Second Words

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #8: Margaret Atwood (1984)

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

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

Talking Out of Turn had one section devoted to critics who ran against the current of popular thinking in the eighties. That chapter included discussions with film critic Vito Russo (The Celluloid Closet) who wrote a book about gay cinema before the horror of AIDS changed the landscape; also Jay Scott, who would later die from AIDS, spoke about how, despite being one of Canada's sharpest and wittiest writers on movies, he was initially a reluctant critic; and author Margaret Atwood who turned to literary criticism in her 1983 book Second Words. She discussed -- from an author's perspective -- the value of criticism and how it was changing for the worst during this decade. 

Freud and the Holocaust

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #7: D.M.Thomas (1981)

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

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large. 

The most conventional form of biography, or autobiography, where the writer conveys their story in a straight-forward manner was subverted in different ways during the eighties. Wallace Shawn, for example, with playwright Andre Gregory and film director Louis Malle concocted My Dinner with Andre (1982), a film about two men having dinner and discussing personal philosophical issues set in the dramatic form of a performance piece. Author David Young, in his book Incognito (1982), stumbled upon a box of old photographs that he found in an attic of an old house he bought. He decided to write a biography based upon the sequence of photos he discovered. Thriller writer William Diehl (Sharky's Machine, Chameleon), a committed pacifist, wrote lurid pulp as a means to exorcise the violence within him. What many of these artists in the eighties were attempting to do, in a post-modern sense, was to link to their work to the collective memory already existing in their audience. It was a shared mythology all the more enhanced by a growing and expansive popular culture.

author and poet D.M. Thomas

In 1981, poet and novelist D.M. Thomas decided to work with historical fact as a means to create a vivid and powerful work of fiction that would link the psychological insights emerging in the work of Sigmund Freud with the terror of the Holocaust during WW II. He did it in a novel called The White Hotel, a book that caused some controversy at that time due to his approach. The White Hotel was broken into three movements which opened with the erotic fantasies of Lisa, one of Freud's patients, which overlapped with the convulsions of the century leading to the Holocaust. Over the years, many film directors including Terrence Malick (The New World), Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch (even Barbara Streisand) attempted to put The White Hotel on the screen. But its dreamy horror has yet to be conceived as cinema. In this, one of my very first professional radio interviews, D.M. Thomas explained how he created such a potent fiction out of this unsettling reality.

Fear of Sex

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #6: Erica Jong (1984)

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

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

In the days when feminism was called "women's liberation," the emphasis was on equal rights, the control over reproduction and challenging existing stereotypes. But during the eighties, a number of different economic and political issues came to the surface within the movement. As some freedoms were won, questions were raised, such as, what happens to the spirit of the struggle itself? Feminism (like any political movement) was faced with the difficulty of evolving and diversifying in order to accommodate different views and the possibilities of reform. Some of those eclectic voices to emerge in feminism became part of a chapter in my book called The Many Faces of Feminism. One of those interviews was with author Erica Jong. In the seventies, Jong put herself on the literary map with her controversial roman a clef Fear of Flying (1973), which took on sexual taboos with all the irreverence of a female Henry Miller. Her novel was narrated by its protagonist, Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing, a twenty-nine-year-old poet who had published two books of poetry. On a trip to Vienna with her second husband, she decides to indulge her sexual fantasies with another man. When I spoke to her in 1984, she had just published a sequel titled Parachutes and Kisses. The idea of sexual independence for women was the centerpiece of Fear of Flying, but the notion of sexual freedom and what that means in the eighties became the basis of our discussion of Parachutes and Kisses.

Script Weaver

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #5: Robert Towne (1988)

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

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.


One section of the book dealt with film directors confronting the changing face of the industry in the eighties. In 1988, screenwriter Robert Towne was one of Hollywood's most gifted, intelligent and in demand writers. He emerged out of the sixties as a "script consultant" on Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and in the seventies on The Godfather (1972). He become an influential screenwriter as that decade went forward (The Last Detail, Chinatown, Shampoo) and turned to directing in the eighties (Personal Best,Tequila Sunrise). When we chatted in 1988, while he was promoting Tequila Sunrise, an entertaining romantic melodrama starring Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell, neither of us knew that he would make only two movies (Without Limits, Ask the Dust) in the next two decades. Yet given the bleak forecast he provided for Hollywood movies in this interview, the future now comes as no surprise.

