Are they worth it? Part 2: Robert Parker and the Fellowship of the Grape

Robert Parker Online is a logical extension of The Wine Advocate: Self-published and independent, it holds out the promise of privileged access to the man. For $99US, you can peer over Robert Parker’s shoulder as he scribbles his tasting notes on all of those pilgrimages he makes across the world’s great wine regions.

Take the current issue—there are something like 1000 reviews of wines from a very modest number of regions. The back-catalogue promises tens of thousands of reviews; the known universe of wine logged on a scale of 75 to 100. It’s all very intimidating, actually: Having unlimited access to Parker’s notes is a bit like putting on Sauron’s great ring of power, or staring into the Palantir of Orthanc—it can be deadly if you haven’t got the personal power or strength of character to process the information capably.

And these days, the rings of power are of most use to the merchants. A Parker score of 85 or above on a tag below a bottle on a wine-store shelf is a guarantee of a second look from a customer; a score of 90 virtually assures a sale. At least one reason a wine-lover hardly needs to subscribe to the newsletter is that all the good scores have already been cherry-picked and posted at a store near you. You already have access where you need it most.

Much of the rest of RPO is fairly typical weblog fare, i.e., gossip and filler—albeit at a social level where hubris is on the menu right after the aperitif. (A running series of dinner-party notes called The Hedonist’s Gazette feels like Don Juan’s Diary for the wine-slut—yet another unsuccessful attempt to give porn a good name.)

If that sounds as sour as a month-old, half-finished bottle of Beaujolais, it’s not meant to. The point is that we should probably think twice before we try to meddle in the affairs of enological wizards. Parker is a Force, and if we’re candid we admit that that’s what we’re trying to buy into when we subscribe to Robert Parker Online. And we’re not there to admire the depth of the metaphors; to luxuriate in the explosions of fruit, silky tannins and hints of shoe-leather on the finish. It’s Parker’s mighty 90’s and withering 79’s that are the name of Parker Online game; he’s there to sit in judgement of our purchasing decisions, and we’re paying him the money to either praise his good taste when he agrees with us, or call him a fool when he doesn't. Robert Parker Online is wine-appreciation as fantasy baseball: A library of Alexandria for people whose lives revolve around vinicultural box-scores.

Published 2007, EAT Wineblog

Are they worth it? Part 1: Jancis Robinson

When somebody asks you to pay $140CDN a year for access to her private blog, the first claim you'd want its author to make is of some professionalism; Robinson professes something closer to flirty neurosis: "Welcome to this very personal, obsessively updated, completely INDEPENDENT source of news, views and opinion on fine wine and food by me, Jancis Robinson." Close your eyes and pretend that was written by a guy---would you ever want to meet him without witnesses?

What's perhaps most fascinating is the almost teen-magazine vocabulary she uses to promote her wares, promising "gossip and my deeply personal opinions" or "my special collection of advice and facts" to the subscriber. (You mean, there's an ordinary collection of advice somewhere in the free section, alongside a selection of more superficially impersonal opinions?) The come-on is that you're not only getting inside information, but that you're getting an ethereal sort of equivalent to personal access; she's not only going to be whispering in your ear but nibbling on it as well.

And the privileged content? Well, for every two articles available only to paid members, there are three that any plebe can read, so you've already got more than half of her output without dropping even a sou. As for the rest, a lot is local and inapplicable to you (like February 1st's "If you're going to the Australia tasting today..."); or ratings of wines you're never going to see (the same day's "Domaine de la Romanée Conti 2004's"). By and large, the unique stuff that you might find nowhere else really does amount to highly esoteric gossip---her marketing actually matches her goods.

Are the goods worth it? Well, here's one way to think of it: For the cost of a year's admission to JancisRobinson.com, you could buy a couple of fabulous bottles of wine and a copy of Robinson's Oxford Companion to Wine---a book that, the last time I looked, made no claims to being obsessive or deeply personal, but merely to being a fabulously professional piece of work. The choice isn't just yours, it's a pretty easy choice as well.

Published 2007, EAT Wineblog

New frontiers in Euclidian wine-tasting theory: The exponential tasting

How should you describe the taste of a mouthful of wine to someone?

