his regime helped usher in a decade of fantasy superheroes that brought back jingoism as a popular adventure model. In Argo, Affleck shows us that the fictional fantasy film, which Mendez uses to spirit the hostages away, had only just made a comeback through the popularity of Star Wars in 1977. During the conclusion of Argo, however, when the camera pans over a young boy’s bedroom filled with Star Wars toys and other comic characters, we get a clue about the decade ahead. ‘Argo’ would ironically become the predominant model in American commercial action cinema. We would even have a former B-movie actor as President of the United States.

Argo begins with a comic strip history lesson showing how the American overthrow of a democratic regime in Iran led to the tyranny of the Shah which ultimately sewed the seeds for the religious zealotry to follow. The point here however is not to reduce history to comic-book simplicity, but to show us how these shorthand visual depictions create powerful visceral responses that movies tend to enhance. Affleck is trying (in an age when formula dominates American movies) to execute a meaningful use of formula and showing us how you can use it to breathe life into a complex story (while sometimes having to leave out the complexity). Although fundamentally Zero Dark Thirty is a more ‘serious’ work than Argo, it’s Affleck’s film that lingers as the more affecting movie. He dares with the hindsight of time to inventively toy with popular formula styles; those styles that today get reduced to largely impersonal forms of entertainment. Zero Dark Thirty, on the other hand, deliberately avoids the temptation of boiling the blood with commercial cunning. Bigelow resists moving with emotional complexity into the dirty areas of the so-called War on Terror. But Argo finds its life by confidently using contemporary popular forms in order to provide a reflecting mirror of the past. The film not only doesn't get mired there: it stares straight ahead into the present. And like the best of Seventies commercial cinema, Argo shows no signs of ever dying on the screen.

-- February 17/13

American Composer: Frank Zappa's Understanding America



“It's all one album,” Frank Zappa once told journalist Jerry Hopkins in characterizing his work during an interview for Rolling Stone magazine in 1968. With only three releases to his credit, and long before he'd come to accumulate close to 100 records of satirical rock, orchestral, ballet, electronic and jazz scores, Zappa already fully grasped the “conceptual continuity” of his project/object. “I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order,” he said. “It still would make one piece of music you could listen to.” In 1993, a couple of years before he would die from prostate cancer, Zappa followed through on that suggestion. He took a razor blade to his back catalogue with the purpose of creating a caustic, but passionate musical portrait of the nation that produced him. Understanding America is a two-CD musical anthology unceremoniously put out last fall by Zappa Records through the distribution of Universal (who recently re-released, with huge sonic improvements, his large body of work). But given the little fanfare provided its arrival, you might as well call it The Mystery Disc. The CD comes with a stark 1975 black-and-white photo of the composer on the front cover, a didactic title, no track listing on the back cover, no accounting of the various musicians who play on it, no background notes on the songs (including which year they were recorded and what albums they first appeared on), and scant explanation concerning the context of the new album except for cryptic pronouncements that it's a record about “love, peace, justice and the American way.” (Its very design prompted a friend of mine who saw it to ask: “Is this a bootleg?”)

If the proposed audience for Understanding America is the Zappa fan, it might make sense to avoid redundancies by leaving out information that's already been absorbed into the DNA of the initiated. But what will the uninitiated make of this release? Some fans have already panned the album on websites and chat rooms complaining that it uses the old reverb-drenched digital mixes instead of the new cleaner and dryer ones (but what other mixes would he use since Zappa sequenced this release while he was still alive?). They're also arguing about the inclusions of some songs and the omissions of others (as if this were yet another 'greatest hits' package). How about the new listeners to Zappa's music? Since it's unlikely to get reviewed by contemporary pop critics, Understanding America not only doesn't stand a chance of being understood, it likely won't be realized either. And that would be a huge loss. Drawing from a vast and varied selection of Zappa's compositions, Understanding America is a musical jig-saw puzzle piecing together a political heritage embroidered with assassinations, deep racial divisions, religious zealotry, cultural elitism, and witch hunts. (The album traces chronologically – with a couple of detours – the dramatic changes in the political and social landscape from the era of Lyndon Johnson to the end of the first Bush presidency.) It also provides a unified field theory of Zappa's disparate selection of songs. Understanding America gives listeners a perceptively potent framework; one in which to examine the conflicting characteristics of American life, as well as providing a completely new contextual ground in which to experience Frank Zappa's music. One of the great ironies of Understanding America, however, is that the work included on it ended up embraced more by dissidents behind the original Iron Curtain (who even did prison time for embracing it) than by Americans deprived of his music by radio stations who censored it. Understanding America sets out to test the strengths of American democracy, too, by holding the country to the promises held in its founding documents by primarily shedding light on its failings. And because of Zappa's openness to such diverse musical genres, he draws from a huge storehouse of self-expression to do so.


By actually combining serious contemporary music with rock, jazz, and social and political satire, Frank Zappa became one of North America's most ambitious artists. No musical ghetto could contain or define him, and no sacred cow or social group was beyond his reach. Zappa created a unique and sophisticated form of musical comedy by integrating into the canon of 20th-Century music the scabrous wit of comedian Lenny Bruce and added to it the irreverent clowning of Spike Jones. His body of work, both solo and with his band, The Mothers of Invention, presented musical history through the kaleidoscopic lens of social satire, and then he turned it into farce. Zappa poked fun at middle-class conformity (Freak Out!), the Sixties counter-culture (We're Only in it for the Money), disco (Sheik Yerbouti), the rock industry (Tinsel Town Rebellion), and the Reagan era (You Are What You Is). He was just as content writing inspired orchestral compositions – performed by the London Symphony and the Ensemble Modern – as he was writing seemingly dumb little ditties like “Dinah-Moe Humm” or “Valley Girl.” He could just as readily quote contemporary classical giants like Igor Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse and Anton Webern; or blues greats like Johnny 'Guitar' Watson and 'Guitar' Slim; not to mention, doo-wop groups like The Channels and Jackie & The Starlites. Yet it was these paradoxical elements that the North American mass audience rarely had the chance to engage. The name Frank Zappa instead conjured up the image of a deranged, cynical, and obscene satirist rather than a composer with an impious, yet utopian, ambition to close the divide between high and low culture. People preferred, usually out of ignorance (and often contempt), to portray Zappa as a fetishist with a predilection for adolescent humour (“Don't Eat the Yellow Snow”), and one who possessed a leering smugness (“Broken Hearts are for Assholes”), rather than deal with the specific points of what these individual songs were actually about.

“One of the things that always impressed me about Zappa, besides just the delight with his rhythmic invention, was that he didn't allow anything to be beyond him – high culture, low culture,” said Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons. Whether it was in his most scatological songs like "Bobby Brown Goes Down," his political attacks on Christian fundamentalism ("Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk"), or even his testimony before Congress fighting the censorship apparatus known as the Parents' Music Resource Center (PMRC) in the Eighties, Zappa clearly identified the inherent contradictions in American democracy. (The censorship arm of the PMRC wasn't launched by Moral Majority Republicans, who would support it, but by liberal Democrats.) The songs on Understanding America provide an intricate map of those incongruities. But where popular political artists like Woody Guthrie, Billy Bragg, U2, or Rage Against the Machine, tend to make their art explicitly partisan, Zappa's political music transcended the rallying nature of the topical song. He already understood how popular music, borne out of commercial and marketing demands, could always be co-opted by corporate interests who could sell listeners anything deemed fashionable. "Unlike Sting and U2, who ask us to admire their actions on our behalf, Zappa sets up a series of questions about meaning and its social control that encourage our speculation," wrote Ben Watson in his book, Frank Zappa's Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. Which is why Zappa doesn't identify with the "correct" view in many of his songs; instead, he provides a setting that causes listeners to raise queries about what they are consuming. His music, according to Watson, is "an anathema to liberalism, which thinks that only commitment to certain pre-selected 'ideas' separates the the saved from the damned."

Zappa often picked subjects and people that unnerved listeners who wanted to strongly identify with the artist. “Frank persisted in discussing all those subjects that made people squirm – politics, sex, religion, whatever,” remarked Jill Christiansen, who was the catalogue development for Rykodisc (where Zappa's huge collection was made available on CD in the Eighties and Nineties). “He demanded that you think.” Understanding America makes similar demands on us to think because it isn't just a collection of favourite tunes that take you on a nostalgic tour down memory lane. The album provokes your involvement with its theme because even if you try to “squirm” away from the words, the music leaves you no room to escape. “Something happens...when satiric or erotic texts are sung to powerful music,” wrote poet Ed Sanders, the founder of The Fugs, on Zappa's satirical strategy. “[It] raises their ability both to thrill and excite as well as to prick censorious ears.” It's in those goals that Understanding America succeeds most.


Understanding America opens with “Hungry Freaks, Daddy,” the very first song on Zappa's debut album, Freak Out! (1966). It's a prophetic anthem that sets the tone for both the record and the composer's utopian goals. “Hungry Freaks, Daddy” begins with the inverse of the guitar chords that began The Rolling Stones' great hit “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” and then launches into a full-frontal assault on America's stagnant culture (“Philosophy that turns away/From those who aren't afraid to say what's on their minds/The left-behinds of the Great Society”). The Great Society (a term invented by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to describe his ideal America) is already deemed false by 1966, so Zappa sees no reason to feel forsaken. But there is a significant difference in the perspective of both songs. “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,” released a year earlier in 1965, speaks basically to a state of alienation in the listener. Mick Jagger is expressing frustration at being betrayed by the promises of consumer culture. Zappa is talking directly to the disenfranchised listener, not an alienated one. Jagger may feel cheated because conforming to corporate ideals doesn't make him terribly happy, but the singer in “Hungry Freaks, Daddy” isn't betrayed by the false blandishments offered by the culture. He's already rejected them.

If the false promises of The Great Society are expressed in the opening track, we are introduced to the President himself in the next tune, "Plastic People," originally the first song on Absolutely Free (1967). As a drum roll kicks in, Zappa introduces Lyndon Johnson, just as singer Ray Collins, in the voice of LBJ, addresses the crowd: "Mah fella Americans..." We then hear the intrusive opening notes of Richard Berry's "Louie Louie." Zappa had incorporated "Louie Louie" (a staple for every bar band) as a stock idiom in just about every album he recorded, but it wasn't out of malice to Berry. On the contrary, it was included as a snide indictment of how this lovely Fifties R&B song (with its musical roots in Chuck Berry's lilting Latin melody of "Havana Moon") got turned into a ridiculous frat-house hit in 1963 by an Oregon group called The Kingsmen. (By mangling the words of Berry's song, The Kingsmen famously raised the possibilities of perverse sexual fantasies in the lyrics which drew the attention of the FBI and the FCC who conducted an obscenity investigation.) In doing his own variation of the Kingsmen version of the "Louie Louie," Zappa shows us that even the President of the United States isn't safe from this pervasive song – and neither is the rest of the nation. But "Plastic People" mostly addresses the conformity that Zappa saw creeping into the very counter-culture that he celebrated in "Hungry Freaks, Daddy." He also sees conformity infecting love affairs where truly romantic encounters start to fall victim to trendsetting. (Understanding America continually shifts from song to song, and even within each track, between the political and the personal, revealing that the dynamics of sexual and social politics are often one in the same.) Throughout the tune, Zappa doesn't mince words about how dangerous succumbing to authoritarian ideas can be. In retrospect, "Plastic People" even has a chilling prescience. Just consider these lyrics written only a few years before American Nazis fought to win their Constitutional right to march through the streets of Skokie, Illinois:

Take a day and walk around
Watch the Nazis run your town
Then go home and check yourself
You think we're singing about someone else
.

"Plastic People" would take on a larger significance when countries in the Eastern bloc, living under authoritarian Communism, adopted it as their anthem. When Zappa was touring heavily in Europe after the song was recorded, a few fans from Czechoslovakia came across the Austrian border to hear his concerts in Vienna. They told Zappa after the show that the song was responsible for inspiring a whole movement of dissidents growing within their country. One of those rebels was Milan Hlavsa, a Czech rock star, who was the co-founder of an underground band called The Plastic People of the Universe. They supported various other democratic radicals in their music, including playwright Vaclav Havel, during the Seventies and Eighties.


In the next song, "Mom & Dad" (from We're Only in it for the Money), Zappa shifts his attention from the rebellion of adolescents to the complacency of the parents. In this case, it's about a middle-class couple sitting at home drinking who come to learn that their daughter has been shot dead by the police while protesting in the park. Zappa reveals a naked ambivalence towards simply taking sides in this mournful ballad. Yet he still manages to level with every stratum of the culture as he documents the cultural wars of the Sixties. The drinking parents, hiding behind their appearances, end up intrinsically linked to their drug-addled kids ("Ever tell your kids you're glad that they can think/Every say you love them/Ever let 'em watch you drink"). As if to anticipate the obvious question faced when the guns of the authorities get turned on their own citizens, he follows "Mom & Dad" with "It Can't Happen Here" (from Freak Out!). "It Can't Happen Here" is an absurdist a cappella number reminiscent of a barbershop quartet. But there is nothing harmonious in the sound, or in the content of the song. "It Can't Happen Here," not coincidentally, is also the title of the 1935 anti-fascist novel by Sinclair Lewis. In the track, though, the tinge of romantic paranoia ends up inseparable from the absurdity of its social observations. "Who are the Brain Police?" (also from Freak Out!) then introduces with full portentousness why it can happen here: the acceptance of an authoritarian mindset ("What would you do if we let you go home?/And the plastic's all melted and so is the chrome"). As the bass throbs and creaking jail doors seem to surround singer Ray Collins, the idea of plastic also includes the record vinyl, addressing the fetishizing of the product itself in the age of LPs ("What will you do when the label comes off?"). Zappa satirizes the manner in which listeners identify with the music on the album in their quest to form an identity.

"Who Needs the Peace Corps?" (from We're Only in it for the Money) is one of the funniest, yet stinging analysis of the hippie movement and the drug culture that immobilized them ("I'll love everyone/I'll love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street"). Since the hippie culture was born in San Francisco, the melody also carries the hopeful spirit of Tony Bennett's "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." However, Zappa dispenses with any romantic attachments and more boldly links the passivity of hippie altruism to its ultimate collusion with the authoritarian powers of government. "The single most important [lesson of the Sixties] is that LSD was a scam promoted by the CIA and the people in Haight-Ashbury, who were idols of people across the world as examples of revolution and outrage and progress, when they were mere dupes of the CIA," Zappa told biographer Neil Slaven reminding him of the government mind-altering experiments dosing people with LSD in sleep rooms beginning in the early Fifties. The government itself becomes the subject of the mini-opera "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" (from Absolutely Free) which is also about what Zappa called "people who run the governments, the people who make the laws that keep you from living the kind of life you know you should lead." "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" is a seven-and-a-half minute opus paced at the speed of a Loony Tunes cartoon, and is filled with enough musical quotes and references to inspire a dozen oratorios (the quotes range wildly from The Beach Boys' "Little Deuce Coupe" to Charles Ives). While "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" is a scathing indictment of how authoritarian attitudes are formed, it is also a jab at the sexual revolution of the late Sixties.

Kent State on May 4, 1970 (photo by John Paul Filo)

Zappa continues his assault on the government in "Concentration Moon" (from We're Only in it for the Money) which attacks the police for its blatant brutality against the hippies ("American Way/How did it start/Thousands of creeps/Killed in the park"). Where "Concentration Moon" significantly anticipated, three years before it happened, the tragic shooting and killing of four students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, the next song, "Trouble Every Day" (from Freak Out!), was a response to the August 1965 race riot in the inner city of Watts – a revolt of such magnitude that it gained worldwide attention. The casual arrest of a black motorist in Los Angeles was the spark that set off this powder keg of frustration. The Watts uprising, brought on by neglect, black unemployment, discrimination, poverty, plus brutality by the L.A. police, raged on for six days. During that week, 10,000 angry people turned Watts into an inferno. As viewers watched on television, rioters burned cars and buildings and looted stores while the riot police were pelted with stones, attacked with knives, and shot at. The National Guard was finally called in, and by the time order was restored, thirty-four people were dead, hundreds were injured, and over 4,000 arrested. Although "Trouble Every Day" shares much of the outrage and purpose of the protests songs of the time, it is also a blistering blues track that spares neither side:

Well, I seen the fires burnin'
And the local people turnin'
On the merchants and the shops
Who used to sell their brooms and mops
And every other household item
Watched a mob just turn and bite 'em
And they say it served 'em right
Because a few of them are white,
And it's the same across the nation
Black and white discrimination
Yellin' "You can't understand me!
"

"Trouble Every Day" is filled with many unresolved contradictions – the kind that deprive the listener of the satisfaction of pumping a fist in the air out of solidarity. Heard today, it's just as relevant to understanding the Rodney King riots of the Nineties as it was to capturing Watts in 1965. (It's amazing that no rap artist has ever covered this tune because the lyrics, which are set in the blues, have the propulsive vocal rhythms of a great rap song.) The following number, "You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here" (from Freak Out!) blows raspberries (in the form of kazoos) in the direction of the uncritical pop audiences at concerts. But what it actually does more successfully is set up the next song, "We're Turning Again" (from Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention), a riposte aimed at the counter-culture of the Sixties. It's here that Understanding America takes its first chronological detour from the music of that turbulent decade by introducing a song recorded in the Eighties. "We're Turning Again," as music critic Chris Federico correctly implied in his work Zappology, is a play on Pete Seeger/The Byrds' "Turn, Turn, Turn," a staple of Sixties idealism. The significance of "We're Turning Again," besides satirizing the failure of the Sixties idealism, is to also remind us that it was Ronald Reagan who was committed to wiping out Sixties reform (even back during that period when he was governor of California). Zappa unleashes an unsparing attack, however, on the pseudo-innocence of the hippie counter-culture, with its naive belief in the goodness of putting flowers in the National Guardsmen's guns:

They're walkin' 'round
With stupid flowers in their hair
They tried to stuff 'em up the guns
Of all the cops and other servants of the law
Who tried to push 'em around
And later mowed 'em down
.

This portion of "We're Turning Again" refers specifically to Allison Krause, one of the victims of the Kent State shootings, who the day before her death, put a flower in the barrel of a Guardsman's rifle, saying, "Flowers are better than bullets." The earlier inclusion on Understanding America of "Mom & Dad" (which clearly anticipated Kent State) is echoed in "We're Turning Again" which more explicitly spells out how Kent State contributed to the death of the Sixties counter-culture. Zappa may be at his most sarcastic here, especially towards the decade's tragic icons – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon and Mama Cass Elliot – but he's also aware that, compared to the music heard on radio stations in the Eighties, something of true value had also been lost:

Everybody come back
No one can do it like you used to
If you listen to the radio
And what they play today
You can tell right away
All those assholes really need you
.

Zappa saw that, by the Eighties, radio formatting had changed the medium dramatically from a musical outlet into an advertising vehicle.


After "We're Turning Again," which puts the Sixties soundly to bed, the next couple of songs ("Road Ladies" and "What Kind of Girl Do You Think We Are?") usher in the post-Sixties hangover when Zappa turned to examine areas of self-gratification in the Seventies. When he first broke up the original Mothers of Invention, Zappa put together a new, vaudevillian band (featuring Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, the former lead singers in The Turtles) whose satirical strategies centred more on the sexual exploits of rock stars and groupies. As well as recognizing the dramatic changes in the rock & roll culture, with its evolving folklore, he was also taking a page out of Lenny Bruce. Aside from his social criticism, Bruce had also radicalised stage comedy by bringing into his onstage routines the sleazy backstage world of stand-up (highlighted in his amazing "Palladium" number). This strategy gave his work a discomfiting vitality because it confronted audiences with routines that raised questions in them about what is funny and what isn't. Zappa would also do likewise as he chronicled the moribund state of rock culture in the Seventies, including the sexual desperation and megalomaniacal qualities of both stars and promoters. Critic Ben Watson accurately captured this new Zappa ensemble as "designed to expose backstage events at precisely the time when rock was turning into a patronizing spectacle of cosmic proportions." If the Sixties gave us performers who had (despite the drugs) imagined a better country in their music, the new rock in the Seventies gave us "sweaty, horny pop stars whose main interest was in getting laid." The criticism in the rock press towards songs like "Dinah Moe-Humm" (also included on Understanding America), where the goal of the singer is to bet a woman he meets on the road that he can make her cum, came from an exalted view of what rock should be. This is why they dismissed the song as juvenile. But what Zappa was doing was uncovering the reality of rock's low road as a way of exposing some of the hypocrisies in taking the high road.

Frank Zappa performing "I'm the Slime" on Saturday Night Live.

The second disc of Understanding America opens with "I'm the Slime" (from Over-nite Sensation). The song's subject – television – was seen by many as too easy a target to criticize. But Zappa provides a compelling ambiguity here by identifying with the very object he's attacking. He portrays himself as the slime (even on the front cover of Over-nite Sensation, his scowling face is seen dripping from a TV tube). Singing in a menacing and reverberating whisper, Zappa plays havoc with the listener by assuming a devil-doll role not unlike Joel Gray's MC in Cabaret.

I'm vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
.

Zappa follows that 1973 song with "Be in My Video" (from 1984's Them or Us album) where the pernicious slime has now distorted our intimate relationship with music in this hilarious swipe at MTV culture and rock videos. Cleverly, Zappa performs the song as a Fifties doo-wop number which reminds the listener of rock's hopeful beginnings in that decade before those ideals became corrupted. He fires barbs at the videos of Peter Gabriel ("I will rent a cage for you/With mi-j-i-nits dressed in white") and David Bowie ("Let'd dance the blues/Under the megawatt moonlight"), even though both artists actually worked imaginatively within the form. But his chief purpose behind "Be in My Video" was to expose the worst excesses of rock video narratives:

You can show your legs
While you're getting in the car
Then I will look repulsive
While I mangle my guitar
.

On Understanding America's next track, "I Don't Even Care" (from Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention), Zappa reaches back again to the Fifties to resurrect one of his R&B heroes, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, to sing this propulsive number about a growing political and economic impoverishment.

Listen! Standin' in the bread line
Everybody learnin' lyin'
Ain't nobody doin' fine
Let me tell you why
I don't even care
.

The song carries such an angry bite that it's obvious the singer indeed does care, which makes the track more faithful to the punk aesthetic of refusal than most punk songs celebrated for doing so. "Can't Afford No Shoes" (from One Size Fits All) further examines the Seventies economic recession while showing how the Seventies generation at root was simply looking to survive ("Can't afford no shoes/Maybe there's a bundle of rags that I could use/Hey anybody, can you spare a dime/If you're really hurtin', a nickel would be fine"). Out of the spiritual and economic depression, though, Zappa takes us into the Eighties with "Heavenly Bank Account" and "Dumb All Over" (from You Are What You Is). In these tracks, Zappa unveils the rise of the born again Christians. There had always been a strain of messianic preoccupation in the Sixties counter-culture (expressed in films like Easy Rider). During that time, Jesus became a symbolic hippie doomed to crucifixion by the power structure, as he was in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Songs like "Put Your Hand in the Hand" by Ocean, "Day by Day" from Godspell, "Signs" by the Five Man Electrical Band, and "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum further drew the link that led many disillusioned social activists instead to a life of religious deification. But Zappa recognizes also that this hippie romanticism had shifted in the Eighties: the hippie Christ had now been swallowed whole by the yuppie Christ. Those born again were now finding salvation in the mighty dollar. To exploit that desire, the Moral Majority, which was founded in 1979 (and whose name was drawn from Richard Nixon's silently conservative constituents), dedicated themselves to aligning the Church with the State.With the help of Ronald Reagan in 1980, they quickly infiltrated the Republican Party and began dictating policies that bore the strong influence of fundamentalist Christianity:

Cause he helps put The Fear of God
In the Common Man
Snatchin' up money
Everywhere he can
Oh yeah
Oh yeah

He's got twenty million dollars
In his Heavenly Bank Account
.

"Dumb All Over,"a great rap number, goes further into showing how religion has done little to foster world harmony, but instead has created a litany of bloodshed:

You can't run a country
By a book of religion
Not by a heap
Or a lump or a smidgeon
Of foolish rules
Of ancient date
Designed to make
You all feel great
While you fold, spindle
And mutilate
Those unbelievers
From a neighbouring state
.

If Marx once described religion as the opiate of the people, Zappa says in "Cocaine Decisions" (from The Man From Utopia) that another white powder would become the drug of choice in the Eighties ("Cocaine decisions/You are a person with a snow job/You got a fancy gotta-go job/Where the cocaine decision that you make today/Will mean that millions somewhere else/Will do it your way").Cultural critic Camille Paglia, in Sex, Art and American Culture, also examined the role of cocaine in the new yuppie revolution. "In the Sixties, LSD gave vision, while marijuana gave community," she writes. "But coke, pricey and jealously hoarded, is the power drug, giving a rush of omnipotent self-assurance. Work done under its influence is manic, febrile, choppy, disconnected." In "Cocaine Decisions," Zappa identifies the omnipotent culprit behind that incoherence expressed by those who would come to shape the nature of political and cultural power in the Eighties (and would eventually contribute to plummeting us into the global fiscal crisis in the 21st Century).


"Promiscuous" (from Broadway the Hard Way) is Frank Zappa's first explicit rap song (but unfortunately it isn't as potent as "Trouble Every Day" or "Dumb All Over"). The track tackles the AIDs epidemic as explained by Ronald Reagan's Surgeon-General Everett Koop. In "Promiscuous," Zappa questions Koop's prognosis of the deadly disease. "He speculated about a native who wanted to eat a green monkey, who skinned it, cut his finger, and some of the green monkey's blood got into his blood. The next thing you know, you have this blood-to-blood transmission of the disease," he told Playboy. "I mean, this is awfully fucking thin. It's right up there with Grimm's Fairy Tales." What Zappa fails to acknowledge, however, is that even though Koop was an evangelical Christian conservative, he went against the grain of right-wing supporters by endorsing the use of condoms and sex education to slow the spread of AIDs. He even disturbed Reagan constituents by providing information on AIDs to over 100 million Americans in 1988. Koop also encouraged sex education for children beginning in the third grade.

Zappa's explanation for the AIDs epidemic (which he explores in the next track from his 1984 musical Thing-Fish) ties the epidemic to government experiments in genetic mutation. Fully aware of the LSD experiments conducted by the U.S. government on civilians in the Fifties and Sixties, Zappa felt that the government hadn't abandoned their covert experiments. Furthermore, they may have hatched a mutation of bacteria that inadvertently caused a strain that affected individuals by attacking their immune system. Since the epidemic arrived just when fundamentalist Christianity had found their legitimacy in the Republican Party, AIDs could then be perceived and sold by the Moral Majority as being part of God's plan to punish the wicked. (On television, during that decade, religious leaders like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell continuously claimed that AIDs was divine retribution from God on its very victims: homosexuals, prostitutes and intravenous drug users.)


After the "Thing-Fish Intro," Zappa goes back in time on Understanding America to his 1979 rock opera Joe's Garage and introduces us to the authoritarian Central Scrutinizer who passes government laws. Joe's Garage is about how the government might wish to do away with music because it is a cause of unwanted mass behaviour. "Environmental laws were not passed to protect our air and water...they were passed to get votes," Zappa writes in the album's liner notes. "Seasonal anti-smut campaigns are not conducted to rid our communities of moral rot...they are conducted to give an aura of saintliness to the office-seekers who demand them." He goes on to say that if listeners find the plot of Joe's Garage to be a bit too preposterous, "just be glad you don't live in one of those cheerful little countries where, at this very moment, music is either severely restricted...or, as it is in Iran, totally illegal." But, by 1985, Zappa found that the United States had become one of those "cheerful" countries where music could indeed be "severely restricted" by an organization called the PMRC.

The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) was a committee that had the stated goal of increasing parental control over the access of children to music deemed to be violent, or sexual, by labeling albums with Parental Advisory stickers. The group was founded by four women: Tipper Gore (the wife of senator and later Vice-President Al Gore); Pam Howar (wife of Washington realtor Raymond Howar); Susan Baker (wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker); and Sally Nevius (wife of former Washington City Council Chairman John Nevius). The censorial activities of this group were originally inspired by a precociously gifted pop artist from Minneapolis named Prince, who caused a stir with a song from his Purple Rain soundtrack album called "Darling Nikki" (which had a reference to a young girl masturbating with a magazine). Tipper Gore, who bought the album for her eight-year-old daughter, was horrified when the lyric was brought to her attention. So she decided that something must be done through government legislation to protect children from what she found to be unacceptable music. "What we are talking about is a sick strain of rock music glorifying everything from forced sex to bondage to rape," she told Rolling Stone in 1985. The PMRC soon after put together a list of offending songs which included (along with "Darling Nikki"), Sheena Easton's "Sugar Walls," Judas Priest's "Eat Me Alive," AC/DC's "Let Me Put My Love Into You," and W.A.S.P.'s "Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)." The list also reached absurd levels of musical ignorance when tunes like Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" and Captain and Tennille's "Do That to Me One More Time" also made the cut.

The PMRC within a short time lobbied Congress for strict legislation on record labeling. But instead of having Prince, Bruce Springsteen, or Sheena Easton going on the warpath to Washington to defend their work, it was Frank Zappa, Dee Snider (of Twisted Sister) and folkie John Denver who took charge. (Zappa's songs didn't even appear on their list.) Out of the testimony he did before Congress in September 1985 came a piece called "Porn Wars" (from Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention). This extended piece of sophisticated sampling draws on taped excerpts from the hearings that are speeded up, looped, and layered over-top of one another. The electronic percussive sounds of a synclavier provide a musical bed for the vocal calamity. Zappa's tape experiments, which he first explored with a Dadaist splendour in the Sixties, came to anticipate the politically volatile work heard later in dub poetry, hip-hop and rap.

Frank Zappa testifying in Congress against the PMRC.

Using the voices of the various senators at the hearing, in a manner that makes their grandiose statements sound robotic and dehumanizing, Zappa brings out the chilling implications of their intent. But he also deftly parodies the monotony of the endless fascination with the questionable lyrics, repeating loops (for instance) of Senator Paula Hawkins' talking about "fire and chains and other objectionable tools of gratifications." "Porn Wars" deserves a place alongside the work of other contemporary composers such as Steve Reich, who early in his career had worked ingeniously with tape-looped voices and music in "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out to Show Them" (where he created abstract music out of the timbre of the spoken word). On Understanding America, Zappa extends the original piece (titled here as "Porn Wars Deluxe") by inserting even more sections from the hearings. He also strategically edits into the work various songs from his catalogue (including snippets from tracks we have already heard earlier on Understanding America like "It Can't Happen Here" and "Brown Shoes Don't Make It"). The effect creates a fascinating full circle that further gives new contextual meaning to the very work we had just been re-experiencing in its new setting. Fans will no doubt also notice that some tracks on Understanding America have been edited down, or cut before they conclude, so that each song segues perfectly into the next.

The album could have successfully concluded here, but Zappa decides to go out on "Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk" (from Broadway the Hard Way). In this song, he uses some of the same strategies once employed by Spike Jones (where Jones would use references to familiar songs to spring jokes). Zappa embroiders into this track iconic pieces of Americana like "The Old Rugged Cross," Stephen Foster's "Dixie," Franz von Suppe's "Light Cavalry Overture," the theme from The Twilight Zone, and (of course) "Louie Louie," to attack the piety of the Christian televangelists. Zappa even goes so far as to tie the Moral Majority's policies to what he sees as their Ku Klux Klan heritage by borrowing an unforgettable image from Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit":

If you ain't born again,
They wanna mess you up, screamin':
"No abortion, no-siree!"
"Life's too precious, can't you see!"
(What's that hangin' from a neighbor's tree?)
Why, it looks like 'colored folks' to me
.

"Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk" is the shadow version of Elvis Presley's "An American Trilogy" (where songwriter Mickey Newbury included "Dixie," "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "All My Trials"). Rather than nostalgically celebrate the country through a combined history of its songs, however, Zappa exposes the corruption he thinks those songs continue to hide.

I can't think of any other contemporary American composer who has reorganized his earlier work with the desire to tell a story about his country. Back in the late Seventies, in his 3-LP opus, Decade, Neil Young did something similar to Zappa. But on that album, Young drew for us a compelling picture of how he became the singer/songwriter we knew. On Understanding America, Zappa looks out into the nation itself rather inside himself to assess his own evolution as an artist. And though his judgments are as harsh as they are sometimes brutally funny, his views are anything but cynical about the electoral process. (At the end of "Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk," a live recording from the 1988 tour where he was registering people to vote, he encourages the audience to get out into the lobby at intermission and do so.) Greil Marcus, in his book, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music, once looked out at his country to examine its moral prerogatives through the music it created. "America is a trap: that its promises and dreams, all mixed up as love and politics and landscape, are too much to live up to and too much too escape," he wrote. Although the American political landscape is indeed deeply rooted in this Puritan heritage, Understanding America offers proof that America's best music, movies and paintings have always been brave attempts to refute it.

-- March 10/13

American Dreams & British Nightmares: Jim O'Brien's The Dressmaker (1988)



Thanks to The Beatles, Liverpool has become something of a tourist haven, apparently second only to the Tower of London for sightseers in England. Ironically, the city's history is hardly a cause for celebration. For while Liverpool spawned The Beatles, The Beatles ultimately wished to break free of this seaport locale. Even so, one could always hear the character of Liverpool in their songs, the sense that as things could always get worse, they would find ways to make things better. That goal is also a characteristic germane to the city, a quality Alistair Cooke once described as "cheerful pessimism." The cause of that "cheerful pessimism," though, came directly from Liverpool's disparate economic and cultural life which begins in the 18th Century, when the slave trade from Africa became mixed with the cotton market from North America. When abolition became law in 1807, slaves were not allowed to land in England, but since cotton was sent to manufacturing cities like Manchester and Birmingham by railroad, other immigrants made their way to the jobs.

By 1820, the dockyards and the Cotton Exchange attracted close to 160,000 Irish immigrants from across the channel to make the kind of money they couldn't make in Ireland. But the Irish would also become the despised in Liverpool and were the victims of both unrest and hopelessness. During the Depression years, with the merger of the Cunard and White Stripe shipping lines, the luxury liner traffic was being rerouted to Southhampton. This decision changed the industrial base of Liverpool diminishing their economic status. The only way that they could retain their former status was by becoming the anchor of the country's naval operations. But that change inadvertently created an adverse effect when relentless German air raids lead to massive destruction. By 1941, thousands were killed and the city was reduced to rubble. After the war, it took years to relocate over ten thousand persons.

Liverpool in the Forties

During that period, Liverpool became part of a metropolitan area called Merseyside with a population of about a million and a quarter. When the U.S. entered the war, Americans were stationed there – and they were a source of great fascination for Liverpudlians. Given the hardship they'd endured under German bombs, the brash and stylish manner of Yankee soldiers represented something quite hopeful and exotic for locals to look up to and admire. "The people living within these confines saw the seaport as a threshold on the horizon," Beatles biographer Bob Spitz wrote. "Beyond it, an invisible world beckoned. Not a day passed when detachments of tall-masted ships weren't diligently on the move, bound for one of the globe's imagined corners." But during the mid-Forties, through all the devastation, the rationing, and the nightly rain of bombs and casualties, England's dreaming hadn't really grown beyond surviving on the obliterated streets in which they lived. So when the Americans came calling then, they were the objects of derision as much as envy. They were also a reminder of everything that Liverpool didn't have, even if they represented what Liverpudlians might truly want.

No movie caught the ambiguous corners of that conflict, where longings can also breed repression, better than Jim O'Brien's The Dressmaker (1988). John McGrath's script, which is based on Beryl Bainbridge's 1973 novel The Secret Glass, is set in Liverpool in 1944 during the nightly blackouts and food rations. The story centers on two sisters, Nellie (Joan Plowright), the dressmaker of the title, and Margo (Billie Whitelaw), the younger sibling, who works on an assembly line in a munitions plant. While Nellie makes other people's dreams come true with her assembly of dresses, she has no future dreams of her own. Nellie is basically a seething spinster who's rigidly devoted to past decorum and respectability, that is, the manners that she feels have been disrupted by the war. But her good taste serves as character armour to mask murderous rage. Margo is her opposite, boisterous, up for a song, and a good time gal looking for the next party. Yet she's also vulnerable to the watchful eye of her sister. While in Nellie's care, her husband had died from mustard gas poisoning suffered in World War One. On account of that tragedy, the sisters have continued to carry a simmering contempt for each other. At least, it simmers until they do battle over their meek 17-year-old niece Rita (Jane Horrocks), who was left in their care by her father (Pete Postlethwaite), after Rita's mother died. When Rita falls in love with Wesley (Tim Ransom), a young American soldier from Mississippi stationed in Liverpool, it ignites the tension between the two siblings.

Billie Whitelaw, Jane Horrocks and Joan Plowright

Like the character of the city itself, Rita is waging an inner war between freeing her desires to express her sexuality like Margo, or becoming as prudish and as hard as Nellie. Rita is strongly attracted to Wesley, who represents an exotic American to her. He's a symbol of the very freedom she dreams for. But she is also terrified of his sexual advances towards her. Since Nellie is a self-righteous custodian of old values, she becomes an emotionally suffocating presence in the house. Film critic Hal Hinson, in The Washington Post, described perfectly the priggish Nellie by defining her as a woman with "a streak of mania in her bustling...bent over her sewing table, her mouth stuffed with pins, she seems deranged, driven mad by her efforts to keep things stitched together." The desperate Rita goes to Margo for help because things for her are becoming emotionally and sexually unstitched. By doing so, she hopes that Margo will understand her fears and help her win Wesley. But Margo, despite her libidinous temperament, is too timid to stand up to the power of Nellie's disdain for her. Nellie naturally triumphs in the end.

It's easy to see how The Beatles could emerge out of the bone-chilling world depicted in The Dressmaker. While they are products of the repressive culture that Nellie represents, they also embraced the free-spiritedness of Margo, who has a striking resemblance to Julia, John Lennon's late mother. But there's something of Rita in The Beatles, too. It isn't her awkward shyness, or her forlorn whimpering that prevents her from sustaining joy; rather, it's in her strong desire to imagine a way out of the misery. Despite Wesley's continued attempts to break up their relationship by standing her up, never calling, or even flirting with Margo when he comes to family dinner, Rita still maintains the faith that he'll still one day want to hold her hand. As The Beatles looked beyond their own environment, to dream of a world where they could prevail, they had to carry the ghosts of the past that they also escaped from. In The Dressmaker, Rita often wakes up from horrible nightmares with hideous screams (until the end when she's silent), and they are screams that release her momentarily from a bad dream. But the scream is itself a manifestation of the kind of bad dream she won't escape. That scream would find its own release for The Beatles' in their shouts of freedom heard in "Twist and Shout" and "Money (That's What I Want)." But it would also find a different echo in John Lennon's twisted, painful moments towards the end of "Mother," on his solo 1970 Plastic Ono Band album, when his cries aren't about finding freedom, or even resolution. They were the screams of a man who, as Albert Goldman said in The Lives of John Lennon, couldn't get the past out of his system.

-- March 24/13

Running the Table: Croupier (1998)


When novels or movies delve into the intensely turbulent world of gambling, it's often from the point of view of the gambler. Which makes perfect sense, dramatically speaking, since it is the gambler who daringly tries to reinvent himself by risking everything. Quite simply these nervy, often unstable individuals, who have fascinated novelists from Dostoyevsky to Dick Francis, make great protagonists because they can feel like Charles Wells one minute and one of the walking dead in the next. There have been many good movies on the subject, too – Robert Altman's California Split (1974), Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels (1963), Albert Brooks's Lost in America (1985). All of them gleefully revel in showing just how giddy and precarious the lives of gamblers can be.

Rarely, though, do we see the perspective from the other side of the blackjack table. But director Mike Hodges's Croupier, a taut, tough-minded crime drama, with a razor sharp script by Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth), shifts its focus from the guy betting the chips to the one dealing the cards. And the view, although radically different, is every bit as riveting. Where a gambler constantly flirts with the idea of losing control, the croupier always struggles with his ability to maintain it. Jack Manfred (Clive Owen) is just such a control freak. He's a budding writer in Britain whose first novel has just been rejected. While trying to come up with another idea for his publisher friend Giles (Nick Reding), Jack's estranged father calls from South Africa. He has a lead for a job as a croupier in a British casino. Jack, who was trained in the profession by his father years before, wants to escape his family past. but he also needs a job and a salary.

Jack reluctantly takes the position, and it quickly transforms him. He's now the man in charge, spinning the roulette wheel, dealing the cards, and becoming a witness to the misfortune of others. He also becomes, as Jack says, "hooked on watching people lose." This new amoral attitude alienates him from his affectionate working-class girlfriend Marion (Gina McKee), an ex-policewoman who's now a store detective. When she asks Jack what she means to him, he replies: "You're my conscience." Marion volleys right back: "Haven't you got a conscience of your own?" While developing his new idea for a novel about the life of a croupier, Jack meets an attractive South African gambler, Jani de Villiers (Alex Kingston), who one day proposes an idea for a heist of his casino that could change his fortunes.

Clive Owen here suggests some of the magnetic charm of Paul Newman with the glamour bled out. Jack is callow, yet totally absorbing and charismatic. Even when he's brutally beating up a man he's caught cheating, or having rough sex with a co-worker (Kate Hardie) who comes to his aid, Jack Manfred is completely watchable. McKee is also quite impressive as a woman whose desire for a simple life belies the fact that she also holds some interesting cards up her sleeve. Her love for Jack is based entirely on the idealized life she wants for herself. Marion loves an idea of who Jack is, rather than the reality of who he is. This is unlike Jani, who understands Jack's true nature all too well. Kingston has a cool air of mystery that gives her role a delicate touch of ambiguity. Mike Hodges is a director who carries very little pretension. In the 1971 crime drama Get Carter, he stripped everything down to Carter's brutal desire for revenge. In the elegant 1980 fantasy Flash Gordon, Hodges created a simple, unadorned comic-strip world that was still a colourful and romantic adventure fable. In Croupier, Hodges has fashioned an absorbing existential drama about a man who may hold all the bets, but he can't gamble his life.

-- May 3/13

Political Creed and Character: Anita, Pussy Riot - A Punk Prayer, Downloaded, TPB AKF, Good Ol' Freda, Our Nixon


Anita Hill

Freida Mock’s Anita, about Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony to the Senate committee hearing on Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court, might have drawn on our compassion more had her film not worked so hard at being warmed-over hero-worshipping. One of the early controversial cases of sexual harassment is ripe for a sharp filmmaker tg delve into, but Mock is too partisan to bother. She wants to get crowds cheering for Anita Hill rather than looking into the foundations of the hearings themselves – and their aftermath. While Hill is a great subject for a film and she carries herself (in both the hearings and her later life) with great poise and integrity, the hearings touched on more than just sexual harassment. What Anita first avoids is delving into how the prosecutorial tone of the Senate investigation reflects the deeper puritanical strains in American culture (the undercurrents that lead to books like Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter) and – even more significantly – the unresolved racial issues (given that both Hill and Thomas are black). Mock chooses to see the hearing simply as a gladiatorial arena where a proud and brave liberal black woman stands up against the white middle-aged patriarchy. But because Thomas is a black conservative, the film simply dismisses his defense as if he’s merely hiding behind his race. The political prejudices underlining Anita end up watering down the potency of its subject and simplifying it.

Pussy Riot

Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer also loses its potency because it never goes beneath the story it tells. Maxim Pozdorovkin and Mike Lerner cleanly tell the tale of the Russian female punk band and the trial that ensued when this outfit staged some guerrilla theatre in Moscow’s central Orthodox cathedral. Although the picture helps us understand the authoritarian nature of the Putin regime in Russia, and we get a close look at some of the Orthodox followers and see how formidable they are. (They're about as scary as geriatric bikers out of Hells Angels.) But the movie draws its line in the sand too cleanly between freedom fighters and autocracy. I admire the irreverent spirit of Masha (Maria Alyokhina), Nadia (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova) and Katia (Yekaterina Samutsevich), but what is unacknowledged is the question of whether their art is any good. Nobody in the film considers that it might be just as dogmatic and intolerant as the institutions they attack. (I’m sad to say that “God’s Shit” is no “Anarchy in the UK.”) When the filmmakers look back at the more innocent beginnings in the early lives of these women, I think the picture gathers some resonance because it brings up associations with other radicals and our need to understand their origins. But all you get here are clues because the film doesn't care to examine them in any depth, or nuance. Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer is a partisan work of advocacy rather than a disturbing look at how – and why – the Pussy Riot case reveals how Russia is unable to embrace democratic principles because the ghosts of its Tsarist and Soviet past continue to haunt them.


While actor Alex Winter is probably best known as Bill in the cheeky fun of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (as well as its superior sequel, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey), he’s also been a pretty adventurous director (Freaked, Fever). His latest picture, Downloaded, might not be terribly daring in style, but the subject – the creation of the music download site, Napster in 1998 – is both smart and informative. Winter lays out the tale of self-effacing programmer Shawn Fanning who pioneered digital media sharing on the Internet along with Sean Parker, a self-promoting pioneer who would quickly move on to Facebook after the legal flame out over Napster. In the film, Winter speaks with software developers and musicians on all sides of the fence about the issue of copyright violation. But what is most fascinating about Downloaded is the way it uncovers how Fanning (without malice) simply exploited the short-sightedness of the music business on digital technology which ultimately threatened territorial control over their artists. Fanning also unwittingly exposed how their gouging of consumers on CD prices forced music fans to do – on a global scale – what fans in the Seventies used to do when they made cassette recordings of their favourite LPs to share with their friends. Downloaded is bound to antagonize those who still wish to cling to an analog world view, but Winter doesn't demonize one over the other. His film is simply a prescient reminder of how we are now living in McLuhan’s Global Village.


Simon Klose’s TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard is the perfect companion piece to Downloaded, but done in a completely different style. If Downloaded gives a straightforward account of a digital pioneer, Klose shoots his film – about three Swedish computer wizards who created The Pirate Bay, an online Bit-Torrent tracker – as if chasing his story with hellhounds on his trail. In a sense, they were on his trail because Hollywood studios were using every means to shut down The Pirate Bay and imprisoning its founders even though their site shrewdly didn't host any illegal content. The film is much denser than Downloaded and, since it is happening in the moment, less reflective on its subject. But despite its misshapen aspects, TPB AFK is fascinating in contrast to Downloaded. If Downloaded illustrates the entrepreneurial side of American ingenuity, the European made TPB AFK shows us technological anarchists who take aim at American ingenuity with the sole purpose of undermining it.

Freda Kelly and Paul McCartney

Good Ol’ Freda, the story of Freda Kelly, who ran The Beatles’ official fan club, is a fascinating portrait of an age before the Internet. Kelly wrote and edited and distributed the official fan club magazine of the Fab Four before Facebook and Twitter might have made all of her hard work either easier or irrelevant. The doc is a satisfying look at the saner side of fan worship. Not only did Freda have the scruples to stay fervently loyal to the group over the years (and not spread gossip or pull skeletons out of closets), she was also incredibly humble (not even telling her children of what she did). Listening to her look back over her life with The Beatles, she comes across as the antithesis of Beatlemania. She gets the fever of the music without succumbing to the fever of idolatry. Director Ryan White barely touches on the dark turbulence that tore the band apart, and Freda herself keeps the proceedings relatively innocent, but Good Ol’ Freda still unfolds like the discovery of a lost and forgotten scrapbook of hopeful times.

Our Nixon

In Our Nixon, director Penny Lane doesn't take easy shots at the travesty of Richard Nixon's presidency. Since she wasn't around in the Seventies, she tries to look at Nixon soberly without having been soiled by the dirty tricks criminality of his era. Our Nixon gathers in a bird's eye view the whole troubling period through primary sources. Those sources turn out mostly to be from over 400 reels of Super 8 footage of Nixon's years between 1968 and 1974 and shot by his special assistant Dwight Chapin, domestic affairs advisor John Erlichman and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman.

Although Lane's style of shaping this archival footage might suggest the pioneering work of Emile De Antonio (Point of Order, Milhouse: A White Comedy), it lacks the agit-prop anger that fuels De Antonio's perspective. Penny Lane tries instead to hold together contradictory views by allowing the footage to speak for itself. While it comes to resemble a collection of home movies, the varied footage cuts together fluidly as if taken by one cameraman. She never once lets her own voice intrude but instead gives way to television interviews with Nixon's men, plus Watergate tapes of Nixon on the phone with each of them.

What resonates most about Our Nixon, though, is the way it touches our fascination with visual documentation. If the Kennedy family also obsessively filmed themselves, their footage went on to create the attractive and appealing myth that would come to define the Camelot of the Kennedy years (the very images we stored and savored that would be later overshadowed by murder and loss). In Nixon's case, his footage here provides a shadow version of the Kennedy charisma right down to the dark stubble on Nixon's face, and the used-car pitch-man body language, that gives visual clues as to why he wasn't to be trusted.

-- May 12/13

Riffing On Myth: The Source (1999)


Watching Chuck Workman's impressionistic, stirring, and often quite entertaining documentary The Source, you'll certainly get a supple feeling for who, and what, the literary movement known as the Beats was to American life. While weaving together a dazzling collage of free-associating visuals and sounds, Workman aptly demonstrates that there is certainly no shortage of material – written, filmed, or recorded – on this group of socially radical writers. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, in the late Forties, came to be the pioneers of this subterranean movement. Out of this material, The Source creates a wealth of associations about the Beats with the details – and incongruities – of their history lurking under the surface.

It was America's post-Second World War desire for calm and conformity that spawned the Beat Generation. These writers, as the official story goes, set out to break down the walls, shake up the straight world, and reject the spoils of American society. They wrote novels and books of poetry that shocked both the literary and the artistic world with explicit language, performed improvised readings that captured the bop rhythms of cool jazz, and lived lives of notorious excess. Novels like Kerouac's On the Road, Ginsberg's epic poem Howl, and Burroughs' The Soft Machine or Naked Lunch, ripped into the fabric of the staid Eisenhower Fifties. Yet this rebellious subculture, filled with individuals who laid claim to being desolate and underground dharma bums, also sought access to the mass culture. They wanted to be cool and hip, and to live out the mythology they helped create. The Source is a riff on their mythologized history. It's about how they created a movement, which became co-opted on television and in the movies, that would be the antecedent for Sixties counter-culture and, later, the music of such diverse bands as Soft Machine, Steely Dan, Sonic Youth and the head-butting poetry of Henry Rollins.

Aside from being a documentary director, Workman has been making compilation short films for the last 20 years, and he shows amazingly fluid editing skills in The Source. He's stunningly proficient at putting together a smooth, coherent narrative from such disparate material. (Some might recall his wonderfully compiled retrospective episode for TV's Mad About You in 1997. He also created inventive trailers for numerous films including American Graffiti and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.) Workman also integrates dramatic readings from Johnny Depp as Kerouac, John Turturro as Allen Ginsberg, and Dennis Hopper as William Burroughs. And, for the most part, it works wonderfully. Depp does more than just evoke the doomed romanticism of Kerouac – he actualizes him. And Hopper shrewdly captures Burroughs' slow drawl that sounds like amplified whispers from a death-head. Unfortunately, Turturro seems to think he's back in Barton Fink. His reading of Ginsberg's "Howl" pales next to James Franco's reading in Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein's docudrama Howl. Turturro stomps on the words as if he's trying to kill cockroaches.

As The Source explores the enduring myth of the Beats, it sometimes misses some of the more salient facts. The female point of view, for example, is fleeting. (One of the key figures, Diane DiPrima, is pretty much a cameo.) And we see just a glimpse of the latent misogyny in some of the men (like poet Gregory Corso's dismissal of a female companion who questions one of his assertions). But The Source is mostly a lovely primer about a group of writers who lived out a shared ecstasy of bohemian living. When Ginsberg – the movement's true hero – walks the streets of New York (not long before his death), there's a look of serene joy in his face. The man who once told America where to stuff its atom bomb now looks totally at home there. Despite their fabled railing against the culture that spawned them, in The Source, we're finally touched by their desire to be loved and accepted.

-- May 18/13

To Boldly Go Where No Parody Has Gone Before: Galaxy Quest (1999)


What's disappointing about J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek film is that it feels less an inspired tribute to the original TV series than an attempt to simply exploit the fondness fans feel for it. While the new cast seems more at home in their parts than in the last one, Star Trek Into Darkness unfortunately is a cluttered action adventure. It also tries to clone itself from the superior Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but without the core of emotion that gave that film its special poignancy. The new film is intermittently entertaining, but Star Trek Into Darkness takes its title perhaps a little too literally. (The 3-D effects have a way of making the picture look like it was shot through sludge.) Abrams also gives the picture an obvious post-9/11 context, but it doesn't resonate in the same way The Wrath of Khan's literary allusions did. That's, in part, because Abrams explicitly imposes the War on Terror on the material of Into Darkness whereas A Tale of Two Cities and Moby Dick were thematically linked to the overall story of The Wrath of Khan. It would hardly be necessary for me to continually bring up The Wrath of Khan had Into Darkness not copied so much from it. But Abrams seems to want the cachet of the latter film without actually earning it. He's hoping that in using some of the same powerful scenes from Khan he will magically ignite his own picture. But they don't because Into Darkness lacks the sensibility to underscore the significance of what those scenes reveal about the characters. Which is why sometimes parody does better at capturing the appeal in a favourite TV show than the straight homage of Abrams' approach.

Galaxy Quest (1999) is that rare kind of parody that actually has the same affection for its subject as Into Darkness does, but director Dean Parisot and screenwriters David Howard and Robert Gordon create a genial, often hilarious lampoon that manages to get at the crux of why these space adventures have such a devotional audience. (Into Darkness merely caters to that devotion without reflecting on it.) Galaxy Quest doesn't even have to trash the genre to accomplish this task. It's a peppy comedy that instead redeems the love of the fan. Galaxy Quest isn't telling followers to get a life, as William Shatner once did to followers of Star Trek; it examines why this is a life. Tim Allen stars as actor Jason Nesmith, who played Commander Peter Quincy Taggart on 'Galaxy Quest.' Like Captain Kirk (William Shatner) of Star Trek, he's given to uttering such pontifically heroic lines as "Never give up, never surrender" when in imminent danger. Alan Rickman is Alexander Dane, a stylish Shakespearean actor who portrays Dr. Lazurus, a half-humanoid, half-reptilian alien. Dane is endlessly depressed that he is forever being identified with 'Galaxy Quest' rather than his higher calling. "I was an actor once," he is given to moan. Sigourney Weaver is the blond and bursting-at-the-chest Gwen DeMarco, who was the fictional ship's communications officer. Her biggest complaint is that fan magazines write "six paragraphs" on her boobs rather than her brawn. Tony Shalhoub, as actor Fred Kwan, is the unperturbed Tech Sergeant Chen.

The Thermians

Twenty years after the show went off the air, the crew of the NSEA Protector are now just out-of-work actors, donning their uniforms for fan conventions where they hawk autographs and talk trivia with the faithful. One group that turns out to be a little too faithful is the Thermians, a race of aliens from the Klatu Nebula who have mistaken the old TV show for what they think is a "historical document." So they decide to whisk this dispirited group of performers into space to help them defeat a very real and deadly adversary. Galaxy Quest is about the way these actors have to draw on the roles they once played. And with real conviction, they need to save the Thermians, defeat the enemy, and more importantly, become the heroes they no longer believe they are.

Allen plays Nesmith as a man who knows that with his bland good looks, he could be heading an adventure show one day, and opening a supermarket the next. You root for the guy even though he's a pompous fool. Alan Rickman draws on the familiar droll humour he showed years earlier as the Euro-Trash terrorist in Die Hard. His Dr. Lazurus, who wears what looks like a multicoloured seashell welded to his head, is a comic portrait of resentment and humiliation. Sigourney Weaver uses her physique with an ingenious expressiveness that befuddles the space aliens. But Tony Shaloub steals the film as a Zen master of calm in a chaotic storm.

For such an unpretentious SF parody, Galaxy Quest has a quiet elegance. The scenes in space, shot by Jerzy Zielinski, have a rapturous quality that punctuate the jokes about how tacky space often looks in TV dramas. And the Theramins, whose haircuts give them the look of a gathering of televangelists, sound like seals. (They might have studied 'Galaxy Quest' but they talk as if they spent years watching Mork and Mindy.) Director Parisot (who made the underrated romantic comedy Home Fries) realizes that Galaxy Quest is a light comedy about how actors can become just as trapped by the aura of a popular television program as its fans. But he also gives the audience something more: 'Galaxy Quest' might be just another television show, but he also shows us why it really is the stuff that heroes are made of.

-- May 21/13

Beyond Palookaville: The Criterion Collection's Release of On the Waterfront (1954) 


Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront 

"I can't discuss it as a movie anymore," director Martin Scorsese tells film critic Kent Jones in an interview included on the new Criterion Collection release of Elia Kazan's powerhouse 1954 drama On the Waterfront. "It's more of a phenomenon. Are there better movies? Probably. I see how the story is structured to make a point...[Yet] there is something revolutionary about that film." There are few movies that take us beyond the experience of simply watching one. Certainly Citizen Kane (1941) does, with its dazzling sound and visual innovations, where director Orson Welles – having come to Hollywood out of his daring work in theatre and radio – combines the two mediums in order to treat our eyes in the way we often use our ears. In doing so, he distracts us from some of the shallowness and the flaws in the plot and unleashes something boldly new and entertaining. Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939) is undoubtedly another, where all the rules of genre get broken to create a masterpiece of multiple genres mingling together into something so new that the viewer is both engaged and moved by a picture that defies classification.

On the Waterfront is a straight-forward drama, written by Budd Schulberg (What Makes Sammy Run), about a New Jersey longshoreman and ex-boxer Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) who comes to tackle the moral dilemma of whether to remain loyal to his mob-connected boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) and Terry's brother, Charlie (Rod Steiger), who is the mobster's right-hand man, or to talk instead to the crime commission and name names. It doesn't seem to belong in the same category of films that could be described as "revolutionary." But that's only if you seize solely upon the melodramatic structure of its plot. What sets On the Waterfront apart from more conventional melodrama, besides the emotional force of its storytelling, happens between the lines of the story. It even goes beyond the film into the larger world that shaped it. "On the Waterfront is no more about the real business of the docks – working conditions, union racketeering, or reform – than Hamlet is an expose of corruption in the medieval Danish court," writes filmmaker Michael Almereyda (Nadja) in the DVD liner notes. "[On the Waterfront arrives] at an elevated place in our collective consciousness, a place where familiar images and scenes continue to seem urgent, to surprise us, to trigger intense feelings, reaching past the long shadows of politics and the blind wind of success or failure." To define that elevated place Almereyda refers to, you first have to grasp the social and political issues that turned On the Waterfront into the very phenomenon that Scorsese describes.


The film's cogent use of the black-and-white neo-realistic settings, inspired by the movies of post-war Italy, the evocative eye of cinematographer Boris Kaufman (L'Atalante), plus helped along by a dynamic jazz inspired score by Leonard Bernstein, all inform the picture's empathetic recognition of underclass alienation. On the Waterfront is a culmination of the social consciousness born of the Group Theatre of the Thirties. Elia Kazan, who once called himself "a cosmic orphan," was a Turkish-born Greek immigrant who along with Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford formed the Group Theatre collective with the goal of developing an American artistry that was both forceful and naturalistic. To do so, they pioneered an acting technique – the Method – which was derived from the teachings of the Russian Konstantin Stanislavski, whose emphasis on psychological realism became a key component of their work. For ten years, this group produced many important American playwrights like Clifford Odets (Waiting for Lefty in 1935) and Irwin Shaw (Bury the Dead in 1936). They had their biggest hit with Odets' Golden Boy in 1937. Due to the social awareness of the Group, however, many (including Kazan) flirted with (if not joined) the Communist Party. Kazan was a member of the Party while in his mid-twenties, when the Depression was at its worst between 1934 to 1936, but would soon reject their dogma and their determination to turn the Group Theatre into its ideological arm. So in 1952, during the HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities) hearings on Communism, Kazan testified as a friendly witness and gave up the names of eight former Group colleagues who had been Party members. One of them was Clifford Odets, who had left the Communist Party at the same time Kazan did, and all the others were names known to HUAC already. But Kazan's decision would cost him friends and allies, and it would also ultimately lead him to direct On the Waterfront.


On the Waterfront was originally to be a collaboration between Kazan and his friend playwright Arthur Miller, whose Death of a Salesman Kazan had directed on stage in 1949. First developed around the time of Salesman, The Hook was to be an expose of the corrupt unions in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Both Miller and Kazan were planning it as a movie in 1951, but Harry Cohen of Columbia Pictures was nervous about Miller's leftist views and wanted The Hook to be an allegory for the Cold War instead with the mob replaced by Communists. Miller quickly pulled out of the project and Kazan's testimony would soon follow. Kazan's fateful decision ended their friendship for the next ten years. Miller would go on to write The Crucible, a condemnation of the Salem witch-hunts in 1692, as his own allegorical response to Kazan's capitulation to the HUAC. Kazan's wife, however, balked at the comparison. She would write Miller afterwards to tell him that "there were no witches in Salem, Arthur, but there were Communists in Hollywood."As tragic and sordid as the HUAC hearings were, she was right. The Communist Party did dominate the politics of the movie industry during the Thirties and Forties right from the era of the Popular Front and beyond the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939.

Since the Thirties, Stalinist ideology had significantly corrupted American intellectual and cultural life to the degree that it bitterly divided the American left in ways similar to today's post 9/11 era. "Stalinism today is not a point of view but a psychological and sociological phenomenon," critic Robert Warshow wrote in a 1947 essay in The Nation called "The Legacy of the 30s." "The intellectual's problem is to define his own position in the whole world of culture that came into being in the 30's – a world in which he must live and of which he is a full partaker." Kazan had been a partaker as a former Communist, and thus was significantly different from Miller who had never been a member. The question of taking responsibility for one's beliefs then takes on a whole different meaning in the case of Kazan. "And the question to be asked is not: What is my opinion of all this?" Warshow goes on to write. "That question is easily answered, but those who ask only that have fallen into the trap, for it is precisely the greatest error of our intellectual life to assume that the most effective way of dealing with any phenomenon is to have an opinion about it. The real question is: What is my relation to all of this?" On the Waterfront, whether you wish to praise or condemn it on the grounds of justifying Kazan's ratting on his friends, to HUAC, becomes his way of asking what is his relation to all of this.

Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan

Two years before he made On the Waterfront, Kazan wrote a statement published in The New York Times defending his reasons for testifying. Although he later credited the text to his wife, the voice in the piece seemed clearly to be his own. Along with describing his time in the Party and why he broke with them, he went on to get at the nagging issue that would ultimately become the very tissue of On the Waterfront. "Secrecy serves the Communists," he wrote. "At the other pole, it serves those who are interested in silencing liberal voices. The employment of a lot of good liberals is threatened because they have allowed themselves to become associated with or silenced by the Communists." Many saw, perhaps rightly, the questionable ethics of Kazan's decision, that his testimony would give strength and validation to HUAC – especially in its ability to destroy the lives of other individuals in its zealous attempt to seek out Party loyalists. But Kazan saw his testimony as simply another outlet for the passionate convictions in which he made his pictures. "[We] must never let the Communists get away with the pretence that they stand for the very things which they kill in their own countries," he wrote. With Miller out of his life, Kazan turned to another former Communist, screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who had also garnered similar controversy. In 1951, when screenwriter Richard Collins testified before HUAC, he named Schulberg as a former member of the Party. So Schulberg responded by testifying himself as a 'friendly witness' that certain Party members had coerced him in the writing of What Makes Sammy Run, his 1941 novel about the backstabbing culture of Hollywood. With Kazan and Schulberg both feeling the sting of having ratted on the people they knew, they went to work resurrecting The Hook, which, in 1954, became On the Waterfront.

Watching On the Waterfront today, it's surprising to find that, in the last fifty years, it hasn't lost its ability to overwhelm. But what stirs you isn't the melodrama. Its strength comes instead from what happens in between Kazan and Schulberg's 'big scenes.' Terry Malloy is conceived as an uneducated man, a lumpen-proletariat, who is torn between purgatory and salvation. The way Brando plays him, his instincts are without question rooted in the territorial imperative. But a surprising innate sweetness is also present in him and gradually awakened by Edie (Eva Marie Saint), a young convent girl who happens to be the sister of a man Terry set up to be murdered. Their scenes of verbal sparring in the bar, which begin the spiral of their relationship, are inescapably touching. Their delicate verbal dancing awakens in the viewer a full recognition of how fragile romantic possibility can be. In their performances, as well, Brando and Eva Marie Saint reveal finely tuned desires that yearn with an urgent need to connect. Those moments make perfect sense of Terry's decision to turn his back on the security of the mob life. ("When he plays those scenes with her, I'm broken up," Kazan would later tell film critic Richard Schickel.) However, Karl Malden, as Father Barry, is cast as the tough social conscience of the picture – and he carries its meaning like a billboard around his neck. He uses Biblical scripture as the kind of dramatic liturgy which leaves no mystery or nuance, and substitutes for realism the rousing speeches of a politician stumping for votes. Father Barry may explicitly open the door for Terry's conversion, but it's Edie's implicit urging that allows him to walk through it. And it's the love story that miraculously transcends the melodrama of Father Barry's sermonizing.

Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando in the famous cab scene

The famous scene of Terry Malloy in the cab with his brother Charlie is still one of the great defining moments of brotherly betrayal in movie history. With Terry now about to testify before the crime commission, his brother Charlie either has to talk him out of it, or kill him. Terry's confrontation with Charlie, in which he accuses him of selling him out, of giving him a "one-way ticket to Palookaville," still resonates despite its familiarity because we've all felt at some point in life the bitter taste of Palookaville. But the scene also goes beyond Palookaville to a more chilling place than perhaps even Kazan and Schulberg imagined. Rod Steiger, who was never given enough credit for his shrewd underplaying of Charlie, is actually the more tragic figure here, a man who has made the idea of Palookaville comfortable for himself to live in. Charlie is the educated brother who perhaps knew better than Terry, but made all the wrong choices for the safety of easy money and sold himself out more completely than he did his own brother. (It's possible that Scorsese had Charlie in mind when he gave the same name to Harvey Keitel's smooth operator in his 1974 Mean Streets, a man who plays the friend to everyone while climbing the rungs of his uncle's criminal organization.) Charlie is the truly damned soul in On the Waterfront and the one for whom death is the only true release. In a later scene, one that is seldom recalled compared to the iconic scene in the cab, Terry and Edie get chased by a truck down a dark alley and emerge from hiding to see Charlie hanging on a ledge from a hook. Kazan doesn't treat that moment as justification for Charlie's sins, or to tell us that he got what was coming to him, but rather as a moment of tenderness between brothers. Terry comes to terms with human weakness in this moment and recognizes that he is actually the stronger man. He literally – and symbolically – lets Charlie off the hook. (Brando is peerless in that quiet moment when he covers his brother's body with his coat and lays his burden to rest.)

If everything that follows that scene is impacted with the conventions of action melodrama, where revenge becomes a sanctimonious desire, On the Waterfront never loses touch with its core of realism. The villain, Lee J. Cobb's Johnny Friendly, isn't a gangster titan like Little Caesar, or an ambitious one like Scarface. He isn't even a symbol to be brought down. Instead, he's no more than a ruthless man who crawled up from his own slum to survive. In bringing him down, Terry is actually rejecting the thug in himself. (When he confronts Friendly, he even says that by being loyal to Friendly he was ratting on himself all those years.) But there is no getting around the improbable ending in which Terry triumphs over Friendly and (despite suffering many broken bones when he's beaten) goes to work and drives the corruption from the docks. (The union figure Terry is based on was not so lucky.) But the fantasy of closure doesn't diminish all that comes before it. "On the Waterfront provides an imaginative experience," Pauline Kael wrote in I Lost it at the Movies. "If one regrets that the artists, having created an authentic image of alienation, failed to take that image seriously enough, one remembers also that most films provide no experience at all."

The picture's attempt at an authentic image of alienation does indeed leave a residue of "imaginative experience" that would carry its influence through the years of American movie-making. Kael would even reference On the Waterfront when she reviewed The Godfather in 1972, in which Marlon Brando plays a gangster this time, a criminal lord who makes choices that ultimately become a corruption of American idealism. "Nothing is resolved at the end of The Godfather, because the family business goes on," she wrote in The New Yorker. "Terry Malloy didn't clean up the docks at the end of On the Waterfront; that was a lie. The Godfather is popular melodrama, but it expresses a new tragic realism." If On the Waterfront lacked some of the courage of its convictions in 1954, or even the boldness to recognize its own underlying tragic realism, it was still real enough to make a movie like The Godfather possible some twenty years later. Produced in the midst of the unresolved currents of Stalinist politics, government hearings and the Hollywood blacklist, On the Waterfront is about a man who discovers his convictions and then attempts to define them in a world where they will always have consequences. Martin Scorsese would go on to say about On the Waterfront in his film A Letter to Elia (2010) that "it was as if the world that I came from, that I knew, mattered." That, and not its melodrama, is what makes this movie both the phenomenon and the revolutionary motion picture that it became.Which is why On the Waterfront still reverberates today as a story that is more unsettling than its triumphant conclusion suggests.

-- May 24/13

Dead Man Talking: The Films of Takeshi Kitano



Over the last thirty years, Takeshi 'Beat' Kitano has had an illustrious career directing and starring in comically violent gangster melodramas, such as the international hits Sonatine (1993), Hana-Bi (1997) and Outrage (2010). With a sense of humour as stoic as that of a statue, Kitano carved out for himself a deadpan action figure who's bemused by the utterly chaotic world around him. He also packs into his characters plenty of that Clint Eastwood character armour while adding a pinch of Charles Bronson's rugged muscularity. (His inexpressiveness is so imposing that when he speaks it's as if those taut muscles have created logjam in his throat.) But Kitano's impersonal and non-communicative qualities aren't just part of the current chic of being cool and ironically detached. There's also something rather maudlin at work in this facade. Likewise, his brutality isn't an expression of latent, unexplored psychopathic tendencies; it supposedly comes from some deeper, nobler place. He might shoot, maim and kill – but that's okay, because he's acting for the love of a dying woman (Hana-Bi), or the honour of a good friend (Violent Cop). His 2000 comedy, Kikujiro, has been described as a departure from the earlier mold. Well, it is, and it isn't.