Movie Passion

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #4: Pauline Kael (1983)

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/11/talking-out-of-turn-4-pauline-kael-1983.html

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

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

Talking Out of Turn had one section devoted to critics who ran against the current of popular thinking in the eighties. That chapter included discussions with film critic Vito Russo (The Celluloid Closet) who wrote a book about gay cinema before the horror of AIDS changed the landscape; also Jay Scott, who would later die from AIDS, spoke about how, despite being one of Canada's sharpest and wittiest writers on movies, he was initially a reluctant critic; and author Margaret Atwood who turned to literary criticism in her 1986 book Second Words. She discussed -- from an author's perspective -- the value of criticism and how it was changing for the worst during this decade.

Pauline Kael

There was also a discussion with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael who two years earlier had returned to writing after a brief hiatus as a consultant in Hollywood.  Kael's career began at a fortuitous time in movie history during the sixties when Godard, Truffaut, Bertolucci and Arthur Penn dramatically changed the face of the art form. Her reviews also changed the intent and style of criticism. She fought the auteur school of Andrew Sarris that was worshipful of film directors. She created instead an intuitive and personal approach to criticism based on examining her responses to the work and illuminating that experience in the context of art, politics, popular culture and literature. In a sense, she acted on D.H. Lawrence's sharp observation in his Classic Studies in American Literature: "Never trust the artist, trust the tale."

When we met to talk at the Windsor Arms hotel in Toronto, during her book tour for her compendium, 5001 Nights at the Movies, the Reagan decade was already beginning to have its deadening impact on the movie industry. I had only been reviewing professionally for about three years and was already beginning to witness a decline in quality pictures as well as the decline of a critical and discerning audience. With that question rattling in my brain, we began the interview.

The English Way

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #3: Margaret Drabble (1987)

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/11/talking-out-of-turn-3-margaret-drabble.html

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

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large. (See some of the others here and here.)

author Margaret Drabble

During the eighties, England was going through the trauma of no longer being able to maintain the power and the glory it once possessed when it was an Empire. So (just as in the United States) England also elected a leader, Margaret Thatcher, who (like Ronald Reagan in the U.S.) promised to restore those "glory days" at any cost. Of course, Reagan and Thatcher, both larger than life figures, never came close to restoring anything glorious. But they did both change the political landscape dramatically. In their midst. many spoke out against their policies - including author Margaret Drabble (The Radiant Way). 

In one section of Talking Out of Turn, I looked at England during that decade. And I wanted to include individuals who both predated Margaret Thatcher and were also contemporaries of her. At CJRT-FM, I was lucky enough to have spoken to author Alan Sillitoe (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), film directors Lindsay Anderson (If...) and Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette) and they helped flesh out the past and the present. But Margaret Drabble was a writer who crossed over from both the Seventies to the Eighties. She not only became an outspoken critic of the Thatcher government, she also understood the price her policies would exact in the future. In this 1987 interview, Drabble delved into the effect of Thatcherism on human values. The Radiant Way, her study of three friends begins right on the eve of the Thatcher era. It was her first work of fiction in seven years.

Fright Show

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #2: David Cronenberg (1983)

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/11/talking-out-of-turn-2-david-cronenberg.html

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

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

Tom Fulton of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

The horror film genre in the eighties had grown significantly more popular because horror writers, like Stephen King, were pumping out books that were already infused with a film sensibility. But the success of thillers like Friday the 13th and The Nightmare on Elm Street also brought on a deluge of dread-inducing suspense pictures that were essentially about people bent on, what my friend Alex Patterson once called, head-pulling rampages. Although these films and their imitators were often lauded for their subversiveness, they were actually quite morally conservative, fitting snuggly into the Reagan era. After all, in those movies, why was it the sexually active teenagers who always got snuffed out and it was the virgin who became the hero that vanquished the killer? Many of these horror movies did more to re-enforce our fears and prejudices than help us come to terms with transgression. 

David Cronenberg.

What true horror became in the eighties and what it began to mean in artistic terms was part of a discussion I had with one of its practitioners, David Cronenberg (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), in 1983. As a Canadian director who began his career in the seventies making low-budget thrillers, Cronenberg was just about to release his first big-budget commercial movie, The Dead Zone, which was adapted from a best-selling Stephen King novel. He was also about to be honoured at the Festival of Festivals (the original name of the Toronto International Film Festival) and had programed a series on science-fiction films for that year's event. We began the interview talking about the changing face of horror right at that moment when, in retrospect, he was beginning to move beyond the genre.