Over the last couple of decades, two separate theoretical camps have evolved: First, that group we might call the Parkeristas, who aim for a universal and accessible wine language, based on teasing out and analytically identifying components of taste and bouquet (i.e., ‘this wine has a palate of lychees, saddle leather and earwax.’). Facing them are the people whom Robert Parker has benevolently dubbed the terroirists, who believe the best way of conveying meaning when you’re talking about a bottle of wine should be how it meets the standards of its geography, (i.e., ‘this tastes like a well-made, medium-priced right-bank Bordeaux ought to’).

The distinction between these groups is largely a decision about what you’re going to take as your wine-taster’s fundamental atomic particle; that descriptor that can’t be understood in terms more basic than itself. What makes a good Bordeaux? An enological Bill Clinton might say that it all depends on what you want to mean by ‘Bordeaux’: is it a progressive time-space nexus leading to the wine in your glass: France→Bordeaux→ Medoc→Margeaux→Chateau Giscours→1995; or is it “aromas of licorice and sweet, smoky new oak intermixed with jammy black fruits, licorice and minerals”?

A fundamental element of the descriptive discipline for each side has to be a familiarity with those most basic elements of your vocabularies—if you’re going to talk about licorice and lychees, (or if talk about them is to have any meaning for you) you need to experience what they taste and smell like, and learn to distinguish them in the wine you’re drinking. Similarly, if type, geography, style and terroir are going to be the most basic elements of your wine vocabulary, you need to experience what they taste like, and learn to distinguish them—you need to first know what, for example, that well-made, medium-priced right-bank Bordeaux tastes like. The rest of it is simply zeroing in—and then at some point of specificity, resolution fails and you have to shut up.

If the tastings in this blog are going to lean more towards the topographical winespeak of the terroirists, it’s because this is largely how the most interesting wines come to you—by geography, not fruit-genre. While you can certainly go out and buy yourself a multitude of, say, Tempranillos, when you start to seek out real distinction of winemaking expression, you end up getting geographically specific; you start exploring estate-made Riojas and Ribera del Dueros.

So here’s a relatively inexpensive method—a party-trick, almost—to get familiar with the fundamental elements of a region. Take Bordeaux as our thought-experiment: Eight people each kick in $25 to give a total kitty of $200. (And before you gulp too hard at that entry price, remember what an average evening at a bar usually costs you.) Find a reputable store and spend half the pot on the best bottle of Bordeaux you can get for that price. Spend half of what remains on the best bottle you can get for that price. And so on. Geometrically, it’s called the Golden Spiral.

You can also follow that spiral in reverse: find the cheapest bottle of Bordeaux you can. (In my regular store, it’s about $11.) Find a bottle that’s approximately double that ($25) and so on through $50 to $100. You should find that as the price goes up you zero in on a more precise geographical designation. Walk your spiral from cheapest to most expensive and back, and by the end of the tasting, you’ll be well on the way to mastering the fundamentals of your chosen language—or at least one dialect of it.

A sample exponential Bordeaux tasting assembled from BC sources might look like the following:
Chateau de Courteilliac (Bordeaux AC) $11.99
Chateau Greysac (Medoc AC) $25.99
Chateau d’Aurilhac (Haut-Medoc AC; Cru Bourgeois) $32.48
Chateau Grand Puy Lacoste (Pauillac AC) $98.60

Or from Ontario retailers:
Christian Moueix Merlot (Bordeaux AC) $14.95
Chateau Les Cabannes 2004 (Saint-Émilion AC) $23.95
Chateau Villemaurine 2001 (Saint-Émilion Gran Cru) $56.45
Chateau Troplong Mondot 2003 (Saint-Émilion Gran Cru) $99.00

The variations are endless: all you need to remember is, spiral in geographically. And if you’re dealing with a good retailer, don’t hesitate to ask for advice—it may be the most fun the proprietor has all day.

