LUNA SEA NOTES

Film Criticism, Where is Thy Sting? (Part Five)

2012-02-01T12:00:00.000-05:00

Back in the spring of 2010, when Andrew O'Hehir of Salon wrote a piece about the rapid cutting of film critics from various publications, his tone told all of us to get over it. Since we wouldn't and didn't, Susan Green first stepped up to address it. By the next day, everyone wanted a shot beginning with Kevin Courrier. On the third day, David Churchill came to the podium. Not originally planning to write anything, Shlomo Schwartzberg followed after reading the previous days' posts. To complete our response, Andrew Dupuis provided a philosophical reading of how the film industry has affected the art of criticism.

Is Film Criticism Dead? #5

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/04/is-film-criticism-dead-5.html

My colleagues [Susan, Kevin, David & Shlomo] have previously and majestically destroyed Andrew O' Hehir's ignorant article "Film Critics: Shut up already!" I support them and their opinions whole heartedly. But I feel as if my position on the subject would be trite, so I'm shifting the looking glass from film criticism to the film industry's impact on it. Here are some disparate observations.

(1)

We've been focused so intently on whether film criticism is on its way out or not that I think we've somewhat neglected an important point that we wouldn't have anything to write about were it not for the films themselves. The steady decline in the quality of films has paved the way for many a harsh word. In other words, it's becoming increasingly more difficult to stay positive when pretty much every film that projects itself onto the silver screen simply isn't worth the time it takes to attack it with the mighty strokes of a keyboard. This may be partly why film criticism just isn’t being taken seriously anymore. Criticism today examines the mediocrity of mainstream cinema but doesn’t often look at how we got here.

(2)

Film criticism originated from the realization that the movies we were watching were being crafted as an art form, that there might be more than meets the eye. The likes of Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford were paid tribute because it was recognized that they were manipulating the medium to better suit their own voices; they made art disguised as popular entertainment. But that was cinema in its golden age. This month over two dozen films saw a major theatrical release. Compare this to a decade ago when only a dozen were released, two decades ago where eight made their way to the silver screen and thirty years ago where a single film was released to theatres in April. Films used to be treated as events. Things were so much simpler and releases were handled with care. But industries grow because it's the nature of the beast. And it leaves a lot of garbage to search through if we're going to find anything worth mentioning. But there are still diamonds in the rough (only it's excruciating to sit through most of these poor excuses for entertainment). It’s those little gems, however, that keep most of us coming back for more. The lot of a film critic is to survive the garbage heap to seize the diamond – but the garbage can wear down the morale of the critic. Is he even sure he’s writing about an art form anymore?

(3)

We need to keep history alive but stop living in the past. Of course, if we don't pay tribute to films now that were deemed worthy thirty years ago who will? If no one shows an interest in films like the originalInvasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the wonderful 1978 remake then they may not live beyond DVD's eventual demise. With technology changing rapidly films are getting left behind. Avatar may be damn near impossible to avoid right now but will Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) survive to find a new audience? We've given so much power to contemporary cinema and its fading magic that many viewers will grow up blissfully unaware of the films their favorite movies play homage to.

(4)

People will never stop seeing bad movies so a critic can't stop this no matter how hard they try. It's not enough to know that disposable movies like The Back Up Plan are already being mistaken for other unmemorable flicks such as The Break Up (2006) and The Wedding Planner (2001). The box office tallies of James Cameron's Avatar and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland continue to push movies likeThe Lion King (1994) and Jurassic Park (1993) further from our consciousness. Money doesn't equate quality and it certainly won't dictate whether people will still care about Avatar twenty years from now. Which begs the question: Will anyone remember or care about the reviews those pictures received?

(5)

It's not good enough to continue offering disposable critiques of terrible films or documenting the forgetfulness of a picture whose name escapes you after leaving the theatre. We need to shift our focus and honour films, both past and present, to those that matter. The best movies pay tribute to the legacy of film history; they’re not made because they feel they deserve a place there.

(6)

Sure, many critics are in it now for the pay cheque but don't forget why you chose the profession in the first place. Forget O' Hehir and Speak up, don't shut up. If we lose sight of why we fell in love with films in the first place there isn't a reason to keep on writing about them now, is there?

- originally published on April 30, 2010 in Critics at Large.

-- Andrew Dupuis is a devoted cinephile and graduate of Brock University's Film Studies program with an extensive background in Canadian and popular cinema. He is currently working on his first book.

Film Criticism, Where is Thy Sting? (Part Four)

2012-01-31T12:00:00.003-05:00

Is Film Criticism Dead? #4

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/04/is-film-criticism-dead-4.html

Andrew O'Hehir's recent Salon piece on film criticism has understandably struck a nerve with my colleagues on this site. I agree with both Susan and Kevin that critics losing their long-time jobs on major newspapers, magazines and trade publications is tragic, but I’m not sure it matters all that much. The new generation of film critics coming up the ranks just aren't worthy to inherit the mantle of the relatively few good film critics and film writers we still have.

Long gone are the days when a talented critic like Pauline Kael could tub thump for a favourite movie, like Barry Levinson’s wonderful comedy Diner (1982), and actually turn that film, which was dumped by its studio, into something of a hit. Siskel and Ebert did the same for Carl Franklin’s terrific thriller One False Move (1992), which had been under the radar until they shone a light on it. These days, critics are only taken seriously as negative factors. In fact, some movies are now not even press screened in hopes that the movie can get a decent weekend box office before the reviewers take a whack at it. But since those movies are generally bad, they likely would have been financially unsuccessful regardless of whether the critics were able to pan the movie in advance of its opening.

Truth be told, the public doesn’t give a damn what we film critics say about anything - and the press generally doesn't give them a reason to be taken seriously. In Canada, we had a situation where one leading film critic tried his utmost to get one of the country’s major film critics’ associations to honour Paul Gross’s execrable war movie, Passchendaele (2008), which was never even picked up for distribution in the U.S. He wanted to give it some sort of award since the film was, in his words, an important one. And our national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, even published an editorial urging the public to attend the movie – which deals with Canada’s role in one of the key battles of the First World War – out of some sort of civic duty. I did an article many years ago asking if film critics were indeed soft on Canadian movies and, you know what, they actually admitted they were, and also treated American independent movies equally leniently, too. Is it any wonder English Canadian movies tank at the local box office? The public, understandably, doesn’t trust their local movie reviewers to tell the truth about their national cinema.

And when the film critics have a chance to expose flaws in movies that the public wants to see, they usually drop the ball. How many times did I read reviewers castigate James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) for lacking a decent, original script but then turned around to praise the film anyway since the special effects were so stupendous? Or bend over backwards to deny the obvious anti-Semitism in Mel Gibson’sThe Passion of the Christ (2004), even when its virulent hatred of Jews was plain as the nose on your face? And Gibson, to boot, was an anti-Semite himself. They’re also great at travelling in packs, or pack journalism, deeming movies bad or disasters when they’re often neither. John Boorman’s Burma-set political movie Beyond Rangoon (1995), for example, was an excellent picture, but was uniformly trashed by the film critics who first saw at the Cannes Film Festival. That ensured that critics (who were not at Cannes) wouldn’t bother investigating to see if the movie was as indeed as bad as initially written. And are Gigli (2003) or Ishtar (1987) really the worst that Hollywood has to offer, compared to genuine turkeys like A Few Good Man (1992) or Top Gun (1986)?

O’Hehir misses the point in his rant. Sometimes film critics, good or bad, and who still think for themselves, do lose their jobs. And they are now losing them in greater numbers. But it’s also occasionally about ignorant twentysomethings, who know very little about the history of movies, or are interested in diverse forms of cinema, that are taking jobs away from their more-knowledgeable elders. When I lost my job at Boxoffice, after 20 years, because my editor responded to a reader who was questioning whether I had actually seen the movie I panned, he insinuated that I actually hadn’t (he wrote that he didn’t know if I had or not but surely hoped I did). It was less a case of pandering to the public, though it was that as well, and more an indictment of the Internet where the reader can engage in cheap, anonymous criticism of a film critic without taking the trouble of writing a literate letter to their local newspaper and attaching their name to it. The so-called ‘democracy’ of the Internet, which is whyBoxoffice decided to let the readers respond to the magazine’s reviews, can function as a killer of meritocracy, too. But many of the remaining Boxoffice film critics, cowards as they were in not standing up for Kevin and myself, are still original thinkers. It’s not always as simple as consumer reporters replacing discerning film critics. (I did lose a film reviewing gig at a suburban Toronto weekly a decade ago, after seven years there, because my editor didn't like my going against the popular grain, but an internal survey by the newspaper, which was never published, also determined that my column was popular and I was never replaced by any other critic.)

I am much more concerned today with the imminent deaths of so many newspapers and magazines, even when they’re also published online, than I am of the specific critics or writers who are out of their jobs. And if I want to be contrary here, the loss of the post of film critic at so many newspapers may not matter all that much. After all, we have very little decent music criticism, even in quality music magazines like Mojo, but we still have a lot of good music. The reverse is true of the movies. Most of them, Hollywood and foreign-language alike, are really bad, as per Theodore Sturgeon’s law that 90% of everything is crap. And the critics, young or older, free-thinkers or not, still reviewing either just won’t acknowledge that. Thus their praising of Hollywood garbage like Avatar, or the elitist garbage ofSyndromes and a Century (2007), comes to mean the same thing in the end, unworthy films getting reams of ink or pixels while the few better films out there often go unnoticed.

In that light, my sympathy for the likes of Variety’s Todd McCarthy, or the Detroit Free Press’s Terry Lawson, or any other film critic suddenly thrown out of a job, is more a function of my relating to people my own age (in their 40s and 50s), losing their steady gig and paycheque and less a concern about what it means to the so called art of film criticism, So is film criticism dead? Not entirely.The New York Times still values its film critics and Time magazine just added Mary Pols, who is quite good, to its roster, replacing Richard Schickel, who has retired from reviewing, and thus augmenting its long time critic Richard Corliss. There are also some good film writers, like Howard Hampton, gracing the pages of magazines like Film Comment.

Is film criticism in bad shape, perhaps dying? Yes but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. After all, if so little of real worth is coming out of their practitioners’ computer keys, maybe this is one critical art form that should be euthanized and put out of its misery. If every film critic, including those of us writing on this blog, disappeared tomorrow, the quality of movies would not be affected one iota. Yes, good film writing, as opposed to straightforward (read unimagnative) movie reviewing, is important in terms of trying to call attention to quality or exposing meretricious films that are receiving undue praise; we wouldn’t still be practicing it, as we are on this blog, if we didn’t believe that. But it may not be significant enough if, ultimately, we don’t help or hinder the chances of a movie being seen by those who it was made for or change what gets made or rejected by cinema’s powers that be in the first place. In that light, the death of film criticism can be viewed as utterly meaningless. More disturbing, to me at least, in light of the current cinema’s continuing poor quality, is the thought that maybe the smart film criticism we grew up with may never have never meant anything at all.

- originally published on April 24, 2010 in Critics at Large.

-- Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto.

Film Criticism, Where is Thy Sting? (Part Three)

2012-01-30T12:00:00.003-05:00

Back in the spring of 2010, when Andrew O'Hehir of Salon wrote a piece about the rapid cutting of film critics from various publications, his tone told us to get over it. Since we wouldn't and didn't, Susan Green first stepped up to address it. By the next day, everyone wanted a shot beginning with Kevin Courrier. On the third day, David Churchill came to the podium with some very specific reasons why he left the profession years earlier.

Is Film Criticism Dead? #3

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/04/is-film-criticism-dead-3.html

I wasn't going to weigh into this issue for a couple of reasons. First, both Susan and Kevin had done such a good job here taking the mickey out of Andrew O'Hehir's ridiculous Salon column "Movie Critics: Shut Up Already." Secondly, I've not been a film critic for over 20 years, so I didn't think what I had to say would be timely. But then I read Kevin's piece and it brought to mind why I decided to quit film criticism as a profession in 1989. I guess I saw the writing on the wall for both what the profession was becoming and what I was becoming within that profession -- neither of which I particularly liked.

It all began with a long-forgotten Weird Al Yankovic flick called UHF (1989). Never saw it; never wanted to. One afternoon, I was attending a concert at the Ontario Place Forum (now the Molson Amphitheatre), when a film-critic acquaintance of mine sat down beside me. He will remain nameless to protect the guilty. We shot the breeze about what we were up to for a bit and then he told me a story. He was working for a free newspaper (it no longer exists) writing film reviews. He'd been assigned the aforementioned Yankovic 'classic' which he told me he hated, and wrote a review that basically indicated same. After he handed the assignment in he got a phone call from his editor. It seemed the film's production company was buying a big ad for this film in that week's paper. The editor asked this critic if he'd mind changing his review to something "more positive." And he did.

Let me repeat that: And he did.

I was absolutely floored. "First," I said to him, "How could you do that? And secondly, if I was ever dumb enough to do something like that, I'd sure as hell would never tell somebody like me, or anybody, I'd done it." I don't remember his lame excuse, but needless to say our conversation ended shortly after that. I don't know about him, but I had and have something called integrity and ethics. What he'd done was something I'd never think of doing (But what do I know. Kevin told me recently this "writer" continues to thrive in the profession.) Flashforward to that fall. As film critic gigs were drying up, and I found myself scrambling, something began to happen to me that Kevin wrote about yesterday:

"Many editors and producers, with their concern for numbers (or advertising dollars), therefore fear the possibility of losing portions of their audience. In that climate, if you’re a critic, you can begin to fear your own instincts. Instead of standing up for your insights, you might worry more about what the reaction to your piece might be – and what the fallout of that opinion might bring." I found myself in that self-same trap. As I saw my last steady film critic gig vanish, I began to question my opinions and my insights. I began to second guess everything I was trying to do. My writing suffered and I was no longer having any fun in a profession I fell in love with when I wrote my first piece of published criticism in 1978 (it was about The Deer Hunter). I attempted to write for a few weeks more, but I knew in my heart it was over, so I quit. Why? Because I didn't want to become like that critic who changed his opinion about UHF because he was told to. I couldn't work in a profession where that sort of behaviour was condoned and encouraged, and I worried that I might become like that.

I walked away. I don't regret it. And guess what? Twenty years later I'm having a lot of fun again writing about film, music, books and TV here.

- originally published on April 23, 2010 in Critics at Large.

-- David Churchill is a film critic and author of the novel The Empire of Death.

Film Criticism, Where is Thy Sting? (Part Two)

2012-01-29T12:00:00.008-05:00

Is Film Criticism Dead? #2

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/04/is-film-criticism-dead-2.html

It’s pretty clear from Salon critic Andrew O’Hehir’s article, with its Alfred E Neuman What-Me-Worry attitude, that he really has no grasp of the bigger picture at stake here – as Susan so aptly put it yesterday. But why should he? What’s becoming increasingly obvious today is the manner in which careerism has infected journalism, so much so that O’Hehir (as a critic paid to ask questions) refuses to examine why certain film critics are no longer considered employable while others are.

I’ve been somewhat fortunate that I came into the profession in 1981 just as the line started to blur between critical and consumer-friendly journalism. Looking back, I think I've had a pretty satisfying career and accomplished things on terms that I found agreeable. That’s partly because there was a time when you could distinguish yourself from puffery by, to quote one sharp radio producer, treating the audience as voyeurs rather than consumers. In those days, if your goal was to be smart, articulate and informative, it could get you hired. It’s almost the opposite now. I’ve lost three jobs as a film critic in the last few years not because I wasn’t doing my job, or forgot how to write, or talk, or had nothing of interest to say; I was relieved of my duties because I held to the same standards I originally brought to my work – and those standards in the business have now radically changed.

I left Boxoffice in Los Angeles after about ten years with the magazine because the editor-in-chief decided to question the integrity of one of its veteran critics on their public website. When the editor refused to remove the slander, I quit in support of the writer. But there wasn’t a whisper of protest from any of the other in-house critics even though any one of them could have just as easily been targeted. After seven years of reviewing films for CBC Radio Syndication, I was let go by an aspiring executive who didn’t think I liked enough movies (i.e. I wasn’t being consumer-friendly). Finally, last fall, I was dropped from the freelance roster of Metro Newspaper without them even informing me that I was being let go. They ducked that responsibility by neglecting to invite me to the freelancers' meeting before the Toronto International Film Festival thus leaving me stranded with no one to cover it for. So I ultimately had to give my press pass back to TIFF. It was the first time not covering the Festival since 1981. Once again, there was no cry of foul from anybody. When professional standards and conduct have slipped to this degree, where editors and producers can act with impunity and without consideration, you can’t lay the blame solely on the economics of the time. However, economics are now being used as a pretense to instill fear in writers who don’t want to lose their gigs, or their access to all those movies and celebrities to interview. That may be one reason why we see more consumer reporting rather than film criticism – and why moral courage in the face of unethical practices is on the decline.

Consumer reporting, for one thing, is much safer. If all you’re doing is giving plot summary and informing the audience that they’ll either love it or hate it, nobody is going to get too jazzed – or upset - over what you say. After all, anybody can have an opinion. Criticism though is about ideas as well as opinions. It’s about creating a context for your reactions which turns out to be more dangerous because it then forces the audience to consider what they are consuming and why. Many editors and producers, with their concern for numbers (or advertising dollars), now fear the possibility of losing portions of their audience. In this climate, if you’re a critic, you might begin to doubt your own instincts. Instead of standing behind your insights, you might worry more about what the reaction to your piece might be and what the fallout from your opinion might bring.

Since I’ve “retired” from professional reviewing and co-founded this website in order to continue writing commentary free from those pressures and anxieties, I have been teaching and lecturing and listening to people asking me questions about the profession – questions that Andrew O’Hehir chooses to avoid. When they ask me why film criticism has been gradually losing its teeth, I often share my experiences and observations. I tell them that if you are a real critic, you will continue to be one wherever you land because sometimes changing circumstances are out of your control. So all you can do is be true to yourself while resisting any capitulation to the desperate conformity around you. But, as a way of explaining the why-now part of this problem, I also give them a quote from the late American composer Frank Zappa.

