Summer's a Comin'

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.

Since we'll soon be turning from spring to summer with thoughts of heading to the water it seemed appropriate to bring up one of the season's great terrors thanks to Susan Green.  

My Holiday Obsession: Cinematic Sharks

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/07/my-holiday-obsession-cinematic-sharks_4830.html

On America’s annual Fourth of July this month, I lazily tuned into a late-night cable broadcast of the ultimate Independence Day movie: Jaws, which haunted my visits to the beach – and that of countless others – long after it was released in 1975. This time around, adrenaline-fueled insomnia kept me glued to the TV for the film’s next two sequels, which I’d never seen before. But I was too pooped by 2:45 a.m. to keep my eyes open for Jaws: The Revenge. I can only assume that a franchise getting sillier by the year had reached an apex of silliness by its fourth go-round.

This guilty-pleasure marathon came despite the fact that Steven Spielberg’s career-making hit (he only directed the first one) and George Lucas’ 1977 Star Wars forever altered the landscape of cinema in my country. (Or should I say the seascape and galaxyscape?) The more introspective narratives with gravitas of the early 1970s gave way to action and adventure, a scenario that bombards us with one mindless summer blockbuster after another, few of them ever as original as their lower-tech antecedents of three decades ago.

What kept me riveted to Jaws, though, was Robert Shaw’s portrayal of Sam Quint, a shark hunter with an ego almost as big as the 25-foot Great White that proves to be his undoing. I once read the Peter Benchley bestseller on which the script is based but can’t recall many of the details. This character’s history, revealed in a drunken moment of truth-telling aboard the rickety boat, provides a depth that makes his ghastly death in the deep all the more tragic. In July 1945, Quint had been aboard the USS Indianapolis, a ship that delivered essential parts of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, it sank. Out of the 880 survivors, only 316 were rescued alive. While floating for four days, the rest perished from starvation, dehydration, hypothermia and attacks by tiger sharks. Now that’s a patriotic tale rarely heard when the successes of the Revolutionary War are celebrated on July 4th, as the movie’s little island resort town of Amity is attempting to do when a gigantic fish with serrated teeth and an insatiable appetite disrupts the festivities.

All that Jazz

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.

Paul Hoeffler was known as a great jazz photographer who often caught the musicians seemingly in flight performing the music they loved. When he died of bone cancer, David Churchill wrote a lovely tribute which was as much a testament to their friendship as it was an appraisal of his best work.

Remembering Paul Hoeffler: Master Photographer

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/07/remembering-paul-hoeffler-master.html

Paul Hoeffler

On this, the fifth anniversary of his death, I thought it was appropriate to write about my friend, photographer Paul Hoeffler. Between 1997 and 2005, I was privileged to get to know Paul, a man many would consider – to use that old saw – a photographer's photographer. Not only was he a brilliant photographer, but he was also known as one of the best printers around. He could take images and in his darkroom create works of art out of less than perfect material. I got to know Paul through my job at the LCBO, Ontario's government-run alcohol retail outlet. By the time we met, I'd been working in the liquor trade for 15 years and Paul had been a professional photographer for 40. In my capacity as a Product Consultant, he came to me looking for advice. A conversation started – it was always easy to talk to him – and we quickly moved beyond customer/retailer relationship into a friendship. Within our friendship, we had an unspoken rule: he taught me about jazz music and photography and I taught him about wine (I got the better end of that deal).

Jimmy Smith

In the 1950s, Paul was in the right place at the right time. Going to school during the day at the Rochester Institute of Technology studying photography, he spent his nights at many of the jazz clubs around the city. Using his blunt charm (he suffered neither fools nor crude behaviour gladly), he managed to win the trust and respect of many of the greatest jazz artists of the day during their concert tours through his town. Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Jimmy Smith, Oscar Peterson, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong and Dizzie Gillespie, amongst others, all gave him unprecedented access in Rochester and elsewhere after he left school. In the Rochester days, the photographs weren't only because of his complete love of the music and musicians, it was also his school work assignment. That access is something, Paul told me, that is impossible today. Their music inspired him to capture, visually, what they did musically. For example, the shot of Jimmy Smith, taken from below as he plays the organ (I use the present tense here on purpose, because so many of Paul's photos feels like the action is happening right now), his cigarette smoke languidly leaves the frame, could only be achieved if the subject trusts the photographer.

For the Love of Sondheim

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 key to making a good musical, besides having good material, is the staging and the tone it establishes. Which means sometimes a musical that normally doesn't impress a critic, such as in the case of Stephen Sondheim's Company with Steve Vineberg, can finally win him over.

 

The Marriage Musical: Stephen Sondheim's Company

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/08/marriage-musical-stephen-sondheims.html

For Stephen Sondheim aficionados, Company is beloved as the watershed musical that established him as a musical-theatre innovator. In a number of his early musicals he supplied the lyrics for the music of older, established composers (Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story, Jule Styne on Gypsy, Richard Rodgers on Do I Hear a Waltz?). His professional debut as a composer-lyricist was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962, but that was an old-fashioned vaudeville along the lines of Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse – and bizarrely, though the score was ingenious, Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove’s libretto received all the attention. (His other solo effort, a strained, distinctly sixties satirical farce called Anyone Can Whistle, closed after 11 performances. The Encores! series of concert-style musical revivals at New York’s City Center staged it two seasons ago with a superlative cast, but engaging as the production was you could see exactly why the show had bombed in 1964.)