Kikujiro doesn't feature Kitano and Yakuza gunman shooting up the landscape, as in Outrage, but he hasn't abandoned the sentimental side of his work, either. There isn't a mortally ill woman giving his life meaning this time, but in Kikujiro, she's been replaced by a young boy longing for his mother. Kikujiro (played by Kitano) is a deadbeat loser whose wife (Kayoko Kishimoto) urges him to help this rather sullen and lonely boy, Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi), find the mother who abandoned him years earlier. Living with his grandmother, Masao one day comes across some family photos of his late father and mother. He also finds a possible address for her. Because it's summer, and all the boy's friends have gone away, Kikujiro is urged to help Masao find her. But Kikujiro is the least likely candidate for the task. Besides being both a narcissist and an obnoxious idiot, he's also a loud-mouth and insensitive to everybody – including the boy. I can only guess that we're supposed to find all of this misanthropy funny (and endearing) because we ultimately discover that, deep down, Kikujiro is really a decent fellow. If Takeshi Kitano has been Dead Man Walking through most of his action dramas, in Kikujiro, he's turned into Dead Man Talking.

Takeshi Kitano & Yusuke Sekiguchi

The unholy mixture of violence and bathos in his action pictures works at taking the edge off the brutality. But the slapstick and sentiment in Kikujiro makes instead for a queasy sanctimoniousness. It also makes the story less comprehensible. You don't have a clue as to why Kikujiro's wife would ever trust her boorish husband with such a delicate journey. Sure enough, the first stop for Kikujiro and Masao is the betting track, where Kikujiro blows all of Masao's travel money on the bicycle races. (He even blames the boy for making him lose.) Kitano also throws in a deeply unfunny – and jarring – slapstick scene involving a pedophile who tries to attack the boy. And although Kitano provides endlessly quirky scenes involving the many people they meet on the road, the whole movie quickly becomes tedious because there is very little chemistry between Kitano and Sekiguchi. At times, the boy seems as repulsed by him as we do. And the continuing list of characters that turn up do little to help. Two bikers, nicknamed Baldy and Fatso, appear to be a good luck charm for the boy. But charm isn't the word you'd use to describe their presence on the screen. (Before Kikujiro and Masao are to return to Tokyo, Masao inexplicably dreams about them appearing over the Milky Way.)

The only concession to lyricism in the picture, where traces of the dreamy magic that the best road journeys inspire are present, comes when Kikujiro and Masao meet a juggler (Fumle Hosokawa) and her boyfriend (Nezumi Mamura). Their elegant mimicry briefly brings the boy – and the movie – to life, making you wish he'd run off with them. Despite the coarseness of the material, Kikujiro is also surprisingly well shot. Cinematographer Katsumi Yanagishima, a regular collaborator with Takeshi Kitano, brings out the rich, impressionistic colours of summer in a country coming into full bloom. Back in 2000, when Kitano told the press that "this film belongs to a genre which is outside my speciality," he wasn't being coy. Judging from Kikujiro's overzealous slapstick, coupled with its smarminess, Takeshi Kitano tries here to become Japan's answer to Roberto Benigni. Now that's a fate I wouldn't wish on anyone I cared about.

-- June 23/13

State of the Union: Roland Emmerich's White House Down


When Barack Obama was elected as the first black President of the United States in November 2008, it was a momentous event in American history. And it ignited a fever of idealism not felt since 1960 when John Kennedy first declared the coming of a New Frontier. At that time, JFK's inaugural address provided a promise that the country would begin to live up to its most cherished dreams – the quest for equality that lay in its founding documents. Of course, Kennedy's murder in Dallas in 1963, to be followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968, not only seemed to assure that the promise couldn't be kept, but also that the coming of Obama wouldn't be in anyone's rear view mirror. Obama's election victory, arriving after almost four decades of racial segregation, war, assassinations, government corruption and terrorism, was experienced as both euphoric and an impossibly earned reward after years of bitter struggle and loss. Given that climate, it seemed only natural to believe that the movies of the Obama era would be in large supply and perhaps be even richer in content and feeling than those in any other Presidential period before him. But those pictures just didn't materialize. And, in part, it was because Obama, the avatar of another New Frontier, couldn't be found.

If supporters have experienced his presidency since 2008 as cautious, ineffective, and lately, an act of betrayal after the revelations of the government's wire-tapping of its citizens, his enemies continue to exploit that rift by making him seem a non-entity (as Clint Eastwood did at the Republican Convention), a fraud (as Donald Trump implied by demanding his birth certificate), or America's greatest threat (as the Tea Party and people on the conspiracy fringe of the right and left have claimed). In this climate, Obama emerged not as a world leader, but a trapped and inert statesman because, despite what his presidency represented, racism clearly hadn't gone away. The tragic currency of assassinations, embroidered throughout American history, had not really changed either. We're all too keenly aware of what happens to those who become lightning rods for great social change. American idealists seek community, but they also draw out the isolated loner who feels neither a need for community or to be a part of history. He chooses instead to destroy those who offer it to him. Given the danger zone Obama operates in today, he understands fully that if anything were to happen to him due to any bold move he made in public policy, his family would not only lose a father, the country would dissolve in violence and chaos.


In Roland Emmerich's White House Down, about an assault on a black President by a right-wing paramilitary group staging a violent coup, there's no question about the mirror it holds up to the state of the union. The parallels with Obama and his political crucible are unmistakable. (It could be titled Obama's Revenge.) But its allusions to the current president are all on the surface. With a pulpy plot by James Vanderbilt that borrows from Die Hard, White House Down creates a bogus surrogate for the nation's hopes and fears. In the story, President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) is getting plenty of heat over a proposed peace treaty between his allies which would lead to military forces pulling out of the Middle East. In particular, he draws the rage of the retiring Head of Presidential Detail Martin Walker (James Woods) who organizes his own detail to remove the President. Walker seeks revenge for the death of his son who was killed in a black ops mission approved by Sawyer. His conspiracy of mercenaries, also black ops types led by Emil Stenz (Jason Clarke), supposedly speak for the might of the military-industrial complex which sees the treaty as a threat to their control of the region. (How their control is manifested in the Middle East is never explained, or made sense of. And if they were that powerful, why would the President be so bold in blatantly threatening them?)

John Cale (Channing Tatum) is a police officer assigned to the Speaker of the House Eli Raphelson (Richard Jenkins), whose son he saved in Afghanistan. On a day that he's escorting Raphelson, Cale offers a White House tour to his daughter Emily (Joey King), who is not only disenchanted with her father due to his painful divorce from her mother, but also because he voted for the wrong presidential candidate. In an effort to make it up to her and win her approval, he tries to get a job with the Secret Service. Yet he gets turned down for the position by agent Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who just happens to be a former college acquaintance of his. (She feels that his record shows a lack of authority and follow through.) But he gets to prove otherwise when the terrorists bomb the Capitol building and set forth to take the President hostage. While Cale ultimately rescues Sawyer and attempts to get him to safety, Emily ends up in the clutches of Stenz's men. On top of saving the nation, Cale also preserves the family honour by getting to his daughter in time.

Jamie Foxx as President Sawyer

White House Down might appear to some as a left-wing fantasy where Obama finally gets to claim his rightful place in office, but Emmerich, a master of destruction orgies (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012), is the Irwin Allen of the digital age rather than an action director with imagination, skill and intelligence. Like Allen (The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno), Emmerich treats character and plot as mere ploys to get to the thrills. All he really wants to do is jolt us out of our seats. But he also can't resist pandering to the sanctity of conservative-style family values. Unlike a superb action/adventure film like Skyfall, the most recent James Bond picture, which also delivers thrills and excitement but with skill and wit, White House Down is a solemn and campy affair in which violence is done in the service of sanctimony. Where Skyfall is a piece of terrifically directed commercial entertainment that also intelligently and perceptively parses the post-Cold War political terrain, White House Down is no more than a catalogue of tired effects created to exploit our fears of further terrorist attacks. The picture plays with our prurient fascination with destruction just as the Irwin Allen disaster movies of the Seventies did. But while those movies had an inadvertent way of reflecting the mood of a country that was breaking down and falling apart in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, and where authority and heroism were up for question, White House Down just asserts the territorial imperative. President Sawyer is simply another version of the weak intellectual who can only defend his home from thugs when he becomes one himself.

Jamie Foxx comes across as pretty light on his feet, and he brings an affable touch to President Sawyer, but he isn't terribly affecting because he's hemmed in by the inanities of the script which has him delivering lines while running from explosion to explosion. As his personal savior, Channing Tatum may be swift and able, but he's as colourless as a Joe Palooka Teddy Bear. Tatum has the heavy-lidded, punch-drunk look of Josh Hartnett, but without any of Hartnett's wily soul. He also lacks the humourous self-awareness that Bruce Willis demonstrated going up against Alan Rickman and his Euro-Trash crew in Die Hard, where Willis's self-deprecating smirk gave that movie some verve. Quirky performers like Maggie Gyllenhaal end up looking bland and ordinary here while James Woods can barely rise to the occasion of obvious villainy. Richard Jenkins and Michael Murphy (as the Vice-President) look bored and distracted, as though they're simply concentrating on walking in the predictable footsteps laid out for them in the script. And Joey King plays the kind of precocious child you fear may one day end up heading a hit production of Annie. (When she heroically waves the White House flag to warn off jet fighters from bombing the President's home she's as unbearably self-righteous as Mel Gibson in Emmerich's The Patriot.)

Despite all the talk of this being an Obama era movie, the thrust of White House Down is not how a President redeems his oath of office, but how a father earns and wins the love and trust of his estranged daughter. The state of the country – even the world – is also arbitrary to the thrill of seeing capitol buildings come crashing down while a beleaguered war hero shows a cerebral head of state what it takes to save his Presidency. The Obama of White House Down still ends up a nowhere man with no distinct presence in the country that elected him. The President doesn't get to stand up for his principles and then have them vindicated by those who support him. He becomes the master in his own home only when he can master a machine gun and take out home-grown terrorists while wearing his Air Jordans.

-- July 7/13

Strike Three: Brian Helgeland's 42


Harrison Ford and Chadwick Boseman in 42

It’s curious that most American films about baseball, arguably the country’s national sport, have little to do with baseball. It doesn't matter whether you're watching Pride of the Yankees (1942) or The Natural (1984). You never get to fully comprehend what makes the game such a clear mirror of the culture that created it because the movies never want it to be one. Instead, baseball ends up as an inspirational tool to tell tired moral dramas of personal triumph. Rather than examine how the game has both ignored and led the political and cultural changes in America, most movies about baseball resist the ties that bind the game to the nation's character in an effort to win over the mass audience with stories about heroism. Baseball has certainly had its iconic heroes, from Babe Ruth to Ted Williams to Cal Ripkin (just as it has had its tainted ones, from Ty Cobb to Pete Rose to Barry Bonds), but, in movies, we rarely get to see what sets those individuals apart from the rest of us. There's a desire to make them seem ordinary, as though this contrived egalitarianism would make us identify with them more strongly. One baseball movie that did truly confront the complexity of our celebrity worship, Ron Shelton's bracing Cobb (1994), about the violent and racist clutch hitter Ty Cobb, was ignored by audiences and critics alike (just before, ironically, O.J. Simpson's trial would capture national attention).

There is perhaps no baseball story more worthy of recounting, however, than Jackie Robinson's. Robinson was the first African American who broke Major League Baseball's colour barrier when he was invited to join the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. For years, a number of directors (such as Spike Lee) have been eager to tell that story, and many (like Robert Redford) almost got to make it. Brian Helgeland's 42 gives Robinson the first on-screen treatment since Robinson played himself in the rather wan The Jackie Robinson Story in 1950, or Andre Braugher who did in the 1990 TV drama The Court Martial of Jackie Robinson. 42 painstakingly attempts to get the facts right, shows us how Robinson ended baseball's Gentleman's Agreement (there was no official statute banning blacks from baseball, just a universally accepted and unwritten rule which no club owner was eager to break) only to endure endless abuse for doing so. But the picture misses the bigger story. Helgeland, who showed a gift for dramatic complexity as the writer of L.A. Confidential, Conspiracy Theory and Payback, turns Robinson's historic narrative into a square and dull after-school special. 42 does more to assuage the white guilt of those who barred black players from the game than to demonstrate how Robinson's efforts actually affirmed black America, both bringing joy and triumph and preparing the ground for racial integration in the coming decades.

Although the picture doesn’t span Robinson’s entire career, concentrating only on his play in the minors for the Montreal Royals and his first season helping the Dodgers win the 1947 pennant, the dramatic arc of the picture seems even punier. Helgeland essentially avoids the social and political context of a growing black militancy after the Second World War, the kind that would ultimately lead to the Civil Rights struggle. (One black soldier who wanted to play the game once said, “If we are able to stop bullets, why not balls?”) The earlier achievements of boxer Joe Lewis and Olympic track star Jesse Owens also helped set the stage for integrating black athletes into sports that were dominated by whites, yet Helgeland opts for the more obvious and sentimental melodrama where one noble black man stands up against the racism of America.

Chadwick Boseman and Nicole Beharie

Chadwick Boseman (from the 2009 TV series Lincoln Heights) is a smart choice to play Robinson – he demonstrates Robinson's agile flair on the base paths where he could control the pace of the game with his guile. But the picture lacks the personal dimension that could show us what made him the kind of dynamic player that he was. (Robinson's base stealing, for example, came right out of his time playing in the Negro Leagues where they emphasized a more aggressive style of game than in the Majors.) Boseman shows a relaxed and intuitive rapport with Nicole Beharie as his wife, Rachel, but their married life is so chaste it could have been conceived by Norman Rockwell. But the worst casting is Harrison Ford as Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, who Robinson claimed did as much for American blacks as Abraham Lincoln. Ford, unfortunately, seems to think he’s playing Will Rogers with all his homespun wisdom. Yet 42 never dramatizes how Rickey’s desire to desegregate baseball came out of his sharp business sense as much as his religious ideals. Rickey understood as well as any owner that there were dozens of star athletes in the Negro Leagues and that if he were the first to integrate he would be able to get some of the best players for a good bargain. Ford's Rickey spends more time pealing off pearls of wisdom that resembles husking corn.

Overall, Helgeland fails to give 42 the kind of satisfying shape that could show us how Robinson overcame the racial abuse to play his best ball. When Philadelphia Phillies’ bench boss, Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk), taunts Robinson endlessly with horrific racist slurs, the scene simply draws attention to itself. Chapman's tirade suggests that if only the game could only get rid of such vile crackers, baseball would be a better sport. You’d never know from 42 that the racism of white players was also based on the notion that if the Majors were integrated many of them would lose their jobs because of the skill of the black players coming out of the Negro Leagues. In its own benign way, 42 patronizes Robinson’s achievements and puts them on a pedestal rather than delving into questions of why baseball waited so long to integrate.

While watching the picture you can't escape the feeling that 42 is playing it safe in order to find appeal with a mass audience that doesn't wish to consider those unsettling issues of race and racism. Once when Jackie Robinson helped the Montreal Royals win a championship, he was chased for blocks by adoring fans. He said that it was probably the first time a black man was chased by a white crowd that didn't have lynching on its mind. All through Robinson’s career, up until his death in 1972, he never backed away – even when joking – from the uglier implications of what it meant to be a black baseball star who excels in a culture that refuses to accept him. 42 tries to be a genial picture that means well, but it lacks the shrewdness of Robinson’s fortitude. If Robinson had the moxie to steal home, 42 never gets on base.

-- July 19/13

Two Faces Have I: The Stepfather, Natural Born Killers & The Controversy Over Rolling Stone Magazine's Cover Photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev



"That day's Boston Globe has run a story about the nurses at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital who took care of Jahar [Tsarnaev] those first few days after his capture [for the Boston Marathon bombing]. They were ambivalent, to say the least, about spending too much time with him, for fear of, well, liking him. One nurse said she had to stop herself from calling him 'hon'."

- Janet Reitman, "The Bomber: How A Popular, Promising Student Was Failed By His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam And Became a Monster," Rolling Stone, July 2013.

One Friday afternoon, back in 1987, I set off to review a new suspense film called The Stepfather, a skilfully smart thriller that nobody at the time wanted to see. Directed by Joseph Ruben (Dreamscape) and written by crime novelists Donald E. Westlake (God Save the Mark) and Brian Garfield (Death Wish) with assistance from Carolyn Lefcourt, The Stepfather was about a bland suburban family man, Henry Morrison (Terry O'Quinn), who murders his whole family without anyone noticing (except for his brother-in-law who obsessively hunts him down), changes his identity to Jerry Blake, moves away, and marries into another single family. Although the story was largely fictional, it actually had its roots in something quite true. At the time of The Stepfather's release, a New Jersey husband and father, John List, had been a fugitive from justice for over sixteen years for the crime of murder. In November 1971, he had killed his wife, his mother and his three children and then immediately vanished. For nearly a month, after the crime was committed, nobody noticed his disappearance, or were even aware of the carnage he left behind. That whole month, while his neighbours in Westfield went about their business, John List assumed a false identity and moved to Colorado where he soon remarried. (List was finally apprehended in June 1989 when the story of his murders had been broadcast on America's Most Wanted to his new wife's horrified surprise.)

John List
The length of time it took for the investigators to find List was due to the fact that no one could positively identify him. Most witnesses informed detectives that List was 'too ordinary' in both his looks and his behaviour for them to make a clear identification. Not only was he not what many in the neighbourhood would suspect as a mass murderer, List was also a devout Lutheran, who taught Sunday school, and had once served in the U.S. army during World War II. (List had also been given an ROTC commission as a Second Lieutenant.) While attending university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, List had earned his Bachelor's Degree in business administration with a Master's Degree in accounting to follow. He met his wife in 1951 and then quietly blended into suburban American culture for over twenty years before he went on his bloody rampage. For a nation raised on the idea that killers are only recognizable as the slobbering and stubble-faced monsters of B-suspense dramas, the bland and colourless face of a suburban accountant didn't ring any alarm bells in his neighbourhood.

When he made The Stepfather, Joseph Ruben saw a decade that had been dominated by Ronald Reagan's Moral Majority and their fundamentalist idea of conservative family values. The virtuous qualities of Reaganism, according to Ruben, were rooted in those quaint TV sitcoms of the Fifties like Make Room for Daddy and Leave it to Beaver. So Ruben and his screenwriters envisioned their own version of John List, and they created a character who patterned his life and family expectations on those bland suburban shows. But when his current family didn't conform to those expectations, he would massacre them and move on to seek another. In The Stepfather, Terry O'Quinn plays a stridently optimistic real estate agent who sells his idea of the American Dream, but he becomes a living nightmare to his stepdaughter (Jill Schoelen) who quickly suspects the violent intentions that are hidden beneath his façade. With her mother completely blinded by her husband's sweet attentions, the stepdaughter is left to uncover the darkness that has invaded her home. The picture plays with familiar themes developed in earlier movies like Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), where the charming Joseph Cotten plays a serial killer invited to a sleepy American town by his unsuspecting niece; and Charles Laughton's atmospheric Night of the Hunter (1955), where Robert Mitchum, a bogus minister with 'LOVE' tattooed on one hand and 'HATE' on the other, bamboozles the adults who look up to him, but terrifies the children who suspect his motives.

The Stepfather, however, was also on to something new. By 1987, we'd had a glut of horror movies (and their sequels) like Friday the 13th and Halloween, which were the kind of dread-inducing thrillers that gave us masked killers in the guise of faceless bogeymen, allowing movie audiences to project their worst fears on to them. Despite the bloodshed always provided in these pictures, there was no daring in the violence. Quite the contrary. The movies asserted a mainstream morality rather than challenging one. The filmmakers cast promiscuous kids as the killers' victims, thus making the adolescents pay for their erotic transgressions. That's why the heroes of these movies almost always tended to be virgins, the ones who resisted sexual temptation, which gave them the moral strength to vanquish the monster (until the next installment). The Stepfather subverted that genre staple by throwing a curve ball at the audience. The killer was not only recognizably human this time, he could well have been the man next door. He might even be your own stepfather.

The Stepfather (1987)

When The Stepfather opened it was released without the benefit of a press screening, which sent a signal to critics that the picture was probably no more than a run-of-the-mill trashy slasher flick. The television ads didn't help, either, by featuring thrusting knives and cutting comments that guaranteed gruesome thrills for the initiated, but likely scared off the adult audience that might have otherwise responded favourably to the movie. What there was of an audience that Friday afternoon I saw the picture were largely teenagers waiting for the latest Jason or Michael Myers to spook them. But those predictable shocks didn't arrive. The opening scene, while cropping his bearded face, it gave O'Quinn the look of a tenured English professor were it not for the blood smeared on it. Within moments, we watched him turn into the clean-shaven real estate salesman he'd soon become. After he descended the stairs, we slowly and deliberately bore witness to his vicious crimes as if they rose out of some forbidden imagination. The kids at the screening, who were initially chatting excitingly, waiting for the killings, now became deeply quiet and disturbed. I knew then that the movie was doomed. (Despite two ridiculous sequels and an equally stupid 2009 remake, the original picture tanked commercially.) Since the educated audience was already set to ignore The Stepfather as a crude thriller (and they did), the teenagers would likely tell their friends to avoid it because it wasn't one. What sent them into true dismay instead of their anticipated state of dread was that the face of the stepfather wasn't the mask of a bogeyman, but the face of an ordinary man.

Those distressed teenagers came into my mind when a heated debate started to percolate recently on Facebook. Like many in the last week, I've been following the outrage of those responding to Rolling Stone magazine putting the young Boston bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, on their cover. The image, a grainy self-taken photograph by now familiar to us from a variety of news stories on the bombings, is there to draw attention to Janet Reitman's portrait of Tsarnaev in a piece of investigative journalism called "The Bomber." Her article delves into how deceptive the face of terrorism is, just as The Stepfather stirred ambiguity into an audience prone to killers in goalie masks. But rather than be struck by what the Washington Post calls the look of "evil in soft focus," many chose to see the cover instead as the second coming of Justin Bieber. In their mind, Rolling Stone was making a celebrity out of a killer. So stores began to refuse to stock the magazine, the Boston mayor became outraged, and petitions were drawn up to boycott Rolling Stone. All over social media people were complaining that Rolling Stone has "prettied him up," turning Tsarnaev into just another rock star, as if the magazine freed him from custody and posed him in a room for their star-making shot. (No one seems to mention that Reitman's story on Tsarnaev doesn't 'glamourize' him, or turn him into a rock star.)


At first glance, the relaxed handsomeness of the adolescent Tsarnaev is indeed quite a shock, but I think for reasons much different than the outraged are claiming. Magazines have always put disturbing psychopaths on their covers, not just to sell magazines (as many this week have argued) but to grapple with the notion of what makes a killer. But when they're the Columbine shooters (who were featured on the cover of Time magazine) or Charles Manson (who was also in Rolling Stone back in the Seventies), the images comply much more properly to our perceptions of who psychopaths are, so no one gets upset. The face peering out from the July cover of Rolling Stone doesn't accommodate those perceptions. Mark Joseph Stern writing recently in Slate nails the controversy right on the head with a sobering insight. "By depicting a terrorist as sweet and handsome rather than ugly and terrifying, Rolling Stone has subverted our expectations and hinted at a larger truth," he writes. "The cover presents a stark contrast with our usual image of terrorists. It asks, 'What did we expect to see in Tsarnaev? What did we hope to see?' The answer, most likely, is a monster, a brutish dolt with outward manifestations of evil. What we get instead, however, is the most alarming sight of all: a boy who looks like someone we might know." As in Terry O'Quinn's recognizably human stepfather, Tsarnaev looks like anyone we might have gone to school and hung out with.

The photo Rolling Stone used was, in fact, also published earlier in a New York Times story on Tsarnaev. This prompted the newspaper to address the Rolling Stone controversy. "[S]ingling out one magazine issue for shunning is over the top, especially since the photo has already appeared in a lot of prominent places, including the front page of this newspaper, without an outcry," the paper said in an editorial. "As any seasoned reader should know, magazine covers are not endorsements. Time magazine, for example, had quite a few covers featuring Adolf Hitler during the war years. Less than a month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Time featured a less-than-demonic photo of Osama bin Laden. Charles Manson appeared on Rolling Stone’s cover 40-some years ago for a jail-house interview that was as chilling as it was revealing. We could go on." So could I. But why does this same photo, that does not cause a whisper of complaint when the New York Times runs it, prompt a public outcry when it appears in Rolling Stone?


Perhaps the answer lies in Rolling Stone's identity as a pop culture journal aimed at youth. Pop culture magazines are generally looked down upon by educated adult readers because they've already declared them as superficial due to their subject matter. The magazine's motives are therefore considered suspect before people even examine the context for the photo – the article itself. In the minds of those readers who cling too earnestly to their Harpers (or National Review), Rolling Stone has no business doing current affairs (even though the magazine has included credible current affairs coverage by serious journalists - from Hunter S. Thompson to Michael Hastings - throughout its existence). While Rolling Stone may no longer be the cutting edge of alternative journalism, many now perceive the magazine as part of a tabloid world they choose to ignore. The picture of Tsarnaev, with his soft, inviting eyes, has a way of drawing attention to the fact that the face of a murderer can hold the same overpowering beauty as that of a movie star or model. When we are drawn to Tsarnaev, it reveals something about why we are so often fooled by the Ted Bundys and the John Lists – these people who use charm in order to disarm us and draw us into their evil intent. Rather than confront our vulnerability in the face of that charisma, we project our fears of attraction outward. We blame the media for 'glamourizing' a terrorist. No doubt this is why people are spending so much time getting into knots over the cover (and its alleged meaning) rather than bothering to read and discuss the content of Janet Reitman's piece. Talk about people not getting past the cover.

Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers (1994)

There are others who complained that Rolling Stone's decision to run the photo is part of the sick and obsessed celebrity culture we live in. They look back fondly on Oliver Stone's 1994 Natural Born Killers, a hyperbolic crime drama about Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), two mass murderers who become lovers and whose exploits get glorified by the mass media. In it, they see Stone pegging the national malaise that leads to magazines putting terrorists on their covers. It's hard to say what Oliver Stone pegged in this overwrought satire except for an evangelical contempt for the very culture that created Mickey and Mallory (the very opposite of what Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde did in the late Sixties).With the blunt force of a very small hammer, Stone blames TV sitcoms, mass media and the 'stupidity' of our mass culture for the glorification of the killers (which ends up implicitly celebrating their murderous exploits since we get what we deserve for our emptiness). Stone's film shrieks loudly, but it's hardly bold, or even truly controversial (like the Rolling Stone cover). It expresses nothing more than self-righteous hysteria about the moral emptiness of America. (Natural Born Killers features the kind of tub-thumping you used to hear from Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell when he held America in contempt for its 'depraved' behaviour.) Stone likes working over the audience in his films. When Natural Born Killers came out, film critic Hal Hinson of the Washington Post got it right when he said that the picture degenerates into the very thing it criticizes.

What The Stepfather did in 1987, and what Rolling Stone has done now in 2013, is to confront the kind of complacency and cynicism that Oliver Stone caters to in Natural Born Killers. Unlike Stone's picture, they show us the seductive side of evil and then implicate us in the act of seduction. We are trusted to see the discrepancy between the alluring face of the celebrity and the act of a monster. As opposed to all the shrill moralizing about our debased media and celebrity murderers in Natural Born Killers, what Rolling Stone and The Stepfather are saying is that maybe if we could recognize those monsters with two faces, we could also see that there's a huge difference between the art that tells you what to think and the kind that allows you to think.

-- July 24/13

The Laboratory of the Cutting Room Floor: Anticipating Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait



CBS Records announced this past week the forthcoming August release of Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait (which contains session material from that original 1970 album as well as its follow-up, New Morning). It's hard to know what to expect. As another instalment in their Dylan Bootleg Series, which takes us again into their vaults to experience unreleased material, CBS is calling Another Self Portrait an opportunity to "give fans a chance to reappraise the pivotal recordings that marked Dylan's artistic transformation as the 1960s ended and the 1970s began." But the record they've chosen is probably the most reviled in Dylan's catalogue. It also shows us the pitfalls of selling goods defined by the iconic name of the artist rather than by the quality of the material within.

When he released Self Portrait, Bob Dylan essentially pulled a fast one on his fans. And the critics largely hated it. In Rolling Stone, critic Greil Marcus opened his epic review by asking, "What is this shit?" What was this shit? Besides the sly joke of the album's title (he performs mostly covers rather than original material), Dylan positioned the two-record set as a riposte aimed at those who wished to hold him to the mantle of being a spokesman of his generation. "I wish these people would just forget about me," Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1984 looking back at Self Portrait. "I wanna do something they can't possibly like, they can't relate to. They'll see it, and they'll listen, and they'll say, 'Well, let's get on to the next person. He ain't sayin' it no more. He ain't given' us what we want,' you know? They'll go on to somebody else." But the record was also aiming to achieve something more. It represented a somewhat daring, yet failed, attempt to conceptually put his music in the context of the American songbook of Tin Pan Alley. So besides including live versions of his own "Like a Rolling Stone" and "The Mighty Quinn" (from the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival), he performed Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon", Elmore James's "It Hurts Me Too," plus traditional folk material like "Alberta" and "Little Sadie." Self Portrait doesn't fall apart because the concept is bad. It's that Dylan can't fully commit himself to the concept.

The performances are often so shoddy and poorly arranged that their inclusion seems haphazard. Not only are the recordings from the Isle of Wight horribly sloppy, Dylan's cover of Paul Simon's "The Boxer" (where he painfully attempts to be both Simon and Garfunkel), Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain," and The Everly Brothers' "Take a Message to Mary" add nothing to the originals. Unlike on Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding, albums in which Dylan's highly subjective voice demanded to be heard and the songs themselves were bold, funny and could nail an epoch, in Self Portrait he disappears into the arrangements. The songs sing the singer – and not very well. With the exception of a few tracks, like "Copper Kettle" and "All the Tired Horses" (where his voice is actually nowhere to be found, but his spirit is), Self Portrait resembles a bootleg album of hastily assembled tracks. (The album's single, "Wigwam," in which Dylan trills over a bed of Muzak that might have been dreamed up by James Last, is Self Portrait's ultimate sick joke.) There is little on the record, in other words, that illustrates what made Bob Dylan one of our most significant songwriters and performers.

Bob Dylan in 1970

So how does one approach songs from the cutting room floor of an album that should have perhaps been left on the cutting room floor? I haven't obviously heard the whole record yet so I can't say. But the fragments in a teaser trailer CBS put together do illustrate a man tracing the roots of both his musical path and interests. When his near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966 forced him into semi-retirement, it was as if he also retired from the violent battles with his audience to pull back from redefining himself. So he retreated not only into domesticity, but into one of the fruits that domesticity provides: your own record collection. In the safety of his own living room, he became the audience rather than the performer facing one. Among other things, Self Portrait suffers from the sense that Dylan is playing the songs to himself rather than to the listener. But the samples I've heard on Another Self Portrait, from Eric Anderson's "Thirsty Boots" and Tom Paxton's "Annie's Gonna Sing Her Song," actually reach out to an audience. You hear the threads of what not only came to define the musical territory Dylan had already been mining to that point, but also what would later become the Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour on satellite radio. On that program Dylan, as the host, took us on musical journeys through the history of American music – blues, jazz, show-tunes, rock and folk – using a theme like 'the weather' as the clothes line on which he hung the songs. On Another Self Portrait, he also extends to his listeners the country sound he was immersed in with his previous album, Nashville Skyline, by reminding us (as he had on the irreplaceable The Basement Tapes) that his music was not narrowed by the social protests of the topical song. In his mind, the American songbook is an evolving and expanding catalogue tracing a map of the nation's struggles and triumphs.

Another Self Portrait could very well be the album that Self Portrait wasn't. It may compare to how Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993) set Dylan up for his series of records (Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft) that brought his voice back to its authentic sound. In those two early Nineties records, Dylan revisited the songs of his youth, earlier versions of the America that would help him come to terms with the country he was living in now. He then set forth to mine his own path with those tracks ("World Gone Wrong," "Black Jack Davey") as skeleton keys for his own ("Not Dark Yet," "High Water (for Charley Patton)"). But we already know that the history that followed those sessions led into the eventual aimlessness that Good As I Been to You got him out of. The only authentic thing about Self Portrait was its portrait of an artist in hiding. What Another Self Portrait might just reveal is more of what Dylan was actually hiding from.

-- July 28/13

Spare Parts: The Criterion Collection Release of Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984)


In British director Alex Cox's 1984 debut cult film, Repo Man, which the Criterion Collection has recently released on regular and Blu-ray DVD, people are long past being stirred by the sunny allure of Los Angeles. They're now well into its shady violence. The L.A. of this cheerfully nihilistic picture isn't even that sunny anymore. The neon-bright daylight skies (shot by the crack cinematographer Robbie Müller) could be lit by the same florescent bulbs that adorn a 7-11. The night scenes come across as black ink blots brightened by sparsely placed street lamps that make the city look about as desolate as its inhabitants. According to Cox, whatever appeal Los Angeles had in its past, by the Eighties it's nothing more than a junk yard of spare parts where people are essentially hanging on to whatever junk they've got left.

This maniacally funny science fiction comedy basically tells us that the dashed dreamers who once littered this west coast paradise are now hostile predators brutally protective of their possessions. And since it's a pretty common joke that people in L.A. only travel in their cars, it's the car that has now become the vehicle of their rage (just as it was in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend). Since the Hollywood hits of the Eighties were usually 'buddy movies' like Lethal Weapon (1987) and 48 Hrs. (1982), Alex Cox satirizes how in those weepies for men the buddies settle their personal conflicts to learn important life lessons about civility. Repo Man features two guys who really don't give a shit about civility (or each other). The only life lesson they learn is the tools to repossess a car in record time to survive the economic downturn. Cox's punk ethos, which is far less self-conscious than it became later in Sid and Nancy (1986) and Walker (1987), is totally refreshing and it clears your head. Repo Man – gratefully – doesn't set out to improve anybody.

In the story, Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez) is young punker who gets fired from his dull job as a supermarket stock clerk. Upon arriving home, he's horrified to discover that his Sixties boomer parents, who are chronically stoned on grass, have given all the money saved for his education to a televangelist. In total despair and walking the streets, Otto runs into Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), who cons Otto into repossessing a car. When Otto finds out what he's done, he gets enraged and shows his displeasure by pouring a bottle of beer on the floor of the agency. (All the workers there, worn down by their endless cynicism, are revived by Bud's act and yell, "You're alright!") But once Otto sees money in it – that is, instant cash – he becomes Bud's partner in a life that Bud describes as "intense." Intense isn't the half of it. What gives Repo Man a distinctive charge from most cult films is that it doesn't pander to a cult audience. Instead of making a movie with the intent of being worshiped and adored, Cox resists the kind of fetishistic desires that lead people to see cars as extensions of themselves (and a cult movie as a talisman). One of the funniest characters, Miller (Tracey Walter), an acid burn-out tending to the lot's garbage bins and who hasn't lost all his marbles, pretty much sums up the picture's intent by saying, "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are."

Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton

There's a running subplot in Repo Man that comes right out of the early Cold War pictures that deal with the neutron bomb testing at Los Alamos (like Kiss Me Deadly) and the possible hiding of space aliens. A scientist (Fox Harris) is possibly carrying around some space creatures in the trunk of his 1964 Chevy Malibu. (Each time someone opens the trunk to investigate, they get vapourized by radiation.) But the film's plotting slackens when Otto's girlfriend Leila (Olivia Barash) tells him there's a $20,000 reward offered by the government for the car, and he and rival repo men from Mexico compete for it. Repo Man's single-minded drive ends up a little too dispersed towards the end. (Fox Harris, though, with his frizzy mad scientist hair and thick eye-glasses, is a hilarious and ingenious cuckoo – a chatty conspiracy nut on amphetamines.) The pairing of Harry Dean Stanton, with his pock-marked face that seems eaten away by ravenous inertia, and Emilio Estevez, with his baby-faced anomie, is also truly inspired. Stanton's Bud is so used to the dull ritual of taking people's cars that Estevez's continued petulance gives him a caffeine jolt. And Tracey Walters, a regular in many Jonathan Demme pictures, is a feral pixie, a punkier Puck, who muses on hilariously in fractured sentences about the "cosmic unconsciousness."

Repo Man, like the cars that get repossessed, is hot-wired by various lively punk songs by Iggy Pop (the main title song), Black Flag and The Circle Jerks (who pretty much sum up the ethos of the picture with "When the Shit Hits the Fan") and The Plugz, whose delirious "Hombre Secreto (Secret Agent Man)" brings the Johnny Rivers' classic back from the dead. But if Repo Man stays true to its punk aesthetic, that doesn't mean its punk refusal is an empty stance with a decorative bobby-pin through its cheek. At one point, Bud lectures Otto by saying, "Never broke into a car... Never broke into a truck. 'I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof, nor through inaction let the personal contents thereof come to harm.'" Otto, high on speed and in a frenzied daze, can't fully comprehend the lecture, so Bud adds, "It's what I call the Repo Code, kid!" Repo Man, with its shaggy insolence, does have its own dignity.

-- August 11/13

Nobody Home: World War Z, Moonrise Kingdom, The Master, Blue Jasmine and In a World...


Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom

You can see the pervasive impact of marketing on contemporary movies today simply by observing just how many pictures are driven more by their advertising concept than the actual drama itself. In the big budget apocalyptic picture World War Z, for instance, where zombies are overtaking humans, the undead have more dramatic motivation than the people trying to stay alive. In one scene, Brad Pitt plays a father desperately attempting to get medicine for his asthmatic daughter who is suffering from an attack. But as soon as he finds a pharmacy, not only does he forget to administer the medicine, her attack magically disappears and the movie forgets all about it. The audience hardly notices though since they are eagerly awaiting the next zombie attack. But this kind of dramatic deficiency isn't just the domain of the Hollywood blockbuster, where the sheer size and spectacle becomes the only form of engagement the mass audience seems to want from movies. This lack of realism is also germane to the success of many independent and art house features.

Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is a picture of human behaviour – adult and child alike – that one might have perceived at the age of ten, but the film isn't actually an examination of that behaviour. Anderson's idea of whimsy is to enshrine the sort of adolescent narcissism that most of us learn to outgrow. All of his films (with the exception of Fantastic Mr. Fox) avoid confronting the pains of moving into adulthood because they are about protecting the tender preciousness of staying young. In other words, his pictures are a treacly tribute to arrested development. Yet when I hear audience and critics applauding Moonrise Kingdom for its charm, I can only guess they are responding to its quirky solipsism, where the characters don't so much reveal themselves in the dialogue, but rather the dialogue comes to define their quirkiness. People may want to see their own preciousness celebrated rather than examined through drama. This could explain why Wes Anderson's work, over the years, has become a successful commodity that marketing executives can sell as 'unique.'

P.T. Anderson's The Master

P.T. Anderson's hugely-celebrated The Master, a film about cultism, has also developed its own little cult of followers. And like in most of his previous work (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood), the ideas don't spring from any dramatic logic in the story but instead from the imposed style of the director. This is an age when film directors are worshipped and screenwriters barely acknowledged, so The Master gives us cinephilia at its most solipsistic. It doesn't matter to those who admire it whether anything makes dramatic sense because it makes filmic sense. Who cares why Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is trying to raise money among society matrons for his Scientology-like enterprise, takes on Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) as his disciple and spokesman, a war-damaged World War II vet? What does it matter that Freddie's unpredictable violent outbursts would surely alienate those who might otherwise support Dodd's The Cause? We're just supposed to believe in the interdependence of their relationship. For some viewers, this could be a tony commentary on the appeal of the con artist in American culture that comes to confirm their already held opinions about America. The rigorously stylized script and the obsessive tone of The Master, acclaimed as masterly, only shows us film technique as a fetish at the expense of sense and sensibility.

Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine

In the recent Woody Allen picture Blue Jasmine, in which Allen is clearly inspired by A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the great American plays, there is little understanding of what makes Tennessee Williams' work so dramatically compelling and complex. Despite a breathtaking performance by Cate Blanchett (as the Blanche DuBois figure, she takes the picture to levels of tragic realism that the rest of the picture seeks to avoid), Blue Jasmine is hopelessly incoherent and tone deaf. (The audience I saw the picture with didn't even know whether they should be laughing or not – and often found themselves laughing at inappropriate moments – because Allen shows no empathy for or understanding of the working class characters that surround Jasmine, a social climber who has taken a tragic fall.) But the picture is currently being praised as a masterpiece that shows Allen going to new depths despite his total failure to understand even the basic workings of procedural drama. For instance, when Jasmine discovers her husband (Alec Baldwin), a corporate criminal, has been sleeping around on her, she takes revenge by calling the cops to rat on him about his business dealings – and they show up immediately to arrest him without gathering any evidence to build their case. How can you believe the bigger picture in Blue Jasmine when Woody Allen can't get the smaller dramatic details right? The audiences for Moonrise Kingdom and The Master are attracted to those pictures because they have the perceived outside status of the art house. Blue Jasmine is the work of an industry insider who makes movies for the kind of literate audiences who read The New Yorker and already reject the Hollywood that produces World War Z. Since popular culture has become more and more niche marketed to target specific audience tastes, the movies today (like pop music) don't deviate from their dictated norms.

If the younger intelligent film audience that turns up for Moonrise Kingdom has no patience for conventional drama, it isn't necessarily because they're more hip than the mass audience. It may be that they prefer their stories pre-interpreted for them as detached irony. They often take their cue from the tone of TV satires like Arrested Development that have acquired a cult following. And you can feel the residue of that kind of thinking in the acclaim currently being bestowed on writer/actress/director Lake Bell's In a World.... Describing it as a sharp feminist comedy – as many critics have – is merely another way of reiterating what the film already explicitly tells us it is. Carol (Lake Bell) aspires to be a voice-over narrator for movie trailers (in particular, for a feminist tetralogy called Amazon Games which spoofs The Hunger Games). The obstacle to her success is not only her father (the lugubrious Fred Melamed), who is the 'king of voice-overs,' but the male-dominated profession that stands in her way. A clever and ironic comedy could be made about how an independent career woman seeks success in a business that demands that you become the impersonal voice for ads that sell movies. But In a World... isn't that picture. It's far too conventional (while chalking up timely gender commentary) for that. The stakes simply aren't very high here – you can pretty much guess early on that Carol will not only triumph in her quest, but will also win the love of the sensitive guy who knows and appreciates her true inner self. Yet it's not just the soft-sell romantic charm the picture promotes that makes it so innocuous. At the screening I attended most people laughed almost the entire time. But the laughter didn't feel like a form of surprise, of being caught up in an inspired gag; it seemed in response to a movie telling them exactly what they already wanted to hear. (Which is what early laugh tracks on TV comedies were used for.)

Lake Bell's In a World... 

Lake Bell (Children's Hospital, Surface), in her directorial debut, doesn't allow the comedy to breathe and percolate. She flattens out the story by creating characters who are exactly the kinds of people we assume them to be. Bell provides no subtext and no mystery to discover in them. And when they do speak, it is in a lingo that isn't dialogue, exactly, but more an ironic commentary on dialogue. (Many of my friends who enjoyed Arrested Development, a show that mystified me, loved that program for just those qualities.) In a World...actually most resembles those popular and celebrated Susan Seidelman comedies from the Eighties like Desperately Seeking Susan and Making Mr. Right, films that were very insular, as if the characters only existed in the world the movie created for them. Like Seidelman's films, Bell sacrifices dramatic and comedic engagement for self-conscious social commentary. For instance, I don't think we're supposed to care about why Carol desires the voice-over job, or even if she is talented enough to take it. We're just supposed to be in there rooting for her because she's standing up to the patriarchy. (Ken Marino as Gustav, the boorish and chauvinistic heir to the voice-over throne, is the kind of straw man whose wardrobe announces his misogyny before his mouth does.)

In a World... is actually a marketing division's dream because it's a sure package that can't miss. It features a female actor/writer/director on the rise who has pulled the movie together through her own perseverance. She raised the money and garnered the industry support that took the film to Sundance where it won Best Screenplay. But while it's an independently made film with a feminist subject, it still has the beating heart of the most blatantly commercial projects. Even public radio, seizing on the movie's pedigree, is getting good at providing ad copy rather than critical observations. In praising In a World..., American NPR recently said that "underneath the comedy, it's a moving story about female empowerment." And, with no whisper of irony intended, they also added that "it's a movie trailer industry counterpart to Rocky." Maybe someone at NPR is also itching to voice trailers.

-- August 18/13

It's probably not surprising that Charles Manson, despite his psychopathy, heard the beginnings of a race war on The Beatles' 1968 White Album, especially since the album owes as much to black music as With the Beatles did in 1963. In fact, the music heard here, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, does emulate black discontent rather than the romantic hopes heard in the Beatle cover versions of "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" or "Please Mr. Postman." The anger buried within the black sound tapped on the White Album would ultimately find its own distinct voice in 2004. A DJ named Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) had taken samples from the White Album and mixed them with the work of rap artist Jay-Z's The Black Album (2003). Jay-Z was born Shawn Corey Carter in the New York projects a year after the White Album was first released. Besides being one of the most financially successful hip-hop artists, Jay-Z was also the former CEO of DefJam Recordings and Roc-A-Fella Records. He went on the co-own The 40/40 Club and the New Jersey Nets NBA basketball team. Yet even though he was one of the most successful rap artists in America, after his acclaimed 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z decided that he'd had enough of the business in 2003 and wished to retire.

His farewell album was called The Black Album. The "Intro" told listeners that his time had come to quit. From there, the album became an angry and defiant memoir, not unlike John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, which summed up his career while simultaneously re-assessing it. On "December 4," Jay-Z even featured his own mother Gloria Carter describing giving birth to Jay, after which, he raps about his parent's divorce and how he soon took to the streets. When his mother bought him a boombox, to help deter him from a criminal life, Jay-Z's love of music began. In 2004, shortly after the release of The Black Album, Jay Z put out an a cappella version of the album to allow for DJ re-mixes and mash-ups, which is how the album came to the attention of Danger Mouse. "I had seen that there were these a cappella Jay-Z records," Danger Mouse explained. "I was listening to the White Album later that day, and it hit me like a wave. I was like, 'Wait a minute! I can do this." It wasn't the first time he'd sampled The Beatles either. When Danger Mouse was taking a college class on the History of Rock, the instructor told him how The Beatles had assembled "A Day in the Life" from two disparate pieces. "So I remixed 'A Day in the Life' with a song by Jemini The Gifted One, who was one of my favourite rappers at the time," Danger Mouse recalled. "And that was the weird remix I had on my mixtape: Jemini's Funk Soul Sensation instrumental mixed with The Beatles." Although sampling had always been a huge part of hip-hop culture since the mid-Seventies, the idea of using one album as a sole source of sampling was totally unique. Without seeking permission from the surviving Beatles, Danger Mouse first burned a sample mix for a few friends, but within a month more than a million copies had been downloaded on the Internet. The Grey Album was a hybrid record that darkened The Beatles' sound while providing lighter shadings to Jay-Z's angry confessions.


All through The Grey Album, Danger Mouse doesn't attempt to match the beat and rhythm of both records as he does find the right sound to accompany Jay-Z's voice and lyrics. But sometimes he finds the right Beatles song. In "Encore," where Jay-Z speaks out to fans who want more than he's already given, Danger Mouse samples the melody of Lennon's bitter "Glass Onion," underscoring Jay-Z's declarations with John shouting, "Oh yeah!" The video for "Encore," seen on YouTube, features footage from the TV special scene in A Hard Day's Night. As The Beatles take the stage, with a worried Victor Spinetti surveying the monitors in the control room, Jay-Z takes the stage to join the group. As The Beatles perform the samples from "Glass Onion," the video features a simulation of images non-associated with The Beatles: Ringo doing some record scratching, as Lennon break-dances in front of a chorus of showgirls. During the mournful "What More Can I Say," where Jay-Z laments his monumental career in rap, Danger Mouse samples the appropriate "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." To fit the angry sniping of "99 Problems," Danger Mouse turns to "Helter Skelter," with all its historical associations, to provide some searing textures that vividly embroider the song. Besides introducing the hip-hop crowd to The Beatles' music, The Grey Album also redefines the White Album for a contemporary audience by discovering its R&B undercurrents –undercurrents that were cured in the resentment of the dashed hopes of the Sixties.

While Entertainment Weekly hailed the CD as the Best Album of the year, EMI was not so fond of it and launched a number of lawsuits. Since Danger Mouse didn't get permission from EMI to sample The Beatles, their lawyers immediately sent him a cease-and-desist letter for distribution, reproduction and public performance of the White Album. But in the age of music file downloading, The Grey Album was alive and well online. Furthermore, in February 2004, to protest EMI's actions, more than 300 Web sites and blogs staged a 24-hour online protest called "Grey Tuesday" where 150 sites offered the album free for downloads. Today the bootleg is still available to download, despite continuous legal threats. As for Jay-Z, he ultimately ended his short-lived retirement. In late 2006, turning his back on The Black Album, he stormed back with the hit CD Kingdom Come. In the first week of release, he was back selling 680,000 copies. While his denunciation of a ruthless business and a duplicitous culture that spawned him continued to breathe life over the World Wide Web through Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, Kingdom Come re-instated his desire to be back in the game, top of the heap, happily plugging his highest-selling album in a one-week period. As for The Beatles, the White Album signalled that it was soon to be lights out.

-- September 1/13

The Jazz of Melancholy: Alan Zweig's When Jews Were Funny


Alan Zweig interviews comedian Norm Crosby
In his book The Haunted Smile, Lawrence J. Epstein talks about Jewish comedy as if it were perched at the edge of an abyss. "Their stage style is tinged with sadness," Epstein writes. "It is haunted by the Jewish past, by the deep strains in American Jewish life to be strained – the desire to be accepted and the concern for a culture disappearing – by the centuries of Jewish life too frequently interrupted by hate, and by the knowledge that too often for Jewish audiences a laugh masked a shudder." In the new documentary When Jews Were Funny, director Alan Zweig gets caught up in his own personal quest for the comic sources of that shudder. By turning to an older generation of Jewish comedians – including Shelley Berman, Norm Crosby, Jack Carter and Sheckey Greene – Zweig seeks to identify what makes their work particularly Jewish in nature.

But if you're at all familiar with Zweig's other documentaries, such as Vinyl and I, Curmudgeon, you know that he isn't drawn dispassionately to compelling subjects such as this one. Zweig brings his own personal obsessions into his work, as well as a scabrous intensity that scratches wounds barely under the surface of the skin of his pictures. Which is why When Jews Were Funny is not only about the dread beneath the gag, it's also about Zweig's own discomfiting search for what made the Jewish comics of his youth so funny; that is, was it their Jewishness, or was it something else? It's about the fears of becoming "an old Jew," someone predominantly characterized by the mask worn to disguise that shudder, to which Zweig (who is now 60 and a recent father) gives grave consideration. Not surprisingly, some comedians, like Howie Mandel and Gilbert Gottfried, jump into the fire that Zweig sets, while others (like Shelley Berman and Bob Einstein) dance uneasily around the tips of the flames.

director Alan Zweig

When comedian David Steinberg tells Zweig that oppression helps Jewish humour while assimilation hurts it, he's on to something that lies (although not fully explored) at the core of the film. If Jewish success in America, especially in the case of the Hollywood moguls who built what Neal Gabler called "an empire of their own," was predicated on creating a fantasy culture of inclusion, it came with the Jewish guilt of abandoning their heritage (a story acted out in The Jazz Singer and expressed unwittingly by some of Zweig's subjects). But Steinberg seems to be telling us that what better way to take away the pain of that guilt, and even conceal it, than through humour? The comedy of shame, guilt and denial has, of course, taken many forms. For instance, Groucho Marx's daughter was once denied access to a gentile club where she wanted to go swimming. Groucho famously replied that he wouldn't belong to any club that would have someone like him for a member – adding that since his daughter was only half-Jewish, could she not go into the pool up to her waist?

When the young Jewish teenagers in Barry Levinson's Liberty Heights (1999) face a sign barring them from access to a public pool in mid-Fifties Baltimore ("No Jews, dogs or coloreds allowed") they turn it into a gag. One of them questions how the order on the list was arrived at. Why did Jews come first, for example? On what grounds? Another poses a more logical question: What would happen if a dog showed up at the pool? Would he read the sign and then leave? The paranoia of gentile aggression, shared by more contemporary Jewish comedians including Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, aren't of interest to Zweig in When Jews Were Funny. He is drawn to the earlier age of Jewish comics who couched their hostility in gags about their wives, as Catskills comics like Henny Youngman did, or harmlessly joked about getting no respect, like Rodney Dangerfield.

Comedian Howie Mandel in When Jews Were Funny

Although Alan Zweig doesn't back away from the uneasiness of the material in When Jews Were Funny, he doesn't provide enough illustrations to either illuminate or provide contrast to what his subjects are saying. (The film is terribly short on source material, relying – perhaps due to cost – on only a few archival TV performances. These decisions leave the picture tonally banal with a collection of talking heads occasionally being interrupted by TV footage.) When Howie Mandel talks about how Jews "squeeze pleasure" into their life experience, you want to see examples of how this fits into the comic material of their work. Zweig instead moves on to the next comic. Impresario Mark Breslin describes Jewish comedy as "the jazz of melancholy" and you get hungry for that kind of mordant riffing, only Zweig carries on with his continuous probing. It's also a shame that Zweig has left out a number of notable female Jewish comics like Joan Rivers and Sarah Silverman. It's true that he does include Judy Gold and Cory Kahaney, but when they raise the imposing spectre of the Jewish mother, Zweig doesn't delve very far into why they do, or how she becomes this looming figure for these comics.

When Jews Were Funny has such a rich subject that it's a shame the movie isn't better. Alan Zweig's own personal questions about what it means for him to be Jewish have clearly motivated the film, but he hasn't fully pondered the significance of his questions. Mark Breslin is right when he says that the history of twentieth century comedy is Jewish, and he goes even further when he says that winning that prize has also spelled a crisis for Jewish comedy. In When Jews Were Funny, Alan Zweig is clearly uneasy about the prize that's won. Though he puts his finger on that very crisis in Jewish humour, his film doesn't go far enough in unmasking it.

-- September 8/13

David Bowie Is 



"White rock & roll had always been about inspired impostures," critic Tom Carson once wrote back in the Seventies perhaps implicitly invoking Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger. He made clear that their intent was to set themselves apart from the larger culture while simultaneously creating an alternate one for other outsiders to join. "The pact made made between rock performers and their listeners in the Fifties and Sixties was that those pretenses had conviction." In other words, their showmanship promised more than just a desire to entertain; they sought to transform their world – and ours – with an impassioned desire to create a new one. So for those who felt set apart from the demands of this older order, a compliant society that demanded you conform to its idea of normalcy, Elvis, Dylan, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones engaged our estrangement and opened up possibilities for us to remake it – and ourselves in the process.

David Bowie, on the other hand, was far less demonstrative in his appeal. "Bowie's show, by contrast, was a show – explicitly artificial and camp, not from ineptitude but brazen intention," Carson went on to say. "Through his invented alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, the singer presented rock & roll as a dying religion: Ziggy himself was a synthetic messiah, an alien come to earth to enact a parody version of that emblematic counter-culture fantasy, the rock star as martyr." With all his talent and awareness of the cultural shifts that came to define rebellion in 20th Century art, including Dadaism and surrealism, David Bowie became a virtual catalogue of those transgressive movements. While walking through the David Bowie is exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, however, you can become acutely aware that. For all his attraction to transgression, Bowie never offered a true self to give his rebellion intent. His revolt merely provided a mirror for those who only wished to see their rebellion reflected in his shape-shifting personality. In other words, David Bowie was the first rock performer to make passivity seem sexy.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

The adolescent narcissism that Bowie always appealed to wasn't new. James Dean had it with his physically contorted expressions of alienation. But Bowie came of age in the Seventies when youth rebellion had lost its aggressive insolence. In the world of glam, sensitivity was defined by creating a fetish out of the notion of feeling different, of finding yourself in a mirror while preening, rather than shattering the reflection that the mirror holds. Even with his sex role dimensions, Bowie never suggested a specific gender in which to transform himself. (In his starring role in The Man Who Fell to Earth, as Pauline Kael pointed out, he was the first movie star to have his crotch airbrushed.) While there was impudent power in his best music, there really wasn't the threat of danger in Bowie's many character roles, as there was in James Dean, Brando, or Mick Jagger. Aggression got turned inward so that Bowie's costumes and masks provided protection from a hostile world rather than using them to face up to the outrage that hostility can stir and marshalling the defiance needed to confront it.

"Bowie's much-vaunted androgyny seemed more than anything an aspect of to be all things to all pop people – in sequence, never simultaneously," Greil Marcus once wrote in Rolling Stone. "He became 'new' so regularly that his personality ceased to exist." Bowie is provides a fascinating and shifting portrait of a modern day aesthete who became a bridge to a laundry line of personae rather than inhabiting them himself.

-- October 22/13

A Future Nostalgia: The Quest Homeward of Paul McCartney



At the age of 71, Paul McCartney continues to build his legacy, never content to coast on the sizable reputation he built as part of one of popular music's most significant groups. But as he goes forward, with a new album – called New – it's curious how much McCartney draws from his past in order to move forward with a more contemporary sound. He performs as a man who knows full well that he can't out-jump his own shadow so by embracing it he casts his reflection forward. Yet just as he dabbles in keeping current, there is still a relentless quest in his music to get back, to seek a place of refuge while continually defining his musical future. (The latest album has four producers on it to help him do so.) Once was a way to get back homeward, he once sang confidently in 1969 on "Golden Slumbers." But for Paul McCartney, all his life, getting back homeward became an illusive task. As his career scaled musical heights not imagined, McCartney always looked to the past for some point of reference, or maybe for some profound meaning to make sense of how far he'd come as an artist. Who could blame him? With The Beatles, he not only was living out a dream, but the dream took on a life that made him feel larger than he truly was. His songs once had a power that they couldn't attain now that he was on his own. Writing in The Beatles was about more than just honing his craft. It fulfilled McCartney's ambitions and gave full shape to his creative impulses; it completed him. With the band gone after 1970, looking back could have seemed futile. But without a burning sense of the past, McCartney couldn't see a future in front of him.

Unlike John Lennon, who consistently sought to escape his own history, McCartney always looked for a means to seize it. In "Yesterday," a young man reflects on still innocent times, when personal troubles were nothing more than a blur fading into the distant. By finding shelter in that past, he might eventually become the man he'd hoped to be. Early on Lennon identified a dwelling for himself – in his mind. He sought satisfaction there in a song like "There's a Place" because he could discover none in the real world. McCartney, on the other hand, finds no true comfort anywhere in "Yesterday," only the need for a place to hide away. Even on an earlier composition, "Things We Said Today," which seemed anchored in the present, he included hints of yearning back. "It was a slightly nostalgic thing already, a future nostalgia," McCartney told friend and journalist Barry Miles. "[W]e'll remember the things we said today, some time in the future, so the song projects itself into the future, and then is nostalgic about the moment we're living in now, which is quite a good trick." The thought of looking into the future, while living in the present, but always looking back to the past, was actually less a trick than the continued state of Paul McCartney's mind.

George Harrison and Paul McCartney in the studio

An unfinished McCartney song fragment, recorded in 1968 during a studio session for The Beatles, found its way onto the record between Lennon's pensive "Cry Baby Cry" and the musique concrete of "Revolution 9." The song, which arrived suddenly like a cry from the beyond repeated a phrase over an acoustic arrangement borrowed from "I Will" (a song McCartney had just been recording). It was the phrase, "Can you take me back where I came from, can you take me back?" But this lovely yet eerie ballad, heard in a faint echo, seemed weightless, practically haunting itself. Take you back where?, it left you asking. After the mournful weight of "Cry Baby Cry," "Can You Take Me Back?" seemed a faint plea from a ghost ship, a desperate appeal for solace that would never find resolution. Before you could even grasp where McCartney needed to go, his voice gently faded into the background, and then suddenly vanished from the record.

By 2005, rather than continuing to compose songs that sought a way home, McCartney began literally trying to get back. He had experienced too much grief to endure in recent times. It had been 25 years since Lennon, his former writing partner and creative adversary, had been murdered. His loving wife and collaborator Linda McCartney had died of breast cancer in April 1998. George Harrison, his childhood friend and fellow Beatle, was also dead from cancer. His new marriage to model Heather Mills was quickly coming undone. McCartney may have started to wonder if he actually had become the character in "Yesterday." The troubles that he wished were far away now covered his life with heartbreak and loss. The dream life he had once accomplished for himself didn't conform to the life he was now living as a popular solo musician. So McCartney had the idea to retrace his professional steps. A new album and a special concert to promote it might provide clues to solving the puzzle of his life.


The first step in that direction, though, actually began a few years earlier in 1999, in the same dank basement cellar where manager Brian Epstein had first heard The Beatles in 1961: Liverpool's Cavern Club. The material McCartney had chosen to take to the Cavern (which had since been renovated) was fitting for the occasion. It was, in fact, some of the same music Epstein would have known. McCartney had just recorded a new album called Run Devil Run, a sparkling catalogue of hard driving rock songs from the Fifties. He came to excavate the seminal work of his life as a way to re-connect to the very source of what he loved most (as Lennon had also done less successfully on Rock & Roll back in 1975). Run Devil Run revealed to the listener McCartney's polished showman's instincts in picking songs that best defined his varied strengths. His tastes may be erratic, with a tendency towards the maudlin, but his sense of his own personal musical roots is sure. It's what earned him the right to lead his own band.

McCartney brought together a talented ensemble including Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour, guitarist Mick Green, pianist Pete Wingfield, and drummer Ian Paice, and put them through the same rigorous recording schedule The Beatles had once adhered to. They would play through all the giants of Fifties rock: Gene Vincent ("Blue Jean Bop"), Larry Williams ("She Said Yeah"), Ricky Nelson ("Lonesome Town"), Fats Domino ("Coquette") and, of course, Elvis ("All Shook Up," "I Got Stung," "Party"). There was also one McCartney original ("What it Is"). He would later say about re-visiting this developmental music that "it [was] the magic drama they created in the music that was important, not the person." This was McCartney's way of saying that Run Devil Run was more than just a nostalgic tribute album to the heroes of his past; the album also connected him to the intimate moments of his own past, where dream and intent had converged, where The Beatles' magic drama had fully surfaced. "[I]t wasn't always the song or how good the singer was, it was how good my memory of it was, whether it was a really glowing hot ember of a memory," McCartney told Jim Irvin in Mojo.


That glowing hot ember was burning pretty bright in 2005, too, when he decided to record an album of new songs titled Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. Rather than produce the record himself, he brought on board Radiohead's Nigel Godrich. With Godrich, McCartney sought to move away from the melodic lyricism of his more traditional songs and experiment instead with creating innovative tunes with layered patterns. "I think that's what Nigel wanted," McCartney told Jon Wilde in Uncut. "A friend of mine heard it and said, 'It's like you're taking me to a place with this album.'" The place he was taking us to wasn't home, exactly, but maybe it traced the beginning of how to get there. The front cover of the CD provided a small clue. It was a stark black & white photo, taken by his brother Mike in 1962, featuring Paul sitting alone in the backyard of his parents' house, below a clothes line full of drying sheets, strumming his acoustic guitar and singing a song. The picture was taken through a window shielded by some net curtains, made by his late mother Mary; in the frame, they appear to be silhouetting her talented son. The photo, taken the year The Beatles would release their first single "Love Me Do," shows Paul looking off beyond the yard (perhaps dreaming for the moment he would no longer be alone). What the CD cover tells us is that, for McCartney, chaos underscored his life after the early death of his mother from breast cancer. But music was his salve for healing those wounds. He abandoned the isolation of that backyard when he embraced John Lennon's The Quarry Men as his new residence. Grief and the hope for salvation became the cornerstone of The Beatles' music. That same mixture would form the ambiance of Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.

To launch the CD, McCartney decided to give a small concert for an invited audience and film it at Abbey Road Studios. The event served as a coming home to where chaos actually turned into creation. As McCartney walked onto the studio floor, he looked out towards the invited guests, pleased to be there but overwhelmed to find himself in surroundings that held indelible memories. "That's where the grown-ups lived," McCartney said, pointing up to the control room and reminding the audience of the time he was a kid about to make his first record. He talked about his nervousness in recording "Love Me Do" because, in order for Lennon to play his harmonica in the chorus, McCartney had to sing the title over it. He then glanced around the studio floor, wistfully taking it in. He imagined Lennon singing "Girl" in one corner, Harrison plucking his guitar in another, and right behind him, he could picture Ringo keeping time. As the past appeared almost ready to swallow him up, McCartney quickly announced, "I want to try things a little bit different."

Chaos and Creation in Abbey Road

After introducing Nigel Godrich, who would record certain effects and play prepared tape loops, McCartney grabbed an acoustic guitar and launched into a new song from the album. "Friends to Go," which he described as "a George song," was a fascinating McCartney tune. Addressing the singer's need to reveal himself, because he's been hiding and waiting for friends to leave, the number seems to have a lot in common emotionally with Lennon's "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away." "Friends to Go" makes you aware of the gaps in McCartney's creative life because he was now exposing them in this song. McCartney followed it up with "How Kind of You," a song about being grateful for someone's love and friendship. There's an elegiac beauty to this song. It tells us something of his desire for the community of friends, and how the loss of his mates has deprived him of it. Meanwhile Godrich uses loops of an epiphonic acoustic guitar to add textures that sound like pouring water on wounds to wash away the pain. After finally rendering himself defenseless, McCartney began to launch into his musical past.

First, he began rubbing the top of a series of empty wine glasses with his fingers, recording a drone effect, before performing "Band on the Run" as a rousing sea shanty. Later he transformed "Lady Madonna" from its original barrelhouse tribute to Fats Domino into a blues dirge. He danced as lightly as Fred Astaire through Eddie Cochran's turns of phrase in "Twenty Flight Rock," the cover song that got him into Lennon's group. Later he unveiled Bill Black's original stand-up bass, the one featured in "Heartbreak Hotel," when Black was in Elvis's band. McCartney wrapped his arms lovingly around the neck and performed his own version of the song. He was enjoying the freedom of opening up territory, connecting with the crowd, and taking them into new and interesting facets and interpretations of his work. He was re-inventing himself, and his music, in the very place where he had first begun recording it. With a new authority, he used the occasion to invoke his old partners who were no longer there. To accomplish that goal, towards the end he created a song on the spot where, with the magic of overdubbing, he got to play bass, rhythm and lead guitar, plus drums, to become – in spirit, anyway – The Beatles. But as enjoyable as this track was, McCartney knew that he couldn't escape the shadow The Beatles had created. After all, what was he singing? "Gotta go home," he cried happily. Gotta get back.

One poignant moment stood out from all the others. Early on, he started to play an old song, "In Spite of All the Danger," that many in the audience didn't know, summoning his former mates without being consumed by their loss. Recorded in 1958 with The Quarry Men, "In Spite of all the Danger" was the group's first record. And in it, the only tune that McCartney and George Harrison ever wrote together, lay the genesis of the utopian promise The Beatles would set forth – then try in vain to live up to. Encouraging the throng to sing along with him, McCartney sang that in spite of all the danger, he'd do anything for you, anything you'd want him to, as long as you'd be true. The lyric never once indicated what the danger was, but we assumed that it was looming, ready to pounce, if that promise wasn't fulfilled. Even in 1958, perhaps, McCartney recognized that the danger in any dream – especially a romantic one – was the fear that it wouldn't come true, or more to the point, that it wouldn't last. "In Spite of All the Danger" is about how The Beatles' story began, and in a way, it's about how it ended. Yet that night, McCartney offered that hope once again and the audience affirmatively joined in, forgetting the heartbreak that inevitably followed the promise that the song made. And at that moment, the long-time burden of being a Beatle appeared to be lifted: McCartney had happily recalled a point in time when he was one. He was home.

-- October 25/13

Blunt: Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave



During an interview with American composer Randy Newman on the National Public Radio show Morning Edition in the fall of 2003, host Bob Edwards questioned Newman's motivation for composing "Sail Away," a sweeping and majestic track about the slave trade told from the point of view of the slave trader. In the song, Newman not only steps inside the skin of this flesh merchant, he introduces his African captives to an idea of freedom which turns out to hold the fruits of every horror they will later face as black Americans. But the orchestral arrangement is so majestic, it arouses an eagerness to jump on board in spite of the words you're hearing. Shocked that Newman could write such a beautiful song about such a shocking subject, Edwards pressed on. "What am I supposed to say," Newman replied, "'Slavery is bad?' It's like falling out of an airplane and hitting the ground. It's just too easy. And it has no effect."

Newman could just as easily be describing Steve McQueen's new and highly acclaimed film 12 Years a Slave. If McQueen's first picture, Hunger (2008), boiled a complex situation down to a blunt portrait of one man starving himself to death out of political principle; and his second, Shame (2011), reduced a character's sexual obsession to a prurient judgment of his pathology, 12 Years a Slave, a true story about a free Northern black man, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) sold into slavery, repeatedly tells us – with the impact of a blunt instrument – that 'slavery is bad.' This approach may be too easy, but (judging by the enthusiastic reviews and huge box office) it has apparently been highly effective. McQueen achieves this acclaim by opting for endless scenes of pictorial abasement to whip up the audience's outrage rather than dramatically engaging us in Northup's fate. McQueen's glacial temperament and his freeze-dried painterly style (literally, with its nods here to Goya) treats melodrama as a formal exercise.