Back in 1986, Zappa was interviewed by The Progressive, a Wisconsin monthly magazine associated with Midwestern progressivism, on the subject of mediocrity. Here’s what he had to say:

“Social pressure is placed on people to become a certain type of individual, and then rewards are heaped on people to conform to that stereotype…[You] can then look at what’s being done and say, ‘Jesus, I can do that.’ You celebrate mediocrity, you get mediocrity. People who could have achieved more won’t because they know that all they have to do is be ‘that,’ and they too can sell millions and make millions and have people love them because they are merely mediocre.”

“Few people who do anything excellent are ever heard of. You know why? Because excellence, pure excellence, terrifies…[people] who’ve been bred to appreciate the success of the mediocre. People don’t wish to be reminded that lurking somewhere there are people who can do some shit you can’t do. They can think a way you can’t think; they can run a way you can’t run; they can dance a way you can’t dance...So to keep them happy as a labor force, you say, ‘Let’s take this mediocre chump and we say, ‘He is terrific!’ All the other mediocre chumps say, ‘Yeah, that’s right and that gives me hope, because one day as mediocre and chumpish as I am, I can [be terrific, too].’ It’s smart labor relations. An MBA decision. That is the orientation of most entertainment, politics and religion. So considering how firmly entrenched all that is right now, you think it’s going to turn around? Not without a genetic mutation, it’s not!”

Amen.

- originally published on April 22, 2010 in Critics at Large.

- Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

Film Criticism, Where is Thy Sting? (Part One)

2012-01-28T12:20:00.002-05:00

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Back in the spring of 2010, Andrew O'Hehir of Salon wrote a piece about the rapid cutting of film critics from various publications. His tone told us to get over it. We couldn't and didn't. Susan Green stepped up to address it. Before long, it became one in a series of volleys.

Is Film Criticism Dead? #1

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/04/is-film-criticism-dead-1.html

Dorothy Parker

Film critic Andrew O’Hehir in Salon recently lamented the end of film criticism with the idea that even if it is on its death bed, and critics are losing their jobs, quit griping about it. Write about movies, he says, instead of your wounded pride.

There are a few of us at Critics at Large who have been at the short end of that ugly stick and we don't feel quite as glib about heading to the dustbin as Mr. O'Hehir does (it's also a lot easier to take that stand when you actually still have your paying job as a film critic). But let's digress no further.

Let's hear instead from Susan Green:

Jeezum Crow! That’s a traditional term used by old-time native Vermonters, a disappearing breed, to express anger but avoid blasphemy. Last week a piece by Andrew O’Hehir on Salon.comtargeted another disappearing breed, film journalists whose work appears in print. His point seems to be that critics who have lost jobs -- such as Todd McCarthy, recently fired by Variety after 31 years -- or are concerned that could happen in the near future should stop discussing this trend.

“Shut up. Shut up now,” O’Hehir commands. “If you’re worried that people don’t want to read your movie reviews, what in the name of Jesus Christ crucified makes you think they want to read your bitching and moaning?” Well, what in the name of Jeezum Crow makes this guy think we want to read an employed writer ridiculing a colleague who worries that his or her livelihood, and probably passion, might be obliterated?The dumbing-down process is significantly accelerated as literate newspapers and magazines are eclipsed by anything-goes Internet blogs. (Critics at Large is a literate Internet blog, by the way, and Salon is a literate online mag.) Aren’t the complaining critics O’Hehir demeans just canaries in the coal mine of an educated society’s destruction?

He disses the “elite cultural institution” perpetrated by the likes of Manny Farber, James Agee and Pauline Kael as a thing of the past after “a nice 50- or 60-year run.” OK. In that case, it’s goodbye William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Dorothy Parker. Why bother to measure good writing by virtue of such clever, intellectual standard-bearers? Why have standards at all? As the millennium approached in 1999, a panel of 360 political leaders, scientists, wordsmiths and visual artists selected Johannes Gutenberg as the most influential person of the past one thousand years. His 1455 eureka moment resulted in the printing press, without which there would be no computers today, and was deemed a profound achievement that changed the course of civilization like no other. The German inventor’s first publication was the Bible. Talk about Jeezum Crow!

- originally published on April 21, 2010 in Critics at Large.

-- Susan Green is a film critic and arts journalist based in Burlington, Vermont. She is the co-author, with Randee Dawn, of Law & Order Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion.

Red Scare Canuck Style

2012-01-27T12:00:00.000-05:00

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Most people know about the 'Red scare' in the United States culminating in the witch-hunting of the McCarthy era Fifties. But Canada had its own witch-hunt finely detailed in Daniel Francis's book which is addressed in this piece from last year by John Corcelli.

The Prism of History: Daniel Francis’s Seeing Reds: The

Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/01/prism-of-history-daniel-franciss-seeing.html

When you look at the world through the prism of history, the events that unfold today can appear luminously connected to the events of the past. In Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror (Arsenal Pulp, 2010) by historian Daniel Francis, this valuable prism comes with a fascinating story.

Francis is an historian based in Vancouver and he’s written over twenty books about Canadian history, including the Encyclopedia of British Columbia. His latest book covers 24 months in Canadian history, namely the post-war years leading up to the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. His premise is simple. In the years after the First World War, political activism by the masses was at its peak. Led by Unions, people felt the urgent need to achieve economic equality and launched an often highly charged political battle against the Federal government and industry for better rates of pay, better working conditions and more say in the political process. This revolt, leading up to the Winnipeg General Strike, was characterized as the “Red Scare” by the government and media of the day.

Author Daniel Francis

But as Francis explains, it wasn’t an isolated revolt. His worldly analysis helps us understand why the Canadian public was so charged up on both sides of the political spectrum. The rallying call of political activism was in full force in Canada between 1914 and 1919. It was first generated by the war itself as Canadians volunteered to fight. By 1917, after an intense political fight over conscription, Quebec’s independence movement got an early spark. When the war ended, newspapers carried the stories of revolution in Europe that inspired some Canadians who were eager for social change. What is striking about the book is the size, scope and militancy of the Canadian public, made up of a mostly Anglo-Saxon and Eastern European heritage.

After 1918, it wasn’t unusual to see thousands of men and women on the streets protesting against the government. As Francis astutely points out, “While the Great War was a momentous struggle that united most Canadians in support of their armed troops, it was also a divisive force, revealing and intensifying deep fractures in Canadian society. Native-born Canadians doubted the loyalty of the foreign-born.” Immigration, particularly after 1890, was an integral part of government policy as the Feds tried hard to seek out people to develop the growing economy. Immigrants from Europe, Great Britain, and the United States relocated in droves so that by 1914, when Canada entered the war, “half a million people living [here] could trace their origin to countries with which Canada was now in conflict.”

Winnipeg General Strike 1919

Francis paints a fascinating picture of the rise of political activism on the one hand, and the federal government’s strong actions to suppress it on the other. His book weaves tales of massive demonstrations on the streets of Winnipeg, or Toronto, that were inspired by the Russian Revolution. He also reports on the often-secret methods used by the Federal government to suppress and undermine these protest movements, aided by a paranoid House of Commons and a print media that sold the “Red Scare.” Francis doesn’t pull any punches describing the various spies employed by the North West Mounted Police, the precursor to the RCMP; or the work of Canada’s chief censor, Ernest Chambers, who spied on people who were considered radicals. “Better dead then Red” wouldn’t echo the discourse until the 1950s, but it was alive and well in Canada after 1918.

Francis tells this story with an approachable, slightly non-judgmental style, characterizing the era with great insight. As we read, the author seeks to answer the following questions: What happened during the Red Scare? Who participated? And how can we understand it in the context of its own time and in relation to current events? By carefully selecting details out of his extensive research, Daniel Francis seems to have lifted all the important stuff from his research, assessed its value and interpreted the events. He doesn’t burden the reader with a lot of dry facts but tries to add dramatic colour to the historical figures that graced Canadian government, media and political activists. Canadian history, often challenged as being dull and boring, is brought to vivid life as genuinely interesting and as provocative as any other country.

Francis has also grasped the media disinformation campaign that fueled the Red Scare with unrepentant stories about the “evils of Communism.” He cites Macleans magazine as an early anti-communist rag supported by major newspapers such as The Globe and the Manitoba Free Press, all under the private ownership of what we would now consider right-wing hardliners. One has to remember that “journalism,” as an honorable profession, was still decades away. Newspapers then often printed hearsay for fact and exaggerated what they didn’t understand. Francis puts these stories into a proper context and succeeds at relating the significance of what most Canadians were reading at the time. The Toronto Daily Star gets better marks for being a more balanced, a-political paper at the time, unlike today.

The so-called Red Scare, according to Francis, was a manufactured fear-mongering plan to ridicule the opposition forces in Canada with the help of the police, conservative media and covert agencies such as the RCMP. In fewer than 300 pages, Francis tells the story of two of the most significant years in Canadian history that led to the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. The result is a book that reflects a country that is barely recognizable today.

The last chapter, called “Nothing to Fear except Fear mongering itself” is the author’s personal reflection of what he’s learned from that story. For Daniel Francis, the study of these two years in Canada’s history is a prism to the 21st Century in Canada today.

Seeing Reds is a quiet reminder to me that the events of the present are usually shadowed by what’s come before.

- originally published on January 23, 2011 in Critics at Large.

- John Corcelli is a musician, actor, writer and theatre director with a keen interest in history.

The Dubious Agenda of Julian Assange

2012-01-26T12:59:00.003-05:00

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has been in the news a great deal lately including an extensive interview in the current Rolling Stone. While many have rallied to support his stated goals of government transparency, critic David Churchill begs to differ with his ethics.

Pernicious Pacifism: Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke and Julian Assange's WikiLeaks

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/08/pernicious-pacifism-nicholson-bakers.html

While doing research into World War II for a writing project, I came across Nicholson Baker's non-fiction book, Human Smoke (2008 – Simon & Schuster), on the bargain tables at my local Chapters bookstore (it was a second-printing hardcover). Looking for a stand-alone source of quotes and thinking on the war while it was happening, Baker's work looked promising. The book consists of hundreds of short vignettes (the shortest 20-30 words; the longest 1 page) taken from letters, diaries, speeches, books, magazine and newspaper articles published from between August 1892 and December 31, 1941 (the first vignette is a quote from Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, and the last is by Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian-Jewish writer and diarist). The majority of the book covers the years between 1933 and 1941. Baker's thesis? If the Allies had not been so complicit, so blood-thirsty in their actions, and only listened to the pacifists, a peace treaty could have been established between them and the Axis powers. Because Baker is a pacifist, the book not only repeatedly argues that a peace treaty of some sort could have been established with the Axis powers (thus preventing the war), he also blames the Allies for much of what happened to cause the war to break out in the first place. Although, to be fair, Human Smoke doesn't let the Nazis off the hook, Baker's book does suggest that Roosevelt and Churchill were little different than Hitler.

Nicholson Baker

As I said in my title, the book is pernicious. Nicholson Baker – a writer of several novels – is obviously a talented writer who is using his skills to an ill-conceived end here. For example, during the course of Human Smoke, he suggests the following: If the British had not started the bombing of the German cities in the first place, the Nazis would not have followed suit; if it weren't for a British blockade of Europe, convoys of food destined to feed the starving of Europe would have got through (no, he doesn't mention anything about the Germans just taking the food for their army, which would have likely happened); again, if not for the British blockade, the Nazis could have gone through with their original plan to relocate the Jews of Europe to either Siberia or Madagascar, thus preventing the Holocaust (!); if the Americans had not been so provocative as to give the Chinese warplanes and establish their naval fleet in Hawaii, the Japanese would not have felt so threatened and been forced to attack Pearl Harbour, thus bringing the Americans into World War II. Another bit of finger-pointing he indulges in is looking at the number of American pacifists who were detained for refusing the draft. (Of course, he mentions that these people were imprisoned for a year or two and then released, but he fails to acknowledge that any German or Japanese pacifists in their countries were either shot in the head or shipped off to a concentration camp.)

Ultra Decoding Machine

As I continued to read, I was constantly resisting the urge to pitch this god-forsaken book across the room (since each vignette is so short, it was hard to stop reading – hmm, maybe “pernicious popcorn” would have been a better title for this piece, because once you eat one piece you need to keep going). What Baker fails to do is to fill in the whole story. For example, the dozens of events that caused the Americans to give fighter planes to the Chinese and locate its fleet in Pearl Harbour – such as the “rape of Nanking” incident in December 1937 when the Japanese attacked and conquered Nanking, China, killing and raping thousands of civilians – are never mentioned because it would defeat his argument. Sure, the Allies did some bad things during this period (some of which were pretty horrendous, like turning away Jewish refugee ships that in many cases were forced back to Germany, and imprisoning Japanese-American/Canadian citizens in internment camps), but during war, actions are taken and directions determined (such as, fire-bombing civilian targets in Germany to break the German citizens' will) based on the need to defeat the enemy. Many of these ideas were failures, but many of them had to be tried since they didn't have the 20-20 hindsight we have today. Baker also brings out the tired story of how Coventry could have been saved because the British knew it was going to be attacked. He never mentions that they knew this because of the German Ultra decoding machine the Allies had secretly captured. The British uncovered the truth of the attack by decoding messages using their copy of the machine. If they had moved enough weaponry and airplanes around Coventry to protect the city, the Germans would have known Ultra had been compromised and would have changed their coding techniques and untold thousands more people may have died elsewhere. And the war could have raged on longer than 1945 – horrifying decisions had to be made, and Coventry was one of them.

Julian Assange

Ultimately, what Baker's book is really about is the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan (it is not for nothing that British-colonial Iraq's part in WWII is brought up on more than one occasion). What he's trying to get at is that the West must open peace talks with the antagonists in these two wars, particularly Afghanistan. But his argument is horribly compromised. He sets forth an agenda in his book about how 'if only' this or that had been done, the WWII would have been prevented and the “end of civilization” would not be upon us (the book is subtitled “The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization”). Unless one is a psychopath like Hitler, nobody wants war, but when the belligerents are intractable, such as the Taliban and Al Quaeda, what is the point of creating a negotiated peace when people such as this (and Hitler too – remember Neville Chamberlain's “peace in our times”?) will make whatever promise you want to hear and then promptly break it? He is trying to shame the West into “seeing” what they did before and during WWII in an effort to shine a light on what is happening in the here and now. Too bad there's not a lot that's new here (much of the blame he tries to lay is crackpot), and whenever his point of view is challenged, he conveniently ignores the details that would undermine it.

This leads me to Julian Assange and his lunatic organization WikiLeaks. Another pacifist who blames the West for what's going wrong in the world, Assange's organization recently released 92,000 pages of secret American documents onto the Internet in an attempt, I guess, to blame the West for what they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. His aim is to hurry the end of these wars by holding a mirror up to the West and shaming them into getting out. To what end? So the Taliban can come back, oppress women and kill anybody who disagrees with their medieval point of view? Now, as far as I'm concerned, Assange has as much blood, if not more, on his hands as he accuses the West. Within the 92,000 pages were also names and addresses of Afghan citizens who were assisting NATO forces in order to bring about some form of democracy to their country (no, not a Western version as it won't work, but one that makes sense in the Afghan context). Because of Assange and his gang's actions, the Taliban have announced they now have these names and retribution will commence. NATO is scrambling to find these brave folks and get them to safety, setting back some form of freedom in Afghanistan by who knows how many years. Assange, of course, counters the charges that he is now helping the Taliban to kill by saying “the West has all the blood on its hands, not me” (he's wrong). I cannot conceive of a worse use of the Internet.

If Assange and Baker are what it means to be a pacifist, they can have it all to themselves.

- originally published on August 5, 2010 in Critics at Large.

-- David Churchill is a film critic and author of the novel, The Empire of Death.

Bogus Genre: The Chick Flick

2012-01-25T12:00:00.001-05:00

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

One of the worst things that can happen in a meaningful conversation is when one side's opinions end up pigenholed in a manner that renders dialogue and disagreement moot (and mute). For instance, when people began defining movies by gender definition, where only women could like romantic and sensitive material and guys simply liked to watch shit blow up, it could suitably end a conversation about whether or not a movie was actually any good. If you're a guy and you thought there was something fraudulent in a weeper like Sleepless in Seattle, it was merely because you were a guy and didn't get it. Kevin Courrier got it alright. And this is what he had to say on the subject.

Chick Flicks: A Bogus Phrase for a Bogus Genre

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/06/chick-flicks-bogus-phrase-for-bogus.html

If ever there was film genre term that I wish would disappear it’s the chick flick. As one who always champions movies as a democratic art form, it’s beyond ludicrous to hear people – usually women – dismiss the opinions of men when it comes to (mostly) romantic stories just because they happen to be a member of the wrong gender. I first encountered this dubious term back in 1993 when I told a group of women that I found Nora Ephron’s romantic weeper Sleepless in Seattle rather creepy. In the movie, Meg Ryan pursues (you could say stalks) a wistful widowed man (Tom Hanks) until he finally hooks up with her. I suggested that I didn’t find the premise the least bit romantic because if the roles had been reversed, and it was Hanks shadowing Ryan, the picture would have been a sleazy thriller. Think Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) rather than Sleepless in Seattle. A few of the women though dismissed my observation and stated that I just didn’t get Sleepless in Seattle because I was a guy and didn’t understand a 'chick flick' when I saw one. (My response: What the fuck is a chick flick?)

Following the insanity of that line of gender demarcation, it would stand to reason then that only guys should review action films that blow up shit real good. And maybe only blacks should weigh in on anything starring Denzel Washington and Queen Latifah. Perhaps Jews are the only ones qualified to discuss the oeuvre of Adam Sandler. Anyway, I think you get the idea. I thought of all this when reading the reactions to Toronto Globe and Mail film critic Rick Groen’s pan of the second Sex and the Citymovie. A number of women (and a few men) cried foul because, since Rick was a man, he obviously didn’t understand what made the movie appealing to females. First of all, the idea of designating such a limiting, condescending term as chick flick to movies like Sex and the City is insulting to both men and women. It suggests that only women like romantic stories, so therefore they should only be allowed to review them. Forget that I know many women who love action fare and despise sentimental movies, just as I know many men (including me) who loved Gillian Armstrong’s stirring adaptation of Little Women (1994). And while we’re at it, why not bring up director Katherine Bigelow, a woman who made a number of (mostly) redundant violent action pictures until, with The Hurt Locker (2009), she finally made a powerful film about the very underpinnings of the genre.