Couples

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.

Some television shows, at first glance, may appear to be old hat giving us the appearance that it's already been done before. But then we see the network turn an old hat turned into something new and stylish. On the other hand, something that on the surface appears new and original may, in the end, be the kind of hat we end up quickly discarding. So Shlomo Schwartzberg discovered back in 2010 when he wrote in Critics at Large about two radically different shows: The Good Wife and United States of Tara. 

The Good Wife and United States of Tara: One Circle Opens Wide, The Other One Closes

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/08/good-wife-and-united-states-of-tara-one.html

Julianne Margulies in The Good Wife

* Note: the following post contains spoilers for the recent seasons of The Good Wifeand United States of Tara.

I was glad to see CBS’s very fine drama The Good Wife do so well in the recent Emmy Award nominations. It was a fitting recognition of last year’s best new network TV series and also a reminder that when they want to, the free channels can also match the quality of cable series and in the comparative case of United States of Tara, which imploded in its second year, surpass them, too.

(I was also pleased to note that ABC’s clever sitcom Modern Family dominated the recent nominations, as well, from among the new network shows that premiered last season, though I am baffled by FOX’s Glee, which had the most nods among the neophyte TV series. Well mounted as Glee is, it strikes me that this musical drama about a group of outcast teens who begin to discover themselves when they join their school’s fledgling glee club, isn’t doing anything that Fame, the movie and TV series, didn’t already do back in the early eighties.)

What if...

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.

Amazingly, it's been fifty years since The Beatles first created a rent in the culture and changed the face of popular music. Beginning with the appetizing single "Love Me Do," they quickly followed it up with the electrifying "Please Please Me." But what if the band never survived long enough to record that follow up? In what state would the world (and more particularily England) be in due to their break-up? That question took the form of Larry Kirwan's novel Liverpool Fantasy which Kevin Courrier wrote about two years ago in Critics at Large.

Dystopian Dreams: Larry Kirwan's Liverpool Fantasy

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/03/book-liverpool-fantasy.html

In my book Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream, I was trying to answer a question. How did a group like The Beatles, who wrote songs about love and helped to build a popular culture based on pleasure and inclusion, also attract hate and murder. To do so, I realized that I'd have to answer another key question: Was The Beatles' utopian dream worth it?

Given that the state of the world, in the wake of the band's demise, is not the one they sung about - and hoped for - in "All You Need is Love," it was tempting to ask whether or not The Beatles truly mattered. I thought I was going to have to justify the group solely on the strength of their music until I came across, quite by chance, a book by Larry Kirwan called Liverpool Fantasy (2003). In his book, Kirwan (who was the lead singer of a New York-based Irish rock group called Black 47), imagines England without the emergence of The Beatles.Liverpool Fantasy is a dystopian, yet comical, look at the absence of The Beatles from history. It doesn't spare the reader, but it doesn't ridicule the dream the band created either.

Back to the Source

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.

Every artist with a long body of work at some point puts together an anthology that attempts to account for where they are now. (The most vivid example is Neil Young's Decade, or his current Archives project.) When John Mellencamp decided to embark on his own anthology, On the Rural Route 7609, John Corcelli set out to ponder his choice.

American Conscience: John Mellencamp's On the Rural Route 7609

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/06/american-conscience-john-mellencamps-on.html

A colleague of mine, who didn’t know John Mellencamp, asked me what he would be remembered for in music. I said, the song “Cherry Bomb” one of Mellencamp’s biggest pop songs now part of the musical currency of formatted radio. It remains a catchy track with just enough edge to stand out on any “soft-rock” radio station. I suspect that I have better ears than most, if I may be so bold to say, because there’s something explicitly “American” about John Mellencamp. His songs have continuously featured stories of farmers, the working class, rodeos, county fairs, etc. This new 4-CD box set, On the Rural Route 7609, which looks like a relic from your grandfather’s collection of 78s, seems intended to depict Mellencamp in a particular way. Quotes from Tennessee Williams bracket the collection with an essay by Anthony DeCurtis, music critic for Rolling Stone and The New York Times. If nothing else, this set is intended to re-imagine the songwriter in a less commercial way.

Singing the Body Electric

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.

What makes dance so exciting is how the performers, with the help of a great choreographer, can make the body seem even more physically expressive than what already holds in our imagination. Deirdre Kelly had such an experience last year while watching the Paul Taylor Dance Company perform Polaris.

Larger-Than-Life: Paul Taylor Dance Company

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/04/larger-than-life-paul-taylor-dance.html

 "Polaris" Photo by Lois Greenfield

The wonderful thing about well-trained dancers? Just how wonderful they are. You can’t take your eyes off them, or stop marvelling at their ability to seem larger-than-life and super-human, creatures propelled into greatness by the strength and skill of bodies leashed to the hand of an expert teacher and choreographer. Such was the thought inspired by watching members of Paul Taylor Dance Company perform earlier this week at the Markham Theatre, located north of Toronto, as part of the New York’s troupe’s recent, four-city Ontario tour.