Set in 1841, the story begins with Northrup (who lives in Saratoga, New York, with his wife and two children and makes his living as a skilled carpenter and violin player) lured into a lucrative touring gig by a pair of men who actually plan to drug him and sell him into slavery. For the rest of the movie, we watch as he endures the horrors of bondage for over a decade until he's helped to freedom by a Canadian labourer (Brad Pitt) who is hired to work on a plantation that's holding Northup. All though the picture, we can see that Northrup has to hide his identity as an educated man in order to survive the white slavers who believe that blacks are inferior. But McQueen doesn't show us what Northup has to hide before he's sold into bondage which means that Ejiofor is reduced to giving a pantomime performance. He either becomes the victim of callous brutality, or a passive witness to it. He's given no dramatic shadings to provide hints of awareness as to how much his fate is changing him. When there is an opportunity for dramatic insight into his character, as in one moment during a flashback when we see a black slave follow Northup and his family into a Saratoga store because he's obviously curious about how this black man moves about so freely, McQueen lets the scene go limp. (If he had surer dramatic instincts, McQueen would have shown in that moment that Northup's Northern status had cocooned him from the knowledge that slavery is as much about class as it is about race. Instead, the characters are left staring ironically into each other's eyes pointlessly until the significance of the scene is lost.)

Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor

If Ejiofor is given no more to play than noble dignity, the plantation owners (with the exception of Benedict Cumberbatch as a conflicted slaver who gives his scenes a core of ambiguity) are right out of the worst exploitation films. Once again Michael Fassbender is forced, as he was in Shame, to play an affliction rather than a character. As Edwin Epps, a violently racist and abusive planter, he seems to be channelling Perry King's overheated sexual psychopath from the lurid Mandingo. Not only does he mistreat his workers, he has an obsessive hunger for a young slave girl, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), whom he rapes at will. Of course, his sexually starved and jealous wife, played with a dutiful earnestness by Sarah Paulson, spends the film taunting her tortured husband and abusing Patsey. (McQueen isn't content either showing us Patsey getting brutally beaten once by the wronged wife, but has her attacked yet again, and later mercilessly whipped by Epps. Does the director share his characters' depravities?) While you can't help but feel for Nyong'o's Patsey, her victimization gets treated so artfully that it has the effect of aestheticizing the violence so that the audience can feel nothing but revulsion. As the slaver's right hand man, Paul Dano is a Confederate cartoon. He chews up scenery with the same zealous enthusiasm he displayed gobbling up the surroundings in There Will Be Blood. Dano is contrasted with Brad Pitt's sainted liberal, a man who has no passing acquaintance with an id. Since John Ridley's screenplay hasn't given dramatic shape to the characters, the actors end up playing types rather than people.

Sometimes a film's subject (like slavery) makes it harder for a dissenting critic to reach an audience – especially one that's already likely to accept the picture's dramatic perspective. After all, audiences affirm, the movie is certainly on the right side of the issue; it even shows how unsparingly brutal the slave trade was. So who cares how it's done? (It's this kind of attitude that prevented Bob Edwards from perceiving the sly intelligence of Randy Newman's take on the subject in "Sail Away.") But 12 Years a Slave wears you down because it does nothing more than exploit our collective guilt towards what Randy Newman called "America's most insoluble crime." Where Newman's "Sail Away" transcends its own irony as a disturbingly unresolvable work, 12 Years a Slave, with its solemn and cold detachment, never rises above its polemical rhetoric.

-- November 18/13

Convergences: Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis's Dallas 1963


Fifty years later and the assassination of President John Kennedy still hasn't been settled. Besides those who feel that there are still questions to be answered, people continuously reflect back to that November day as if they could change its outcome. Critic Phil Dyess-Nugent has suggested that our comfort zone gets severely rocked when a loner, a virtual nobody, can walk into history and completely alter it, as Lee Harvey Oswald most likely did. Yet the true mystery of the murder is that we can't resolve one simple question: How is it possible that our larger than life figures are never safe from the alienated souls who walk our city streets? Many of us found out on November 22, 1963 that they're not. These underground men and women who choose to change history by killing those who are making it go unnoticed, and they are lethal shadows we never see coming. Of course, political conspiracies do exist, but they operate more often in a chaotic world where plans are never so easily acted out. They emerge as much by accident as they do in the dark rooms where devious schemes get hatched. (Brian De Palma's 1981 conspiracy thriller Blow Out provides a perfect illustration of how happenstance undermines our ability to control and execute plans.) Nevertheless, Mark Lane, in his otherwise speculative JFK conspiracy book Rush to Judgement, was correct in saying that the variables in the murder of JFK delve into the primal taboo of parricide, where the father is murdered and we need to seek closure. This desire for quick and easy resolution as a means to appease our guilt over this family crime can be just as applicable to those who insist there are shooters on the grassy knoll as it is to folks who exalt the Warren Commission's findings.

One lingering query that does still emerge out of the assassination – by those who believe Kennedy's death was part of a plot and also by those who didn't – is why did the murder happen in Dallas? Arthur Penn thought he answered it in his 1966 politically paranoid assassination thriller The Chase, which takes place in a corrupted Texas town (obviously standing in for Dallas) that's overrun by right-wing zealots and Klansmen and climaxes with a political murder. Film critic Pauline Kael, though, in seeing through the literal metaphor, dismissed that idea and panned the picture while saying, "Many people all over the world blame Texas for the assassination of Kennedy – as if the murder had boiled up out of the unconscious of the people there – and the film confirms this hysterical view." There's no doubt that The Chase, made three years after the Kennedy killing, wallows in delirium and self-hatred. Still, Texas scholars Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis in their new book, Dallas 1963 (Grand Central Publishing), suggest that there might be good reasons why the murder of the President boiled up in Dallas, where a fermenting climate of violent right-wing extremism was consuming the city.

Authors Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis

Beginning their book in January 1960, during Kennedy's election campaign, and writing in the present tense, they show how Dallas was accurately defined as a "City of Hate," containing a viciousness that would grow even uglier after JFK was elected. The authors recount this story by going month by month – through the eyes of a number of Dallas citizens – from the 1960 Presidential campaign until that fateful November weekend in 1963. And it reads with a rapt inevitability often found in thrillers such as novelist Stephen King's engrossing 11/22/63. But if that book functioned as a clever and exciting alternate history in which we eagerly follow one man back in time to stop the murder, Dallas 1963 is a suspense story with no mystery. We already know the outcome and there's nothing we can do to change it. The book instead instills in us a festering spore of growing dread, a helplessness borne from knowing what the people in the book don't, of what the convergences of violent intolerance will actually bring forth. Dallas 1963 reminds us of how America is a young country that remains in conflict with the promises inherent in its constitutional documents. Founded through a Revolutionary War for independence, but stained by a legacy of slavery, this conflict would evolve later into a bloody Civil War over the definition of the nation's identity. The irrational side of that quest would continue to be acted out by the voices of religious extremists and racists who claimed (even before the Tea Party) that they represented the true calling of the American spirit. These same zealots made up some of the civic leaders and leading citizens in Texas. They included Republican Congressman Bruce Alger, who led a violent protest against Lyndon Johnson in 1960 for being Kennedy's Vice-Presidential candidate and betraying the city and the state of Texas; H.L Hunt, an eccentric oilman and author, who fought against integration and funded radical anti-Communist groups; W.A. Criswell, a racist Baptist minister who told his white flock that they could no longer say "chiggers" when speaking of blacks, but must say, "chegroes"; Ted Dealey, who published The Dallas Morning News, and who came to confront Kennedy in the White House in 1961 at a luncheon where he talked of providing a real leader "on horseback" because the people in Texas believed Kennedy was "riding Caroline's tricycle."

The most troubling figure in Dallas 1963, though, is General Edwin A. Walker who would be the constellation that all others in this tragic story would revolve around. After being fired by JFK for preaching right-wing propaganda to his troops, General Walker went to Dallas where he became both a national hero and a potential political candidate destined for the White House. Beginning as a United States Army officer who fought in World War II and the Korean War, Walker soon became a rabid anti-communist who resigned his commission in 1961 when Kennedy admonished him for accusing Eleanor Roosevelt and former-President Harry Truman of being "pink." After running for Governor of Texas in 1962 (and losing to John Connally), Walker led riots against the admission of black student James Meredith into the all-white University of Mississippi in Oxford. He would also organize the infamous protest against United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson on "UN Day" in Dallas a month before the President was killed which lead to violent attacks on the Ambassador by supporters of the John Birch Society and the Minutemen. By professing the belief that Communists were inside the United States government, he found huge support in Dallas among people like H.L. Hunt. But Walker (who seems clearly to be the inspiration for the character General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove) not only galvanized the right, he also drew the ire of the extreme left – including Lee Harvey Oswald, who attempted to assassinate him in April 1963 with the same rifle he used to murder Kennedy seven months later. (In the Seventies, long past the times that enabled him, Walker would be arrested for two acts of public lewdness in a Dallas Park and would serve a 30-day jail sentence and be fined $1,000.)

General Edwin A. Walker

Dallas 1963 doesn't just focus on the extremists who profess hate. There are also three heroic figures in the book who bravely rail against it. One is African American preacher H. Rhett James who not only worked to integrate the segregated lunch counters in Dallas, he also helped bring Martin Luther King Jr. to the city in January 1963 where he spoke without violent reprisal. Another is Juanita Craft, who headed up the local NAACP youth council. She not only fought against segregation but was also planning a "Bombingham Tea" demonstration to be held the Sunday after Kennedy's visit, which she was dedicating to the four black girls who were killed in the bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. Stanley Marcus, who founded Dallas's most prestigious retail business, Neiman-Marcus, brought a cosmopolitan liberalism to the largely racist city and would help Dallas transform itself after the Kennedy assassination. Minutaglio and Davis write very little about the aftermath of the assassination, nor do they speculate about any conspiracy, but rather they simply detail the factual events that led up to November 22.

Their relatively dry journalistic approach might seem impersonal to some, but Dallas 1963 is about letting the city breathe its own air without the authors imposing their own perspective on the material, which may be why the book is written in the first person. It may also be that because Dallas is no longer the "City of Hate," the authors simply wanted to lay its ghosts to rest by letting them have their own voice. Their task may still be in vain since the assassination has its own way of locking the city in a time warp. In the present, Dallas may have had (as recounted by Craig Offman in the The Globe and Mail a couple of weeks ago) a number of Democratic mayors, "a Latino lesbian sheriff...a thriving Arts District, world-class museums...[and] a convention hub that challenges Las Vegas and Atlanta," but it remains the city that killed the country's 35th President. So as Dallas goes about its daily business in the present, each fall visitors pour into Dealey Plaza to trace the steps of a murder story its citizens can't erase. Dallas 1963 is something new and refreshing in the Kennedy assassination literary canon. It's a dark, foreboding tale about how a city's past comes with formidable chains that continue to imprison its future.

-- November 26/13

A Better Life: Brett Ratner's The Family Man (2000)


Nicolas Cage and Don Cheadle



A Christmas Carol (1951), but I prefer the irreverent comic edge of Richard Donner's Scrooged (1988). Many point to Frank Capra's perennial sentimental staple, It's a Wonderful Life (1946), but I've never bought the idea of it being heart-warming. It's a Wonderful Life has always been a film noir in denial. James Stewart plays a decent man driven to suicidal despair by the demands made on him by the small town he lives in. But rather than examine his compulsive need to do for others (rather than satisfy his own needs and desires), the movie has us believe that because of the love of the townsfolk, Stewart gets redeemed rather than trapped by the town and his own neurosis. Brett Ratner's The Family Man, which draws on aspects of both A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life, works better. Like those movies, this one also asks: What would you do if you had a second chance? The difference is that Ratner and screenwriters David Diamond and David Weissman don't turn the story into a simple scenario that presents one kind of life as preferable to the other. The redemption their hero earns is discovering that what he's lost truly makes his life satisfying. Every holiday season, people love to put forth their favourite Christmas movies. Some suggest the redemption melodrama,

Nicolas Cage plays corporate lawyer Jack Campbell, who thirteen years earlier took off for an internship in London while leaving his girl, Kate (Tea Leoni), behind. He promised her at the airport that he'd return to carry on their love affair, but he ended up staying on. In the interim years, Jack returned to America but he becomes a high-powered, wealthy attorney, the toast of Wall Street and a popular bachelor. Kate has become a mere whim in his memory. While coming home from work one late evening on Christmas Eve, Jack stops in a convenience store and confronts Cash (Don Cheadle), an angel posing as a wired street punk hassling the clerks over a lottery ticket. When Jack peacefully settles the issue, Cash asks him if he has everything he wants in life. Jack tells him that he is perfectly content and goes off home to bed. The next morning, however, thanks to Cash, Jack finds himself with a different idea of contentment. He's now living a new life in a suburb of New Jersey. And he's in bed next to Kate on Christmas morning, with their two kids eager to open their presents, rather than alone in his penthouse suite. The Family Man is about how, despite his initial horror and misgivings, Jack Campbell discovers that life with Kate is more fulfilling than the life he led as an unattached corporate attorney.

Tea Leoni in The Family Man

Nicolas Cage doesn't always work convincingly in conventional romantic comedies unless his quirky side is in evidence (as it was in Moonstruck), but he meshes those quirks beautifully into his characterization here. Cage is not only convincing as a blueblood who conquers women with the same ease that he conquers Wall Street, he is also oddly funny living in befuddlement in New Jersey selling tires for a living. It helps considerably that it's Tea Leoni playing Kate. She shares some of Cage's quirkiness along with the sexual ease of a woman who is content within herself to be constantly tickled by life's curves. Leoni plays Kate as a woman who has found a simple means to personal fulfillment and for whom a suburban family hardly diminishes her hunger for pleasure (as it did Annette Bening in American Beauty). Her comic timing is a quiet motor purring through the picture and Leoni gives Kate a libidinous grin that leaves Cage often slackjawed in response. Her sexual appetite actually adds to the comedy because it has a way of feeding Jack's bewilderment towards his circumstances. As much as he wants his old life back, he can't help questioning his decision to leave her behind. There's a sharp pang in Cage's delivery, for instance, in a scene when he looks at Kate and tells her how beautiful she is.

The Family Man can't rise above certain flaws in the storytelling. Don Cheadle doesn't get to do much with his rather bizarre angel of mercy, nor is he ever really believably explained. (He does come off better than Harry Dean Stanton's angel did in One Magic Christmas, where his manner of dress suggested a child killer.) The movie also fritters away because the ending feels too pat. Of course, you wouldn't believe a darker conclusion where Jack refuses the opportunity to get Kate back. But the movie-makers seem to have backed away from following through on the romantic impulse that comes from earning that second chance. Fortunately, The Family Man isn't suffocated by the limits the narrative imposes on it. The actors have a way of turning the picture into something that truly suggests a wonderful life.

-- December 17/13

An Ear to the Ground: The Criterion Collection Release of Robert Altman's Nashville



When he died in 2006, Robert Altman was one of the most prolific and idiosyncratic of contemporary American directors. Always with an ear to the ground, he didn't follow fashionable trends, or cater expediently to public taste. Instead, he was gallantly intuitive in an open quest for authentic engagement, the quality of which was often revelatory. Most movies over time – good and bad – fit comfortably into genres with recognizable rules that defined them as genre pictures, so we could easily distinguish a film noir from a screwball comedy. But Altman defied those categorizations by delving into exactly what makes a genre tick. He did this by stripping away a movie's pedigree without losing the flavour of the genre itself. Whether he was doing a combat satire (M*A*S*H), a western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller), a detective story (The Long Goodbye), a murder mystery (Gosford Park), or stage drama (Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean), Altman keenly re-defined our idea of what makes a genre picture by treating moviegoers, as critic Paul Coates once wrote about Jean-Luc Godard, as critics rather than consumers.

To be that critic, confusion and uncertainty often came with the territory. For one thing, Altman's films were almost always densely textured, with the kind of overlapping dialogue and multi-track sound that required you to lean forward as if you were listening to an old blues recording filled with static and surface noise. His movies also kept your eyes busy, the images playing like reveries in your imagination. The performances seemed to come from somewhere in the frame where you weren't looking, or at least, from where you weren't used to looking. Instead of performing on script, the actors appeared to be in the process of discovering who they were as characters – their marquee value as a movie-stars didn't guarantee their dominance in the story. Sometimes a performer you hardly recognized, or maybe didn't know at all, might pop out in the kind of memorable scene that (in most movies) would only be reserved for the biggest stars. As for the plots of his pictures, Altman's movies grew from between the lines of the written story. An elliptical style of storytelling emerged, opening up territory without the benefit of a safety net. Which is why his daring could be just as reckless as it was boldly original – he made almost as many bad movies (A Wedding, Quintet) as he did great ones.

Robert Altman
In many ways, Robert Altman's movies (especially in the Seventies) served as something of a cultural barometer. In Altman's case, they took the temperature of a young country in waiting, one that was still coming to terms with itself, with its promises made and its promises broken, while anticipating just where that idea of America might be heading in the years to come. His epic 1975 musical Nashville (just released by the Criterion Collection on Blu-ray DVD in a sparkling new remastered print), coming as it did during the American Bicentennial celebration, spoke candidly to a nation caught in a lingering hangover over the end of the Sixties.With an awareness of the litany of assassinations, particularly JFK's murder in Dallas in 1963, a war in Southeast Asia, and Watergate, Nashville's prescience about the future of the country is almost sobering in its clarity. What begins as a story about a number of aspiring artists and veteran stars gathering in the country-music capitol to find success becomes intertwined with a political campaign launched by a populist outsider seeking to offer New Roots for the Nation. But the picture becomes something much larger by the end. What we may not have fully absorbed in 1975 was the way Altman anticipated how politics and entertainment would soon become indistinguishable from each other: how a former B-movie actor, Ronald Reagan, who offered his own New Roots for the Nation in the guise of Morning in America would find himself elected President, and a pop star from the Sixties, John Lennon, who, with his band from Liverpool, England, helped create the counter-culture, would be murdered one month after the election.

Nashville borrows its structure from the familiar terrain of Grand Hotel (1932), a movie where a large group of spiritually lost and disfigured strangers gather in the post-WW1 years in a place where, as one resident puts it, "People come and go [and] nothing ever happens." The original 1929 novel by Vicki Baum, Menschen im Hotel, that inspired the picture, gives us much more of the political malaise that brought on all this ennui. A blogger who goes under the name of Caroline wrote perceptively about this on the website Beauty is a Sleeping Cat: Menschen im Hotel "isn't only about ageing," she argues, "the loss of success and fraud, but it also shows the aftermath of WW1. The war has left its mark on the people, their faces and their souls and changed the society forever." The film Grand Hotel, however, is only about ageing and the loss of success. The characters are also played by the cream of rising Hollywood stardom and elegance including John Barrymore, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo (who despite wishing to be alone couldn't be close to hermetic in a cast this huge). Grand Hotel might examine despair and moral transgressions, but it ignores the political realities that brought them on. The landmark film instead helped create the template for the future of the Hollywood star system. Nashville goes the other way. It features a number of non-stars playing people struggling with success while the political backdrop of the nation is heightened rather than ignored.


The opening scene in the picture provides a clue to where Nashville is heading when we're treated to a whirlwind commercial that is selling us – in the form of a TV ad – a greatest hits album featuring all the songs we're about to hear in the movie. Besides calling up and satirizing all those K-Tel and Ronco television commercials that offered discounted albums of greatest hits that weren't available in stores, the opening scene is also reminiscent of the National Lampoon Radio Dinner album released in 1972. On that comedy record, the creators of National Lampoon, an American humour magazine (a spinoff of Harvard Lampoon, which ran from 1970 to 1998), take on the icons and myths of the Sixties. In “Those Fabulous Sixties,” we hear the voice of Bob Dylan selling us a package of all the protest songs of the past decade. Besides using every cliché of the decade as a means to sell us – as consumer goods – the songs that defined the era, we realize that the songs themselves have now become commodities (we hear snippets from each of the tunes that is so brief that we barely acknowledge what they are). In Nashville, Altman creates a similar kind of ad, but he's selling us songs we haven't even heard yet from a movie that's about to begin. Besides satirizing the way Hollywood turns epic pictures with an epic cast into an event, Altman is setting us up for how the country will soon come to accept anything that is promoted with style without recognition of its content, or whether or not we wish to consume it – and that includes politics.

Altman also deviously ups the ante on the 'greatest hits' style of casting from Grand Hotel, too, by introducing us to even more characters, twenty-four of whom are drawn together around a political rally for Replacement Party candidate Hal Phillip Walker (the one individual we never see but only hear through the external loudspeaker on his campaign car).The cadences in Walker's voice, as he solicits support for his candidacy by promising to change the words to the national anthem, tax churches and fire lawyers from Congress, resemble the homespun whimsy of Will Rogers. His claims recall the populist outsiders out of the American past, but they also foreshadow the future candidacy of Ross Perot in 1992. Perot ran for the Independent Party and (like Walker in Nashville) came to denounce Congress, in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington when he said, "This city has become a town filled with sound bites, shell games, handlers, media stuntmen who posture, create images, talk, shoot off Roman candles, but don't ever accomplish anything." Of course, Perot himself was all sound bites; but then again, sound bites were all we'd ever get from politicians in the years to come.


The huge cast of characters include country superstar Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), a cross between Porter Wagoner (with his striking Nudie) and Johnny Horton, who is recording a patriotic song ("200 Years") to commemorate the Bicentennial, while an Englishwoman named Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), who claims to be doing a documentary on Nashville for the BBC, chatters endlessly in a parody of public broadcasting hyperbole. In a neighbouring studio, the white gospel singer Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) leads a black choir; she's married to Del (Ned Beatty), Haven Hamilton's lawyer, who is trying to set up a rally for Walker for his campaign manager, John Triplette (Michael Murphy). Meanwhile one of the most popular country singers in Nashville, Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), a beautifully sensitive and fragile performer with shadings of both Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, has arrived at the airport with her manager/husband, Barnett (Allen Garfield). She is welcomed by Haven, his partner Lady Pearl (Barbara Baxley), who still seems in shock over the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Pfc Glenn Kelly (Scott Glenn), who is a fan with both a historical and devotional attachment to the artist, and Bill (Allan F. Nicholls), Mary (Cristina Raines) and Tom (Keith Carradine) of the popular folk trio Bill, Mary & Tom. Also arriving at the airport is Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn), there to pick up his niece, Martha (Shelly Duvall), a teenage groupie who has come to visit her sick aunt but prefers the company of the stars who are quickly gathering. In the airport restaurant, the black cook Wade (Robert Doqui) looks out for waitress Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles), a singer who is eager for stardom yet can't carry a tune, just as he fires contempt at African American country singer Tommy Brown (Timmy Brown), for being an "Oreo" cookie – black on the outside, but white on the inside. (He is clearly inspired by Charley Pride.) Later on, after a car pile-up on the highway, Winifred (Barbara Harris), an ambitious singer waiting for her moment, seizes a moment to escape her husband, Star (Bert Remsen), after he refuses to take her to the Grand Ole Opry. Also on the highway and driven from his overheated car is Kenny (David Hayward), a soft-spoken young man with a violin case, who suggests a musician (and is mistaken for one) but is really a loner on a mission – one that provides the picture's climax.

There are other characters in this exhilarating jamboree, such as Karen Black as country star Connie White, who with her coiffed blonde hair becomes a dead ringer for Lynn Anderson; Richard Baskin, who was the film's music supervisor and wrote many of the songs performed in the picture, and who has a cameo as the long-haired piano player, Frog; and Elliott Gould and Julie Christie, who appear in brief cameos playing themselves. But Altman uses his cast as a community in motion continually creating intersections throughout the story. The idea of a community that metaphorically serves as a reflection of the nation also runs deeper when you start thinking about why Altman chose Nashville. In her New Yorker review, Pauline Kael nailed it when she wrote of the city Nashville as "the Hollywood of the C&W recording industry, the center of fundamentalist music and pop success." But she goes even further in describing the significance of country music itself, a music she says is "about the longing for roots that don't exist." She talks about how the country sound "is a twang with longing in it; the ballads are about poor people with no hope." The absence of that hope can't be separated from the fact that Nashville is in the South, a part of the country that was conquered in the Civil War. "[T]he songs tell you that although you've failed and you've lived a terrible, degrading life, there's a place to come home to, and that's where you belong," Kael continued. Which is why one of Hal Philip Walker's diatribes that opens the movie can lead so smoothly into one of Haven Hamilton's songs: they both speak to that sense of belonging. When Walker tells us that when we pay more for an automobile than it cost Columbus to make his voyage to America, he speaks to the recession that's gripping the country in the mid-Seventies. But when Haven Hamilton begins to sing right after that "we must be doing something right to last two hundred years," he looks to the American past in order to make sense of the present.

Ronee Blakley and Henry Gibson

The past is always the present in Nashville, whether it's in the way Lady Pearl can't forget "the Kennedy boys," or in how Barbara Jean in the middle of a performance brings up stories from her family past that remind her of the roots she feels she's lost. But Altman isn't making a statement about America as many other film-makers in that era did; instead, he's captured what critic Molly Haskell describes in the Criterion booklet as "the full complexity of America, rich with contradictions, rife with neurosis, and convulsed by the celebrity madness of ambition and envy." Precisely because he doesn't seek to make a topical statement, Altman could also anticipate things no one thought possible – as in the assassination of a pop star. In 1966, Bob Dylan had already gone electric and faced angry and betrayed folk fans. That same year, John Lennon was facing record burnings and angry mobs with The Beatles after telling a reporter that his band had become more popular than Jesus Christ. Despite the disillusionment stirred in both cases nobody thought a pop star could draw murderous rage: that was saved for politicians. But the Sixties proved that there were performers who had become political in the sense that they made the social world personal and vice-versa. They had created phantom utopian countries that provided for others the freedom to have an equal voice and to have a stake in the music they loved. But with that love also comes the kind of obsession that fuels alienated assassins who target political idealists. In a culture, as Altman saw it, where celebrity and politics were inseparable, a pop star could just as easily become a target of an anonymous killer. So, in Nashville, screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury was asked to turn Barbara Jean's fate into a murder. Through that tragedy, Altman illustrated how an entertainer whose ability to connect strongly with her audience through the personal roots examined in her music could also become the target of violence from an impersonal loner with no sense of his own roots.

But not everyone was satisfied with the conclusion. Greil Marcus wrote critically at the time in the Village Voice that it was "an ending whose meaning no one could possibly escape." When John Lennon was shot to death five years after the release of Nashville, Altman was even asked by The Washington Post whether he felt responsible for his death. Rejecting the claim that his film had inspired Lennon's killer, or given him permission to murder the ex-Beatle, Altman denied any responsibility. Furthermore, he told the reporter that maybe people should have heeded his warning. Yet Nashville isn't designed as any kind of warning, or even a put-down of celebrity obsession. Since Altman enjoys his characters, and loves seeing where they'll take the story, he doesn't sacrifice anyone to make a dramatic or political point. Rather, Nashville is a bracingly comic examination of what happens to a country when people no longer wish to be citizens, but stars or groupies instead, and how that dynamic would soon become the political capital driving the nation. The two songs that bookend the picture provide the shift in political perspective. If Haven's opening number looks triumphantly to the American past, the concluding tune after the murder, "It Don't Worry Me," a song that's equally political, peers ahead with uncertainty to the years when Americans generated shock absorbers so that hardship wouldn't disturb them any longer. Nashville is a work of timeless imagination and it has a savvy that never loses its power to entertain, all the while making us aware of the perils of celebrity entertainment.

-- December 24/13


                                                                        2014

The Coen Odyssey: Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis



In his memoir, Chronicles, Bob Dylan wrote that “a folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.” What he meant was that you had to let the songs sing you rather than the other way around. When Dylan would perform a traditional tune about the slave market, like "No More Auction Block," he wanted to sing it from inside the experience of the black man being sold into bondage. "With a certain kind of blues music, you can sit down and play it," he said in 1966. "[But] you may have to lean forward a little." Becoming a character in a song like "No More Auction Block" requires a fair bit of leaning, and maybe sometimes even donning a few nifty disguises, but that's how Bob Dylan transformed American topical music into a fervid national drama that the listener had a stake in.

In the opening scene of the latest Coen brothers' film, Inside Llewyn Davis, as the titular folk singer (Oscar Isaac) plays the traditional death ballad "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" with earnest dedication, what's clear is that Llewyn Davis has yet to meet even one of those thousand faces. He sits on a faintly lit stage in a Greenwich Village club with confident assurance and sings that he doesn't mind being hanged, but dreads the finality of the grave. Yet for all his fidelity to this dramatic dirge, Llewyn never truly gets possessed enough by its power to bring the Gaslight Cafe audience into that endless sleep with him. Over the course of the picture, however, we quickly grasp that Joel and Ethan Coen are most certainly fascinated by what's at stake in the song. With Inside Llewyn Davis, they take Llewyn on an elliptical and evocative sojourn through the American heartland of the early Sixties, in the dead of winter, and touch the despair and futility that's right at the heart of the song. In doing so, they've fashioned a funny, occasionally touching, and remarkably haunting ballad of their own. It's by far their best picture.

Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis

The film traces Llewyn's career from that opening performance through a series of episodes that ultimately send him back to where he started. At first, having recently lost his singing partner to suicide, Llewyn is emotionally at sea. His latest solo album, Inside Llewyn Davis, is not selling, and he spends his days sponging off friends and colleagues when he's not doing gigs. He's even greeted in a cold alley after one of his performances by a man who beats him up for having heckled another singer the night before. But that beating is merely part of a chain of unfortunate events that keep Llewyn on the road to nowhere. After sleeping at the Upper West Side apartment of his oldest friends, the Gorfeins, he gets locked out with their orange tabby cat and the feline travels with him as if they are both fated to be stray pets. With the nimble cat in tow, he ends up in the West Village apartment of some old musical pals and colleagues, Jim (Justin Timberlake) and Jean (Carey Mulligan), where he finds out that Jean is pregnant, possibly with his baby. Llewyn desperately seeks out session and stage work to pay for her abortion, but he's thwarted at every turn either by circumstance or by his own doing. By the end of the picture, Bob Dylan has literally just arrived in the Village to change history while Llewyn's time is done.

Although I've provided merely a sketch of the story, Inside Llewyn Davis is most importantly a character drama with a full seasoning of barbed jokes. What makes the film linger in the imagination beyond the gags is the work of Oscar Isaac, a virtual newcomer, who gives Llewyn the look of a man not used to being noticed even if he also comes across as extraordinarily handsome. Although you normally would never describe a Coen brothers film as soulful, Isaac does give this picture the emotional gravity it needs. He's not the target of their contempt that the protagonist of their last picture, A Serious Man, was. In that film, the character's nebbish personality seemed to invite the fate of Job. Working with more empathy here, the picture is inspired by the life of Dave Von Ronk, one of the seminal figures of the folk revival in the early Sixties. Like Davis, Ronk's own recordings, borrowing the cadences of Rev. Gary Davis, were faithful renditions of traditional American folk music with strains of gospel, blues, spirituals and New Orleans jazz. His fourth album in 1964 was actually called Inside Dave Von Ronk. But Von Ronk never achieved the acclaim of the artists who admired him like Dylan, Phil Ochs, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Tom Paxton. His largest role was as a spiritual godfather to others, or serving as what author Robert Shelton called "the mayor of MacDougal Street." (Van Ronk would die in 2002, five years after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award, while undergoing postoperative treatment for colon cancer.) Despite the outcry of those upset that the picture isn't more faithful to both the period and the artists, the Coen brothers, with their poker faces intact, aren't concerned with being devotees to historical fact. But even if they aren't trying to tell the story of an era, depict a bohemian enclave, or show how a great interpreter of American music came to miss the big time, the picture captures the artistic daring of the period. Inside Llewyn Davis is partly about the irony of a guy who is so righteously devoted to the integrity of his sound that he can never be in tune with his times. Using the narrative structure of a folk ballad, the Coen brothers (re-teamed with songwriter T-Bone Burnett) have returned with more imagination and assurance to the themes of Homer's Odyssey that they first mined in O, Brother Where Art Thou? (2000). But the characterizations are richer this time and the picture less driven by impersonally staged slapstick.

Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake and Adam Driver as the 'John Glenn Singers' 

Even with the movie's reshuffling of history, most of the ensemble recreate vivid archetypes of the milieu. Justin Timberlake, who has proven to be a colourfully versatile actor who can play against type and still create authentically appealing personalities, is a genius at understatement. While Llewyn is a folk music purist with a priggish inflexibility, Timberlake's Jim sees the lighter possibilities of crossing over into pop (as demonstrated in a hilarious scene at a recording session as part of the 'John Glenn Singers,' which include Adam Driver as Al Cody, a nod to Ramblin' Jack Elliott, when they do the hilarious novelty protest song, "Please Mr. Kennedy"). When Llewyn asks in profound disbelief who could have written such a piece of puffery, Jim answers him with a comic lump in the throat, one that expresses both pain and pride. Although it's obvious that the Coens see Carey Mulligan's Jean as a woman who combines an angelic sweet voice with a hard-as-nails personality, Mulligan's mannered petulance continually fights the camera. You don't believe that someone like Llewyn (or even easygoing Jim) would be attracted to her. There's no mystery in her to uncork and she becomes the weak link in the movie. John Goodman, who didn't come up with much as the cyclops in O, Brother, is a bundle of personality as jazz musician Roland Turner, a be-bop artist out of the Fifties with a contempt for folk music who moves to a different drummer (and with a heroin habit providing his rhythm section). Along with his poet driver, the moody Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund, who played Jack Kerouac in On the Road), they take Llewyn to Chicago where he meets producer Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), who sees what we see, that Llewyn is talented but not a scene changer. (Bud Grossman is clearly named after Bob Dylan's legendary former manager, Albert Grossman.)

Since the Coen brothers are essentially pastiche artists, their wry and sardonic humour can sometimes be off-putting. But it certainly isn't here. The mythic style of the picture plays sumptuously off the realist settings, aided considerably by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel's spellbinding visual tapestry. Unlike many of their other films like Barton Fink (1991) and Fargo (1996), where they use an ironic hipness relentlessly to score points off of their characters, Inside Llewyn Davis is about what it costs to be hip. The directors' mocking satire has a detached cleverness that usually makes them seem morally superior to their material, but here they let the movie breathe, just as they did in their affecting remake of True Grit. Inside Llewyn Davis finds the brothers allowing sarcasm to come from inside the characters rather than imposing it on the story.

While people continue to debate the dubious merits of the frenzied torpor that makes up The Wolf of Wall Street or American Hustle, there's a much more fascinating mystery going on Inside Llewyn Davis. "Death is not universally accepted," Dylan said back in 1966 as he continued to reinvent the music that inspired him. "[Y]ou'd think that the traditional music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact." Critic Greil Marcus, while seizing on that quote in his liner notes to the 1975 release of Bob Dylan and The Band's The Basement Tapes (1967), built on Dylan's keen observation when he wrote that "'the acceptance of death' that Dylan found in 'traditional music'...is simply a singer's insistence on mystery as inseparable from any honest understanding of what life is all about; it is the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back." Inside Llewyn Davis is informed by that quiet terror of a void staring back, in the unanswered suicide of Llewyn's partner, in the cat who disappears like a wounded specter into the woods off a lost highway, and in death songs like "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" (which Dave Von Ronk once recorded), and the haunting choices made in "The Death of Queen Jane" (which Llewyn sings for Bud Grossman). Death's eternal mystery leaves a residue in Inside Llewyn Davis that you carry with you afterwards. The void that stares back at Llewyn Davis, as he rambles aimlessly down the road, turns out to be the same cold fatalism that the music seeks to deliver you from.

-- January 22/14

Rob Ford and the Culture of Corruption: Crazy Town, The Wolf of Wall Street, American Hustle and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty


The night Rob Ford was elected Mayor of Toronto, almost four years ago, he had just won a bitterly fought battle to lead the city, and he did it by manipulating a populist rage towards city government. Ford had warned us of a "gravy train" of bureaucratic waste depriving us of our hard-earned taxed dollars. While he positioned himself as city saviour, he also began targeting those he described as 'liberal elites,' a pampered, educated and entitled bunch, whom he saw as the true enemy of the hard-working individual. If Margaret Thatcher had once casually dismissed the notion that society actually existed, Ford went a step further. He talked about the city of Toronto only in terms of the taxpayer rather than in terms of its citizens. Since we all pay taxes – even when we're homeless and buy a cup of coffee – taxpayer was merely a code word for property owner. To Ford, Toronto wasn't a diverse and multiculturally vibrant urban community, made up of those who are privileged and those who aren't; it was instead a dysfunctional corporation he was about to restore to efficiency. His message to the city, where he alone could determine those he'd serve and those he wouldn't, was communicated with obscene clarity on the day of his coronation. CBC Television broadcaster and former NHL coach Don Cherry had arrived in his flamingo pink suit to drape the chain of office around Ford's neck. It was Cherry who helped set the new tone for the city in his opening remarks. "Well, actually I'm wearing pinko for all the pinkos out there that ride bicycles and everything," Cherry began with cheers from the crowd in the upper rotunda while city counsellors sat in shock. "I say he's going to be the greatest mayor this city has ever, ever seen, as far as I'm concerned – and put that in your pipe, you left-wing kooks." One thing certain in those tone-setting remarks: contempt was now public policy.

At first, it all seemed absurd. Cyclists everywhere, not used to being identified by a former hockey coach as Red Guards out of Mao's Cultural Revolution, donned buttons proudly proclaiming themselves pinkos, while others in the outer suburbs began approving this newly declared War on Bikes. Yet even if it was a predictably strange first year of Ford's term, where debates about whether we even needed libraries brought out the animus in Margaret Atwood, who would have guessed what it would devolve into today? Many of us, I'm sure, rightly figure that if we were in a position of social responsibility and we were caught on video smoking crack cocaine, lying about it, appearing in 'drunken stupors' after hours in the workplace (or at large), consorting with criminals, calling the chief of police, whose budget we control while we consort with criminals, a 'cocksucker' on video, ranting (again in a recording) about someone we wish to kill, we would likely be finding ourselves in the unemployment line (if not in court). But Rob Ford is once again running for Mayor, and still showing strong support from his constituents. And none of the other candidates (perhaps for fear of the power of that constituency) want to go after him. (Their dubious and fatal strategy appears to be to just ignore him.) Journalist Robyn Doolittle first broke the crack cocaine scandal in the Toronto Star and (with Kevin Donovan) pursued the story rigorously despite being disbelieved by many in the city because they couldn't produce the smoking gun.

Don Cherry and Rob Ford

While American talk show hosts got plenty of mileage out of such outrageous behaviour (especially in such a quaint and inoffensive country as Canada), the larger questions were going unanswered. How could a public figure bring on himself and the city such personal and public disgrace and still hold office, and even feel as if he still had a right to? In America, if a married presidential hopeful has an extramarital affair, it can end his hopes. Just ask Gary Hart. So how did Rob Ford survive the onslaught? In her book Crazy Town (Viking Canada), Robyn Doolittle not only chronicles the whole sordid story, she tries to get at the questions behind how it happened and why it's been enabled – not only by Ford and his supporters, but by the city at large. "The man has used up all nine lives and then some, and still he endures," Doolittle writes in Crazy Town. "Now, he's a global celebrity. A rock star who gets mobbed everywhere he goes. With his reputation in supposed tatters, he can haul out novelty bobble-heads of himself and people will line up for hours to pay for one. In normal times, admitting to smoking crack cocaine, being exposed as a compulsive liar, and getting caught up in two massive police investigations into guns, gangs, and drugs would spell the end of a political career. But these are Rob Ford times. They are not normal." The notion of normalcy may be relative, but she has a point here. Our perception of corruption itself has changed over the years. It's as if we no longer hold that ethics have any place in public office. We have finally embraced the cynicism of the barroom pundit who tells us that everything is corrupt so why bother doing anything? Ford's admissions merely shows us that he's human, and that he's at least admitting what other leaders are too cowardly to confess. The Ford story localizes a civic malaise, but it is also part of a larger one that has even been expressed in a number of popular movies this past year.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Back in the post-Watergate period of the late Seventies, a number of American directors responded to their nation's turn towards corruption in period films (The Godfather, Part II, Chinatown), and in contemporary ones (Shampoo, Nashville), but (maybe with the exception of Chinatown) there was a belief that the founding ideals of the country still made a difference and that the Nixon presidency had violated those ideals. Right at a time when America was celebrating its bicentennial, those movies expressed with both anger and passion a need to live up to those virtues by dramatizing the ways in which we had come to debase them. But that belief is no longer a motivating factor today in films like The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle. For about the first forty minutes, The Wolf of Wall Street, about the stockbroker shark Jordan Belfort (Leonardo Di Caprio), is a shallow but engaging depiction of immoral behaviour. With an entertaining untrustworthy narrator at the helm, director Martin Scorsese creates a buzz between the outrageous world depicted on the screen and the viewer's disbelief. But once Jordan reaches the top, Scorsese shifts into a cautionary satirical tale that loses touch with his protagonist's rampaging and appalling appetite. The rest of the movie becomes a series of long, redundant and numbing episodes – and they relentlessly pound you over the head with the decadence of capitalist excess. Depriving us of any dramatic invention, Scorsese avoids the specifics of what motivates Belfort. We don't see the ways he scammed people to become rich, or even how he managed to keep people loyal to him despite his outlandish behaviour. Scorsese and screenwriter Terrence Winter back away from his cocaine driven lust for money and sex to indulge in something more prurient: the results of that desire. The Wolf of Wall Street tells us that we all want to be Jordan Belfort, so there's no need to suggest why we wouldn't. Back in the Eighties, Scorsese provided a similar cautionary parable in The King of Comedy, where an obsessed autograph hound, Rupert Pupkin (Robert de Niro), kidnaps a popular talk show host (Jerry Lewis), and later becomes a national celebrity for doing so. Unlike in Taxi Driver, where Scorsese took us seductively into a vision of hell through the eyes of Travis Bickle, and where we came to feel his rage (even if we didn't share it), Rupert Pupkin arrived already summed up as a cipher out to demonstrate that television was turning us into blind fools. Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader showed us Travis Bickle's Biblical fury towards New York City in Taxi Driver, and what turned him into an assassin from inside of that rage. All we see in Jordan is a rock star-cum-gangsta who bilks the system and gets away with it. He's a sociological construct rather than a dramatic character.

American Hustle

In American Hustle, two small-time con artists (played by Christian Bale and Amy Adams) are forced by an FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) to set up an elaborate sting operation on corrupt politicians (which includes the mayor of Camden, New Jersey). While the picture is based on the ABSCAM operation in the late Seventies and early Eighties, the movie speaks to us in a more contemporary rant, like talk radio, confirming that our institutions are so corrupt that it's not actual people committing the crimes. Director David O. Russell, who showed remarkable satirical skills and revealed a deft gift for combining absurdism and tragedy in his Gulf War drama, Three Kings (1999), has lately turned hyperactive and moralistic. (Silver Linings Playbook treated mental illness as a means to romantic self-actualization.) For over two hours, the characters in American Hustle (who are as deliberately disfigured by their hairdos as Rupert Pupkin was by his in The King of Comedy) scream at each other in relentless close-up to show us how hopeless they are. Never mind the basic incoherence of the story, where you can't believe that Bradley Cooper's insubordination towards his supervisor (Louis C.K. in a surprising and thankfully quiet performance) doesn't get him fired, American Hustle traffics in populist cynicism as earnestly as it does in cheap sentimentality. (The two scammers are celebrated – they get to have normal and conventional lives in the end.) American Hustle already accepts the assumption that our political system is corrupt from the top down, so there's no need to tell us how or why we got there. We need only revel in the irony of it all.

Rob Ford T-Shirt in the window of Sunrise Records

Which is why Rob Ford is now celebrated, as if he's the new Che Guevara, on t-shirts sold in Canadian shops like Sunrise Records. With his huge beaming face on the front, you can wear on your chest his most outrageous quotes, like how he didn't crave cunnilingus with a city councilwoman because he's got "more than enough to eat at home." In a recent article in Salon, Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll talked about the "lazy cynicism" that has replaced "thoughtful conviction as the mark of an educated worldview." They use novelist David Foster Wallace as a prime example of asking: How does art progress from irony and cynicism to something sincere and redeeming? The question is vital because today most people would dismiss the idea of redemption as naive and sentimental. "At one time, irony served to reveal hypocrisies, but now it simply acknowledges one's cultural compliance and familiarity with pop trends," write Ashby and Carroll. "The art of irony has lost its vision and its edge." You can see this view embodied in television shows like Dexter (where a homicide detective is a serial killer who – ironically – murders those who are worse than him), Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, where the characters become equipped with italics that define their ironic and 'dark' shortcomings. In programs like Arrested Development, the irony is dressed up in hip and knowing clothing that makes us feel smart and cool. The viewer doesn't expect the dramatic risk of naked emotion being revealed; quite the contrary. Instead, we get a self-conscious commentary on what naked emotion is so that we can laugh at it. What Ashby and Carroll insightfully point out is how Wallace sensed that true irony, especially in the work of novelist Thomas Pynchon, had once successfully given us "a pop reference to reveal the dark side of war and American culture." But television had adopted "a self-deprecating, ironic attitude to make the viewers feel smarter than the naive public, and to flatter them into continued watching." This attitude is not just pervasive on television, but also in a contemporary culture that continues to fall into a paralyzing stasis. "Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig," Wallace wrote. "And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It [uses] the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself."

Ben Stiller in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

That spirit of hermetic insulation is certainly felt in Spike Jonze's quite popular Her, where the hero comes to love the voice of his computer operating system over the rest of humanity. But Her doesn't critically examine our fascination with technology; it depicts it instead as a preferable hiding place. Within its womb, we don't have to stand for (or rebel against) anything. No wonder Ben Stiller's lovely and bittersweet The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was so unanimously overlooked by critics. Stiller had become the post-modern darling in pictures like The Cable Guy (his own version of The King of Comedy) where the cautionary satire and comedy about the effects of television were so pointed and obvious that it congratulated us for catching on. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty gets inside its subject with more reflection than reflex. The picture examines a negative assets manager of photographs at Life magazine (Stiller) who lives in a fantasy world, but wishes to be a hero in a real one. As Life experiences job cuts and corporate changes, Mitty has to find a special photo intended for the cover of the magazine's final print issue. In doing so, he uses his imaginative life to find a way back into the real world. He doesn't change the outcome of corporatization, but his actions tell us what we've lost because of it. Unlike Her, which creates virtual worlds to reside in, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty reveals to us why the real one still matters.

If Wallace is right in saying that irony is a "protective carapace" against the appearance of naiveté, the acceptance of chic nihilism is now everywhere – even in celebrated rebels who appear to be bucking the system. You could sense this nihilism in the leaderless Occupy Movement, a group that so distrusted power that it seemed to fear standing for anything. Their perspective boiled down to a simplified screed out of Naomi Klein or Noam Chomsky, where the world gets divided up into the powerful and powerless – and guess who wins? In this uncomplicated view, the nuances of human drama get reduced to polemical statistics. If whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers in 1971 because he knew his government was lying about its conduct in the Vietnam War, he also did it because he cared enough about what his country was putting in jeopardy. Taking huge risks, as a former military analyst for the RAND corporation, Ellsberg put the government's actions and values to the test. There was an actual country he was asking to be accountable. But what about the current heroes like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange? Sean Wilentz in The New Republic has you thinking again. He writes: "Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange hardly subscribe to identical beliefs, and differ in their levels of sophistication. They have held, at one time or another, a crazy-quilt assortment of views, some of them blatantly contradictory. But from an incoherent swirl of ideas, a common outlook emerges. The outlook is neither a clear-cut doctrine nor a philosophy, but something closer to a political impulse that might be described, to borrow from the historian Richard Hofstadter, as paranoid libertarianism. Where liberals, let alone right-wingers, have portrayed the leakers as truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors, that’s hardly their goal. In fact, the leakers despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it."

This "paranoid libertarianism" of Snowden and Assange is really not so far removed from Rob Ford's "gravy train." In both views, the world becomes divided into an Us versus Them paradigm where institutions no longer provide an honourable calling to civic duty and responsibility. There is no true country to stand for, no values to test against circumstance, and no chances taken to see what it reveals about the person taking the risk. The night Rob Ford was elected I wrote a piece about his choice of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," the bombastic track from Rocky III, as his theme song that ushered him to his victory party. His first term has more than lived up to his taste in music. But if I were to find a song that sums up where we are now, in the face of the worst political and public scandal in the city's history, I might have to reach for Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb." Just don't ask me to play it.

-- April 24/14

Blow Hard: Jude Law in Dom Hemingway


Jude Law as Dom Hemingway

In Richard Shepard's incessantly verbose Dom Hemingway, Jude Law plays the title character, a British safecracker who has spent 12 years in prison for not ratting out his boss. Pumped up like a Cockney Jake LaMotta and with Popeye biceps to match, Hemingway is a boastful blowhard who in the opening scene gets progressively hard from the blow job he's receiving from a fellow prisoner. Hemingway, eager to be released so he can finally get the money owed him, addresses the camera while crowing about being – quite literally – the cock of the walk until he finally ejaculates. The stunt of watching Jude Law, who has built a career portraying mostly mild-mannered sorts, spitting invective at the same pace as his mounting erection is a clever joke. But Dom Hemingway can't sustain the cartoon intensity of its lead character because there's nothing behind the bluster. It's a one-note joke about potency and it dies with the money shot.

While there is some semblance of a plot, there isn't much drive in the story beyond Dom's bottomless rage. Besides the infantile rages, which are self-consciously peppered with equal proportions of verbal acuity and street slang, there is little dramatic motivation provided to make much sense of his behaviour. And you get the feeling that we're not supposed to make much sense of it. Dom Hemingway is the bastard child of Tarantino, where dialogue doesn't reveal character but instead reflects back on itself to make us feel hip to its style and sparing the viewer ever engaging the possibility of dramatic content. Despite the slick nihilism of the picture, though, Jude Law still manages to hold the audience with the musical rhythms of his patter turning the pungent dialogue into British working-class rap. If early in his career, Law seemed almost shy of the camera discovering something beneath his cultivated charm (as he was in The Talented Mr. Ripley), he has been a stronger presence on the screen in recent years. Whether it's in the soulful humour and resourcefulness he brings to Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes, or the traces of fragile, inarticulated passion he revealed as Karenin in Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, Jude Law has shed the Teflon that made him so opaque in pictures like Alfie and Closer. (Back then, he made his strongest impression as a mecha, Gigolo Joe, in Steven Spielberg's A.I.) In Dom Hemingway, he gives himself over to the role much like Terrence Stamp did in a similar part in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey except that Law is left showboating (unlike Stamp) because the character has no role to play, or any real demons to confront.

Jude Law and Richard E. Grant

Shepard saddles Hemingway with a best friend, Dickie (Richard E. Grant), who accompanies him to the villa of Dom's former boss, Ivan (Demián Bichir), to collect his cash. But Grant is doing the straight man role here. While that may seem as daring as having Law playing the macho psychopath, Grant ends up completely stranded. Richard E. Grant brought real Shakespearean fire to his raging thespian in Withnail & I, but playing passive in Dom Hemingway leaves him gutted. You can't figure out why these two are such loyal friends. They seemed to be joined at the hip because the screenplay tells them so. (Shepard's earlier 2005 feature, The Matador, had a similar problem with Pierce Brosnan playing a self-destructive hit-man who also goes on numerous verbal rampages for no apparent purpose as he inexplicably teams up with a mild-mannered businessman played by Greg Kinnear.)

The plot of Dom Hemingway seems just as arbitrary as its characterizations. When Dom openly flirts with Ivan's Romanian girlfriend Paolina (Mădălina Diana Ghenea) and aggressively insults the crime boss, it's mordantly funny, but it makes no sense given his pure expediency. Who knows? Perhaps we're supposed to think that his raging dick also makes him a stupid dick. But instead of getting himself killed, Dom apologizes and Ivan delivers £750,000 and provides a wild night of partying. Afterwards, they go driving in Ivan's car when a smash-up leaves Ivan dead and Paolina gone with Dom's cash. As Dom goes on a tear to find his dough, Melody (Kerry Condon), a reflectively sweet party girl he'd been hanging with, and whose life he'd saved at the crash, tells him sagely that he's destined for good luck. His fortune turns out to be the possibility to reconcile with his estranged daughter, Evelyn (Emilia Clarke), who has hated him since her mother died and her dad went to prison. Now a grandfather, Dom has to choose between the lost cash and the chance at being a proper parent. Guess which side wins out? (Our bad luck.)

In a sense, Dom Hemingway is a throwaway lark that, like Sexy Beast, where Ben Kingsley played a similar violent con on a mission, gives actors known for certain character roles a chance to try their chops playing against type. But the picture is also reflective of what passes for genre filmmaking today. There was a time when many directors sought to transcend genre by thinking past it and taking the audience into uncharted ground. But the crime genre, including Pulp Fiction and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, is no longer about daring forays down roads to perdition. Their trails ultimately lead nowhere.

-- May 18/14

Afterlife: Abel Gance's J'Accuse & George Romero's Night of the Living Dead


In 1919, when French director Abel Gance made his anti-war drama J'Accuse, the picture was perfumed with the scent of death, and informed by endless reports he received of his friends dying at the front during WW1. But unlike many anti-war pictures, good and bad, J'Accuse wasn't designed as political agit-prop. "I'm not interested in politics," he would later remind film archivist and author Kevin Brownlow in his book on the silent film era, The Parades Gone By. "But I am against war, because war is futile. Ten or twenty years afterward, one reflects that millions have died and all for nothing. One has found friends among one's old enemies, and enemies among one's friends." Gance had good cause to skirt the expediency of political agendas and reflect more soberly on matters of life and death. He had once been drafted into the French Army Section Cinématographique, but ended up being discharged due to ill-health, which likely spared his life. He would then go on to a film career that would include the tragic drama La Roue (1923) and his landmark epic Napoleon (1927).

Being consumed by thoughts of the dead, especially the war dead, is not unusual for a film director – especially a pioneer like Gance who would along with D.W. Griffith invent a cinematic language that would change the course of dramatic narrative. With this awareness of an emerging art also came the knowledge that moving pictures could provide houses for lingering ghosts who would haunt us for decades. The photograph froze a moment in time, but a movie depicted time in motion, and breathed air into and gave life to the people who were part of the picture. In the years to follow, as actors would become movie stars, their iconic selves – from James Dean in his rebellious red jacket to Marilyn Monroe in her billowing white dress – would fix themselves in the collective unconscious, unchanged by time, and even untainted by their own early, tragic deaths. Where in life, mortality claims everyone; in film, you can live forever and remain fully intact. Somewhere today streaming in cyberspace, James Dean still pleads to be understood by a revolving cast of indifferent adults in what is perhaps another afterlife.

When Gance first conceived J'Accuse (he would remake the film again in 1938), he concocted a romantic drama that would be as sentimental in its conception as his later Napoleon would be. He loved his melodramas painted purple. But Gance was also a man out of his time. If his romantic sensibility hearkened back to a mustier past, his cinematic techniques looked daringly into the future. He might have employed dead stumps of storytelling, but his camera eye could animate those stumps by imagining things yet unseen. In Gance's hands, the screen could fill with images superimposed on each other, sometimes while the screen itself would divide into four sections as if we were viewing the action through a kaleidoscope (like in the dormitory pillow fight in Napoleon); or he could stretch the width of the image to create the first version of Cinemascope with the triptych at the end of Napoleon that gave birth to the possibilities of widescreen not yet conceived in the silent era. The quick cutting and multiple perspectives of the train wreck in La Roue seem today like an everyday part of our contemporary visual culture on satellite news and social media. "Abel Gance's art is the art of frenzy, tumult, climax," Pauline Kael once wrote in The New Yorker. "He dashes towards melodramatic peaks and goes over the top." Without that frenzy, though, Gance's films might have already been stillborn.

Séverin-Mars and Romuald Joubé in J'Accuse

For a good stretch of J'Accuse, nothing seems out of place in this archetypal drama, and nothing quite prepares you for what Gance has in store. Set in the Provençal village in the south of France, the people initially welcome the declaration of war in 1914 and they enlist en masse. One of those soldiers, François Laurin (Séverin-Mars) is a married man, jealous by nature, and who suspects that his wife, Édith (Maryse Dauvray), of having an affair with a local poet, Jean Diaz (Romuald Joubé). When he discovers her infidelity to be true, François sends her to live with his parents in Lorraine, where she ends up captured and raped by German soldiers. Curiously, François and Jean also find themselves at the front serving in the same battalion.When Jean is discharged due to ill-health, he finds Édith with a young half-German daughter, a product of the rape, which leaves Édith's father seeking vengeance to retain the honour of the family name. When François returns, he suspects its Jean's child and the men declare war on each other until the truth sends both men back to the front to seek vengeance towards their common enemy. But François gets killed in battle and Jean is driven mad by shell-shock which leads to a vision. And it gives Gance the poetic conclusion he needed for his moral drama.

Gathering the inhabitants of the village, Jean tells them of his vision on the battlefield around a fireplace as if the crackling flames were conspiring to conjure up a ghost story nobody wanted to hear, but couldn't resist. He tells of the hundreds of dead soldiers, scattered like fall leaves across the battlefield, who suddenly arose from their endless sleep to march again. Only not to war this time, but instead to their homes, to confront those they loved to discover whether those loved ones were truly worthy of the sacrifices these men made. As Jean begins his story, the screen suddenly fills with the war dead. Then slowly rising, in the hundreds, they amble down the dirt roads, but the impact they make doesn't grow out of gothic horror. The poetic grandeur of this scene is strikingly similar to what David Fincher achieved in the opening moments of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) when the clockmaker devised a clock that ran backwards so that he could reverse the many deaths of young men on the battlefield which also happened to include his own son. The walking dead in J'Accuse seemed to be marching forward to a time in our consciousness when the television news would show, almost nightly around the world, other marches of young men and women fighting for civil rights, protesting a Southeast Asian war, or turning on tanks invading their country's sovereignty. Only Gance seemed to envision it all before there were TV cameras and mass marches for those cameras to capture.

The war-dead about to rise in J'Accuse

Though Gance's walking dead scene was not designed to scare viewers, but to wake them from their own complacent slumber, the sequence itself wasn't without its own particular horror. "The conditions in which we filmed were profoundly moving," Gance told Kevin Brownlow. "These men had come straight from the Front – from Verdun – and they were due back eight days later. They played the dead knowing that in all probability they'd be dead themselves before long. Within a few weeks of their return, eighty percent had been killed." The sequence, which was shot in the south of France, required over 2000 soldiers on leave to rise from the dead, only to go off days later to their inevitable demise. While the dead in J'Accuse would be content to return to their graves once they knew their sacrifice wasn't in vain, in real life, the truth couldn't be more different. The afterlife of those soldiers are enshrined only in the flickering images of a silent film.

It's hard to say whether George Romero, a young low-budget director from Pittsburgh in 1968, ever saw Gance's J'Accuse, but the film he made in America's most violent year since the Civil War, certainly demonstrates that he might have. In Night of the Living Dead, a grainy, low-budget horror film, the dead get to rise again, only this time they're not back to confront the living, to see whether or not their deaths are worthy, they're here to consume with a relentless intent those who live and then turn those they cannibalize into the walking dead like themselves. "[T]he title of George Romero's film could have been a beatnik poet's metaphor for the 'CBS Evening News'," wrote critic J. Hoberman in his book, Midnight Movies. But the metaphors aren't as explicit as they are in Gance. Despite Romero's own current take on the picture, where he claims every political point in it to be deliberate (as they indeed would be while adding to the diminishing quality of the numerous sequels Night of the Living Dead spawned), Romero found a way to bottle the air that was poisoning the culture. Hoberman argues, and I would say accurately, that Night of the Living Dead seemed to soak up the tumult of the previous four years before it was made. "The previous three years had seen riots and insurrections in the black ghettos of virtually every American city, and in the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King – the symbolic leader of American blacks and the subject of extensive FBI harassment – was assassinated on the terrace of a Memphis motel under circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained," he writes. He goes on to further list, as part of that growing unrest, the huge march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War in 1967, and the student occupation of Columbia University in 1968. Later that year, the murder of Robert Kennedy, the subsequent violence at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the events in Paris that almost took down the Gaulist government, plus the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, brought the turmoil to a simmering boil.


On the surface, Night of the Living Dead was no more than an independently made horror film which over the years would grow to become a horror classic. The larger question is why? While it's no secret that the fear of being eaten alive is every bit as potent as being buried alive, Night of the Living Dead did more than just tweak a nerve and pinch the gooseflesh the day it opened in October, 1968. Its notoriety grew (as Gance's picture also did) from something more subterranean. The story is pretty rudimentary given its budget of $114,000. In a rural Pennsylvania cemetery, two siblings, Johnny (Russell Streiner) and Barbra (Judith O'Dea), come to visit their late mother. Within moments, a tall, staggering stranger (Bill Hinzman) comes out of nowhere and attacks Barbra. When Johnny is killed after coming to her aid, the stranger pursues her until she takes refuge in an abandoned farm house where she is ultimately trapped with a family, a couple, and a black truck driver, Ben (Duane Jones), who happens upon the residence. For the rest of the night, they battle off the flesh-eating ghouls until the only one left is Ben. But it's his final fate that provides the lethal O Henry finish.

While Romero recognized that most horror films in the Fifties concerned themselves with the dangers of science where creatures would invade from outer space and nukes would turn women into fifty-foot predators, he developed his sensibility out of EC Comics where horror had a more political dimension. (Their 1953 comic, "Judgment Day," was a commentary on racism that featured a black astronaut and it landed EC in hot water with the Comics Code Authority who objected to the hero being black.) Out of Romero's anger over the crumbling culture around him, he devised Night of the Living Dead as a different kind of revolution. "We were going to make a movie about a new society basically swallowing up the old," Romero told Stuart Samuels, the director of Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream (2005). "The old doesn't see it coming because they're too trapped in their own circumstance." While the picture may lack any overt political message, it was the first movie where a black actor was the lead action star without his being black being the point of the story. It is only at his death that the resonance of his race seeps through the material and ties it to the year it was made. But the event that gave that scene further ironic resonance, was something Romero didn't see coming. "[That spring], we finished the film and threw it in the trunk of the car and drove it to New York to see if anybody wanted to buy it and that was the night," Romero recalls. That night that he refers to is the evening of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

Zombies on the hunt in Night of the Living Dead.

The grainy black and white film-making also eerily invoked the evening news which was still largely not seen in colour in 1968, and it gave the film the shocking immediacy of documentary realism. Along with the movie's texture, the hand-held camera work also brought another familiar dimension. "I was trying to intentionally make those scenes look like the news we were seeing from Watts and from 'Nam," Romero explains. And like the evening news, which was filled then with nightly reports of cities burning, and students on campuses in conflict with soldiers and National Guardsmen, not to mention the endless flag-draped body bags of the war dead, Night of the Living Dead depicted a whole culture that was relentlessly stalking the viewer. "The film never wavers from its desire to terrorize the audience and offer no hope at the end," J. Hoberman asserts. "We were living in a country where there was intense polarization and violence and Night of the Living Dead could only be understood in terms of the Vietnam War." People seemed to understand that from the outset, but it didn't mean it would be embraced for all its shocking boldness. Roger Ebert initially panned it for its brutality. Variety spoke of Night of the Living Dead in terms of "the pornography of violence." But it was the absence of a prurient fascination with violence that denied it that pornographic status and made the film something that's still terrifyingly real today.

In the subsequent zombie films that Night of the Living Dead surely influenced, including Romero's own sequels, along with the popular TV show The Walking Dead, death has lost its pain and its power to shock. The Walking Dead especially is so fascinated with splattering brains each week and trivializing death in its aftershow gabfest, Talking Dead, that the zombie has been turned into nothing more than a lifeless commodity we continually consume to boost viewership and ratings. If people were fighting for their humanity in Night of the Living Dead, or coming to terms with its cost in J'Accuse, today people appear more to identify with the undead, as if true human feeling had already been gobbled up. The post-modern age has done much to chisel the tombstone of a more romantic and passionate response to death and destruction. Its left in its place a comforting cool cynicism where folks distrust any form of rebellion against the norm. We're so inured to shock now that it's rare that a work of art even has the ability to cause a riot, or perhaps stoke passionate debate. In J'Accuse and Night of the Living Dead, the undead stalk the living as a reminder of what's being lost, and they were made by film artists with a critical voice. The people killing zombies on the screen today, no more animated than the corpses they continually cut down, only come to show us what we've come to accept as human.

-- June 5/14

Eight Arms to Hold You: The Criterion Collection Celebrates the Fiftieth Anniversary of A Hard Day's Night


"The first rock and roll movies had little or nothing to do with rock and roll music, and everything to do with the rock and roll ethos," wrote Greil Marcus in his assessment of the genre. That ethos he describes was present in many Fifties pictures where adolescents were no longer accepting the proscribed values of the status quo. You could see it in Marlon Brando's defiance in The Wild One (1953), where when asked about what he was rebelling against, he replied, "Whaddya got?" You could recognize it in the painfully vulnerable James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), as he attempts to wake up his incognizant parents to the misunderstood youth they were alienating. The distilled essence of what would soon become rock 'n' roll was weaved into the fabric of those movies. According to Marcus, though, its power wasn't fully comprehended until Bill Haley & the Comets drove home the combined sociological screeds of The Wild One and Rebel in The Blackboard Jungle (1955), with its opening blast of "Rock Around the Clock."

After that, aspiring rock artists started lining up to see their possible future on the silver screen; and John Lennon began thinking that maybe this was a cool job. The Beatles were first turned on by The Girl Can't Help It (1956), which featured Little Richard in the opening credits singing the title song. The plot was largely superfluous, but significantly, it was about how the music business was run by the mob (giving a whole new meaning to the word hitmen). Besides grooving to Little Richard, Gene Vincent, the Platters and Eddie Cochran, youngsters also swooned as the buxom bombshell Jayne Mansfield strutting by in her tight clothes, clutching milk bottles to her heaving breasts. In 1956, having been one of those kids first stunned by Brando, Elvis Presley stepped onto the screen in the Civil War drama Love Me Tender, where two brothers fight over politics and the love of Debra Paget. His elegiac ballad, "Love Me Tender," which maybe planted the early seeds for McCartney's eventual "Yesterday." But it was his role as the violent rockabilly singer Vince Everett in 1957's Jailhouse Rock where the rock ethos fused effortlessly with the music. From there, just as the rock movie began, it seemed almost over. Except for the tabloid chic of High School Confidential (1958), which delved pruriently into a teen dope ring, it was the sanitized Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach party movies and Elvis's decline in Hollywood.

When The Beatles considered doing their own film, they wanted it to be more than simply a mediocre formula flick. Having watched fellow Brit Cliff Richard traipse about like an airbrushed Presley in the glorified travelogue Summer Holiday (1963), The Beatles wanted something that might define who they were, or at least, what we might perceive them to be. The end result of their quest became the genre-defining A Hard Day's Night, being re-released in a digitally-restored Blu-ray edition by the Criterion Collection, and the road leading there came about by some shrewd business strategies. In 1963, United Artists was aware that Capitol Records in the U.S. had been refusing to issue The Beatles' recordings. This meant that there was no provision being made for soundtrack records in case the Fab Four ever wanted to make a movie. Since United Artists were convinced of The Beatles' ultimate international success, they proposed signing the group to a three-picture deal. If The Beatles agreed, United Artists was set up to release three soundtrack albums (which the studio assumed would go through the roof even if the films flopped). Noel Rodgers, who was the A&R man for United Artists in England, and Bud Orenstein, who served in their film division, drew up a contract that would ultimately net United Artists not only a superb Beatles record, but a hit movie made for under a half million dollars. There was no way they could lose.

director Richard Lester
After James Bond producer Harry Saltzman turned down United Artists' offer to work on A Hard Day's Night, the studio approached Walter Shenson. Shenson was an American expat, a producer at United Artists, whose claim to fame was casting Peter Sellers in the social satire, The Mouse That Roared (1959). "United Artists approached me when they apparently found out that the contract between Capitol Records and The Beatles didn't cover movie soundtracks," Shenson said. "They wanted to cash in on the Beatle craze, so the movie was just an excuse to release an album." Shenson introduced the group to another American, the 32-year-old director Richard Lester, who brought the same exuberant pop inventiveness to his films that The Beatles were bringing to pop music. Lester was from Philadelphia, a precocious kid who started grade school at the age of three. While he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in clinical psychology, he did some part-time work as a stagehand in a local TV studio. Quickly, he developed an interest in directing, becoming successful in his new trade at CBS. Having both studied music and played in a band, Lester toured Europe where he ultimately settled in England, where he continued his work as a TV director. He began with his own comedy show, The Dick Lester Show, before developing an association with Peter Sellers. This led to the production of a series of wildly comic TV programs capped by The Goon Show in 1958. Aside from his connection to the Goons, which drew the interest of The Beatles, Lester had also directed a wildly innovative slapstick short, The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film (1960), which was packed with the kinds of sight gags that would inspire A Hard Day's Night. "I was the right film director for them," Lester said candidly. "I chose them. They chose me. They'd seen a short film of mine [The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film]. They knew I'd made a pop film [It's Trad Dad] before that. They knew...I would understand them musically." (The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film is included in the Criterion Collection special edition DVD.)

While the film was being negotiated in October 1963, Liverpool playwright Alun Owen was brought in to fashion a screenplay around a day in the life of the group. Owen came from the school of working-class kitchen-sink realism that had spawned Arnold Wesker and John Osborne. Some of his plays were adapted to television – like No Trams to Lime – a grim drama that had Shenson wondering if Owen could bring the levity required for The Beatles' first picture. But Owen successfully caught hold of the band's comic potential by following them while they toured Dublin and Belfast, observing them in the fervour of Beatlemania. Early in 1964, Owen, Walter Shenson and Richard Lester then went to Paris where The Beatles were doing the Olympia concert with Silvie Varton. At the George V Hotel, they watched the group being prisoners in their own hotel room and conducting themselves as a comic troupe under the most adverse circumstances. They knew that this would be the heart of the movie. The story could then be about The Beatles scrambling through their professional life, escaping screaming fans, signing autographs, and rehearsing for a television special.


