Spirit of the West

Pop culture, by its very nature, cannibalizes the larger culture around us. At it's best, it reinterprets and reflects back our collective memory. Nothing does that better than movies, as Shlomo Schwartzberg points out in his review of Rango in Critics at Large.

Rango: Brilliant and Adult

There’s been a recent fuss made by some parents’ groups about the fact that some of the characters in Gore Verbinksi’s brilliant new animated movie Rango are actually, shudder, smoking. They feel that the movie is setting a bad example in that regard and will entice their kids into taking up the deadly habit. I think their concerns are misguided as most of the small fry watching the film will be too busy enjoying the antics of the anthropomorphized creatures on the screen to pick up on that aspect of the movie. But I also feel that maybe, at heart, this isn’t really a children’s movie in the first place. Rango, despite the fact that it’s animated, is actually a really smart and decidedly grown-up send up and homage to classic westerns and other movie genres, one that is chock full of obscure movie in-jokes and adult references and situations. There’s even a mention of brothels in the Los Lobos song that plays over the closing credits of the film. In that light, I’d recommend that adults leave their kids at home or find another animated movie – there’s no shortage of them out there – to take their kids to instead. Leave Rango for us old folk who can best appreciate it.

English Voices

Sometimes the best way to understand a city is through the voices of people who live there. David Churchill discovered that when he came upon Craig Taylor's Londoners and wrote about it for Critics at Large.

In the Key of Studs Terkel: Craig Taylor's Londoners

Big Ben from Trafalgar Square - Photo by David Churchill

Over the years, I have been fortunate to visit cities considered some of the most exciting in the world: New York, Paris, Rome, Bombay and London. Like many before me, I fell in love with each one of them for their own unique reasons. Heck, Paris so inspired me during my one and only (so far) visit that it became the setting, and partial inspiration, for my first novel, The Empire of Death. But it is without question London that has its siren call still singing in my ears. I've only been there twice, but upon my return home each time I've longed to go back so I could continue to explore this great and historic city. Sure, two trips barely scratches the surface of this locale, but for whatever reason (perhaps because England is half my heritage – Irish being the other) it is a city I feel instantly comfortable and at home in, even if they don't seem to know they drive on the wrong side of the road.

Little Driver pub - East London - Photo by David Churchill

When I travel, the first thing I always do is toss my suitcases into my hotel room and go for a stroll around the neighbourhood. The last time I was in London in 2009, I stayed at a lovely little hotel in the east end near the Bow Street Tube station called City Stay (its appeal, beyond good rates, is that they had a kitchen you can cook your own meals in as long as you bring in your own food – it saved me a bundle). Across the road is a terrific working class pub, called Little Driver, which instantly became my local after a long day exploring. (I did an edit on The Empire of Death there while enjoying their perfect-temperature drafts of Guinness. Isn't that what pubs and coffee shops are for, drinking and writing?)

Craig Taylor - Author of Londoners

This is a very long way to introduce a wonderful oral history of London compiled by Craig Taylor, called Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told By Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long For It (Ecco/Harper Collins – 2012), to give it its full title. The book is inspired by the work of the great American oral historian Studs Terkel (Working, The Good War, Hard Times, and many others). Taylor, an ex-pat Canadian living in London (ironically, he's lived there for several years before he felt comfortable to call himself a Londoner – he didn't think he'd earned it), like me became enthralled with the city, but unlike me he made the decision to make it his new home. As he walked around the city, he began to pick up conversations with the people all around him. He realized there were so many stories, so many voices, that he had to compile the voices in order to, as he says, give us a “snapshot of how London is now.” It sure took him a great deal of time. The project took five years: he burned through 300 AA batteries, and the transcripts took up almost a million words. With the help of his hard-working editor, Matt Weiland, he winnowed the hundreds of interviews down to 90 voices. I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been to roll this much data into a coherent and compelling text, but regardless of how he did it, he has succeeded admirably.

Holiday Cheer

Tis the season to be jolly and to listen to some good tunes chosen in Critics at Large by Susan Green.