Visibility and Invisibility

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #1: Jerzy Kosinski (1982)

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/11/talking-out-of-turn-1-jerzy-kosinski.html

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

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

Jerzy Kosinski

The interview with author Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird, Being There) took place in 1982 while he was promoting his novel, Pinball. The book was written in response to the murder of John Lennon a couple of years earlier. It's the story of a female fan who hunts down a popular rock star by seducing a former classical pianist to help her in the search. The novel examines the motivations of the pop fan: Is she moved more by the artist, or his art? Our talk also came shortly after the release of Warren Beatty's Reds (1982), which examined the life of the American Communist journalist John Reed (Ten Days That Shook the World) who covered the Russian Revolution. In the film, Kosinski played the Soviet ideologue Zinoviev.

Jerzy Kosinski was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust by living under a false identity. He wrote about that experience in The Painted Bird (1965). Many of his books took up the theme of anonymity and invisibility which, ironically, came to a head in the late eighties when he was being accused of plagiarizing some of his work. He ultimately committed suicide in 1991. His final note read: "I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity." Before Eternity knocked, we discussed the subject of anonymity and visibility.

Douglas Adams: Literary Hero

Although Douglas Adams has been gone for over a decade, his work still finds new audiences including some television adaptations that drew enthusiastic responses from Mark Clamen in Critics at Large.

Dirk Gently and the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All British TV

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/03/douglas-adams-dirk-gently-comes-to.html

Stephen Mangan and Darren Boyd star in Dirk Gently, on BBC Four

Adapting beloved literary characters to television is a risky business. Often, though, it is a risk well worth taking, as in Steven Moffat’s sublime variation on the classic Conan Doyle characters and stories in Sherlock, which recently aired its second season. This year, the BBC tries its hand at another generation’s literary hero: Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently. The TV version of Dirk Gently first saw the light of day as a 60-minute test pilot that aired in December 2010. Commissioned for a three-part series a few months later, the first new episode premiered on BBC Four on March 5 and its third and last episode aired just this past Monday. With Gently, the result is less explosive than with Sherlock, but then again, the show is working with a smaller palette (smaller budget, and a half hour less screen time per episode – a Gently episode is 60 minutes, while Sherlock episodes run 90) and a much more restricted canon. On the other hand, Moffat was hardly the first to adapt the great detective, and Dirk Gently hasn’t (yet!) been immortalized as a puppet on Sesame Street. Adams’ fans have reason to be apprehensive, and when it comes to this new series, it is really a matter of balancing expectations.

Reaganism

With the American presidential election upon us, we felt it timely to revisit the reagan era through an HBO documentary reviewed by Susan Green for Critics at Large.

Recollections of Reagan: A Confounding Centennial

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/02/recollections-of-reagan-confounding.html

President Reagan (Credit: Ronald Reagan Library)

While visiting embattled Nicaragua as a journalist in 1984, I met the grieving mother of a four-year-old killed by the Contras. These vicious mercenaries, not-so-secretly funded by the United States, had been firing mortars into the remote mountain town of Teotecacinte. After residents spent 17 consecutive days in rudimentary bomb shelters, Carmen Guttierez Suyapa was allowed to play outside when it seemed as if the attacks had finally ended. She died under a sapodilla tree, where someone later planted a tiny flowering begonia in her memory.

Ronald Reagan lost his memory to Alzheimer’s disease, at the end apparently no longer able to recall having been the 40th president. Upon his death in 2004 at age 93, he had lived 89 more years than the Nicaraguan child whose blood essentially was on his hands. The Contras – he referred to them as “freedom fighters” and “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” – got their weapons and other supplies with his blessing.

There is, of course, no mention of little Carmen in Reagan, a thought-provoking and beautifully crafted profile that's perhaps a bit too kind to its controversial subject. The documentary premiered at January’s Sundance Film Festival before a February 7 broadcast on HBO (with a repeat at 8 p.m. on February 9) during a week that marked what would have been his 100th birthday. Director Eugene Jarecki, who divides his time between New York City and Vermont, covers that 1980s period of intervention in Central America primarily to examine the Iran-Contra affair: Proceeds from illegal arms sales to the Ayatollah supported the counterrevolutionaries trying to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who spearheaded the entire operation, has since said of Reagan’s participation: "I have no doubt that he was told about the use of residuals for the Contras, and that he approved it. Enthusiastically."

Thriller Dillers

Despite the number of best selling thrillers out there, David Churchill in Critics at Large bemoaned the current state of the genre.

Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and the Current State of the Thriller

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/12/dan-browns-lost-symbol-and-current.html

As a genre, whether in books or films, the thriller is in a terrible state. And no, it's not all Dan Brown's fault. Over the last 20 years, the thriller has devolved to the point where it is often just this side of science fiction. I love good science fiction, so this is certainly no diss of that genre, but when thriller writers and filmmakers feel compelled to produce more and more outlandish plots just to get attention, you know something is wrong in the state of Denmark (and yes, I would consider Hamlet a thriller, one of inaction perhaps, but still a thriller).