The black & white movie opens with the definitive chang of George Harrison's guitar, popping like a starter's gun about to begin a race, which it does, as The Beatles are seen being pursued by shrieking fans through the street. As they scramble, falling and laughing, exhilarated by the attention, they roar through a train station. The title song calls forth both the intense enjoyment of the moment and the relief awaiting when they finally arrive home. The Beatles charging through the station becomes a true test, daring the crowd to catch up, leaving us to wonder what might happen if they did. As the cat-and-mouse game continues, Paul McCartney sits in the station, with his grandfather, reading a newspaper while disguised by a goatee not far removed from the one he'd grow for Sgt Pepper in 1967. In 1964, though, McCartney's disguise is part of the game. In 1967, the beard would be part of a transformation, an escape from the game set forth between the band and their fans in A Hard Day's Night. For now, the group enjoyed being Beatles and the movie celebrates the genial side of Beatlemania. But it's not all geniality. There's a cheeky side to this picture, too, that shows the band as quick-witted when they face adversity. Whether it's the press, or an elder gentleman on a train who objects to their manner, The Beatles don't back down or become patently cute. When the upper-class gentleman in the train car, who's offended by the rock music on their transistor radio, tells them that he fought the war for their sort, Ringo quips, "I bet you're sorry you won." The only dramatic tension in the picture comes from whether they'll make it to the TV show – and pull it off. Of course, they do, and in the end, they fly off in a helicopter with group photos falling to the ground below like confetti at a coronation. That's what A Hard Day's Night becomes, a celebration of The Beatles rising up in the sky, to (what John Lennon would often call) the toppermost of the poppermost. "The film, probably more than their music, took The Beatles across social barriers, won them an audience among the intelligentsia," wrote Greil Marcus. "[It] broadened their hardcore base from teenage girls to rock and roll fans of every description – if rock and roll was about fun, then this movie was rock and roll."

Lester began shooting the film from March 2, 1964 until late April, with the chase scene done around Paddington and Marylebone Station on the west side of central London. Wilfred Brambell, who had played the "dirty old man" character on the popular British TV sitcom, Steptoe and Son (which would provide the template for the American version, Sanford and Son), played Paul's Irish grandfather. All through the film, a big deal is made about how "clean" he is in reference to his role on Steptoe. The teenage fans were brought in from a number of London theatre schools. When two million pre-orders for the soundtrack were made before the film even premièred, it was clear that United Artists' hunch had panned out. A Hard Day's Night brought out a new sophistication in their music. Moving from the bright optimism of "Please Please Me," "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand," the band starts writing love songs about ambiguity ("If I Fell," "I Should Have Known Better") incrimination ("You Can't Do That") and reflection ("Things We Said Today").While the film happily and successfully solidified the myth of The Beatles, their music here begins to define the more complex contours of their optimism.

Wildred Brambell and John Lennon

A Hard Day's Night is the first (and only) Beatles album featuring all Lennon and McCartney originals – and they were mostly written before having read the screenplay. It was the first album recorded on four-track machines allowing for more intricate dubbing and mixing. "A Hard Day's Night" provided the title of the movie and was based on one of Ringo's many malapropisms (making him the Yogi Berra of the band). McCartney told reporters in the U.S. while promoting the picture, "because it sounded a funny phrase at the time but the idea came of saying that it had been a hard day's night and we'd been working all day and you get back to a girl and everything's fine." The conflicting temperaments of Lennon and McCartney fused beautifully in this song. Where Lennon describes the struggle of working hard all day, McCartney responds to the hope of getting back home. Richard Lester liked the title of the song being the title of the movie since it captured the mad pace of the group in the eye of the hurricane. "I Should Have Known Better" is a brief throwback to the spirit of "From Me to You," including the winsome harmonica opening and a sprightly Lennon vocal. After the opening credits featuring the title song, "I Should Have Known Better" is the first song performed in the picture while The Beatles are playing cards in the train baggage car. "If I Fell" is a lovely, yet pensive ballad, written by Lennon in mid-February, a song he rightfully considered a precursor to "In My Life" (even sharing the same chord sequences). "If I Fell" is about an affair where the singer is asking the girl that he desires whether she'll love him more – if he leaves his wife. With that in mind, "If I Fell" provided a affecting moment in Alan Parker's hard-hitting film Shoot the Moon (1982), where Albert Finney and Diane Keaton play a middle-class married couple coming apart after the husband has an affair with a younger woman. When he leaves her, Keaton sits mournfully in a bathtub singing "If I Fell" to herself, smoking a joint, as her voice cracks on the most painful, significant lyrics. Those lyrics refer back to the sentiments of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," where the mysteries of romance seemed so enticing. Now the singer discovers that holding hands isn't quite enough to define the intricacy of romance. The song gets performed to Ringo while the band was rehearsing in the TV studio for their special.


Apparently, Lester couldn't figure any other place in the film to put the song. "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You," an infectious Latin-flavoured tune about seducing a woman onto the dance floor, was written for George to sing. Harrison brings his characteristic rueful shyness to his performance, as Lennon and McCartney's harmonies cheer him on. "And I Love Her" is a strikingly affirmative number composed by McCartney as an exercise to see if he could write a love serenade that began in mid-sentence. It's a song that demonstrates how much he learned about balladry by performing "Till There Was You." "Tell Me Why" returns The Beatles to the girl group origins of "Chains" and "Boys," illustrating how far they'd come in creating their own versions of those tracks. By Lennon's standards, "Tell Me Why" is an impersonal song, but it's such an apt demonstration of the group's total command of harmony that you can be easily fooled into thinking that it's about something that actually matters. "Can't Buy Me Love" was included in the movie for one of the most memorable scenes, where the group escapes the controlled environment of the studio, to frolic on the playing fields of Isleworth behind the Odeon Hammersmith. "I'll Cry Instead" is a country-flavoured song about romantic loss which carries the same vindictive quality as "You Can't Do That." It was originally considered for The Beatles' breakout sequence in the film, but it was relegated to the soundtrack album because of its dour tone. When the film was remastered for video in 1986, the song was used in a pre-credit montage created by Walter Shenson.

A Hard Day's Night premièred at the London Pavilion Cinema on July 6, 1964, while the single and soundtrack album were released on July 10th. The film opened on 100 screens in the U.S. in August where it made $5.6 million. It became the match to light the fire of The Beatles' world tour in 1964, and would be instrumental in convincing folkies like Roger McGuinn and David Crosby to exchange their acoustic axes for electric ones, and then form The Byrds. "I guess the thing which struck me was that they were using a lot of folk music chord changes," Byrds co-founder Roger McGuinn recalled. "They were using passing chords up until that point, so in a way they were subtly combining folk and rock. This is what inspired me and gave me the idea [to play electric rock & roll music]." Chris Hillman, who would later join The Byrds, remembers McGuinn turning up at the Troubadour with a 12-string acoustic Gibson guitar and playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Byrd David Crosby would say that their band "was an attempt at democracy or a kind of family" which they learned from The Fab Four. The Byrds would, of course, eventually rival The Beatles in becoming a bickering family.


The critics were exuberant in their praise of the picture. Rather than cater to the popularity of the group, the movie was appraised as a movie. "...A Hard Day's Night has turned out to be the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals," wrote Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice. "[T]he brilliant crystallization of such diverse cultural particles as the pop movie, rock and roll, cinema-verite, the nouvelle vague, free cinema, the affectedly hand-held camera, frenzied camera, frenzied cutting, the cult of the sexless subadolescent, the semi-documentary, and studied spontaneity." The Daily Express meanwhile called it "delightfully loony" and compared The Beatles to the Marx Brothers. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times thought the film "tickle[d] the intellect and electrifie[d] the nerves." Roger Ebert would later echo Sarris's comparison to Citizen Kane. Of course, A Hard Day's Night gave us an idealized view of The Beatles, but there was a shady tinge to the reality of their massive success celebrated in the picture. To provide distraction between scenes, they kept their energy up with amphetamines and scotch. There were also many young females, used as extras, who were steered into The Beatles' trailers for quick bouts of shagging before going back before the camera. One extra, who had no interest in a quickie, was a 19-year-old model named Pattie Boyd. Lester had recalled using her in a commercial he'd directed, so he invited her to be one of the smitten girls on the train meeting the band. She would eventually go out with George Harrison after he gave her an autograph with seven kisses on the photo. They would eventually marry in 1966.

Early in 2007, I happened to catch a number of fake movie trailers appearing on YouTube. If there was a concept to these faux coming attractions, it was to deliberately misrepresent the original movie, perhaps as a way to satirize the manner in which trailers provide false hooks to steer us to the picture. So Stanley Kubrick's familial horror film The Shining (1980) was re-cut to suggest a father/son reconciliation drama directed by Cameron Crowe. Martin Scorsese's feverish Mean Streets (1973) was crossed hilariously with Sesame Street. There were quite a number of other films represented, but one in particular caught my eye. It was for a movie titled A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead. The trailer begins typically as a teaser announcing the legendary Beatles in their landmark debut A Hard Day's Night. As well, we soon start to recognize the usual swarm of fans about to greet them. Moments later, however, the tone dramatically changes. As the opening scenes of A Hard Day's Night unfold in the train station, the band is being pursued not by eager and happy fans, but by the zombies from Zack Snyder's remake of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (2004). As The Beatles laugh and cajole their way through alleys and cars, the screams of the undead, bloodthirsty for flesh, continue to bear down on them. The cutting between both pictures is so seamless that the zombies seem to be moving in rhythm to the music.

The original 1978 Dawn of the Dead was a blood-spattered EC comic-strip satire of consumerism gone mad, but the re-make is a post 9/11 apocalyptic calamity where every facet of societal decorum breaks down. Nightmares have replaced dreams. Over the opening credits, we hear Johnny Cash singing about a man taking names, the Grim Reaper cataloging death on every corner of the planet. If the screaming throngs of A Hard Day's Night were once participants in The Beatles' utopian dream, the zombies of Dawn of the Dead are former participants in the grind of life. Their hunger isn't driven by the delight brought on by The Beatles' music, it's brought on by the instinctual drive to consume. In A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead, the band is oblivious to the danger of becoming zombies themselves. They don't even recognize that they're being blindly fed upon by their followers, who don't follow because of their shared ideals, but because the cadavers need to feed on the living beings in front of them. What's missing from A Hard Day's Night is an awareness of that danger – something A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead cleverly gets at. If The Beatles truly fought becoming a tool of mindless consumerism, wouldn't their fame be evidence of still potentially being its tool? If fans continued to impulsively scream at the mere sight of The Beatles, and buy every record whatever its quality, would the excitement of consuming it truly bring the satisfaction that the music promised? A Hard Day's Night had no intention of raising these prickly questions, but in short time, those issues, would soon come to define the group's fate and the cultural revolution they launched. 

-- June 7/14

Marking Time: Richard Linklater's Boyhood


Ellar Coltrane in the opening scene of Boyhood

In the opening scene of Richard Linklater's audaciously conceived memoir, Boyhood, the camera captures the dreamy face of six-year-old Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), lying on the grass and staring up at the scattered clouds, as if they could carry him past the temporal plane of his early childhood. The rest of the picture is, of course, about carrying Mason Jr. (as well as the audience) past our more conventional notions of temporal time. In Boyhood, Richard Linklater traces the early life of a young boy into adolescence, and he accomplished this by periodically shooting the movie over a twelve-year period, thus allowing us to literally follow his life (along with that of his family and friends) from the time he is six until he is eighteen. Being no stranger to the emotional struggles of adolescence (Dazed and Confused), or determining what's permanent and what's fleeting in time's passing (The Before Trilogy, Tape), Linklater also tries to find imaginative ways to dramatically render what's cerebral (as he once demonstrated in Waking Life). The full body of his work indeed gets effortlessly diffused throughout the two hours and forty-six minutes of Boyhood. But for all its daring originality, where Linklater introduces into film narrative a radical new approach to dramatic naturalism, the actual drama of Boyhood gets largely swallowed up by its concept. Boyhood ends up marking time rather than uncorking the ephemera of life that time marks.

Countless film directors have become fascinated with the linearity of time in drama. French filmmaker François Truffaut followed the fictional life of Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) – beginning in 1959 with The 400 Blows, and then we watched him grow up into adulthood in the following Antoine and Colette (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), and finally, Love on the Run (1979). The great Indian director, Satyajit Ray made The Apu Trilogy (1955-59), an astonishing work, that told the story of Apu, a poor Bengali boy, who became educated and grew – through hardship and tragedy –from a tempestuous child into a deeply compassionate and worldly adult. Some directors also take that fascination further by understanding that movies allow us to cheat time in a way that live theatre can't. In his Up documentaries, director Michael Apted successfully chronicled the lives of fourteen British children from different economic backgrounds since 1964, when they were all seven years old, and then filmed them every seven years until 2012, to see if their social standing had in any way predetermined their fate in the future. In The Godfather, Part II, Francis Coppola succeeded in magically recreating, in his sequel to The Godfather, the early years of Don Corleone and his family and associates, where he rose from being a poor immigrant in New York City into a criminal lord. He achieved this using different actors who powerfully evoked the same characters played by others in the previous picture. In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), David Fincher convinced us (with some help from digital technology) that Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) could age and experience life backwards. He began childhood as an aged man left orphaned in a nursing home and would ultimately die at 84, as an infant in the arms of the woman he had loved his whole life.

What these directors did was generate dramatic tension by contrasting the past with the present to arrive at their epiphanies (except perhaps for Ray's Apu Trilogy which didn't juxtapose the past and present, but instead gathered for itself an overwhelming cumulative power moving forward through time). With Boyhood, Linklater documents a series of events that vary in dramatic power and invention, but the picture itself never achieves an overall unity of soul. At times the scenes in Boyhood resemble pebbles being dropped in a pond, but the ripples don't connect to anything ahead of it. Which is why Boyhood suffers from a slight redundancy, an emotional greyness, that soon settles over the picture and makes it a little dull – even if the film's surface is alive and bubbling.

At first, when we're introduced to Mason Jr., we discover that he's from a broken home in a small Texas town. He is being raised by a working-class mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), who is struggling to parent two kids, including an eight-year-old girl, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter), the wise ass of the family and one who loves to provoke her brother (at one point waking him with a shrill performance of Britney Spears's "Oops! I Did it Again"). Ultimately, they move to Houston where Olivia tries to find a better job and where they can also be closer to their grandmother. But they end up in closer proximity, as well, to their father, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), who begins to re-enter their lives. The picture follows both parents as they separately try to deal with their growing kids while finding new partners of their own. In the case of Olivia, she fares worse than Mason Sr. After going back to school to get her degree, she marries one of her professors (Marco Perella) who turns out to be a horrifically violent and abusive alcoholic; and then later, she hooks up with an emotionally damaged soldier (Brad Hawkins) from the Iraq/Afghanistan War. Mason Sr. finds a quaint and less demonstrative woman (Tamara Jolaine) from a Christian background to marry and start a new family with. Linklater thankfully never brings facile judgements to his characters which frees the movie from any traces of melodrama. But when he includes scenes of the alcoholic father exploding at the dinner table and clearly abusing his wife and children, we also don't see how those traumatic moments shape the lives of those who escape him (and those who don't). He may spare us the conventions of easy resolutions, but he also deprives us of the residue of dramatic conflict.

Patricia Arquette and Ellar Coltrane

If Boyhood fails to precipitate a wholeness as the scenes accumulate, some of the performers do manage to give the picture definition anyway. Patricia Arquette, in a vividly expansive performance, nimbly embroiders a full-bodied personality out of the movie's disparate scenes. Arquette convincingly sketches out a persuasive portrait of a woman who made choices before she knew what choices she wanted to make. Becoming a young mother has clearly choked off the possibilities of her life, but Boyhood shows how she struggles to get those options back. Even if her taste in romantic partners turns out to be suspect, she manages to still be a loving and protective mother with sharp parental instincts, while she struggles through school to later become a university professor. Ethan Hawke brings his characteristic boyish and roguish charm to the part of Mason Sr,, a man who clearly lacks the tools of parenting, without losing the desire to act like one. Mason obviously loves his kids and (in some sense) still remains one himself. But if Boyhood is about the growing pains of Mason Jr., it's even more convincingly about the strides taken by his father to become a better one.

The key performances by Ellar Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater are somewhat more problematic here. Perhaps because Linklater identifies more closely with them (and one of the performers is his daughter), he acquiesces to their temperament. Mason Jr. has bright eyes that dim somewhat as the years go on, perhaps due to the troubled family life, but his personality is so recessive that it works against the film's concept of discovery. (It's a lovely touch though that Mason Jr.'s inquisitive eyes in the opening shot lead to his eventually becoming a photographer.) Mason Jr. may change physically, but he emotionally blurs his way into teenage life. And since the picture doesn't provide much in the way of reflection, only a forward propulsion, his pliable sweetness becomes a form of emotional armouring that keeps him somewhat opaque. That blurring quality is evident especially after Mason Jr. meets Sheena (Zoe Graham), a bright and inquisitive young woman who slowly becomes his soul mate. When they have a falling out suddenly after she has an affair, the picture barely gives us time to take in what got lost between them in the break-up. We don't get to feel the pangs of loss, or of the possibilities lost. At the beginning of the film, Lorelei Linklater has the stronger personality of the two siblings, but even she seems to vaporize as the picture goes on. (It's been said that she wanted out of the project. Perhaps that's why Samantha seems to inexplicably recede over time.)

Ellar Coltrane and Ethan Hawke

As film narrative, Boyhood is an ambitious piece of work. But it makes me think more of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011) rather than Truffaut's Antoine Doinel pictures, and not just because both films are about young boys growing up in Texas. While Boyhood is definitely less abstract and elliptical than Malick's memoir, both movies are blatant attempts to transcend the more traditional forms of eliciting meaning from memory. In The Tree of Life, though, memories get presented as fleeting and scrambled rather than as linear events already chocked with insight. Without a true grasp of dramatic coherence (which isn't one of Malick's aims or strengths), the pieces don't find a shape that get anchored in clarity. The Tree of Life becomes an inchoate experience, stirring in its various set pieces, but rarely touching the ground the characters walk on. Linklater also consciously sets out to spare Boyhood the familiar. Unlike Malick, though, he achieves this in a more naturalistic manner. Linklater may resist the conventions and clichés of drama by not reducing a character's behaviour to pat observations, but he also doesn't follow through to provide dramatic revelation. Boyhood is supposed to unfold, I think, more like a series of family photographs that we've just happened upon, and where the bits between time remain largely a mystery to us. Indeed, the key question, which is posed at the end of the film, is a philosophical enigma. Do we seize time, or do the moments actually seize us? The picture never really satisfactorily answers that query. Boyhood chronicles with tenderness and consideration the trials of getting older, but it misses some of the nuances that come with growing up.

-- July 25/14

Deception: Woody Allen's Magic in the Moonlight


Emma Stone and Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight

The title of Woody Allen's new romantic comedy Magic in the Moonlight promises more than it delivers. Not only is there little in the way of a romantic impulse to be found here, you'd be hard pressed to find that the picture even has a pulse. As if suffering from tired poor blood, Magic in the Moonlight comes across as a weary exercise in willed enchantment. Set in 1928, the movie begins in Berlin where an illusionist Wei Ling Soo performs feats of magic, including making an elephant disappear, to the strains of Stravinsky, Ravel and Beethoven in front of a wildly enthusiastic audience. After the show, we discover that Wei Ling is actually Stanley (Colin Firth), a British cynic and misanthrope, who not only castigates his employees, but even casually dismisses his admirers.

Later he meets up with Howard (Simon McBurney), an old friend who is another illusionist, who enlists Stanley to travel with him to the Côte d'Azur where the Catledges, a wealthy American family, have become transfixed by a young clairvoyant, Sophie (Emma Stone). The hope is in having Stanley expose her as a fraud before she bilks the Americans of their fortune and marries Brice Catledge (Hamish Linklater), a fawning goof who is so smitten with her that he's given to continually serenading her with a ukulele. Although Stanley with his cynic's disposition seems the perfect choice for debunking Sophie's supposed gifts, he ends up falling in love with her when he discovers that she may be the real article.

If you're going to make a movie about the romantic awakening of a curmudgeon, one who uses fakery to hoodwink an audience into believing it's magic, then you need an actor who suggests the possibility of believing in the extraordinary even if he chooses to deny it. Colin Firth might have brought a patrician wit to this arrogant bore who has the libidinous rug pulled out from under him, but instead Firth's reserve as an actor snuffs out any spark of life in the character. When he begins to fall in love with Sophie, he could be just as easily be agonizing over what socks to wear. Although many of my female friends swooned over Colin Firth's Mr. Darcy in the 1995 television production of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it was likely because Firth misinterpreted Darcy’s inarticulateness as a sign of the character’s quiet smouldering sexuality. (Darcy was conceived by Austen, however, as a man incapable of revealing his deeper desires because of his asocial rectitude.) In recent years, Colin Firth started to dip much deeper into that reserve by unmasking what his mannered behaviour had always buried – as he did in A Single Man (2009), The King's Speech (2010), and the little seen drama, Genova (2008), where Firth provided cracks in his character armour as a grief-stricken father trying to help his children through a horrible family tragedy. In Magic in the Moonlight, the self-protective armour is firmly in place as Stanley never challenges his moral superiority, even after it has been revealed to be self-delusion and snobbery. Because of this, nothing feels truly at stake in the picture and the romance itself fizzles.

Anyone who has swooned over the dizzying comic sparkle of Emma Stone, especially in parts of Easy A (2010), and the whole of The Amazing Spider-man (2012) and Gangster Squad (2013), will be severely dismayed to see how Woody Allen dampens her percolating effervescence into a lame-brained ditzyness. Since Stanley represents the rationalist skeptic in Woody Allen, the man who debunks the supernatural, we only see her through his eyes. Except for her opening scene in meeting Stanley, where her lubricious grin stretches across the screen to cast its own entrancing charm, Allen shrinks her captivating temperament into a petulant narcissism. By the end of the movie, with its plot twists, the very essence of the story itself even gets undermined by a tired game of deception and self-deception. A number of eager performers, from Eileen Atkins as Stanley's elderly Aunt Vanessa and Marcia Gay Harden as Sophie's mother, are left with little to play but waxworks while wizard cinematographer Darius Khondji, who drapes the images in the rich realist colours of Gustave Courbet, can't do anything to animate the inertia of the characters in the frame.

Woody Allen
When Midnight in Paris (2011) became a huge critical and box office success, it was no fluke. It was a delightful comedy about the perils of taking refuge in the past and how to become a relevant voice in the present again – even if the times you lived in didn't carry the same renaissance spirit of the late Sixties. But Magic in the Moonlight feels like a refutation of Midnight in Paris's fresh revelations, which for a brief moment returned Woody Allen back to being a contemporary figure again; an artist who seemed at home in the present. In Magic in the Moonlight, Allen has not only abandoned that effervescent spirit of discovery, he doesn't even give the weightless pleasures of the uncanny their due. His humbug spirit here is not only earthbound, it's stillborn. What's even worse is that the film continues to recycle themes about God and existence that Allen has already worn thin. So rather than succumb to the sweet alchemy of erotic possibilities, which the title itself implies, Woody Allen drains the picture of any sexual tension and carnal humour as if romance were now nothing more for him than a parlour trick.

-- August 2/14

A Formula Film with a Human Face: The Criterion Collection Release of Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill (1983)



When Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill came out back in 1983, it was understandable (especially if you were a political activist in the Sixties) if you found yourself appalled at just how glib and superficial the whole treatment of the period was. In it, a group of former college radicals gather for a weekend when one of their former comrades, Alex, who has lost his way, commits suicide. As they bury him, they dredge up the good ol' days and reflect on what has happened to each of them since. This would have been perfectly compelling if The Big Chill had believably suggested that any one of these people were ever once radical, let alone political activists. The level of ease they reach together in that South Carolina home, even when they rub each other the wrong way, doesn't take into consideration the uneasy course the country has taken since they last took up sides against it. The group seems more caught up in what middle-age and their choice of occupation has done to them rather than what has happened to the United States by 1983.

For a movie supposedly about the politics of a turbulent period, there is little to find that's political in it. With no sense of what happened in the land between their time as committed activists and now, there's not even a comprehension of how some of the counter-culture (especially the Weathermen) began turning criminal, even psychopathic, like the political revolutionaries in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, or the bombers in Jean-Luc Godard's prescient La Chinoise (1967), as the decade drew to a close. The shootings at Kent State and Jackson State in the early Seventies are never alluded to on this mournful weekend, and the picture never once mentions a President. The country itself is what ends up missing-in-action in The Big Chill. For all their former activism, and their engagement in the world, the collective gathered here are only interested in their state of mind and their own well-being rather than the state of the country. You're never convinced that this group was ever made up of idealists who, by the Eighties, turned into narcissists. They suggest instead refugees from one of Werner Erhard's human potential encounter groups rather than anyone who did time in the SDS. Despite the death of one of their own, which provides the very title of the picture, there is little in the way of a chill in the air considering where America actually was when the film came out.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan had been President for three years. His claim of a new Morning in America had taken hold, but it actually amounted to nothing more than a cultural air-brushing of the Sixties (which The Big Chill avoids considering). According to Reagan, the Sixties aftermath of Watergate, Nixon's resignation from office, the hangover from the Vietnam War, and the collapse of the counter-culture, was just an illusion. Never mind that we had just come out of a period in the Seventies where American film-making, in addressing this national crisis, had radically changed the course of Hollywood, the very venue where Ronald Reagan had once plied his trade. But that cultural revolution, like the political one, was also coming to an end as he took power. By the Eighties, movies were turning hugely formulaic and political discourse was becoming cheerfully acquiescent.

Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now

The big movies of the late Seventies, too, the ones that tried valiantly to confront the troubled era about to change – like Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate – ended up collapsing from the weight of their own hubris. In trying to adapt Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a novella that uncorked the unconscious fears lurking within the colonist in the age of 19th Century colonialism, to the era of Vietnam, Coppola got lost up a river of muddled metaphysics and self-loathing. In Heaven's Gate, Cimino's attempt to examine the transcendental nature of American ideals, where the cultivated minds of Harvard in the 1800s attempt to enrich the uncultivated minds of immigrants coming to the new land, ended up becoming an inchoate downer about American futility and corruption. By embellishing the small tragedy of the Johnson County War (where Montana landowners took the law into their own hands and shot a handful of immigrants trespassing on their land and stealing cattle), Heaven's Gate turned that isolated event into a full-blown holocaust where hundreds were slaughtered under the sanction of the President of the United States. Cimino's agit-prop Western tried to stir the indignation of those Americans alienated in the post-Vietnam period, but he ended up – for close to four hours – adrift in an amorphous haze of passivity and dust.

The failure of Heaven's Gate (on top of the success a couple of years earlier of Star Wars) helped turn American movies on their retrograde course. But that wasn't all. The hangover from the Seventies was also followed by the murder of John Lennon just after Reagan's election. Lennon's shooting seemed like a sick form of penance for promises that could no longer now be fulfilled, and we came into the Eighties with clearly diminished expectations for the future. So into this emotional and political stasis drops The Big Chill, written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, a former ad writer from Detroit, who had already made his chops writing two of George Lucas's Star Wars pictures (The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi), as well as Lucas and Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Kasdan would later direct (just prior to The Big Chill) a slick, impersonal film noir, Body Heat (1981), that turned the genre's enduring temptation into darkness, something film noir had always assured, into a pastiche of malice. Is it any wonder that some us watching The Big Chill in 1983 might have afterwards considered going the way of Alex?

Kris Kristofferson in Heaven's Gate

But time has a funny way of changing your response to a picture when the context for it no longer applies. The Big Chill, which the Criterion Collection has recently re-released in a gorgeous Blu-ray print, still remains slick and self-centered, but the picture's solipsism is undercut by its comedy, where parody and farce happily commingle, and we can now see some clue as to what entertained audiences at the time and made the picture a hit. The Big Chill is an ensemble piece which requires actors to rely less on scene-stealing and more on collective bargaining. If political collectivism is in short supply here, the commercial skills of ensemble comedy make up the distance left by lack of depth. The impersonal aspects of Kasdan's gifts, which were sometimes made distinctly vivid by his directors (Irvin Kershner in The Empire Strikes Back and Steven Spielberg in Raiders of the Lost Ark), are brought to life in The Big Chill by the actors. The movie opens with Harold (Kevin Kline), a jogging-shoe entrepreneur, bathing his young son while having a sing-a-long to Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World," as his wife, Sarah (Glenn Close), a doctor, answers a phone call where she is informed that Alex has been found dead. Before long, the disparate group of friends, who haven't seen each other for some time, arrive at the church. Michael (Jeff Goldblum) is now a celebrity writer for People magazine. Sam (Tom Berenger) is a TV action star who bears a strong resemblance to Tom Sellack. Karen (JoBeth Williams) has become an unhappy ad-executive's wife. Meg (Mary Kay Place), who once dreamed of "defending Huey and Bobby," is now a corporate lawyer. Nick (William Hurt) has inherited the cynicism that finished off Alex as he has become a drug dealer who dips into his own supplies. The other member of the group, although not of their generation, is Chloe (Meg Tilly), who was Alex's young girlfriend.


If the group is perhaps too neatly defined by their pedigree, the actors help flesh out the particulars. Kevin Kline gives an infinitely more relaxed and grounded performance than he had in his previous picture Sophie's Choice. Harold is secure in his life choices, but watching his former comrades squirm with theirs, makes him comically protective. At one point, Nick does something foolish which brings the police to Harold and Sarah's home. There's a sharp irony in having Harold tell Nick that he's "dug in" and that he doesn't appreciate Nick bringing the cops on his ass when he has spent his adult life cultivating their favour to protect his home from vandalism. (The scene would have been funnier – and better – if instead of taking Harold's point of view, Kasdan had shown how Harold's retreat into domestic bliss had also made him indifferent to Nick's distress, the same kind of emotional flailing that led to Alex's suicide.) As Sarah, Glenn Close, with her characteristic Mother Earth maternalism, shows warmth and understanding, but also with an appealing and ticklish sense of naughtiness that's sprinkled around the edges. After recently watching Close's formal demeanour turned into gargoyle mannerisms caricatured to numbing extremes in the ludicrous TV legal drama Damages, Close (like Kline) creates various shades of nuance in her character and has an anchored presence of sanity in The Big Chill. Jeff Goldblum's Michael could have been (with a few false steps) turned into the picture's convenient punching-bag for selling out, but Goldblum's lively eccentricity (which he also used to great effect in Phil Kaufman's 1979 Invasion of the Body Snatchers) justifies his life choices. We come to recognize that he was always a superficial guy, only now he's coming to realize it. While Kasdan (and co-writer Barbara Benedek) don't flesh out Karen's reasons for marrying an ad executive, when she still has the hots for Tom Berenger's Sam, JoBeth Williams still gives a convincingly brittle and bitter performance as a woman who projects her unhappiness onto others so as not to be accountable for her own choices. Tom Berenger maybe has his most likable screen role in The Big Chill because he brings humility to Sam's quiet machismo. (Sam knows that he can't live up to his TV role, but he also doesn't mind milking it when he needs to, as in the film's opening scenes when he charms a stewardess on the flight in order to get another little bottle of alcohol to sooth his grief over Alex.)

But the two most interesting roles, in retrospect, are William Hurt's Nick and Meg Tilly's Chloe. Nick carries the discomfiting elements of disillusionment that The Big Chill continually backs away from. Unlike the others, Nick has turned his early rebellion into masochism where drugs are no longer part of what opens your mind, but now become what freezes your soul. While Alex himself never appears on the screen (except as a body being dressed for his funeral in a clever gag that opens the movie), he still persists in Nick. It's a shame that Kasdan and Benedek make Nick – literally – impotent because they didn't need to. He already feels as impotent as those who failed to change the country. Considering Hurt's horribly baroque turns in more recent pictures like A History of Violence, it's refreshing to see some of the quiet desperation he provides within Nick's self-destructive behaviour. That desperation attunes itself perfectly to Alex's suicide, but it also makes him a perfect soul mate for the young Chloe. Meg Tilly doesn't have a lot of screen time, but she holds her ground against all those others growing nostalgic over their lost possibilities. "I don't like talking about the past as much as you guys do," she says. And it's not held against her that she has a firm grip on the present with no air of pretension, or any need to retreat. Unlike Harold, who's "dug in," Chloe just digs what she does without a whisper of self-doubt or hypocrisy. Which is why it makes perfect sense that her and Nick would connect.

William Hurt and Meg Tilly in The Big Chill

Although much has been made about the baby-boomer nostalgia of the soundtrack to the movie, I think people have short-changed how smartly Kasdan employs the songs. As the movie opens, and the group gradually hears the news about Alex's death, we hear Marvin Gaye's 1968 version of Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield's "I Heard it Through the Grapevine." While many Motown artists had covered the song, from Smokey Robinson & the Miracles to Gladys Knight & the Pips, until Gaye, the track was always a pleasantly teasing and knowing tune about romantic betrayal where the singer gets the upper hand by calling out the heel who has cheated. But Marvin Gaye brought a whole new reading to the song where that betrayal becomes a tale of unrelenting paranoia, and the singer gets surrounded by snake rattles and foreboding chords played on an electric piano that stalk him like the jealous thoughts brewing in his head towards the woman who has taken up with another man. It's a harrowing song that offers the listener, and the singer, no comfort in what gets revealed. Gaye's version also came out in October 1968. It was just months after the horrors of that year that would find Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy dead from assassins' bullets, the Prague Spring of liberal reform in Czechoslovakia turned suddenly into the summer of disenchantment with invading Soviet tanks, and a Democratic Convention in Chicago where the police would riot in the streets with the protesters. It came out one month before Richard Nixon would become President of the United States, too, and turn the Seventies into a travesty. If The Big Chill avoided in its story and characters the political consequences that led to that frost, the music came to reflect some of it instead. (There's another sharp bit that Kasdan includes when Karen plays The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" at Alex's funeral. Besides the obvious irony in the choice of song, the irony compounded by the fact that the song is about the end of the Sixties, it's being played by Karen, for whom it serves as also a perfect commentary on her marriage in the movie.) Sometimes the songs become the glue that binds the group in their tastes, as they weather out the weekend while listening to the stereo, but they are never used to bury the film in instant nostalgia (as the selected tracks did in American Graffiti).

There's times when we want things from movies that can't always be provided – especially at times when we feel we need them most.Watched today, The Big Chill doesn't address any real needs, or come close to calling up the era it eulogizes (but then again, neither does John Sayles's The Return of the Secaucas 7, an earlier 1980 picture that deals with the same issues, because it lacks the power to stay in the memory. Despite the depth, intelligence and political awareness of the director, Sayles lacks the filmmaking skills and dramatic imagination to put that intelligence across). If one wanted a movie that seemed a more accurate picture of a reunion of Sixties activists, you could maybe turn to Sam Peckinpah's last film, The Osterman Weekend, an adaptation of a Robert Ludlam novel that came out the same year as The Big Chill. This timely get-together doesn't bring out wistful memories of lost innocence, but instead (as the late film critic John Harkness rightly pointed out) the unresolved rage and suspicion that the former radicals once projected on their own country. But Peckinpah's characters are conceived as calculatingly as Kasdan's so the period politics still don't seep through. If you had a need for comprehension, a sense of why we went from the new frontier of JFK to the sleepwalking of Ronald Reagan, Brian De Palma's unjustly ignored thriller Blow Out (1981) gave you that before the sleepwalking even truly got in motion. (For that matter, five years before Ronald Reagan, Robert Altman's epic Nashville not only saw it all coming, but showed us how we got there and where we've been going since.) The Big Chill is nothing more than a reasonably entertaining formula film, but one with a human face, where the old values of a Hollywood ensemble farce intersect with the new realities of contemporary drama. As William Hurt's Nick cares to remind us, while he watches a mindless drama on television, "Sometimes you have to let art flow over you." Which is sometimes true – even when it isn't exactly art.

-- September 27/14

Hypnotic Goth: The Gift (2001)


Cate Blanchett in The Gift

Back in 2001, Sam Raimi said in an interview that if he couldn't get actress Cate Blanchett for his new movie, The Gift, then he didn't want to make it. After seeing the film, it's easy to see why he was so adamant: she's so good that it's hard to imagine the picture without her. Blanchett plays Annie Wilson, an attractive widow in a small Georgia town. She makes her living doing psychic readings for her neighbours as a way to support her three young boys. But her gift is also something of a curse. Annie is still reeling from the sudden death of her husband in a horrible accident – a misfortune that she saw coming. When she gets another psychic warning about a possibly murdered débutante, she helps the police find the body and the suspect, but she fears that her second sight might have put the wrong man in jail.

Cate Blanchett has proven to be one of the most translucent actresses we have on the screen – every tremulous emotion can be read on the pours of her skin. Blanchett doesn't display a recognizable style of acting, rather she morphs from part to part, much like Michelle Pfeiffer did earlier in her career. She can play a vast selection of roles – in movies as varying as Pushing Tin, I'm Not There, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Aviator and Blue Jasmine – but her distinctly etched performances, one dramatically different from the other, always have a unity of soul. In The Gift, she plays Annie Wilson as if she were a grown-up version of Stephen King's Carrie, the troubled adolescent with telekinetic powers, only Annie is more self-assured. Where Carrie's powers emerge from repression and out of her control, Annie's come from an ability to see more than she cares to perceive. Blanchett's Annie is a vulnerable woman, but one who doesn't see vulnerability as a form of weakness. Despite being burdened by the power of having a second sight, Annie knows it's a strong part of what makes her feel whole.

Keanu Reeves and Hilary Swank

The Gift might not reach the chilling depths that his previous thriller, A Simple Plan, did, but it's still an evocative and hypnotic Southern Gothic melodrama. The screenplay by Billy Bob Thornton (who had a key role in A Simple Plan) and Tom Epperson takes a story that has a little of the sparseness of Horton Foote and cures it in the flamboyant ink of Stephen King. In A Simple Plan, Raimi worked with a terrific, but small ensemble of actors, where The Gift has him working with a larger group. And they spring a number of memorable moments. I don't know if Keanu Reeves has ever been better than he is here playing a redneck wife abuser who Annie suspects of the murder. (His chilling and fierce dominance put me in mind of Harvey Keitel's equally unnerving abuser in Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.) The wily Katie Holmes is devilishly flirtatious as the débutante who becomes the murder victim, while Giovanni Ribisi adeptly mixes both tenderness and terror as a young mechanic who Annie tries to help out of a brutal family. Hilary Swank brings startlingly ambiguous shadings as Reeves's battered wife, and Michael Jeter does one of his wondrous bits of comic whimsy as the redneck's lawyer. Greg Kinnear meanwhile is pure perfection as a deeply unhappy suitor whom Annie is attracted to. His self-effacing handsomeness has never been employed for more ambiguous reasons than it is here.

Sam Raimi may have started his film career making wildly kinetic and entertaining horror films like Evil Dead and Darkman (which had some of the dadaist pop that you would find in a Loony Tunes cartoon), but starting with A Simple Plan, he began combining cartoon expressionism with a stark dramatic realism – a variation he also later brought (and used to a different purpose) in the operatic Spiderman II (2004). Although The Gift is more textured than the comparatively minimal A Simple Plan, it is nowhere near as dramatically complex. (I'm no psychic but I figured out the ending before Cate Blanchett did.) The Gift however does do full justice to the dreamy undercurrents of sexual hysteria and repression that rest uncomfortably at the heart of most Gothic melodramas. For all its horror, too, the picture doesn't linger in the imagination later as Brian de Palma's 1976 adaptation of Carrie did, or carry the weight of total desolation that concludes A Simple Plan. But it casts for itself quite an eerie spell that holds you – at least, until the lights come up. 

-- October 2/14

Hearing Voices: Tom Marshall's Changelings (1991)


In the first few pages of Tom Marshall's novel, Changelings (Macmillan, 1991), we are confronted with voices. The first one we hear is that of Laird Allen Carter, a man in jail for a rape he cannot remember committing. Soon he's joined by other voices – male and female – with different names, describing memories of events involving sexual seduction, violation, incest and child abuse. These recollections build in intensity until we realize that all of these people share the same past. We soon grasp that these voices belong to two people: Laird Carter and his twin sister, Elaine. In one elliptical stroke, Marshall has plunged us into the world of multiple personalities and possession.

Of course, the subject of spiritual possession, or multiple personalities, isn't new to fiction. Edgar Allen Poe gave us a poetic nightmare about the ghost of Lenore, and Stephen King in The Shining tantalized us with the idea of not being the person we think we are, of being possessed by someone evil. But Changelings isn't about frightening the reader: it's about piecing together fractured narratives. The story takes place in 1960 as Laird tries to seek help. He finds it in a prison psychologist named Herb Delancy, a "do-gooder" who wants to believe that "there is a definite science of the workings of the mind." Herb gets more than he bargained for when he meets the many personalities within the body of Laird – including a brutal psychopath named Al, a womanizer known as Lyle, a spiritual twin sister for Lyle called Alana, and the voice of reason who comes in the form of Lou. All of these personalities are unformed, and even split off from each other. The task for Herb is to integrate them so that he can find out who the real Laird is. Running parallel to this story is that of Elaine, also plagued by voices that almost lead her to murder her children. She finds solace in the world of spiritualism, as a medium who makes the voices serve her own needs. One day, Alice Delancy – the wife of the psychologist – stumbles into her life and Elaine is forced to examine how those voices possessed her. Alice is haunted by the memory of her first love, who was killed in the Korean War. When Elaine is able to bring back the spirit of this lost love, it sets loose as obsession in Alice that pulls Elaine into the longings of this passionate, unfulfilled woman.

In his earlier novels, Adele at the End of the Day (1987) and Voices on the Brink (1988), Marshall (who passed away in 1993) showed a restless and probing intelligence, as if fiction for him served the purpose of a divining rod that sought the unfathomable sources of dramatic conflict. (Marshall was also a poet who did his thesis on A.M. Klein and published four linked collections of philosophical, meditative verse called The Elements: Poems 1960–1975 in 1980.) Marshall's poetic lyricism is what allows him to let loose the personalities in Laird and Elaine, where they seem to be speaking for themselves and independent of the author's voice. The novel submerges us, pulling us with the force of an undertow, into their hidden dramas and often leaving us wanting more. I certainly wanted to know more about Herb, who is in many ways the centre of the book. But it's a small disappointment that we never truly get to examine the contours of his psyche because his character is given no weight. (It's a shame that Marshall couldn't have done what Robert Lindner did in The Fifty-Minute Hour where, in one case study, the analyst gets pulled into the alternate universe of his patient that sets loose his own unconscious world.) Fortunately, it is Alice's despair over the death of her former lover that gives the book the soul that's missing in Herb. She suggests heroines like Gretta Conroy in James Joyce's short story, "The Dead," a woman who becomes possessed by the memory of a young suitor who died for her.

What makes Changelings such a strangely moving experience, even with its flaws, is that it transcends the more conventional understanding of spiritual possession, where the subject always appears to be out of the ordinary and otherworldly. With the assuredness of a poet, Marshall puts this subject into the context of our daily world. He examines how the traumas of childhood create voices in us that initially saves our lives. But he's also saying that if those voices continue to survive into adulthood, they can kill us.

-- October 10/14

The Dogs of Comedy: Revisiting Christopher Guest's Best in Show (2000)


Christopher Guest in Best in Show

It's often been acknowledged – especially in ads – that dog owners not only have a lot in common with their pooches, they sometimes live their lives through them. You can usually size up a dog owner, too, just by watching the type of canine they have at the end of the leash. Dogs can either act out the most regal aspects of the owner's personality, or, as in the case of pit bulls, the owner's latent aggressions. In Best in Show, Christopher Guest satirizes this symbiotic and idiosyncratic alliance by casting it in the colourful arena of a dog show. Using the same spry ensemble of comic actors (Michael McKean, Parker Posey, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy and Fred Willard) that he first worked with in his 1996 debut Waiting for Guffman, in Best in Show, they prove to be even more eccentric than their pets.

Best in Show follows a wide assortment of dog owners who make their way from all over the United States to attend the distinguished Mayflower Dog Show. Among the competitors are an obnoxious yuppie couple, Meg (Parker Posey) and Hamilton Swan (Michael Hitchcock), who feel the success of their marriage can only be measured by the care they show for their pampered Weimaraner. Gerry Fleck (Eugene Levy), an innocuous suburban salesman, and his extremely vibrant wife, Cookie (Catherine O'Hara) bring their agitated Norwich Terrier, who seems to embody all the unacknowledged sexual tensions that exists between the owners. A gay couple, Scott (John Michael Higgins) and Stefan (Michael McKean), bring the royal treatment to their Shih Tzu by adorning her as a queen. The blond bombshell, Sherri Ann (Jennifer Coolidge) and her two-time champion Standard Poodle, "Rhapsody in White," are trying to win their third trophy. And Guest casts himself as Harlan Pepper, a Southern gentleman with a hang-dog expression, who's paired with an equally sombre bloodhound.

Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara

Guest, who also wrote (and starred in) Rob Reiner's modestly ambitious cult favourite, This is Spinal Tap (1984), has a gift for flaky humour and that's what's in full abundance here. Guest isn't out to make fun of the oddities of ordinary people as much he wants to get those peculiarities to bloom. This is probably why he takes such pleasure working with many of the former Second City comedians. Their particular genius is in creating likeable cartoon characters that are firmly rooted in the real world. Eugene Levy, in particular, knows how to put the eyebrows on deadpan comedy. What Levy's Gerry Fleck knows about sales doesn't even come close to what he doesn't know about sex. Every time O'Hara's Cookie meets some stud who once dated her, Levy shrinks Gerry to the size of their terrier. As Cookie, O'Hara is wonderfully adept at being outlandish without coming across as shrill (the same comic combustibility she brought to Tim Burton's Beetlejuice).

Fred Willard and Jim Piddock hosting the dog pageant

Best in Show, though, does have a few dead spots. The gay couple's flamboyant behaviour is only mildly amusing because Guest only parodies what's obvious in their eccentricities. (Guest works best when he parodies what his characters don't perceive about themselves.) Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock, who start out horrifyingly funny, later become simply horrifying because Guest can't vary their high-pitched annoyance. And although I loved the way Guest's Harlan Pepper matched up with his bloodhound, their scenes together don't grow much funnier than the conception. But Best in Show reaches its comic peak with Fred Willard as the TV co-host who makes completely unseemly remarks while covering the pageant. Playing with a straight face, Willard has the kind of impeccable comic timing that explodes every joke, leaving you simultaneously laughing and wincing at his blind inappropriateness. (A few years back, I saw Willard on one of those Celebrity Poker television programs doing the same routine while winning every hand and drawing the look of daggers from the other card players. I couldn't tell whether it was distilled Willard comedy, or if he was dangerously risking getting himself killed before the program's conclusion. The tension of that dynamic kept me watching to the end.)

Best in Show is certainly a much livelier comedy than Waiting for Guffman, and Christopher Guest got even more assured directing his next film, A Mighty Wind, which parodied the Sixties folk revival. Yet Best in Show might still be too quaint for its subject. If not for Willard's ingenious scene-stealing and Levy's forlorn double-takes, the picture would be merely a gently pleasant diversion. Which is to say, Best in Show may not have a lot of bite in its satire, but it has a pretty amusing bark.

-- October 16/14

Reckless Moments: The Deep End (2001)


Tilda Swinton in The Deep End

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

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

In the Twenties, Holding was known for penning a number of romantic novels, but she turned to detective thrillers after the stock market crash of 1929. In her noirs, Holding explored the roles of marriage and motherhood, and she described the character Margaret Hall as having "the resourcefulness of the mother, the domestic woman, accustomed to emergencies." That's exactly how Swinton interprets her. Margaret sees her tasks – trying to bury the body in the lake, wiping away all the evidence, fighting off a darkly handsome blackmailer, Alec (Goran Visnjic), who is set on ruining her son – as challenges to her abilities to be a good mother, rather than imprudent acts that could lead to catastrophe.

Joan Bennett in The Reckless Moment (1949)

In The Reckless Moment, the mother (Joan Bennett) commits murder to protect her daughter from an unsavoury older man. By modernizing the story so that the character's now a son who is homosexual, McGehee and Siegel, in The Deep End, hint at the unacknowledged subliminal ties he has with his mother, bonds that are tinged with sharp ambiguity. Beau, an aspiring trumpet player, has a future his mother fears could be jeopardized by his jaunt out of the closet. By making Darby's death an accident, rather than a murder, it gives Margaret's actions the appearance of desperately painful acts of a protective parent cleaning up the messes left by her child. Although Tilda Swinton's performance dominates the movie, she's ably supported by a good cast. Visnjic's Alec, who at first comes across as an intimidating stud with an incriminating videotape, slowly begins to develop a deeper empathy with Margaret. Alec is basically a man whom you feel life has dealt some bad hands to. (He has a tattoo of a pair of dice on his neck, as if he hopes that one day they would magically role sevens.) Josh Lucas is resourceful, too, playing a young man at odds with his adolescent libido. Peter Donat, as Margaret's live-in father-in-law, provides a few peppy scenes where he seems to be alternately hyperaware and totally oblivious to what is happening right under his nose.

The Deep End was the second feature film from Scott McGehee and David Siegel (their most recent is a 2012 adaptation of Henry James's 1897 novel, What Maisie Knew, which is also about the trials and bonds between parents and their children). Their first film, Suture (1993), was about a white murderer who tried to assume the identity of his estranged half-brother (who happened to be black). But Suture was one of those intellectual puzzles, like Christopher Nolan's highly overrated Memento, that's so caught up in being clever that it barely begins to make dramatic sense. But McGehee and Siegel aren't hiding any cards up their sleeves here. The Deep End is such an assured film noir that it actually takes place, for the most part, in the crisp brightness of daylight rather than the blackness of night. After all, the trepidation the picture inspires isn't the kind that allows anyone to hide in the dark.

-- October 31/14

Paradoxical Sojourns: Bruce Cockburn's Rumours of Glory


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

Born in Ottawa, Cockburn attended the Boston Berklee College of Music in 1964 where he learned jazz. But when he came back to Canada, he played rock music in various groups like The Children, The Flying Circus and Olivus. Bass player Eugene Martynec had just left the Toronto rock band Kensington Market when he met first met Cockburn. Hearing that promoter Bernie Finkelstein was starting a new label called True North, Martynec immediately proposed Cockburn, who recreated himself as the rural folkie. But even with the acoustic textures of his early records, Rumours of Glory showcases tracks that hint at something tougher like "The Blues Got the World" and "You Don't Have to Play the Horses," originally from Night Vision (1973), with its stark cover that features painter Alex Colville's 1954 painting, "Horse and Train," which was inspired by a couple of lines from poet Roy Campbell ("Against a regiment I oppose a brain/And a dark horse against an armoured train"). The use of electric instruments and synthesizers are employed with delicate precision on songs like "All the Diamonds in the World" (1974's Sun, Salt and Time) and the Allen Ginsberg inspired "Silver Wheels" (1976's In the Falling Dark) while the jazz influences could be heard on the lovely chamber instrumental "Rouler Sa Bosse" (from Sun, Salt and Time).


By 1979, Bruce Cockburn started to make music that even had the earmarks of commercial pop on it – like the reggae drenched “Wondering Where the Lions Are” (originally heard on Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws). Within a year, “Wondering Where the Lions Are” had become a hit and reached #21 in the U.S. Billboard Charts. It was on the 1980 release Humans, however, when you could hear an eclectic assortment of musical styles from reggae ("Rumours of Glory," "What About the Bond") to acoustic punk ("Fascist Architecture") despite (or perhaps because) his married life was coming apart. The result of that split would be heard in his first self-produced Inner City Front in 1981, which would kick off with the big band impressionistic hard rock of "You Pay Your Money and You Take Your Chance," which owed much of its poetic spree to Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business." Since he'd also fallen in love, Inner City Front also had its share of romantic songs like the lovely "And We Dance" (which is sadly not included in the CD box), but the politically incendiary tracks "Justice" and "Broken Wheel" do make the cut. The point of including those cuts in the box are perhaps to show that living in the city and observing urban life had not only changed Cockburn’s music, it was also dramatically altering his global perspective which was growing more radical in scope. From here, Cockburn's music never lost its free ranging compass even if the songs grew less elliptical and moved more towards the finger-pointing topicality of protest music. 

Whether it was ecological devastation ("Radium Rain," "If a Tree Falls"), human rights abuses ("Santiago Dawn," "Peggy's Kitchen Window"), corporate crime ("People See Through You," "The Trouble with Normal"), or Indian rights ("A Dream Like Mine"), Cockburn remained musically inventive even if the content became more obvious and less suggestive. Overall, Rumours of Glory remains a remarkable testament to a musical artist who is trying to wed his own spiritual transformation into a skeleton key that makes sense of the material world. In a time when most organized religious groups, especially the fundamentalist extremists, worry about the glory to be found in the next world, and sometimes justify acts of terrorism to arrive there, Cockburn can be heard grappling with the follies of a life lived in the present. When he sings in "The Last Night of the World" (from the 1999, Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu) that "I learned as a child not to trust in my body/I've carried that burden through my life/But there's a day when we all have to be pried loose/If this were the last night of the world," he's not dreaming of an afterlife, but of a romantic glass of champagne in this one.

Bob Dylan transformed himself from an acoustic troubadour into a rock and roller in 1965, and fans booed him across the world for betraying the cause of folk music. When Bruce Cockburn went from being a rural folk artist into an urban and electric rocker in 1981, nobody got upset – even though he began featuring some radically new music. What Rumours of Glory reveals is an artist continually evolving and whose many changes don't so much provoke his audience (as Dylan did), but draw them instead into his paradoxical sojourn for freedom where his spiritual salvation can transform both his art and the world he depicts in it. Rumours of Glory opens the door to a world of those possibilities – both musically and politically – and it's an enduring riddle that Bruce Cockburn continues to try and resolve.

-- November 4/14

Meditations on Love and Death: L'Enfer (2005), Autumn in New York (2000) and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005)


Karin Viard, Marie Gillain and Emmanuelle Béart in L'Enfer

Danis Tanović's Oscar-winning debut, No Man's Land (2001), drew most of its intrigue from the comic dilemma of two men – a Bosnian and a Serb – reluctantly sharing a trench in a time of war. L'Enfer (2005) is a densely absorbing thriller where three women reluctantly share a spiritual trench in a completely different kind of war. Based on Krysztof Piesiewicz's screenplay, which was originally conceived for the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski and loosely inspired by the second part of Dante's Inferno, L'Enfer is about the kind of erotic unhappiness that burns. Sophie (Emmanuelle Béart) is a married woman who comes to believe that her photographer husband is having an affair with one of his clients. Anne (Marie Gillain) is a young student who is obsessed with one of her professors, a married man who has just split up with his wife. Celine (Karin Viard) is a spinster caring for her invalid mother who begins receiving strange advances made to her by a young man (Guillaume Canet) she meets in a bar.

For a long spell, Tanović draws out the suspense by depriving us of knowing who these women are and how their stories intertwine. But when he does eventually spring the narrative trap, not only does the submerged elements come together, he doesn't distil any of the picture's tension. As in No Man's Land, fate and free-will become predominant conflicts which Tanović masterly weaves into the drama without making a point out of it. A remarkable cast of French actresses, all of them playing on raw nerve, provide an electrical charge that hums under the deceptive serenity of the film's direction. The dramatic thrills in L'Enfer hum like a furnace and lure us into an obsessive web that's so seductive that Tanović lets you feel hell's heat.

Richard Gere and Winona Ryder in Autumn in New York

Joan Chen's romantic melodrama, Autumn in New York (2000), a love story where death comes to redeem the living, walks into as many dramatic traps as it's trying to avoid. But there's also an intuitive intelligence that seeps through the tired and familiar sentimental tropes in the story. Which is to say, the shortcomings of Autumn in New York are overcome by many of the virtues of the woman directing it. Will (Richard Gere) is a celebrity restaurant owner in Manhattan who is also a womanizer. Every gesture he makes as he greets and seats is softly seductive and flirtatious. Given that it's Gere in the role, he could be on autopilot, but he doesn't play these scenes in the callow manner he developed in earlier pictures like American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman. With his elegant crop of grey hair, Gere doesn't use his handsomeness to fight the camera as he did in those pictures; he opens up instead to what it might find. Gere brings out a vulnerable tentativeness that lurks beneath Will's cocky self-assurance. One night, a young woman, Charlotte (Winona Ryder), is having a birthday party at his restaurant and Will becomes totally disarmed in her presence – especially given the uneasy circumstances of her being the daughter of a woman he once loved and who died. Joan Chen provides a ghostly timbre as Will is initially drawn to Charlotte because of how she invokes his feelings for her deceased mother. But the picture is also about how he works through the spectre of past feelings. Though Charlotte looks like a woman with time on her side, in actuality, she's running out of it as she suffers from a fatal heart condition that leaves her fighting to take in what life she has left. Since Will has been living as if time didn't exist at all, Autumn in New York becomes about how their fragile – and brief – romance tests their resolve to make their love matter.

While the story draws its prurient fascination from the love affair between an older man and a younger woman, Chen and screenwriter Allison Burnett explore this affair not by moralizing, but by drawing our attention to its delicate dynamics. With sensuous shadings, Winona Ryder plays Charlotte as a wise romantic who not only knows what she is getting into, but dispenses of any consideration of her being the innocent ingénue. She's hungry for the kind of life experience that comes with age – and time is something that she's short of. Shot in vivid impressionistic seasonal colours by the celebrated cinematographer Changwei Gu (Farewell My Concubine, The Gingerbread Man), Autumn in New York highlights the picture's tangled emotions and moods. Gere and Ryder also bring out the tantalizing delicacy of their tenuous affair. In the scene where they first kiss, the screen, in the dark shades of fall, is filled with apprehension, doubt and desire.

Although Chen tries to avoid creating a maudlin weepy on the order of Love Story, or using cancer to dispense life lessons as Terms of Endearment did, the picture loses its assurance and poignancy once it includes a scene where Will betrays Charlotte. Despite their later reconciliation, you can't escape the stale notion that her ultimate death is supposed to redeem Will just as Ryan O'Neal was saved by Ali McGraw's demise in Love Story. We're supposed to believe that Charlotte's end turns Will into a nobler man which betrays the tremulous qualities which made the first half so emotionally stirring. When the picture opened, there were no press screenings and the picture was largely torn to pieces. But sometimes the margin between success and failure is a slim one. If Autumn in New York ultimately falls into conventional notions of death and redemption, it still leaves a residue that undermines that sentiment. At its best, Autumn in New York says that no matter how strong the love, death always removes the happy ever after.

Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in Tim Burton's Corpse Bride

For much of his career, director Tim Burton has woven together elements of both the macabre and gothic romance into a sumptuous comic symphony – sometimes with delirious assurance (Beetlejuice) and sometimes with stunning tone deafness (his adaptation of Sweeney Todd). Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005) is a spirited and assured piece of stop-motion animation set in a cheerless 19th Century European village, where Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp) is about to marry the bashful Victoria Everglott (Emily Watson). At the rehearsal, Victor badly stumbles over his wedding vows and dashes away into the forest in embarrassment. While practicing, he places the wedding ring on what he believes is a twig. It turns out instead to be the bony finger of Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), a murdered bride. She gleefully rises from her grave to declare Victor as her groom. Once Victor disappears with Emily down to the necropolis where she resides, a conniving Lord Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant) starts to put the moves on the abandoned Victoria.

Adapting the happily ghoulish sensibility that Henry Selick displayed in Burton's 1993 animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas, Burton (along with co-director Mike Johnson) mix with a fervent glee darkly clever puns and inspired visual gags. Depp's Victor is a gauntly endearing heartsick romantic who could also be confused as a walking corpse. When Bonham Carter's beautifully melancholic cadaver awakens the dormant libido of the sad-sack Victor, it's as if Gahan Wilson had just made his acquaintance with Edgar Allan Poe. Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is a genuinely entrancing ghost story that's also a grand tale of romantic bereavement. The tears of laughter it induces in us are sometimes inseparable from the tears of remorse that inspired it.

-- November 28/14

A Pining Spirit: Perth County Conspiracy...Does Not Exist


This piece is an edited and revised version of a script I wrote for the radio documentary "Dream Time: The Story of Perth County Conspiracy...Does Not Exist" for CBC Radio's Inside the Music.

Back in 1970, the passions of the Sixties counter-culture seemed spent. The Beatles, who had inspired the communal spirit of that age, had bitterly broken up. For one thing, John Lennon had just declared that the dream was over. George Harrison then wistfully told us that all things must pass. But not so in Canada. That same year, singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn gently urged us to go to the country. Joni Mitchell lamented getting back to the garden in her song about the Woodstock Festival. And in Stratford, Ontario, a town known for its Shakespearean Festival, a group of musicians, actors and a café owner converged to create a folk/rock ensemble calling itself Perth County Conspiracy. Every night, in a local haunt called The Black Swan, run by proprietor Harry Finley, musicians Richard Keelan and Cedric Smith began to work their magic at midnight. With a collection of politically irreverent and mystical songs, they created a challenging theatrical experience for those curious Stratford Festival patrons looking for something a little unexpected and out of the ordinary.

Out of the inspired lunacy of those midnight shows a record album would eventually be recorded. But unlike most pop albums, Perth County Conspiracy…Does Not Exist (1970) wasn’t just a collection of songs. It was a conceptual statement about a way of life. While concept albums – from The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper to The Who’s Tommy – were certainly in vogue then, the Perth County Conspiracy album was distinct even from those time bound recordings. Their record didn’t simply draw from its present times, it was also cured in the past; in the spirit of Shakespeare, in the poetry of young children, and the anarchic satire of the Firesign Theatre, as well as, the eloquent prose of Dylan Thomas. In a few short years, during the early Seventies, Perth County Conspiracy created in their music an appealing image of a communal society. Perth County Conspiracy…Does Not Exist brought forth the notion that through the arts – theatre, prose and music – there was a means to dream of a generous, more inclusive culture. But it wasn’t expressed through the hokum of flower power; no, there were portentous warnings in this music, too, a sense that, as part of a cosmic convergence, the darkness of night always shook hands with the light of day.

The story of their forming created its own serendipity. Harry Finley had just relocated his Black Swan café from Hamilton to Stratford in 1961 because of the burgeoning theatre scene. The circumstances for finding a place turned out to be just as fortuitous as the eventual forming of Perth County itself. But it was hardly a smooth transition moving to Stratford. Although the theatre Festival was in its ninth year and drawing new crowds to the town, it wasn’t yet what you would call an artist-friendly place. Before becoming an idyll for thespians, Stratford was a working class railway town. (Sometimes even local toughs beat up the actors.) Soon Cedric Smith, bornin Bournemouth England, came to Kitchener, Ontario when he was nine. One night, a mutual friend from London introduced Harry to Cedric who was doing an evening of songs by The Kingston Trio and The Clancy Brothers. As Cedric developed his acting career in Stratford, he also continued his musical one in the off-season. Throughout the Sixties, he toured the United States meeting various left-wing progressives who set him up with gigs playing coffee houses in Chicago and Detroit. By the summer of 1968, after performing in Chicago during the riots at the Democratic convention, Cedric came back to Stratford. He was then introduced by Harry to another talented performer, Richard Keelan.

Richard Keelan and Cedric Smith

Keelan was born in Michigan in 1941 where his father owned a tavern. This bar had a jukebox so that whenever the records were changed, the family got to keep them. So Richard’s early musical education included swing jazz and Louis Prima. But like most kids in the Fifties, when he discovered Elvis on television, he fell in love with rock and roll. By the end of the Fifties, though, Keelan fell in with the folk music scene. He was soon influenced by The Kingston Trio and especially the legendary Leadbelly with his 12-string guitar. By the time he finished Grade 12, he had formed his first band – The Swinging Shepherds – named after Moe Koffman’s hit. Rather than go to college, however, Richard Keelan broke up the band and headed to the Southern states to play coffee houses. When he came back to Detroit, it was to form The Spikedrivers, a psychedelic folk band. They made a record but their label didn’t know how to market them. So he went on to form another group equally baffling to label executives called The Misty Wizards. Then, by 1967, fate forced his hand when the summer riots broke out in the black communities.

The riots ultimately drove Keelan and his wife out of Detroit and into Canada. Finley, who’d seen The Spikedrivers perform in the States, quickly invited him to Stratford to play The Black Swan. It was there where Smith and Keelan began to trade song ideas and the seeds of the conspiracy were first planted. Cedric and Richard, though, were a contrast in style. Where Cedric had a darker theatrical singing voice, Richard complement his with a light and melodic tenor. But they were both snug performing eclectic styles of music and dramatic presentations. Their loose knit try-it-on spirit also meant that they didn’t audition musicians to be members of the band. Some, like bass player Michael Butler, and songwriter Terry Jones, could show up and join up. But there’s no way that Perth County Conspiracy could have thrived without both The Black Swan and the counter-culture that sustained it. In the early Seventies, communal societies had popped up everywhere with people wanting to get back to the land to escape the pressures and anxieties of the city. Furthermore, they set out to create an alternate culture.


The personality and the dramatic style of Perth County Conspiracy was furthered mostly by the nature of their nightly programs at The Black Swan. In 1970, six months after Perth County Conspiracy began honing their stage show, they started considering making a studio album. Their hope was to make a record that could duplicate the mixture of drama and music that they were doing on stage. Their good friend Gary McKeehan was a freelance producer at CBC who offered them an opportunity to record something for the public broadcaster’s radio transcription projects. They did the album but it was simply a collection of original songs and covers. It wasn’t until McKeehan introduced them to Columbia Records producer John Williams that the group began to conjure Perth County Conspiracy…Does Not Exist. Williams signed the group to the label offering them a standard contract with 8% royalties to be paid out. Now they had the freedom to develop in the studio the heady dramatic program they offered at The Black Swan.

Out of all the wide-ranging music on this record, there is also a dream, a pining spirit. It’s a spirit where you are invited to envision – out of all of this musical diversity – a notion that, within all this diversity, a common ground could be shared. Perth County Conspiracy…Does Not Exist provided a myth to live in. And like most myths, it’s seldom the whole truth. For instance, the album’s cover which portrayed everyone living on the same farm and sharing the land couldn’t have been further from the facts. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with taking leaps of risk and imagination. But all dreams have endings and the one the group chose to conclude the record was a somber song called “Crucifixation Cartoon,” a track that woke you up from the dream of the record; a record where musicians, actors and poets had entertained you with art and artifice. But “Crucifixation Cartoon” was the real deal. It talked to you about the price of freedom.

When Perth County Conspiracy…Does Not Exist was released, Columbia Records booked Massey Hall for the launch. It was a full house. It was also the first time Richard Keelan got to play this fabled venue. But the relations between Perth County and Columbia Records did not continue to be a beautiful experience. Although their album sold well enough to do a second pressing, it did not help pay off the advances made to the group, so they saw no money. In fact, Columbia claimed they owed them cash. The group continued playing steady gigs of a show they called The Midnight Hour (performed at midnight of course) at Toronto Workshop Productions, the left-wing theatre company where Cedric had been playing Che Guevara. They’d also met the Canadian Marxist poet Milton Acorn and began scoring music to some of his poems. Despite financial loss, Columbia decided to follow up Perth County Conspiracy…Does Not Exist with a double-live album recorded at the Bathurst Street United Church. But the concert album, poorly recorded and mixed, had little of the magic heard on their previous studio one.


After the release of their live album, Perth County Conspiracy parted ways with Columbia Records. But the group continued expanding adding singer/songwriter Bob Burchill, bass players Larry Brown and David Woodhead, plus pianist and violinist Paul Gellman. This larger ensemble then started its own independent recording label called Rumour Records and, like a conspiracy, turned up in a variety of congregations. Despite the vagueness of these ensembles, they did travel to East Germany in 1975 to do an album at the invitation of the East German government. But soon after, the band went their separate ways. When they got back to Canada things splintered. Richard Keelan formed the Spiral Band in 1978 and later moved to Hamilton. Cedric Smith continued his acting career and becoming a recognizable fixture on TV shows like Road to Avonlea.

Since the release of this album, it has more than lived up to its title. Not only did the record go out of print in the late Seventies, it has never even been issued on CD. Indeed the conspiracy still does not exist. But like a true conspiracy, it has gone underground and its spirit can be heard in some contemporary groups like Fleet Foxes or Midlake. But the record has curried favour in Europe especially among fans of psychedelic folk –proving that the utopian promise that Perth County Conspiracy’s music held out has stood the test of time even if the group itself couldn't.

-- December 6/14

The Weight of Gold: Michael Winterbottom's The Claim (2001)


Nastassja Kinski and Peter Mullen in The Claim.

Michael Winterbottom's The Claim (2001) is set shortly after the 1849 California Gold Rush and loosely based on Thomas Hardy's emotionally devastating 1886 novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge. But Winterbottom doesn't simply adapt Hardy's powerfully evocative moral drama and recast it in the emerging American West, he cures the film in the poetically elliptical style of Robert Altman's imagined frontier of McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971). Altman's film, which starred Warren Beatty as a gambler with a vision and Julie Christie as the pragmatic madam he loved, was a dreamy, effusive view of the ruggedness of settling the land. The Claim doesn't share the fulsome lyricism of McCabe, but like Altman's western, Winterbottom allows the story to unfold through an evocatively shifting tableau of conflicting moods.