Listening: A Retrospective Soundtrack To Live By

As the troublesome decade draws to a close, people are compiling their top-ten lists for various art forms. I’d like to think back instead on a half-century of popular music that was able to, as a traditional gospel line suggests, “rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham.” Each tune has stuck with me. Not every one of the past 50 years is represented; some supplied multiple selections -- I could barely escape the 1960s, in fact. It wasn’t easy to choose from among so many worthy contenders. My apologies to the Supremes, Ray Charles, the Beach Boys, Etta James, Elvis Presley, Elvis Costello, the Grateful Dead, Jackson Browne, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Mark Knopfler, Jesse Winchester, Bonnie Raitt and countless others. Disco and hip-hop aside, these are a few of a nostalgic Baby Boomer’s highly subjective favorite things:

Gone But Not Forgotten

Friendships are built on the love we share of movies, music, books and television. One such program, for Mark Clamen in Critics at Large, was Terriers.

FX’s Terriers: Catch a Ride with a Trickster and a Travelin’ Man

Terriers (on FX)

For the most part, the FX Network was good to me in 2010. By mid-summer, they had already premiered three of my favourite new series of the year: in comedy, the hilarious and deeply original Louis C.K. vehicle, Louie; in animation, the surprisingly funny, edgy, and intelligent spy spoof, Archer; and in drama, the hard-boiled contemporary Western, Justified, based on the work of Elmore Leonard and starring Timothy Olyphant. (All three shows have been renewed and will bring us second seasons in 2011.) But the folks at FX weren’t done yet: on September 8th, they premiered Terriers. Created by screenwriter Ted Griffin (Ocean's Eleven) and The Shield creator Shawn Ryan, Terriers stars Donal Logue (Life, Grounded for Life) as Hank Dolworth, an ex-cop and recovering alcoholic, who teams up with Britt Pollack, his best friend and mostly reformed thief (played by Michael Raymond-James, True Blood), to open an unlicensed private investigation firm. Based on the early promos for the series, I had initially positioned the series in relation to The Good Guys, the good-natured buddy-cop show created by Matt Nix (Burn Notice), which premiered on FOX over the summer (and was cancelled last month). But halfway through the opening credits of Terriers (and the original theme song written by the show’s composer Rob Duncan), I knew I was going to be delightfully mistaken. With substantial characters and two charismatic stars, some powerful writing and subtle serial nature, Terriers would soon rise to the level of FX’s spring season hit, Justified. While often hilarious, the show was also carefully plotted, and offered a perfect mix of compelling characters, dark humour, and genuine intrigue. Unfortunately, by early December, FX announced that due to low ratings it was not going to renew Terriers. But whatever its future, Terriers will remain one of the few bright spots in what was an often disappointing new fall TV season.

Donal Logue (front) and Michael Raymond-James

Set in a beachfront neighbourhood of San Diego, and shot on location all over San Diego County, Terriers harkens back to the best of old and new noir storytelling. With its DIY private detectives and a cosy California town rife with corruption, conspiracy, and complicated land deals, it has a Veronica Mars—circa Season Two—feel. (I would like to say it’s darker than Veronica Mars, but to be honest, I’m not sure that’s even possible:Veronica Mars put the noir back in neo-noir.) But unlike most of the hard-boiled genre—be it on film or television—the central figure of this story isn't an isolated moral outlier but a pair of detectives, whose deep friendship is often the only point of stability in their ever-shifting universe. Even if, as detectives, Hank and Britt find themselves perennially getting in way over their heads, as friends their world is really never in question. Logue and Raymond-James were real-life friends long before Terriers was ever conceived, and this comes through in their comfortable dialogue and brilliant timing. Most of the show’s best moments happen between Hank and Britt as they sit in their rundown truck (which is the closest thing their struggling detective business has to an office): best friends who simply enjoy one another’s company.

Karina and Donal Logue as Steph and Hank Dolworth

In the end, Terriers is a show that is built on relationships: not only Hank and Britt, but Hank and his ex-wife Gretchen (Kimberly Quinn), Britt and his girlfriend, Katie (Laura Allen), Hank and his former partner, Gustafson (Rockmond Dunbar). Over the course of its 13 episodes, each of these relationships deepens and develops before our very eyes. Watch especially for the introduction of Hank’s brilliant and schizophrenic sister for a few episodes mid-season. With the character of Steph Dolworth—played by Karina Logue, Donal Logue’s real life sister—Terriers finally matures into the series it was meant to be. Their sibling chemistry shines in every scene they share, and Steph’s presence brings out the rich humanity and dark humour of the Terriers universe.