Herewith are some of the basic plots of a few thrillers in the last 30 years: a group of former Nazis clone Hitler (Ira Levin's The Boys From Brazil – 1976); a group of scientists raise the Titanic to obtain a rare mineral that the US government can then use to create a sound wave to knock down Soviet missiles (Clive Cussler's Raise the Titanic – 1976); Hitler's right-hand-man Rudolph Hess has survived the war and is now a super villain in South Africa attempting to launch a nuclear device at Israel (Greg Iles' Spandau Phoenix – 1993); a virulent form of the Ebola virus is stolen by an evil group planning to let it free on the world (Ken Follett's White Out – 2004); a plan to destroy the Vatican with antimatter is hatched by a madman who also wants to be Pope – and, oh yes, the novel's hero jumps out of a helicopter using a tarp as a parachute! (Brown'sAngels and Demons – 2000); a group of people over centuries try to hide the fact Jesus married and fathered children after his crucifixion – the Catholic Church does everything in its power to eliminate those who know (Brown's The Da Vinci Code – 2003); a madman tries to show that a plan to keep The Word from the whole world is the result of a conspiracy by the Masons – many of whom are at the top of the US government (Brown's The Last Symbol – 2009, just released in paperback in October 2010).

Frankly Speaking

It's rare to find a memoir about a mentor relationship with a famous artist that isn't self-aggrandizing, or filled with prurient gossip, but Pauline Butcher's memoir about Frank Zappa, as Kevin Courrier explains in his review in Critics at Large, is a cut above the rest.

Beauty & the Beast: Pauline Butcher's Freak Out! My Life With Frank Zappa

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/12/beauty-beast-pauline-butchers-freak-out.html

Until recent years, most of the books about the late American composer Frank Zappa, including my own (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa), have been attempts to provide a proper context for his work. Simply put, for many, the name Frank Zappa only conjures up images of a deranged freak who warns us not to eat the yellow snow. What gets lost in that somewhat uniformed view is a much deeper and complex understanding of how Zappa brought to popular music a ferocious desire to break down the boundaries between high and low culture. He created in his work, until his death from prostate cancer in 1993, a unique and sophisticated form of musical comedy.

By infusing the canon of 20th Century music with his scabrous and outrageous wit (influenced by comedian Lenny Bruce and the irreverent clowning of Spike Jones), Zappa presented musical history through the kaleidoscopic lens of social satire turning that history into a wildly theatrical display of Dadaist farce. He poked fun at middle-class conformity (Freak Out!), the Sixties counterculture (We're Only in it For the Money), Seventies disco (Sheik Yerbouti), the corporate rock industry (Tinsel Town Rebellion), and the fundamentalist narcolepsy of the Reagan era (You Are What You Is). Beginning with his band The Mothers of Invention in the Sixties, Zappa built a formidable career in rock & roll by combining a wide range of styles, including serious contemporary music (inspired by Edgard Varese, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern and Charles Ives), jazz (Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus), rhythm & blues (Guitar Slim, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson), doo-wop (The Channels), and social and political parody. His career essentially had its roots in the artistic rebellion against the excesses of Romanticism in the late 19th Century beginning with the absurdism of Erik Satie, and then continuing with the birth of serialism that ushered in the modern era of the 20th Century. 

Arrested Development

Just released this week on DVD, Wes Anderson's latest film Moonrise Kingdom has impressed a number of people save Shlomo Schwartzberg in Critics at Large.

Beyond Precious: Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/07/beyond-precious-wes-andersons-moonrise.html

Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman in Moonrise Kingdom

Having just finished teaching a course on the great American cinema of the ‘70s, and spending weeks immersed in fine films by directors at their creative peaks (Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and many others), it was something of a rude jolt to be brought back to earth having to deal with the generally underwhelming current crop of American directors. While Spielberg, De Palma and Scorsese are still around and often doing good work – creatively Coppola is missing in action – there are only a handful of relevant moviemakers (David Fincher, Curtis Hanson) from the next generation who make movies that speak to the way we live today. And when you’ve tasted the highs of The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Nashville or Shampoo, why would you want to make time for the enervated films of Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Meek’s Cutoff), the scattershot ones of Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) or the contemptuous movies of Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Life During Wartime)? But of all the annoying/irritating minor talents being unduly praised to the skies, usually only by certain film critics, none is likely more of a chore to sit through than Wes Anderson. His latest movie, Moonrise Kingdom, is really more of the same: a hermetic, arid, mindless film that defies you to truly care about anything that’s happening on screen.