Thomas Hardy's novel was a morally complex character study about Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, who sells his wife to a sailor one night in a drunken daze. When he sobers up, he's determined to give up drinking. He even becomes a successful and wealthy man as well as the respected mayor of the town of Casterbridge. Eighteen years later, though, his wife returns to him with her daughter, in order to reveal the truth of his earlier actions to the town he rules. This revelation drives Henchard back to drink and ruin. The Mayor of Casterbridge is about the cumulative power of past sins that can unravel the illusions we sometimes take refuge in. The Claim carries the emotional freight of Hardy while extending the theme of shattered personal illusions to larger ones – the town he creates in his own image aptly titled: Kingdom Come. Daniel Dillon (Peter Mullan), an Irish-American immigrant who runs Kingdom Come in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, is wealthy, respected and (like Henchard) has an unsavoury past. Years earlier he sold his wife and his own daughter to a gold prospector to acquire the deed to a claim that would lead to his riches and fame. But his ailing wife Elena (Nastassja Kinski) and his daughter, Hope (Sarah Polley), much later venture to Kingdom Come to make him repent. Dillon makes a noble attempt to redeem himself, but he's also compromised by the presence of Dalgish (Wes Bentley), an expedient railroad surveyor who poses a threat to Dillon's power and wealth. Dalgish also threatens Dillon's romantic entanglement with Lucia (Milla Jovovich), the saloon singer who loves him and is doomed to lose him to the woman from his past.

Milla Jovovich in The Claim.

The emotional power in The Claim grows out of a fever dream brought on by desperate greed – just as Von Stroheim's Greed (1924) and John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierre Madre (1948) did – while Alwin Kuchler's elegiac cinematography invokes the faded photos of an emerging civilization. Winterbottom, along with screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (his collaborator on the 1997 Welcome to Sarajevo), create a pensive dramatic fable where tragedy and regret delicately commingle. Peter Mullan, whose heavy spiritedness can usually sink a movie, delivers a powerhouse performance here. Mullan often plays characters who are all body armour, but this time we get beneath the cracks in the shield. Nastassja Kinski, who once played Hardy's Tess in Roman Polanski's film, has developed much more emotional range here since she no longer uses her beauty as an opaque mask. Kinski plays Dillon's abandoned wife with a quiet dignity that doesn't call attention to itself. Milla Jovovich also does some of her best work as the sultry and bereft singer, while Sarah Polley creates a quiet presence with deep emotional reserves as Hope. Only Wes Bentley's Dalgish carries the same vacuous blandness he displayed in American Beauty (1999) as the videographer/dope dealer.

A few years earlier, Michael Winterbottom made a bold attempt to tackle Hardy's Jude the Obscure, which is about (among many things) cruelly dashed idealism. But the film couldn't successfully invoke the psychological dynamics of the story. It was as if Winterbottom was chained to Hardy's densely told tale and wasn't free to find his own voice to interpret its drama. Jude instead turned into a banal exercise in social commentary. But by shifting the story of The Mayor of Casterbridge to a new location under different circumstances and times, it seems to have freed Winterbottom to find his own way. The Claim is worth its weight in gold.

-- December 12/14

Incongruous Encounter: Frank Sinatra Meets Randy Newman


There have been some naturally skeptical reactions to the notion of Bob Dylan doing a cover album of songs associated with Frank Sinatra. With a voice that is more a rough in the diamond than the reverse, his about to be released Shadows in the Night stands to prove an interesting challenge that hopefully will yield better results than his crooning of Christmas carols a few years back. But Shadows in the Night got me thinking about another incongruous encounter between Sinatra and another unlikely performer long before he died.

I think it's safe to assume that when Frank Sinatra created Reprise Records in 1960, he didn't envision a line-up that would eventually include Tiny Tim, Jimi Hendrix, The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Neil Young, The Fugs and Randy Newman. However, by 1970, there they were, not to mention a host of others just like them – and here was Frank Sinatra situated among them. Curiously, at the time, Sinatra was also in need of a hit song. So he turned to an unlikely collaborator from his label: Randy Newman.

Frank Sinatra has been a best-selling artist for Capitol Records since 1953 after a long string of sensational albums. Sinatra possessed the kind of dreamy, forlorn voice that could reach down to the very essence of tenderness in a sad song. When he interpreted such indelibly sorrowful tunes as "I Can't Get Started," on No One Cares (1959), or "Willow Weep for Me," on Frank Sinatra Sings Only for the Lonely (1958), he would embody the song's anguish so effortlessly it was if the compositions were singing him. Sinatra had perfected a distinctly romantic style, a sexiness born of both heartbreak and despair. He played out the role of the lonely guy at the bar, nursing his glass of scotch, then imparting a lasting story of regret to you alone. In doing so, Sinatra could keep alive a slight flicker of romantic desire, hushed yearning or grievous moment that became more deeply intoxicating with every line he sang.

By the late Fifties, however, Sinatra's real unhappiness lay with Capitol Records. Disgruntled, he wanted out of his contract, citing exhaustion with the demands of the major labels. In Reprise, what Sinatra envisioned was an independent record label which might attract folks like fellow Rat-Packer Dean Martin and jazz music's true dignitary, Duke Ellington. But while Martin and Ellington eagerly jumped on the bandwagon, the Chairman of the Board still wasn't satisfied; he just wasn't making the huge impact he had years earlier. Sinatra's subsequent Reprise recordings didn't manufacture anywhere near the hits his years with Capitol produced. Even still, there was an abundance of wonderful songs. Who can forget the beautiful melancholic cadences of "Summer Wind," or the unquenchable craving of "Strangers in the Night," not to mention "That's Life," with its soulful swing? But by 1968, the songs were no longer singing him. Sinatra had grown far too comfortable in the role of the romantic icon. His cover of Paul Anka's self-pitying "My Way," for example, was so overwrought that it became a self-parody of the wounded romantic Sinatra had been playing for years. When "My Way" only climbed as high as #27 on the pop charts in 1970, Sinatra turned to Randy Newman. When Sinatra met Randy Newman in the studio, he found a singer-songwriter and pianist who was far from a wounded romantic, someone who shuffled shyly across the room as if trying not to be noticed. Yet Newman had already provided a nimble collection of songs for other proven performers including Dusty Springfield, who had just recorded "I Don't Want to Hear it Anymore" and "Just One Smile" for her soul classic Dusty in Memphis (1969), and earlier, in 1966, the unmatched heartbreaker "I've Been Wrong Before" (which would have been an ideal cover for Sinatra); the jaunty "While the City Sleeps" and the dark desperation of "Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)" for Irma Thomas; and the soft bossa-nova of "Take Me Away" for Jackie DeShannon in 1968. But the song he would dream up for Sinatra had the curious title of "Lonely at the Top."


What Sinatra clearly didn't know about Newman was that he was also a pop parodist. But most musical satirists who perform comedy songs ("Weird Al" Yankovic and Adam Sandler come to mind) commonly trash other, more famous, artists. After all, it's an easy way to create an instant hit record. Some, like "Weird Al," have built long careers solely on the backs on those they parody. When he demolishes Micheal Jackson's "Beat It," with his own "Eat It," it is nothing more than a one-note joke, one we feel perfectly safe in sharing because we aren't the butt of it. But Newman's work is cut from a different cloth. In his satirical numbers, parody is not an end in itself, it's merely a means to get at something more resonant in the target of the joke and to the culture that produced that target. Parodists like "Weird Al" and Adam Sandler also lay waste to the work of those with larger ambitions, but Newman is someone for whom artistic ambition is wrapped up in the question of what constitutes amusement and what constitutes art.

It's hard to say then if Newman wrote "Lonely at the Top" to take the piss out of the grandiose "My Way," or tweak the persona of the lone romantic, but a studio session was soon arranged for Newman to play Sinatra the song. Unlike "My Way," with its phony tough-guy platitudes, "Lonely at the Top" is a biting examination of the romantically fatalistic figure Frank Sinatra had spent a career creating. Sinatra pressed himself quietly against a studio wall while Newman crouched over the piano and slowly began to sing. As a piece of music, "Lonely at the Top" was your basic ragtime ballad, but the lyrics – spoken in the first person – were something quite peculiar. Not only did the song subtly mock the persona Sinatra had spent his career creating, it also caricatured the life and career of Newman himself: "I've been all around the world, had my pick of any girl," sang the unworldly Newman in his customary low drawl. "You think I'd be happy, but I'm not." Ol' Blue Eyes stood attentively trying to measure the meaning of this odd little ditty, while Newman continued his sly deconstruction of the Sinatra persona: "Everybody knows my name, but it's just a crazy game. Oh, it's lonely at the top." Could this clown be serious? Sinatra no doubt wondered. In all likelihood, Newman had already lost his big chance for a hit record, and by the song's conclusion, the jig was definitely up – "Listen all you fools out there/Go on and love me – I don't care/Oh, it's lonely at the top."


Without saying a word, Sinatra left the studio having made it perfectly clear there would be no hit song coming from Randy Newman. For his part, Newman wasn't terribly surprised, as he had immediately identified one of the significant differences between the two performers. Where Newman had written a character study of a man who couldn't find solace in being on top, Sinatra was an artist who believed that solace could only be found there. "It would have been real difficult," Newman recalled. "[Sinatra] couldn't have played many [types of] characters in his songs." Newman recognized that his song required that Sinatra distance himself from, even parody, the image he helped create. "He could have [truly got] it if he had this sense of humour and he actually was leaning against leaning against a lamppost, looking forlorn," Newman continued. But if you listen carefully to Newman sing "Lonely at the Top," you immediately catch the incongruities in the song, a caustic and clever ingredient that Sinatra surely resisted, and for good reason. Sung with a straight face, by any popular performer, Sinatra, or even Barbra Streisand (who also turned it down), the tune would lose its character and its point.

A couple of years after the fateful Sinatra session, Timothy Crouse, in Rolling Stone, elaborated on the discrepancy: "Although it was written for Frank Sinatra, 'Lonely' is really a parody of every self-congratulatory end-of-the-road song Sinatra ever sung." Since Newman was a "nobody," he could be anybody in his songs, a luxury Frank Sinatra, with all his fame, couldn't afford. "I can do personal stuff because no one gives a shit – no one knows who the hell I am," he said at the time. "But Sinatra can't sing 'Suzanne' [a Newman song about a rapist's fantasies] because he's somebody." After Sinatra's rejection, Newman sat down to write more songs and decided to keep "Lonely at the Top" for himself – as a cute joke in which the chap singing that he's lonely at the top hides a fear that he might actually be closer to the bottom. Newman eventually added it to live shows, the self-deprecating joke growing deeper each year he was continuously nominated for Academy Awards for his film music and rejected, and even included the track on his studio album, Sail Away, in 1972. Sinatra, meanwhile, abandoned recording and went into a brief retirement. But though the session did not produce a successful collaboration between these two radically different American performers, it proved to be an instructive experience for Newman. He could now put his futile attempt to emulate Sinatra behind him, and in the process, finally discover the paradoxical corners of his own voice.

-- December 20/14


                                                                    2015

Agit-Plop: Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen's The Interview



Probably the biggest irony concerning Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen's political satire, The Interview, is that the controversial events surrounding it, and the global political ramifications its been linked to, will be more memorable in time than the film itself. Who knew that it would take a stoner comedy from Sony Pictures to help launch a terrorist cyber war on the Western world from hackers allied with North Korea – an act that would end up with the film being pulled before its Christmas Day release? After an initial act of censorship, and President Obama slapping the studio and movie venues on the wrist, The Interview is now playing in selected theatres. But is the picture itself worth all the bother? Well, no. But like most things that get censored, the reasons being offered are more troubling – and more illuminating – than the film creating the fuss.

As a piece of slacker comedy, The Interview actually begins quite well, with a clever parody of the "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" scene in Cabaret, and then unfolds as casually and as genially goofy as a scatological Crosby/Hope road movie. Dave Skylark (James Franco) is an ingratiatingly dippy host of Skylark Tonight, a celebrity talk show. Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen) is the show's producer, but he still longs for a career in serious journalism and has settled for being a success in populist banality. While celebrating the biggest scoop on the show (rapper Eminem comes out of the closet in the movie's best staged gag), as well as their 1,000th episode, they discover that the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (Randall Park, who plays the expedient Minnesota governor Danny Chung on HBO's Veep) is a huge fan. Thinking that there's still an opportunity for legitimacy in current affairs programming, Aaron leaps for an opportunity to interview the Stalinist dictator. Once he sets their historic meeting in motion, by travelling to China to receive (all too briefly for the trouble) instructions from Sook (Diana Bang), an attractive North Korean official, his host Dave eagerly accepts the assignment. The CIA, however, have also been monitoring their movements and have another assignment in mind. Agent Lacey (Lizzy Caplan from Masters of Sex) recruits the duo to assassinate Kim in order to facilitate a coup to bring down his government. With the use of a poisonous transdermal strip, hidden on Dave's hand, a handshake between him and Kim would complete the deed. Of course, Dave blows it and from there the picture – literally – descends into chaos. Any goodwill the movie had in its first half-hour also gets completely squandered. The screenplay by Dan Sterling, which runs out of ideas before he even gets to the point of the plot, simply indulges in stupidly unpleasant and badly staged slapstick gags that would make The Three Stooges blush with embarrassment. In one, upon arrival in North Korea, Kim's bodyguard discovers the strip and seizes it. Thinking its gum, he eats it and dies. The CIA has to smuggle another one in that's airlifted in a phallic container that Aaron has to smuggle into the palace rectally. Before long, the attempted coup descends into the grisly violence that contributed to making Pineapple Express so unpleasant. The Interview, like the container in Aaron's rectum, disappears up its own ass.

James Franco and Seth Rogen.

The performers are also left largely stranded due to little characterization provided in the story. James Franco's blissful fan-boy demeanour as Dave would have been a lot funnier if he didn't work it so hard. Franco has so little to play that he resorts to frantic mugging, leaving him chewing up what little scenery the film provides us. Seth Rogen has played variations on this character in other pictures, but even he becomes exhaustively desperate – especially in his love scene with Diana Bang's Sook, who has a hidden libidinal smile that is never allowed to crack into one. Lizzy Caplan, on the other hand, is as humourless as she is playing Virginia Johnson on Masters of Sex. In the funniest moments of Masters of Sex, Caplan never seems to be in on the joke – even if she is the one making it. She is almost as emotionally armoured here playing Agent Lacey as if fighting the bad taste in her lines. As for Randall Park's Kim, the puppet playing his father in Team America: World Police was given more personality to play with. Park is at least lively, portraying him as another lascivious party animal who has a love of margaritas and Katy Perry (which makes him appear as if he'll be soon coming out of the same closet as Eminem). The homoeroticism in the interplay between Dave and Kim though diffuses the picture's comic potential since the pairing of Dave and Aaron also has that same unacknowledged bonding – and nothing is ever done with it. The Interview is actually too dumb and unaware to make any connections, sexual or political, that would give the frat boys attending the movie too much discomfort. The assassination of Kim itself is staged as if to parody a Michael Bay action film, but it's so clumsy that it could be paying homage to him, as if telling North Korea that we live up to everything they loathe about us. Even here, The Interview isn't very effective comic agit-prop; it's the new genre of agit-plop. 

When news of The Interview first came out, I don't think anybody was thinking The Manchurian Candidate. But some film critics on social media, after Sony pulled the picture, seemed outraged that the movie was drawing all of this international attention. They even went so far as implicitly supporting its suppression because it wasn't the kind of picture worthy of their support. A few even suggested that The Interview, because of its juvenile condemnation of Kim John-un, was asking for trouble (as did many news outlets like the Washington Post which prompted a friend of mine to ask, "Where does the Post's sudden respect for Kim Jong-un come from?"). Are we so worried about offending a cruel, sadistic dictator that we can't satirize how two dweebs get hired by the CIA to assassinate him? The Interview doesn't even have the moxy, the inventiveness, or the highly subversive humour of Team America: World Police (2004) (which also mercilessly and hilariously parodied the Hollywood action genre). But whether The Interview is a bad comedy, or the daring satire like The Manchurian Candidate, isn't the point. Instead of addressing a clear violation of freedom of expression, why are we blaming the company for green-lighting a dumb comedy that is essentially as artistically edifying as The Three Stooges tweaking Hitler in You Nazty Spy! in the Forties (which they did when America was still neutral in fighting fascism)? Should Hollywood have shown caution there, too? In 2006, Britain's Film Four released a film called Death of a President which featured the assassination of President George Bush, during a time of war, and I don't remember anyone calling for a censoring of the film. (It actually did open in the United States despite an unforgiving portrait of Bush.) Artistic freedom matters whether you are Seth Rogen or Jean Renoir. South Korean cinema routinely takes shots at Kim (and for damn good reason), but should they also be cooling it? I think what gets under some critics' skin is that The Interview represents everything they loathe about corporate Hollywood and leads them to empathize with the forces of censorship. (It's one of the areas where left and right ideologues make smooching bed companions.) If Paul Thomas Anderson (who is considered an artist, and has made his own, very different, stoner comedy this Christmas season with Inherent Vice) had made The Interview, the critics who are appalled would be singing a different tune.

James Franco and Randall Park in The Interview.

Then there are those artists who themselves started making ridiculously rational pleas for censorship. Paul Schrader reflecting back on Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which he scripted, said after the recent pulling of The Interview: "There is no such thing as Free Speech. Never has been. There has always been an ill defined red line between what is permissible and what is not. Somewhere between 'Do not yell 'Fire' in a crowded theater' and Don't Insult the Queen's Wardrobe. It constantly fluctuates. Scorsese and I did not believe we'd crossed the red line on The Last Temptation of Christ but we had. That film was censored as surely as The Interview but only after terrorist injuries and deaths. Every studio knows that blasphemy against the Prophet or incitation to racial violence are beyond the red line. Now they know making a joke out of assassinating the head of a hostile head of state is across the red line. Labelling The Interview confrontation as a Freedom of Speech issue simplifies a more complex argument." Besides there being a huge difference between yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre and a movie being screened in one, I do not recalling any "terrorist injuries and deaths" over Last Temptation (except for one incident in France), only protests, threats and heavy security. It's disturbing when artists start finding justification for censorship – especially after their last film (Schrader's own Dying of the Light) was subjected to cuts they didn't ask for. Right-wing pundits have also decided that it's our patriotic duty to see The Interview as if movie-going should be aligned with civic virtue. But here, they end up turning a mindless, poorly-made political comedy into fodder for a national debate on freedom and values while real issues like police brutality and partisan gridlock continue to infect the republic – and conservatives ignore it.

To single out The Interview as some product of malaise is as simple-minded as the picture itself. There have been plenty of clever stoner comedies like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), and its even funnier sequel, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991), and long before that there was Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke (1978), which brought to light in a reefer haze the intersections between political and popular culture. But here's where there's a bigger problem with the debate around The Interview. If critical dialogue on the arts was still part of a larger public discourse that raised skepticism to its own art form, instead of being dictated largely by industry shills, or consumer reporters refining the Siskel & Ebert turn of the thumb, there wouldn't be a need to take sides on releasing The Interview. The practice of skepticism, of not taking things at face value, was always considered an asset when it came to questioning political parties, cultural policy and current events. But when it came to the arts, you were also playing with commerce, which upset those who wanted us to consume it. It used to be that if critics didn't behave and toe the line, you were deprived access to screenings and interviews with the artists (which would cause great concern for your editor who would wonder why everyone else was getting that big interview). Over the years, however, studios have found that by actually promising perks, rather than depriving them, they could get more out of the reviewer. If you were getting rewarded with those posh interviews and all this exclusive treatment, how could you possibly have anything bad to say? This is why when you turn on your television, or radio, you'll hear the local critics sounding as companionable as the weather reporter.

Diana Bang, Seth Rogen and James Franco.

There are a body of serious film critics who now occupy a desert island of which they have become their own audience, while consumer reporters (posing as critics) continually put their finger to the wind before commenting to the nation at large. There is no longer a common ground where cinephilia and smart populist reviewing define the terms for debating the merits of contemporary movies. While it was once understood that critics deliberately positioned themselves between the marketing executives, who wanted you to consume what they offered without question, and an audience that came with their voyeuristic appetites, there is no longer an open dialogue that includes people from all walks of life. The world of film criticism has become as polarized, and as class conscious, as current political punditry. The national gab, in general, has been turned over to fanboys (and girls) who lead with their enthusiasm (not a bad place to start), but avoid any hint of a strong opinion that might put them at odds with their fetish which marketers cater to and count on. Artists themselves are even adopting the language of the marketing folks. Fearing that they might not find an audience for their work, they resist real criticism and hope instead that the critic will simply judge what's there and not imagine what could have been. The debate of ideas which often raises the stakes on the arts has now been dimmed to the safety of innocuousness. And artists are aiding this madness by worrying about demographics rather than the sensibility expressed in the work.

The Interview is becoming a bigger hit than it likely would have otherwise been. While the issues that put the movie on the shelf were real and were no part of a publicity stunt (Sony will take many months, if not years, repairing the damage caused by the leaking of confidential e-mails due to the hacking), the lack of any sensible dialogue on the picture has made the picture more an event than a movie to talk about. Marketing gurus everywhere must be sleeping comfortably tonight.

-- January 3/15

Je Suis Charlie



On Wednesday morning, January 8th, the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo was attacked by three masked gunmen who stormed the building and killed ten of its staff and two police officers. The gunmen are currently identified as Muslim extremists. The attack came shortly after the paper tweeted a satirical drawing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Irreverent and stridently non-conformist in tone, the publication has always been anti-religious while taking on the extreme right, Islam, Judaism and Catholicism. Its sensibility was clearly defined by its former editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, as "left-wing pluralism." In September 2012, the newspaper had published a series of satirical cartoons of Muhammed, some of which feature nude caricatures of him, in response to the anti-Islamic film, Innocence of Muslims, which led to attacks on U.S. embassies and increased security in France. Before yesterday's attack, the magazine had also been the victim of an earlier terrorist attack – a firebombing in 2011. In solidarity with those who perished for exercising their freedom of speech, I've decided to let others have their voice in response to those events and to sit back and listen to those voices. In the spirit of Charlie's pluralism, I've also included contrary ones, as well, to keep to the spirit of equal opportunity democracy.


“Nothing is sacred. Not even your own mother, not the Jewish martyrs, not even people starving of hunger. Laugh at everything, ferociously, bitterly, to exorcise the old monsters.” François Cavanna, founder of Charlie Hebdo, in 1982.

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

"Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home...Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium...The massacre at Charlie Hebdo should be an occasion to end speech codes. And it should remind us to be legally tolerant toward offensive voices, even as we are socially discriminating." David Brooks, The New York Times.

"The statement, “JE SUIS CHARLIE” works to erase and ignore the magazine’s history of xenophobia, racism, and homophobia. For us to truly honor the victims of a terrorist attack on free speech, we must not spread hateful racism blithely, and we should not take pride in extreme attacks on oppressed and marginalized peoples." Jacob Canfield, The Hooded Utilitarian.


"[T]he kind of blasphemy that Charlie Hebdo engaged in had deadly consequences, as everyone knew it could … and that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s greater good. If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more." Ross Douthat, The New York Times.

"Why does the news media keep calling terrorists 'militants'? I thought Buzz Hargrove [the former National President of the Canadian Auto Workers trade union] was a militant." A comment from a friend a few years back.

"I’m the liberal in this debate. I’m for free speech. To be a liberal, you have to stand up for liberal principles. It’s not my fault that the part of the world that is most against liberal principles is the Muslim part of the world....In 10 Muslim countries, you can get the death penalty just for being gay. They chop heads off in the square in Mecca. Well, Mecca is their Vatican City. If they were chopping heads off gay people in Vatican City, wouldn’t there be a bigger outcry among liberals?” Bill Maher, On Jimmy Kimmel Live.

"Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect." Salman Rushdie.


"After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam. This was not an attack by a mentally deranged, lone-wolf gunman. This was not an 'un-Islamic' attack by a bunch of thugs—the perpetrators could be heard shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad. Nor was it spontaneous. It was planned to inflict maximum damage, during a staff meeting, with automatic weapons and a getaway plan. It was designed to sow terror, and in that it has worked. The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised." Ayaan Hirshi Ali, The Wall Street Journal.

Charlie Hebdo has a long record of mocking, baiting and needling French Muslims. If the magazine stops just short of outright insults, it is nevertheless not the most convincing champion of the principle of freedom of speech. France is the land of Voltaire, but too often editorial foolishness has prevailed at Charlie Hebdo.” Tony Barber, Financial Times.

"After 9/11, Americans often said that in the 'war on terror,' America faced a different enemy than in past conflicts. Instead of a state, the U.S. government was now fighting a terrorist network that operated within many countries but formally governed none. But the Sony and Charlie Hebdo attacks flip that paradigm around. Instead of redefining the enemies we fight, they redefine who among us is doing the fighting. In last year’s struggle with North Korea, America’s primary combatant was an entertainment company. In France today, the primary combatant is a humor magazine. This time, the shift to non-state actors is occurring within the United States and other Western countries." Peter Beinart, The Atlantic.

"The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied." President Barack Obama speaking to the United Nations General Assembly in 2012.


"Swashbuckling war correspondents, muck-racking investigative journalists: we’re familiar with the type of fearless reporters who are willing to risk death in dogged pursuit of That Story. But drawing cartoons, giving people a bit of a giggle — even a politically charged giggle — is not supposed to make you eligible for combat pay. That it was for Charlie Hebdo is not only a commentary on their radical Islamist antagonists, but on the magazine itself. Totalitarian ideologues of whatever kind are, it is well known, implacably hostile to humour — for humour is the crack in their mirror, the flaw in the perfection they seek to create on earth, the 'crooked timber of humanity' the most despotic regimes have never managed yet to straighten out. But if that is true then it is equally true that humour is and must be implacably hostile to totalitarianism. They are mortal enemies; each is in peril so long as the other lives." Andrew Coyne. National Post.

"Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned. That is why what happened in Paris cannot be tolerated. But neither should we tolerate the kind of intolerance that provoked this violent reaction." Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League.

"Charlie Hebdo and the Muslim community's reaction to it is a complicated issue. But the murders are not. Twelve people were murdered because of the publication of ideas.We can try to figure out what those ideas are, but it is irrelevant to our reaction to the murders.We can look at the value of those ideas, but it is irrelevant to our reaction to the murders. We can look at the affect of those ideas on a larger community, but it is irrelevant to our reaction to the murders. Our reaction to the murders should be to defend the expression of those ideas." Ruben Bolling, Tom the Dancing Bug Blog.


"The horrific murder of the editor, cartoonists and other staff of the irreverent satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, along with two policemen, by terrorists in Paris was in my view a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public. The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims often also have low rates of belief and observance). Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to France came as laborers and were not literate people, and their grandchildren are rather distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism, pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France. Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination. This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th century." Juan Cole, Informed Comment.

"We have been here before: the 11 September attacks led many liberal intellectuals to become laptop bombardiers, and to smear those, such as Susan Sontag, who reminded readers that American policies in the Middle East had not won us many friends. The slogan ‘je suis Charlie Hebdo’ expresses a peculiar nostalgia for 11 September, for the moment before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, before Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition, before all the things that did so much to tarnish America’s image and to muddy the battle lines. In saying ‘je suis Charlie Hebdo’, we can feel innocent again. Thanks to the massacre in Paris, we can forget the Senate torture report, and rally in defence of the West in good conscience." Adam Shatz, LRB Blog.


"The debate should not be about freedom of expression and extremism. The real debate should be about France and how it deals with its Muslim population. Attacking and killing journalists is highly symbolic, as was the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. Why are the media and politicians pushing us to choose a side: liberty or oppression, freedom of expression or violence, secularism or religion? In their pursuit to make us choose the 'right' option, politicians and media pundits create a new holy entity called freedom of expression. It becomes another sacred, holy, untouchable 'cow.' Another religious concept which if you're 'killed' promoting, you become a 'martyr.'" Monia Mazigh. Rabble.ca.

"The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about French military action against the Islamic State in the Middle East, or the American invasion of Iraq before that. They’re not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West—the Paris version of Newtown or Oslo. Least of all should they be 'understood' as reactions to disrespect for religion on the part of irresponsible cartoonists. They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention. Because the ideology is the product of a major world religion, a lot of painstaking pretzel logic goes into trying to explain what the violence does, or doesn’t, have to do with Islam." George Packer, The New Yorker.

"Much of Europe, which, as a political entity, is not fully grappling with the totalitarian madness of Islamism, is not Charlie. Certainly much of journalism is not Charlie. Any outlet that censors Charlie Hebdo cartoons out of fear of Islamist reprisal is not Charlie. To publish the cartoons now is a necessary, but only moderately brave, act. Please remember: Even after Charlie Hebdo was firebombed in 2011, it continued to publish rude and funny satires mocking the essential ridiculousness of the Islamist worldview. That represented a genuine display of bravery. CNN, the Associated Press, and the many other media organizations that are cowering before the threat of totalitarian violence represent something other than bravery." Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic.


"Today, every major world religion is experiencing a significant revival, and revived religion isn’t an opiate as we once thought, but a very strong stimulant. Since the late 1970s, and particularly in the last decade, this stimulant is working most powerfully in the Islamic world. From Pakistan to Nigeria, and in parts of Europe, too, Islam today is a religion capable of inspiring large numbers of men and women, mostly men, to kill and die on its behalf. So the Islamic revival is a kind of testing moment for the left: can we recognize and resist 'the possibility of tyranny?' Some of us are trying to meet the test; many of us are actively failing it. One reason for this failure is the terrible fear of being called 'Islamophobic.' Anti-Americanism and a radical version of cultural relativism also play an important part, but these are older pathologies. Here is something new: many leftists are so irrationally afraid of an irrational fear of Islam that they haven’t been able to consider the very good reasons for fearing Islamist zealots—and so they have difficulty explaining what’s going on in the world." Michael Walzer, Dissent Magazine.

"Part of the argument against the cartoons is that they caricature Muslims and therefore contribute to discrimination against Muslims in France, people whose rights have been impinged by, among other things, cruel and arbitrary laws against the wearing of headscarves in public schools. However, most of the images that I’ve seen reproduced so far (and I confess to having never heard of Charlie Hebdo before this tragedy), depict not average French Muslims, but either Mohammed or Islamist extremists. This in itself might be troubling to those Muslims who believe any representation of Mohammed is sacrilegious, but it doesn’t necessarily meet the typical Western definition of racism, that is, by implying that all members of the group look and behave alike." Laura Miller, Salon.

"Because I don't have as many bookshelves as I'd like, I have only a selection of books on display (the rest are in boxes), but one book I always have on the shelf, at eye level, is my wounded copy of The Satanic Verses. They tried to kill it, but they didn't succeed. So the very least I can do is make sure it is always there, always on display, always showing its wounded face to the world. Have I read it? I tried a couple of times over the years, but I always seemed to pick it up when I wasn't really in the mood for a challenging read, but last week I tried again. I'm about 100 pages in and it has finally really hooked me, so I read a little every night. For a short term, my wounded book is not currently on eye-level shelf, but my bedside table. As I said, the actual book is a challenging read at some points (and pretty straight narrative at others) that requires concentration and patients to get into the rhythms of how Rushdie wrote it; the beauty of his language and storytelling skills are hypnotic. But the final irony is this: I guarantee that 99% of the people who protested it, and Khomeini himself, never have read it. If they picked it up to try, they would have put it down within two or three pages because there is difficulty there, especially at the start. So, as with most thugocracies, they pick on something to deflect people from real issues (the bread and circuses method – or in his case, the fact he was losing the Iran-Iraq war), rouse up the rabble and set the mindless hoards loose on something else. It's happened throughout history and will continue to happen until the ends of time. But thankfully, there will always be a Rushdie, a Donker, and others out there to say no, this will not stand. And my wounded copy of The Satanic Verses will also continue to stare anybody down who dares to challenge it." David Churchill, Critics at Large ("When a Physical Book Becomes a Symbol: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses").

-- January 8/15

The Age of Coming: The Criterion Blu-ray release of Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también (And Your Mama Too)


Maribel Verdu, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna

No one has ever fused the indissoluble relationship between sex and death in a coming of age story quite like the wildly gifted Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón does in his 2001 Y tu mamá también (And Your Mama Too). Recently re-released on DVD in a sparkling new Blu-ray print by the Criterion Collection, Y tu mamá también plumbs the depths of adolescent eroticism, where sexual surrender brings one in touch with the primal terrors of loss and separation, with a refreshing and shocking candidness. It immediately calls up Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, which examined with equal frankness the turmoil of sex and death from the vantage point of middle age. After charming audiences with the sophisticated fairy tale A Little Princess (1995), and the sumptuously expressionistic Great Expectations (1997), Cuarón returned to his Mexican homeland to make a sexually rowdy and wildly funny road movie, where two teenage boys, who are best friends in Mexico City, hit the road with the runaway wife of one of their cousins while their girlfriends are away in Italy. Armed with a juvenile code of conduct that is quickly undermined and rendered inadequate by the older woman they journey with, Cuarón unveils with buoyantly sportive humour the unacknowledged homoerotic bonds of male companionship – while also confronting the desperate need one has for sexual satisfaction when mortality looms large in the future. Y tu mamá también, which won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, has virtually nothing in common with the more conventional coming of age stories like Rob Reiner's Stand By Me (1986), which sentimentalizes death by using it to reinforce the dubious virtues of staying young, or the Harlequin romanticism of the early Seventies hit, Summer of '42, where sex becomes a tender awakening that makes one forget the finality of death. The more welcoming sensibility that informs Y tu mamá también is alive and anarchic, much like sex itself, and suggests a delinquent version of Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962) coupled with the rough house friskiness of Bertrand Blier's Going Places (1974).

Two 17-year-old best friends, Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna), are both looking forward to a summer of sexual frolic while their girlfriends are away. Unlike their counterparts in most coming of age stories, these guys aren't sexual novices about to lose their virginity, they're young roosters crowing with tributes to an age of coming. But once they take to the road with a 28-year-old woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdu), who has just found out that her husband has had an affair (and she has also received some troubling news on another front), we discover how innocence has little to do with quantity, but the quality of surrendering oneself. After meeting Luisa at a wedding, they devise a plan to seduce her by asking her to join them on a trip to an imaginary beach on the Oaxacan coast. Surprisingly, she agrees to take part. But while they revel in their adolescent fantasies, Luisa is trying to deal with some very adult sexual and emotional yearnings that are in jeopardy. So rather than the boys getting the better of Luisa, she separately seduces both of them, which not only reveals the fragility of their friendship, but the underpinnings of their masculine bravura.


It's not surprising, but certainly refreshing, that Cuarón understands with ribald irreverence how the turbulence of male bonding is often fought on the battleground of women. The two friends, who think their summer will be filled with grass, beer, and unbridled fucking, have to come to terms instead with the most lethal intoxicants of polymorphous sexuality. When Luisa takes both of them to bed, on separate occasions and for reasons much different than they assume, it stirs darker rumblings of what these two young men actually mean to each other. (They're also both from different walks of life. Julio is from a lower middle-class family whereas Tenoch is the rich son of a politician in the Mexican cabinet.) When Julio bears witness to Luisa seducing Tenoch, he is confused, angry and feeling more than a little remote. So he strikes out at his friend with the only weapon he has which is the revelation that he slept with Tenoch's girlfriend. Not only does this unbalance the bond between them, it leaves them open to the unexplored aspects of their own friendship. (Bobby Roth's neglected gem, Heartbreakers (1984), featuring Peter Coyote and Nick Mancuso as two inseparable friends who act out their hidden jealousies and resentments towards the women in their lives, is another very satisfying modern examination of this conflict.)

As in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild (1986), Cuarón uses the road as a map that takes us through a tumultuous emotional landscape; one that changes the texture and perceptions that we have of the people on that journey, while opening up the country that enables and shapes those perceptions. In both movies, the directors embrace the notion that their countries are in a state of continuous transition much like the characters who inhabit them. Even Luisa, who unveils the deeper insecurities of her companions, has to confront her own transitory state. Deeply hurt by her husband's infidelities, she doesn't take to the boys out of spite for what he has done. She has a deeper need to understand how he could find another woman more sexually appealing. By going to the core of her own erotic desires, with young men she has no emotional bonds to, it gives her the freedom to find out without any obligations. But her sexual bouts also uncork the desolation brought on by grief, and by a recognition and acceptance of the mortality she faces not only in her romantic life, but the endings in life itself.


Cuarón shows the kind of restless intelligence that can rehabilitate a genre, but he also gets some beautifully cadenced performances from the actors who breathe new life into this drama of self-discovery. Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal are like tag-team comedians, so familiar with each other that they know which nerves to tweak and which buttons to push, while Maribel Verdu gives the kind of lyrically moving and sensually alluring performance that creates tremors in the story. The raptures she creates in her final dance with the boys when they finally reach their paradise are almost ghostly, something grasped and quickly lost, that lead them to ultimately surrender her to the beach and the water that will swallow up their experience of her, but not the memory of the occasion. At the end, when both boys carry the weight of loss that also frees them to become men, Cuarón reverses the process we usually see in coming of age stories. It isn't the recognition of death that starts the journey to self-discovery, it's where the road to discovery leads. It is a more fragile and vulnerable perception to have to carry.

As Charles Taylor points out in his illuminating essay included in the Criterion booklet, many of Cuarón's films have been steeped in fantasy and adventure, but not as a means to escape reality, but rather to enhance it. Much is gained – and lost – by the young imaginative adults of A Little Princess, Great Expectations and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), and by the adult hero of the dystopian Children of Men (2006) who clings to his hopes by a tenuous thread. The process of giving birth to new life is another thread that also ties this daring director's work together – including his latest marvel, Gravity (2013), which as Taylor remarks, "rewrites the physical journey of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, ending, instead of a beginning, with an earth creature learning to walk upright, and thus affirming a faith in humanity as the vehicle of evolution that the woozy metaphysics of Kubrick's techno-evangelism rejected." Y tu mamá también recognizes that affirming a faith in humanity is not the same as providing false pieties to get us through. When the picture ends with Frank Zappa's elegiacal "Watermelon in Easter Hay" on the soundtrack, it carries the sting of regret that comes with loss. But it also embraces what loss gives you in return.

-- January 11/15

What's Up, Doc?: Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice



Like E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975), Thomas Pynchon's 2009 detective pastiche Inherent Vice is a hip and hefty comic riff (only with a melancholic bedrock) that builds on pop connections and associations already alive in the reader's mind. In Ragtime, a parable of American lore in which the author performed masterful tricks with the history we thought we knew, Doctorow captured the spirit of America in the era at the turn of the twentieth century and World War One. But rather than write a realistic account of the period, Doctorow created a crazy quilt, and a flip-book chronicle that was, in many ways, already a movie before it became one. Inherent Vice is equally opulent, but given that it invokes America in the early Seventies when the heady counter-culture of the Sixties is decimated by assassinations, drugs, and the election of Richard Nixon as President, it is perfumed in regret and loss. There's also a sense of dread implored, too, as the story opens in Los Angeles on the eve of the Manson trials (where Charles Manson, a diabolical psychopathic drifter, who looked like a hippie, had colonized the same California girls Brian Wilson once wrote lovingly about a few years earlier and together Manson and those women committed mass murder). Inherent Vice is about the door starting to close on the communal utopia the Sixties promised.

Drawing upon the combined sensibilities of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Roger L. Simon (who introduced the first hippie detective, Moses Wine, in 1973's The Big Fix), James Ellroy (minus his strychnine cured cynicism), the Coen Brothers's The Big Lebowski (1998), Robert Towne's stories for Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) and Hal Ashby's Shampoo (1975), and the zapped underground comics of Gilbert Shelton's The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Pynchon fashioned an affectionate accounting for the psychedelic day about to pass into a psychotic night. Set in fictitious Gordita Beach, Larry "Doc" Sportello is a private investigator and a proud pothead who is lost in the cannabis fumes that decorate his already wistful demeanor. One night, he receives a visit from his former girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth, a dreamy hippie girl whose desires for hedonistic freedom have now turned as expedient as Julie Christie's Jackie Shawn's did in Shampoo. Having had an affair with the real-estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann, Shasta wants Doc to help prevent a plot allegedly hatched by Mickey's wife Sloane and her lover, Riggs Warbling, to have Mickey admitted to a mental health institution. From there, Inherent Vice (a phrase that refers to a hidden defect, or the very nature, of a physical object that causes it to deteriorate because of the fundamental instability of its components) introduces a plot as labyrinth as Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939), where Doc encounters members of George Jackson's Black Guerilla Family, a rock musician once thought dead from a heroin overdose who becomes a government informer on subversive activities for a gang of right-wing goons known as Vigilant California, and a sinister schooner known as the Golden Fang, which houses a criminal network of drug trafficking that will ultimately define and permeate the junk bond era of Reagan's Eighties. He also has to deal with his doppelgänger in the form of an old LAPD nemesis, Detective Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, a straight-arrow cop with a flat-top hairdo out of Jack Webb's Dragnet, but with an unconscious and disturbing oral fixation on food. Everybody's looking for instant gratification in a culture where pleasure is now coming in short supply.


Since Inherent Vice has all the devilish embroidery of a contemporary noir, the novel is naturally steeped in movie lore with Doc casting himself as a modern-day John Garfield who continually puzzles his way through the elliptical movie plots of Val Lewton's uncanny B-horror pictures like I Walked with a Zombie (1943). But what holds the strands of the novel together, despite the endless story twists and outrageous characters that turn up, is Pynchon's continual turns of phrase. His madcap dialogue cleverly distills the aroma of a language once used as a portal to paradise, but has now (for its characters) become a harbinger of a dead-end life in waiting. The hip talk that had bound a culture together as easily as the joints passed around and shared now arouses suspicion, isolation and deception. As the narrator of the story, Pynchon sets this encroaching paranoia in the context of whimsically comic descriptions of ideals that are drifting away and contrasting them with what is now being settled for. He identifies strongly with Doc's fears that "the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parathesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness." But he's not foolish enough to take nostalgic refuge in that sentiment because he knows that its romantic naivete provided the hand that "might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good." Inherent Vice, like Robert Altman's sly revision of Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1973), stays true to the romantic spirit of the detective's moral universe. Also, like Altman, Pynchon dispenses the nostalgic notion of the detective's code of honour being adequate to the task, by showing its inadequacy in a world where velvet paintings can depict "a Southern California beach that never was – palms, bikini babes, surfboards, the works."

Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin in Inherent Vice.

In Paul Thomas Anderson's faithful adaptation of Inherent Vice, which takes in most of the plot with very minor changes made to the narrative, he puts a lot of love and dedication into weaving its disparate strands into a coherent story. Unlike The Master (2012), There Will Be Blood (2007) and Magnolia (1999), where his rigorously stylized and self-consciously obsessive need to remove storytelling from the particulars of dramatic motivation provided incoherent abstraction, Inherent Vice doesn't create its own cinematic desert island. Film technique isn't a fetish at the expense of sense and sensibility here. With a self-effacing humility, Anderson enters Pynchon's universe – with its own maddening abstractions – and gives himself over to the material. In one early close-up shot, where Doc (Joaquin Phoenix) is lying on his sofa measuring the miles between his thoughts of the past and the ones that occupy the present tense, Anderson beautifully adduces a loss that can't be gathered with a desire for clarity that can't be found. When Doc's past (in the form of Katherine Waterston's Shasta) then waltzes through the door like a mirage out of his memory finding celestial form, Anderson sets just the right tone that marries his own obsessions about those desperately seeking control with Pynchon's irreverent take on the paucity of that desire. But because Paul Thomas Anderson's weakest hand is his dramatic one, he can't lift the material beyond creating visual and musical flourishes that propel the plot. Anderson gives us the story, but he can't unravel the mysteries that permeate it.

For a director who has such a dynamic visual presence, as There Will Be Blood and The Master surely demonstrated, Anderson's biggest deficiency is in his inability to give over to the dramatic conflicts that his characters possess. Unlike Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941), or John Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) or The Man Who Would Be King (1975), who used film technique to free themselves in order to plunge into the possibilities – and dangers – of losing control, Anderson's own vice for control is inherent in just about every picture he makes. As a result, he can't identify with the urgent maniacal drive in Daniel Day-Lewis's oil entrepreneur in There Will Be Blood, but instead reduces him to a single-minded tyrant that leaves him with no tragic dimension to match his teeming avarice. It's as if Anderson were making an epic tale of American betrayal that implied that there was actually no American Dream to breach since it was already a nightmare to begin with. (This view conformed perfectly to those already disparaging American culture in the Bush period.) There Will Be Blood may have been epic, but it was puny in scope and with barely a moment of dramatic plausibility. The Master also had its characters in the vice of a power struggle, where war trauma and alcoholism met cultish megalomania, but Anderson again abandoned creating dramatically distinct and coherent portraits of dysfunction. He preferred to make broader behavioural statements that turned into abstractions of deviant human behaviour. (If Anderson were a clearer dramatist, he would have understood that Philip Seymour Hoffman's cult leader would have never picked the psychically damaged Joaquin Phoenix to represent his cause given its controversial ideas.) Magnolia was supposed to be about the serendipitous connection between random events, but instead Anderson willfully fit together stories that made little dramatic sense as a tapestry –.and with characters that were even less plausible such as Tom Cruise's TV self-help misogynist whose methods for dating wouldn't ever be successful let alone allowed on the air.

Katherine Waterston as Shasta

With Inherent Vice, Anderson doesn't exercise that claustrophobic need to hem everything in since the culture is already doing that to its characters. But he does little to vary the dramatic tone and open up the vibe of the period after that stunning opening scene. The picture seems to take place in a fugue state, like the characters themselves, and where we follow the plot strands, but don't feel the connections between the events and the people that these events are happening to.You barely catch wind of the impact of the Manson trial, despite it being mentioned, or the shadow of fear it cast over the community and the counter-culture. And the book's jokes don't uncork the paranoia but seem part of a stoned cartoon universe where all human activity is reduced to stasis. As accomplished as Joaquin Phoenix is as Doc, he doesn't portray him as a perpetually stoned detective, medicating himself due to the pain of loss, and who is struggling to see through the pot smoke. Instead, he's like one of Gilbert Shelton's Furry Freak Brothers continually taking refuge from reality which defuses what's at stake in the story. Speaking of cartoons, Josh Brolin's Bigfoot is no more than an outsized Fred Flintstone pounding Doc as if he's Barney Rubble, a pal he has to periodically beat sense into. Katherine Waterston creates a delectable dream image when Shasta first walks in the door on Doc, but the languid tone of the picture keeps Shasta in the fog as if she's a continually forgotten plot point. Owen Wilson is absolutely right to be playing Coy Harlington, the heroin-addicted surf rock musician who is presumed deceased, but right is about all he gets to be. Even one of the best lines in the book, when Coy tells Doc that while turning up in his old band again, he was unrecognized ("Even when I was alive, they didn't know it was me"), Anderson doesn't give the line its due, but lets it fall flat like a stoned aside. Martin Short turns up as a quack physician who serves only to remind you of Henry Gibson playing a similar character in The Long Goodbye. Reese Witherspoon as Doc's current girlfriend, Penny, the Deputy DA, is one of the few who rises above the din to create a lively comic presence. She is a bright bulb that lights the picture. Anderson also smartly introduces a minor character Sortilège (Joanna Newsom), who acts as narrator to integrate the lyricism of Pynchon's prose.

It's rare to find a movie that is so faithful to its source as Inherent Vice is, but it also goes to prove that narrative fidelity isn't enough to make a great film. Pynchon's shaggy-dog procedural indeed makes perfect movie fodder and it may have gotten under Anderson's skin reading it. But in a career so busy making obsessive films about insulation, Anderson's lavish attention to the book feels remote and opaque rather than one that shook him loose. Pynchon's novel left me feeling high and laughing at the looming darkness he depicts and parodies, but Anderson's film is a druggy spectacle lost in a purple haze of good intentions. And it only left me with a bad case of the munchies. 

-- January 17/15

The Pen As A Sword: The Lessons of Philip Kaufman's Quills (2000)


Kate Winslet and Geoffrey Rush in Quills

In the opening scene of Philip Kaufman's prickly erotic drama Quills (2000), based on Doug Wright's clever and prescient play, we bear witness to a muscular brute partly dressed in leather who both gropes and caresses a young woman in what appears to be a sadomasochistic tryst. As we're drawn in further and become aroused by the deeper and darker dynamics of their grappling, we soon discover that we've actually become enraptured by the sight of Mademoiselle Renard, a libidinous aristocrat, who is about to meet her demise at the hands of a sadistic executioner during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution. Just as she is about to be decapitated, we meet the incarcerated Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) who is in the process of documenting her tale. In one swift stroke, Phil Kaufman implicates us in our deeper fascination with sex and violence. With that audacious opening, the director, who is no stranger to eroticism and politics (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Henry and June), brings us in more intimate touch with our hidden and forbidden desires. He uses the outrageous exploits – and the brutally frank writings – of the Marquis to raise more probing questions about the role of art, the matters of sex and the dubious tool of censorship. And it's no accident that the story is set a short time after the Reign of Terror because what's up for grabs in Quills is the romantic belief in the basic goodness of man.

Quills traces the story of de Sade, who Rush plays with the gusto of a sated satyr, during his final years at the Charenton Asylum, where he is incarcerated due to his lewd behaviour. He writes his salacious stories, which still have the power to create a scandal, at the urging of Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), who is the progressive head of the asylum. This decent and liberal man of God believes that art can act as "a purgative to the toxins in the mind." So the inmates are treated in a very humane fashion and encouraged to use art as a form of therapy. But thanks to Madeleine (Kate Winslet), a young laundress who is fascinated with the Marquis's prose, Sade is able to unleash his own "purgative toxins" to the public because she sneaks his material out to be published. When the Emperor Napoleon gets wind of Sade's violently horny dramas, he demands that the Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), a cruelly scientific Grand Inquisitor, curtail de Sade's ribald scribblings through his own violent and persuasive means.

The picture begins as a comic battle of wills over Sade's ability to write and publish despite the opposition to his work, but when the Marquis refuses to stop, he's stripped of his quills. So Sade rebels by using anything he can find – not excluding his own excrement – to compose his scandalous novels. Quills is, without question, an anti-censorship film with a smart and timely thesis over the role of satire, censorship and (you could extend this) to the recent tragedy in France. Yet the picture never succumbs to melodrama. Sade may be a victim of a repressed society, but he's hardly portrayed as an innocent lamb who is martyred by being led to the slaughter. Sade is seen as a self-serving narcissist who writes his prose to draw attention, as well as provoke and offend, and to lure the innocent Madeleine into his clutches because he recognizes how his writing inspires the titillating fantasies beginning to bubble in her. But while her fantasies may be stoked by Sade's work, her heart actually belongs to the selfless Abbe (whose heart might belong to God, but his hidden desires don't). The Abbe tries to lure Sade into writing more elevating prose, but Sade can see through the purpose of his plan. Recognizing the Abbe's unacknowledged lust for Madelaine, Sade knows that Abbe's desire to censor him comes from Abbe's own fear that the work might stoke his own libidinous longings which he's trying to deny are there. The Abbe hides his lust behind his quaint liberalism which sees the world, as he does art, in terms of cause and effect. When he tells Sade that art is created to exalt us, the Marquis tells this naive soul, "I would have thought that was your duty, not mine." Dr. Royer-Collard understands Sade more clearly and the danger he represents to the institutional order. He sees with a cunning malice that the Marquis celebrates in his novels the hidden cruelties that this viciously cerebral doctor (played with steely control by Caine) only pretends not to possess.

Joaquin Phoenix as the Abbe

The first half of Quills plays like a risqué comedy of manners and it's brimming with ribald wit. It also features a brisk ensemble cast including Billie Whitelaw as Madelaine's blind and mindful mother, Amelia Warner as the child-bride that Royer-Collard brutalizes just as Sade's prose opens a door to her sexual adventurousness, and Stephen Marcus as the mute brute for whom Sade's work inspires an act of horrific violence. It is that horrific tragedy, and its aftermath, where Phil Kaufman and Doug Wright truly illustrate their courage and depths of perception. The Abbe, who is portrayed with a supple sense of dread by Phoenix, is a man of decency who becomes complicit in a murder, and a willful participant in another. His liberal rationalism, which attempts to create a humanistic alternative to brutal behaviourism, doesn't leave room for the irrational desires that his faith serves to repress. Quills illustrates that the romantic notion of authoritarianism isn't divided so neatly into the black and white that gives the Abbe comfort. The divide isn't so neatly drawn. After all, it wasn't Reagan's Republican Moral Majority that led the charge to censor rock and roll records in the Eighties through the creation of the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center), it was Tipper Gore, the wife of liberal Al Gore. When there were plans in Ontario in 2000 to make a film depicting the horrific murders committed by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka (which would eventually be released as Karla in 2006), it wasn't the stalwarts of the conservative Alliance that raised their voices in protest, it was Howard Hampton, the leader of the NDP (the New Democratic Party), who did his damnedest to stop the production. Quills is a liberal movie that critiques how liberalism can sometimes form a shaky compliance with the forces of repression and censorship – and why.

Philip Kaufman is a largely unheralded director deserving of a larger following than he has. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) is still the funniest, scariest (and prescient) SF films ever made. The Wanderers (1979) captured with subtle cadence the shifting values of the late Fifties and the early Sixties better than American Graffiti did (and the music is placed more poignantly instead of for its nostalgic value). The Right Stuff (1983) was a truly hip and beautifully scaled epic drama. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and Henry and June (1990) were, of course, stirring erotic dramas containing all the fear, trembling and excitement of sex. Rising Sun (1993) was a clever contemporary film noir set in the global economy. In most of his work, but especially in Quills, Kaufman recognizes that art, even in its most extreme forms, is dangerous. Quills is about the ways art doesn't ennoble us (although it can enrich us), but instead stokes our imagination (for good or ill) because it has the power to inspire a response. The best art – especially sharp satire – doesn't need to apologize if it offends. Engaging with what we find offensive might even help us come to terms with why it does, instead of seeking ways to compartmentalize our responses. Like the best subversive work, Quills inspires and instigates with a razor-sharp prose.

-- January 22/15

I Kill Therefore I Am: Clint Eastwood's American Sniper


Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle in American Sniper

A number of the recent Academy Award-nominated films – all based on true stories – have come under a lot of heat regarding their historical inaccuracies. While the argument of fidelity goes without saying when it comes to documentaries, it's often understood, if not explicitly stated, that a good drama can be based on true events rather than literally depicting them. (Did anyone ever really quibble over whether The Life of Emile Zola or Lust for Life were truly accurate portraits of their subjects?) Most of the squabbling over the recent Selma, The Imitation Game, or Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, though, comes with more political baggage than the nature of Van Gogh's rivalry with Gauguin. This kind of partisan bickering also does more to obscure whether or not these movies are actually any good.

The Imitation Game, which is based on the life of British cryptanalyst Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) who helped crack the Nazi's Enigma code during WW II, has been attacked for either diminishing Turing's homosexuality, or overemphasizing it, or inventing fictional characters and perhaps altering historical events. Of course, there are alterations made, but they don't diminish the story, or harm the picture, which is one of the strongest dramas made this year. In one sense, The Imitation Game succeeds in accomplishing more believably what Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind (which really played fast and loose with the life of John Nash) failed to do: illustrate how our genius is sometimes inseparable from our pathology. In the best male lead performance I've seen this year, Benedict Cumberbatch brings a brittle intensity to the story which invokes the desolate isolation that lay buried in Turing. His relentless pursuit of perfection (in creating a computer prototype) comes to reflect a deeper personal loss that he's been carrying within him from his youth. Turing's interplay with Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) and their fragile tone of intimacy and empathy, also has the quiet rapture of a kindredness arrived at by necessity, rather than by choice. Screenwriter Graham Moore probably put it best in a recent interview with The Huffington Post when he was asked about the question of historical accuracy, "You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like, that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feels like."


Most of the arguing over Selma also seems to be centered on its historical accuracy which, to my eyes, is only one of its many problems. Director Ava DuVernay turns President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) into her straw man so that she can keep Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) on his iconic pedestal, and it's compounded by the fact that the picture, despite the power of its subject, has no dramatic clarity to support that decision. Unlike The Butler, which was roundly and unjustly ignored last year, Selma doesn't even capture the exultant and defiant tone of the Civil Rights struggle that was garnered from the strength of the gospel music coming out of the black churches. In Selma, where the story is conceived in the most basic forms of melodrama, the dramatic tension emerges from watching people march in a state of dread just waiting to be beaten and stomped and murdered. And even if DuVernay got more of the facts right – including the troubled, but steady, alliance between King and Johnson over black voters' rights in the South – it wouldn't have improved the film because the storytelling is painfully prosaic. (Lyndon Johnson's "We Shall Overcome" address which was the finest, most eloquent, plea of his Presidency is reduced in the end to a concession speech.) The events in Selma may be stirring, but the picture isn't.

This brings me to American Sniper, depicting the life of military marksman Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), the deadliest shooter in U.S. military history who had 255 kills while serving in Iraq, and a movie about his life that has drawn more bullets for its jingoism, as well as for its factual issues. Based on the memoir by Kyle, with Jim DeFelice and Scott McEwen, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (William Morrow, 2012), Clint Eastwood's drama doesn't have the incendiary chauvinism of a Rambo – in fact, it barely has the potency of drama. As a director, Eastwood's biggest weakness is in providing the kind of dramatic motivation that is coherent, let alone engaging. Yet unlike his lugubriously inconceivable Mystic River, or his equally improbable boxing drama, Million Dollar Baby, American Sniper has a clear blueprint for a cogent tale of the making of an American hero who just happened to be its most lethal killer. But rather than provide a psychological subtext, or a dramatic conflict that lies beneath a man who can justify his special gift as a killer, Clint Eastwood's story (based on Jason Hall's screenplay) simply boils down to: I Kill Therefore I Am. Eastwood stays outside the inner dimensions of the main character and instead presents the episodes from his life. His conflicts are only defined by the trauma of having not protected enough men while serving in Iraq. If Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2008) took us pretty far inside how a skilled bomb disposal soldier (Jeremy Renner) got addicted to the mortal danger of war, American Sniper shoots nothing but blanks by never calling into question the moral precepts that shaped Kyle's character.

Sienna Miller

Those principles are delved into in the opening scenes in Iraq where Kyle is trying to decide whether to take out a young Iraqi boy in the street who may be carrying explosives. Just as he decides whether to shoot, the picture flashes back to Kyle's childhood where his father has taken him deer hunting. After downing the animal in one shot, the father soon defines at the dinner table his world view. He sees the planet as divided into sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. Making it clear that he doesn't care to raise sheep (and he backs it up with a slap from his belt on the table), or aggressive wolves, he sees his son as the sheepdog who protects the flock. A real artist would question that logic (as Martin Scorsese did in Taxi Driver by not defining the vigilante Travis Bickle as the "sheepdog" who saves Jodie Foster's teenage prostitute from the "wolf" pimp played by Harvey Keitel), but Eastwood does use it to frame Kyle's heroism which robs 9/11 and the Iraq War of both its tragic and political complexities. It deprives Kyle of his tragic dimensions, too, because the trauma he endured during his four tours of duty (which would end with his murder when he was shot and killed by a troubled veteran on a firing range back in the U.S.) actually flies in the face of the territorial imperative his father instilled in him.

Despite the impersonal aspects of American Sniper, however, Bradley Cooper gives one his most personable performances yet on the screen. Unlike the mannered scene-chewing he did in American Hustle, The Place Beyond the Pines, and Wedding Crashers, Cooper is relaxed on camera here and he shows some of the laid back humour he once displayed as the genial journalist on TV's Alias. His scenes flirting with Taya Renae (Sienna Miller), his future wife, in a bar have some of the casual comic foreplay that Eastwood himself had with Rene Russo when they played Secret Service Agents in Wolfgang Peterson's 1993 thriller In the Line of Fire. In those brief moments when American Sniper lets its guard down, as in that scene in the bar, Eastwood does some of his best directing. But when he tries to show the strain the war is putting on their marriage, Eastwood doesn't make much dramatic sense of the spiritual vacuum they share. While Cooper's Kyle is reduced to blank stares while watching a TV screen, Miller is saddled with banal scenes of fretting (featuring equally tired dialogue on the order of "I won't be here when you come back"). All we see is a repetition of the same scenes over and over with no sense of how they even saved their marriage. One psychiatric session seems to magically cure Kyle of his inner demons, which would probably come as a huge surprise to returning veterans still grappling with ghosts. (At one point, Eastwood even blows a potentially harrowing moment when the pregnant Taya is leaving the hospital and she hears her husband in the middle of a battle over the telephone. As she breaks down crying in terror, nobody in the background of the hospital entrance seems to notice her distress, or comes to her aid.)

Director Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper

All the acclaim Clint Eastwood has acquired from both critics and the public over the years is due, I think, to the fact that people like to believe that they've been watching a former action star who has now evolved into a great dramatist. But the problem is that Clint Eastwood has never brought the nuances of great drama into his movies despite their subject matter. Eastwood's 'serious' pictures suffer from the same basic moralism of his Dirty Harry films, which is why, in American Sniper, he can't see the underlying flaw in Chris Kyle's stoicism, which is the blinkered parochialism he learned from his father. It's also why Eastwood can only turn up the dramatic heat when he introduces a doppelgänger for Chris Kyle in the form of Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), an equally effective sniper for the insurgents, who gets reduced to the kind of brutal serial killer that Dirty Harry used to wipe out. (When Kyle finally gets his man, it's in a typical Eastwood "make-my-day" moment.)

While American Sniper isn't a strong enough drama to earn all the controversy it continues to attract, there's no question that Clint Eastwood is maybe getting payback for his empty chair stunt at the Republican Convention a few years back when he turned the President of the United States into an invisible man. The irony, of course, is that the man in the director's chair has been more invisible in his work than the Commander-in-Chief. American Sniper may be about a man who always knew how to find his mark, but the director has yet to acquire the aim needed to deliver his.

-- February 8/15

God's Lonely Men: The Celluloid Cities of Time After Time (1979), Zodiac (2007), The Conversation (1974), Taxi Driver (1976) and Nightcrawler (2014)


Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells and David Warner as Jack the Ripper

Why is it that movies set in American cities do more to characterize their locations than to simply inhabit them? Los Angeles on film is as different from New York, as San Francisco is from Los Angeles. While L.A. sprawls outward across a wide screen into places where people never have to encounter each other, San Francisco creates a concentric circle where characters obsessively retrace their steps with the expressed purpose of encountering others – that is, those who are also circling the same territory. In the movies, San Franciscans seek to explain psychological riddles that can never be solved. "What used to mean San Francisco for me is disappearing fast," wrote film essayist Chris Marker (Sans Soleil) in 1994, years after he became obsessed with the city, and with Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), which was set there. "The spiral of time, like Saul Bass’s spiral in the credit sequence, the spiral of Madeleine’s hair and Carlotta’s in the portrait, cannot stop swallowing up the present and enlarging the contours of the past." San Francisco is continually lost in the spiral of time and its characters quickly find themselves out of time.

The H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) of Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time (1979) travels to the Bay area in a time machine believing that the future holds forth a socialist utopia, as well as an escape for him from the moral strait-jacket of Victorian England. As he arrives in 1979, he's hot on the trail of Jack the Ripper (David Warner), the mass murderer who got there first. Jack believes the future will prove his view that human existence is nothing more than a charnel house of death and destruction, and where people hunt and are hunted. Wells has greater hopes. But when he arrives, he can only circle a strange city that gives him no peace, or place to rest, and where utopia can only live up to its translation – which is about being nowhere. The Ripper, by contrast, is more cozy in San Francisco than he was in the deep fog of London. The spiral of time, however, gets to determine our perspective and that of the characters. If both men had come over, say, a decade earlier, the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco might have actually confirmed Wells's idea of enlightenment and the Ripper would have taken a bus in frustration to L.A. where he possibly could meet up with Charles Manson. But the Bay area of 1979 wasn't tanning itself in a Summer of Love. San Francisco was one year removed from the mass suicide of 913 San Franciscans who fled to Guyana and followed cult preacher Jim Jones into a twisted idea of socialist utopia. And if seeing the lifeless bodies of men, women and children scattered across a jungle landscape weren't already more than enough, a week later, former city supervisor, Dan White, assassinated Mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk at City Hall. So when the Ripper tells Wells that here in the steep hills of San Francisco, he fits right in, he can't help adding that the city makes him look like a rank amateur a century earlier.

The spiral of time in San Francisco, which unspools like reels of film, also swallows up the characters in David Fincher's Zodiac (2007), who are not only trying to solve a series of mass murders by a serial killer, they're also discovering how helpless they are in identifying him. The murderer claims not only real bodies here, he also claims the lives of those who are obsessed with him, as if he were a poltergeist that time itself set loose to wreak spiritual destruction. Police detective Paul Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) going over one crime scene after another always makes us conscious of the city's geography, but his mapping only yields clues that don't spawn answers. As he chases his tail in the city streets he knows only too well, it's a tale told on the screen that offers up answers too easily arrived at. For Toschi, the years are starting to pass him by and leaving him no closer to catching – or even identifying – the killer. So he sits uncomfortably in a movie theatre watching a version of himself in the guise of Harry Callaghan (Clint Eastwood) in Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971). Not only does Harry single out the perpetrator for the audience to hiss at, Harry has the weapon he needs to dispense with both the killer and due process in order to send people home happy. Toschi is living out a nightmare no movie can solve, and it's too much to stomach, so he exits the theatre before Harry shows him a future that never comes.

Mark Ruffalo in Zodiac.

Circling the city also does little for James Stewart's Scottie in Vertigo, a man who relentlessly covers the same ground that once carved a clear and deadly path that led to the death of the woman he loved. Yet like a former detective, Scottie still looks for clues he may have missed, and he covers the same roads we watched him walk earlier in the film as he followed Madeleine (Kim Novak). When he eventually meets a woman who looks just like her, it's not in one of their familiar places. And it puts both of them off-guard. Both characters then seek to undo what has been done by stepping back inside the spiral to undo the damage of time and finally fulfill a love that was once lost. But Vertigo is also a detective story. It offers up evidence in a crime that Scottie can no more ignore than Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) could in San Francisco a decade earlier in The Maltese Falcon (1941), when he sent up the woman he loved for killing his partner. But where Spade "won't play the sap," Scottie helplessly becomes one, even losing her twice like a man trapped in his own existential deja-vu.

In Francis Coppola's The Conversation (1974), Gene Hackman's Harry Caul, a professional eavesdropper, lives in his own perpetual deja-vu. With due diligence, he goes over his assignment, a taped conversation he's recorded that might be setting up his targets for murder, and he gets lost in the circle of time taken to record it. As the reels of tape spin in their own concentric circles on his deck, the sounds we hear take the shape of an aural spider web. Caul relentlessly manipulates the reels, as Scottie in Vertigo did the streets of San Francisco, in order to find the one clue that uncorks the meaning of the conversation. But he can't help but misinterpret what he hears because, for all his skill at bugging conversations, he lacks the intuition as a human being to understand what they mean. The circles of sound that spin over and over drag him down a drain he can't escape from and where ultimately he becomes the target of others who listen to him. Rather than circling the city, as he did daily with his microphones, Harry Caul ends up himself encircled.

Gene Hackman in The Conversation.

If San Francisco is what film critic Pauline Kael once called "paradisaical," it makes sense that something like Phil Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), which is set in that city, could uncover a hidden horror. A place well known for cultivating non-conformists, might also someday cultivate those who wish to make us all as one (as the seed pods who land do to the citizens of the city). But would that same fear also be applicable to a city like New York? "In New York, where crime is so obviously a social outgrowth, the dregs belong to the city, and a criminal could not be viewed as a snake in paradise," Kael wrote in her review of Dirty Harry. Given that view, New York might well endorse the coming of seed pods in order to bring peace and serenity to a bustling city that crackles with conflict. But, in Los Angeles, where the hedonistic pleasures of the city have a way of also spawning apocalyptic horrors, corruption and seduction make companionable bedfellows. Which is to say that the pods may have landed there before they discovered San Francisco.

New York and Los Angeles do create curious contrasts in dramatic study. You just have to consider two films that contain the same DNA, even when the cities that spawned them alter their characteristics. Dan Gilroy's debut film, Nightcrawler (2014), which just came out on DVD, is being compared which good reason to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976). Both films deal with sociopathic loners who blend into the crowd, and ones who also desperately seek to stand out from it. While the comparisons to Taxi Driver are apt, there are also some fascinating differences (also, as good and unsettling as it is, Nightcrawler doesn't transcend the noir genre as masterfully as Taxi Driver does). In Nightcrawler, Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a thief who roams the night until he becomes fascinated with freelance 'nightcrawlers' who shoot footage of accidents and crimes in Los Angeles and then sell it to news channels. Bloom soon begins his own nightcrawling 'business' which includes –in some ways – manufacturing the death and mayhem that he sells.

While Taxi Driver, set in New York during the Seventies, is about a Vietnam vet, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), who is an outsider waging a personal war with the city in which he drives cab, Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) lives in contemporary Los Angeles and the only war he is waging is with himself. Bloom is a cipher who wishes to find a self that allows him to achieve. The New York of Taxi Driver is claustrophobic and tightly wound, and a city which gives Travis no room to disappear into his isolation, while the Los Angeles of Nightcrawler is so sprawled out and dispersed that all Lou has is his isolation. He seeks an identity that allows him to belong. New York becomes Travis's projection of Hell, a damned city that needs to be cleansed of its filth, while in Lou Bloom's Los Angeles, with its sparseness, it is in sharp contrast to the teeming crowds who walk the streets of the Big Apple and torment Travis. Los Angeles is a pleasure zone where loners can find the space to invent any self they choose to fill in the gaps the city leaves them.

Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler and Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.