This is why I think this chick flick nonsense gets at something deeper and even more insidious in the culture. At bottom, the use of the term is an attempt to undermine film criticism and treat men and women as mere advertising demographics in which we become perfect fodder for the marketing machinery of film distributors. Using Sex and the City as a perfect example, the women who complained about Rick Groen’s pan didn’t even address any of his criticisms of the movie. Furthermore, the letter writers could only suggest that if a woman had written the review she would have enjoyed the movie since she was female. But that suggests that Sex and the City is beyond critical analysis, meaning that women automatically buy into the movie’s advertising since it was being marketed to them in the first place. In short, what made these letter writers truly angry was that Rick Groen didn’t buy into the brand, but instead encouraged readers to consider what they were consuming and why. That’s what a critic – male and female – does. Or, at least, that’s what they’re supposed to do.

I haven’t seen the new Sex and the City yet, but I saw the first one and I found it to be a rat’s nest of product fetishism and sit-com banality. And this is coming from a guy who loved the TV show (at least for the first few seasons), because it was everything that the movie wasn’t. From week to week, I was fascinated by the show’s ability to take us inside the romantic pursuits of urban single women, at their most candid, discussing the men they dated and why they dumped them. At times, Sex and the City (the TV show) resembled Sandra Shamas’s one-woman show, My Boyfriend’s Back and There’s Going to Be Laundry (1987), which also took you into the comic absurdity of romantic longing from a woman’s perspective. And, like Sex and the City, it wasn’t the least bit self-congratulatory. But the firstSex and the City movie was all self-congratulatory, a callow betrayal of what made the show so distinctly appealing – to both genders.

I think, though, that this narrow-minded assignation of chick flick is nothing more than a defensive posture assumed by those who just want to enjoy the movie without having anyone make them think about it. After all, what makes people susceptible to advertising is their willingness to believe that the product being sold to them is what helps define them. And if women want to buy and endorse the most primitive forms of romantic sentimentality, don’t blame men for pointing that out – unless they’re trying to sell you a male version of that same crock.

- originally published on June 8, 2010 in Critics at Large.

--Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Critics

2012-01-24T12:00:00.020-05:00

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Movies that become cult pictures often become so because they speak to viewers who seek pleasures outside mainstream acceptance. But cult pictures can also draw strong contrary reactions as well. Mark Clamen and Shlomo Schwartzberg, for example, got into a friendly and engaging dust up over one such cult favourite.

'Scott Pilgrim' Levels Up

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/08/scott-pilgrim-levels-up.html

Imagine a world which is organized by the logic of video-games and comics. What if life’s painful social situations were staged as epic confrontations between good and evil? Also, while you’re at it, imagine you play bass in an unambitious garage band, live in a low-rent bachelor apartment, and have an unconscious littered with low-resolution exiles from old Nintendo games.

Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World opens theatres everywhere today, and nowhere (outside of comic conventions perhaps) is it more highly anticipated than here in Toronto. Based on Toronto native Bryan Lee O'Malley's six-part graphic novel series, Scott Pilgrim is a special kind of triumph. Love it or hate it, you have never seen anything like it before. With its extended dream sequences, balletic fight sequences, and sometimes breakneck pacing, the film is a kinetic roller-coaster ride. The movie is not unlike a Golden Age Hollywood musical—except instead of the characters’ emotions manifesting themselves in song and dance numbers, here they become epic battles to the death.

If you, like me, missed the film’s sneak preview at San Diego’s Comic-Con three weeks ago, seeing it in Toronto is a solid consolation prize. There wasn’t an empty seat at the advance screening I was at Wednesday evening and the room was primed with eager anticipation. When the 8-bit rendition of the Universal Pictures theme rang out, the crowd let out a cheer. No doubt, the film had come to the right place. Whatever its box office numbers, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a cult classic in the making, and could forever engrave Toronto in the hearts of video gamers and comic book fanatics worldwide.

Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead

The action/romance/fantasy/comedy stars Michael Cera (Juno, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist) as Torontonian Scott Pilgrim, a 22-year-old slacker and amateur musician with little drive and even less money, who meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the girl of his dreams, fresh off the boat from the USA. Unfortunately, there’s one catch: in order to keep dating her, he must defeat her seven evil exes - in mortal combat.

When I first heard that a Hollywood film adaptation was in the works, I knew there were two directions the film could have gone: translate Toronto into a comparable American Midwest town, turning the American allure of Ramona into a New York City girl in Cleveland kind of thing, or jump into Toronto with both feet. I’m thrilled they went the second route, and I have no doubt that the Canada-chic thing will play very nicely for the key US demographic. The film was shot across Toronto last summer, and many of the books’ signature Toronto sites even made their way onto the screen — including Casa Loma, Lee’s Palace, the Sonic Boom Record Store, and an array of Canadian brands probably unknown to Americans, like the CBC, Pizza Pizza, and Second Cup. As I was watching the film, I couldn’t help but see these elements as small remunerations for the hundred of times that Toronto has been forced to pass as New York, San Francisco, or Chicago on TV and film. (Despite all that, I do confess I did miss the apocalyptic duel at Honest Ed’s, but I think that was perhaps rightly understood to be a wholly untranslatable Torontoism.)

Excerpt from Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (2004)

In fact, O’Malley penned the first of the “Scott Pilgrim” books in 2004 while still working at a comic book store in Toronto. The sixth and final volume was published just this past July. The black and white graphic novels are drawn with a clean, stark drawing style inspired by Japanese manga, and play host to a wide cast of slackers, amateur musicians, and video-game obsessed 20-somethings. Though the stories themselves are profoundly embedded in the urban and social geography of Toronto, by Volume 3 (Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness, 2006) the series had gained an international audience. Detailing the rich inner lives of a generation raised on a steady diet of video games and indie rock, the books are clever beyond measure, laugh out loud funny, often poignant and even philosophical.

The screenplay, co-written by directors Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall, remains impressively true to the spirit and energy of O’Malley’s books. The dialogue is almost exclusively lifted directly off the pages of the books—and this is definitely a good thing. O’Malley has an ear for the spoken word that deserved to be taken to the screen. (To pick just one favourite of mine: “Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it.”) This reverence for the source material never stooped to a slavishness reproduction, however. Wright’s staging of the fight sequences is stunning, and there is a Bollywood sequence that plays much better in the film than in the book. Needless to say, adapting the six graphic novels to a two-hour feature came at some costs. The characters of Ramona and Scott’s own poisonous ex Envy Adams (Brie Larson,United States of Tara) lack the complexity of their book counterparts. The film’s cast shines nonetheless, especially Kieran Culkin (Lymelife) as Pilgrim’s “gay roommate” and best friend, who steals almost every scene he’s in.

Michael Cera and Scott Pilgrim

Adapting a beloved graphic novel to the screen is a unique challenge. (Let’s not forget the almost 25 years it took for Watchmen to finally get made.) But it seems the stars all aligned in advance to make Scott Pilgrim happen. Michael Cera, for example, may have been born to play the role of Scott Pilgrim. But as perfectly Scott Pilgrim’s retro-chic parka fits, Cera isn’t playing his usual “nice guy who lets the cute but self-involved girl walk all over him until she comes to her senses and sees him for what he is” character. Creator O’Malley describes Pilgrim as a “clueless, energetic, kind of innocent asshole.” And truth be told, Cera’s Scott Pilgrim is a bit of a dick. Still, Cera invests Pilgrim with the considerable charisma required to make the character the gawky, effortlessly cool lady-killer he needs to be.

Brandon Routh as Ramona's third evil ex-boyfriend

The extended cast is a meta-story in itself. In a brilliant bit of stunt casting, two of the ‘evil exes’ Pilgrim faces off against are played by Brandon Routh (of 2006’s Superman Returns) and Chris Evans, who will come to the screen as the star of next year’s highly anticipated Captain Americafilm. Key to a movie with such an indie music sensibility, the film’s soundtrack is equally noteworthy, with Beck composing the songs that Sex Bob-omb (Pilgrim’s struggling band) plays, and Toronto's Broken Social Scene making a cameo appearance on stage as the band's musical competition.

Director Edgar Wright is himself uniquely suited to this project. Though this was his first US studio film, the British director is coming off the heels of the successes of Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). But in many ways, the film marks a welcome return to his pre-Shaun of the Dead days. In 1999-2001, Wright and his Shaun star and co-writer Simon Pegg collaborated for two seasons on a show for Channel Four in the UK called Spaced. Spaced, a cult classic in its own right, shares many of the themes of Scott Pilgrim, telling the story of two 20-something flatmates in London whose mundane lives are punctuated by bouts of surrealism and fantasy as they struggle to deal with the everyday challenges of job hunting, dating, and trying to keep from being bored.

Wright has always had a way of tweaking a genre film so that it approaches the giddy fun of parody, but he never loses sight of the emotional human core of a story. In the end, for all of the flash and CGI, the real substance of Scott Pilgrim's story is found in the non-fantastical stress and drama of daily life. In Scott Pilgrim’s universe, the most memorable event of the evening isn’t the epic battle, with Thor-like hammers or lip-syncing demon ‘hipster’ girls. Instead, it’s the utterly painful awkwardness of you and your new girlfriend bumping into your most recent ex, or meeting that ex’s stunningly douchey vegan boyfriend. Or more simply, working through the unintentional dishonesty of new relationships between sincere people who don’t quite know themselves. Doesn’t surviving all that make you some kind of hero?

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is over-the-top, noisy and colourful, ecstatic and (often literally) explosive fun, and for all that, the humanity of its story is never lost. This might well turn out to be the most original movie of the summer.

-originally published on August 13, 2010 in Critics at Large.

- Mark Clamen is a lifelong television enthusiast. He lives in Toronto, where he often lectures on television and popular culture.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: Another (Opposing) View

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/08/scott-pilgrim-vs-world-another-opposing.html

In yesterday’s Critics at Large, Mark Clamen weighed in on what is likely to become a major cult hit, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, He liked the movie. I didn’t. Here’s why.

I should point out that, unlike Mark, I haven’t read the graphic novels upon which the movie is based. But since Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is apparently quite faithful to its source material, I don’t think that matters all that much. More to the point, I don’t get what’s so great about this film, whose story has nerdy, anal and self-involved Torontonian Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) falling for Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) a new (American) girl in town and, in order to keep her, being forced to fight to the death with her seven evil exes. That’s pretty much the whole story and after ex- number two showed up on the scene, I was getting bored of the whole affair.

I agree with Mark that Kieran Culkin as Wallace Wells, Scott’s gay roommate, is fine and funny in his role and that Cera (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Juno) spins some nice variations on his usual sad sack, sensitive persona. He also has an appealing chemistry with Winstead; you believe that Scott would want to date Ramona. Mark also points out, correctly, that most of the film’s characterizations are thin but feels that Scott Pilgrim is inventive, fun and original enough to compensate for those flaws. And that’s where we part ways.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World may be original or more accurately original looking – it evokes the helter-skelter speed and patterns of a video game – but it’s awfully superficial and empty, in the same manner as Christopher Nolan’s Inception, this summer’s other unduly praised movie. There really isn’t a lot going on in Scott Pilgrim, particularly in terms of observations on twenty something life, its key selling point, especially when compared to the sharp Michael Cera film Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008). That film covered the same romantic ground as Scott Pilgrim, minus the battles, and displayed the same gay friendly, loose attitude to life but it did it with more panache, depth, wit and style. And let's not to forget, it boasted one of the best soundtracks of recent years, with music by The National, Vampire Weekend and Mark Mothersbaugh, among others. As for the much remarked upon Toronto/Canadian references in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, saluting the local pizza places, coffee shops, record shops and clubs in the city’s Annex neighbourhood, while they were a pleasant surprise, coming from an American studio film, they were also just window dressing. There’s no real commentary underlying them. Scott is one tough Canadian when he has to be, so any possible comparisons between meek Canadians and violent Americans are moot. Canadian references do not equal a Canadian sensibility. If you want that, check out the brilliant apocalyptic science fiction film Last Night (1999), from Toronto director Don McKellar, who has a too brief cameo in Scott Pilgrim. It doesn’t help Scott Pilgrim, either, that so many of the performances and performers in the movie were so bad, especially Alison Pill (Milk) as Scott's fellow band mate and former girlfriend, Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) as Scott’s snooty sister and, not surprisingly, Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore), as one of Ramona’s exes; I did like the vegan ex (Brandon Routh of Superman Returns), though more for his dialogue than his acting. (The movie isn't entirely devoid of wit.)

While watching Scott Pilgrim, and knowing that the glib directorial hand of Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) was all over the film, I couldn’t help feeling that I was being sold a bill of goods that the filmmakers were frantically trying (and failing) to convince me to buy. But I found nothing new and special going on here. Compared to most of the dreck being spewed out of Hollywood this summer (Grown Ups, Get Him to The Greek, Salt, Inception), perhaps there is. But to my critical eyes, Scott Pilgrim appears as simply a juvenile, banal and even stupid film. Cult hit or not, I just don't get its appeal.

- originally published on August 14, 2010 in Critics at Large.

- Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto.

Role Models

2012-01-23T12:00:00.003-05:00

We all have role models while we're growing up. But as Laura Warner pointed out in her terrific review of Tina Fey's memoir, you can have role models even after you've grown up.

Always With a Little Humour: Tina Fey’s Bossypants http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/04/always-with-little-humour-tiny-feys.html

I think Tammy Wynette phrased it quite well when she said that “sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.” Despite of how far we’ve come and how some insist that the war on sexism is over, it’s still hard out there for a chick. (Perhaps on planet Margaret Wente it’s already won, but the rest of us are still huddled in the trenches.) In her recent memoir Bossypants (Reagan Arthur, 2011), Tina Fey brilliantly explores how many battles still exist and proves that it is sometimes hard to be a woman. But with the right mind set, it can also be downright hilarious.

In Bossypants, the former SNL writer, actress, and creator of 30 Rock, confronts the trials, tribulations and hilarities of growing up, going for it, getting it, and dealing with the consequences of getting it, in the male-dominated world of comedy-writing and show business. Each of her challenges is approached with a combination of dignity, toughness and, of course, humour. When having to answer those who asked her “Is it hard for you, being the boss?” Fey points out that Donald Trump is probably never asked that same question. Bossypants is part memoir, part self-help guide, and part satirical retort to the absurdities that still exist in gender politics. And Tina Fey rolls it all up into one package. She shows how many of the struggles faced by women can still be dealt with, and overcome, by applying just a little funniness.

From her awkward coming of age discoveries of all the possible “deficiencies” of a woman’s body, to her controversial acceptance of Photoshop, the theme of lookism is revisited throughout her work. Fey takes on the insane pressures put on women, particularly women in show business, to look perfect with her gentle touch: “I have thus far refused to get any Botox or plastic surgery. (Although I do wear a clear elastic chin strap that I hook around my ears and pin under my day wig.)” It is her self-effacing wittiness, combined with her smart rationalization that such standards are just impossible, that makes this reader much more comfortable.

Burdened with discrimination from her improvisation days at Second City in Chicago to the double-standard criticism she received from her Sarah Palin impersonations, Fey is direct with her revelations of the unfair disadvantages faced by women in her profession. For instance, she sums up the destinies for female comedy writers this way: “I’ve known older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work. The women, though, they’re all ‘crazy’ …[the] definition of being crazy in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.” Fey’s tone, however, is by no means bitter or defeatist. It just a clear-cut reality check, fully equipped with jovial, yet constructive, solutions: “When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: ‘IS this person in between me and what I want to do?’ If the answer is no, ignore it and move on.”

Tina Fey and baby Alice.

Of course, those who have any life outside of work are also treated to the joyful torture of dealing with a work/life balance. Happily married (proving that some boys do like smart girls) Fey also has a loving family. She also discusses various mommy war issues (including special anecdotes about the “Teat Nazis”). Like every parent, she just finds a way to cope. Sometimes that means mixing business with pleasure: like bouncing baby Alice, her daughter, on her knee while trying to learn Sarah Palin’s accent via YouTube videos. Overall, Fey seems to transcend the guilt and pressure with a sound confidence in her love for her family and their love for her.

Fey actually devotes the final chapter of Bossypants to her work with the nauseating decision on how she should spend her last five minutes: on her career, or on another child. Throughout the book, she comes to terms with the fact she has a lot on her plate. Fey reminisces about a conversation she had with Oprah, while she was pulling off 30 Rock, parenthood, and moonlighting on SNL. Oprah seemed “genuinely concerned” about Fey’s hectic schedule. Fey responds, “When Oprah Winfrey is suggesting you may have overextended yourself, you need to examine your fucking life.” Apparently her "fucking life" looked just fine to Fey, since she and her husband have recently revealed (appropriately on the The Oprah Winfrey Show) that they are expecting baby number two.

Tina Fey on 30 Rock.

While reading this incredibly inspiring memoir, I watched the reviews trickle into the media. I saw many ladies fall all over themselves professing their love for smart, witty, funny, beautiful, perfect-in-every-way Tina Fey. While admittedly she is also my (latest) girl crush, I think maybe what we should be taking away from Bossypants is not the burning desire to be Tina Fey, but, like Tina Fey, to be oneself.

-originally published on April 17, 2011 in Critics at Large.

– Laura Warner is a librarian, researcher and aspiring writer living in Toronto. She is currently based in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre’s Music Library.

Think Again...

2012-01-22T12:00:00.002-05:00

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

We all have fond memories of movies from our past that we loved. But what if they didn't either age well (or perhaps we did)? Maybe then we would see and understand things we didn't notice the first time....just ask David Churchill about Diabolique.

Trapped in Amber: Henri Clouzot's Diabolique

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/06/trapped-in-amber-henri-clouzots.html

The movies we love (and sometimes hate) don't change. They are static things forever locked on film (or digital imagery). What changes is us. As we grow and mature our tastes evolve. But the movies? They are like the bug trapped in amber. They exist unchangeable. When I was seven, my parents threw a birthday party for me and my friends. After a lunch and some games, we were treated to a matinee in our local cinema to the relatively new movie for our small Ontario town. I loved the 2 ½ hour movie we watched. But don't think I thought it was the 'best film I'd ever seen,' but I sure enjoyed it.