Published 2007, EAT Wineblog

Oak Chips from the A.S.I.’s Woodchopper’s Ball

A profile of NYC Sommelier Aldo Sohm in a recent Washington Post serves to warn us of the upcoming International Association of Sommeliers bonspiel in Greece a few weeks from now. Sohm (who was judged “American Sommelier of the Year” by the American Sommelier Association), “clearly intends to win” in the breathless words of the Post’s Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg. Sohn’s Rocky-like training regimen is not half so unintentionally hilarious as the authors’ wide-eyed boosterism for it, but if you read between the lines, it brings out a lot of the contradictions in this upcoming sommelier’s bake-off.

At first blush, a Sommelier’s competition that’s staged like an athletic event or a competitive cultural occasion like a film festival seems completely wrong-headed; sort of like getting Margaret Atwood and Alice Monroe to face off with word-processors in front of the fans at BC Place. No matter how you stage the event, or what you require of the participants, you’re not in any meaningful way measuring what counts as excellence in their professions.

Virtually all the professional qualities that make a great sommelier are things that can’t be measured in a centralized contest. Just a few of those skills are

• Knowing clientèle: to be able to non-patronizingly tease out a customer’s tastes and preferences, and in a limited time, accurately judge what would make a customer happy
• Knowing the menu: being intimately acquainted with the food that the restaurant serves; with what went into a dish; how the way it might have been cooked will affect the taste of the wine it’s paired with; and a hundred other local details
• Knowing the chef: outstanding sommeliership is invariably a successful partnership with an excellent chef
• Mastering the setting: putting it all together—the successful sommelier-chef partnership produces an outstanding unified experience matching wine, food, and a unique individual who walks through a restaurant’s front door

Competition instead measures a sommelier’s robot-like qualities, like identifying a wine blind—something that will never happen or be required in a sommelier’s job. Worst of all, a competition like the one coming up in Greece rips the sommelier out of context: If the International Sommelier’s Association honestly wants to find the world’s best sommeliers, then they should have a meal in the competing sommelier’s restaurants! Visit them on their home turf, like everybody else does.

But that wouldn't be an Event. Taking the actual steps required to find the world’s best sommeliers would make the IAS’s central committee more like the authors of the Michelin Guide, than the blue-bloods of, say, the International Olympic Committee. And when you shine your flashlight down around the bottom of the competition’s barrel, it’s the capital-e nature of the Event that counts.

This Event exists not to find the best sommelier in the business—at least the best in the way we restaurant patrons would most benefit from—but to publicize the organization, feed the egos of the people running it and (only incidentally) to promote the profession of Sommelier itself. Publicly endorsing the people who do the best job matching wines to foods for the people who actually patronize the world’s restaurants—and pay the tab—is way down at the bottom of their menu. It’s a reminder that the virtues of the successful critic are selflessness and anonymity. But the vices of the successful competition organizer are egomania, privilege, and vanity.

Published 2007, EAT Wineblog

If an oak-chip falls into a bottle of wine and there’s nobody around to talk about it, does it make a sound?

Every now and then, a big-ticket wine commentator will gingerly prod at an issue that a lot of big-time winemakers wish would go away: Wood chips. A couple of weeks back, Decanter Magazine briefly reported that the practice of adding oak chips to aging wine had increased by more than 200% in Bordeaux, which moved Eric Asimov to throw the issue open for discussion in his New York Times blog. (In the dialogue roused there, at least one chipper chip-booster rightly pointed out that if the process had a name with more cachet, the practice of using oak chips in winemaking would be a lot less controversial.)

But mostly, the sound you hear is that of a lot of wine-people walking softly. There’s a mighty oak growing in the corner of the room, but nobody really wants to talk about it. Why doesn’t anybody want to talk about it? Because everybody knows that nobody really knows anything, and controversy usually most easily thrives in an information vacuum.

What part does an oak barrel play in the taste of, say, a good Bordeaux? (The part it can play in a really crummy bottle of wine is already obvious to anybody who indiscriminately drinks a lot of new world wines.) More precisely, what part of that glamorous flavour comes from wine merely coming into contact with oak; and how much from something that an oak barrel sitting in a Bordeaux cellar can uniquely provide? Or if you really want to be paranoid in your epistemology, if the makers of Chateau Margeaux suddenly started conscientiously ageing half of their output in stainless steel with oak chips, and the other half in their usual barrels, would Robert Parker notice the difference if he didn’t know to look for it in advance?