In that sense, it isn't the city, but the Internet that gives Lou the community that Los Angeles denies him. In this virtual world, he learns to incorporate the self-promotion verbiage of websites that turn him into a perversion of the self-made American entrepreneur. "I feel we live in a hyper-capitalist society, in the sense that everything now is the bottom line – it’s really a world reduced to transactions," Dan Gilroy told critic Michael Sragow in Film Comment. "In this world, Lou is so far ahead of everybody else because he’s only about the bottom line. So his way of speaking, in the line of that integrated-vertical-synergistic bullshit – that’s literally his religion. Lou is a corporation." Gyllenhaal's Lou is also the product of a corporate digital world where information gets absorbed, but without effect, and he doesn't discriminate, or have any conscience about its content. Travis Bickle represented an alienation that could be accounted for. He lived in isolation in a real world seeking community but couldn't find it. Lou Bloom's alienation has no desire to find real community. In one sense, he's simply looking for a job.

But where the New York of Taxi Driver concludes with a bloodbath that momentarily provides Travis with psychic relief, Scorsese (and screenwriter Paul Schrader) make clear that the process of rage is once again building in their character. That the city chooses to reward Travis's actions – rescuing a teenage prostitute (Jodie Foster) so that she can return home to her family – as heroic reveals a greater madness at large where behaviour is recognized over motivation. In Nightcrawler, the ending is more problematic because motivation gets abandoned. Gilroy wishes to make a larger sociological point. So he reaches for an ending that resembles more Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1982) than Taxi Driver.

Throughout the picture, Lou sells his material to a local TV news director, Nina Romina (Rene Russo), who is eager to see her ratings jump. Though she may be looking for the sensational to sell her news, she isn't stupid, at least, until the end when Gilroy asks us to believe that after perceiving Lou's mounting megalomania, she still welcomes him into the executive world of her television station. The picture not only stretches credibility here, but attempts to make a larger point of claiming that society at large has become a comfortable home for Lou, a world in which he finally fits. Besides making this specious claim, which takes us outside the movie's dramatic logic and into the illogic of making social commentary, Nightcrawler caters to a cynicism that Taxi Driver avoided by leaving us with the discomfiting idea that Travis Bickle will always be "God's lonely man." Lou not only finds his job, but he also finds a warm spot in the bosom of corporate America. But isn't this just like the cities that spawned these films? While New York, in Taxi Driver, ultimately honours realism over fantasy, the Los Angeles of Nightcrawler, despite its many virtues, gives us a pat ending worthy of the city it was made in.

-- March 4/15

Brother's Keeper: Netflix's Bloodline


Ben Mendelsohn and Kyle Chandler as brothers in Bloodline

A number of years back, I had people consistently recommending that I watch Damages (2007-2012), a television procedural thriller about a ruthless high-powered attorney (Glenn Close) and her young protégée (Rose Byrne) that she was both tutoring and perhaps trying to murder. After all that praise, I couldn't wait to catch up with it. When I finally did, though, I couldn't believe how ridiculous it was. With barely a shred of dramatic believability, Damages kept the audience in total suspense by withholding plot points, using flashforwards and flashbacks while offering up one outrageous red herring after another. Damages wasn't neo-noir. It was inadvertent high camp. Watching Glenn Close grandstanding in the manner of Joan Crawford in her gargoyle roles, and glaring into the camera in an endless series of frozen close-ups, became a hilarious parody of malevolent evil. Created by brothers Glenn and Todd A. Kessler, Damages streamlined a dramatic formula that had already been successful for a number of other hit shows that liked to define themselves as 'dark' by employing what a friend of mine cleverly calls "cozy cynicism."

What I think appealed to many in Damages was its view that our institutions and the people within them are already so corrupt that they were simply mirroring what we already held as true. The show comfortably confirmed the dubious notion that corruption was so intrinsic that there weren't really any ethics to violate. (At the beginning of Dexter, a detective who is also a serial killer murders only those who are perceived as worse than him.) In one outlandish plot twist after another, everything in Damages boiled down to: Don't Trust Anyone. Yet what made film noir such an appealing genre in the Forties and Fifties was the notion that basically decent, trusting people could, through fate or unacknowledged desire, head down those roads to perdition. Our terror came from seeing those ordinary folks breaking faith with the community and institutions they were part of. But in these contemporary shows, all roads lead to perdition since there are no values existing to violate. The current big hit, House of Cards, even has the lead character (Kevin Spacey) address the camera as if he were winking at the audience and assuring us that his questionable behaviour is in perfect keeping with a political system that we've already grown to distrust and reject. There's nothing at stake in this kind of drama because there are no stakes to lose in the first place.

Thankfully, in the Kessler brothers' latest series thriller, Bloodline (on Netflix), they hone much closer to material more believable than Damages. With the help of a tip-top cast, Bloodline faithfully resurrects noir themes in a story that delves into the unconscious dramas that lurk within the family and can tear them apart. Set in the Florida Keys, the Rayburn clan run a tourist resort that's helmed by local patriarch Robert Rayburn (Sam Shepard) and his wife Sally (Sissy Spacek), who are about to celebrate a county dedication. As they call together their children to help join in the event, it becomes clear that not all is well with the siblings. The arrival of the oldest brother Danny (Ben Mendelsohn), seen travelling on a bus from Miami popping pills and having hallucinations, is creating unrest since he is the black sheep of the family. His brother John (Kyle Chandler), a local detective, has always been the peacemaker between Danny and their father (who had rejected Danny long before), but his sense of duty to Danny hides a rage he has yet to fully tap. His sister Meg (Linda Cardellini) is a local attorney who feels alienated from her father, yet she still does his legal work as if that will eventually earn his favour. She is also involved with John's rather stoic partner, Marco (Enrique Murciano), but she secretly hooks up for passionate sex with a client, Alec (Steven Pasquale), which leaves her feeling worse. Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) is the younger brother, a hothead that works at a local harbour, whose turbulent behaviour is beginning to cost him his marriage to Belle (Katie Finneran). Bloodline examines how the uncorking of the circumstances surrounding the death of their sister, Sarah, years earlier, unravels a bushel full of resentments and rivalries that ultimately have tragic consequences.

Ben Mendelsohn as Danny

Although the Kessler brothers remain masters of the tease with their relentless flashforwards and flashbacks, the technique has a more sound purpose in Bloodline. Here jumping back and forth in time provides a sharp contrast in the viewer of getting to see not only the climax of a crime of passion, but how good intentions turned so irrevocably tragic. The theme of the series in a sense resembles Bruce Springsteen's "Highway Patrolman," a song about brothers where one is an officer of the law and the other is consistently in trouble with the law. This mournful, haunting ballad first appeared on Springsteen's starkly conceived Nebraska (1982) album and it examined how the officer consistently overlooked his older sibling's indiscretions because a man who turns his back on his family "ain't no good." (The song also influenced Sean Penn's The Indian Runner, his 1991 debut film as a director.) That's certainly the problem that John Rayburn has with Danny. Becoming a family outcast, however, has turned Danny into a trickster who manipulates his siblings so that he can ultimately bring the family down for rejecting him. He does this by delving into a dangerous business partnership with a scary local gangster, Wayne Lowry (Glenn Morshower), who smuggles both drugs and illegal immigrants into the Keys. John's efforts to continually keep the peace and protect his brother, though, do nothing but stir up the hornet's nest at home. Danny is able to keep his family off-guard because he knows their weaknesses and he carefully exploits each one of them – including his own mother who still harbours guilt over Danny's predicament and wishes to make amends by having him manage the family business.

Unlike Damages, which was filled with a cavalcade of howlers, Bloodline works harder to resist the pull towards melodrama. More character driven than Damages, the story in Bloodline doesn't impose itself on the actors the way Damages did. Kyle Chandler, who showed how effectively he can play a man of authority on Friday Night Lights, is also ideally cast as John. In Friday Night Lights, Chandler's solid presence as an actor provided an emotional grounding for the teenage football players he coached and the family he was trying to raise. On Bloodline, his presence provides more the illusion of solidity. His assuredness here hides the self-loathing that leaves him feeling that he actually betrayed his brother when they were kids. (When Sarah died, their father took it out on Danny with a vicious beating that landed him in the hospital. The children all lied about what happened to protect their father.) Since Danny knows John's vulnerability, he manipulates him to become the kind of man he resists becoming. The Australian actor, Ben Mendelsohn, as Danny, is creamy smooth playing the victim who turns conniver. With a sly subtlety that seems attuned to the steady humidity of the Florida Keys, Danny insinuates himself back into the family with an allure that unmasks the family dynamic while also continuing to act it out. Norbert Leo Butz, who plays the younger sibling Kevin as the perpetual adolescent, is the easiest character for Danny to tweak because Kevin may do a lot of barking, but he has no bite. Kevin secretly knows that he's getting older but never feels as if he's growing up.

Sissy Spacek, Linda Cardellini and Norbert Leo Butz.

Even though Bloodline centers on the brothers, the women are all vividly present. Linda Cardellini's Meg is a woman who never gained her father's full acceptance or bonded closely with her mother, so her sexual affairs are as much random as they are reckless. She is so unanchored that her pursuit of law comes across as providing a safe refuge from the troubling idea that she is nowhere. Jacinda Barrett as Diana, John's wife, is an oasis of sanity who sees through Danny's machinations but can't reach John because the fish hooks in him run too deep for her to pull them out. Chloë Sevigny, as Danny's lover Chelsea, may see all too clearly the type of man she's in love with, but in a life filled with disastrous romantic affairs, Danny speaks in the only language she understands. But rather than portray Chelsea as the type of woman who sets out to redeem her man, Sevigny smartly plays her as one who is given to fatalistically accepting her lovers on the only terms they know. While Sam Shepard and Sissy Spacek don't have huge roles, they fill them with an authority that feels authentically rooted in the material.

Bloodline isn't perfect. It tries to pile on a few too many plot climaxes towards the end and it's a little hard to fully believe that someone as careful as Wayne Lowry would allow himself to trust a man whose brother is a detective. There's also a suggestion of incestuous material that is never made clear, but perhaps that will be uncovered in the upcoming season. (Bloodline has just been renewed by Netflix.) While hardly a tropical version of Long Day's Journey into Night, Bloodline is about the same family neurosis. It's about the willful blindness that sometimes comes out of being a brother's keeper, and where nothing is kept safe – or protected – only secrets.

Coda: Bloodline wouldn't repeat its success in the second season where it came to even outdo the implausible camp of Damages

-- April 4/15

Parting Clouds: Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria


Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria.

Now that he's reached the age of sixty, French director Olivier Assayas's work hasn't settled into austerity, but instead continues to give off a youthful inquisitiveness that remains quietly passionate and quirkily insightful. Rather than becoming reserved and pedantic in his observations, Assayas continues to sparkle with a wry and active curiousity. He rejects easy irony for a more open-ended bemusement that belies the affliction of time and collapses the gap that often exists between generations. In Irma Vep (1996), Assayas presented a middle-aged film director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who tried to capture a past classic by remaking Louis Feuillade's silent serial Les vampires (1915-16) only to discover his flailing efforts had more to say about the state of the present. In his rich and meditative Summer Hours (2008), a group of siblings begin to dread the disappearance of their childhood memories, along with their summer home, after their mother dies, only to soon recognize that those memories can be transformed by the generation that follows. Something in the Air (2012), which didn't get half the audience it deserved, looks back at the political and cultural turmoil of the early Seventies and examines a young activist who can't reconcile the rigidity of fixed ideologies with the fluid sensuality of the pop culture he loves. Assayas's films are almost always about the flux of life where meanings don't get imposed but are drawn from an expansive embrace of experience.

In his latest film, Clouds of Sils Maria, that flux of life is the texture of the story itself where by blurring the lines of demarcation between two generations of women, he shows how their different individual perspectives on both life and drama draw them together and tear them apart. Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is a hugely popular movie and stage star travelling by train to Zurich with her young American assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart), to collect an award for an elderly reclusive playwright who twenty years earlier cast her in a play that launched her successful career. The play, Maloja Snake, centers on a turbulent relationship between Sigrid, a tempestuous young woman and her employer, Helena – that ultimately ends in tragedy. Maria had starred in the role of Sigrid. But the playwright suddenly dies which turns the evening into a tribute to his life. In Zurich, Maria is approached by a highly popular theatre director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who wishes to revive Maloja Snake, only this time with the now older Maria in the role of Helena and a young movie sensation, Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz), in the role of Sigrid, the part Maria still feels she owns. Although she agrees to do the production, it fills her with anxiety to give up her original character, and so she and Valentine rehearse the play in an effort to make her understand Helena's perspective. Of course, part of the comic tension in this conception comes from the fact that Valentine, who's around the age Maria was when she played Sigrid, hasn't lived long enough to fully grasp the older woman's feelings, so she can't help assuage Maria's anxieties. Their rehearsals end up acting out the dynamics from the play rather than illuminating them. From this premise, Assayas toys with issues of aging and the vagaries of time and examines that transparent line between the characters an actor plays and the roles we all play in real life.

Chloë Grace Moretz in Clouds of Sils Maria.

While the contrasting of age and experience in the world of theatre has worked to great comic effect in pictures like All About Eve, Clouds of Sils Maria with its Nordic location and climate better evokes the shifting female psyches of Ingmar Bergman's Persona, but with a naturalism that Bergman abandoned for abstraction. Maria is aware that she is getting older, but since she is an actress, she also believes in the illusion of drama which can disguise reality. And with Binoche in the role, it's hardly an effort to accept that illusion since she can transform herself in an instant into a radiant beauty (as she does in the Chanel gown she wears to the tribute gala). But Assayas isn't trying to pit Maria's belief in eternal youth and beauty against an ambitious and equally alluring Valentine. If Binoche's Maria has the formality of a huge star, Kristen Stewart has the spiky intrigue of outre glamour. While Maria doesn't feel that she fits into the era she now lives in, where she is going through a divorce and taking roles in pictures that don't interest her, Valentine is a product of the digital age and adaptable to circumstance partly because time is something that she perceives is always ahead of her. When they work through the lines of the play, the friction it causes comes from the fact that Maria is beginning to experience the ways in which Helena feels disposable in the eyes of her young lover. In playing Sigrid, Valentine quickly comes to understand that she can't make up for Maria's fears of irrelevancy and needs to break free from the symbiotic trap she already feels ensnared in as Maria's assistant. Stewart gives a remarkably unaffected performance, especially given her obvious awareness of her own iconic status in the Twilight series. But Assayas doesn't exploit that association to score points, he allows Stewart instead to draw from it as a means to expand Valentine's own perception of her predicament with Maria. The crossing of illusion and reality becomes so beautifully layered that the film never winks at the audience, but instead shifts our purview as delicately as the 'Maloja Snake' – a large cloud formation that weaves through the Maloja Pass in the Swiss Alps like an amorphous reptile slithering through and bringing turbulent weather in its wake.

The third major character Jo-Ann Ellis is clearly a delinquent Lindsay Lohan-type, but Chloë Grace Moretz transforms this tabloid icon into an intelligent performer. Jo-Ann not only knows how to manipulate the circumstances around herself and Binoche's Maria to enhance the tension needed to play opposite her, but she is also smart enough to understand her value as an actress. Moretz supplies a cunningly chameleon performance which allows her to pass through any emotional heavy weather that crosses her territory. Jo-Ann has become a comfortable star of pop blockbusters in the same way Maria is a huge 'serious' actress. So Jo-Ann sees Sigrid as a part that matches both her ambitions and her youthful ingenuity – a different set of ethics and circumstances than those that once informed Maria's interpretation of Sigrid.

All through the picture, Assayas clearly wants us to reflect on the illusory aspects of youth, middle-age and stardom rather than make facile judgments about their merits and detractions. It couldn't be further from Alejandro González Iñárritu's celebrated Birdman, with its tiring moralistic post-modern concept of artistic authenticity. Despite an arsenal of technical ingenuity, Birdman's conceit about acting and drama felt completely inauthentic and the movie eventually swallowed its own tale. Clouds of Sils Maria without employing a whisper of pyrotechnics actually takes us further inside the artistic process and illumines what it takes to both unveil and disguise reality.

-- May 16/15

You Can Never Go Home: John Maclean's Slow West


Michael Fassbender and Kodi-Smit McPhee in Slow West.

The mythic loner of the Western has always reflected that split in the psyche of the American character where the hopes of nationhood are continually set against the rights of the individual. The Founding Fathers dreamed up a nation with a standing promise to create a country built on equality and true governance. But the hero of the Western, the one who stood tall to wrest nationhood from the anarchy of the outlaws, best supported D.H. Lawrence's idea that "the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." All of which explains why the gunslinger who brings about the law that creates governance doesn't really get to benefit from it. He never comes to live in the home he helps create. Unlike the gangster figure of the Depression Era who chose to live outside the law, and expressed what Robert Warshow described as "that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects 'Americanism' itself," the hero of the Western always sought Americanism, and permanent roots, even though, deep down, he knew he'd never have them.

For someone like John Wayne, the idea of home became downright elusive if not an illusion. Despite leading an obsessive search for his niece kidnapped by Comanches in The Searchers (1956), Wayne's Ethan Edwards eventually delivered her home and alive, but Ethan didn't get to share the spoils of residence, instead he's left framed outside the door against the vast country that spawned him. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), his Tom Doniphon, in a drunken rage, burns down the home he was building for the woman (Vera Miles) he silently loved when he discovered that she had fallen instead for the lawyer (James Stewart) who taught her to read and to dream of a country she could become a citizen of. But Tom Doniphon can't share in that dream of citizenry, he can only exist in its shadow, secretly and silently saving Stewart from the superior gunman Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). He has to lurk in a dark alley with his rifle aimed at this vicious killer with the purpose of preserving the rule of law so that it will triumph over the brutal vigilantism of Liberty Valance.

John Wayne's Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

This nomadic character wanders from Western to Western, most famously and self-consciously as Alan Ladd's Shane riding off into oblivion after dispatching Jack Palance, or in the homeless avenger played by Clint Eastwood who deprives sheriff Gene Hackman of his desire to build his own home in Unforgiven (1992). But he also exists in the contemporary urban Western of Jack Bauer in 24, forever acting outside the law while keeping social order alive and doing penance for it by living in perpetual exile from that order. Even in the science fiction of Steven Spielberg's adaptation of HG Wells's War of the Worlds (2005), Tom Cruise's once irresponsible father saves his children from the Martian attack, but his ex-wife and current husband don't invite him in for a beer with gratitude for his ordeal when he returns them safely. Cruise ends up sharing the same open wilderness that swallowed up John Wayne. Americans will always define themselves in terms much larger than any one person, but it's individual rights – what the loner represents – that will always run counter and prevail alongside the dream of nationhood. You could say that though many voices dreamed of this nation and spoke out through the years against its dark legacy of slavery, segregation, and later even came to demand decent health care and sane gun legislation, but they were also – to excuse the pun – shot down by another constituency that represented the lone American, the "patriot," the one who saw government sponsored health care as creeping socialism (or worse), and gun laws they were convinced were designed to undermine the rights established by those who fought a revolution for their country's independence. It's a contradiction that has no resolution and the movies have reflected that unresolved riddle endlessly in Westerns.

While American Westerns may continue to act out this issue, or delve into it with great sophistication as Sam Peckinpah did in Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), and the director's cut of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), it's equally fascinating to watch a non-American dip his toe into the primordial pool. British director John Maclean's debut Slow West is an enraptured meditation on this same enduring myth. Although it is as unhurried as its title suggests, the movie never becomes languid and inert. At ninety minutes, Slow West is a ballad about a foreigner who comes to America to test its legends and fulfill a romantic purpose while being teamed with a Western loner gunman who is fated to live in those myths. But because Maclean is fascinated by the mythology of the American West, and the loners that populate it, he brings the vivid curiosity of an outsider who unravels with wry amusement both the appeal of its mythology as well as its limitations. Instead of revising the genre (as Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff tried to do), or blatantly extol the myths and legends of the West (as The Lone Ranger attempted a couple of years back), Maclean creates the ambiance of an Appalachian murder tale. With clear and deep focused vistas (where New Zealand stands in for the American West) exquisitely shot by Robbie Ryan who brings some of the luminescent splendor of Albert Bierstadt's paintings of the period, the story is both quirky and strange as if the True Grit of the Coen Brothers had suddenly been interpreted by Bill Forsyth (Local Hero).

Ben Mendelsohn's Payne.

Slow West follows 16-year-old Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young man from Scotland, who is traveling through the unsettled American frontier of the 1870s as if in a fever dream in search of his lost love, Rose (Caren Pistorius), who was forced to leave Scotland with her father. While on his quest, Jay meets a lone outlaw, Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender), whom he partners with in his pursuit. While Jay attempts to live out the legends of the West as any young innocent might imagine them, Silas becomes the harbinger of the brutal reality in front of them. But it isn't brutality that sets the tone of Slow West. Instead there's a quivering timbre of irony where death turns out to be as arbitrary and accidental as it is deliberate. (In one scene, they come across a skeleton with an axe in its bony hand laying under a fallen tree that clearly fell the wrong way.) Ultimately, the duo come across some bounty hunters led by Payne (Ben Mendelsohn), who wears a huge unshapely fur coat that embraces him like a grizzly bear that expired on contact. What Jay doesn't know is that these riders are also seeking out Rose and her father because they have become outlaws with a $2000 reward on their heads. When Silas discovers the truth about Rose, he attempts to dissuade Jay from his sojourn, but without revealing the truth. Undaunted, Jay and Silas persevere until a final shootout in a frontier home settles the story.

Michael Fassbender's Silas draws upon the mystical gunslinger created by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, like A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966), but he's not laconic and as armored as Eastwood was. Fassbender gives this slight role the dimensions of a man who lives outside civilization but not because he rejects it. Like John Wayne's earlier tragic heroes, Silas seeks justice and a country that's settled, but the brutality he's both witnessed and perpetrated (including a shocking killing in a grocery store where Jay loses his innocence) gives him the tragic contours of one who may desire life in a community but he knows he doesn't belong there. Ben Mendelsohn's Payne, on the other hand, is perfectly at ease with death and exile and living out a survivalist's code. Although Mendelsohn lacks the trickster charm here that he showed in Bloodlines, he exudes a vexed humour that delivers menace. (When he finally approaches the ranch that holds Rose and her dad, he yells to his posse, "Kill that house!") Kodi Smit-McPhee, who played Viggo Mortenson's son in the apocalyptic drama, The Road (2009), displays just the right inattentive dreaminess to anchor Jay's devotion to romantic legend. (His wake-up call when he finally gets to confront Rose is a doozy.) Caren Pistorius has little screen time as Rose, but her furtive look of uncertainty satisfies the shape of her role and who she represents in Jay's fantasies.


Slow West is an art Western that is sometimes a little too impressed with itself (and its gags), but it also has a rangy looseness that I haven't seen in a Western since Fred Schepisi's comparable Barbarosa (1982), where Gary Busey played a young innocent running from the law who teams up with a veteran bandit (Willie Nelson). Barbarosa was also an American Western directed by an outsider (Schepisi is Australian) who used his detachment to provide commentary on the genre's enduring mythology. Slow West doesn't have the spacious lyricism of Barbarosa, but it has some of its legendary grandeur. When Silas walks into the wilderness at the end and leaves Rose to a home she now tends, John Maclean doesn't treat it as an act of fatalism, or willful abandonment like in Shane. Silas doesn't really need a home to live in. In Slow West, he comes to discover that he's been carrying home within him all along.

-- June 3/15

Dead End: A Dissenting View on Mad Max: Fury Road


The influence of marketing divisions on movies right now is so pervasive that what sometimes passes for reviewing could just as easily have been dreamed up in the boardroom. When The Globe and Mail calls Australian director George Miller's return to the action genre in the new Mad Max: Fury Road "a double-barreled shotgun enema to the senses," is that kind of macho hyperbole (fitting to the genre) giving me an idea of what to expect, or is it choice ad copy to sell it? As for the metaphor, who thinks enemas are very pleasurable to begin with, let alone what you are looking for in a good movie?

I know it's not so much that film critics are eager to line up behind the product driven views of executives. Their taste in formula pictures after all is shockingly bad. But the climate reviewers are now working in is not designed for informed criticism, but instead for a style of consumer reporting. After all, if audiences today are being treated (in the crudest sense) as if they were nothing more than consumers, in that same way some of us are now thought of as 'taxpayers' rather than citizens, there is less need to ask questions as to what art is and why it is. Once when I was reviewing Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind (2001) for CBC Radio, his adaptation of Sylvia Nassar's fascinating biography of mathematician John Nash, I wanted to describe why the movie was such a failure of imagination by describing how Howard turned Nassar's nuanced take on Nash's life and illness into a banal and conventional redemption story. My producer told me to forget the book and just tell the listening audience whether or not they should go to the film. In other words, leave out the context and just whip out a thumb to go yea or nay. It turned into a huge battle which I eventually won, but over time more episodes of this nature would ultimately cost me my job. And here we're talking about a radio network in the public sector not pressured by advertisers. But the mindset of regarding listeners as consumers was already in place.

With this comes a blind adherence to a popular taste which tells you that whenever a film makes a whole lot of money on the opening weekend, it has to be good. While those you never heard of are without a doubt duds to avoid. A critic's job used to be, in part, to actually draw attention to the interesting work that nobody was paying attention to, and to movies that didn't benefit from those huge marketing campaigns. But the national media has become nothing more these days than an extension of the marketplace itself where smart critical thinking is replaced by promotional journalism. Editors are constantly feeling the pressure from their bosses to protect the status quo, or they are replaced by those who will. This helps explain why a new Tom Cruise film will garner any number of cover stories in the entertainment section of magazines and newspapers, even though anyone who is already a fan of Tom Cruise is certain to be going anyway. So he hardly needs all the attention. Meanwhile, a movie that could really use some ink gets ignored because nobody writing about it stands to gain anything by taking the risk of drawing attention to it. Out of this comes an audience primed to conform to whatever is deemed to be popular taste. Because movies are also now so heavily niche marketed each genre also has its own devoted fan base. In that world, marketing divisions slavishly cater to those who treat what they love with a devotion often indistinguishable from fetishism.

Tom Hardy as Mad Max in Fury Road.

After recently seeing Mad Max: Fury Road, I can fully understand the passion and enthusiasm it has generated in both audiences and many critics. Given that most contemporary action dramas are tedious and impersonal in their cookie-cutter designs, Mad Max: Fury Road by comparison across with the visual dynamism of spectacles such as D.W.Griffith's Intolerance (1916), or Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), where the vistas are brimming with bold visceral excitement. George Miller is a director of considerable imagination for conceiving action. And in Mad Max: Fury Road he has made a movie out of what is essentially an extended chase sequence. There are so many memorable baroque touches (and very little CGI) that you can practically hear the director gleefully crowing all the way to the finish line. But if there's true sensibility at work in the movie-making, there's also a conflict in form given the material he's working with here. Not content to make an action jamboree, Miller loads the picture with issues – issues that in a genre that is all about delivering kinetic thrills can't possibly be dealt with in any depth. It's this distinction that's missing in much of what I'm reading.

The original Mad Max (1979) certainly didn't have any pretensions to being noble in its intentions. As much a demolition derby as revenge fantasy, Mad Max was set in Australia in the near future and featured a cop named Max (Mel Gibson) who chased down a marauding gang of bikers who eventually got their revenge by brutally taking out his wife and child. By the end, however, Max becomes a hot rod vigilante who dispatches each one with balletic precision. The film was a huge international hit (except in North America where it played in a horribly dubbed version because the distributors didn't think viewers would understand the accents). But given that the material was nothing that hadn't already been plumbed successfully in numerous American genre hits featuring Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry), Charles Bronson (Death Wish) and Chuck Norris (Lone Wolf McQuade), they needn't have worried. But Miller had already decided that Max's character touched something deeper in the viewer. He ventured in the widescreen sequel, The Road Warrior (1982), to portray Max as a heroic Jungian archetype based on characteristics already defined by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949). In it, Campbell describes what he calls the "monomyth" where a hero's journey begins in crisis. When he achieves victory, he is then transformed into a new spiritually enlightened man. "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man," Campbell writes of this evolved heroic warrior. Back in the early Eighties, however, George Miller told me in an interview that he discovered and rejected Jung while training to be a doctor before finding his vocation as a filmmaker. "I always found Jung's work a little too mystical for me," he said. But he obviously had a change of heart and quickly embraced Jung's concept of the collective unconscious after Mad Max found such strong audience rapport. It's a shame he didn't trust his first instincts. For Jung's theories not only don't apply to The Road Warrior, they can't work because Max – who reluctantly helps homesteaders who've survived a Third World War from violent bikers who covet the oil refinery they are protecting – doesn't really do anything heroic, or even become Campbell's transformed man in the end. (The homesteaders already seem to know that Max is hopeless to rely on. They use Max as a distraction so they can find their freedom away from the bikers.)

Mel Gibson as Mad Max (1979).

In The Road Warrior, Mel Gibson's Max gets reduced to being a detached icon representing nothing more than a leather-clad survivalist. He might have been conceived in the same manner that the lone hero of the American Western was, an icon recently explored in John Maclean's fine picture Slow West, except that Max has no beliefs at stake. The only drama is in seeing his glorified passivity contrasted with the swirling action of those who are around him."The religiosity implicit in Jung's therapeutic approach tends toward passivity," Robert Lindner writes about the psychotherapist in Prescription for Rebellion (1952). "He seeks to bind mankind to archaic forms...[by] hypothecating the 'fact' that such archetypes always provide creative solutions." (Lindner also postulated that Jung's early sympathies to Nazism written about in his 1939 book The Integration of the Personality came out of his blind adherence to archetypes as a guide to understanding the self.) Despite the dynamic and exciting movie-making in The Road Warrior, Max is given no inner life to dramatize which makes him – and the picture – an ultimate exercise in glum heroics. The self-conscious desire to create a meaningful myth out of Max's journey served to sap the picture of any exhilaration outside of the thrills of the action itself.

The third film, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), continued the turgid march towards mythologizing Max's fate without really getting anywhere – despite his saving a band of children. Once again, he is left wandering the desert. Which brings us to Fury Road where Tom Hardy now plays Max, but he is still the same "shell of a man" eking out a life in Outback while fuel and water become even more of a scarcity. After being captured by the legions of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the biker gang leader, Toecutter, in Mad Max), Max is imprisoned. Joe possesses sex slaves in which to propagate his successors, War Boys to do his bidding, and he rules over a desperate populace he keeps loyal by providing water that he hoards. Even though he promises his followers immortality in Valhalla, one of his female lieutenants, Imperator Furiosa (a brooding Charlize Theron), decides to spring the female slaves and head for greener pastures. Joe is furious at losing his "property" and sets his warriors loose on them. While Max is initially used as a vehicle hood-ornament providing a "blood bag" for the War Boys, he eventually sides up with Furiosa to lend his hand in an epic chase that pretty much takes up the entire picture.

The Road Warrior (1982).

A lot is being written about the movie being "a feminist picture" and having contemporary relevance. But little of that becomes of any dramatic consequence. For example, Mad Max: Fury Road keeps reminding us about gas shortages and environmental calamity. Yet for the whole film people drag race at insane speeds without giving the shortage a moment's thought. Someone recently tried to convince me – unsuccessfully – that this was ironic and intentional. But there's no scene in the picture where that irony is ever addressed because without the gas guzzling there would be no thrill ride of a movie. The film is also supposed to be about liberating sex slaves from the patriarchy, but you never come to understand their struggle, or even why they want Max to help them. (At first glance, they appear to be doing a fashion shoot in the desert that looks destined for the E! Channel.) Miller might be able to frame actors on the screen so that they make strong impressions, but they have no developing dramatic inner life that would make us feel for their fate. A sign in Joe's harem lair screams "We Are Not Things!," but isn't that what all the women become in the larger scheme of the story? No one is given much of a personality to suggest otherwise. Couldn't we have one woman perhaps arguing with Furiosa about whether her utopian idea of freedom in this green world is going to be any more satisfying than Joe's lair? A smarter writer might have suggested that Furiosa's notion of paradise might possess similar snakes that already plague Immortan Joe's idea of Eden. (Eve Ensler, who wrote The Vagina Monologues, might have been tagged to be the script supervisor which gives the story cache for some feminists. But that doesn't tell you whether or not The Vagina Monologues is a good enough feminist play to warrant her contributions.)

Immortan Joe's sex slaves.

It's at the end, however, after defeating Immortan Joe, where Miller's Jungian mythologizing becomes a complete drag and defeats the whole purpose of the film. Max – once again – has to fulfill his role as the predestined loner and he abandons the women to go off into oblivion. Given that he is likely the only healthy guy around, and since most of the other men are covered with hideous tumors, how are these women going to perpetuate the human race for the future? Can't Max, who is still haunted throughout the movie by the ghosts of those he couldn't save, be restored back to humanity due to all his efforts? The picture deliberately resists any exhilaration of feeling at the end to preserve its mythical components which is why it ends up as inevitably dour as The Road Warrior was. Much of this probably doesn't matter to the movie's enthusiasts because its fans only want the mythical and iconic content to be true to its origins and viscerally satisfying – which is something George Miller can produce better than anyone. Mad Max: Fury Road is without a doubt a dynamic piece of work that stands apart from the deluge of loud and dreary action material usually filling the screen. But when Tom Hardy's Max inexplicably walks away at the end of Fury Road, guaranteeing the franchise – and Max – yet another encounter with death and mayhem, we're not really seeing anything radically new and daring. Despite his considerable gifts and skills as a director, when it comes to Mad Max, George Miller is perfectly in tune with the marketing zeitgeist.

-- June 5/15

Unsung and Unknown - The Wrecking Crew & I Knew it Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale


The Wrecking Crew

It's largely held to be true that when The Beatles invaded America in 1964, one of the seismic impacts they had was in wiping out the Sixties rebirth of Tin Pan Alley. An ambitious group of songwriters (Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Neil Diamond, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, 'Doc' Pomus and Mort Shuman) were all situated in the Brill Building in New York City there looking to sell hit songs. And many great ones they did indeed sell. But The Beatles proved that by writing your own tunes and playing your own instruments you needn't be solely dependent on other songwriters to provide your material. Pretty soon, just about anyone who could pick up a guitar started performing and composing – but not all of them could do both. In Los Angeles, there lurked a famous collection of somewhat anonymous session musicians – dubbed 'The Wrecking Crew' – who played on an abundance of familiar hits by The Byrds, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, The Monkees, not to mention just about every hit song produced by Phil Spector, including The Ronettes' "Be My Baby," The Crystals' "He's a Rebel" and Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High." Totally unsung, and yet playing key roles in songs ranging from "God Only Knows," "California Dreamin'," "The Beat Goes On," "Last Train to Clarksville" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" to Frank Zappa's masterful orchestral absurdity Lumpy Gravy (1967), the Wrecking Crew were sonic dreamers and dedicated trench soldiers who conjured up a storehouse of memorable hooks, even if, as a nameless group, they existed in the dark.(The album covers for bands like The Monkees didn't even credit them as the players on the record.)

This diversified collection of seasoned performers is the subject of The Wrecking Crew (2008), which played the Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto a few months back. The picture is good fun – informative and a generous piece of work. Director Denny Tedesco, whose father was the Crew's virtuoso guitarist, Tommy Tedesco, starts out highlighting the significant contributions that his father made to the American pop music of the Sixties. But he moves beyond making a cozy family portrait and opens it up into a larger and memorable scrapbook that highlights all the talented and eccentric musicians that the listening public never knew. The ensemble includes the versatile session drummer Hal Blaine (who not only coined their name, but created a huge number of highly recognizable drum riffs including the opening to The Beach Boys' "Wouldn't it Be Nice"), and the bassist and guitarist Carol Kaye (who was not one of the few female session players of her era, but also came up with the walking bass line that opens "The Beat Goes On" ). Many of the Crew would later go on to become solo stars on their own like Glen Campbell and Leon Russell. Jack Nitzsche soon become an arranger for Neil Young with Buffalo Springfield ("Expecting to Fly") and then worked on his Harvest album in the Seventies while also becoming a film composer (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

Carol Kaye and Tommy Tedesco.

The Wrecking Crew is quite informal and casual, too, which gives the picture much of its charm and agreeable quality. Unlike Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002), which looked at the Funk Brothers, the anonymous musicians who provided non-credited accompaniment to many of the great Motown singles, The Wrecking Crew doesn't sentimentalize their plight. Standing in the Shadows of Motown seemed to be making the argument that it was the Funk Brothers who were responsible for making those great songs by The Four Tops, The Supremes and Marvin Gaye possible (which turns out to be a ludicrous argument once you hear them backing up Joan Osborne as she butchers "Heat Wave"). The Wrecking Crew makes no such claim that session musicians are the forgotten artists, but rather it demonstrates the subterranean artistry that lurks behind their anonymity. You come to see how important adaptability is to the varied styles of music they played whether it was the ersatz jazz pop of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass's "A Taste of Honey," or the gorgeous and sumptuous balladry of Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night." It's about musicians not driven by ego. In putting their full support behind the egos of the artists, they eagerly surrendered themselves to whatever the song demanded. They found themselves in the shadows rather than claiming (as Standing in the Shadows of Motown did) that true artistry lies in the shadows. Given the assembly line approach to their endless recording gigs, which strongly resembled the way writers and directors worked in Hollywood during the Studio Era, it wasn't all paradise. There were any number of burnouts and bad marriages as a result. Not everyone's personal life gets fulfilled here, even Tommy Tedesco's. He would suffer a stroke in 1992 which would leave him partially paralyzed until he died in 1997 of lung cancer. But Danny Tedesco in The Wrecking Crew not only gives his father his full due for a body of work left unsung, but also provides a bigger stage for shedding proper light on all the other troupers as well. In a sense, like his father, Tedesco finds his own artistry by beaming quietly in the background.

John Cazale and Al Pacino in The Godfather, Part II.

One of the most memorable scenes (among many) in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II (1974) comes when Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), who has inherited the illegal crown from his underworld father like a sleeping sickness, discovers that his older brother Fredo (John Cazale), passed over in the family, has betrayed him. During a New Year's celebration in Cuba in 1959, just as Fidel Castro's revolution is about to throw a monkey wrench into the Mafia's plans to expand their gambling empire, Michael gives his sibling a huge kiss and then says to him, "I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart." This pivotal scene provides the title to a touching short documentary on the equally short life of actor John Cazale, and speaks directly to its very subject. While the viewing public may always remember those heart-piercing words that Michael speaks to Fredo, they don't always know who John Cazale is. I Knew it Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale, directed by Richard Shepard, makes sure you do remember in this loving homage to a gifted actor who was something of a genius at playing men living in the shadow of others. (It originally aired on HBO and can be currently found streaming online.)

John Cazale's parts might have reflected a certain kind of lost, lonely soul, but he revealed the recesses of impacted rage with more subtlety than just about any other character actor. The obvious irony has always been that though Cazale may have portrayed the forgotten and unknown, he happened to be doing it in some of the most seminal American films of the Seventies: The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather, Part II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and The Deer Hunter (1978) – astoundingly the only films he would ever make. That's not lost on Shepard, but he doesn't milk it, either. With the help of actors like Steve Buscemi, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sam Rockwell, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and directors Francis Coppola and Sidney Lumet (who directed Cazale in Dog Day Afternoon), plus Cazale's surviving brother, he instead fills the forty-minutes of screen time with moving tales and clips featuring a highly skilled actor who went fathoms deep inside the solitary pain of those characters he played. I Knew it Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale lives up to its title by rediscovering how distinctive each performance was. Coppola talks about how Cazale used a recliner chair like a prop to reflect his resignation during his last fight with Michael. Sidney Lumet reminds us that while we didn't think Al Pacino's bank robber would kill any of the hostages in Dog Day Afternoon, we were never sure whether Cazale as his partner would. "All I wanted to do was work with John for the rest of my life," Pacino says. "He was my acting partner." In I Knew it Was You, you discover that they became soulmates a long time back, bonding while working at Standard Oil as messengers. Soon they would live together in a communal house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when both were cast in Israel Horovitz's play, The Indian Wants the Bronx, and they both won Obie Awards (in 1967 and 1968). When Cazale appeared in Horovitz's Line, Richard Dreyfuss invited casting director Fred Roos to see the play. Looking to find an actor to play Fredo in The Godfather, Roos immediately suggested Cazale to Coppola.


Like other great character actors, such as Robert Duvall, Warren Oates, J.T. Walsh and Steve Buscemi, John Cazale had a knack for creating dimensions in limited individuals. Besides Fredo, his Stan in The Conversation, who works with surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), might have been a sad sack, but he had more capacity for life in him than Hackman's Harry, who was depicted as a cipher. The Stan he portrayed in The Deer Hunter was dim and frail, but he seemed more rooted in that steel town than Robert De Niro's iconic Michael, who towered above his community. As Sal in Dog Day Afternoon, Cazale found his most demanding role playing a guy who has nothing left to lose. Sal's anxiety becomes a fuse always threatening to ignite a powder keg of violence. The comedy comes from the way Sonny (Pacino), the most desperate of amateur bank robbers, tries to keep Sal from detonating.

His lover and one-time colleague Meryl Streep comes off strongest in the picture. In part, it's because Streep appears so unguarded and still protective (in a good way) of Cazale and her feelings for him. There's a delicate warmth she reveals here that you don't often see in her. Her remembering how she stood by him in his last days (they had acted together in The Deer Hunter) when she wasn't yet a huge star (that would come later) brings out a bracing humility that is overwhelming to watch. It's also quite stirring to see how, when Cazale almost lost the role of Stan in The Deer Hunter because he had lung cancer and wasn't insurable, Robert De Niro stepped forward to pay for his insurance claim. Streep and the director also threatened to walk if he wasn't cast. You come away realizing that, for an actor who played so many loners, John Cazale had the best of friends.

Sam Rockwell makes quite an interesting observation about John Cazale in I Knew it Was You. He says that while most actors might dream of playing Michael or Sonny because of their magnetism, it's Fredo he says who makes those other performances work so strongly because "he's just so recognizably human." With that recognition comes the fact that in five huge movies filled with young actors about to become stars, John Cazale never found fame. But now when you look back, his vulnerability in each role is a burning spot glowing in the shadow of the screen.

-- June 9/15

This Was His Song: William H. Macy's Rudderless


Billy Crudup in Rudderless.

In the opening scenes of William H. Macy's debut film, Rudderless (2014), Sam Manning (Billy Crudup), a divorced advertising executive in Oklahoma, has just landed a large account and is in the mood to celebrate his success. He immediately calls up his son, Josh (Miles Heizer), an Oklahoma University student, whom we've just watched record in his dorm a number of songs he has written, to join him at a local bar. Although Josh is reluctant to go, Sam insists. When he doesn't arrive, Sam figures his son stood him up and leaves him a message admonishing his behavior. Just as he's about to leave, however, Sam looks up at one of the television monitors in the bar to witness breaking news about an outbreak of campus violence that he later discovers has claimed the lives of a number of students including his boy.

From there, Sam's life goes into a tailspin. He throws his career away, lives as a functioning alcoholic in a sailboat on a lake, and barely holds on to a job as a contractor's assistant. When his ex-wife Emily (Felicity Huffman) comes by to deliver their son's guitar and his discs, Sam initially wants to throw it all away in the same manner as he's been throwing away his life. But since he played music together with his son when he was much younger, he has second thoughts and begins listening to Josh's demos. Once he starts singing them, he gets reeled in by their naked power. So much so that after work, he goes by a local bar where amateurs perform their work and he sings one of Josh's songs. The tune gets the attention of a geeky and insecure young musician, Quentin (Anton Yelchin), who follows Sam to his boat and attempts to get him performing on stage with him. Convinced that there must be other great songs like that one, he ultimately convinces Sam to help him put together a band – Rudderless – which quickly achieves local notoriety with the tracks Josh wrote.

I've gone to great lengths here describing the opening section of Rudderless because the content sounds pretty much like a conventional Afterschool Special about how a parent is brought back to life by embracing the music of the son he lost to violence. But Rudderless throws the viewer a couple of potent curveballs that undo that particular notion and leave us about as emotionally unmoored as Sam. When Steve Vineberg, in praising Billy Crudup's performance a few months back in Critics at Large, described him as a "thorny" actor, he could have just as easily been speaking for the movie as well. Rudderless takes up a subject seldom dealt with from such a volatile perspective and does it with intelligence and sensitivity. This is not a story of redemption, or about healing wounds. There are also no reconciliations to be found. Rudderless is about the opening up of lesions and acknowledging the kind of trauma that has no simple resolution. In a sense, picking a genre like music was a smart choice by screenwriters Jeff Robison and Casey Twenter because we always look to popular song in times of both happiness and sadness to transform, or enhance, our state of mind. But Rudderless doesn't operate in a predictable way, but instead digs into the paradoxical question of what kind of person creates good music.William H. Macy delves quite bravely into that unresolved argument over our perceptions are around the artists who create work we love and also what values we hold them to when they do so. It may well have been that this touchy area, which is directly and thoughtfully addressed in the picture, caused the film to get some bad reviews and a straight-to-video-and-streaming fate.


Which is too bad. Many will miss some of the really fine work Macy does with his actors. As good as Billy Crudup was playing a musician in Almost Famous (2000), the movie itself was cloying in its examination of pop idolatry. His role as Sam has more sharper edges somewhat reminiscent of his part in Keith Gordon's Waking the Dead (2000), where he played a haunted Coast Guard officer and the former lover of a political activist (Jennifer Connelly) who turns up dead in a car bombing. Crudup has a more riveting corporeality as Sam, though, and he moves through the picture like unpredictable weather. His moody detachment also has some of the precisioned lyricism he showed in the highly underrated Stage Beauty (2003). Sam has lived his life by the Dale Carnegie kind of positive thinking that made him a success as a consultant. But when his son dies the bottom goes out of his value system and leaves him no anchor – except for the songs he discovers and hangs onto for dear life. Crudup never softens Sam's resolve, either, except in some expendable footage where he's battling with his marina landlord. The tone in those moments turns broadly comic and cartoonish. Anton Yelchin, as Quentin, shows he has grown long past the self-conscious precociousness he possessed as Hank Azaria's son on the TV series Huff. In Rudderless, he turns clever befuddlement into the disquieting aroma of profound disbelief (which is why he's also so effective as the young Chekov in the recent Star Trek films).What compels him most about Josh's songs is how they unravel those vulnerable areas he has yet to claim in himself. But his recognition of where Josh's vulnerability took him leads Quentin to a climatic moment where he no longer wishes to yield to their power. At times, Yelchin suggests some of the fragility of Brad Dourif's Billy Bibbit from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest only without the stutter.

Selena Gomez in Rudderless.

There are a number of minor roles in Rudderless that also reverberate. Laurence Fishburne turns up as Del, the cranky owner of a music store, who resembles a grown-up version of the purist record collector Jack Black played in Stephen Frears' High Fidelity (2000). Felicity Huffman's even smaller part as Sam's ex-wife sends tiny shock waves through the movie. She's able to touch depths here that she couldn't achieve in the much larger role she had in the TV series American Crime. There she had to carry all the self-conscious social commentary of the screenwriter. Selena Gomez, as Josh's ex-girlfriend, also manages to make the most out of a couple of cameo moments, while William H. Macy's proprietor, who runs the tavern and directs the musical proceedings, does it with the same casual aplomb he shows as a movie-maker. The songs by Eef Barzelay, Selena Gomez, Ben Limpic and Billy Crudup somehow seem to come magically from one mind. They create an unsettling portrait of a troubled songwriter trying to feel his way back into a world in which he feels he doesn't belong.

What makes Rudderless truly linger in the mind afterwards, though, is Billy Crudup's performance. Like a man wrestling in an emotional hailstorm in an effort to discover clarity, Sam pisses into the wind (sometimes literally) in defiance of the realities he doesn't care to accept, and yet knows he can't escape. Crudup doesn't leave the viewer any way out of the maelstrom that houses the art he feels an urgency to embrace. In the end, Rudderless is simply about trying to sing your way home just when your idea of home seems no longer possible, or to even truly exist.

-- June 13/15

Salvation: Love & Mercy


Paul Dano as Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy

"The Beach Boys propagated their own variant on the American dream, painting a dazzling picture of beaches, parties and endless summers, a paradise of escape into private as often as shared pleasures...Yet by the late Sixties, the band was articulating, with less success, a disenchantment with that suburban ethos, and a search for transcendence."

– Jim Miller in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (Random House, 1980).


Is it any wonder that Los Angeles is known as "the City of Lost Angels"? It's the place where sellouts go to bask in the sun, and shady deals get made under palm trees. Never mind that L.A. was the corruptible home of Raymond Chandler's incorruptible detective Philip Marlowe, it was also where Annie Hall was seduced away from Alvy Singer in Woody Allen's hit comedy. Los Angeles may be a tinsel town, a superficial jewel and pleasure palace, but its endless summers hold out a paradoxical promise. Songwriter Brian Wilson successfully depicted the seductive charms of that promise in The Beach Boys' best early music ("I Get Around," "Fun, Fun, Fun," "California Girls"), but when he tried to grow past the adolescent whims of what Jim Miller called that "paradise of escape," even calling it into question in the aching "Don't Worry Baby," Wilson was unable to take the band successfully into adulthood. The hedonistic thrill of The Beach Boys would, by the end of the Sixties, ironically become associated with the apocalyptic horrors of Charles Manson.

In the astonishingly good Love & Mercy, a biographical drama about Brian Wilson, first-time feature director Bill Pohlad crafts a dazzling picture of the promised land Wilson sought in his music. By taking us into the sound of his records and contrasting them with the timbre of his psyche, Pohlad dips boldly and imaginatively into Wilson's life with the breakneck zeal of a collage artist in heat. In creating a movie for the ears, as well as for the eyes, Pohlad assembles the puzzle pieces of his tale in a refreshingly open-ended style that embraces both experimental and conventional narrative forms, which is why Love & Mercy isn't a typical musical biography of a tortured genius, or the conventional story of a disturbed man redeemed by love (as Ron Howard's fraudulent A Beautiful Mind was).Yet it has all those elements at play within it. But the dramatic textures of the story functions like a vivid kaleidoscopic mirror. It's told in a parallel narrative which depicts two different periods in Brian Wilson's life: the recording of Pet Sounds and Smile in the mid-Sixties where Wilson began to break from the celebration of the California surf heard in "I Get Around" and "Fun, Fun, Fun," and the late Eighties, when Wilson lived in isolation away from The Beach Boys and under the dubious care of Dr. Eugene Landy, who exercised a Svengali-like control over him until Melinda Ledbetter came into his life. Brian Wilson's fractured personal world only synergizes into one when he finds salvation in his songs.

The Beach Boys working on Pet Sounds in Love & Mercy

For a first time director, Pohlad (who produced The Tree of Life, 12 Years a Slave and Brokeback Mountain) shows a remarkable dexterity in the storytelling (helped along by a dense, yet beautifully layered script by Michael Alan Lerner and Oren Moverman). Rather than simply chronicling the story of the rise to success of The Beach Boys, Pohlad takes us inside the process of Wilson's early songwriting and we see and hear the later studio sessions (with "The Wrecking Crew") that produced Pet Sounds and the aborted and glorious mess of Smile. The purpose of doing this is not only to have us hear this mad genius at work in the creation of those transcendent songs, but also to contrast that process with the grim reality of Wilson's troubled life, where we watch him brutalized both by a jealously violent and controlling father (played with creepy precision by Bill Camp) and undermined by his cousin, band mate Mike Love (Jake Abel) who resists abandoning the surf music that made The Beach Boys famous. By continually shifting back and forth through time, Love & Mercy contrasts Wilson striving for transcendence with the desolate loner pining for contact in his later years. The impact is both moving and wounding to watch.

None of this would even be possible if Pohlad didn't show such remarkable skill with the actors (which becomes an even more admirable task given the very structure of the picture itself). In the early Sixties section, Wilson is played by Paul Dano who calls up with an uncanny resemblance Wilson's dreamy fugue states that would lead him to write such indelibly romantic songs like "Good Vibrations." But in the later Eighties period he's portrayed by John Cusack, who holds a broken mirror to the damaged soul Dano's Wilson was fighting for earlier in the Sixties section. While neither actor literally resembles the other, Pohlad is able to establish a unity of soul across time – another kind of synergy – that is comparable in some ways to what Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro did playing Don Corleone in different periods in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II. It becomes so clear watching Paul Dano in Love & Mercy why he was so horribly ineffective as the charlatan preacher in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. As an actor, Dano doesn't believably possess the soul of a trickster, but instead he has something of the disassociated spirit of a genial hippie lost in clouds of reefer smoke.When Dano's Wilson explodes in distress at the dinner table, due to his intake of hallucinogens, it comes from the buried recesses of a psychosis he can't understand or control. Dano's gift is for feeling his way into Wilson's distress unlike his crazed sermons from the pulpit in There Will Be Blood which were so self-consciously mannered that they turned helplessly into a parody of quackery.

Brian Wilson on the left with Dano and Cusack on the right.

As good as Dano is in Love & Mercy, John Cusack has the more difficult role and he's never been better on the screen. If Dano easily embodies the vulnerable boy who can't grow up to be a man, Cusack perfectly suggests arrested adolescence in the body of an older adult. In his scenes with the car saleswoman, Melinda (Elizabeth Banks), who would later rescue him from Landy and then become his wife, Cusack shows some of the cracked moonstruck tenderness that won audiences over in his role as the teenage Lloyd Dobler in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything. But Lloyd's mooniness derived out of a young outsider's sanity, and it was self-assurance that helped him find the love he desired and embrace his passing from adolescence. But Cusack's Wilson isn't so fortunate. His attempts to connect with Melinda represents a grappling with loose ends of awareness, a longing for contact that is perfumed with regret and loss. (On a dinner date with another couple, he doesn't think twice about bringing up his father's sadism which he recounts calmly while everyone else is recoiling in horror.) Elizabeth Banks (from Sam Raimi's Spiderman trilogy and The 40-Year-Old Virgin) has the kind of quirky comic timing that is in perfect synch with Cusack's genial eccentricities. Their scenes together have some of the intuitive romantic dazzle that James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan often reached in pictures like The Shopworn Angel and The Shop Around the Corner. Paul Giamatti, as Eugene Landy, one again shows just how resourceful an actor he is. Whether he is playing an enraged struggling novelist (Sideways), or a clever Chief Inspector (The Illusionist), Giamatti is distinctive without ever repeating himself. He plays Landy as a narcissist disguised as healer. He's the kind of con man only southern California produces and Nathanael West wrote about. He needs to live through Wilson in order to validate his own sense of being as being equal to Wilson's genius. When Melinda presents a formidable challenge to Landy's control, he shows her what his control means in some of the most unsettling work this actor has come up with yet.

Elizabeth Banks and John Cusack

You could say that Love & Mercy wouldn't have been possible without The Tree of Life, or perhaps Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, which was an impressionistic study of Bob Dylan, but the picture actually improves on both of these ambitious failures. Terence Malick's The Tree of Life was a memoir about growing up in Texas that abandoned conventional narrative in order to create on the screen the elliptical manner in which our memories actually function, but Malick lacks the dramatic sense to anchor the story and make it into a realized experience, whereas Love & Mercy provides a clothesline on which Pohlad can experiment without losing touch with the narrative themes. (Malick is a superb visual stylist who is in desperate need of a good dramatic writer.) While I'm quite fond of I'm Not There, a beautifully made film that illuminates the mysterious masks that Bob Dylan wears, the picture is conceived too self-consciously as an academic thesis. It cleverly displays all his masks without successfully dramatizing why they're there. If you didn't know much about Bob Dylan, it's doubtful if I'm Not There would help solve any mysteries (and it doesn't leave the actors much to play – except for Cate Blanchett who draws on the flamboyance of Tallulah Bankhead to bring out all the androgyny of the mid-Sixties Dylan). Love & Mercy has a thesis, too, but it feels arrived at rather than demonstrated. When Pohlad brings together in time Dano and Cusack, and thereby collapses time, he does something more interesting with the same idea that Stanley Kubrick was celebrated for in his ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Where Kubrick trafficked in high-minded metaphysics, Pohlad achieves true spiritual transcendence where time doesn't just heal wounds, but reassembles the pieces of the psyche that those wounds shattered.

While the story occasionally wobbles, it doesn't hobble the picture. For instance, we never get inside the making of the 1988 solo album Wilson is working on with Eugene Landy that contains the co-written song "Love & Mercy." If that section of the story had been clarified more we might have seen exactly how Landy was able to control and coerce Wilson. The legal means that Melinda uses with Wilson's family to get Brian away from Landy's clutches is also too vaguely worked out on the screen to make much sense. (Between 1983 and 1986, Landy annually charged $430,000 forcing Brian Wilson's family members to devote their publishing rights to his fee. Landy received 25% of the copyright to all of Wilson's songs, regardless of whether he contributed to them or not. When Wilson's family discovered that Landy had been named as a chief beneficiary in Wilson's will, Brian's cousin Stan Love filed for conservatorship in 1990, and the family soon contested Landy's control of Wilson, ultimately achieving successful legal action in late 1991. Landy died in 2006.) Love & Mercy doesn't go deep enough into how Landy exerted such a grip on Wilson so that he couldn't see he was being swindled and abused. But these are tiny flaws.

Most film biographies of disturbed talents can't resist the most sentimental roads to redemption, but Love & Mercy achieves the same goals without all the sentimentality. One watches the movie and can fully understand the music of Brian Wilson as well as the life that came to shape it. Love & Mercy stirs you with its vision and its daring. It might be one of the few pictures that simultaneously moves you to tears while making you jump for joy.

-- July 11/15

Truer Detective: Miami Blues (1990)


Alec Baldwin in Miami Blues.

Why are so many popular film noirs and hard-boiled TV dramas these days so fucking solemn? In the HBO series True Detective, which is about as brooding and humourless as television gets, there's enough lugubrious dialogue to sink David Fincher's Se7en. (Maybe True Detective is supposed be a straight-faced parody of James Ellroy's or James.M.Cain's pulpy prose. But I doubt it.) The writing is actually literary in the worst way – self-conscious neurosis always reflecting back on itself even as it wallows in its existential darkness.When Vince Vaughn's Frank remarked a couple of episodes ago that “there’s a certain stridency at work here,” I howled at the TV screen. He could be speaking for the series itself. True Detective strives for importance by layering on the dread and critics and viewers seem enthralled by all the tortured somnambulism. Could it be the tough-guy dialogue that tries to be smart, or is it possibly the story which affirms some knowing cynicism about the nature of corruption and our acquiescence towards it? Who knows? It could make for perfectly viable dramatic material if it were done without this ennui-on-the-sleeve pretension – in fact, Netflix's first season of Bloodline does do corruption well, but nobody's writing about it. So despite the strong presence of a lot of good actors on True Detective, to paraphrase critic Paul Coates, they all end up moving like the drowned under water.

Speaking of good actors, when I saw Fred Ward wasted in a True Detective cameo a few weeks back as a cop in a hallucination, I was reminded of an infinitely better little crime thriller he starred in called Miami Blues (which recently came out in Blue-ray) where he was a truer detective. While the HBO drama tries for something deep and foreboding in every moment, as if it were terrified that revelations could sometimes be found in the most casual interplay, Miami Blues makes no such claim for depth. Yet it has plenty to say and with a cutting irony that springs plenty of surprises. While everything in the Los Angeles of True Detective is blighted – even the sun seems in too much of a funk to shine – the city of Miami Blues glows in bright and smudged pastel colours like a beacon calling to the id to come out and play. The picture keeps the hunger and the insatiable need to quench it always up front and reminds us that villains aren't always after the bling to nurse their pathology. In Miami Blues, people are constantly sacrificing things – clothes, guns, a badge, false teeth, and even their fingers – just to get some satisfaction. People's dreams here are pretty basic, but their means of fulfilling them in the end become costly. In that vain pursuit, violence and ironic comedy commingle in a manner that gives Miami Blues its own delectable bite.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alec Baldwin

To the strains of Norman Greenbaum's hideous late Sixties hit, "Spirit in the Sky," 'Junior' Frenger (Alec Baldwin), a psychopathic con man just released from prison in California, flies into Miami with a new stolen identity and a basic goal of getting rich. As he leaves the airport, however, he gets hustled by another kind of con artist – a Hare Krishna recruit who is trying to palm off a copy of the Bhagavad Gita – and Junior responds by breaking the guy's finger, sending him into shock, and giving him a fatal heart attack. Junior flees the scene and the murder is investigated by Sgt. Hoke Moseley (Fred Ward), a shaggy dog detective with false teeth, and his partner, Bill Henderson (Charles Napier), who take turns cracking each other up over whether you could define this crime as a homicide. Meanwhile Junior checks into a hotel and orders up a hooker, Susie Waggoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a girl with simple needs who's putting herself through school. Right away she sees that her goal is to domesticate the infantile Junior (no name could be better) and building for themselves a future. The Hare Krishna murder, though, leads Hoke to Junior's door, an apartment he eventually shares with Susie. It doesn't take Hoke long to size up Junior as a veteran criminal who has done some hard time. But he has no evidence to arrest him. Before he can come up with some, though, Junior finds his way to Hoke's run-down hotel residence, beats him, and robs him of his badge, gun and his false teeth. While the dazed Hoke recovers in the hospital, Junior goes about Miami, disguising himself as Hoke, solving all his open cases – and pocketing all the spoils for himself.

Back in 1990 Alec Baldwin was young and trim, not the sturdy-as-granite fellow we've come to know from 30 Rock. Baldwin plays Junior as an insatiable infant with a violent appetite who sees the world and wants what's in it – including the domestic simplicities that Susie offers him. You could say he resembles Al Pacino's Scarface, who also saw Miami as his own personal Eden, except that Junior is Tony Montana without all the over-baked machismo, which in Brian De Palma's film turned everything inadvertently into ridiculous camp. Baldwin is agile on his feet like Jimmy Cagney was in White Heat – actually almost as funny – and not as heavy-spirited as Pacino. Junior's tickled at how easy it is to play detective and be a criminal at the same time. He may be in perpetual arrested adolescence, but he's also quick-witted, and that gives the part some gravity. By contrast, Fred Ward's Hoke is sharp and sweet, but he's so grizzled that the people he needs most continually underestimate him. Hoke knows that he's become a joke within the department because he forgets to put his teeth in and his potbelly always hangs forlornly over his pants. But when Junior starts solving his cases and making a fool of him, the fox within awakens. Once he gets partnered with Ellita Sanchez (Nora Dunn), he even turns foxy. (Nora Dunn, who isn't given much to do unfortunately, is stunningly gorgeous in just about every shot.) Hoke earns Ellita's respect and admiration by the end.

Fred Ward and Nora Dunn

Jennifer Jason Leigh gives the character of Susie ample consideration. Although Susie appears simple-minded and naive, she isn't. She may firmly believe in the family values concurrent with the post-Reagan years that the picture is set in, but she also believes that the straight life will ultimately redeem her. She knows that Junior abandoning his recidivist criminality would be as easy for Junior as her giving up prostitution and she's crushed when he continues to live the life. (She finds out that he's lying to her when she bakes him a horrid vinegar pie and pretends to eat it happily rather than reacting honestly.) Although in many pictures since, Leigh has played hollowed out versions of damaged souls, she fills Susie's structured role with a number of fascinating and funny contours. (Even when she tells Hoke that she stayed with Junior because he ate everything she cooked and never hit her, she makes that seem significant rather than a joke on her character.)

Miami Blues was made under the aegis of Jonathan Demme and you can feel his spirit of generosity throughout the picture. (He and George Armitage became friends when they both worked under the tutelage of Roger Corman in the Sixties and Seventies. Miami Blues also features a number of Demme regulars including the incomparable Tak Fujimoto who shot the picture.) While Armitage's script, based on a novel by Charles Willeford, is somewhat thinner than Demme's Something Wild or Married to the Mob, Miami Blues has a snaggle-tooth appeal. That may have something to do also with the intelligence underneath the pulp of the picture. Even the use of "Spirit in the Sky" isn't arbitrary. Norman Greenbaum's song pointed at the shift in Sixties idealism towards the morphing of hippies into the Jesus children of the early Seventies. At the beginning of the picture, Junior is morphing himself as well into a born again entrepreneur with a junk bonds mentality where his criminal psychopathy now seems almost commonplace. Armitage cleverly contrasts the amorality of Junior's outlook not only with Susie's earnest acceptance of American family values, but also with the predatory world of the recession decade he's been released into. If True Detective gives you the impression that its characters are so damaged they had nothing to lose to begin with, Miami Blues tells you that even getting your false teeth stolen can feel like a capital offense.

-- July 16/15

Lady Blue: What Happened, Miss Simone?



There's no question that it's been a pretty good period for music documentaries. Just when you thought that they were becoming more often than not tributes in granite, featuring little about the music and more about the artist's tenacity in surviving substance abuse and failure, a number of pictures have come along lately with real temperament and a sharp critical perspective on the work. Early on in the year, there was the engaging and informative The Wrecking Crew which may not have been strikingly innovative in its technique, but was touching in its generosity towards a group of musicians who had never really been publicly recognized before. Alex Gibney, who had already parted the curtain on the sinister machinations behind the Church of Scientology in his compelling Going Clear, came up with two radically different musical portraits of James Brown (Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown) and Frank Sinatra (Sinatra: All or Nothing at All). In Mr. Dynamite, Gibney captured not only the thrilling showmanship in James Brown's music and the vibrant electricity of his live concerts, but in speaking to his band, the JB's, he was also able to plumb the strains and fragile bonds within the comradeship that fueled his meteoric rise to fame. By going to the roots of Brown's version of soul music, which combined funk with the ecstatic heights reached in the churches of black gospel, Gibney also made sense of Brown's complex connection to the black community. (Although he was a spiritual Godfather to dispossessed blacks, who felt even more disenfranchised after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he was also a self-made entrepreneur and an exponent of black capitalism that would lead him to later support Richard Nixon.)

In Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, a four-hour two-part epic, Gibney not only defines the romantically heartsick persona Sinatra brilliantly cultivated in his long singing career, but he also draws a vividly rich portrait of Sinatra's life (which was as equally complex as James Brown's). But what made this movie truly innovative (and it was sustained for the full length of the picture) was the manner in which Gibney wove together Sinatra's voice-over commentary. Gibney didn't just conventionally pull his quotes from any one interview that Sinatra gave about his life and career, Instead he stitched together – sometimes sentence by sentence – a Sinatra reflection on his life that was constructed from remarks Frank made in different interviews over time. As if composing his own piece of music for Sinatra to perform, where the linearity of time magically becomes timeless, Gibney manufactures the rhythms of Sinatra's speaking voice and then runs it parallel to his singing one.

Now in the new Netflix documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, director Liz Garbus performs a beautifully cadenced balancing act that negotiates the troubling episodes that dogged singer Nina Simone's life while also unveiling her invaluable contributions to popular music – contributions that in songs like Rodgers and Hart's "Little Girl Blue," George Gershwin's "I Love You, Porgy," and Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You," fused the classical counter-point stylings of Bach with traditional gospel and rhythm and blues. Her regal formalism which boldly contrasted with her fiery self-determination would later influence performers like Joni Mitchell, as much as her contralto singing style would be adopted and transformed by such artists as Pete Townshend, Antony Hegarty and Alicia Keys. Unlike the jazz and soul singers who would give in to the torrents of emotional power found in the music's gospel roots and then express the sheer joy they experienced in the freedom they found, Nina Simone always sounded trapped by the shades of blue she saw tucked in the corners of those songs she chose to cover. When she sang "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood,"it didn't have the crying plea that Eric Burdon of The Animals once gave it, as if the love he sought and trusted might just free him from the trappings of the working-class life he lived. Simone takes to the track as if the wounds of rejection had already consumed her and she was letting you in at what was gnawing at her bones. Unlike Bessie Smith, whose passionately sexual voice had the alchemy of healing within it (something that Aretha Franklin would herself find in soul), Nina Simone defined the pain that lay in sensual desire and articulated the cost it could exact. She didn't invoke Billie Holiday exactly, who took sexual pleasure from pain and rejection, but instead brought out the tension between desire and rejection. By doing so, her songs would simmer and slowly boil. There was a rage under the surface of her stately presentations which gave them both drama and suspense.


In What Happened, Miss Simone?, Liz Garbus provides the story that perfumed those performances and informed what we came to hear in Simone's artistry. Drawing on interviews with Simone (who died of breast cancer in 2003), her daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, her former husband and manager, Andrew Stroud, her guitar accompanist and musical director Al Schackman, and even Simone's diary entries, Garbus's film bears witness to the life of a disturbed and talented singer whose work didn't help her transcend her struggles. In the film, we see how she came to define those trials (or in the case of her incendiary civil-rights song "Mississippi Goddam,"which was her response to the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of the church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four black children, find an outlet for her anger and outrage). Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, in Tryon, North Carolina, she was the sixth of eight children. Coming from a poor black family who turned to the local church for comfort, Nina Simone (who would later take her name from both French actress Simone Signoret, who she'd seen in the 1952 film, Casque d'or, and niña which means 'little girl' in Spanish) began playing the piano at age three. Besides performing gospel standards in her church, like "God Be With You, Till We Meet Again,"she would be also be drawn to classical music and gave her first recital at the age of twelve. (During that performance, we discover, her parents were made to sit in the back of the fall to provide room for the white audience. But Simone would not perform until her parents were allowed back to the front row.) Garbus reveals how Simone wanted to be a classical pianist who with the help of scholarship money got to hire a private tutor to further her studies. With a fund later provided by her family and community, she sought entry into the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, but was rejected because of her race. In the film, Garbus makes clear that not only did this rejection inadvertently build a bridge for her into popular music, it was a key to understanding the rage that seethed under the Lady Blue regalia.