The movie? Doctor Dolittle, a movie considered terrible on almost every level (even at the time). And, yes, it is. About 13 years ago, I tried re-watching it with my young niece and nephew; I couldn't make it through an hour. And yet, this loved-it-yesterday-but-not-today experience is not confined to films considered bad. In the 1970s, I finally saw on television a 1955 French thriller by Henri Clouzot called Diabolique. I adored the twists and turns this film took. A month ago, the DVD company Criterion released a pristine version of the film as part of their exemplary collection. I had not seen the film since that night in the 1970s, so I jumped at the chance to see it again. Imagine my surprise when I ended up finding it dull, emotionally icy, dated and on some levels reprehensible. However, to this day, the picture is considered a masterpiece of thriller film-making. It influenced not only Alfred Hitchcock (his film Vertigo is based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, authors of the book that was the source for Diabolique), but also, in the current era, Brian Singer's The Usual Suspects and much of the work of M. Night Shyamalan (God help us!), amongst others. Diabolique's plot is pretty simple.

Simone Signoret & Véra Clouzot

A dilapidated private boys' school is run by a dour, vicious, penny-pinching creep named Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse). With him at the school is his wife Christina (Véra Clouzot – whose money he used to start the school), and his mistress Nicole (Simone Signoret). Christina knows all about the affair since Delassalle does nothing to keep it a secret. Yet, because he's such a monster, the two women form a bond and conspire to get rid of him in a way that will make it look like an accident. Complications arise. I'll say no more for fear of spoiling the film's surprises. I must say that one thing that puzzled me about the film's conceit, even back at in the 1970s, was why in God's name Delassalle would hook up with Nicole (a woman best described as 'handsome') at the expense of Christina (a beautiful Brazilian). Okay, this might be the old Ginger-and-Mary-Ann Gilligan's Island thing. But I've always preferred raven-haired women to blondes (Signoret was blonde), so I'll admit my bias.

Anyway, why I found the film so dull in 2011 is that because, as with so many thrillers, one of the biggest problems they all face is that once you know its thrills, the movie doesn't have much left to hold you unless the filmmaker finds ways to keep you entranced. With The Sixth Sense, for example, once you knew its surprise, there really was no reason to see it again (though many did), because even though it was well-acted it was often painfully slow-moving. Diabolique is almost 2 hours long and it feels it. Frankly, this material only needed about 90 minutes to tell its tale.

Henri Clouzot

In thinking about the other films of Henri Clouzot that I've seen (The Wages of Fear, a thriller about three men who, for a lot of money, agree to drive a truck full of nitroglycerin through a jungle to a wildcat fire at an oil well; and The Mystery of Picasso, a kind of documentary about Picasso where he silently goes about creating a series of canvases – it's better than it sounds), I finally realized Clouzot was a misanthrope similar in temperament to Stanley Kubrick (though, I still like much of Kubrick's work – but I'll save that for another blog) and perhaps a misogynist. In Diabolique, he presents Christina as a nervous, physically fragile, childish woman (even her long, dark hair was done up in a strange double pony tail that seemed to be knotted on the end – something a kid would do). I came away this time with the feeling that Clouzot had nothing but contempt for her character. Reading the excellent essay in the Criterion DVD by critic Terrance Rafferty, and watching the good but short documentary about the film featuring Kim Newman, I learned that Véra Clouzot herself was a physically fragile woman with a heart condition, and yet Henri (her husband) insisted in shooting take after take after take of her and Signoret dragging a trunk containing a body around. For 'authenticity,' Henri insisted that a real person (alive, thankfully) actually be in the trunk. But he has a woman with a real heart condition playing a weak woman with a heart condition and is then forced by her director and husband to do something that might be damaging to her health. Creepy.

The documentary also revealed another troubling fact about Clouzot. There was a scene in the film that illustrated Delassalle's cheapness when he purchased half-rotten fish to feed to the staff and students. Again, for authenticity, Henri supposedly used real, half-rotten fish. The only performer we see eat the fish, in close-up, is Véra. It was monstrous. It makes you think Henri identified a bit too much with Delassalle. Véra Clouzot died in 1960 from her heart condition. She was 47. You begin to wonder if his cruel treatment of her had anything to do with it.

Mystery of Picasso

Back in the 1970s, I reacted to the clever tricks of Clouzot's thriller; today all I can see is the ghoul behind the camera. Finally, it was really not surprising that he followed up Diabolique with a documentary featuring Pablo Picasso. Picasso was also a legendary misanthrope and misogynist. They were probably like two peas in a pod. The film they made together was a brilliant look at the creative process of an artist, but it had, like Diabolique, almost no heart, because at the end of the shoot, Picasso insisted that the works he made all be destroyed so they would only exist in Clouzot's film, trapped in amber.

Endnote: The Criterion Collection of Diabolique is an absolutely stunning remastering. The black and white photography shimmers. The DVD also includes, as I said, a fine essay career overview of Henri Clouzot by the respected critic, Terrance Rafferty. There's also the previously mentioned short documentary about Clouzot and the film featuring Kim Newman. On top of that, Criterion features an entertaining introductory video with Serge Bromberg, co-director of a documentary on Clouzot about his unfinished film, Inferno. It's a good doc too, but do not watch it before you see the film as there's way too many spoilers in it for an 'introduction.' There's also a commentary track on selected sequences that I've not yet had a chance to listen to.

- originally published on June 10, 2011 in Critics at Large.

– David Churchill is a film critic and author of the novel The Empire of Death.

Denying Reality

2012-01-21T12:00:00.017-05:00

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

The term 'politically correct' might have now become something of a shopworn phrase that labels rather than explains, but like most definitions, its origins have a basis in fact. Shlomo Schwartzberg, in this piece, brought the definition back to its origins as a means to define some peculiar ideas of casting television and movies.

Do The Right Thing! The Contentious Issue of Politically

Correct Casting

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/05/do-right-thing-contentious-issue-of.html

There’s been much ado about some casting choices in recent Hollywood projects, not because the actors chosen are necessarily bad but because, say their critics, they’re not the right colour for the roles.

First off, many people are upset that white actor Jake Gyllenhaal (Brokeback Mountain) is the lead in the just-released film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, since he’s demonstrably not of Persian (or Iranian, as it’s known today) origin. Then comes news that The Last Airbender, the soon-to-be-released movie from M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs) -- based on an Asian - inspired TV series, called Avatar: The Last Airbender -- will also be a largely whitewashed affair. This follows on the heels of the announcement that white filmmaker Kenneth Branagh (Hamlet) has cast a black actor, The Wire’s Idris Elba as Heimdall, one of the Norse gods in Branagh’s upcoming adaptation of Marvel’s Thor.

Each of these movies has provoked a backlash. Though, predictably, in our politically correct climate. the Marvel comic fans objecting to Elba’s casting in Thor are deemed to be suspect, if not outright, racist in their concerns. while those protesting the casting in Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender, are deemed to have valid concerns about the casting decisions. Would I be labeled racist if I suggest that they all have legitimate reasons for being unhappy with the choices made in the adaptations of their favorite TV show, comic book or video game (Prince of Persia)?

But does this mean that only the right ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation should hold sway when it comes to casting a theatrical production, film or television series? Openly gay Newsweek writer Ramin Setoodeh obviously thinks so; he recently unleashed a tsunami of criticism when he wrote that too many obviously, openly gay actors are playing straight roles and failing to convince audiences of their heterosexuality.

My own view on all of this is decidedly mixed. Re: gay actors/straight roles - I have no problem believing Neil Patrick Harris, who is openly gay, as the womanizer of all womanizers on the funny CBS TV sitcom How I Met Your Mother, but I might have problems accepting a less-talented gay actor in a heterosexual role. Of course, since there is no shortage of closeted gay actors currently playing straight roles in TV, on stage and in the movies, Setoodeh’s point is largely rendered moot. On the other hand, I do think a film called Prince of Persia should at least have someone who appears to be a Muslim in the lead, even if he’s not actually Muslim or Arab; he could be a Sephardic Jew or a Spaniard or even an Indian, but he ought to be believable playing a Persian character. And if The Last Airbenders’s main characters were originally Asian, then I would expect the film version of the TV series to be the same. The fact that the project does have a name director like Shymalan in front of the camera ought to minimize the perceived risk of its success at the box office.

It’s a similar situation when casting actors to play Jews; some non-Jewish actors, like Italian actor like Joe Mantegna, in movies such as Homicide (1991) and Liberty Heights (1999), are completely believable in Jewish roles and vice–versa. Jewish actor James Caan was also utterly convincing as Italian Sonny Corleone in The Godfather (1972). (The Sopranos used Caan’s casting as the punch line of a really great scene in the show.) But other non–Jews may not be believable in Jewish roles. It’s a matter of casting close to the role if not exactly on the nose. Very few filmmakers would (or could) do like French director Olivier Assayas, who made certain in his new five and a half hour miniseries Carlos, based on the life of the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, that each actor was of the ethnicity of the character he played and could actually speak the language that character would speak.

Does that mean that Assayas’s project is purer than other less scrupulously cast movies or TV series? No, but it does enhance his project over others and avoids some pitfalls that a differently cast production might have. Carlos still has to work on so many other levels, besides its casting, in its story, acting, direction, to succeed as great art. We’ll see if it does when it reaches North America in the fall.

The bigger issue is this: does the casting damage the movie, or TV show, take you out of it, so to speak? Last summer when I went to see the Shaw Festival's production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, the story of the famous painting by Frenchman Georges Seurat, I couldn’t help but be distracted by the presence of a black actress among the cast of upper-class French society women circa 1884. It wasn’t a matter of her acting, which was fine, but the fact that it was extremely unlikely that anyone from that stratum of French society would not be white. That bit of colour blind casting, while fully commendable in roles that don’t call for a specifically black or white character, detracted from the realism of Sondheim’s production. It struck a false note in what was otherwise a near flawless musical. Unfortunately, I suspect that if the Shaw festival had rejected the black actress for the role, she might have accused the company of racism, a too-easily made charge these days. This mounting of Sunday in the Park with George, after all, was not an avant-garde production, or one that was revisionist through and through, so this bit of minor casting was questionable. In that light, a black Norse god in Thor would be equally problematic.

It is fair, though, in 2010 to ask why a white actor should play a Muslim role in a movie like Prince of Persia? Or why the protagonists of a movie, like the recent 21, a fact-based story of mostly Asian card sharps, should end up played by whites on screen? But it’s also important to point out that that is not the only criteria to be applied to the performer or else only genuine transsexuals would be allowed to play transsexuals on screen as some transgender activists have demanded.

In fact, one can point to earlier racist portraits on film, when this type of casting wasn't controversial, such as in white actor Mickey Rooney’s vile, highly stereotypical incarnation of a Japanese man in 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany’s. While other roles, such as white actor Peter Seller’s portrayal of a hapless Indian movie star in the 1968 comedy The Party (both films were directed by Blake Edwards), were not racist at all. Seller’s protagonist is a likeable chap who is never played for cheap laughs.

The other reality, and it’s the opposite of substituting white actors in the non-white roles, is that sometimes, the removal of colour, ethnicity or religious background is done out of fear of appearing racist or anti–Semitic. In real life, the characters at the centre of The Accused (1988), which was based on a true story of a raped woman who sued her rapists and the men who egged them on, were of Portuguese extraction, but the film offered up a deracinated view of the perpetrators of the crime. Other People’s Money (1991), the story of a villainous corporate raider who goes after a small mom and pop operation, was careful to dilute its main character's Jewish background, not least by casting clearly non–Jewish Danny Devito in the Jewish role of Larry Garfield. Even Martin Scorsese in his seminal Taxi Driver (1976) made sure that the teen prostitute’s pimp was not African–American but white lest he be accused of racism even though his his research for that film revealed that New York pimps in the 70s were virtually always black.

In those cases, a combination of fear and a recognition that American society was not rid of those who would like to see Jews, African Americans or other groups as the bad guys in movies led to understandable decisions re: casting and mixed results re: the final product. Of the three movies, onlyTaxi Driver is a great film and one that tackled racist attitudes successfully (with Scorsese himself playing a virulently anti–black character in one scorching scene).

Would The Accused or Other People’s Money have been better films if they hadn’t made the changes they did? It’s doubtful but the movies might have gained some nuances that would have made them stand out more from the pack. After all, if you’re going to fully explore the worlds of ethnic and religious minorities, you can’t only show their best faces on screen. You must also examine why their worst faces manifest themselves occasionally as well. But it’s important to note that the filmmakers would have to have handled the racial and religious realities of the stories in The Accused and Other People’s Money with great sensitivity lest they play into the racial and religious prejudices of the audiences viewing their films.

So it comes down to talent, making the right casting choices, without being held to rigid, unbending rules of who should play what roles. And if you're going to cast against type, make sure it’s with a believable actor and not one who skewers the reality of the project you’re putting together. Oh and one more thing, offer up a variety of roles and character types for all groups in society. I am sure if there was more of a palette of Arab/Muslim portraits on American movie screens, besides the inevitable terrorist roles, or a more varied depiction of Asian–Americans in Hollywood, protests over the casting slights in Prince of Persia or The Last Airbender would be minimal if not ignored altogether. If those groups, and others, felt fully comfortable with the way they were depicted on screen, they’d likely shrug off the wrong-headed movies that deny their reality as they would have plenty of positive, honest and complex movies to embrace instead.

- originally published on May 28, 2010 in Critics at Large.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches regular courses at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute, where he just finished teaching a course on the work of Steven Spielberg. He will next be teaching a course there on the films of Sidney Lumet, beginning on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012.

The Voice of Schmilsson

2012-01-20T12:00:00.010-05:00

One of the great things a documentary, good or bad, can do for a writer is to give him also an opportunity to delve in the life and work. It's even more enjoyable when it gets to be an artist whose work has never been fully appreciated like pop singer Harry Nilsson.

Dreams Are Nothing More Than Wishes: Who is Harry

Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/01/dreams-are-nothing-more-than-wishes-who.html

There couldn't be a more apt title for John Scheinfeld’s engaging documentary on the late singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson than Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? Despite the fact that Nilsson was both a prolific pop songwriter and a gifted tenor, perhaps what made Nilsson less than a household name was that he didn't comfortably fit into the niche of a traditional pop crooner. It also took Scheinfeld almost four years to get a distributor for his movie about him. But it’s definitely worth the wait.

Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? examines with both insight and empathy the life of a pop artist whose pining voice cast a larger shadow on a tragic life. While he wrote songs that became hits for The Monkees (“Cuddly Toy”), Three Dog Night (“One”) and Blood, Sweat and Tears (“Without Her”), his only chart successes were other people’s tunes. “Everybody’s Talkin’” (made famous in Midnight Cowboy) was written by Fred Neil, while the Grammy-winning “Without You” was originally a track by the British rock group Badfinger. Nilsson never performed concert tours to promote his albums and his studio work itself became unique in that he did all his own overdubbed harmony vocals. With the help of top-notch players (from Little Feat’s Lowell George to keyboardist Nicky Hopkins), Nilsson became an insolated pop force, someone hidden away in the imagined world of a recording studio. From there, his lovely and quirky ballads and anthems could bring a youthful longing to unrequited wishes.

But, out in the world, he was on a destructive tear through nights of drunken escapades. Those endless nights would ultimately tear apart his greatest gift: his voice. By the time he died of a stroke in his fifties in January 1994, Nilsson barely registered in anyone’s consciousness. He had become a vague remembrance at best. If anything, pop music fans recalled his memorable evening in 1974 when he and John Lennon got tossed out of a nightclub after getting violently drunk and heckling the Smothers Brothers. Nilsson was more notorious as the lush who contributed to Lennon’s Lost Weekend than the talented vocalist who illustrated both a childlike innocence and a street-smart parodist. The Beatles connection loomed large in Nilsson’s early success, however, when they called Nilsson their “favourite American group” upon hearing his second album, Aerial Ballet (1968). Thanks to their valuable praise, Nilsson started to achieve some modicum of commercial recognition.

Scheinfeld tells the story of the rise and fall of this paradoxical figure in a traditional documentary style, but the arc of the story (with its tragic implications) isn’t morose. Quite the contrary, using audio tracks Nilsson recorded before his death to create notes for a possible memoir and interviews with associates and producers (including hilarious comments from Terry Gilliam, where Nilsson’s last songs were included in The Fisher King, producer Richard Perry, singer/songwriter Van Dyke Parks, Mickey Dolenz (of The Monkees), plus Nilsson's widow Una), Scheinfeld allows a sympathetic portrait to emerge of an artist whose failings did not destroy those who continued to love him. But Who is Harry Nilsson? also does full justice to his music. The film illuminates the unpredictable arc of a career of commercial pop that didn’t follow conventional pop rules. As far back as his debut album, Pandemonium Shadow Show (1967), with the opening track “1941,” Nilsson defied convention. In this autobiographical song about a father who leaves his son, the son runs away to join a circus, gets married, has a child and ends up committing the same sins as his father. The sadness in the song is submerged in a carnival melody that carries with it the faint reverberation of a childhood lost. Innocence is not only irreclaimable here, it can never be recovered. The wistful mood cast over “1941” saves it from becoming as treacly and self-conscious as Harry Chapin’s comparable “Cats in the Cradle.”

Who is Harry Nilsson? brings to our awareness a performer with a wide range of talents. He could create an intimately funny and moving chamber work with Randy Newman (Nilsson Sings Newman), write a children’s musical fairy tale that became a popular animated film (The Point), record the first standards album (A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night from 1973) which used compositions from the American songbook to create a song cycle that told a story of a love affair found, lost and then recovered. Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ to Him)? is a compassionately funny portrait of a complex artist and man whose dreams were ultimately fulfilled even if his wishes couldn’t sustain him.

- originally published on January 18, 2011 in Critics at Large.

-- Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

I'm in Love With My Car

2012-01-19T12:00:00.021-05:00

There's no argument that the car is now a pervasive symbol in popular culture. But if Kevin Courrier seemed surprised when David Churchill told him he was curious as to why he liked sea chanteys, Courrier was equally amazed to discover that Churchill was a petrolhead.

Petrolheads: Our Love Affair With the Car

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/07/petrolheads-our-love-affair-with-car.html

Ever since I played on the remains of my maternal grandfather's one-and-only car back in the 1960s, I've been fascinated by cars and driving. My grandfather owned a Model T Ford that, once it was no longer viable for the road, he had turned into a tractor to work his land. By the time I got to it, it was a rusting hulk that sat on my uncle's property. We kids used to hop on the old seat and pretend we were driving anywhere but there.