If you had to pick one word to define his films, such as Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tanenbaums(2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), it would be precious. Not in the very valuable meaning of the word, but in the affectedly dainty or over-refined definition. With the exception of his debut movie, the sweet, likeable Bottle Rocket (1996), Anderson’s films are enshrined baubles that may look pretty – he doesn’t stint on the art direction – but beyond surface appearances have little of value on offer. If Moonrise Kingdom is about anything – and it barely is – it’s a paean to lost innocence. Unfortunately, that worthy theme is laid on with a trowel by the filmmaker, undone by its lackadaisical pace – there’s almost no forward momentum in the movie – and depicted in a decidedly voyeuristic fashion. The putative lovers are two 12 year olds, nerdy orphan Sam Shakursky (Jared Gilman) and emotionally distraught Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward). When he disappears from his scout troop, which is led by an anal-retentive scoutmaster (Edward Norton), and she runs away from her turbulent home life, the adults in the community embark on a frantic hunt for the children, leading to all sorts of (banal) revelations about themselves, the kids and life itself.

Filmmaker Wes Anderson

In a nutshell, Moonrise Kingdom, which was co-written by Anderson and Roman Coppola, is vapid and moronic. The adults are idiots; the kids precociously, but not believably, wise; and the world Anderson likes to portray is unrecognizable. People do not speak or behave in any believable manner in his films – they’re laconic to a ridiculous degree – and are prone to reading magazines called Indian Corn or belonging to groups like The Khaki Scouts of North America, titles which are meant to be ironic commentaries but which only betray Anderon's undue fondness for obvious quirky jokes that go nowhere at all. This emperor really has no clothes. 

Animated Homage

There are many film directors who pay homage to artists they admire, but as Shlomo Schwartzberg pointed out when he reviewed Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist, this homage brought the subject of this tribute back to life.  

Tati Lives!: The Illusionist

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/01/tati-lives-illusionist.html

While there’s no shortage of animated movies coming our way each year – and many good ones in the mix – simple, hand-drawn animation the way it used to be done by Disney, among others, is something of a lost art. Except nobody has told French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet that, and as a result he’s producing some of today's finest animated work. The Illusionist, Chomet’s follow-up to his wonderful Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003), is a small gem. It is a continuation of his brilliant cinematic vision while also a departure from his previous feature.

What Chomet has done (and who would have imagined this?) is bring beloved French director Jacques Tati (Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle) back to exquisite life, both in terms of the project itself and as a character in the movie. The Illusionist was originally written in 1956 by Tati and Henri Marquet as a tribute to Tati’s estranged daughter Sophie Tatischeff, but the script was never produced – until now. Changed somewhat – the film’s main location has been moved from Prague to Edinburgh, where Paris-born Chomet now lives – The Illusionist, which is set in the late fifties, is a poignant (platonic) love story between a fading French magician named Tatischeff and Alice, a young Scottish woman he encounters who he eventually ends up living with. Tatischeff is having trouble earning his keep, as his audiences flock to newfangled acts, such as the preening rock and roll Beatles-like group Billy Boy and the Britoons, whom he shares billing with at the outset of the movie. Tatischeff's old-fashioned magic shtick, complete with a rabbit being pulled out of his hat, isn’t cutting it anymore, sending him on a desperate trajectory from Paris to London and, finally, to Edinburgh. There, he and his bad-tempered rabbit settle into a rooming house with Alice. He tries, and usually fails, to bring in enough money for he and Alice to live on. Yet the young girl, who touches him deeply, is also an ingenuous, innocent soul, who believes that Tatischff is actually conjuring up all the presents (a pretty pair of shoes, a beautiful winter coat) he buys her, forcing the magician to find jobs to pay for the gifts. Being cast in the spirit of Tati, those endeavours usually don’t fare well.

Jacques Tati

Tatischeff, of course, is a stand-in for Tati himself. Chomet’s animated version of the French comedian – created by chief animator Laurent Kircher – is spot on, perfectly replicating Tati’s unique gait (half shambling, half balletic) and his perpetually quizzical expressions, as if he’s always missing the joke that everyone else gets. Finely recreated, too, is the way Tati/Tatischeff leaves quiet havoc in his wake, as objects are damaged and things get screwed up, while he's only vaguely aware of what he’s done. (The real Tati pops up, too, on a movie screen showing his classic Mon Oncle, proffering, in a quietly subtle and amusing scene, an opportunity for the two Tatis to play off each other.) Alice, with her big eyes and diffident, kind manner, brings out the best in Taitscheff, giving him, in effect, a reason to keep on going when he might otherwise have given up on life.