As the film makes clear, Simone's anger was not only directed towards a racist society, but it was also an anger that turned to depression. By the time she married Andrew Stroud, Garbus through interviews and diary entries shows how he became her nemesis. Much like Colonel Parker with Elvis, Stroud completely controlled her artistic life but he also brutalized her violently when she didn't conform to his wishes. (The interviews here with Stroud were from another source in 2006. He died in 2012.) Garbus, however, stops short at portraying Simone as simply the victim of abuse, she shows as well how Simone became an abuser herself, to her daughter, her musicians and even her fans. The violence might have consumed Simone completely had it not been for the Civil Rights movement which politicized her. But as the movement turned more radical towards the end of the Sixties, it drew out the violence within her. (In one scene, she tells Martin Luther King Jr., “I am not non-violent.” He replies with a wry humour, "You don't have to be.") Although Nina Simone would eventually leave her husband and leave the United States, which she came to loathe after King's assassination and (at the suggestion of her friend singer Miriam Makeba) would move to Liberia, she first looked to Lorraine Hansberry's unfinished play, To Be Young Gifted and Black, to create her most exultant Civil Rights song, "Young, Gifted and Black" (which both Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway would do full justice to in the Seventies). After many years in a self-imposed exile, Simone would eventually turn up in France to revitalize a career that had floundered, and to finally confront the demons that had been crippling her for so long.

While there's a lot packed in What Happened, Miss Simone?, the documentary never feels overwhelmingly dense because Liz Garbus establishes a late night rhythm that moves comfortably with the many Simone tracks we hear on the soundtrack. Sometimes it's hard to separate the artist's personal life from their work (especially when one has little to do with the other) because the mass audience is always primed to level the playing field. They want to see that the artist can suffer just like the rest of us despite their genius. But sometimes there is a connection between those two worlds that deepen our responses to their work – especially when we see how much of the artist's life might actually inform it. For Nina Simone, she built a home for her defiance, her pain and her rage in the tunes she chose to interpret. Her songbook could probably serve as an unofficial memoir to the one she did write (I Put a Spell On You in 1993). What Liz Garbus does in What Happened, Miss Simone? is weave a melodically doleful, yet riveting tapestry, about an artist for whom melody and song seldom brought harmony into her life.

-- July 20/15

Tactile: Carlos Marques-Marcet's 10,000 km



In the opening moments of Carlos Marques-Marcet's remarkable film 10,000 km, Sergi (David Verdaguer) and Alexandra (Natalia Tena) are first seen making passionate love. As the camera fixes on their bodies, which are thrusting and swaying in motion to the erotic rhythms they both invent and discover, we can see how delicately intertwined their sexual and emotional lives are. They seem inseparable. But as inseparable as they might be, it's not a symbiotic partnership. Sergi and Alexandra still retain their individual selves as if sex for them wasn't about losing yourself in your partner, but about connecting at the most intimate and tactile place where you find out some great mystery about yourself. While Sergi is a music teacher in Barcelona who is seeking more secure work and Alexandra is a photographer trying to further her career, they both live together and desire a child. Before she can get pregnant, however, she gets an e-mail from Los Angeles offering her a one-year residency. Although Sergi is initially resistant to letting her go, he values her independence as much as he does his own and he relents. But the distance between them, which makes up the title of the picture, puts their relationship to the test. The ability to hold their connection close initially seems tangible because of Skype, Facebook and e-mail, but Marques-Marcet has fashioned a thoughtful and honestly probing examination of modern romance in the digital age. And it's a corker.

One of the key paradoxes of social media today is that although we have more access to information and people, it only creates a perception of increased intimacy. There are people today who have no problem (or show no conscience) about breaking up a relationship in a text and doing it from a safe distance. They've learned how to be cocooned and protected by the technology that they are supposedly using to reach out to people. It's as if human beings were now becoming inseparable from the impersonal data that's being exchanged. 10,000 km traces the distance of that lost intimacy by fashioning an intelligent and stirring two-hander that not only depicts how lovers can grow apart over time, but Marques-Marcet also employs the means of technology they use to seek each other out. Social media becomes part of the visual strategy of the story. Sometimes the screen turns into what they see through their Skype camera, or on their Facebook page, or their scanning of an e-mail inbox. By contrast, the opening lovemaking sequence and its aftermath happens in one single shot that depicts their coital and post-coital moments in real time, but once Alexandra gets to Los Angeles and they turn to their computers, the images move quickly in various shades of light and shadow so that we experience what they see and also what they don't get to see. Marques-Marcet never lets the film become too conceptualized to the point where we lose touch with the emotional anchor of the story.

David Verdaguer in 10,000 km.

David Verdaguer, who shows some of the brooding hangdog sensuality of Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis, with subtle sureness lets us see how Sergi's self-doubts increase as he witnesses the liberation that Alexandra feels being in a foreign country. Although he tries to fill the emotional spaces in their Barcelona home that she left behind, in one scene, he violently starts destroying those things she left behind that remind him of her. Natalia Tena, who most know as Nymphadora Tonks in the Harry Potter films, and perhaps more recently as Osha in Game of Thrones, has a vibrant sensuality as Alexandra. She responds kinetically to her new surroundings unlike Sergi who needs the stability of roots. As her new apartment slowly fills with items that inadvertently estrange her further from Sergi, she is both terrified of what she stands to lose with him being so far away and thrilled by what she is gaining from these new experiences abroad. No moment expresses that better than the scene where they try to have sex over Skype. While he can fill his imagination with thoughts of her being with him in Barcelona that allow him to orgasm, she starts to lose interest when she realizes that her sexual desire is so intrinsically linked to the human contact with Sergi that she now doesn't have. Her gesture of closing her laptop as he climaxes is the equivalent of turning and facing the wall in bed after unsatisfactory sex.

Natalia Tena in 10,000 km.

10,000 km may catch you up in familiar territory – the travails of the long distance romance – but it has you experiencing that theme in an entirely new and refreshing way. The picture can also call up the illuminating meditation on romance that Richard Linklater unveiled in his trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) where the excitement of discovery was shared by its director, its stars and the audience. There's a refreshing honesty at work in 10,000 km where sides aren't taken and points aren't being made. What we experience instead is the fragile territory that being a soulmate maps, where promises can't be kept despite the efforts of both partners. And if 10,000 km celebrates the depths of desire that true love can bring, it doesn't back away either from the heartache that those depths can sometimes foster. In speaking of those depths, there might not be a better love scene in recent movies as heartbreakingly beautiful as when Sergi and Alexandra take up their laptops in their distant lands, as if to invoke a shared physicality, and they dance around their separate rooms to the strains of the Magnetic Fields' "Nothing Matters When We're Dancing." Like the great song they've chosen, there's not a false note to be found anywhere in the picture.

-- July 23/15

To Be or...: AMC's Humans



The AMC/Channel Four summer SF series, Humans, which just finished its first season last Sunday, focuses on the familiar theme of what it means to be human in a world being run largely by synthetic life. Loosely based on the 2012 Scandinavian show, Äkta människor (Real Humans), Humans (which is set in a future Britain that doesn't look dramatically different from the present) is a densely plotted, yet engaging, serial drama that sets itself up as a thriller, but resists the kind of melodramatic mechanics that give most popular television programs their push. Although that approach is certainly laudable, and it never becomes languid (especially given that other successful thrillers like True Detective manufacture suspense by mainlining dread), there is a pronounced lack of suspense despite the very nature of the story. Since Humans wants to be on the human side of every issue there seems to be little of consequence despite the consequences that unfold. Even so, the cast – whether they are playing real people or synths – have dimensions built into their roles which gives the plot some pep and purpose.

Humans begins with the married Joe Hawkins (Tom Goodman-Hill) buying a synthetic human, Anita (Gemma Chan), to help him take care of his children, including his precocious, tech-savvy teenager Matilda (Lucy Carless), her brooding brother, Toby (Theo Stevenson), and the youngest sister, the energetic Sophie (the aptly named Pixie Davies). Their mother, Laura (Katherine Parkinson), is a lawyer who (for reasons we come to understand later) remains remote from her family and gets completely consumed in her work keeping her away from home for extended periods. Part of Joe's motivations for obtaining a synth is purely practical to compensate for his wife's continued absence, but it also has to do with a growing sexual frustration that draws him more intimately to his new purchase. What he doesn't realize, despite his various desires, is that Anita is not who she seems to be. Having been bought as if brand new, we soon discover that she isn't right out of the box. Originally named Mia, she had months earlier been kidnapped by black market entrepreneurs who hacked her with new software – but not enough to erase her previous identity.

While the larger society uses synths as a labour force either doing menial work, household duties – or as part of the prostitution trade working in sex clubs – we discover that a handful of synths are also part human and at odds with a society which is growing more hostile towards the artificial life. In particular, Leo Elster (Colin Morgan), who is the son of the late synth inventor David Elster (Stephen Boxer), was given synthetic parts and brought back to life when he died in an earlier accident. As it turns out, Leo's caregivers and companions are all synths who were given human consciousness by his father. After David's death, the synths scattered and so his loyal watcher, Max (Ivanno Jermiah, who resembles a teenage reincarnation of Woody Strode), goes on the hunt with Leo for his fugitive family. The dispatched crew include the dynamic vixen Niska (Emily Berrington) who works in a sex club and has grown to distrust and hate humans; the acquiescent Fred (Sope Dirisu), who is under the supervision of Professor Hobb (Danny Webb), an artificial intelligence researcher who assists government and law enforcement in trying to enslave synths; and detective Karen Voss (Ruth Bradley), who is passing as human and denying her nature while fooling her married police partner, Pete Drummond (Neil Maskell), whom she is also attracted to. But Pete is growing more suspicious and jealous of synths that make him feel less than perfect, especially since his disabled wife Jill (Jill Halfpenny) now depends on a synth for practical, emotional and – eventually – sexual needs. Leo's most treasured sibling on the loose is Mia, who he doesn't initially know is now working as Anita in the Hawkins' household. On the periphery of the story is Dr. George Millican (William Hurt), a retired and widowed synth researcher who once worked with Elster, and who becomes an empathetic supporter of his former partner's work by helping the synths on the loose. (Millican's also developed a parental bond with an outmoded synth caregiver, Odi, played by Will Tudor, who the doctor refuses to recycle in order to acquire a new one).

The less nuanced 2012 Scandinavian show, Äkta människor (Real Humans).

If the plotting sounds complicated on Humans, it is. But the story unfolds with ease and clarity. The original series, Real Humans, wasn't quite as dense, but was needlessly churlish in the same manner as Stieg Larsson's detective novels. (Real Humans caught that chic cynical tone of Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books where Swedish society is portrayed as so ugly and venal that it appears to be conceived by bitter and resentful humanist socialists who were enraged that their country didn't turn out to be this idyllic paradise they'd hoped for.) For instance, in Real Humans, the ambiguous detective Pete is written instead as a working-class factory drone who is not only jealous of his wife's synth, but turns out to be a spousal abuser as well. The synths in Real Humans also look like Barbie and Ken dolls rather than suggesting the human characteristics that could justify the ambivalence humans would feel about their attachment to them. In Humans, the soft features of Gemma Chan continually make you aware of the possibility of human perfection. The psychological subtext where human beings are continually made aware of their own imperfections and take out those hostilities on the synths they've come to depend on permeates the narrative.

Humans goes a long way, as well, to rehabilitate the existential ideas that became so botched in previous projects that clearly influenced this one. The humanoid synths on the run and looking to survive suggest the group that populated Ridley Scott's film noir wasteland of Blade Runner (1982). But Humans has a more coherent core concerning their survival. Blade Runner, which set Harrison Ford's Deckard in pursuit of them, made little sense of their plight. Besides trying to comprehend how Los Angeles became this apocalyptic ghetto where smoke and rain became as frequent as people, Scott didn't make clear why Deckard was in such hot pursuit. (As Pauline Kael pointed out in her perceptive review, since the humanoids needed their lifespan expanded by their creator, why didn't they just turn up at their inventor's home?) Blade Runner made little sense because it also strayed from its source, Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and concentrated more on its elaborate set designs. (The fact that Ridley Scott endlessly tinkered with his picture may well reflect the many ways it was never satisfying to him.) William Hurt's inventor seems a carry over from the similar part he played in Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) which is certainly an influence on Humans. But A.I. tried to recast the Pinocchio story of a puppet who longs to be human in science-fiction terms that ran against the grain of what Pinocchio was about. As seen through the eyes of David (Haley Joel Osment), a Mecha created by Professor Allen Hobby (William Hurt), human society and the family he is part of becomes unappealing in the manner of a misanthrope's view that humanity was a lost cause to begin with. A.I. doesn't even draw the most basic emotional links between the synthetic David and Hurt's Geppetto figure. Only Jude Law's Jiminy Cricket character, Gigolo Joe, fulfilled the emotional contours of the story. The synths also have the glassy-eyed stare of the mind-reading child monsters of Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (1960), an adaptation of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, but in Humans their glowing comes from mostly benign thoughts as if they'd escaped a yoga retreat.

Tom Goodman-Hill and Katherine Parkinson

In a sense, Humans gets inside the same burning issues of a technological world unconsciously shaping our idea of being human as Alex Garland's cleverly conceived Ex Machina did earlier this year. But maybe because this cautionary story of tech paranoia has so often led to calamitous conclusions, Humans has given the subject a more generous reading. That interpretation might make the series appear quaint when one thinks back on it, but I think its creators, Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley, want to deliberately blur the lines between what is human and what is synth behaviour. That's why there is little perceptible difference between the half-human Leo, who understands the limitations and strengths of both worlds, and William Hurt's Millican, who is human but still finds a kindred connection with Odi. (Hurt also gives one of his delicate and less mannered performances.) Humans has been picked up for a second season because the dramatic arc of what the previous season brought us is only now beginning to be uncorked. Since that path taken is one well traveled, the direction Humans is possibly taking us next season has barely visible footprints. I'm certainly curious enough to follow.

Coda: I didn't follow Humans into season two for too long as dramatic inertia took over the show despite the growing complexity of the storyline. Before long, I was having trouble telling the synths from the humans. I bailed.

-- August 8/15

Genius: James Ponsoldt's The End of the Tour


Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg in The End of the Tour.

It's only the end of August and it's already been a terrific year for movies. They've arrived from all corners of the globe and each with very distinct sensibilities that set them apart from the demands of the marketplace towards being generic. Besides the quirky enchantment of Paddington, there was Olivier Assayas' sumptuously satisfying Clouds of Sils Maria, the sublime sweet sadness of the Brian Wilson bio pic Love & Mercy, Carlos Marques-Marcet's erotically charged 10,000 km, Alex Gibney's fearless scrutiny in Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and his nuanced consideration of Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, the conventions of the western being freshly reexamined in Slow West, and the new rendering of an old theme in Ex Machina. There was the resurrection of director David Gordon Green (George Washington) returning from the wilderness of mediocrity (Pineapple Express) with Manglehorn where Al Pacino equals the bold work he did last year in the largely ignored The Humbling (which was the movie that Birdman pretended to be). If someone was trying to pose the argument that cinema was dead, I would point to these pictures as signs that the art form is still alive and breathing quite nicely. Now James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now) caps off the summer with the extraordinary The End of the Tour, a perceptive comic masterpiece that cuts to the quick of timely questions about celebrity and artistic authenticity and the movie does it with an intelligent wit that is as probing as it is poignant.

The movie is based on journalist and author David Lipsky's best-selling memoir, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010), which chronicled his time spent working on a profile for Rolling Stone about author David Foster Wallace whose 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, had just hit the cultural stratosphere with some of the same impact on a generation that Hemingway and Salinger had earlier, and maybe Joseph Heller (with Catch-22 especially) did decades later. Lipsky's book, which reads like a philosophy course turned into an appealingly droll two-hander, unfolds like a free-associative cultural discourse. It's being held though between two gifted scribes on a quest for some idea of what an essential self might be – only it's a sojourn taking place in a quickly evolving solipsistic culture. While they both jibe on about film, literature, pop music, film and canine culture, their own shared desire for authenticity runs up against the limitations of neurosis and insecurity. Lipsky is an aspiring young writer who wishes to possess the genius of Wallace for himself by both lionizing him and knocking him off his perceived pedestal. The fact that Lipsky's doing a magazine profile puts him in charge of the conversation. But Wallace proves to be an elusive target because his talent doesn't grow out of a need to pump up his own self-esteem, or reflect some secret fetish to build for himself a fan club. What Lipsky doesn't see, but the reader does, is that Wallace's perceptions into the pleasure principle of popular culture comes out of his resilience, as much as it does the growing isolation he feels in the wintry landscape of Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, where he lives alone with his two dogs and teaches at the state university. That world becomes both his sanctuary and a cocoon. (Wallace would commit suicide in 2008.)

David Foster Wallace. (Photo: Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

James Ponsoldt turns Donald Margulies's script - the kind of faithful adaptation that resists the desire to be slavish - into a Quixotic comedy of words. He also gives the picture a breezy ebullience as if he were reconceiving My Dinner with Andre as a road movie. Unlike the similarly themed Amadeus, which suffocated in its own high-mindedness, The End of the Tour erases the divide between high and low culture so that pop tarts and Falcon Crest can be discussed and consumed as copiously and without judgment as talk of Jonathan Franzen. As he did with Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley in The Spectacular Now, Ponsoldt lets his actors set the rhythms of the film. Jesse Eisenberg is practically a genius at conveying characters with a steely intelligence who seem to burst out verbally from their impacted body armour. His intense concentration on his tape machine, with his stern attention to the on/off record buttons, reflect his tight grip on his acquired role as inquisitor. In pictures like The Squid and the Whale and The Social Network, Eisenberg went to great lengths to create precociously verbose comic characters whose motor mouths, with lips always flapping, seemed detached from the rigidity of their bodies. (Last year, in Kelly Reichardt's unheralded Night Moves, Eisenberg, playing an eco-terrorist, went even further into that rigidity. Out of that stillness, he gave a quietly intense performance – practically a work of pantomime – that brought out the full horror and tragedy lurking within a true believer.)

Critic Phil Dyess-Nugent last year wrote that "Eisenberg’s characters have largely continued to be clumsily innocent about romantic and sexual relationships, while being wised up about everything else." That's certainly quite true in his earlier work, but his David Lipsky has lost the clumsiness that masked his deeper sense of inadequacy. Eisenberg's Lipsky covets Wallace's fame, but he also feels guilty about his envy which he feels taints his authentic love of Wallace's work. It's a triumphant performance that illuminates the competitive tics in male bonding. Those tics also create their own battlefield – as they so often do in heterosexual relationships – in the world of women. (Anna Chlumsky, as Lipsky's girlfriend, is on the margins of the film, but their battles over the phone map out a troubled terrain in their relationship that has more to do with his unresolved feelings towards Wallace than they do towards her.) Although the film is centered on the two men, Mickey Sumner as Becky, a good friend of Wallace's from college, and Mamie Gummer as Julie, a literary agent who became Wallace's friend, flesh out their supporting character roles so they don't take a backseat to the guys. 


Jason Segel, as David Foster Wallace, not only stands in sharp contrast to Eisenberg's tightly wound Lipsky; he also gives a hugely empathetic performance. Segel's Wallace has a large genial frame (topped with a hippie bandanna) but he moves with such a casual reticence that he's as carefree as his two lumbering dogs. Part of the film's humour and pathos comes from their contrasting body language that is as memorable as Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as unlikely friends walking across a bridge in Midnight Cowboy. Watching Segel's Wallace spar with Lipsky, you can tell he enjoys having his newly acquired reputation tested, but he's equally guarded about the boundaries that surround his personal life (especially any information that could make him out to be a stereotype). Whether he's showing amusement, curiousity, or anger (as when he picks up on Lipsky flirting with Becky), Segel lets you feel Foster's need for authenticity in his life as well as his work. Segel's Wallace is an artist always questioning the responses he invokes in his fans. But unlike Kurt Cobain, he's less tormented about it. Wallace doesn't write down to his readers; he wants his work to possibly lift someone out of their isolation. Unlike post-modern critics who drain the sensuality out of the genres they try to untangle, Wallace delves passionately inside that entanglement as if by doing so he might find his way to the core of who he really is and why so many thought him a genius. The depths of empathy that Segel imparts to his portrait of David Foster Wallace lingers afterwards with a wistful sweetness.You don't have to read Infinite Jest to get the gist of The End of the Tour. I tried valiantly to make my way through the novel and although it is clearly the work of a major talent, I felt like I was entering a labyrinth with a No Exit sign. (Maybe like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, I need to give it my full attention when I retire.)

But I've enjoyed some of Wallace's essays – especially his 1997 collection titled A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again – where he writes on American irony, the impact of television (his true addiction and obsession) and David Lynch. Wallace suffered from the kind of depression that only prodigies struggle with because they are constantly trying to sort out whether they are truly the people everyone says they are – including those who love them most. Within that conundrum, however, also lies the battle they continue to wage with themselves as to whether they can even live up to the billing. Is my work real, or is it merely the extension of what everybody expects and thinks of me? Those who don't carry the high expectations of others have a freedom to fail that geniuses never do. James Ponsoldt has pulled off a miracle by making a funny movie about a quest for self that has no bottom to it. Which is why The End of the Tour turns out to be an existential comedy with real teeth.

-- August 29/15

                                                                 2016


Endurance: Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant


Leonardo DiCaprio in Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant. (Photo: Kimberley French/20th Century Fox)

In Francois Truffaut's probing essay, "What Do Critics Dream About?" which opens his book of movie reviews, The Films in My Life, he writes, "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse." Of course, Truffaut (as both movie director and critic) is talking about the kind of visionary work where artists who break the bounds of convention risk not only alienating an audience, but also their own sanity in order to make their movie "pulse." That would include Erich von Stroheim's 1924 epic tale of avarice (Greed), Abel Gance's thrillingly lunatic Napoleon (1927), Orson Welles' groundbreaking Citizen Kane (1941), Bertolucci's equally inspired and crippling 1900 (1976), Martin Scorsese's ambitious musical, New York, New York (1977), Francis Coppola's metaphoric dirge Apocalypse Now (1979), Michael Cimino's amorphous western Heaven's Gate (1980), Werner Herzog's lunatic Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Terrence Malick's madly idiosyncratic The Tree of Life (2011). Whether any of these films achieve the artistic heights their directors intended is not the point. They were clearly movies perfumed in the joy or agony of their creator's need (or megalomanical desire) to stretch the art form – and if they didn't always work, they often made better films possible in those they inspired. But when it comes to Alejandro G. Iñárritu's epic adventure The Revenant, which has been piling up awards and accolades for its own daring, perhaps another category should be considered: the job of making cinema. For unlike the previously mentioned work, Iñárritu conceives his films (21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful and Birdman) as highly controlled endurance tests where the risks become self-consciously employed and (despite the director's enormous skill) the material turns into a mountain of familiar dramatic clichés. Based in part on Michael Punke's novel, which draws on the experiences of the fur trapper and frontiersman Hugh Glass, The Revenant is an epic and artful tale of revenge and redemption, but the motor running this mystical journey is fueled by the same blood lust that powers most commercial exploitation action films.

Set in 1823, Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) leads a party of fur trappers into the unsettled parts of the Louisiana Purchase under the guidance of their most veteran hunter, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), who knows the landscape and the indigenous tribes of the area. When they are confronted by the Arikara in a surprise attack, the survivors have to make their way by foot to their outpost. (The attack is beautifully staged as if happening in a delirium, or a fever dream, where cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's camera seems to discover the battle as it's occurring.) The decision to trek back doesn't sit well with John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) who has developed a deep antipathy towards Glass and his half-native son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), which is due in part to his having been half-scalped by natives years earlier. So when Glass gets mauled by a bear as he's scouting alone and discovered close to death by the party, it's Fitzgerald who tries to convince the group to kill him so they can move quicker. Henry decides however to leave Fitzgerald in charge on Glass (along with Hawk and their youngest trapper, Jim Bridger) with the promise that he'll give Glass a decent burial when he dies. But instead of fulfilling the promise, he tries to murder Glass. When confronted by Hawk, he kills him instead in full view of his helpless father before attempting to bury Glass alive. As Fitzgerald and Bridger (Will Poulter) depart for the fort, Glass emerges mortally wounded from his grave and drags himself across the winter landscape bent on getting revenge for his son's murder.

Tom Hardy in The Revenant. (Photo: Kimberley French/20th Century Fox)

Glass' arduous adventure of crawling and staggering to survive for over 200 miles had already provided inspiration for the 1971 Western, Man in the Wilderness, where Richard Harris as Glass got to transcend mortality. Sticking a little closer to the facts than The Revenant, Man in the Wilderness begins with Glass seeking vengeance for being abandoned, but over the course of the story (where he recalls his life in flashbacks) comes to recognize in the end that the hunting party did not mean him harm. But Iñárritu adds the fictional bit about the murdered son to give Glass' revenge purpose rather than reflection. What the audience gets left with is watching a dying Glass fulfill his obligation to his son and late wife, who was also murdered in an attack years earlier, as he gains spiritual wisdom along the way. However, mysticism doesn't come easy to Iñárritu (in Biutiful he had a terminally ill man with cancer have inexplicably psychic powers where he communicated with the dead before they got to Heaven), because he often uses it to provide salve for the ugliness of the picture's conception. In The Revenant, Glass' desire for vengeance provides the drive of the picture, but Iñárritu pulls back in the end from its consequences.

Even with its tired revenge plot, The Revanant still makes little sense dramatically. Tom Hardy's Fitzgerald is such an obviously conceived villain that you don't believe for a second that Gleeson's Captain Hardy would leave him with the wounded Glass. The only reason he does is so that we get the murder which sets the revenge plot in motion. If Hardy is left licking his lips with malice, DiCaprio's performance ends up pretty much all grimaces. While it may be audacious to watch, it certainly isn't compelling. (Most revenge stories are so single-minded that the lead characters have little to do anyway but act it out.) As for the infamous bear attack, it is indeed powerful and 'realistic,' but it goes on so long that it plays on our prurience rather than making a dramatic point. Despite the fermented naturalism of Lubezki's cinematography, the conception comes across as a stunt to wow us (just like the single-take nonsense of Birdman which ended up having it swallowing its own tale) rather than heighten our senses. The Revenant retains a holistic side that feels as equally fake as its melodrama. Glass' brief encounter with a friendly Pawnee, Hikuc (Arthur Redcloud), who has also lost family, teaches him that "revenge is in the Creator's hands." But everything by the end is set up to have it both ways. Iñárritu needs to fulfill Glass' desire for revenge by setting up the big violent encounter with Fitzgerald, but he also provides a shaky New Age conclusion to soften the blow.

To make a truly risky movie, it requires a director who gives the audience no obvious refuge. But Iñárritu continually does so. He may dress his films in the most artful techniques, but the stories he tells play to the most obvious stale ideas. The Revenant gives us nothing more than an endurance test for both its star and the audience. While it is quite successful at imposing itself on the viewer (much as Birdman did), The Revenant is nothing more than a huge, sprawling contraption built on puny twigs.

-- February 16/16

Jack Nicholson and Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces.

Unlike many of the key actors who became part of the American New Wave of the Seventies, Jack Nicholson was paradoxically alluring. Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty etched their eccentricities and differences in characters that formed clear lines of definition to form a close rapport with the audience. Whereas Nicholson rode a wobbly wavelength in search of a port that never arrived. There was no perceived goal of resolution in the characters he played early in his career. He was the man in the mirror seeking out definition while simultaneously railing at the world around him for continually honing him in. And, yet, movie audiences still became closely allied with his smart-ass independence. As critic Steve Vineberg remarked in his book Method Actors: Three Generations of an Acting Style, if Nicholson was playing a son of a bitch, he was his own man, and on terms that had their own unorthodox integrity. Hoffman and Pacino tied themselves close to the Method style and that inspired them to dig for the passport that defined their characters, Vineberg went on to suggest, but Nicholson cut loose from all those ties to create a compelling portrait of solitude.

In his Westerns, John Wayne sought to build a sense of community out of his stance as a loner, but he was always cast out in the end into the very wilderness that spawned him. Nicholson was instead a hermetic figure forever living in bustling communities, but more content to be the jack-in-the-box surprise who popped out aggressively with a lewd grin and bopping eyebrows and keeping everyone on their toes. This aggression he displayed was also key to the roles that made him a star. It set him apart from his contemporaries who chose instead to go deeper into the interior of their characters to explore the promise that abandoned them. In an age when America's greatest ideals were up against defeat and failure, it was no surprise that Jack Nicholson didn't wear that defeat quietly – or passively. His George Hansen in Easy Rider (1969) warned Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper that their country would strike out violently at those seeking freedom, but his spiky humour made him a more memorable victim than Fonda or Hopper's mythic martyrs would be by the end. Detective J.J. Gittes in Chinatown (1974) didn't simply recoil from the evil deeds of John Huston's powerfully rich patriarch, he mocked them. In The Last Detail (1973), his navy lifer, Billy Buddusky (perhaps the doppelganger of Melville's Billy Budd), could be the cock-of-the-walk showing a good time to a young navy recruit he's taking to the brig, but his tap-dancing profanities proved to also mask his own impotence. Nicholson's sly and subtle paradoxes, a key to his success as a movie star, would bloom even later in his career in movies nobody saw. In The Border (1982), playing a quietly righteous border patrol agent, he defies the corruption offered by his partner (Harvey Keitel) by confronting him and literally drawing a line in the sand that he says he won't cross – only to walk over that line right after he finishes his confrontation. In that lightning quick moment, Nicholson reminds us of both his defiance and his vulnerability.


That curious combination of defiance and vulnerability fused perhaps best in Nicholson's role as the itinerant drifter, Bobby Dupea, in Bob Rafelson's 1970 Five Easy Pieces (which the Criterion Collection brought out in 2010 in a sparkling Blu-ray print). Although Nicholson's Dupea is first introduced to us as a restless blue-collar worker toiling on an oil rig, his past as a privileged piano prodigy from a wealthy family soon lies in sharp contrast to what we initially see. His early life was shaped by the contemplative melodies of Chopin and Bach while his adult world now included a working-class waitress, Rayette (Karen Black), whose soundtrack featured the biographical country twang of Tammy Wynette. (Karen Black would even extend that connection a few years later playing a composite of Wynette in Robert Altman's Nashville.) The clash of class conflict and alienation – often self-consciously imposed on the drama in Carole Eastman's script (under the pseudonym of Adrien Joyce) – catches the mood of the country by 1970.

In his Criterion essay, "The Solitude," critic Kent Jones tells us that Five Easy Pieces gives us "a clear and unobstructed view of this particular type of American existence, brought into being at a certain interval in our history when the expectations of class and family carried more weight than they do now." In one sense, he's absolutely right. If the Sixties were a bold attempt to assert an egalitarian culture that erased the divisions of class, where music and movies could find room for both Ravi Shankar and The Rolling Stones, by the Seventies, a nascent narcissism (coming out of a need for self-protection) widened the gap again. If people once became itinerant and started hitch-hiking to find the country they were part of, now they were looking for ways to escape it. In 1960, JFK asked American citizens to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. Ten years later, after assassinations, riots and an escalating war, people were no longer asking anything of what they could do for their country – they simply wanted to escape it and the endless trauma surrounding it.

Bobby Dupea attempting to reconcile his relationship with his mute father

For Bobby Dupea, he tries to get away from the expectations of others and what he immediately defines as "things getting bad." When he visits his pianist sister, Tita (Lois Smith), in the solitude of a recording studio, she tells him that their father is ill and he should go home. While leaving Rayette in a heartbreak hotel, he heads out from the arid heat of Bakersfield to the fall lushness of Washington state to confront a past he's already fled. But that confrontation, and the revelations revealed, don't change Dupea's consciousness. His family reunion – which is as emotionally stark as Ingmar Bergman in bloom – brings him in sharper contact with his pain rather than any reason to heal it. All the fractured parts of his character actually come into play. As Nicholson plays him, Dupea is as much a bastard to the needy Rayette as he is a salve to his neurotic sibling Tita. He can be cutting to his pompous brother Carl (Ralph Waite) as he is revealing in his emptiness to Carl's emotionally direct girlfriend, Catherine (Susan Anspach), after he plays her Chopin's Prelude in E minor, Op. 28, No. 4. (As he puts it, "it's the easiest piece to play.") With his mute father, on a hill where the beautifully quaint desolation of László Kovács' moody cinematography still creates shivers, Nicholson does some of his best acting and it's uncharacteristic of what we've come to know about him and Bobby Dupea. Struggling for words to define their relationship (that comes out of "auspicious beginnings"), his tears which reveal both loss and a sense of being lost don't put him in touch with a healthy sense of independence. What he discovers – especially when a seductive play for Catherine comes to nothing – is a further affirmation in him to disappear.

While there's no question that Five Easy Pieces caught the zeitgeist of the early Seventies, it wasn't really a "clear and unobstructed view" of it. Director Bob Rafelson imposes on the material the kind of spiritual ennui that hangs over the movie like a noose. Rather than lifting the lid on post-Sixties despair, Five Easy Pieces prefers to cork it in a bottle. You can see that in the picture's most famous scene when Nicholson tells off the waitress who won't bring him substitutions because she follows the rules, just as you can in the cynically battling couple (Helena Kallaniotes and Toni Basil) he and Rayette pick up on the road. (Their scenes echo the one featuring the arguing duo in Bergman's Wild Strawberries which also had its share of self-conscious angst.) Five Easy Pieces (much like Easy Rider) plays to the disaffection of the culture rather than exploring it (as Arthur Penn's Alice's Restaurant did a year earlier).

Jack Nicholson directing the actors in his debut Drive, He Said.

Curiously, Jack Nicholson's Drive, He Said (1971), his debut as director, was more potent at capturing the political alienation in the wind than Five Easy Pieces. Based on Jeremy Larner's 1964 novel, Drive, He Said is about a college basketball star, Hector Bloom (William Tepper), who is caught between becoming a star athlete and joining the Revolution. Formally, the picture is a mess and as much confused as caught up in the confusions of the era, but its uncertainties seem much freer and open-ended than the closed doors that lock Five Easy Pieces. Tepper's performance as Bloom is particularly undefined and yet the role never becomes amorphous. Karen Black as the professor's wife that he's sleeping with and Michael Warren (who would later become a star on Hill Street Blues) as a campus radical suggest the possibilities in people who ultimately hit walls, but the characters aren't hung by their hang-ups. In Drive, He Said, Nicholson brings a risky ambiguity that would go totally missing in his later directed films like Goin' South (1978) and The Two Jakes (1991), the sequel to Chinatown. Much like the Cisco Pike (1972), made a year later, which also breathed in the air of post-Sixties discontent (in fact, more believably than Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Inherent Vice did), Drive, He Said was on a quest for clarity rather than arriving there. Five Easy Pieces has an open ending that offers no solutions, but the picture's grey mood still hangs over its narrative like a wraith. Yet despite the hermetic seal of dissatisfaction that cloaks Five Easy Pieces, the ghostly quality of Nicholson's performance, especially as we watch Dupea disappear up a cold, desolate highway, still resonates and reverberates with the quiet despair of an underground man's lonely confession.

-- May 8/16

Rachel & Alice & Obama



Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married (2008).

In a campaign year which has been filled with anger, violence and rancor, there hasn't been a spirit of hope that many drew from Obama's first ascension to the Presidency. What we have been witnessing in the primaries so far is an ugly reaction to it. Donald Trump, a demagogue Paul Bunyan, lumbers across the land promising walls – both real and figurative – to keep out Muslim and Mexican immigrants and restore America to a greatness he perceives as a land that never had Barack Obama as President. (Trump is the paranoid Truther who first began assailing the presidency by challenging the legitimacy of Obama's citizenship.) The Republican Presidential hopeful isn't stoking the ideals in his country but playing instead to its discontent. Stirring and seeking anger wherever he finds it, especially in the white working-class, he isn't interested in salving the sources of their wounds, but marshaling the power of their rage to vote him in. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton talks and conducts herself as the power broker politician. If Trump speaks to the ugly underside of American exceptionalism, Clinton addresses the unidentifiable masses that make up the country. Given that she comes across like a high-powered CEO who has a demographic sense of her own constituents, it's understandable that she hasn't convinced many disenchanted younger voters to hop on board. They've chosen instead the populist caboose of socialist Bernie Sanders who reaches out to their despair like a crotchety Woody Guthrie and invokes a Promised Land that will build bridges rather than Donald Trump's walls. But his own campaign has been lately doing its own share of erecting walls especially in the face of Clinton's ascending victory as the Democratic choice for President. Unless these two sides truly make peace, a Trump victory is not only highly possible, it will most certainly be a reality. And we'll have as the new President, the anti-Obama.

Over the last eight years, whether it was the partisan gridlock, indecisiveness in Syria which emboldened the apocalyptic force of ISIS, or the arm-wrestling over Obamacare, the President conducted his two terms under continuous siege. It wasn't really a question of whether or not you were a Democrat or a Republican, there was a general unaddressed anger about having a black man in the White House. It was expressed most symbolically in the bizarre scene at the 2012 Republican convention when Clint Eastwood turned Obama into an empty chair that he could address without the President having his own voice. (In the days that followed, there were pictures published of empty chairs being hung from trees in the South just in case we missed the point.) The numerous shootings of young blacks from Madison to Chicago during Obama's Presidency were also no accident. If Obama could be an empty chair, couldn't he just as easily be seen in the black faces that overzealous white cops could blow away? When an African-American is in the White House and groups of protesters have a need to call themselves Black Lives Matter (as if it's somehow a given that they don't), the spectre of racism clearly hasn't vanished. Which is why, despite the formal dullness of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), there was also a strong emotional undercurrent in the picture that connected to the present. In a sense, Lincoln held up a mirror to the ideals of the Obama era by imagining the country Obama inherited, but one he couldn't claim for himself. (Lee Daniels' The Butler a year later would go further and even deeper in reflecting the idea of a black man in the White House who becomes a witness to history rather than free to be a full participant.) Lincoln carried the weariness of unfulfilled prophesy; of the tiredness we also registered on Obama's face during his first debate with Mitt Romney. The movie looked back at how the legislation of racism might have been abolished, but not its practice. Obama's inheritance of that legislation can't fully be acted on because he is cornered by the lingering stain that Lincoln's amendment couldn't eradicate. Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner deliberately submerge the drama of Lincoln's life into a more contemplative examination of the troubled paths taken by Lincoln, his allies, and his adversaries, to keep those promises; promises that would continue to resonate unresolved in the years to follow the Civil War.

As we draw closer to the conclusion of the Obama era, the spark of idealism that once ignited his 2008 campaign now seems to be barely a flicker. But I remember how towards the end of the Bush era, just months before Obama won, seeing Jonathan Demme's unassuming little movie, Rachel Getting Married, and it came to anticipate the possibilities that had seemed all but lost by 2008 and that the Obama campaign inspired. During the late Seventies and Eighties, Demme demonstrated one of the most open and democratic spirits in American movies in pictures like Citizen's Band, Melvin and Howard and Something Wild. After he was honoured with an Academy Award for the uncharacteristically turgid The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, however, that celebrated open-heartedness went largely missing from his work (Philadelphia, Beloved) in exchange for more conventional melodrama. In Rachel Getting Married, though, Demme’s supple touch thankfully returned. Written by Jenny Lumet, Rachel Getting Married examines unresolved family issues and the skeletons that naturally come tumbling out of the closet. But it was not only an honest and affectionate picture about dysfunctional people, it also came to reflect the fragile state of the country towards the end of the Bush period.

Mather Zickel, Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Tunde Adebimpe in Rachel Getting Married.

In the movie, Kym (Anne Hathaway), the black sheep of the clan, returns to her family home from drug rehab for the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie Dewitt). But her arrival stirs up more grief than happy memories. When she was a teenager, Kym was responsible for the death of her younger brother while intoxicated. Her father, Paul (Bill Irwin), goes overboard in trying to make her comfortable which only makes Kym feel that he distrusts her. As for Rachel, she has never truly forgiven Kym for his death even suggesting that Kym has been lying to her counselors about the reasons because she is in denial. (Rachel discovers that Kym has been telling her therapy group that she was molested by an uncle and taking care of an anorexic sister.) Kym tries to find solace with her estranged mother, Abbey (Debra Winger), even trying to get her to accept partial responsibility for leaving the sibling in her care. But she won't. Which leads to a fight that prompts Kym to drive off in a suicidal state and into a car accident. When Kym returns home slightly battered, Rachel cares for her and the wedding continues as family wounds – exposed and raw – begin to heal. The wedding party itself is one of inclusion, of different cultures and ages (even the marriage is a racially mixed one), and so the feeling we are left with by the end is not an isolated world closed off, but one brimming with opportunity. Thankfully, though, Rachel Getting Married doesn't turn holistic and point a path towards clean mental health.There are no pat answers offered for the family's future as Kym returns to rehab and Rachel departs to the back porch to hear the musicians gathered in a gazebo. When she curiously moves out from her seat to engage with them, the camera stays back and watches her leave while never intruding on what she finds.

It put me in mind of another movie, made many years earlier, that also dealt with familial tragedy, but with a much bleaker prognosis. Arthur Penn's Alice's Restaurant (1969), loosely based on Arlo Guthrie's 1967 epic narrative song, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" ("You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant"), which depicts the burgeoning Sixties counter-culture through the communal home of Ray and Alice Brock. In the song, Arlo joins friends for a Thanksgiving dinner, gets arrested and jailed for littering afterward (they use the garbage dump when it was closed) and eventually tries to fail his draft physical. "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" is a sweet comic jamboree that captures the spirit of adventure during the late Sixties while celebrating all its promises. But Arthur Penn's movie, which came out a few days after Arlo appeared at Woodstock, already anticipates the promises that won't be kept. In a script co-written with Venable Herndon (a playwright and teacher), Penn uses the episodes from Guthrie's song, but also adds a narrative that creates a luminous shadow into the next decade. As in Rachel Getting Married, there is a main character in drug rehab. But, unlike Kym, Shelley (Michael McClanathan) is a heroin addict. Alice's Restaurant introduces hard drugs into a story that – as a song – simply celebrated the joys of smoking pot. Ray (James Broderick) and Alice (Pat Quinn) hope that Shelley's stay in their communal church will help him stay clean. But the communal environment is not clean of unresolved feelings. Although Ray and Alice are married, Shelley once had a sexual relationship with Alice that left both still bonded. Ray's underlying jealousy of Shelley's vulnerability and how that appeals to Alice is expressed by Ray in the macho bluster of boys working off their aggression. (Ray is less a hippie here than a throwback to the Fifties Beats of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady.) With the hope that Shelley will stay off junk, Alice ascends to his sexual advances again, but fails to see that their dalliance will doom him to disappointment once she goes back to Ray.

Rachel Getting Married deals with the dynamics of a real family in crisis, but Alice's Restaurant is about folks who have left their families behind to create alternative ones. In an innocent age where people believed they could have 'free love' without the conventional bonds of the monogamous society they abandoned, Arthur Penn shows us how the utopian world they tried to create can't help them escape the emotional traps lay hidden in our nature. Once Ray and Alice celebrate their union at the Thanksgiving dinner, Shelley sees where he stands and promptly goes back on smack. The heartbreaking scene that leads to the discovery of Shelley's newly acquired habit and his departure and death is chilling in what it reveals. Alice is caught between guilt and a maternal love that she thinks will save Shelley. "He needs taking care of," she pleads with Ray. But Ray uses brute force to get the truth out of Shelley and drives him from the church – even smacking Alice when she attempts to stop him. "Where are we anyway?," asks Arlo in an attempt to stop Ray. "I'm in my church. Where are you?," he answers. His house of worship which has drawn kids from all over – even one with a hook hand replacing the one he lost in Vietnam – to find a sense of home leads to the discovery that his church can't save those who worship there. In Rachel Getting Married, Kym tentatively finds her way through the webs of family denial, but Shelley, in Alice's Restaurant, has no family here and casts himself off to the solution of an early grave. (At the funeral, a young woman with a guitar sings Joni Mitchell's "Songs to Aging Children.")

Pat Quinn in Alice's Restaurant (1969).

As Alice Restaurant ends, Ray and Alice renew their wedding vows and he promises to reconsecrate the church. But moments after the celebration, he tells Arlo that he's changed his mind and that he hopes to sell the church to buy some land in Vermont which he hopes will prevent further tragedies like Shelley. "First you're flying it. Now you're selling it," says Alice bitterly from behind the closed screen door which Ray shuts separating her from the rest of the group. If Ray lives in a helium filled fantasy about their communal future, Alice sees immediately that they've crashed. As everyone departs (with no real hope given of anyone coming back), Alice is left alone on the porch in her wedding gown which is gently blowing in the wind. Michael Nebbia's slowly roving camera ultimately frames her in a cameo looking off into the grey fall landscape as Arlo's song is gently playing in the background. This hopeful ballad has now come to resemble more The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Unlike Rachel, who looks out from her porch at the end with an open curiousity of discovering what was to come, Alice is caught contemplating a future that will never be. Years later, Arthur Penn would tell Cineaste magazine that the final scene was intended as a comment on the inevitable passing of Sixties idealism. "In fact, that last image of Alice on the church steps is intended to freeze time, to say that this paradise doesn’t exist any more, it can only endure in memory." Alice's Restaurant, which would be in theatres ten days after the Manson murders and just months before the calamity at Altamont, may have frozen time, but the years since have made the film deeply memorable. Much of what Penn was speculating here was borne out in the years that followed. (A few years after the release the murders at Kent and Jackson State would officially kill off what remained of the counter-culture.) The deep freeze of the Seventies which Alice saw coming would also carry over through the next decades until the coming of Obama. which seemed to be a culmination of all the reforms that the Sixties had once brought forth. It depicts a riddle larger down the road than the current election year can answer and it will endure long after it's over.

-- May 20/16

Grating Expectations: ABC's The Family


Rupert Graves, Liam James, and Joan Allen in The Family on ABC.

You can usually tell when a movie is bad in about the first half-hour. But how can you be sure when a television series has suddenly turned turtle? I lasted only a few episodes into the first season of Fear the Walking Dead, the spin-off to AMC's The Walking Dead, which depicted the zombie apocalypse beginning to grip LA. It seems the writers and producers wanted us to believe that there was no news media (or social media) even covering it. As we witness the carnage and mayhem of flesh-eaters pawing for their next victim, nobody once turned on a radio, a television set, or even checked their Twitter (or Facebook) feed to find out what's going on. I decided then that the writers didn't know what was going on either and I bailed. Yet no one seemed to care if the world of Fear the Walking Dead appeared fake. It went on to become a huge hit that's just finished its second season. The lack of a believable society with coherent character development didn't seem to matter to viewers or critics – as long as we could sit happily in dread waiting out the suspense for the next bit of chomping. A terrible movie can be shaken most times minutes after you leave the theatre. But a bad television show can linger for weeks because you probably invested far more time hoping for the best. Perhaps that's why viewers often bring such lowered expectations to television. It lessens the blow if things go bad. As Bob Dylan once said, "If you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose."

Movies generally have about two hours to make their case, but a TV show has to create a narrative that holds you for weeks. To do that, a series needs to build momentum in the plotting to keep the viewer in a state of continuous anticipation. The narrative therefore doesn't grow out of the characters' motivations – it's more often the other way around. And it can come at the expense of dramatic credibility. Unlike many other viewers, I just couldn't believe the premise of Breaking Bad, where an unassuming high school chemistry teacher with the luck of Job finds out that life can be much worse when he's diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The show's solution of turning him into a meth dealer out of financial desperation seemed too self-consciously imposed on the character. To me, it did nothing more than create a running motor for a downward spiraling vortex where Walter White (Bryan Cranston) gets pulled into a life of criminality for the sake of the family (rather than convincingly demonstrating why this was his only option). In Dexter, the moralism got even thicker. The program's creators turn their detective serial killer into someone who kills only those who are worse than him so that viewers can be spared being implicated in the darkness of his psychopathy. What makes something like The Americans such a compelling series drama is that in finding a precarious balance between character drama and plot momentum (a gift that The Sopranos also shared) they came to challenge and complicate our notions of right and wrong rather than boiling things down to 'the dark side of human nature.'

But if Breaking Bad and Dexter still got by in the compelling confines of their suspense plots, ABC's The Family devises new ways of falling to pieces in just telling a story. After missing for a decade, the young son of a mayor in Maine, Claire Warren (Joan Allen), returns home. Adam Warren (Liam James) is initially greeted with joy and relief by the clan who assumed he'd been kidnapped and murdered by a local pedophile (Andrew McCarthy). In the days after his return, however, suspicions arise about his true identity and whether forces of betrayal and corruption have placed an impostor in the family home conveniently at the moment when Claire is about to run for governor. Before the idiocies in the plot turn The Family into inadvertent camp, the notion of having a child return to his home after being presumed dead for years was novel. Often we get stories of how families cope with their enduring loss, but seldom on what the effects might be if their wishes came true and they ultimately come home. The one interesting dramatic idea gets torpedoed by a series of melodramatic plot twists that defy belief.

Andrew McCarthy in The Family. (Photo: Jack Rowand)

Claire's daughter, Willa (Alison Pill), is the press coordinator for her campaign. She knows that the boy who has returned is not her younger sibling. So in order to see that her mother is elected (and to help salve the grief her parent still feels over her lost son), she contrives DNA tests in order to fake his identity. You would think that the desire to catch the perpetrator would be foremost in her mind, but Willa turns out to be a devout Catholic girl who is rigidly expedient about the wholesomeness of the family unit. But she also has a secret life – as a closet lesbian. Alison Pill is about as convincing being in the closet as Elisabeth Röhm was inhabiting hers as the assistant DA in Law & Order, but she is even less believable running a political campaign. Given that her mother is a Republican running on the platform of family values, it's a huge howler that it takes an ambitious local reporter, Bridey Cruz (Floriana Lima), setting out to uncover the deception, to easily get Willa rolling in the hay with her. But the bad writing doesn't stop there. Adam's abductor, Doug Anderson (Michael Esper), not only continues to kidnap and confine children, he's also about to have a child with his girlfriend, Jane (Zoe Perry), who initially seems oblivious to his extra-curricular activities. When a smart FBI agent, Gabe Clements (Matthew Lawler), catches on and tries to bring Jane in for questioning about her partner, she clobbers him with a frying pan and confines him in a root cellar. (Who knew Maine had so much storage space?)

If the twists and turns of the plot aren't bad enough in The Family (and I've only given you a small taste), the acting just amplifies the calamity. Joan Allen must think she is still playing Pat Nixon because if her face isn't an impenetrable stone wall, she's consistently drowning in hysterics. When she finally discovers that her son may be some other kidnapped boy, Allen doesn't give you a sensible clue as to why Claire caves to Willa's deception except out of political ambition. She doesn't even show a maternal concern that some other parents might be out there sharing the same agony over the lost son she's currently housing. Her husband, John (Rupert Graves), who has been carrying on an affair with the investigating detective, Nina Meyer (Margot Bingham), also doesn't add much to the drama. He comes across as more of a lodger than a husband. Graves has so little to play that when he does show up he looks as if he accidentally stumbled in from some other show.

Andrew McCarthy's pedophile (who lives conveniently across the road and seems to only draw attention from the Warrens as if no one else in the neighbourhood knows he's there), has some of the same tics and mannerisms he demonstrated in films like Pretty in Pink and Less Than Zero. You can't help but notice him from scene to scene. Yet even though it's no secret that we're not watching a harrowing performance on the order of Peter Lorre's sex offender in M, or even Jackie Earle Haley's tragic abuser in the otherwise execrable Little Children, McCarthy still manages to do some of his best acting in scenes where he attempts to bring the true perpetrator to justice. The highly talented Zac Gilford, who found huge depths of empathy as the high school quarterback in Friday Night Lights, plays the oldest son Danny, who wallows in remorse as the resident alcoholic.While the role is ridiculously conceived, Gilford manages to somehow underplay the melodrama to create some form of recognizable human behavior. Gilford helps us see that Danny's drinking comes not just from guilt, but from a self-loathing that grows out of Danny's innate intelligence. His masochism comes from his refusing to trust his instincts. Matthew Lawler also brings some wit to his role as the FBI agent (even if he's saddled with some of the worst scenes in the series – especially one where from his trussed up state in the fruit cellar he helps Jane through the birth of her child). Unfortunately, Liam James as the fake "Adam Warren" is all mood and mystery without a shred of the hidden pockets of terror that should be lurking in an abused boy.

Even as terrible as The Family was, I endured it for the whole season. (A second season is, thankfully, not forthcoming.) While it was much, much worse than shows I did abandon like Fear the Walking Dead and Breaking Bad, I hung in for the kind of perverse reasons you get glued to bad TV. Sometimes a show gets so much better than you expected, like Invasion or Surface, that you reach peaks of great satisfaction that grow out of surprise. But then there's a show that gets so much worse than you thought possible that you stay with it, as if wondering whether it will reach depths of stupidity so profound that your disbelief ends up turning into a twisted form of pleasure. The pleasure wrought from The Family was just about as twisted as it can get. 

-- June 3/16

If History Has Taught Us Anything....Excerpt from the Introduction to Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors #1


Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part II.

Back in 1994, when I was just beginning a free-lance career, I had an idea for a book about American movies. That year, I'd seen Ivan Reitman's sentimental comedy Dave, starring Kevin Kline as a conservative President who falls into a coma and is replaced by a look-a-like (also played by Kline) so as not to send the public into a panic. Of course, the "new" President is more liberal and ultimately alters the policies of the true President. To my mind, it was as if we were watching George H. Bush morph into Bill Clinton in one movie. From that comedy, came the idea for Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

I wanted Reflections to examine how key American movies from the Kennedy era onward had soaked up the political and cultural ideals of the time they were made. By delving into the American experience (from Kennedy to Clinton), I thought the book could capture, through a number of films, how the dashed hopes of the Sixties were reflected back in the resurgence of liberal idealism in the Clinton Nineties. After drawing up an outline, I sent the proposal off to publishers who all sent it back saying that it would never sell. One Canadian publisher almost squeaked it through, but their marketing division headed them off at the pass. From there, I went on to co-write a book with colleague and friend Susan Green on the TV show, Law & Order, plus later do my own books about Frank Zappa, Randy Newman, the album Trout Mask Replica and The Beatles. All the while, I kept updating Reflections, seeing my idea change in the wake of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton's impeachment, the 2000 election of Bush, 9/11, and finally the rise of Barack Obama. For the past number of years, Reflections has also been a hugely successful lecture series. Here are three excerpts from the book beginning with the Introduction. Some of the material collected here has also been addressed in previous films reviewed earlier in Talking Out of Turn.


American films in the last fifty-odd years have come to soak up the political and cultural ideals of the time in which they were made and they often reflected a turbulent quest to define a nation. From the dashed optimism of the Kennedy era through to the renewed idealism that led Barack Obama to the White House, American movies, good and bad, were tissue samples of their age. Many of these pictures – from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Butler (2013) – helped create a hall of mirrors that resembled the climatic shootout in Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai (1947) where you had to shatter a lot of glass to see what was going on. The construction of a hall of mirrors, however, isn't usually a conscious act although sometimes there is intent. You can see a deliberate version of one in Live Free or Die Hard (2007), the fourth installment of the Die Hard action franchise starring Bruce Willis as the terrorist fighting New York cop, John McClane, when he goes up against a group of cyber-insurgents who have hacked into the government's computers. To announce their desire to start a "fire sale," they launch an attack designed to target the nation's reliance on computer controls. To convey this, they edited together a video montage made up of segments of Presidential speeches from Roosevelt to Bush to put their message across. In creating a hall of mirrors effect, where various Presidents end up unwittingly uttering threats to the nation rather than the assurances their original speeches intended, the terrorists simply pull off a clever gag. ("I tried to find more Nixon," says one key hacker with an air of disappointment.) Their distortion of history turns into an obvious stunt, and one that we can see right through. It doesn't make a rent in our consciousness. We are still assured, despite the terrorists' initial control over American cyberspace, that John McClane will come to the rescue to get control back. But there are other hall of mirrors moments that aren't assuring, or designed as stunts, and instead seem embroidered into the fabric of a narrative that creeps out of its corners to spook us.

One of those startling moments happens in a scene late in The Godfather, Part II (1974) set in Lake Tahoe during the fall of 1960. Mafia chieftain Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has finally consolidated the power he inherited from his late father, Vito (Marlon Brando), previously in The Godfather (1972). But as the leaves begin to tumble quietly from their trees in the darkened chill air, Michael discovers that he has one enemy left and he's gathered his men to discuss the strategy needed to eliminate him. "Our friend and business partner Hyman Roth is in the news," he announces to his stepbrother Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) as he hands him the day's newspaper. Roth (Lee Strasberg), loosely based on the famous Jewish gangster, Meyer Lansky, had been part of a scheme to buy into the casinos in Cuba until Fidel Castro's revolution neatly overturned their plans. But Roth had also arranged through the co-operation of Michael's older brother, Fredo (John Cazale), to have Michael killed so that he could take over the operation. Michael is now plotting his revenge. As Tom and Michael's bodyguard, Al Neri (Richard Bright), discuss Roth's vain attempts to seek shelter in Israel and Panama which lead to his ultimate arrival in Miami, the Don instructs them that he wants Roth killed when he lands. "Mike, that's impossible," Tom implores. "They'll turn him directly over to Internal Revenue, Customs and half the FBI." While biting hungrily into an orange, Michael begs to differ. "It's not impossible. Nothing's impossible," he responds. "It'll be like trying to kill the President," Hagen insists. "There's no way we can get to him." At which point, Michael turns to his adopted brother with a sense of surprise. Given the success with which corruption and murder has paved a path to power for the Corleone family, Michael can't believe Tom Hagen still thinks the institutions of American power could stop them. So Michael turns philosophical. "If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it's that you can kill anyone." The room is suddenly quiet as if the air had just been sucked out. Hagen slowly looks away while soaking up the implications of Michael's history lesson. Al Neri meanwhile picks up the thread floating in the dead air and carries on. "Difficult. Not impossible," he remarks with confidence. "Good," Michael answers with the assurance that Neri is on the same wavelength as him. Murder and the changing of the guard, for Michael Corleone, go naturally hand in hand in the pursuit of power.

Given that The Godfather, Part II was released in 1974, it would be easy to view this scene as a metaphor for Nixon and his henchmen deep in their bunker expediently working their way out of the Watergate scandal which was unfolding as the movie was being made. But most people don't read Richard Nixon into this scene even though he would resign from office the summer before The Godfather, Part II made its way into theaters at Christmas. For one thing, Nixon didn't have anyone killed. For another, Michael might as well have been talking about Julius Caesar. But what viewers hear in Michael's remarks instead – even some forty years later – is the assassination of JFK. In literal terms, of course, the association makes no sense. If Michael's comment is taking place in 1960, John Kennedy hasn't yet been elected. (Hyman Roth even tells the press at Miami's airport that he's come back to vote in the Presidential election because he couldn't get an absentee ballot.) But audiences refuse to read the movie in literal terms. They may be viewing a film made in 1974, and reacting to a scene set in 1960, but they are thinking of 1963. That's a true hall of mirrors. The bigger question, though, is why do they make this connection?

The Corleone Clan.

While the first two Godfather films are both considered the greatest American gangster films ever made, they also provide a portrait of a nation corrupted by the ambition of those who came here initially with the intention of joining it. At one time, the gangster may have been the outsider who rejected the notion of America, but in The Godfather, the gangster has become a shadow version of America. The Godfather is no longer about the gangster as the independent man of action once seen in the Prohibition era. That character stole money from a bank when he needed it, had a drink in his speakeasy when he wanted it, and killed competitors in a whim when his power was threatened. What we see in The Godfather is the family unit of the American ideal with all its attending neurosis – from sibling rivalry to paternal envy – forcing upon its children a smothering conformity rather than encouraging an instinct to rebel and providing a passport to self-hood. Yet there is more to this story, too, because many viewers of The Godfather didn't cheer the picture's dark vision of the nation it depicted. Rather they identified with the family on the screen who was corrupting it. When Pauline Kael reviewed The Godfather, Part II in the New Yorker, she remarked on the curious response to its predecessor. "The Godfather developed a romantic identification with the Corleones; [audiences] longed for a feeling of protection that Don Vito conferred on his loving family," she wrote. But she couldn't pinpoint where that romantic identification came from. (She could only say correctly that, after seeing Part II, "you'd have to have an insensitivity bordering on moral idiocy to think that the Corleones live a wonderful life, which you'd like to be a part of.") Critic David Thomson also tried to account for the appeal of the Corleones to movie audiences in his essay, "The Discreet Charm of The Godfather," from his book, Overexposures, where he described the fate of the Corleone family – and Michael in particular – as "the tragedy of a man who had become malignant trying to preserve his royal line." Seeing the films more in the era of their making, Thomson remarked that "every execution and betrayal is justified by [Michael's] Nixonian urge to keep the thing together." He identifies the audience appeal for The Godfather as a consciously designed romance by its director. "The amalgamated work is dark proof of the attractiveness of the villain in the American movie, so long as he's photographed in repose and seen to think before he destroys, and so long as sincerity persuades him to trample on principle." But that view doesn't explain why there was audience excitement generated towards Paul Muni's (or Al Pacino's later) performance as Scarface who is hardly a gangster in repose and who thinks before he destroys. James Cagney in The Public Enemy wasn't much of a thinker either. The audience identification with the Corleones instead might come from the same place they associated Michael Corleone's notion of what history teaches us: the failed idealism of the Kennedy era.

Mario Puzo's novel of The Godfather was a melodramatic potboiler, a trash bin of gossip, innuendo and tabloid headlines. But, as Kael would point out, there was a "Promethean spark" in that trash. For not only was The Godfather a shadow version of America, it was a dark mirror held up to the Kennedy mystique, a Camelot that people still pined for. But the Kennedy era wasn't an honest picture of Camelot, it was a dream held in the imagination of the public. Reality was much different. And yet, to compare families, similarities suddenly emerge. Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the family, had made his family fortune bootlegging during Prohibition. Vito Corleone oversaw an olive oil business founded on gambling and bootlegging in the same period. Joe Kennedy had aspirations for his sons including having his eldest, Joe Jr., one day be President. But Joe was killed in a war mission flying overseas. Vito's boy, Sonny (James Caan), was killed by a rival family so that he'd never come to succeed his father. Jack Kennedy followed in line as the reluctant candidate to fulfill his father's Presidential expectations. Micheal became the reluctant son to inherit his father's power. Both stories have their Frank Sinatra figures and a place for Cuba to fit in. While the Corleones take over Vegas casinos, Kennedy ends up in one to pick up Judith Campbell Exner as his mistress – one he shares with Mafia leaders Sam Giancana and John Roselli. And if there is still any doubt about the Kennedy association in Michael's remarks in Part II, just consider how Coppola stages the murder of Hyman Roth. As Roth is flanked by two marshals on either side, Rocco Lampone (Tom Rosqui) steps into him with a snub-nosed revolver and shoots him just as Jack Ruby (who was once a mobster in Chicago) eliminated Lee Harvey Oswald on national TV.

The Kennedy clan.

The romantic idealization of the Corleones in The Godfather grew out of unresolved grief over the dashed hopes in 1963 which left in its wake more assassinations, a protracted war in Southeast Asia and a deeply divisive country. But the events of 1963 would also create ripples in a pond across the decades where each Presidential era seemed to look back to the Sixties in order to either fulfill those dreams, reject them, or make them disappear. As a result, you could turn to almost any American film and recognize the political period that spawned it. Seven Days in May (1963) exalted the values of the Kennedy presidency, just as The Manchurian Candidate foreshadowed the tragedy of Dallas. In the Heat of the Night (1966) reflected the racially troubled Johnson era as equally as the police thriller Bullitt (1968) brought out our ambivalence about Vietnam and the growing culture of violence. The subject of violence itself was articulated quite eloquently and controversially in a variety of genre films, from the Depression-era gangster picture Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to Sam Peckinpah's bloody western The Wild Bunch (1969). The Seventies' paranoia of the Nixon years, a hangover from the Sixties, gave us an anti-hero for the 'Silent Majority' with Clint Eastwood's vigilante detective in Dirty Harry (1972) as well as one for frustrated liberals in its counter-culture counterpart, Billy Jack (1971). The holistic Carter period tried to put salve on the country's wounds over the failure of Vietnam and Nixon's resignation after Watergate. That salve was applied with the homespun nostalgia of Bound for Glory (1976), which mythologized the populism of Woody Guthrie, and Coming Home (1978), which coated the Vietnam War in liberal sentimentality. But it was the groundbreaking Star Wars (1977) that took viewers back nostalgically to a presumed innocent age. Drawing on the gloried past of Hollywood movie-making, Star Wars asked Americans to forget about the demons of Vietnam and Watergate. In providing a comforting creed for seeking salvation – that is, believing in the Force – Star Wars laid the seeds for the arrival of Ronald Reagan and his Morning in America.

Star Wars (1977)

American movies in the Reagan years not only produced retrograde aspects of American life, they changed the expectations of moviegoers as well. Where the films of the Seventies consistently confronted audiences with critiques of the national trauma, the popular movies of the Reagan period were evasive and produced instead a willful form of amnesia towards the past. By the Eighties, audiences sought out the predictable rather than the surprise and shock of the new. The Vietnam War could also be miraculously won in Rambo: First Blood (1982) and Missing in Action (1984). Popular dramas like On Golden Pond (1981), An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), A Place in the Heart (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985) and Fatal Attraction (1987) asserted a more traditional morality when it came to family values and sex. Even as the Eighties still produced daring and original work, movies that honestly confronted the big sleep of Reaganism, they were barely noticed if not produced and abandoned like orphans. Brian De Palma's satirical thriller, Dressed to Kill (1981), which put us directly in touch with our sexual fears, drew hostile criticism from certain feminist groups who found it misogynistic. His political thriller Blow Out (1982), which unfolded like a time capsule that contained echoes of JFK's assassination, the Abraham Zapruder film that captured it, G. Gordon Liddy's 'dirty tricks' that helped Nixon cover up Watergate, and the tragedy of Edward Kennedy's plight at Chappaquiddick, was completely ignored.

The George H. W. Bush era, with its 'kinder, gentler' aura, ushered in movies that simply placated the Reagan period's bathos. When the first Gulf War was being fought in 1991, we kept hearing about 'smart bombs' and 'strategic hits' that minimized the violence of what was actually taking place. So it should be no surprise that Hollywood produced something like The Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), a piece of 'tech noir,' that puts forth the bogus notion that the Schwarzenegger cyborg (who was a killing machine in the first film) is now a protector of the family he originally set out to eliminate. Instead of being licensed to kill this time, he shoots off the kneecaps of his enemies, which is perhaps what's meant by 'kinder, gentler.' This kind of ginger breading can also be seen in Field of Dreams (1989), where a New Age farmer (Kevin Costner), who was once a Sixties activist, seeks to reconcile his feelings towards his conservative late father. The farmer achieves this dubious task by building a baseball diamond on his debt-ridden farm in order to bring back all the dead players from the scandal-ridden 1919 Chicago White Sox. These players, who helped throw the World Series, get to come out of exile to once again touch the green grass of the country's national game. (Who cares about how this baseball diamond will help ease the economic woes of this idealistic farmer? Who is supposed to notice that the movie never once recognizes the guilt of these ball players?) Furthermore, a black novelist (James Earl Jones) talks worshipfully about baseball being the one great constant in American life, when in reality his race was denied entrance into that great constant for close to half a century.

Field of Dreams (1989)

The idea of reconciling the counter-culture past to the conservative present didn't stop with Field of Dreams. Forrest Gump (1994), though made early in Clinton era, was a picture that took thirty of the most tumultuous years in American life and told us that it was better to be simple than to be smart. The picture rewrites the past in order to create comfort in the present. Forrest transforms the culture because of his decency rather than his guile. He's a feather who floats through history rather than a participant in it. In the terms of the picture, if you do get involved – as Elvis Presley, John Kennedy, John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy did – you face death as a price. We pay dearly for our participation in democracy, so Forrest influences the culture more as an outsider. By staying on the periphery, he stays alive (unlike his childhood sweetheart, Jenny, who falls victim to the 'decadence' of American culture). The film makes Forrest's passivity seem noble and life affirming while it buries the contentious, painful and hopeful aspects of the previous thirty years of American life.

If the Bush era was about burying the tumult of the past, the Clinton era tried to replay the Camelot idealism of the Kennedy presidency. For instance, in a movie like Ivan Reitman's Dave (1993), Kevin Kline has two roles. At first he plays a President not unlike George Bush, but when he has a heart attack, his advisor (Frank Langella) gets a double to take his place in order to secure the government's power. This stand-in (also played by Kline) is more like Clinton. He starts to change the country, but not through direct political action. Instead he appeals to the American public's desire for decency. (He even rekindles the President's marriage by having the First Lady fall in love with him.) In the political thriller In the Line of Fire (1993), Clint Eastwood is an aging secret service agent who failed to properly protect John Kennedy in Dallas back in 1963. When an assassin (John Malkovich) threatens the life of the current President, Eastwood attempts to redeem himself by preventing another horror repeating itself. The film pits a liberal secret service agent (played by the man who once was the vigilante cop Harry Callaghan) against a renegade government assassin who is the ghost of past evil deeds. Yet we don't get any idea of what this current President stands for in order to fully understand why he's become the target of the assassin's wrath. In the Line of Fire is an apolitical political thriller, but raising the ghost of John Kennedy is an interesting touch because the Clinton era summoned the Kennedy era as if it were trying to reclaim its lost hopes. Yet where Kennedy defined that period, Clinton can only invoke nostalgia for it, just as In the Line of Fire ultimately does as well. In the Line of Fire has no political context; it simply conjures up a past without defining the present. The Clinton era may have produced movies tidily scrubbed of political relevance, but by the end of his presidency, he became personally identified with two political movies. Wag the Dog (1997) was a timely satire in which the media diverts attention from a President's sex scandal to a fictitious war. Primary Colors (1998) was based on a novel about the Clinton campaign and raised pertinent questions about how Clinton’s liberal idealism became expedient in his quest for the Presidency. Because both movies dealt with Clinton’s sex scandals, Wag the Dog and Primary Colors foreshadowed his impeachment.