Lost and Found

Songs are are often made popular through their association with particular films. But the story of Penny & The Quarters' "You and Me" from the film, Blue Valentine, is a whole other matter told in this piece for Critics at Large by Kevin Courrier.

Time's Mysterious Passage: Penny & The Quarters' "You and Me"

Michelle Williams & Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine

In Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine (2010), when Dean (Ryan Gosling) selects a song that he clearly hopes sustains the love between himself and Cindy (Michelle Williams), he's in a very familiar and popular movie tradition. That tradition includes Dooley Wilson calling up the lost romantic days in Paris for Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) when he sings and performs "As Time Goes By" in Casablanca (1943), or Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) holding his boom-box high above his head outside the bedroom window of Diane Court (Iona Skye), the girl he's smitten with, so she can hear Peter Gabriel's touching "In Your Eyes" in Say Anything (1989). The romanticism in these songs not only serves to enhance the desires of the characters on the screen, what you could call an urgent yearning in them to make their love work, but it also speaks to the way pop music so often captures the fleeting innocence of what it feels like to fall in love. While in real life, relationships change, the songs always remain the same, fixed in the time in which they were first recorded. And if the relationship falls apart, or especially if it ends tragically, these tunes can quickly bring us heartache. When they suddenly come on the radio – often in a flash – they remind us of who we once were, but are no more.

Airless

With various national societies of film critics about to vote on their favourite films of the past year, Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea is one being considered for acclaim. Steve Vineberg, in Critics at Large, though has a contrary view.

The Deep Blue Sea: Reduced Rattigan

Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz in Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea

Among the various revivals staged to pay tribute to the English playwright Terence Rattigan around his 2011 centenary, possibly the most unwelcome is his countryman Terence Davies’ film of Rattigan’s 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea. Davies is a pictorialist, not a dramatist; the movies that made his reputation, Distant Voices, Still Lives in 1988 and The Long Day Closes in 1992, were art-house chotchkes, with images that looked too much like tableaux and characters he hadn’t bothered to fill in. You could see the influence of the Brechtian-Freudian writer Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven, The Singing Detective), especially in Distant Voices, Still Lives, which contained a number of pub sing-alongs, but he didn’t move through his ideas to any sort of life underneath. Davies is the filmmaker equivalent of the Robin Bailey character in John Boorman’s Catch Us If You Can, who collects pop mementos that, lovingly preserved in an airless setting, removed from any context that might have given them meaning, have become a kind of living dead.

Persona

If any pop performer has built a career on inhabiting various identities, it's been Kate Bush. For David Churchill, in Critics at Large, her latest album has perhaps succeeded best in pushing the boundaries of her own ambitions.

Just This Side of a Masterpiece: Kate Bush's 50 Words for Snow

Only Kate Bush could come up with a song-cycle CD based around the idea of snow. Her first new material in six years, 50 Words for Snow (EMI, 2011) is simultaneously recognizable as a Kate Bush album and pushing boundaries in her approach to song craft. I've followed her career ever since her first hit single, “Wuthering Heights,” absolutely knocked me out the first time I heard it in 1978. Her soaring soprano – taking on the voice of the ghost Catherine Henshaw (the tragic heroine in Emily Brontë's novel of the same name) as she pleads with Heathcliff to let her in – was nothing like I’d ever heard in a ‘pop’ song before; she was only 18 when she wrote and recorded it. Her chosen themes for her music throughout her career have always been eccentric. She's taken on the personas of soldiers (“Army Dreamers”), the young son of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (“Cloudbusting”), a woman testing the fidelity of her husband (“Babushka”) and more than one character who was seemingly derived from Victorian or Edwardian romantic literature. She has also been influenced by films, such as The Innocents(“The Infant Kiss”), Francois Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (“The Wedding List”), and horror films (“Hammer Horror”). There is nothing conventional about the material she explores.