Though I've had a life-long love affair with cars, I've actually never, technically, owned one. Both cars my wife and I have owned have been in her name. So it goes. Yet, I love the idea of the freedom that a car gives you; I love the speed and I love to drive fast. Just not as fast or as well as Nelson Monteiro (more on him in a second). Unfortunately, living in the city, with the congestion, incompetent drivers, irriating stoplights and unrealistic speed limits, it's taken much of the joy out it for me. So, I live vicariously through a long-running, very politically incorrect BBC series called Top Gear (BBC Canada, Monday through Friday at 9 pm -- repeats of the 2002 through 2009 seasons; new shows, Saturdays 9pm). The show has been on TV for almost 33 years (with a one-year break between 2001 and 2002 when it was reconfigured into its current format). The show, hosted by three archetypes (Jeremy Clarkson, the tall, paunchy, man/boy; James May, the long-haired, intellectual, musician who's nickname is Captain Slow due to his, by the show's standards, unwillingness to drive fast; and Richard Hamilton, sort of the 'cute Beatle' of the show who's nickname is The Hampster because he's not as tall as the oafish Clarkson), is pretty basic. Using humour of a decidedly 'laddish' variety, they start most episodes by showcasing some sort of super car (usually an Audi, Maserati, Jaguar, Ferrari, Porsche, you get the idea) on their track. All three are skilled drivers, with Clarkson being the best, Hamilton the most reckless and May, well, his nickname is Captain Slow for a reason. Clarkson or Hamilton almost always take on this part of the show. They race around the track while they discuss a 'fast car's' strengths or weaknesses. There's usually a lot of speed, lots of spins, tons of smoke and a bunch of silly showing off.

After that set up, we find ourselves in the studio with a large, standing audience who surround the lads. They then set up that week's challenge. It could be, oh, proving that the most indestructible vehicle ever is a 1989 Toyota pick-up truck (the things they do to this poor, but mighty truck is unbelievable, yet after every 'frontal assault,' including dropping it from a height of 200+ feet from atop a highrise that is being demolished, the vehicle is started again and again and still manages to move. They were so impressed by this truck's resilience that to this day it appears in the background on a pedestal of honour - the episode is viewable on youtube -- address at end). Or they set the rules for a challenge, such as prove it's faster to drive a really fast car from a town outside of London to Zurich, Switzerland than it is to fly there (two teams -- with usually Clarkson driving and the other two using the other modes -- start out from that little town with most of May and Hamilton's time taken up with actually getting to the airport using anything BUT a car -- they usually lose). This challenge usually lasts the entire program, broken up with various bits such as news and putting one celebrity per week into a 'reasonably priced car' and seeing who is the fastest racing around the Top Gear track (there's a big board that lists the previous celebrities' times -- Simon Cowell was one name near the top).

Then there's The Stig. The Stig is a disguised racing car driver who always appears in a white racing suit, gloves and a helmut with a mirrored visor so he/she cannot be identified. Supposedly, The Stig really is a current racing car driver, but his/her identity is the show's big secret -- perhaps for insurance reasons. The Stig serves two purposes on the show. One, he will normally race the 'fast car' around the track after it's either been praised or slagged to see how fast it really can handle the twists and turns. And two (which we only hear about, but never see), is to give the various celebrities lessons before their solo around the track on how to handle the track at as high a rate of speed as possible without killing themselves or flipping the car. It is for this last reason that the final corner is called 'Gambon' in honour of the actor Michael Gambon (Dumbledore in the later Harry Potter films) who when he took his turn had his car up on two wheels when he did that final turn (not a good idea).

The fans of this show, which includes myself, are called petrolheads. We as a group are hated by the crunchy-granola set because we insist on gloriously burning fossil fuels (the show always makes fun of electric cars because they are notoriously slow and diesel, well, just cuz). I do care deeply about the environment and do whatever I can, but this is my one admitted blind spot. Which brings me back a LOOOONG time later to Nelson Monteiro (pictured above in his version of The Stig).

Nelson is my first cousin by marriage and he's an up-and-coming race car driver. His father, my uncle-in-law, Yvonn Monteiro was the family's original petrolhead (pictured at right, advising Nelson before a race). He raced in his youth and even had the chance to race in one of the Toronto Molson Indy's pre-race races some years ago (one of his greatest moments behind a wheel, he says). This past weekend, Nelson was racing his 1992 Acura Integra, that he and his dad have lovingly turned into a sturdy/worthy race car, at Mosport, one of Canada's premier permanent race tracks. Yvonn asked me a couple of weeks ago it I'd like to come and watch Nelson race in the GT-5 series at the Canada Day Grand Prix of Ontario. I jumped at the chance, and this last Saturday found myself part of the pit crew...Well, not really, Yvonn was the only one allowed in the pit, but er, um, I put a tire on (badly/laughably because these tires had two sets of lug holes beside each other and if you didn't line 'em up properly the tire wouldn't go on -- I finally managed it about one minute after I started) and filled it with fuel between races. If I'd really been in the pit I would have had my ass fired. Didn't matter, I loved every second of it.

Nelson is a young, fantastic, dedicated driver who to my eyes is fearless and very skillful on the track. In this race, 6 GT series race all at once, meaning there were 40 cars on the track each time. I watched Nelson's three races as he powered around corners, caught up and passed his opponents and generally showed he was the real deal. His second race was, I think, the most exciting to watch as he came from behind to overtake his main competitor, Victor Simone in a 1995 Nissan 200SX (he also beat a 1995 Porsche 944S). The races were 20 minutes and about 12 laps each. I actually found my heart racing on more than one occasion during this second race. Each time Nelson roared past (at speeds up to 190 km) he got closer and then finally passed Simone. It was like watching a suspense film because you would see them zip past for about 10 seconds or less and then you'd have to wait and wait for the next fly by to see where he was. He won the second race handily, and came second in his final race. We were all convinced, based on accumulated times, that he came first overall, because the winner of the last race had come fourth in races one and two. For some idiotic reason (and this isn't because Nelson's my cousin), the winner of the last race, regardless of how he/she did in the other two, finished first when the podium was announced. The question in all our minds this past Saturday was 'then what exactly is the purpose of the first two races if it's not decided by accumulated time?'

Regardless, it was my real Top Gear moment where I felt/heard the roar of the engines, got involved in Nelson's endeavours/victories and generally had the time of my life. I am a petrolhead. I'm not the greatest driver in the world, and sometimes I can be as sloppy as everybody else (it comes from indifference because there is so little fun to be had driving in Toronto), but man oh man, when you take a curve in the road just right and at good speed without once touching your brakes while everybody else is crawling, there's nothing like it.

On the way back from Mosport, with Yvonn driving (an exceptionally skilled driver himself), we took the backroads back to Toronto, but I'll keep to myself some of the speeds we occasionally got up to on some of the corners. However, throughout the journey I couldn't keep a gigantic smile off my face.

Top Gear: How To Kill a Toyota Pick-up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kmfx2uNzss

- originally published on July 7, 2010 in Critics at Large.

-- David Churchill is a film critic and writer. He is the author of the novel, The Empire of Death.

TV in a Mirror

2012-01-18T12:00:00.005-05:00

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Television now has a long enough history to entertain programs that are about the medium itself. How television looks at itself in a mirror is what fascinated Mark Clamen in this thoughtful post.

Scaling the Fourth Wall: TV Shows about TV Shows

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/04/scaling-fourth-wall-tv-shows-about-tv.html

Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld: Curb Your Enthusiasm

I've always been a sucker for self-referential media: be it celebrity cameos, intentional genre-busting, fictional characters meeting fictionalized versions of themselves, and everything in between. (My favourite Woody Allen film is The Purple Rose of Cairo, I continue to believe that Last Action Hero is an underrated masterpiece, and no-one probably applauded more than I did for Nathan Fillion’s Firefly shout-out in last season’s Halloween episode of Castle, walking on-screen in full “Captain Mal” gear.) And the most popular and entertaining form these stories have taken is the show about a show: films and TV about making film and TV. It’s a conceit that's been around since Shakespeare, and whether it’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Dick Van Dyke Show, or 30 Rock, there will always be something especially compelling about a show within a show.

Last month, I wrote about the recent Showtime sitcom Episodes. This dark comedy stars Friends alum Matt LeBlanc as Matt LeBlanc, and tells a story as old television itself: the trials and tribulations of making a television show. In this case, it was the story of a married British comedy writing team who had the misfortune to have a hit series of theirs optioned by an American network. As I wrote, Episodes, for the most part, works well (in large part due to the talents of the BBC television veterans who play the show’s leads), and is definitely worth checking out.

But some of the weaknesses I identified in Episodes have got me thinking about just how tricky it can be to make a television comedy about making television comedy. It’s one thing to dramatize or satirize the process (from Singin’ in the Rain to The Player, Hollywood has long been its own favourite subject), but it is quite another to film a comedy about how empty and compromised sitcom production can often be. Episodes mostly held its own, but it’s swimming next to some big fish: The Larry Sanders Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Extras. Here we're going to look at why I believe these shows, in particular, are so successful.

Garry Shandling as Larry Sanders

The progenitor of the contemporary meta-sitcom is HBO’s groundbreaking The Larry Sanders Show, which aired from 1992-1998. Garry Shandling stars as the titular Larry Sanders, host of a late night talk show in the vein of The Tonight Show (where Shandling had been a regular guest host, in the years leading up to Jay Leno’s takeover in 1992). When the series follows the characters off camera, it aims to break open the veneer of false spontaneity and faux celebrity camaraderie of the talk show format, but the talk show itself – which we catch glimpses of in short segments, and which, for the first season at least, were filmed in front of a live audience – is genuinely funny, sweet, and invariably entertaining. The darkness of Larry Sanders lies in the insecurity and neuroses of its characters, and not in any profound contempt for its subject matter.

The most recent season of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (also on HBO) – which climaxed with the filming of a Seinfeld reunion show – took this deconstructive conceit one step further. Though in many ways Curb has perhaps always been implicitly about turning one of American network television’s most successful sitcoms inside out, this last season clearly demonstrated the genuine affection for the product that David clearly feels. The premise of Curb’s seventh season is that Larry (the real-life co-creator of Seinfeld), in a bid to woo back his now-estranged wife Cheryl, finally agrees to bring the old Seinfeld cast back together, which reopens a standing debate over that series’ controversial final episode. Playing out Larry David’s own ambivalences about uncynical endings (he loves the original Seinfeld ending, and the fictionalized Jason Alexander expresses his dislike), this season of Curb re-writes and doesn’t rewrite that most classic series. You just have to watch the brilliant “table read” scene in that season’s penultimate episode (“The Table Read”, Season 7, Episode 9) to see how brilliantly the show can walk that fine line between parody and sincere tribute. Though Larry’s ambivalence over the process is made quite clear, the scene still plays like a master class in TV comedy-writing. Whatever distance Larry David puts between his audience and this new “episode of Seinfeld”, the fact is that what we see of its script is a perfectly feasible and actually very funny show. And the pride that both the real and fictional Larry David feels for Seinfeld is tangible and inescapable, despite the fun Curb has in tearing it apart – which is arguably what the first 6 seasons of the series had always already been.

The cast of Extras

Extras (BBC/HBO) was Ricky Gervais’ 2005 follow-up series to his immensely popular and influential The Office (BBC, 2001-2003).Extras offers a funhouse parody of Gervais’ own rise to fame through the character of Andy Millman (played by Gervais), a struggling TV writer and actor who makes his living working as an extra in film and television, while he shops around an office comedy to the networks. Andy’s show is picked up by the BBC at the end of the first season, though this turns out to only be the beginning of his trials, as the combination of network interference and his own ego conspires to keep contentment continually out of reach. The show within the show – transformed from the reserved comedy series he’d envisioned into a low-brow sitcom (complete with campy theme song, laugh track, silly wigs, and catchphrases) – becomes a hit with the viewers, but not the critics, sending Andy into a spiral which culminates in the biting and poignant 90-minute Christmas episode that caps its second, and final, season. But as much as the success of the sitcom pains and embarrasses Millman, a generous viewer of Gervais’ much more restrained and subtle Extras would have to admit that, broad as the sitcom-inside-the-sitcom is, it is a rather funny example of that middle-of-the-road BBC genre. Like the Seinfeld reunion shown in Curb, if it weren’t for Andy Millman’s internal struggle (and his inability to actually know what he wants or how to achieve it), there would be little to make fun of in the show within the show.

What these three shows have, and what the first season of Episodes I feel often lacked, is a genuine love for television itself. It is a delicate game to satirize a world and continue to show real affection for it. As dark as these shows are, Garry Shandling, Larry David, and Ricky Gervais ultimately reserve their greatest criticism for the conflicted characters they portray, and never fail to respect their audience. In the end, these series are ironic love-letters not only to their fans, but to the medium these artists have devoted their creative lives to.

- original published on April 10, 2011 in Critics at Large.

– Mark Clamen is a lifelong television enthusiast. He lives in Toronto, where he often lectures on television, film, and popular culture.

Bring Me the Head of Cinderella

2012-01-17T12:00:00.039-05:00

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Laura Warner is always at her razor sharp best when she tackles the popular culture of parenting. Being a mother herself, she's quick to spot material that uncorks some of the cultural myths involved in raising children.

(Not So) Pretty in Pink: Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/05/not-so-pretty-in-pink-peggy-orensteins.html

When I became pregnant, after finding out I was going to have a girl, I was ecstatic. No offense boys, but I had whole-heartedly embraced (and still do) the honour, and challenge, of being the first strong female role model to a new member of the future generation. The one aspect I was not thrilled about – aside from the thought of my daughter turning thirteen – was the impending pinkification of everything. The thought of my baby looking like the Pink Panther was too much to bear. So I, unsuccessfully, forbade all friends and relatives from buying her anything pink. For the first two years of her life, I draped her in a wardrobe much like my own: mostly blacks, browns and burgundies (picture a pile of dead leaves). Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against femininity (many of her dead leaf ensembles were dresses), but I find the frills and feathers all too frivolous, oppressive and often downright ridiculous.

Peggy Orenstein, journalist and author of such best-sellers as School Girls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap, shared this disgust with the colour and the girlie-girl culture overall. Prior to the arrival of her daughter Daisy, the thought of having a baby dipped in Pepto-Bismol, and many other stomach-churning issues, made her cringe to the point where she actually hoped for (yikes) a boy. Orenstein opens her latest book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (HaperCollins, 2011), with this shocking revelation. Through this work, Orenstein examines the rise of girlie-girl culture and its impact on the women they become.

Princesses, courtesy of Walt Disney

Orenstein cleverly observes how the “Girl Power” of the early 1990s quickly gave way to the hyper-sexualization and commercialization of girlhood. In 2009, sales of Disney Princess merchandise alone hit the $4 billion mark. To make some sense of this princess culture, Orenstein set out to speak with parents, children, marketers, doctors, psychologists and academics. Trying to figure out how we got to this point, her work analyses the evolving image of the damsel in distress from the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales to the Twilight Saga “heroine” Bella. Was it a biological evolution? Was this some kind of post-feminism backlash? Was it a simple marketing ploy? Surely Disney did not pull this off single-handedly. Through her research, Orenstein does discover that children, after turning three, do naturally gravitate toward gender-specific toys. The availability and desirability of these toys, however, did have some (corporate) help.

The real issue at hand, however, is the impact this hyper-feminine culture has had on young girls. The equation of unattainable standards of beauty, upheld by Barbie, Cinderella and Bratz dolls, coupled with sexual objectification and a damsel-in-distress philosophy that girls need to be looked after, is deadly. Orenstein stresses how the push for consumption combined with increasing pressure of body image is already taking its toll: between 2000 and 2006 the “number of girls who fretted excessively about their look and weight actually rose […] as did their reported stress levels and their rates of depression and suicide.”

A scene from Toddlers & Tiaras

Tying in other cultural movements sparked by the girlie-girl culture, Orenstein takes us behind the scenes to look at child beauty pageants through interviews with Toddlers & Tiaras (an American reality TV series airing on TLC) entrants. Her book also examines the plight of the child star, along with the sweetheart-to-tart evolution of so many so-called “role models” like Hillary Duff, Lindsay Lohen, Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. Finally, she ties in the possible ills associated with social networking websites. While such sites are largely beneficial, they also serve as a cyber-bullying tool, making girls, who are already consumed with the need to feel accepted by their 622 “friends”, even more vulnerable.

These shocking revelations were enough to make one want to lock up their daughter(s) in a tower. Orenstein, however, quells the alarmism with her calm, realistic tone. Unlike many parenting books and self-help guides, Orenstein is not condescending. She does not blame the rise of girlie-girl culture on parents. While she holds firm that we do need to make an effort, she does not scold us for raising our children wrong. Orenstein does not claim to be an expert at any point. Instead she levels with the reader, empathetic that we, like she, are still trying to figure this thing out.

Auther Peggy Orenstein

Orenstein is also refreshingly liberal-minded. While she does warn of the sexual objectification of young girls, she does not hold oppressive expectations that women should stay virginal until marriage, an expectation that is as dangerous and misogynistic as the notion that a woman’s worth is measured by her appearance. She warns that what the rise of girlie-girl culture does is convince young women to want tofeel desired rather than to be desired, which robs them of sexual satisfaction.

Finally, despite first impressions, Orenstein does not slam femininity. She does not support the extreme feminists who only let their daughters play with trucks. In fact, she stresses that such behaviour “disparages the feminine, signal[ling] that boys’ traditional toys and activities are superior to girls’.” There is a difference between men and women, boys and girls, and that’s a good thing.

Like most parents, Orenstein does remain in a state of confusion right up to the end. Giving her very best, she concludes that, while we have limited control over the images and products our children are exposed to, we still need to ensure our own values play an equal part in their upbringing. She states, very eloquently, that “our role is not to keep the world at bay but to prepare our daughters so they can thrive within it.” As a mom, Orenstein’s discoveries do make me a little nervous about my daughter’s happiness and well-being, hoping that I will be able to teach her to value her self-worth. However, I am also up to the challenge.

- originally published on May 18, 2011 in Critics at Large.

– Laura Warner is a librarian, researcher and aspiring writer living in Toronto. She is currently based in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre’s Music Library.

Camelot in Smithereens

2012-01-16T12:00:00.013-05:00

Excerpt from Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism

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 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 Critics at Largecolleague 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.

Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors still continues to be a book about how American movies illuminated the central issues of their age. But the narrative changed dramatically from 2000 to 2010. While I kept sending the new, amended outline to publishers, they continued to tell me how unsaleable it was. (In other words, I wasn't a hot property.) So I retorted by turning it into a lecture series, first at Ryerson University, then at Learning Unlimited in Etobicoke (drawing close to 200 people). From there, it went to the Revue Cinema, a landmark rep house in Toronto, where,they had me do the lecture through the 2008 American election campaign. Reflections continues to attract attention, beginning this fall at the Prosserman JCC in Toronto, and in November, starting at the Granite Club. So much for lack of interest.

Finally, recent attention from a publisher has prompted some writing of the book (fourteen years after the idea first struck). So here is a sample from the introduction to the Nixon Era titled Camelot in Smithereens:

When Sam Peckinpah released his cataclysmic western The Wild Bunch in 1969, America had just come out of a year rocked with violence, assassinations and, of course, the continuation of the Vietnam War. Within this one movie you could feel not only the consequences of bloodletting from an earlier time in the American past, but also the turmoil of the period it was made in -- and it changed American movies forever. Along with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, made two years earlier, The Wild Bunchdeftly examined our hidden fascination with violence. Both films put people on the screen who did horrible things, lived dangerous lives and eventually died in a hail of bullets. But what separated these pictures from their predecessors was the manner in which the violence was brought up close and personal. Unlike previous, more routine westerns and gangster movies, we were implicated in the carnage and felt the deaths as if we had just witnessed a loved one perish in a car wreck. Furthermore, we were asked to empathize with bad people.

In the years to follow, the legacy of these two films would spawn many imitators and inheritors. Much of the best work of Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver), Brian De Palma (Blow Out), Steven Spielberg (Jaws) and (all too briefly) Francis Coppola (The Godfather I and II) couldn't be fully considered without referring to Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch. But those considerations weren't made solely on the question of explicit violence alone, it was what those movies were trying to say about the culture they were part of and how deeply the filmmakers wanted us to feel what they were grappling with. Bonnie and Clydemight have been a Depression-era story, but one could perceive contemporary counter-culture attitudes informing it. The Wild Bunch brought us a familiar portrait of the American past with its lawlessness, yet it had us confront the modern age of warfare and bloodshed. Both Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah wanted us to experience violence not in a moralistic manner, where we easily separate good from bad, but to have us feel the undercurrents of a culture in crisis. Violence had to recover its power to upset us and to shake us out of any complacency with the status quo. And they did.

But in the Nixon era, violence took on a primitive appeal, where law & order became an edict rather than a civil responsibility. Movies quickly began to exploit people's worst fears and resentments. The decade of the seventies started to spawn self-righteous vigilante films like Dirty Harry (1971), the antithesis of the Johnson era film Bullitt(1968). Steve McQueen's rebellious detective feared turning numb to the violence he confronted daily in his work. By contrast, Clint Eastwood's Harry Callaghan took on numbness as a preferred state, a defiant stance against perceived liberal weakness and ineffectiveness. Before long, even highly regarded contemporary directors like Stanley Kubrick would cater to the mood by rubbing our noses in his cynical celebration of youthful psychopathy in A Clockwork Orange (1971). Peckinpah and Penn, too, would get caught up in the American self-hatred that the Nixon years inspired. In Straw Dogs(1971), Peckinpah would turn the spacious sensibility of The Wild Bunch into, what Pauline Kael correctly labeled, the territorial imperative. In Little Big Man (1970), Arthur Penn reinforced the growing and popular notion that America was basically rotten to the core (an attitude he had resisted in Bonnie and Clyde). The Wild Bunch had openly embraced American culture, including us in the unfolding of its many contradictory impulses. But in a land where the President and the Attorney General would justify breaking the law, with wiretaps and arrests, all bets were off and sides were immediately taken.

During the sixties, Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch raised ambivalent questions about good and evil, guilt and innocence, but many of the violent pictures of the Nixon era resembled zealous traffic cops telling us what was right from wrong. Fifty odd years later, after the release of The Wild Bunch, violence is still an unresolvable issue that some refuse to grapple with. While many American movies today turn violence into the cathartic thrill of a video game, many people still lobby for the removal of violence from movie screens (most likely because it's easier than dealing with the reality of it on the street). But that fearful, sometimes puritanical response, doesn't come close to dealing directly with its implications. The risks Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinaph took were formidable and that's why they haven't yet been surpassed.

- originally published on September 6, 2010 in Critics at Large.

-- Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

Class Act

2012-01-15T12:00:00.004-05:00

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

While Mark Clamen is our regular television critic, both David Churchill and Shlomo Schwartzberg keep up the pace with their own interest in both network and cable programming. If there is still anyone out there who thinks that television is inferior to movies or theatre, better think again. Downton Abbey is drawing eager viewers once more with its second season that is just underway. Here's Shlomo on the pleasure of discovering it last year.

The Many Charms of Downton Abbey

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/04/many-charms-of-downton-abbey.html

Downton Abbey (ITV, PBS) is now available on DVD

I must admit I’ve always been fascinated by British dramas and documentaries about that country’s class system. I was too young to be interested in the hit miniseries Upstairs, Downstairs, which chronicled the relations between servants and their masters in a stately manor house. It was an influential show that just celebrated its fortieth anniversary with the release of a box set, and whose sequel premieres on PBS on April 10. But once I was old enough. I became riveted by everything from Michael Apted’s seminal Up documentary series, which examined the lives of select subjects every seven years in a series that’s reached to 49 Up, to Robert Altman’s 2002 Gosford Park, which meshed the vagaries of the British class system with an American-style murder mystery. Invariably, those shows and films depicted a hierarchy that was pretty rigid (especially the Up films) and suggested that you generally were stuck in whatever class you were born into for life. Unlike the American class system (yes, it does exist), which more often than not is based on wealth, the British class apparatus was (and is) always about who your ancestors are, a fact of life that influenced your education and where you could live in London. (Wealth is also a factor but not the dominant one.) There’s a great scene in Mad Men’s most recent season whereby Layne Price (Jared Harris), Sterling Cooper’s British partner, extols his love of America by expressing relief that upon coming to New York, he stopped being asked what school he went to. The fine, entertaining recent British mini-series Downton Abbey, created by Gosford Park’s screenwriter Julian Fellowes and co-written by him with Tina Pepper and Shelagh Stephenson, puts that system under a microscope, showcasing how ‘modern’ times begin to slowly change and erode the traditional way of doing things.

Elizabeth McGovern and Hugh Bonneville

Beginning in 1912, with the sinking of the RMS Titanic, Downton Abbey, which premiered in North America on PBS in January and is now out on DVD follows the lives of the fictional Crawley family, which lacks an immediate male heir to take over the manor in the event that its current owner, family patriarch Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham (High Bonneville) passes on. The Titanic sinking has had an adverse impact on the Crawleys, in particular, because Downton Abbey’s putative heir, Lord Grantham’s cousin James and his son both perished in the disaster. That leaves Lord Grantham’s distant cousin, Matthew Crawly (Dan Stevens), as heir apparent, a change of affairs that doesn’t please the Crawly women, including Lord Grantham’s caustic mother Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham (Maggie Smith), his wife, Lady Grantham, the American-born Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) and his headstrong eldest daughter, Mary (Michelle Dockery). The motley servants of Downton Abbey have their own opinions on the subject and their own domestic dramas to rival that of the occasionally fractious Crawleys.

Downton Abbey, which ran on PBS in four parts, over about 5 1/2 hours, takes a leisurely, intricate approach to its unfolding story, alternating between the Crawleys and the manor’s servants, and slowly revealing the inner workings of their varied lives. What I liked best about the series is its disavowal of stereotypes that often accrue to dramas of this sort, namely the portrayal of the rich as cold and forbidding. Not here: Lord Grantham is actually a very kindly sort, who’s extremely uncomfortable when he realizes he has to sack one of the servants and who, as Downton Abbey begins, has just hired on John Bates (Brendan Coyle), his valet with whom he served in the military. (The relations between the Crawleys and their staff are usually generous and human, which has bothered some bloggers who didn’t buy it, but as rendered in the series strikes me as utterly believable.) Bate’s has been injured in battle, leaving him with a noticeable limp, which makes doing his job difficult and inspires some of the other servants, notably the duplicitous Thomas (Rob James-Collier), Downton Abbey’s First Footman, and the insecure Mrs. O’Brien (Siohban Finneran), Lady Grantham’s Lady’s maid, to try to force him out of his position. Bates, for his part, is an overly proud and secretive sort, who doesn’t make his life easier by refusing help from anyone, though the comely Head Housemaid, Anna (Joanne Froggatt), eventually cuts through his stubborn exterior. Theirs is a touchingly sweet love story. Fortunately, most of her fellow servants are prepared to do the right thing when the chips fall.

Maggie Smith

Downton Abbey is particularly fascinating in its delineation of how things work in a manor house, from the elaborate and complex behind-the-scenes preparations for lavish dinners to the roles and rules supposedly governing how the manor’s high born women are expected to behave. They don’t necessarily agree with those restrictions, however, with Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown-Findlay), the youngest Crawly daughter, agitating for the vote for women, and Lady Mary succumbing to the seductive charms of a visiting Turkish diplomat, a shocking assignation that ends badly.

That theme of rebellion, usually couched in a modern vernacular, is the undercurrent of much of what goes in the manor and its surrounding environs. Matthew and his mother Isobel (Penelope Wilton), a doctor, ruffle some feathers by refusing, at least initially, any servants to help around the house. And Isobel, too, brings in some newfangled medical ideas that don’t sit well with the doctor and nurses at the local hospital. Other rigid concepts, from preservation of virginity before marriage to the whole idea of the modes of inheritance going through the male, are assailed as Downton Abbey and England as a whole begins to settle into the 20th century. It’s not all serious, either, as the show makes comedic hay with the introduction of a new invention, the telephone, a technological development that doesn’t sit well with the easily irritated butler, Mr. Carson (Jim Carter). Then as now, it’s the younger folk who find it easier to adapt to modernity.

Jim Carter as Mr. Carson

Jim Carter’s Mr. Carson is one of the more enjoyable and humorous figures in the series, but the acting in Downton Abbey is uniformly excellent. My favourite character, though, would have to be Maggie Smith whose Dowager Countess comes across, at first, as a continuation of the outspoken but also amusing, upper class snob she essayed in Gosford Park. (Notably, her illustrious name isn’t given special placing in the series, where it runs alphabetically.) But the Dowager Countess – who is apt to complain about the ‘selfishness’ of a maid who had the nerve to go off and get married, leaving her in the lurch, or who responds to her daughter who apologizes for feeling that she had to speak her mind, by plaintively commenting, “why, nobody else does” – slowly changes her spots. She learns to recognize that her position has forced others to defer to her unduly – letting her win for best garden arrangement in a local contest year after year – and allied with her American daughter-in law over Matthews’ pace in the manor, begins to warm to the younger woman. (One interesting fact unveiled in Downton Abbey is that many British men went to the U.S. to wed because so many American women had wealth to bring to the marriage.) In fact, all of the show’s cast, with the notable exception of Thomas, is portrayed in shades of grey; the palpable dislike, even hatred, between self-centered Lady Mary and her jealous younger sister, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) – who resents that Mary has first pick of all eligible men for marriage as is customary – is disturbingly real and vicious. Thomas is actually the series’ only missed opportunity. Thomas is a closeted gay man, and Downton Abbey could have made the salient argument that having to lie about who he is, ultimately affects the way Thomas conducts himself in the workplace, but it didn’t.

The Crawley Sisters: Edith, Mary and Sybil

I’m glad Downton Abbey ran on PBS, a network that I don’t usually have time for, between the blandness of much of its American programming, including its much-vaunted documentaries, and its propensity for censoring what it shows, such as its own commissioned series like American Masters. (A recent profile of actor Jeff Bridges was, regrettably and annoyingly, replete with beeped out swear words.) But, at least, PBS’s showing of Downton Abbey was run without commercials, which was not the case in England where it premiered on commercial channel ITV. We tend to assume that all British television eschews ads because so much of it, from Monty Python’s Flying Circus to Life on Mars, is commercial free. Downton Abbey reportedly had so many commercial breaks that numerous viewers complained upon its airing in the U.K. Being set early last century, also meant it needn’t contain any swearing that the American network might have felt compelled to bleep; the strongest word used in the series, slut, makes more of a visceral impact then it might have otherwise.

As is, our cut of the series was thus able to flow naturally, consistently and pleasingly. (Three directors, Brian Percival, Ben Bolt and Brian Kelly shared the duties. The art direction and costumes are, as in most British period pieces, impeccable.) Much happens in Downton Abbey by the time it reaches its climax with the declaration of the First World War, two years after the series begins. And while the show isn’t groundbreaking or revelatory so much as it’s smart and well laid out, it’s rewarding viewing. It also garnered good enough ratings for a second instalment to be commissioned for airing in England in the fall, and likely early next year in North America. I for one can’t wait to see what happens to the owners, heir apparent and servants of Downton Abbey in the years following the beginning of WWI. It’ll be a journey well worth taking.

- originally published on April 5, 2011 in Critics at Large.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches courses at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute.

Issues

2012-01-14T12:00:00.006-05:00

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Sometimes if a movie has the 'right' politics, some critics will overlook obvious dramatic faults because the 'bigger picture' is being endorsed. But a movie's subject matter shouldn't make it immune from a more open, democratic critical perspective. That's what Susan Green brought to her reading of Lisa Choldenko's The Kids Are All Right despite her sympathies towards the film's cause.

A Matrimonial Muddle: The Kids Are All Right

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/08/matrimonial-muddle-kids-are-all-right.html

Perhaps I’m being politically incorrect, but The Kids Are All Right is not so all right with me when it comes to selecting an enemy. The otherwise lovely new Lisa Cholodenko feature, beloved by forward-thinking audiences across America, zeros in on a suburban Los Angeles married couple with two children. The partners happen to be middle-aged lesbians, each of whom gave birth to a baby conceived with sperm from the same anonymous donor. The youngsters are now teens who decide to find their biological father. His sudden presence in their lives leads to a crisis. Great premise. Terrific actors: Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as the moms, Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson as the offspring, Mark Ruffalo as the unsuspecting third parent. Disappointing resolution.

The narrative initially reels a viewer in with a combination of humor – especially the embarrassment adolescents invariably feel about adult behavior – and a hint of simmering emotions. Nic (Bening) is a physician and a control freak, which leaves the confused, career-free Jules (Moore) with resentment she keeps hidden beneath a slightly ditzy flowerchild surface. Her dream of becoming a landscape designer is ridiculed because her previous business ventures have been failures. Their daughter Joni, now 18, will soon be heading off to college. Her 15-year-old half-brother, Laser, is succumbing to the influence of a friend who likes drugs, danger and cruelty. The freshly-minted dad, Paul (Ruffalo), owns an earthy organic restaurant, for which this veteran of fertilization grows vegetables at a co-op garden. He’s something of a playboy, though hardly a cad or misogynist. His easy-going charm wins over everyone but Nic; she is immediately threatened by the way Joni, Laser and Jules take to the affable guy. Her worry, expressed to him at one point, is that he’s out to steal her family.

This is not Paul’s intention, even though he begins to question the value of remaining single and unencumbered by little ones. He’s not really even a true home-wrecker when a mutual attraction with Jules, hired to tame his uncultivated backyard (and symbolically his untamed heart), results in several energetic liaisons dangereuses. The first of these, played for laughs, has her reacting with amazement at the first sight of his penis, a comic reference to the well-endowed gay male porn she and Nic watch as a turn-on during their own lovemaking sessions.

SPOILER ALERT: Yet Jules’ heterosexual romp essentially is explained away as just another fantasy extension of that girl-on-girl preference rather than what has been evident on screen: a genuine attachment between a man and a woman who seem to have a lot in common. When Nic learns of the affair, their happy home is disrupted but it’s Paul who’s destined to pay the ultimate price – exile, just as he’s beginning to grow up and yearn for commitment.

Cholodenko is the auteur behind the lesbian-themed High Art (1998) and Laurel Canyon, the underrated 2002 tale of louche people in the L.A. music industry. She also has directed episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, Six Feet Under, The L Word and, more recently, a segment of HBO’s Hung titled “Beaverland.” Coauthored with Stuart Blumberg, her script for The Kids Are All Right looks at marriage equality as a norm, replete with warts-and-all domestic scenarios similar to those in conventional households. This message may be aimed at Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that overturned the legalization of same-sex wedlock in California two years ago. The forces of homophobia, which were funded by the Church of Latter Day Saints, won that round. But their hate-filled victory was tossed out on August 4 in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a case before a U.S. District Court in the state. One of Hollywood's most macho stars, Arnold Schwarzenegger, found that in his position as governor he was forced to be the figurehead for a regressive law with which he personally disagrees.

None of the characters in Cholodenko’s movie ever questions the Nic-and-Jules union, however. The issue isn’t even the quaint notion of wedded bliss in general. That conundrum is swept aside with a few typical remarks about the difficulty of sustained togetherness for any gender. Here’s the rub: While pain is inevitable no matter who does the cheating, only the male part of the equation in this instance winds up unforgiven. Jules is pardoned after several mea culpas; Paul’s apologies are rebuffed. Early on, he explains that his two-decade-old contribution to the artificial insemination process was as much about helping others as it was a scheme for some quick cash. He’s a kind, gentle soul, immediately protective of his newfound son and daughter, and the indiscretion clearly took a proverbial two to tango. So why should he be banished from their midst, reduced to the role of almost a pathetic stalker at the end, as everyone else goes on to redemption?

GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning) tries to be an inclusive movement; Jules did not commit a crime by questioning her relationship. Maybe Cholodenko’s queer-as-folk film needs a sequel. All we are saying is give Paul a chance.

- originally published on August 4, 2010 in Critics at Large.

– Susan Green is a film critic and arts journalist based in Burlington, Vermont. She is the co-author with Kevin Courrier of Law & Order: The Unofficial Companion and with Randee Dawn of Law & Order Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion.