Primary Colors (1998)

The George W. Bush era arrived in the wake of 9/11 after many action thrillers (such as The Siege in 1988) had seemed to anticipate the horrors of that day. The post 9/11 years, at least initially, provided curiously more nuanced action dramas of the kind that raised questions about America's role in the world (We Were Soldiers, 2002, Tears of the Sun, 2003), just as Spike Lee's The 25th Hour (2002) captured something of the aftermath of the attacks. But a culture of fear and loathing was just around the corner as the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Michael Moore's fallacious polemic Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Mel Gibson's sado-masochistic religious pageant, The Passion of the Christ (2004), seemed to zealously act out much of the polarized hysteria (from both the left and the right) in post 9/11 political discourse. The audacious satire Team America: World Police (2004), like The Manchurian Candidate, leveled both political extremes by providing a suitable mirror to all the ideological rigidity.

When Barack Obama was elected as the first black President of the United States in November 2008, it was a momentous event in American history. And it ignited a fever of idealism not felt since 1960 when John Kennedy first declared the coming of a New Frontier. At that time, JFK's inaugural address provided a promise that the country would begin to live up to its most cherished dreams – the quest for equality that lay in its founding documents. Movies like Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married (2008) seemed to reflect that pining flame with anticipation for a different spirit of discovery in the country. Those hopes have waned somewhat since. Obama's election victory, arriving after almost four decades of racial segregation, war, assassinations, government corruption and terrorism, was experienced as both euphoric and an impossibly earned reward after years of bitter struggle and loss. Given that climate, it seemed only natural to believe that the movies of the Obama era would be in large supply and perhaps be even richer in content and feeling than those in any other Presidential period before him. But those pictures just didn't materialize. And, in part, it was because Obama, the avatar of another New Frontier, couldn't be found.

If supporters have experienced his presidency since 2008 as cautious and ineffective, his enemies continue to exploit that rift by making him seem a non-entity (as Clint Eastwood did at the last Republican Convention by treating him as an empty chair), a fraud (as Donald Trump implied by demanding his birth certificate), or America's greatest threat (as the Tea Party and people on the conspiracy fringe of the right and left have claimed). In this climate, Obama emerges not as a world leader but as a trapped and inert statesman because, despite what his presidency represents, racism clearly hasn't gone away. The tragic currency of assassinations, embroidered throughout American history, has not really changed either. We're all too keenly aware of what happens to those who become lightning rods for great social change. American idealists seek community, but they also draw out the isolated loner who feels neither a need for community or to be a part of history. He chooses instead to destroy those who offer it to him. Given the danger zone Obama operates in today, he understands fully that if anything were to happen to him due to any bold move he made in public policy, the country would dissolve in violence and chaos.

White House Down (2013)

There’s no question about the mirror Roland Emmerich's White House Down (2013), about an assault on a black President by a right-wing paramilitary group staging a violent coup, held up to the state of the union. The parallels with Obama and his political crucible were unmistakable. (It could be titled Obama's Revenge.) But its allusions to the current president are all on the surface. The state of the country – even the world – is also arbitrary next to the thrill of seeing capitol buildings come crashing down while a beleaguered war hero shows a cerebral head of state what it takes to save his Presidency. The Obama of White House Down ends up a nowhere man with no distinct presence in the country that elected him. The President doesn't get to stand up for his principles and then have them vindicated by those who support him. He becomes the master in his own home only when he can master a machine gun and take out homegrown terrorists while wearing his Air Jordans.

Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors begins its story, of course, in the Kennedy era, a period now considered a landmark age of political activism when television brought the image to politics. The subsequent tragedy of Kennedy's assassination, covered extensively on television, drew a very long shadow over the country and the visual representation of it in movies. The following decades reeled as much from that moment as they would later from the deaths of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Without those pivotal events, we certainly wouldn't have witnessed such incendiary political conspiracy films as The Parallax View (1974), Winter Kills (1976), or Oliver Stone's JFK (1992), which, smartly or poorly, played upon the visual memories we had of those events. Reflections goes on to probe how, in each ensuing presidential era, American idealism became a virtual ping pong ball lobbed between liberal and conservative values – both claiming to represent the authentic vision of the country. Since American movies often echo the secret aspirations, dashed expectations and deeply divisive elements of the country, they still shape – and reflect – much of American public thinking and discourse. And, in this vast house of glass, we remain peering at the distorted reflections they continue to hold.

-- June 12/16

Shock of the Unexpected...Excerpt From the Prologue to Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors #2



At the end of The Godfather, Part II, in the dead of fall, Michael Corleone makes the comment that history teaches us you can kill anyone. Most people heard in those remarks echoes of the assassination of JFK, even though the murder under discussion takes place three years after the mob leader's observation and Kennedy isn't yet president. For all we know, Michael might be referring to seeing Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho the previous summer, for not only did Psycho teach us that you can kill anyone, but the murder of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in a motel shower before the halfway point of the picture also flew in the face of what film history taught us – and the frisson of that moment, that shock of the unexpected, would come to foreshadow the events of the sixties. Director Martin Scorsese recently referred to Psycho in that manner in the Kent Jones documentary, Hitchcock/Truffaut. Phillip J. Skerry in his 2009 book, Psycho in the Shower: The History of Cinema's Most Famous Scene, talks about how the film "ushered in a shift in the cultural paradigm from the bland decade of the 1950s, with its emphasis on togetherness and family values, to the 1960s, that cataclysmic decade of political assassinations, student protests, free speech conflicts, race riots, Vietnam protests, and, above all, violence – in our streets, in our political institutions, in our culture, and most vividly in our media, especially in our films, and in our music." But how could one low-budget thriller with a turbulent twist send such a ripple through the next decade?

The most obvious answer is that Hitchcock killed off the leading lady in the first half hour, which no one had ever done before. But it's much more than that. Psycho altered our expectations in a number of different ways. To begin with, the picture was a huge departure from his previous movie, North by Northwest, which had been in colour and in widescreen. As in many of the director's suspense dramas (though not his recent Vertigo), everything ends up working out in the end -- despite the presence of treachery and mistaken identity, advertising man Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) winds up much happier by the last scene, in bed with the beautiful American spy, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). Psycho was different in every way. It was filmed in black and white and on a lower budget. More significantly, he brought in the television crew from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, his hit TV show, who gave the film some of the same intimacy. And not only was the movie in black and white, at a time when most high-profile films were being made in colour, but the score by Bernard Herrmann was conceived in black-and-white terms. Instead of writing music that featured the full orchestral colour provided by horns and wind instruments, Herrmann scored it for a string orchestra, which deprived it of any tonal range. Furthermore, Herrmann went against the grain of our usual association of strings with romantic music: the string score to Psycho produces nothing but anxiety. Who has ever forgotten the horror of the shrieking strings during the shower scene? (Producer George Martin was clearly haunted by the sound of those staccato strings: years later he suggested to Paul McCartney a similar string orchestra sound for the despairing tone of his "Eleanor Rigby.")

The story deviates from other norms. At first Psycho seems to be a heist movie about a woman, Marion Crane, who steals money with the hope of starting a new life rather than carrying on a backstairs affair with a married man. As she takes off in her car with the cash, we keep expecting her to get caught, but she makes it unscathed until rain forces her off the road and into the Bates Motel. When she meets the young proprietor, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), they seem to connect in a way that partially eases our anxieties, but that assurance doesn't last too long. Once she goes to her room for the night to contemplate the idea of going home and facing what she's done, we see Norman remove a painting so he can peep at her through a hole in the wall, and in that moment Hitchcock makes us complicit in Norman's act of seeing Janet Leigh undress. Hitchcock is reminding us that watching movies is an act of voyeurism, but unlike most directors, who don't implicate the audience but let us satisfy our fantasies, Hitchcock makes us conscious of the act. Since Hitchcock was one of the pioneers of cinema who worked in silent pictures, Norman's looking through a peep hole takes us right back to the early Kinetoscope shorts that aroused the curiosity of private viewers about the moving image before looking at it became a communal activity in the movie theatre. And once Hitchcock has put us in the same position as Norman Bates he sets us up for a murder we don't see coming.

Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in Psycho.

But first we get treated to the image of Janet Leigh having a shower, a fuller view of her than Norman gets. Director Jonathan Demme once talked excitedly about seeing the film as a young man who got to see partial nudity after years of the censorship code, only to pay for his peaked interest by having to watch Leigh get stabbed to death. And once she gets murdered in a horrible and vicious way, we are also put in a position of helplessness, since we're not able to save her. At first we pray that she is still alive so that we don't have to carry the guilt of what we witnessed and failed to prevent. Once we realize she is dead, we shift our allegiance to Norman immediately as he cleans up after what believe to be his mother's crime. The film is all about splits. Janet Leigh's Marion Crane is in a white bra and slip as she makes love to her lover and then in a black bra and slip as she plans her getaway. The heist movie turns into a murder thriller. Norman is split sexually. The audience becomes split in its loyalties. Janet Leigh often said in interviews later that Hitchcock was being clever about the audience's shift of identification to Norman, but I think it's more than just smarts. We need the crime to be cleaned up – and that includes Marion's car going into the swamp – because we share in the guilt. It's funny and interesting that director Peter Bogdanovich once described the effect of the shower scene when he saw it at the film's New York premiere as making him feel as if he'd been raped. Well, it's Marion who gets implicitly raped, but what I think he's really saying is that the scene made him feel like a rapist.

Lee Harvey Oswald faces the TV cameras

The huge impact of Psycho is that it pulled the rug out from under our assurances. Hitchcock didn't play into our shared expectations for restored order and security in this picture; he violated that belief and made us culpable in a crime by exploiting our voyeurism. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, we had survived the Bay of Pigs invasion into Cuba, the Cuban missile crisis which almost led to nuclear war, and we began to feel invulnerable despite our fears. So when the president was suddenly killed in Dallas, our sense of protection was violated – and we got to watch it all happen on television. Jim Morrison of The Doors wrote about the relationship between voyeurism and murder and the Kennedy assassination in his book, The Lords and The New Creatures: "Camera, as an all-seeing god, satisfies our longing for omniscience. To spy on others from this height and angle...The sniper's rifle is an extension of his eye. He kills with injurious vision." Abraham Zapruder was an American clothing manufacturer who witnessed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and filmed the murder with his 8mm home movie camera, having looking through the peep hole of his lens innocently, never expecting to see Kennedy's head getting blown off. Lee Harvey Oswald used the peep hole on his own rifle when he targeted JFK for the kill from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. There were cameras and viewfinders everywhere in this crime – even the live murder of Oswald by Ruby – that brought us intimately closer to the crime. The Kennedy assassination, as critic David Thomson once described it, was a film noir. It was a black-and-white murder that became a live thriller narrative broadcast on television over that dark weekend in November. And isn't it one of life's ironies that Lee Harvey Oswald gets captured in a movie theatre? Psycho prepared us for the shock of the unexpected. And the memorable visual motifs used by the news cameramen who framed every second of that weekend were subliminally absorbed by a number of film directors who would use some of those same motifs for key dramas in the decades ahead.

Although I don't buy Mark Lane's theories about a conspiracy in Kennedy's death, I do like his thesis in Rush to Judgment that the killing of a country's leader is an act of parricide. The murder of the father always provokes guilt in the family which leads to a rush to judgment. You can see this dynamic acted out in scenarios from Hamlet to The Brothers Karamazov. Our witnessing the crime on television drew us into its vortex, and the guilt would be played out in the decades to follow, partly in the movies. The assassination was a national nightmare, and the images that ran across our television screen that weekend were like memory traces of a horrible dream left dormant in our unconscious. Since television news was still in its infancy, there wasn't a plan for covering an event like this. News journalists and anchors were swept up in the events and carried forward by a tidal wave. On the TV news, we watched as newsmen scrambled for information, mangled names and introduced raw film footage with streaks of developing chemicals still staining the frames. We saw them trying to perform their jobs with professional detachment while experiencing the speed and horror of events just as their viewers were.

CBS News Anchor Walter Cronkite trying to read the report from Dallas.

If you watch Walter Cronkite in that famous CBS footage announcing Kennedy's death, he is wearing his glasses. Since he rarely ever wore glasses while reading the news, it was clear that he was having to read copy coming directly off the news wires, not from the usual neatly prepared scripts. So he had to be sure he got the information right. And like us at home, Cronkite was caught up in a horror story without knowing the outcome. By the time he came across the official announcement, he took his glasses off and put them on again, as if struggling with the truth that his eyes were showing him. Not only is it a human moment on live television that conveys the full shock of recognition, but it also reflects everything we are feeling as we watch. So, in the years ahead, these searing images find both subliminal and overt references in a variety of movies, whether or not they were commenting directly on the state of the country. Directors and screenwriters were haunted by what their eyes witnessed that weekend thanks to television, and the films they made afterwards couldn't get it out of their system.

-- November 25/16

What We've Got Here is Failure to Communicate...: Excerpt from The Johnson Era in Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors #3


Vice President Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office on November 22, 1963

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention that August in Atlantic City, the nomination of President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey to the party ticket was merely a formality. On the last day of the event, however, former Attorney General Robert Kennedy came onstage to introduce a short film made in tribute to his late brother. While the legacy of JFK filled the Boardwalk Hall, LBJ seethed at seeing his bid for a Great Society now being eclipsed by the grief and nostalgia the country still felt towards the former president who was gunned down a year earlier in Dallas. It didn't help either that as soon as Robert Kennedy appeared on the convention stage, the delegates erupted into an uninterrupted applause. It lasted nearly twenty minutes and left the sibling of the fallen leader almost in tears. When Robert Kennedy spoke about JFK's vision of the country, he also decided to quote significantly from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: "When he shall die, take him and cut him out into the stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun." In that brief moment, there was no question in LBJ's mind that the country remained "in love with night" and that he was "the garish sun." The bigger irony, though, was the positioning of John Kennedy as the dashed liberal hope of the Party, especially when it was Johnson who would live up to that liberal banner by creating legislation that upheld Medicare, civil rights, aid to the arts, public broadcasting, urban and rural development, and his War on Poverty. But there was something of an unspoken need to position Kennedy to the left, even if in his short term as president he was more of a hawk. It wasn't so much a national conspiracy that made this transformation possible as it was an unconscious need to avoid a more troubling consideration.

When Lee Harvey Oswald fired the bullets that killed JFK, he had recently returned from the Soviet Union where he had defected a few years earlier. Given that the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 almost brought the world to nuclear calamity, the idea of an American assassin who had lived in Russia and then returned home to kill the sitting president was not just a faint echo of The Manchurian Candidate, it also raised the possibility that he could be a Soviet spy. If he was an agent, the inevitability of a world war so soon after the Cuban episode was considerable. In shifting the perceptions of Kennedy in the media more to the left, it allowed Americans the belief that his murder may have emerged out America itself, out of the unconscious of the racist South, the rage of millionaire oil men, the intelligence community, the Mafia – or even Lyndon Johnson (as Oliver Stone would assert years later in his ponderously ridiculous 1991 polemic, JFK). Oswald was soon characterized as a patsy of internal sinister forces rather than a possible enemy spy on a mission. Now it's highly doubtful that Oswald was a Soviet spy – given all we know about him today – but no one then wanted to seriously contemplate that possibility given the stakes at risk if he was. So Kennedy was quickly lionized in death as a sainted liberal, while Johnson was perceived as the pretender to his throne. LBJ's brief tenure as president became less about his domestic dreams and more about his escalating a war in Southeast Asia that was destroying the hopes those policies promised. With the Vietnam War draining funds and morale at home, Johnson was becoming the great betrayer (especially to the Civil Rights movement who saw the dreams of the recently signed Civil Rights Act squandered). To some, he was even a modern day Macbeth satirized by playwright Barbara Garson in her 1967 work, MacBird!, where she claimed that his usurping the fallen crown of Kennedy was one of his lesser crimes.

George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove.

The movies of the Johnson era were even less kind to the sitting president, not only because you could feel the growing violence at home in key American films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Night of the Living Dead (1968), but because you could hear Johnson's "voice" in the drawl of a number of characters who implicitly characterized his "authoritarian" persona. In Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a popular black comedy that lampooned the fears of the Cold War by having an insane Brigadier General launch a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, you didn't see Lyndon Johnson in Peter Sellers' sitting president (who was more a spitting image of a stoic Adlai Stevenson), but instead as George C. Scott's General Buck Turgidson, a barnyard psychopath gleefully telling the president that a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union would be in America's strategic favour (even if America got its "hair mussed" with collateral damage). The manner in which audiences accepted the picture's notion of our military leaders as insane zealots leading us to Armageddon was clearly an after effect of Kennedy's assassination where the mood of the country grew considerably darker.

Just contrast Kubrick's picture with John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May, released in February 1964, a month after Dr. Strangelove. It was about an air force general (Burt Lancaster) who organizes a military coup against the president (Fredric March) because he signed a peace treaty with the Soviet Union. But the mood of that picture, despite its rather stolid direction, was an oasis of sanity next to Dr. Strangelove. Seven Days in May dealt with the fragile state of American democracy with the certainty that there was still a Constitution that mattered, and that it would save the republic. Dr. Strangelove shrewdly played to our growing cynicism that there was no republic left to save. Death and destruction was inevitable in the Johnson era so let's just – as the title suggests – grow to love the bomb. Kubrick brought a nihilistic charge to the picture which allowed us to laugh at what we believed to be true rather than what was true. Dr. Strangelove also had an eerie relationship to the Kennedy assassination. The picture was originally scheduled to be test screened on November 22, 1963, the day of JFK's murder, but was cancelled due to the tragedy. Furthermore, certain scenes in the movie were either changed or dropped before it was rescheduled. Slim Pickens, who would happily ride the bomb to glory in the end, had a line which said, "a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff," and the location had to be changed to "Vegas." There was also a pie-fight scene that was cut because when the president gets struck in the face, Turgidson says, "Gentlemen, Our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime!" If that line had stayed in the picture the association of Turgidson with Johnson might have been even more obvious since Johnson pretty much said the same thing to Congress in a speech four days after the assassination. But it didn't matter what was cut. Audiences were already primed to perceive the new president as an authoritarian borne out of the ashes of the dream of Camelot.

Burt Lancaster and Fredric March in Seven Days in May.

When Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night was released, in the summer of 1967, it was clearly a drama spawned by the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act a year later. Based on John Ball's 1965 novel of the same name, In the Heat of the Night was a murder mystery set in Mississippi where Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), a black homicide detective from Philadelphia, becomes involved in a murder investigation when he assists a racist Police Chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) in finding the killer (after Tibbs is initially accused of the crime). Naturally, both men have to come to terms with their animosity towards each other in order to solve the case. Jewison was somewhat upset then to discover that many audience members thought they were watching a comedy, but in a sense they actually were. Despite the edgy material, and the power of having Sidney Poitier slap a white man after first being struck, the dynamic pairing of both men resembled a cartoon version of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson working together. When you watch such solemn dramatizations of King and Johnson today, such as Selma and All the Way, you can better appreciate the comic tension in Jewison's film which slyly suggests the troubled relationship between the two men. Steiger has the more flamboyant part, though, where the audience gets to see the sheriff get his comeuppance, while Poitier is too hemmed in by his integrity to be funny (except in one early scene on the phone to his boss where he tries to convince him that he's not prejudiced when he doesn't want to work with the white sheriff). It didn't seem to matter whether Johnson was from Texas and the Police Chief was from Mississippi. Filmgoers couldn't miss the lingering reflection of LBJ in Steiger's uncouth behaviour.

Burt Lancaster and Fredric March in Seven Days in May.

Next to Steiger, though, Strother Martin's cornpone authoritarian in Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke (1967) acts as if he's Norman Vincent Peale. Set in the early Fifties, Cool Hand Luke is about Lucas Jackson (Paul Newman), a rebel without much of a cause except for cutting the heads off of parking meters, which lands him in a Southern chain gang prison that's run by a stern warden known only as The Captain (Strother Martin). The Captain, who always feels that he's punishing you for your own good, pontificates at great length about self-improvement while doing the bidding of the Walking Boss (Morgan Woodward), the "man with no eyes" whose lids are always shaded by his mirrored sunglasses. The Captain may be completely baffled by the nature of Luke's crime, but he's even more bamboozled that Luke rose up the ranks in the armed service only to come out the way he went in: buck private. Although the story is set after the Second World War, there's no question that Cool Hand Luke feels more contemporary to Vietnam and the damaged soldiers who would later come staggering home. The heroes of World War Two pictures, whether they were John Wayne or Audie Murphy, always had a country to come home to. In Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman plays a hero with nowhere to go, as if the country that spawned him had disappeared a long time ago. When Luke escapes from prison on numerous occasions, it isn't as if he's heading into an America that provides purpose and sanctuary. He runs simply for the sake of sticking it to the authorities and giving strength to the spiritually beaten men he bunks with. Luke may sing a song called "Plastic Jesus" after his mother dies, but in the terms of this drama, he's supposed to be a real Jesus whose only destination is crucifixion. Newman is playing the American idealist as Christ figure, a man betrayed by his disciples who feed off of him, and who is ultimately destroyed by an authority figure who talks rule of law but only delivers punishment. "What we've got here is failure to communicate," The Captain says in the lingo of the Sixties, rather than the Fifties, after beating Luke for talking back to him. The audience can easily intuit that this line belongs to Johnson, a leader making excuses for a war the country will never win, and for a nation now horribly divided and angry. When Luke finally gets to deliver that same line back to The Captain – mockingly – before the man with no eyes guns him down, Cool Hand Luke is shown not to be about a hero who triumphs over a brutal system. It's about a disenfranchised hero whose only freedom is death because the country he was brought up in no longer is able to listen.

Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke.

Although historians today rightfully claim that Johnson's presidency was the peak of modern liberalism after FDR's New Deal era, the stain of the Vietnam War, racial unrest, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968 turned his term in office into a tragic drama. At the time, many didn't see those tragic components, but instead perceived his policies as acts of betrayal. Johnson had inherited the office from an idealized president who had been murdered and he couldn't escape the long shadow this haunting event cast. The many caricatured voices of Johnson inhabiting the roles played by George C. Scott, Rod Steiger and Strother Martin would give way in 1968, though, to a film where Johnson's voice wouldn't be heard, but the sum of his era would be. Peter Yates's police thriller, Bullitt, starred Steve McQueen as a rebel San Francisco detective Frank Bullitt (based on Inspector Dave Toschi who would later in the next decade become famous chasing the Zodiac serial killer). He's asked by a blatantly careerist DA (Robert Vaughn) to protect a witness against the Mob. When that witness is murdered due to a possible leak of his whereabouts, Bullitt goes up against the DA and his own department to find the truth. While the film is a pretty routine drama with a barely functioning plot (and is mostly remembered for its electrifying car chase up and down the steep hills of the city), Bullitt was selected in 2007 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." What may have singled out Bullitt for such significant attention was a quality found in a scene late in the film that breaks from the routine action and addresses something from both inside and outside the bounds of the story.

Riding to a crime scene in a car driven by his girlfriend Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset), when there's no police vehicle available, Bullitt inadvertently draws her into the violence of what he faces daily. As they make their way back to the city, they pull off to the side of the road in a moment that stops the plot, but advances its underlying themes. Cathy asks her lover how he can face the ugliness of his work without being changed for the worst by what he sees. As if he's reflecting on his job for the first time, Bullitt calmly tells her that this is where his work takes him. But she is unsatisfied with his answer and probes further where they will be in time. "Time starts now," he tells her with an assurance that things will get better. By the time the mystery is solved and more blood is spilled, however, the final image is of Bullitt in his apartment and he's not so sure that time will be kind to them. While Cathy sleeps, he is facing himself in the mirror and looking for hopeful signs that he might not be turning into a zombie who can never come back.

Robert Vaughn and Steve McQueen in Bullitt.

Steve McQueen is the right actor for the role of Frank Bullitt since his expressions are those of a self-effacing hero whose noble acts are always guarded by a slightly pained mask of tentativeness. At the end of Bullitt, McQueen's detective hero stands for a country that's becoming inured by the daily urban violence, the body bags seen on the nightly news returning from Vietnam, and the anti-war sentiment tearing the country apart. As for becoming a zombie, Frank Bullitt would soon morph into Harry Callaghan (Clint Eastwood) in Dirty Harry, a character also based on Dave Toschi. In 1972, this rebel cop who rails against a liberal establishment is perfectly content being numb and an instrument of self-righteous indignation. As the Johnson era gave way to the uncertainty of Frank Bullitt figuring out what time will bring, Harry Callaghan ushered in an era where the only certainty was law and order – and his credo would be invoked by a government that would soon come to violate both.

-- March 8/17

Lost Man – O.J.: Made in America


O.J. Simpson with his award as college football's outstanding player of 1968, in Jan 1969. (Photo: Bill Ingraham)

If there's one prevailing image of O.J.Simpson – a leitmotif forever defining his life – it is of a man constantly on the run. It doesn't matter whether he rapidly escaped the projects of Potrero Hills, in San Fransisco, as an adolescent, or dazzled crowds with a game tying 64-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter of the 1967 playoff between his team USC and UCLA (an unforgettable play that inspired Arnold Friberg's famous oil painting, O.J. Simpson Breaks for Daylight), Simpson is always seen in perfect flight. As a striving track athlete, he broke records with his speed at the NCAA track championships in Provo, Utah, in 1967. When he was drafted by the Buffalo Bills in the NFL in 1969, he would set new marks for rushing. (In 1973, he became the first player to break the 2,000-yard rushing mark in scoring 2,003 total yards with 12 touchdowns.) Because of his lightning reflexes, he even acquired the sobriquet 'Juice' because of the electricity he generated on the field. He was swift of feet moving through a brief film career that included clunkers like Capricorn One (1978) and the popular Naked Gun trilogy in the Eighties, just as he was rapidly bounding through airport departure lounges in numerous Hertz television ads. O.J. Simpson never seemed to stand still so we could get a fix on him. Not at least until he went on trial for murder in 1994 in the death of his estranged wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

In Ezra Edelman's riveting five-part ESPN documentary, O.J.: Made in America, we get a penetrating examination of a star athlete who captured the public's imagination with the swiftness of his charm. But behind that mask of winsomeness was a lost man and a cipher who became a tragic projection of America's greatest stain – racism – where through his veil of celebrity, he could manipulate his image (and, in turn, be manipulated by others) into anything he needed it to be. O.J.: Made in America is a searing piece of political journalism and it has some of the runaway stature of Norman Mailer's best work and maybe Randy Shilt's ...And The Band Played On, where the larger social themes emerge out of the drama and with a startling immediacy. Although it was purely coincidental that O.J.: Made in America premiered on television days after the death of Muhammad Ali, you can't separate one from the other. If Muhammad Ali was a powerful and discomfiting figure who dramatically brought the issues of racism and celebrity into the forefront of popular culture (and even rubbed our faces in it while boasting about his strength and beauty as he knocked out Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson), O.J. Simpson in Edelman's work becomes the anti-Ali, a star who desperately chose to become the invisible servant of a nation that offered him celebrity success if he could be a black man who wished to be white. At Ali's funeral, there were many who preferred to remember him as floating like a butterfly rather than stinging like a bee. That's possibly because he not only – as Cassius Clay – took on the religion of segregation, the Nation of Islam, and changed his name, but he also stood up to the Vietnam War and refused to be drafted. As a proud black man, he wouldn't go fight in a country where "they didn't call me nigger." Ali relinquished his championship title, and urged other black athletes to stand up for their rights (as John Carlos and Tommie Smith did when they raised their black-gloved fists at the award-winning ceremony of the 1968 Mexico Olympics). He even risked going to jail for his actions. The celebrity of Muhammad Ali was borne out of the defiance of one man holding America accountable for its broken promises. But O.J. Simpson, who sped through the doors that Ali opened, ignored the country's dashed ideals and went for the gold. Unlike Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, where the author visibly railed against being both ignored and turned into an expedient symbol, in O.J.: Made in America, we see the reverse happening. O.J. Simpson is a visible celebrity athlete who turns into an invisible man by allowing himself to become an expedient symbol for whatever and whoever will make him accepted and loved.

Rather than begin his documentary with a highlight reel of the O.J. we came to know, he confronts us with the more unfamiliar contemporary image of Simpson in prison during a parole hearing discussing his daily duties while serving out a thirty-three year sentence for armed robbery. Like Martin Scorsese in Raging Bull, who confronted us first with the bloated, overweight boxer Jake LaMotta rather than the sleek compact fighter in his youth, Edelman also strips O.J. of his familiar celebrity disguise so that we can see the man emotionally naked. But, unlike in Raging Bull, where Scorsese ultimately boils down LaMotta's life and career into a cameo of brutality, Edelman uses his moment to open up – for close to eight hours – the varied ways in which O.J. Simpson's constructed mask built his success and later became a cloak that hid his most murderous impulses. Including interviews with many of Simpson's intimate friends and associates, Edelman manages to reveal what appears to be a growing consciousness in a number of people who slowly came to see a disturbing portrait emerge out of the pop construct they bought into. Even as we watch Simpson's meteoric and exciting climb to fame, it's unsettling to recognize that we may have also bought into this fantasy. Contrasting the most tumultuous moments in the Sixties – including the 1965 Watts riots, the assassinations and the rise of black power – Edelman draws an unsettling picture where Simpson seems to be on another planet totally unconcerned with the events tearing apart the country. As he gets feted at celebrity lunches and trades barbs with Bob Hope, there's blood flowing in the streets. One of many scintillating contrasts that Edelman provides is watching a whole community of Watts burning down in an effort to be acknowledged while O.J. Simpson is seen learning to fit in as he runs a football.

O.J. Simpson (centre) and his 1994 defense team: Alan Dershovitz, Robert Blasier, Johnnie Cochran, Jr. and Robert Shapiro.

The paradoxical racial history of Los Angeles is right at the heart of O.J.: Made in America because the city casts both illusion and reality. Jeffrey Tobin, who wrote the 1996 book, The Run of His Life: The People vs. O.J. Simpson that inspired the absorbing and uneven dramatic mini-series, The People vs O.J. Simpson, recently told NPR, "The history of Los Angeles is a history of real racial struggle, and I think because Los Angeles is not the South, because Los Angeles is famous for Hollywood and beaches and good times, I think people outside who didn't grow up there and didn't study it have not realized just how painful the racial history has been, and particularly the relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department and African-Americans." Edelman traces that relationship with both delicacy and intelligence by delving inside the violence of police raids into the black community with Operation Hammer, and the tragic death of Latasha Harlins in 1991 (where a 15-year-old black girl was shot in the head by a Korean-American store owner who mistakenly thought she was shoplifting and received only five years probation for the shooting). The Harlins incident happened just two weeks after the famous Rodney King beating which was videotaped. Edelman sets these incidents up like a prelude to the O.J. trial where the jury would acquit Simpson largely as payback. The irony, of course, is that O.J. Simpson (who had spent his career running from the black community and his association with it) would symbolically be embraced by that community as their tool for getting even for the previous injustices from the white community. While most of us are familiar with all the highlights of the trial that O.J.: Made in America covers – from the ill-fitting gloves to the Mark Fuhrman bombshell – Edelman delves into this intricate landscape with a new authority. From the fact that the proceedings were televised with everyone playing their role for the camera, we now understand the stakes involved when the defense uses the race card and deflects the focus from the victims of the murder to the perceived corruption and racism of the Los Angeles police force. If the documentary is quite successful, too, at showing that the prosecution had strong enough evidence (from the history of spousal abuse to Simpson's blood trail) to convict O.J., it also demonstrates how their carelessness cost them the case.

While many are comparing O.J.: Made in America more favourably to the earlier docudrama, the comparison isn't entirely fair. The People vs O.J. Simpson often teetered between trash and compelling drama, but that precariousness somehow reflected the whole prurience of public and media attention at the time. The casting was alternately terrific (Sarah Paulson caught prosecutor Marcia Clark's eagle sharpness and her naiveté) and poor (Cuba Gooding Jr., as O.J., had too much personality to be playing a man hiding behind his own skin). John Travolta turned in a bizarrely mannered Kabuki performance as Robert Shapiro while David Schwimmer, as Robert Kardashian, did the best acting of his career. The People vs. O.J. Simpson toyed with the issues that O.J.: Made in America dives right into, but it wasn't negligible. O.J.: Made in America goes even further by taking us right to the ironic conclusion of O.J.'s fall when he gets convicted in Las Vegas for a dubious crime as if to make up for the punishment he avoided years earlier. With a deft assurance, Edelman uncovers how Simpson lost the coveted white community when it was clear that he murdered the prize white wife – and then got away with it. He also shows how he lost the black community after the trial because he was no longer useful as a tool for vengeance. What makes O.J.: Made in America so unsettling in the end is not just how it shows an American hero falling from the peaks of stardom, but how (despite his talent) he was never anything more than a projection of who everyone wanted him to be.

-- June 23/16

Picture/Portrait: De Palma & Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words



I can't think of any other film director whose work continually captivated me but has drawn such violent reactions from various friends than the movies of Brian De Palma. It didn't seem to matter whether it was ones that I loved (Hi Mom!, Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Casualties of War, Carlito's Way, Femme Fatale and Redacted), ones that I didn't (Sisters, Scarface, Body Double, The Black Dahlia and Passion), or ones with virtues disguised by their compromises (The Untouchables, Raising Cain, Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars), folks had an axe to grind and I was often the stone used to sharpen it. From the moment one individual introduced me to the fiendishly clever 1974 musical comedy, Phantom of the Paradise, I was drawn into De Palma's spiky impudence. The devious way he deployed irony to give genre pictures a wicked vitality I found to be both darkly funny and emotionally searing – even heartbreaking. This equivocal approach may account for most of the strong reactions I got from various moviegoers. Often when artists use irony, it's with a knowing sense of detachment, and the film congratulates you on your hipness while keeping you cocooned in your certainties. But De Palma played out life's failures on a grand operatic scale. He drew us into a waking nightmare and then proceeded to pull the rug out from under our convictions. That's maybe why one friend, who I took to The Fury after he returned from a yoga retreat, didn't speak to me for months. Subjecting him to a hallucinatory thriller about two teenagers with telekinesis and where De Palma (as critic Terrence Rafferty once wrote) "generate[d] horror from nightmarish exaggerations of the experience of adolescence: the feeling that your impulses have gone out of control, that even your own body is alien, perhaps hostile...," put him in touch with basic drives the weekend in the country was supposed to cleanse. A few years later, when we went to see Blow Out, he took a swing at me afterwards. (Luckily, he missed.) The picture was about a man whose gifts fail him when he tries to unravel a political conspiracy and save the one person he cares about most. What may have disturbed him was that it went against the grain of having our virtues overcome the desires of those who continually undermine them. Needless to say, he never again went to another Brian De Palma picture with me. But others eagerly took his place popping out of press screenings, or surging through crowds of people having a Christmas libation, to demand what I thought of Scarface, or verbally confronting me over how Carlito's Way infuriated them. One much friendlier critic years later, after seeing his Iraq War drama Redacted, even told me, "He better not be kidding."

The question of whether De Palma was kidding or being serious needn't be a mutually exclusive one. Yet that conflicted query is often the fuel that sets others ablaze with indignation – whether it's charges of misogyny by certain feminist groups over his erotic comedy/thriller Dressed to Kill, heated commentary over the perceived grave-robbing of Hitchcock in Carrie, or the "sado-pornography"of his depiction of the rape of a Vietnamese woman by American soldiers in his deeply mournful Vietnam War drama Casualties of War. The conventions of drama are known to follow certain rules of conduct, but Brian De Palma's most incendiary act – thanks to Godard's film essays in the Sixties with their keen awareness of our relationship to movies and pop culture – was to use our relationship to those conventions as a means to satirically subvert them. And in doing so, De Palma was able to (as Pauline Kael once suggested) use humour to intensify horror and vice-versa. Sometimes borrowing the cinematic language of Hitchcock, where voyeurism became a dramatic strategy to implicate the audience, De Palma made us aware of our own vulnerabilities. Yet the bigger irony, despite all the intense debate his movies can stir, is that even with his place secured among his peers in American Seventies cinema – including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Coppola – Brian De Palma is still a virtually invisible presence in critical film study. He barely rates a mention in Peter Biskind's tell-all primer Easy Riders, Raging Bulls on American auteurism in the Seventies. Even the brazen anti-war tone of his early burlesque political satires, Greetings and Hi Mom!, didn't find a warm spot in the hearts of the Sixties counter-culture. But a new documentary, De Palma, by film directors Noah Baumbach (Mistress America, Francis Ha) and Jake Paltrow (The Good Night), which lets the director alone speak to the camera about his body of work (including his struggles as both an independent and Hollywood movie-maker) promises answers to all these puzzling concerns. De Palma never finds a clear focus, or a provocative narrative, to delve very far into the ongoing controversies surrounding the director. But his anecdotes and observations – supported by selected film clips chronologically inserted – are still compelling reflections of a subversive American artist looking back with a wry bemusement on the grenades he lobbed.

Nancy Allen, De Palma and John Travolta during shooting of Blow Out

Right at the beginning, De Palma talks about Hitchcock's Vertigo and he smartly describes it as a movie that explores what directors always do: make the audience fall in love with the illusions they create. (In the case of Vertigo, De Palma states that Hitchcock destroys that illusion – twice – when James Stewart loses Kim Novak first as an illusion and later in reality.) But the documentary doesn't fully follow up on that treatise and explore whether Brian De Palma's movies tend to do the same thing. (I'd argue that his best pictures strip away our coveted illusions in order to reveal the darker reality behind them.) Baumbach and Paltrow cover a lot of ground, but they don't dig too deeply. While they have De Palma recount the familiar story of how his tolerance for blood grew out of watching his orthopedic surgeon father perform in the operating theatre, they seize on something stronger when they have him reveal how his parents' unhappy marriage destroyed their home. De Palma describes how his father's indiscretions (which he dramatized in the low budget 1980 autobiographical comedy feature, Home Movies) led him to track down his father's mistress with a knife until he confronted her in a closet. As a director of primal thrillers, comedies and gangster dramas, it would be fascinating to hear him discuss howthose themes became so personal in his movies. But since Baumbach and Paltrow are the director's friends, they settle in for a more companionable series of interviews. De Palma takes us comfortably through his career, but without the cutting depth, or the stinging intensity that once surrounded the reaction to pictures like Dressed to Kill, Scarface and Body Double.

Nevertheless, De Palma does uncork some entertaining stories about composer Bernard Herrmann's unwieldy tantrum when he came to score Sisters and heard his music for Psycho being used as a temp track on a murder scene. There's also a hilarious explanation for Cliff Robertson's night-of-the-living-dead performance in Obsession. Sometimes De Palma provides a fascinating perspective on his failures like his adaptation of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities where he laments that the picture might had been better had he trusted his instincts and given the picture the juicy cynicism of Sweet Smell of Success. He is affecting, too, when he describes the commercial failure of Blow Out and talks about the sting of John Travolta's final scene as he hears a scream he'll never forget. (Baumbach and Paltrow undercut that moment, though, with a quick cut to Al Pacino's "Say hello to my little friend" outburst in Scarface. We go jarringly from the devastation of a man confronting his own impotence to the boasting machismo of another one acting it out.) I wish De Palma had spent more time on less familiar pictures like Redacted (which updates themes from both Hi Mom! and Casualties of War) and The Fury (which De Palma largely dismisses except for John Williams' astonishing film score). There were dream projects that De Palma missed out on that never get a full hearing like his desire to adapt Alfred Bester's 1952 SF detective story, The Demolished Man, which contains themes De Palma touched on in The Fury. We also don't hear much about his ideas for Act of Vengeance, about the Yablonski murders, that was turned into a routine Charles Bronson action vehicle in 1986, and Fire, about a rock legend who fakes his death like Jim Morrison and was to star John Travolta. De Palma talks about his tenacious battles with censorship and Hollywood, but there's little about how those culture wars wore on him. For instance, Body Double was bathed in bitterness when it came out in 1984. At the time, De Palma seemed to be taking on everyone who dismissed his best work by giving them every reason to hate him. Yet hearing him speak about it here, you'd never know just how fractious the reaction to the picture truly was and why. What De Palma does is chronicle rather than critically evaluate his work in the context of its time. (Brian De Palma's recognition as a political director has only been delved into in any depth by Chris Dumas in his lively critical study, Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible.) Which is why I doubt if anyone who doesn't already know his pictures will find De Palma as riveting as those who do. In many ways, it's gratifying that Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow made De Palma with such great affection in order to bring the prickly director into the light, I only wish there was more substance to chew on. For it's unlikely anyone will ever tell this story again.


In Thorsten Schütte's spunky and informative documentary Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words, the outrageously gifted American composer gets to speak in his own words just as Brian De Palma does in De Palma. But unlike in De Palma, where the filmmakers sat him down for a cozy and informal chat, Schütte gathers source material on the late composer from various television interviews, concert appearances and news stories taken over many years. What he creates is a vividly morphing collage of a contentiously innovative artist whose work in his own country was largely uncomprehended and unheard. Starting with the premise that Zappa found the process of being interviewed a few steps removed from an inquisition, Schütte deftly examines the paradox that Zappa was indeed famous, but nobody really understood what he was actually famous for since his music – except for novelty numbers like "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow" and "Valley Girl" – never had North American radio exposure. Zappa brought to popular music a strong desire to break down the boundaries between high and low culture and that confounded programmers and came to annoy people in the world of both rock and classical music. His viscerally potent mixture of scatology and serious composition also upset those who either wished to cling to a safer, more romantic view of art as something morally and spiritually edifying, or for those who had the flagrant desire to fling snot at the status quo. (Critics like Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs could be counted on to light incense sticks around the rebellious ethos of punk, while dismissing Zappa, because they basically cleaved to the more appealing notion of punk triumphantly storming the barricades of the rock establishment.) Zappa's rebellion took the form of presenting musical history through the kaleidoscopic lens of social satire and then he turned it into farce. By introducing sophisticated modern orchestral forms into the rambunctious world of rock, he was free to show the same carny enthusiasm when he blew the earnest cobwebs out of the sacred halls of high culture. As an equal opportunity offender, Frank Zappa treated American culture with a fearless irreverence – much like Spike Jones and comic Lenny Bruce had before – and that enabled him to distill our sentimentality while creating the possibility of an absurdist's notion of love. That attitude, though, proved to be paradoxical and this is where Schütte's illuminating film opens up a Pandora's box. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words parses with a sharp acuity the candid impertinence of an American iconoclast who gleefully exposed the political and cultural hypocrisies at the dormant heart of the American ideal.

If De Palma attenuates the contentious heat from the controversy surrounding the director's art, Thorsten Schütte turns up the gas. Since most of the interviews and appearances are hosted by those who have little understanding of Zappa's life and work, there is a perceptible tension that either gets amplified or defused by humour. Schütte clearly understands Zappa's contradictory aspects and so he thankfully doesn't avoid them. Despite the omission of other voices to critically appraise Zappa's own obsessions and faults, Schütte allows Zappa the room to reveal his own opinions on subjects like sex and politics so they can stand on their own. (We can decide for ourselves whether or not we agree.) But it's not always as simple as an either/or choice. For instance, not everyone will embrace Zappa's glowing view of groupies as providing "human sacrifices," but his desire to write songs about them did commemorate a folklore often avoided in popular music (except to further deify them as Chicago did in "The Road," or celebrate groupies with an appealingly lavish bad-boy attitude as The Rolling Stones did on "Stray Cat Blues"). Many liberals won't be able to reconcile Zappa defining himself as a conservative on Crossfire while simultaneously standing up to the PMRC in Congress for wishing to censor and label rock music. His impulse to perform a concerto for two bicycles, electronic noise and orchestra on The Steve Allen Show in 1963 might appear to be a lark. But what Zappa was doing was removing Dadaist absurdism from the confines of the Cabaret Voltaire earlier in the century to having it realized on a popular American television variety show. One has to come to terms with a composer who synthesizes the varied innovations of French avant-gardist Edgard Varèse, the neo-classical Igor Stravinsky, the discordantly ebullient Charles Ives, Fifties doo-wop and blues practitioner Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, to also make room for the lascivious story of "Dinah-Moe Humm." Schütte doesn't provide answers in Eat That Question, but he engages us in a one-size-fits-all perspective on Frank Zappa that grows out of the director's own compositional approach to his movie which allows the dissonant ideas to clash and harmonize.

Frank Zappa on The Steve Allen Show in 1963.

It should be no surprise that when we see Zappa arrive in the Czech Republic to meet Vaclav Havel during the Velvet Revolution, he was greeted by thousands of fans he'd never witness at American airports. While his music was invisible at home, here it was slipped illegally into the country during the years of the Communist regime – and many did jail time for merely owning it. What Schütte rightfully illustrates is that Zappa's disparate art flew in the face of Stalinist political correctness that determined what is proper and what isn't. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words shows us an artist who didn't treat listeners as simply consumers. They were also voyeurs. He understood, as a business man, that the record buying public consumed music to reinforce their lifestyle. Therefore they became susceptible to trends. But Zappa's best work forced the audience to confront ideas and thoughts they might not be comfortable accepting blindly. Schütte actually doesn't feature very much music, but he shows its range which indicates the degree of its political pungency. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words isn't likely to resolve viewers feelings about the artist, either, but it gives us a clearer picture of who he really was. (Zappa died of prostate cancer in 1993.) Since Zappa had long hair and an imperial goatee, many chose to characterize him as a deranged freak who imbibed copious chemicals, even though he consistently denounced drugs (except for caffeine and cigarettes which he considered 'food'). He was scorned because of his predilection for adolescent humour and possessing a leering smugness even though he also wrote chamber and orchestral music along with big band jazz and rhythm and blues. Indulging in easy simplifications served for many years as consolation for those who didn't wish to tackle what the music – or the man – was actually about. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words dares to do so.

--July 10/16

High and Low: Notes on Film Criticism and Hitchcock/Truffaut


François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock.

Why is it that some people think film critics (to paraphrase Cyndi Lauper) don't want to have fun? More to the point, why do people get so upset when you don't have the kind of fun they had at a hit movie even though you can explain clearly why it didn't deliver for you? (People never get this incensed when the picture is a commercial failure.) If I find a picture sluggish and heavy-spirited, as I once did with Ivan Reitman's massive 1984 hit Ghostbusters, why shouldn't I say so? Just because it was intended to entertain and make money for the studio doesn't make that a criteria for evaluating its quality. A good critic always judges a film on whether or not they are enjoying it, but they also go further to try and articulate why (even though, according to some moviegoers, you're not supposed to have a contrary opinion when the picture is a huge Hollywood production with a pedigree). Yet, as in politics, the Emperor sometimes has no clothes. But those same folks who always strip the Emperor down to the buff in politics seem to feel that the same doesn't apply to the popular arts which you should just let wash over you. This may explain why there's been such an uproar over the new remake of Ghostbusters where people are insane with rage that Hollywood has dared to reboot a 'classic.' Meanwhile, others get appalled if you diss the original. They assume that, due to your discriminating intellect, you can't simply party down and enjoy getting slimed.

If audiences develop their taste for art by first having an appetite for mindless entertainment, as Pauline Kael once suggested in her essay, "Trash, Art, and the Movies," it's because good criticism makes that process possible. My own movie collection, for instance, ranges from Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game to Dumb and Dumber. Obviously, there's a world of difference between them, but both movies are enjoyable on the terms they offer. There's an irresistible charm that silliness and even stupidity can provide when it's done with a certain tone and skill, just as a profound work with an artist's vision can irrevocably change the way you walk and talk. Yet there's a kind of snobbery that crosses between both high and low tastes. For instance, I know some very literate friends who'd be stunned that I'd even consider Dumb and Dumber a good comedy because their intelligence and higher tastes prevents them from getting in touch with the polymorphous infant in themselves. There are others, no doubt, who think my love of Renoir means I should get out more. Movie pleasure can be delectably superficial, or it can deliver a deeper satisfaction, the same way one develops a taste for better wine while still having the occasional desire to chug a beer.

What constitutes pleasure is always subjective. (Just look at what some people with very broad tastes like to call their 'guilty pleasures.') Given that, why is there this peculiar rage some film goers save only for critics? While it may, in part, be a result of how marketing today has corrupted popular taste, so that audiences align themselves more with perceived success than quality, I think it runs even deeper than that. As in popular music, there is no longer a centre that binds people in the mainstream to the margins so that they can discuss The Rules of the Game and Dumb and Dumber in the same sentence without being dismissed as pretentious, or a slob. If Elvis and The Beatles once provided a common ground for debate in pop music, where mainstream audiences actually aspired to be informed and discriminating, it was because those artists built bridges that broke down cultural walls. Audiences were once inspired to draw lines between The Rolling Stones and Chicago blues, or linking The Beatles with Motown and girl groups. Pop culture inspired a shared dialogue that became a breeding ground for sharp criticism rather than consumer reports on what to buy. The excitement of making connections also became part of the air everyone breathed. But today, people have drawn more protective lines around what they love so that now everyone gets to breathe their own air. Without a centre, what you get is a collection of islands where solipsism rules. Idealism gets replaced by ideology where one artist, or work, gets rigidly valued over the other. In film culture, you see cinephiles sharing their passion for art cinema in a hermitage that's practically exiled from popular taste, while more populist critics talk about mainstream pictures as if from a fan enclave clinging with a fetishistic zeal to the values of childhood and consumerism. Is it any wonder that marketing now triumphs in this climate?

Director David Fincher discussing Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock/Truffaut.

Many of these issues surround the subject of film critic Kent Jones's recent documentary, Hitchcock/Truffaut, which examines the 1966 book French director François Truffaut (The 400 Blows, Jules et Jim) published of his extended interview in 1962 with the popular master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps, Vertigo). Both directors – with their vastly different sensibilities – spent a week talking in great depth about Hitchcock's movies. (When Hitchcock died in 1980, Truffaut updated his book and added a new preface along with a final chapter on the later work not covered in the interview.) While the book, Hitchcock/Truffaut, was Truffaut's attempt to lift Hitchcock from the common perception of his being simply a popular entertainer and placing him into the realm of being a film artist, it also served as a game changer in the culture – and not only for those who came to define popular cinema during the Sixties. Hitchcock/Truffaut marked a moment when the mainstream could accommodate both commercial and art cinema with equal value.

Just as Truffaut, along with Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Agnes Varda and Jacques Rivette, was radically changing the language of cinema as part of the French New Wave, Hitchcock was coming to the tail end of having worked with an artist's temperament since the silent era in the popular mainstream. Yet where the book dramatically opened up an intriguing dialogue about high and low culture, one which also nurtured the debate between critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael on auteurism, Kent Jones's documentary misses that bigger story. Rather than exploring how Hitchcock/Truffaut built a cultural bridge that would later inspire the hunger for film studies, and where canny commercial instincts and artistic drive could bring us something like The Godfather in the Seventies, Jones settles instead for a more conventional analysis. He justifies Hitchcock as an innovative artist while unwittingly shortchanging Truffaut's accomplishments. Hitchcock/Truffaut does feature some lively (though uneven) commentary by directors Martin Scorsese, James Gray, David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin describing the impact of Hitchcock on them. But their casual reflections do more to build a pedestal for Hitchcock to rule as an object of adoration rather than illuminating his significance and shortcomings. Except for Assayas, there's little even spoken that accounts for Truffaut's interest in him. In other words, as entertaining and engaging as Hitchcock/Truffaut is, the picture ends up offering up a narrowed view of their exchange. (The film is punier, too, when you realize that it's a virtual boy's club since no female directors get to be part of the discussion.)


When Kent Jones made his remarkable documentary, Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows (2007), which told the story of the producer at RKO Pictures who made low budget horror films (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie) but with sophisticated means, he did more than justify Lewton as an auteurist. Jones gave us a study of the studio system, the shifting values in American culture especially during and after the Second World War, and he brought his own critical perspective into the narrative. At times, we experienced clips from Lewton's pictures as if seeing those scenes through the eyes of a passionate critic interpreting them for us (even if it was Jones sometimes borrowing a perceptive quote from Manny Farber). You could feel Kent Jones in the fabric of Man in the Shadows and hear his voice – even when it was Martin Scorsese narrating – because he made the subject loom larger than just a chronicling of Val Lewton's efforts. Man in the Shadows took us into how a critic can make sense of an artist's vision. But maybe because Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut are not men in the shadows, Jones relegates himself to the background instead. He seems content to let his directors do all the talking for him and we never come away feeling like we understand why this subject matters to him. Hitchcock/Truffaut comes across as an impersonal study even when it's at its most engaging.

I suspect the disparate cultural climate I described earlier may have had some bearing on why the film's treatment of Truffaut seems so minimal. Among cinephiles today, he doesn't command the same respect and regard that Godard does. But it weakens the film to position him as the student sitting at the master's table. While there are some (like Pauline Kael) who didn't understand why a man of Truffaut's idiosyncratic talent would be drawn to a conceptual stylist like Hitchcock, it always made sense to me. Just as Truffaut was commandeering an open-ended visual language to tell the stories of The 400 Blows and Jules et Jim (where he employed both avant-garde and conventional techniques), he also needed to understand how Hitchcock created his own artistic sensibility in a more restricting studio era. Once he accomplished that, Truffaut likely felt that he and Hitchcock could then find an equal pairing. "If, in the era of Ingmar Bergman, one accepts the premise that cinema is an art form, on a par with literature, I suggest that Hitchcock belongs – and why classify him at all? – among such artists of anxiety as Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Poe," Truffaut writes in his Introduction to Hitchcock/Truffaut. Dizzy Gillespie once demanded an audience with Louis Armstrong to play him the be-bop jazz that was only possible because of Pops. I suspect that Truffaut wanted to measure the worth of his own methods by understanding the pioneering stylistic forms of Hitchcock. (Armstrong would tell Dizzy after listening to his brief atonal demonstration, "You have to know how to play pretty damn good to play that bad.") Of course, it was no surprise that when Truffaut tried to imitate Hitchcock with The Bride Wore Black, where he made himself the dutiful pupil, he couldn't have been less Hitchcock (not to mention barely Truffaut).

I know I'm probably asking for a different kind of picture than what Kent Jones likely wanted to make with Hitchcock/Truffaut. But it left me hungry for more than I got. You don't expect documentaries like this one to magically fill the void where once a passionate common language on movies was shared, but you do sometimes look for a picture than gives you an idea of what might have been lost. Hitchcock/Truffaut succeeds in entertaining us with the minutiae that shaped this historic book. The larger story has yet to be told.

-- July 16/16

Rules of Engagement: Gavin Hood's Eye in the Sky




Gavin Hood's Eye in the Sky is the kind of procedural thriller that clears your head while simultaneously keeping you in breathless suspense. Guy Hibbert's compelling script with its taut intelligence gets into a great subject here: drone warfare. What Eye in the Sky sets out to unravel with sharp slivers of nuance is the moral ambivalence felt by those who execute high-tech strikes against Islamic extremists. Operating from a distance and using drone aircraft and sophisticated camera surveillance, pilots, soldiers and politicians get pulled into the queasy voyeurism of a video battleground. They may be in complete control of the hardware to reduce the collateral damage of innocent human life, but we see that people will always unwittingly stray into the target area. Eye in the Sky skillfully maps out their dramatic strategy, while implicating us as witnesses, but the picture is about our inability to control human behaviour – no matter how sophisticated the technology is. Unlike Hood's earlier Rendition (2007), which focused on the CIA's practice of extraordinary rendition, Eye in the Sky doesn't craft its tale so that every little detail falls neatly into place. Rendition was so concerned about being on the right side of every issue that the audience barely had to break a sweat picking sides. By the end, Eye in the Sky brings comfort and certainty to no one.

When Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) wakes up one morning to discover that one of her colleagues has been murdered by the Al-Shabaab terrorist group, she's confident that they can finally capture its high command – which includes a radicalized British national – in a safehouse in Nairobi, Kenya. Pulling together a multi-national team bound together by various video feeds – including an aerial surveillance pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) and his colleague, Carrie Gershon (Phoebe Fox), an undercover Kenyan field agent Jama Farah (Barkhad Abdi), Lieutenant General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman), who is supervising the mission from London with members of the British government as witnesses, as well as a facial recognition team in Pearl Harbor to identify human targets – Powell plans a capture mission. But when the terrorists shift locations to a house in a densely populated neighbourhood of poor Kenyans, she comes to discover that the terrorists have massive explosives to carry out two suicide bombings with civilian targets. Given the implications of what the team witnesses, the mission quickly turns from capture into kill. But in order to carry out the execution, Powell and Benson have to run the protocol up the chain of command to determine the rules of engagement. (The film, which was shot in South Africa, was originally titled, The Kill Chain.) As various politicians and legal analysts weigh the options, time continues to run out. Complicating the decision making is also the presence of a young Muslim girl, Alia (Aisha Takow), who sells bread every day in the vicinity of the targeted house. Eye in the Skyraises the question of whether saving the life of the innocent girl is worth risking the lives of many innocent civilians if the suicide bombers are allowed to escape.


While some might feel that Hood and Hibbert are stacking the deck by using the life of an endangered child as moral weight in their drama, it is not employed as a sentimental device. A similar scene in Steven Spielberg's Munich, where Israeli agents are attempting to assassinate a Black September terrorist when his young daughter suddenly appears, also delved into the same murky moral ground where the carrying out of a mission risks not only innocent lives, but the lives of those who perpetrate the strike. Eye in the Sky likewise doesn't vilify or extol the characters in order to appease our blood lust as many action dramas tend to do. Whether it's a politician worrying about public perception, or military brass like Powell weighing the consequences, the calculated decision to launch the rocket is not one that doesn't come with a cost. Unlike the Cold War thrillers of a previous era, Gavin Hood also realizes that the stakes are now dramatically different. Where it was fully understood in the past that (despite the ideological differences between the East and West) nobody was driven by the nihilistic charge of blowing up the planet, the enemies of the West today aren't concerned about the fate of this world – it's the next world. Since the fall of Communism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the introduction of the suicide bomber has brought an apocalyptic element that goes against the grain of liberal humanism and Communist authoritarianism. Which is why the characters in Eye in the Sky have to face new fears while being dragged into the same dystopian pit as the murderous zealots they're trying to eliminate.

Besides the smartly drawn script, the performers beautifully flesh out the ideas in it. Helen Mirren draws on her commanding voice with all the authority it carries, but spices it with the same bits of impatient irony Judi Densch used as Q in Casino Royale and Skyfall. Alan Rickman, in one of his last screen roles, underplays his droll delivery to convey the notion that not all military leaders are buffoons or psychotics (as many satires have attempted to convey). Barkhad Abdi (who played the lead pirate in Captain Phillips) gives a warm, expansive performance as an operative who counts on those eyes in the sky, but he is also at the mercy of them since he is the one on the ground. Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos (Venus, Cinderella) follows the action from above and below with smooth, quick takes as if moving to the anxious rhythms of our breathing. If there's anything missing from Eye in the Sky, it's that the picture doesn't go deep enough to scrutinize the subject matter. Rather than dramatize the necessity of drone warfare, the movie becomes more interested in the impact it has on those whose concepts of warfare were shaped in a different era and conducted under different rules. (The only truly phony device is in the obvious symbolic use of a doll that Powell purchases for his granddaughter.) In every other way, though, Eye in the Sky is a top-drawer modern tragedy. With a devastating proficiency, it demonstrates how technological perfection can never mask the endless nightmares that warfare produces.

-- July 26/16

You Probably Don't Even Hear It When It Happens: The Sopranos & The Death of the Gangster Hero


The final scenes of The Sopranos

“The way the thing builds with the music and everything. To me, it gets me and makes me want to cry,” creator David Chase said recently of the controversial scene which concluded HBO's The Sopranos after six seasons in 2007. That moment, which begins in a New Jersey diner with the pop horror of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”playing on the jukebox and ends with an abrupt cut to black, has been debated for years and continues to be. People still argue about whether mob boss Tony Soprano was whacked just before he could sink his teeth into some onion rings, or whether the quick shift to dark simply left his fate to our imagination. Whatever audiences chose to believe, David Chase's decision wasn't an arbitrary one. Which is partly why his emotional reaction to its conclusion is not as simple as waving goodbye to a successful franchise. “It’s not because, ‘Oh, there goes the show. There goes part of my life.’ It has nothing to do with that. It’s what’s on the screen.” What's on the screen is an assured understanding that viewers had been inside mob boss Tony Soprano's head for the full duration, just as audiences had once been in the heads of Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar, Cagney's Tom Powers in The Public Enemy, Muni and Pacino's Scarface and Brando's Godfather. But there's a significant difference this time around. Much had changed in both the gangster genre and our relationship to it.

The famous gangsters of the past – like Robinson's, Cagney's, Muni's, and even Bogart's – emerged during Prohibition when audiences looked vicariously to the gangster for a taste of freedom. To moviegoers, the gangster was his own man while the rest of us lived under laws that attempted to define our morality. If the mobster needed money, he robbed a bank. If he needed a drink (while the rest of us were prohibited), he opened a speakeasy. If he wanted to attend that speakeasy in style, he'd use the money from the bank robbery to buy spiffy duds and became the cock of the walk. Often the gangster was the immigrant outsider who came to America to find freedom, and then when denied access to America's institutions, embraced the frontier image of the gunslinger to create his own country to live in. "In ways that we don't easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and demands of modern life, which rejects 'Americanism' itself," wrote critic Robert Warshow in The Nation in 1948, just as that popular first wave of the gangster genre was coming to an end. And with the conclusion of a brutal World War, people also began craving some semblance of calm. Yet Warshow was right about why we were so drawn to the transgressions of criminal anti-heroes.

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

The release of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and The Godfather in 1972, however, changed the rebellious course of the gangster hero. In Bonnie and Clyde, director Arthur Penn was making a period piece about real American gangsters who lived during Prohibition and cut a path across the country robbing banks. While possessing an awareness of our early fascination with the gangster films of that period, Penn confronted us in his picture with the source of that fascination. In one bold stroke, and one that quoted from a famous scene in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, he had Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) in a panic shoot a bank manager full in the face. Not only did we get to see the banker's face explode in blood (which effectively killed off the Hays Code's power of censorship over Hollywood movies), we also faced our complicity in the violence that the gangster meted out. From that unnerving scene in front of the bank to the film's convulsive conclusion, where Bonnie and Clyde in slow motion die in a hail of bullets, we were stained with their blood and the violence of their acts. When the gangsters of the Thirties went down in a hail of bullets by the end, it was an ending designed as a civics lesson to not go thou and do likewise. But Penn, by reframing the meaning of that final gunfire, stripped the gangster film of any false piety.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

The Godfather went even a step further during the Nixon era. The country was craving law and order as the chaotic violence of the Sixties (which Bonnie and Clyde also mirrored) created a backlash in the Seventies towards security. With that in mind, director Francis Coppola and novelist Mario Puzo fashioned a tale where the story became the opposite of Warshow's early view of the gangster. In The Godfather, not only did the mob now embrace "Americanism," they became a shadow version of it. In a decade where political corruption undermined those same American institutions that earlier excluded immigrants – Watergate happened just a couple of years after The Godfather was released – the mobsters in this Forties and Fifties period picture set goals through their illegitimate businesses to become senators and Presidents. Furthermore, the lone gangster was now gone and replaced by those who conformed to the company line – the Family. Those who didn't were eliminated because "it wasn't good for business." The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II brought a Shakespearean arc to the genre. They both laid to rest the heroism of the urban gunslinger to unveil instead a tragic modern portrait of the assimilated American gangster in a zealous quest for political power, Although there were many gangster films after the first two Godfather films (including a third Godfather which was ill-conceived), no one had taken the genesis of its appeal much farther until David Chase conceived The Sopranos.

The Godfather (1972)

For one thing, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) isn't a sleek hood like the criminal icons of the past. Portly and with a sagging belly that suggests the gluttony of passivity, Tony Soprano is a New Jersey mob boss living in a rich suburb with the spoils of the criminal enterprise he inherited from his father. But rather than being a pistol of dominance, Tony is neurotic and suffering from black-out spells that require him to see a shrink (Lorraine Bracco). He's also under the dominant heel of his mother (Nancy Marchand) and drawing the ire of his jealous uncle (Dominic Chianese) who covets the power Tony possesses. But, despite his uncle's envy, Tony sees himself at the tail end of gangster glory. He lives in a time where being a gangster is about survival in an age of recession, drugs and underworld rats. His crew can quote all the famous scenes from all the key gangster pictures, but they can never live up to the characters they idolize. What Chase does so cleverly is that he provides Tony Soprano with a self-loathing that is equal to his awareness of how powerful he is. Rather than being a reckless figure simply hungry for power, Tony is smart and calculating – yet ultimately a psychopath who can strike viciously when required. In some ways, Tony suggests what Brando's Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront might have been like if he hadn't squealed on the mob and followed his brother's advice and stayed in Johnny Friendly's crew. Tony Soprano is as torn between his instincts and his calculations as Michael Corleone was in The Godfather, and it shrewdly gets the audience on his side hoping for a moment of redemption. But no matter how often Gandolfini's Godfather reels in our hopes, he dashes them cruelly with an act of violence so hideous, we feel guilty for having given him the benefit of the doubt.

The question of violence is never trivialized on The Sopranos. Of course, we get deaths that are familiar to the genre – garroting and shooting – but there are also gruesome murders we are forced to imagine like the killing of Christopher's girlfriend who ratted to the FBI. David Chase also takes us inside the psychological world of the gangster who now lives in the age of depression, anxiety and psychotherapy. So the homoerotic aspects in the male bonding of gangsters now gets examined (as are mobsters who are in the closet), the contrasting between the goomars and the Madonna wives also gets tied to a fear of matriarchy that is both fascinating and comical, and the Catholic concept of sin is just as prevalent as it was in both The Godfather and Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. You could say that The Sopranos is unthinkable without Scorsese's later Goodfellas, but that's only superficially true. While Goodfellas was directed with brio and confidence, it lacked a main character who could anchor the story. Goodfellas was terrific on the periphery, but the rat Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) was more an observer than a protagonist. With Tony Soprano, David Chase has provided a stronger dramatic figure than Goodfellas did. Like Scorsese, though, Chase also shares an intoxication for popular culture and with the show's music he takes his cue from Mean Streets, where it served to be an operatic jukebox, rather than from Goodfellas where the music (at times) was about as random as the radio playing in a nearby car.

The Sopranos

The Sopranos always played to our intelligence and our stored knowledge of the gangster genre, but it also altered our expectations of what it might deliver. And that's where the series ending comes in. Tony had been dodging death all along to the extent that many viewers thought it was inevitable. But in the concluding episode, David Chase came up with a finale that was every bit as controversial as Arthur Penn's in Bonnie and Clyde. After settling all Family business, Tony gathers with his real family for dinner. As he arrives at the diner's front door, he spots himself sitting in his seat just as Keir Dullea once saw himself lying in bed awaiting death at the conclusion of Stanley Kubrick's 2001.While watching for the family's arrival, and listening to Journey on the jukebox, he spots different people entering the joint. All of them come to suggest different characters we met before earlier in the series, and some of whom were hired to kill Tony Soprano. One enters the bathroom (as Michael Corleone did to fetch his gun to kill his father's enemies in The Godfather), but we don't get to see him exit. During the conversation with his wife and kids, however, he looks up towards the bathroom exit in a flash and the screen goes to black. When I first saw this, I was shocked and confused. Later that evening, though, I decided to write it off as a modernist ending and forgot about it. But when I watched the whole series again on Blu-ray, binge watching in a few weeks as opposed to a number of years, I realized that David Chase had done something as daring as Orson Welles had in his famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast.

Orson Welles directing War of the Worlds (1938).

In War of the Worlds, we are hearing a simulated radio show that is being interrupted by news bulletins about strange occurrences in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. Before long, we are in Grover's Mill and listening to a live broadcast of the landing of a spaceship from Mars where the creatures suddenly strike and kill everyone in the vicinity including the reporter. But rather than hear these horrible deaths over the radio, it goes to silence for a number of seconds. That's exactly how Tony's brother-in-law, Bobby, talks about death while out on a boat to Tony in the final season: You probably don't even hear it when it happens. Welles was aware in War of the Worlds that silence on the radio was deafening. It created a huge disconnect with listeners who then began to fear that the invasion was not a radio drama, but the real deal. Death was now a fact and not fiction. Something similar happens in another part of New Jersey during the conclusion of The Sopranos. Radio audiences had quickly panicked and reacted angrily to Welles's radio silence just as television viewers would storm on – and continue to – over The Sopranos going to black. Writer Matthew Weiner, who has since gone on to create Mad Men, told Vanity Fair in 2012 that he loved the conclusion. "For me, I just loved that there was such an interactive quality to it," he recalled. "But the way the public behaved, it was like somebody took the bottle away from a baby. Outrage and shock." While that shock and outrage fueled the debate, Michael Imperioli (who played Tony's hoodlum nephew, Christopher Moltisanti) totally accepted Tony's death. "I think he’s dead, is what I think," he said in the same issue of Vanity Fair. "David was trying to put us in the place of the last things you see before you die. You remember some little details and something catches your eye and that’s it. You don’t know the aftermath because you’re gone." The actor who played Tony Soprano is now really gone, but even he weighed in on the debate before he went to spirit. "When I first saw the ending, I said, 'What the fuck?' I mean, after all I went through, all this death, and then it’s over like that? But after I had a day to sleep, I just sat there and said, 'That’s perfect.'

And it is perfect. Where the ending for Tony Sopranos's antecedents in the gangster genre was often violent and cathartic, Chase demonstrated with a shrewd genius that times had now changed. He deprived us of the shock and satisfaction of watching him get it because it wouldn't have been true to why we had been watching for six seasons. There could be no release from the implications of our empathy with this mob boss. (In the penultimate episode, Tony's shrink gets her release. She closes the door on him and shuts him out of her life thereby reversing what Michael Corleone's henchmen did to his wife, Kay, at the end of The Godfather. But as one friend of mine was quick to remind me, she gets to turn away from Tony, but David Chase knew that viewers couldn't and wouldn't. We'd continue to watch.) Like Welles in War of the Worlds, Chase understands the medium and our compulsive interest in serial drama. We have voluntarily been inside Tony's head for six seasons, and in the end, we face the darkness with him. The lights go out for everybody.

-- August 26/16

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