Nobody really knows: in strict symbolic logic, all counterfactuals are true; and in an information vacuum, your guess is as good as mine, or Robert Parker——or Dick Cheney and Woody Woodpecker’s. And when nobody really knows, tradition and inertia is all you have to guide you. The tradition is oak barrels for great wines, and with the stakes as high as they are for great wines, nobody in the information-vacuum continuum is going to change any time soon. (Or at least tell anybody about the changes they've made.)

When does tradition mutate into mystique? And has the oak barrel crossed over into that dimension? Well, without taking sides, let’s just observe that the winemakers who can charge hundreds of dollars for a bottle of their product (which you also won’t be able to drink for years) have the most to gain from science morphing into the supernatural. When your business is founded on mystique, you’re not likely to join the mythbusters.

Published 2007, EAT Wineblog

Wine fraud's bright future

The fallout from Christies' admission that they had been subpoenaed by US Federal authorities investigating fraud in the auction of classic wines, continues to fall out: Sothebys and Zachys Auction houses have now been dragged in to the vat.

But the reason it's little more than spectator sport for the typical wine-lover is that both morally and aesthetically, it's a win-win, so-what situation: First off, anybody who can afford to pay $20K for a '45 Mouton and who's planning to drink it, can afford to have a bottle of '45 Haut-Brion as a backup. And anybody who buys a '45 Mouton not intending ever to consume it, deserves whatever he gets. For real wine-lovers, this kind of thing makes better theater even than a Dick Cheney hunting-trip.

How widespread is wine counterfeiting likely to be? The sages at The Wine Spectator have pulled a figure of 5% out of their hats, (Interpol claims 6%) but there's no reason to believe that the total isn't significantly higher, if only because with the stupendous amounts of money involved, it's in everybody's interest to keep their mouths shut about it.

The theatrically-minded wine-consumer is thus hoping that this story has more legs than a glass of good Port: Hell, let's discover that 30% of the collectible wines sold to the speculators at auction are frauds. It's probably too much to hope for, but let's have big-ticket wine auctions become so risky a proposition that wine will lose any attraction it has as an object of financial speculation.

So, comrade wine-lovers, let's hear it for the world's wine forgers: Keep up the good work!

Published 2007, EAT Wineblog

The Last Great Spectacle

I’m going out to see my favorite movie tonight. I’m taking all my friends with me, and for four hours, the earth will move. For four hours we will be safe from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Demi Moore and Mission Impossible. For four hours we will believe in movies again. Tonight, we’re all going off to see David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.

It’s time that somebody came out and said it: Lawrence of Arabia is the greatest cinematic experience ever wrought by the hand of man. This is not an opinion that any sane person is supposed to maintain, by the way. A highbrow guilty pleasure, maybe. An extraordinary visual achievement, certainly. But a great film—with a capital ‘G’? Let’s put it this way: in 1992, Sight and Sound asked 130 critics from around the world to choose their top ten films of all time. Lawrence of Arabia was named precisely twice—one time more than Conan the Barbarian.

It’s been a rocky ride to critical legitimacy for Lawrence—to say nothing of Lawrence lovers. It is surely the most unlikely epic ever made: a minor, anti-heroic historical character from an obscure corner of World War One became the subject of one of the most expensive movies ever made. The recipient of seven Academy Awards in 1962, Lawrence was largely forgotten afterwards; cut from 222 minutes to 202, and then to 187; it’s negative left to rot and it’s color left to fade.

Restored in 1989 by Robert A. Harris, Lawrence has since been allowed to tread a more dignified career arc: pristine 70mm prints regularly make the rounds to better rep. cinemas everywhere. Once a year it puts in an appearance at the local Imax theatre in Toronto, together with an ever-changing host of pretenders to the throne of the Big Visual Experience. And of course, it mops the floor with all of them.

Seen up against these miserable usurpers, two things become immediately obvious. First, Lawrence of Arabia  is unarguably the most literate, subtle spectacle ever made. Second, it’s a kind of film that will probably never be made again. To see Lawrence is not just to notice that they don’t make ‘em like that any more. (They didn’t make ‘em like that then, either.) It’s to notice that Lawrence is unique.