Lennonology

2012-01-13T12:00:00.052-05:00

Borrowed Time: Listening to John Lennon's Signature Box

Set

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/11/borrowed-time-listening-to-john-lennons.html

“I’ve always been slightly jealous of the world for having had more time with my father than I did” – Sean Lennon

Sean Lennon makes a valid point considering that he was just 5 years old when his father died. Consequently, our own memories of John Lennon resonate differently. But, in considering the music, we have to take into account Lennon’s relationship with his family and his openly political activities. This is especially true when you examine his entire body of work, as collected in the recently released Signature Box Set. Remastered by the same team that did the excellent work on The Beatles’ mono and stereo box sets from last year, this collection reflects the same standard of audio excellence. The set features Lennon’s singles, demos and completed albums, including a brochure of essays from Yoko Ono, Julian Lennon and his half-brother, Sean. The set also includes a book examining Lennon’s short life and a print of one of his ink illustrations. I took the time to listen to these albums once again in chronological order just as they were intended.

First, a few words about the Plastic Ono Band, and/or Elephant’s Memory, led by John on either guitar or keyboards. These two bands don't resemble The Beatles at all; they are a rather sloppy back-up unit in complete contrast to the Fab Four. This is particularly true due to the presence of Yoko Ono as a vocalist. Like McCartney, Lennon got his famous second wife involved at the get-go because both musicians missed one another on musical (and perhaps emotional) terms best left to a therapist to explain. If you consider where Lennon was in his career, he could have put together an excellent band of top-notch players, but he did not. I think he chose unknown players to either distinguish his sound, or to create a new one. Phil Spector, who produced most of Lennon’s albums, was a major factor in establishing Lennon’s post-Beatle sound.

As for the singles, "Give Peace a Chance" sounds brighter with a better feel for the bedroom in which it was recorded. "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" is Yoko’s shining moment, as it were, and while she struggles to stay in tune, her passion overrides the deficiencies in her voice. "Instant Karma!" has a crisper remastering that chimes more clearly now. "Cold Turkey" comes across as much heavier with the guitar driving the bass line and Lennon’s poignant vocal. He really tries to make you “feel” the withdrawal symptoms in this one. Much more effective here than the original mix that made you feel distant from the experience. This one makes you shiver.

The box set also has a disc devoted to alternate/home recordings. His dirge “Mother” comes across as less-severe in Lennon’s alternate performance. The acoustic guitar is more prominent in the mix, but it sounds like a rehearsal; Lennon’s screaming in pain over her loss begins sooner in this version. “Love” features a solo acoustic guitar and John’s majestic voice: personal, private and sad. “God” is driven by an acoustic guitar and drums. Lennon rants from the front porch and changes the musical dynamics that are much more powerful when he goes to the piano for the final version on Plastic Ono Band. These demo/home recordings sounds quite “finished.” Lennon was good at getting right to the point with his music without messing with the writing. “I Found Out" has his double-tracked vocal front and center with the rhythm section barely keeping up. The final version on Plastic Ono Band is significantly better rehearsed. But Lennon’s vocal here is more memorable. The CD then fast forwards to 1980 with a demo version of the under-appreciated “Nobody Told Me” with a drum machine that just won’t quit. It's yet another example of Lennon’s strong focus of how a song should go. It's a pity that “One of the Boys, India, India” went unfinished but it does illustrate Lennon’s determination to record a demo, whether it was finished or not. The core of the song was solid and he knew it. Now we know it too. "Serve Yourself," his shot at Bob Dylan's 1979 conversion to Christianity, was initially issued on the collection Wonsaponatime in 1998 with Lennon on acoustic guitar. But this version features him on piano and he sounds like Dylan on his “Gotta Serve Somebody.” Speaking of Dylan, no song comes closer than Lennon's alternate version of "I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier," first featured on Imagine, which has the feel of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. On “Isolation,” Lennon is alone on vocal in this much stronger version, albeit unfinished due to the slower tempo and Lennon’s hesitancy at the end of it.

His first solo album, Plastic Ono Band (1970), opens with a scratchy church bell sound that introduces "Mother." It either marks the end of The Beatles, or the beginning of Lennon’s woe. Perhaps it's a blend of both. Especially since it was recorded the year after the band broke up. "Mother" (like the album itself) alternates between anxiety and anger. Lennon was just shy of his 30th birthday when this record was released. Clearly he still had unresolved issues. Now that he was out from under the safety of The Beatles, all would be revealed. Revelation is what this first record is all about and it succeeds despite the pain, angst and his bearing of the soul. Lennon obviously needed to go through this phase and he deals openly with it.

Plastic Ono Band reveals maturity due to self-discovery, primal scream theories notwithstanding. Lennon’s performance, despite the angst, is relaxed and completely focused. His vocal range reflects that focus, too, particularly on “Love,” “Isolation” and “Remember.” The latter track, with its drone-like piano, drives the sound with a firm yet gentle hand that builds the tension. What’s remarkable about Plastic Ono Band is how the 11 songs reflect Lennon the boy, the teen, the restless Beatle and finally the man. It’s his most autobiographical record and reflects his ego-driven self-centeredness. This was an album he had to make before he could, as a solo artist, take on the rest of the world.

Imagine (1971) was recorded a year later in Lennon’s estate in Tittenhurst Park outside of London. Unlike his debut, this is an album seeped in idealism, love and social commentary. And it's more palatable to a larger audience. It makes sense, too, because The Beatles also appealed to an international audience so why would Lennon seek a smaller crowd? Producer Phil Spector, who helmed Plastic Ono Band, was brought back to work on the album from the ground up and he was at the height of his commercial and musical powers. This is particularly evident on the pretty string arrangements for “Imagine” and “Jealous Guy.” The Flux Fiddlers never sounded better! So what we have here is an accessible album on the surface, but there’s much more meaning in the songs themselves. Consider the juxtaposition to "Imagine" of the up-tempo, skiffle song “Crippled Inside,” a humorous song, but with deeper, psychological insight. I’ve always found the lyrics profound: “You can hide your face behind a smile … you can live a lie until you die, one thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside.” These ideas are a little more explicit in the blues number, “It’s So Hard,” where Lennon’s voice is buried in the mix like a voice inside your own head.

My favourite song, though, is “Gimme Some Truth” which features his best performance as a vocalist. He speaks for injustice here and the song reflects the political climate of the times in all its starkness. Although Lennon refers to Richard Nixon in the song, you can easily relate it to all the “neurotic-psychotic-pig-headed politicians.” It’s a pity that this remastered version has softened the edge of the original, vinyl mix. And while Imagine has a lot of worldly imagination in it, nothing gets as personal as Lennon’s shot at Paul McCartney on “How Do You Sleep?” This remastered version improves the original mix right from the start with the string ensemble tuning up that's similar to the start of Sgt. Pepper. Despite its anger, the beauty of this song comes out of George Harrison's slide guitar solo that had then become his signature sound on All Things Must Pass (1971). But right after this is Lennon’s confessional, “How?,” a well-written song that features a series of rhetorical questions that inspire deep reflection -- even though, on the surface, the words could be considered juvenile. The album closes with the up-tempo “Oh Yoko,” as charming a love song as you’d ever want to hear.

Sometime in New York City (1972), which is a collaborative album between Lennon and Ono, hits you smack in the face. Even to this day, Lennon’s explicit lyrics on “Woman is the Nigger of the World” make me feel uneasy. The song is immediately followed by Yoko’s vocal on “Sisters, Oh Sisters,” a delightful up-tempo pop song a la The Shirelles. Perhaps Phil Spector wanted something to lighten the mood after the opening track. But this highly charged political record strikes me as an anomaly. On the one hand, Lennon was desperately trying to assimilate into American society. He loved New York and struggled to get a Green Card for years. But some of the commentary fails to stir up much because Lennon's superficial political take on America reveals that he's still the outsider. Consider “Attica State”: a comment on the violence in that prison that was headline news in 1970. Even though the driving music grabs your attention, the lyrics fail to captivate because Lennon is trapped by the naive nature of the lyrics where he asserts in idealistic generalizations to “free all prisoners everywhere.” That said, the next track, “Born in a Prison,” sung by Yoko, takes a slightly more sincere idea, but she fails to develop it. It’s hard to listen to Ono’s singing anyway because she’s often out of tune in spite of Phil Spector’s efforts to bump up the wall of sound to protect her.

Two songs about the Irish Troubles also grace this album, namely “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “The Luck of the Irish.” I saw John & Yoko perform the latter on The Mike Douglas Show shortly after its release. The censors bleeped “God” from “Goddamn” in the refrain, so all you heard was “Damn! Damn!.” No less effective is Yoko’s decent performance on the middle 8 verses on this recording. "John Sinclair" comes off as the strongest song on the album: a decent acoustic set featuring Lennon on slide guitar. It’s an inspired country-blues about the American White Panther leader who was sentenced to 10 years for marijuana possession. "Angela" is a mid-tempo ode to Angela Davis, who was once on the FBI’s most wanted list for kidnapping and weapons possession. She, too, was a loud, dissenting voice in American politics in the early 70s. "We’re All Water" kicks up a storm, to say the least, in spite of Ono’s screeching on the song. But there’s nothing subtle about this record: it’s a cold slap in the face featuring Lennon and Ono at their most virulent.

When Mind Games was released in 1973, Lennon had just turned 33 years of age and was suffering through a tumultuous year, personally and politically. Despite that, this record is bright, cheerful and well-played. Mind Games sounds like a collection of short stories. “Intuition,” “One Day (at a time),” and “Mind Games” are all songs of self-discovery and speak of living in the moment. There’s one political song, “Bring on the Lucie,” but most tunes involve his now strained relationship with Yoko. "Out the Blue," which reminds me a little of “Sexy Sadie,” could easily be considered a sequel, but it’s really about Yoko and what their union means to him.

Yet Mind Games is a record that refuses to be mysterious in any way. All of the songs are uncomfortably explicit which now reflected Lennon’s songwriting strategy. His original approach worked brilliantly with McCartney because one writer tempered, if you will, the emotion of the other, creating songs that were balanced, imaginative and lyrical. For Lennon, by the time he was in his 30s, the only writing partner he had was Yoko, who probably never challenged him as much as McCartney. Mind Games is a record tipped completely in Lennon’s direction. He sings about love, forgiveness, and politics and continues themes established in the first two records. There is a lot of forgettable tracks such as “Meat City” and “Tight A$.” Thankfully, they are balanced by the strength of the title track.

When you listen to Lennon's collected works in chronological order, his music continually strives to be as un-British as possible. Walls and Bridges (1974) was released 6 months before David Bowie’sYoung Americans. (Lennon co-wrote “Fame” on that record.) Like Young Americans, the street sounds of funk, gospel, blues and rock & roll drive this entire album. This is especially true on “What You Got,” the funkiest song on the record and far better than the number one hit, “Whatever Gets You Thru The Night.” This is immediately followed by the R&B inspired “Bless You” that sounds like Donny Hathaway, or Stevie Wonder, gone uptown. It’s a classy number rich in electric piano and percussion. The only anomaly is the inclusion of “Steel and Glass,” a tough-sounding indictment of his former manager, Allen Klein, that curiously borrows the same string arrangement from "How Do You Sleep?", his vicious attack on Paul McCartney.

Lennon’s tumultuous year, the so-called lost weekend of some 18 months, is perfectly captured in “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out).” It’s a sad lament as Lennon effectively bears his soul one more time; sounding like Harrison on “Isn’t It A Pity.” But it’s no less effective in stirring some dark emotions for me. Walls and Bridges is a much stronger effort than Mind Games even though it was written and recorded under duress. Nevertheless, it pushed Lennon to his creative edge opening possibilities for even better music. Alas, the political and legal pressures that were constantly around him turned out too much for him to bear.

Rock ‘N’ Roll (1975) is an album of classic music from the 50s that could be considered Lennon’s “contractual obligation record.” Despite being wrapped in legal issues, this record (recorded between 1973 and 1974) still stands out for its musical honesty and for the simple reason that John Lennon was getting in touch with his roots. The album cover features one of my favourite images of Lennon taken in Hamburg, Germany in 1961, when The Beatles were building the foundation of their musical legacy. What is remarkable about Rock 'N' Roll is Lennon’s scratchy vocals. He sounds raw, youthful and full of energy. The band is especially tight and the arrangements crisp so it doesn’t sound as sloppy as it could have considering the nature of the recording conducted over a couple of days in October 1974. Rock 'N' Roll still kicks!

Double Fantasy (1980), which comes after Lennon's five year hiatus being a househusband and father, is another duet with Yoko. But unlike Sometime in New York City, where they exchanged political positions, Double Fantasy features a collection of songs that play like an exchange of love letters. (Its actual title includes the sub-title: A Heart Play.) Listening now, it's remarkable how youthful Ono’s songs are compared to Lennon’s on this record. Opening with a Presley/Orbison sound, Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over” signifies his return to Yoko and equally important his return to music, while his songs mine the musical past that formed the basis of his artistry (although “Cleanup Time” is locked into a Philly-funk sound with sharply arranged horns). Ono, on the other hand, is more inspired by the music of the present. Her up-tempo “Give Me Something” borrows from the sounds of the late 70s New Wave -- especially the music of The B52s. For once, she sings in tune and the production values are strong with bits of electronica thrown in for good measure.

For Lennon, his songs, as always, are straight ahead with a few delicate musical touches such as the steel drums on “Beautiful Boy.” It stands out best for its line, “life is what happens when you’re making other plans,” as lovely and poignant a lyric as Lennon ever wrote. While “Watching the Wheels” has too much of a nostalgic feel, a far superior version is the demo that features Lennon on acoustic guitar. That one sends shivers down your spine. This version sounds a little cheeky to my ears. “Yes, I’m Your Angel,” with its cabaret-like presentation, seems silly as well in retrospect. Ono is less convincing on her performance here. Yet I can see her entertaining Lennon in the privacy of their living room singing this one. “Woman” is the perfect combination of Lennon’s confessional style with the right mix of musical hooks and double-tracked harmonies. If nothing else, Double Fantasy is a positive, inspired record. It remains Lennon’s last release in his lifetime and it still holds up against anything else in his collection. The remastering here, not to be confused with the stripped-down version released separately, is a lot warmer in tone.

Milk and Honey was released four years after his untimely death. This album continues the so-called conversation between Ono and Lennon that was started on Double Fantasy. Alas, since Lennon was not part of the final mixing and sequencing, it’s a one-sided conversation. And that’s the sad part. Nevertheless Lennon sounds just as buoyant on these songs as he does on Double Fantasy. Essentially the tracks are rehearsal material featuring Lennon counting in the band and directing the solos. What it lacks in artistic polish it makes up for in spontaneity with an off-the-floor spirit. This is particularly true on “I Don’t Wanna Face It,” a song about denial. The most polished track, though, is “Nobody Told Me” one of Lennon’s catchiest guitar-hooks with a great chorus that still lingers for its relevancy today. Lennon’s “Borrowed Time” with its reggae-influenced beat offers a truly contemporary sound for Lennon, who like many musicians at the time, was inspired by Bob Marley. Milk and Honeyis a good album in spite of its unfinished quality. But that's what I like about this record; its rawness appeals to my ears and it marks one of the best qualities about John Lennon’s music: its unpretentiousness.

Once finished listening, I discovered what a pleasure it was to revisit this music and consider Lennon’s honesty in his art, an approach that carried on for years and never left him. He bore his soul in ways that juxtaposed embarrassment and inspiration. He took musical risks that either failed, or succeeded, but he didn’t care. And while that carefree attitude made me cringe a lot of the time, I respect that fact that Lennon never shied away from his own foibles. But what makes his death so tragic was the fact that he had come full circle in his personal struggles with an eye to a positive future. Now having spent time with the music of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, I can finally understand why Sean Lennon was so jealous of the world for having more time with his father than he did. It’s time that we, too have now sadly lost.

- originally published on November 21, 2010 in Critics at Large.

-- John Corcelli is a musician, writer, actor and theatre director.

The Oprah Effect

2012-01-12T12:00:00.027-05:00

Elitist, Escapist, or Everywoman?: Deconstructing ‘The

Oprah Effect’

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/05/elitist-escapist-or-everywoman.html

Let me be clear: the purpose of this review is not to critique Oprah’s philanthropy, or her validation of sexual abuse victims, or her support of visible minorities. These are all empirically wonderful things. Whether you love her or loathe her, Oprah’s patronage of the causes that matter to Oprah cannot be denied. I’m not sure which side of the Oprah fan club I belong to. Considering how much information is available about the Oprah brand, we know remarkably little about Oprah the person, other than the choice tidbits she and her Harpo minions choose to divulge. Who is Oprah? She morphs her personality to fit each guest. She’s dancing and thumping with Tina Turner, philosophizing with Maya Angelou and talking literature with Toni Morrison. I half expected her to jump on the couch with Tom Cruise during his outburst! Some people would argue that this is the job of the talk show host, to make each guest feel comfortable. People respect Oprah because she is self-made and there’s no arguing that she’s made a lot of money and a big impact.

Toni Morrison & Oprah

Oprah’s success is often credited to her ability to connect with Middle America. Indeed, her struggles with food and body image are something many women can relate to. We do relate to Oprah, but do we admire her? Despite my efforts to dismiss Oprah as just a mixture of favorite things, weight loss gimmicks and secret Stedman, I can’t do it. Despite my efforts to ignore her, Oprah makes me think. Not only that, but I’m embarrassed to say that Oprah makes me think harder and think better about things I think about anyway. Despite my efforts to mock Oprah, she takes my empty ambitions of thankfulness, self-realization and humor and puts them into practice with ideas like a gratitude journal, aha! moments and the ugly cry. The Oprah Winfrey Show seems to invite mocking, but when you actually examine what it stands for, mocking doesn’t make much sense.

It’s no coincidence that Oprah.com is the first site to pop up when you Google “live your best life.” Living fully is Oprah’s calling card. Living fully is easier when you’re a billionaire with a personal chef and a payroll full of experts. It’s much more difficult for the ordinary person. As much as Oprah does connect with women of North America, her daily show is also a sense of escape for ordinary women. For example, one contributor to the online forum thriftyfun.com wondered how often she should change bed sheets. Another member responded “I saw Oprah say on her show once that she does them every other day. But she is Oprah and can do that. LOL. Or have that done, I should say.” Exactly. Many of us enjoy Oprah, but we also realize that her reality is not ours.

Robin Okrant attempted to adapt her life to Oprah’s reality for one year and chronicled the experience in her blog Living Oprah (now a book of the same name). She embodied every lifestyle suggestion made by Oprah and reported how much money, energy, and time it took. It turns out that it’s very expensive to live Oprah and the majority of us simply cannot afford to live our best lives as prescribed by the Queen of Talk.