Yet, Lawrence has always seemed a guilty kind of pleasure for serious film types. I used to think of it as a sort of Gone With the Wind for the erudite. It was certainly my Gone With the Wind: I first saw Lawrence in 1962 when I was seven and for me it was a life-event. Images stayed with me for years: Sherif Ali emerging from a mirage; the sun rising over the desert; the film’s final, muted shot of T.E. Lawrence on his way home—thirty years old and the most important events of his life behind him.

Multiple viewings later, Robert Bolt’s instantly memorable dialogue for Lawrence has wormed its way into my life—mostly those great lines he gave to Anthony Quinn, who played Arab chieftain Auda Abu Tayi. Confronted with a giant-killing argument, what better rejoinder than “thy mother mated with a scorpion”? When I face a desk piled over with work I sometimes gaze grimly out the window towards an imaginary desert horizon and think: “I must find something honorable.” If I’ve cooked a good meal my roommate says: “You are a river to your people.”

Sometimes, I dream that Scarlet O’Hara and Lawrence have somehow psychically become one. Scarlet, near starvation, clutches a handful of dirt and looks into a blood-red sky. “I must find something honorable” she puffs. “Nothing is written” croaks Lawrence to Sherif Ali after rescuing Gassim from the desert, “and after all, tomorrow is another day.”

Alas, until recently it has been perversely fashionable to despise David Lean’s films for being too big, and too grandiose from about The Bridge on the River Kwai forward. Director Francois Trufault best summed up the French New Wave’s opinion: “Rubbish”, he called them, “traps for fools, Oscar machines.”

Ten years after the release of Lawrence, Lean was called to account for his cinematic gigantism. “You’re the man who directed Brief Encounter” began critic Richard Schickel at a National Society of Film Critics luncheon-and-lynching in Lean’s honour, “explain to us how you could come up with a piece of bullshit like Ryan’s Daughter.” Two hours of invective later, Lean complained: “I don’t think you ladies and gentlemen will be satisfied until I do a film in 16mm and black-and-white.”

“No,” said Pauline Kael, then the armour-piercing critic for the New Yorker, “you can have colour.” David Lean didn’t make another film for 13 years. He was to make only one more before he died.

Looking over those lost years, it’s hard not to feel cheated. The new wave’s fight against excess has been utterly lost, with Lean ending up as collateral damage. Today the philistines are more securely in charge than ever. A big film must now be an action spectacular, and budgets of literally hundreds of millions are controlled by cinematic nonentities like Renny Harlan and Kevin Costner. Surveying the wasteland today, who is there to take on the Lean mantle? Steven Spielberg? The mind boggles.

One thing is for certain—no Hollywood studio will ever allow anyone to make anything like Lawrence again. Omar Sharif, who’s career started with Lawrence, sums up the most obvious reason: “If you are the man with the money and somebody comes to you and says he wants to make a film that's four hours long, with no stars, and no women, and no love story, and not much action either, and he wants to spend a huge amount of money to go film it in the desert—what would you say?”

Hollywood is notorious for saying “yes” and throwing enormous amounts of money at filmmakers with hands of cement—this summer alone six movies with Lawrence-like budgets will be released—but they’re not quite so potty as that. We now live in a time where a marble-mouthed ex bodybuilder like Arnold Schwarzenegger can become a Hollywood power, but a David Lean will never again be allowed to exist.

To revisit Lawrence 35 years on is not merely to behold a masterpiece. It is to bear witness to a more cinematic age, a time when a big budget was not a guarantee of mediocrity. It is to recall an epoch when something like big cinema was possible.

So, tonight my friends and I shall make our pilgrimage. We shall see Lawrence of Arabia, and for a few short hours we shall rest. We shall rest. We shall hear the camels. We shall see the desert shining like a jewel. We shall see all evil and all our pain sink away in the great compassion that will enfold the theatre. Our lives will feel as peaceful and tender and sweet as a caress....