It’s incomplete to discuss money and Oprah without mentioning what has been dubbed “The Oprah Effect.” When Oprah endorses a product, sales skyrocket. This says more about our consumerist and celebrity-obsessed culture than it does about Oprah’s discerning taste. In fact, rumor has it that Oprah’s personal taste is actually quite gaudy and horrid. But when you have dozens of people ensuring that you live your best life, apparently this doesn’t matter.

Oprah’s final episodes – the two surprise extravaganzas at Chicago’s United Centre and the final “love letter to her audience” in her studio – were nothing if not representative of Oprah’s show and legacy. They showcased Oprah in her finest glory: part A-list celebrity pal, part benevolent billionaire, and part self-help goddess. The recipe was clearly a success as CTV reported 1.6 million Canadian viewers for the ultimate episode, a record for the series. Her final words of wisdom to viewers included affirmations about feeling worthy, embracing your true calling and listening to life’s whispers. She proclaimed: “You are not alone. You can change your life.”

Oprah certainly changed hers. For a name that means “runaway,” Oprah has runaway - with society’s collective soul, from the childhood she was born into, and now into a lucrative new undertaking with OWN. She is the quintessential self-made woman. From skinny jeans to fat clothes, she has been part of our culture for 25 years. I don’t know if she is elitist, escapist, or an everywoman; ultimately she’s an enigma. I still cannot articulate how I feel about the richest and most influential woman of our time. But instead of joining the anti- or pro-Oprah parades, I’ll live my own life: take what works for me, leave what doesn’t, and resist the urge to ridicule. Oprah would be proud.

- originally published on May 31, 2011 in Critics at Large.

– Mari-Beth Slade is a food and wine lover, wayward librarian and would-be philosopher. She works as a marketer for an accounting firm in Halifax, but spends most days doing yoga poses at her desk or brainstorming discussion topics for her book club.

Light & Dark

2012-01-11T12:00:00.039-05:00

Newfoundland's Finest: In Praise of The Republic of Doyle

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/02/newfoundlands-finest-in-praise-of.html

Never has a show made a city look so lovely. One of the many pleasures of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's TV series The Republic of Doyle is that it has made the city of St. John's, Newfoundland look absolutely gorgeous. From Signal Hill to the multi-coloured downtown buildings to the charm of the harbour and landscape around it, St. John's looks ravishing. It makes you want to go visit it like now, right now.

Allan Hawco & Sean McGinley

But that's not the only attraction. Pretty pictures does not a TV show make. What is so appealing about The Republic of Doyle is its wonderful combination of comedy, action, mystery and heartache. Created by and starring native son, Allan Hawco (his co-creators are Malcolm MacRury and Perry Chafe), the show is, as Hawco freely admits, inspired by the classic James Garner series The Rockford Files. Jake Doyle (Hawco) is – along with his father, Malachy (Sean McGinley) – a private investigator working on whatever cases he can get in the small city of St. John's. Sometimes it's a missing person, sometimes it's a blackmail case, and occasionally it's a murder mystery. The plots, such as they are, are often very incidental to the relationships between Jake and a terrific cast of characters that surround him. What's more important here is his gentle bickering with Malachy, his often moving but so-far unconsummated relationship with police detective Leslie Bennett (the effortlessly beautiful and charming Krystin Pellerin – she's currently on stage in Toronto in Soulpepper Theatre Company's production of the musical The Fantasticks), his attempts to protect his young niece, Tinny Doyle (Marthe Bernard), or his constant rescuing of his screw-up older brother Christian (Jonathan Goad) from himself.

Krystin Pellerin

Allan Hawco has had a fairly healthy career in Canadian theatre and TV, but until now, on TV at least, he's been a character actor, never the lead. It just goes to show you that if you aren't getting cast in the right projects, write the darn thing yourself. Hawco is perfectly cast in the show. He is handsome in that 'dark Irish' sort of way, yet he still has a hint of melancholy and a touch of failure surrounding him. Women are attracted to him, but he consistently finds ways to screw things up (in Series One he was newly divorced; in Season Two, he is juggling two women, the fetching Bennett and the Crown Attorney, Allison Jenkins (Michelle Nolden)). As the series progresses, you know he's meant to be with Bennett, but something always seems to get in the way. He's also a sucker for lost causes (such as his brother). Some critics have dumped on the show calling it too “light,” yet what they seem to miss is that not every show needs to be dark and moody to get at human failings. Hawco's show, within its light, comic frame, gets at some real truths about loneliness, longing and trying to make a mark in a world that could really care less.

One minute you may be laughing, but in the very next, assisted by a perfectly chosen piece of music (such as The Waterboys' “Fisherman's Blues” that filled the soundtrack at the end of this week's episode), you will have a tear rolling down your cheek. This is top-notch TV. Sure, Hawco may have 'borrowed' the basic premise from the US's The Rockford Files, but its Newfoundland setting has given this fine series a consistent top-spin that Garner's LA-set series only occasionally managed to hit.

- originally published on February 17, 2011 in Critics at Large.

– David Churchill is a film critic and author of the novel The Empire of Death. You can read an excerpt here. Or go tohttp://www.wordplaysalon.com for more information.

Where One Day The Twain Shall Meet

2012-01-10T12:00:00.003-05:00

The Two Marks: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn & Money For Nothing

Brian Gable/The Globe and Mail (Jan. 14, 2010)

If we needed further proof that the standards of literacy and education in North America have diminished rapidly, the recent decisions to censor both Mark Twain's classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Dire Strait's satirical song "Money For Nothing" now takes us to pretty embarrassing new depths. That these two events should bookend the current heated debate over the contribution of political rhetoric to the tragic Arizona shootings is hardly accidental. We seem to have lost touch with the true meaning of speech, so much so, that we can no longer tell the difference between what's morally offensive and what isn't.

Mark Twain

In the case of Mark Twain's 1884 novel, a book written during the post-Civil War era, Twain was addressing the turbulent racial tensions that had escalated due to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation to end black slavery. He created a narrative about a young white American in conflict with his culture, one who sought a new form of freedom while journeying down the Mississippi River. Twain also introduced into the story the black character, Jim, a former slave who Finn befriends and learns from. In doing so, Twain sought to attack the growing problems of segregation, prejudice and the continued lynchings by having this main character refute the accepted norms. As Twain once said after the book was published, "A sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience." To achieve this, Twain had to write in the context of the times, from what he knew and the language that he heard, in order to create an authenticity of both character and place. One of the offensive words, of course, was the use of the word "nigger" which was common coin at that time. (Since Jim was also once a slave, he could hardly sound like a Harvard grad in the book either.) None of Twain's nuances seemed to get through to NewSouth Books, however, who have now published an edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that replaces the word "nigger" with "slave" and changes the character Injun' Joe's name to Indian Joe. Besides formalizing American slang in the case of Injun' Joe, which then unwittingly makes Indian Joe seem even more derogatory than Injun' Joe, the use of the word "slave" for "nigger" is hardly the proper term for a character who has just earned his freedom. Oh art, where is thy sting?

Suzanne La Rosa, of NewSouth Books, rationalized their decision to alter the text. "We saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers," she explained. "If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain's works will be more emphatically fulfilled." But how do you spark debate about language and censorship when you create an altered text that future generations will take as the authentic one? Where is the debate when you eliminate the very words that sparked the controversy in the first place? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is already recognized as a moral work, one that pretty much demands that educators prepare their students for the harshness of the world it depicts. Unfortunately, bureaucratic censorship bodies chose to infantilize young students by not allowing informed dialogue to develop. Why? Because they are afraid of hurting people's feelings. But Twain's work is about feelings being hurt, about endured pain and the struggle to address and conquer injustice. How can students and readers confront that reality if these moral arbiters deny them the sometimes painful process of learning about it?

Mark Knopfler

As for the censoring of Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing," by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, because of the use of the word "faggot" in the lyrics, it's now evident that Americans aren't the only ones who have the market cornered on ignorance. The song, which first appeared on the band's 1985 album Brothers in Arms, is a satire of corporate rock told from the point of view of a working-class character who's watching music videos and making derogatory comments about them. According to the song's composer Mark Knopfler, it's also clear that the guy envies the lives of these pampered stars. "The singer in 'Money For Nothing' is a real ignoramus, hard-hat mentality -- somebody who sees everything in financial terms," he told Rolling Stone in 1985. "I mean this guy has a grudging respect for rock stars. He sees it in terms of, well, that's not working and yet the guy's rich: that's a good scam. He isn't sneering." To achieve that, Knopfler wrote the song in the vernacular of the character he was portraying. The sentiment is hardly one that Knopfler himself is endorsing. And an informed and educated public would know that. They would also understand Knopfler's intent if they were more acquainted with the use of the untrustworthy narrator which I wrote about in an earlier post. But censors become self-righteous under the belief that they are protecting homosexuals from defamation without using any analytical skills to determine whether the song endorses anti-gay sentiments or not. They see the word and assume that they are silencing a homophobe.

It's chilling that, years after Lenny Bruce broke the language barrier by performing uncompromising satire, censorship bodies still have the pervasive powers that they do. But those powers reveal nothing learned, nothing new. They still have no grasp of the nature of parody, or even the function of irony. We live today in a climate of fear with a strong desire to repress what we don't care to understand. We may have access to all this information, but we have little desire to discern knowledge from it. Is it any wonder that rhetoric now fuels political debate? It's being used to incite buzz rather than thought. "There's a reason for unruliness in art," The Globe and Mail said in their editorial about the controversy. By airbrushing the unruliness from both Twain and Knopfler, they've not only neutered the power of art to say things we don't want to hear, they've deprived us of things that sometimes need to be said.

- originally published on January 16, 2011 in Critics at Large.

-- Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

I Am Tiger, Hear Me Roar

2012-01-09T12:00:00.008-05:00

Eye of the Tiger: In Defense of Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/03/eye-of-tiger-in-defense-of-amy-chuas.html

As a relatively new mother, I was unable to escape the hype surrounding Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Penguin, 2011). For weeks, my eyes inadvertently wandered to reviews, mostly scathing, of this alleged “Freudian nightmare” treatise on parenting. While Chua is a successful law professor at Yale, has authored numerous articles and two compelling books on political history and economic issues, she is recognized in most households as mean mommy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother shocked a nation of parents and non-parents alike over Chua’s “Chinese” method of parenting. Her philosophy encompasses strict rules such as: no TV, no video games, no drama class, and no sleepovers. Children must honour their parents, play either the piano or the violin (perfectly), and they must never receive a grade less than an A. Before the book hit the stores, endless tear-stained reviews poured into the media, many accused Chua of taking her tough-love tactics too far, of being abusive, of being a fanatic and worst of all, of stealing the childhood of two innocent girls.

While the hype seemed very entertaining, I had no intention of reading another parent’s latest musings, mainly due to my strong aversion to the rise of mommy-literature and mommy-bloggers. I feel no need to publicize my child-rearing methods, nor do I have a desire to read the same philosophies of mass-marketed pseudo-intellectuals. Alas, my efforts to avoid the debate came to an end one evening when one especially cheeky rascal tossed a copy of the book in my lap over dinner. As he sat there quite proud of his gag gift, I managed an underwhelmed “thanks,” while I struggled to decipher whether it would fit in my purse with my more important books. When I finally committed to reading – what I was expecting to be sanctimonious garble – I was incredibly surprised. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was frustrating, inspiring, thought-provoking and above all entertaining. It was not filled with the mere tirades of a matriarchal maniac, but instead featured the courageous journey of one tremendous woman determined to create the best life for her daughters as humanly possible. I found myself wanting to defend Amy Chua to the bleeding heart masses.

Chua makes a compelling defense of her thesis that the Chinese method of parenting is superior to that of the Western style. This argument is fueled by Chua’s fear of a declining civilization. "This country is going downhill,” she articulates throughout her work. Chua is petrified for the next generation, the generation that “because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents” are reaping the benefits of an upper-middle class. She worries that this generation has become both lazy and satisfied with mediocrity. To prevent her daughters, Sophia and Louisa (Lulu), from falling victim, she installs what she believes is a superior method of parenting. This requires Chua to be, what she describes as, a Tiger Mother. This means strict schedules, little involvement in the whimsical touchy-feely activities practiced by Western parents. She is dead set on raising children far ahead of the curve, prodigies in fact.

Amy Chua with daughters Sophia and Louisa

The first two thirds of the book demonstrate the rules of the Tiger Mother in action. Chua reminisces about grueling music lessons, all night math homework escapades and nerve-racking auditions. Her faith in her daughters’ talents caused her to push them to limits unimaginable to many parents – limits of which shocked the nation and sparked outrage. From the trivial (Chua did not allow her daughters to own unintelligent pets such as rabbits) to the undeniably shocking (threatening to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals if she did not play a piano piece perfectly), these criticisms were presented in the most unfair light.

As I read Tiger Mother, and came across each of these so-called injustices, I could not help but wonder how many people actually listened to the author and how many were just going into knee-jerk hysteria. If one read carefully, they would realize that Amy’s threats were mainly talk. She used various verbal tactics of installing both pride and shame in her daughters. One example that sparked a lot of disparagement was when Chua described how, when at her wit's end with her enraged three-year-old daughter Lulu, she demanded that Lulu stand out in the cold until she agreed to play the piano properly. Did the reader not get past the part where Chua felt immediately guilty and pleaded with her defiant daughter to come in and, after eventually coaxing her, put her in a warm bath with brownies and hot cocoa? In my opinion, this more than made up for the ordeal. True, some tactics are unorthodox in this day and age, but I disagree that there was any abuse or neglect. Her daughters at no point were afraid of ever standing up to Chua’s punishments: Lulu obstinately stood out in the snow to spite her mother. Chua just put more effort into raising her children than the over-psychoanalyzed critics would like to admit.

Chua put immense pressure on her daughters to succeed, and why not? What is so wrong with having standards and demanding excellence? There seems to be an inexplicable movement against elitism. When did being exceptional become a bad thing? Chua is an individual who still will not settle for mediocrity. And, to excel beyond the rest, you need to bust your hump. As harsh as the discipline seems, Chua is on to something. When her daughter lost a math competition to a classmate, she had to perform 2,000 math questions that evening until she was the best. Insane, yes, but look at where it got them. These girls have a track record of academic excellence coupled with prestigious awards. Her eldest daughter, Sophia, performed at Cargegie Hall in the eighth grade. Both girls performed in Budapest at Franz Liszt’s Acadmeny of Music. Obviously Chua had done something right.

This thought-provoking work made me contemplate much of my own childhood, which was also very strict and sheltered. While there are many things that my parents did that I still disagree with, the installation of a strict schedule is not one of them. I give much credit to many of my accomplishments and my abilities to the fact that I had discipline installed in me through childhood. Like Chua, I have been able to work “psychotically hard” when necessary. With hard work comes rewards, freedoms and responsibilities that I now enjoy. Chua perfectly describes the difference between idealistic actions and responsible ones: “In Disney movies,” she describes, “the good daughter always has to have a breakdown and realize that life is not all about following rules and winning prizes, and then take off her clothes and run into the ocean or something like that. But that’s just Disney’s way of appealing to all the people who never win any prizes. Winning prizes give you opportunities, and that’s freedom – not running into the ocean.”

Author Amy Chua

However, speaking from experience, I do recognize an important flaw in Chua’s strategy. Being dead set on grooming her daughters for success, she needs to pay attention to the society in which we live and all variables necessary for success. We live in a world where practical intelligence and the ability to build inter-personal relationships is imperative. Separating her daughters from most social activities is not the best method to raise emotional intelligence quotas. This is what concerns me the most about Chua’s parenting method. During my upbringing, sleepovers and extracurricular involvement, outside of piano lessons, was also limited. This led to a great disconnection between me and my peers. While things are getting better, I still feel at a disadvantage in many social situations, both personally and professionally. I believe this has held me back from many personal relationships and has also made necessary professional socializing all the more nerve-wracking.

Thus while hard-work is imperative to success, it does not guarantee it. Natural intelligence, genetics, social abilities and socio-economic placement also come into play. Chua’s daughters are successful and disciplined mainly thanks to Chua’s parenting, but also luckily thanks to their genes and their socio-economic platform. Those without these platforms may find benefits to tiger parenting, but may not have as great of results.

The last third of the book is more introspective and philosophical. You see a softer side of Chua as she is grief stricken by an illness in the family and emotionally brought to her knees by a rebellious teenager. She even, to a degree, acknowledges that she had to ease up on her youngest daughter who, while she benefited from Chua’s simulated boot camp, was just not responding well to the culture in her thirteenth year. It is here I could see not only the physical effort that Chua has invested in her family, but the emotional investment as well.

Overall, the Chua sisters had a tremendously enriched childhood. Those weeping over lost childhoods are in need of a reality check. Sophia and Lulu’s childhood was spent travelling the world, experiencing opportunities of a lifetime, receiving the highest standard of education, and grooming for success. They turn out as bright, well-adjusted, ambitious young women who are in no need of anyone’s sympathy.

Would I instigate any of these methods into my own daughter? Not entirely, especially since my daughter recently attended her first sleepover at the tender age of two. I believe there is no categorical imperative to child rearing. There are people who just do not respond to authority, and while one can try their hardest, you just cannot change people. I do, however, hope that I have the courage and tenacity that Chua had. I hope for the strength and ability to inspire an equally unique and strong human being.

As the title of the book reflects, Chua was born under the sign of the Tiger. (While she claims to disagree with astrology, Chua still finds pride in her sign.) According to the Chinese zodiac, those born in the year of the tiger are courageous, charismatic, and diligent. They are also stubborn and authoritative. Chua does reflect this perfect combination of being extremely admirable and extremely overbearing. The Tiger Mother, regardless of how strict, is an extraordinary parent. While she followed the road less taken, it was much harder, not only in time and effort, but she also had a mind blowing schedule of legal lectures and penning two books, while she invested so much time in her daughters’ upbringings. She also fought a lonely battle, separated from other parents who believed that Chua was in the wrong. But the Tiger Mother kept going. This alone confirms that she is a respectable and admirable person. Whatever one feels about her parenting methods, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother certainly proves that Amy Chua is a force to be reckoned with.

- originally published on March 24, 2011 in Critics at Large.

– Laura Warner is a librarian, researcher and aspiring writer living in Toronto. She is currently based in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre’s Music Library.