Then on Monday, it’s back to the Stalones, the Schwarzeneggers, the Twisters. God! I must find something honorable.

Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997

Angery Young Man

American avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger is probably best known for Hollywood Babylon, a cruel and unusual book about what the golden age of Hollywood looked like with its pants down. Born in 1927 or 1930 (depending on whether you listen to his biographer or himself) he started making films at age 11 or 14. The majority of his early work apparently does not survive, having been burned by its author in a fit of pique in 1967. Anger has become notorious for revising and re-editing the films that remain—four versions of his Inauguration of the Pleasure-Dome have seen the light of a projector—and since 1967, the aim of his cinema seems to have been to ensure that his most enduring creation is the myth of Kenneth Anger, mystical visionary.

The nine short movies that Anger has decided will constitute the cinematic portion of that myth have been gathered together in the so-called Magick Lantern Cycle, which will be shown in two parts this Wednesday and next at the Art Gallery of Ontario. From the evidence that’s on display, the man works better with his pants down than with his mysticism up.

The earliest film preserved is 1947’s Fireworks—a definite pants-down item—of which Anger has written: “This flick is all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July.” It comes off today as an experimental piece by a young filmmaker with a yen for muscular guys in sailor suits, who has watched Eisenstein’s Battleship Potempkin a few times too many. Its roughness is overwhelmingly redeemed by the outrageous obviousness of its visual metaphor (the film could have been subtitled ‘hello, sailor’), and pure gutsiness. Emotionally, Anger put everything on the line; it must have taken a lot of nerve for a 17-to-20 year-old kid to traffic in such in-your-face gay iconography in 1947. It still provides quite a bang 50 years later.

1953’s Inauguration of the Pleasure-Dome (the 1966 “Sacred Mushroom Edition” is now the video release of record) is more like an MGM musical gone mad. By now, Anger had become a disciple of British occultist and bisexual visionary Aleister Crowley, and what hits the screen is a celebration of Crowley’s flamboyant Dionysian faux-religion: if Freemasonry had grown out of a pact between Timothy Leary and the surrealists, a documentary about one of their year-end orgies might have looked something like this. Luridly and beautifully photographed, Inauguration is triumphantly pushed past the jaw-dropping absurdity of its visionary agenda by a soundtrack based on the louder bits of Janácek’s Galgolitic Mass. (It’s a close thing, though—one can only imagine what Anger’s mid-70’s revision with a score by Electric Light Orchestra must have looked like.)

1963’s Scorpio Rising  is a series of closely observed and gleefully nasty field notes on biker culture set to popular songs of the day. It’s both Anger’s most exhilarating pants-down film, and the closest he ever came to a social statement—depending on how thoroughly you want to deconstruct the iconography, it’s about gay Christian Nazi bikers on a one-way road to death. Or maybe it’s America that’s on the road to the apocalypse: Anger has called it a “death-mirror held up to American culture... Thanatos in chrome, black leather and bursting jeans.”

He was never to make another film like it. (A similar project, Kustom Kar Kommandos, was abandoned for lack of funds.) On October 26, 1967, Anger took out a full-page obituary in the Village Voice which read: “In Memorium Kenneth Anger 1947-1967”. Unfortunately, it seems the man was right—films after Scorpio Rising show the observer turned evangelist. The most unfortunate example of this is Lucifer Rising, a project that had been in the works for decades and was finally released in 1981. By now the obsession with Crowley has lost even its camp value and the film itself—vaguely Egyptian types cavort around the statues of the Pharaohs—is a bore. Anger was at his best commenting on the death-force at the heart of the American Babylon he was born into and horrified by. His visions of a new occult age show us the filmmaker as a hobbled mystic—collateral damage of the Age of Aquarius.

There have been no new films from Anger in nearly two decades, and sadly, given the evidence of Lucifer, this may be no bad thing. It may be that he has found the good sense to shut up and try and leave us with an uncluttered view of his earlier work. There is still a lot of clutter in the Magick Lantern cycle, but not too much to get in the way of Fireworks, Inauguration and especially Scorpio Rising—a wonderful reminder that for half an hour in 1963, Kenneth Anger was the most watchable filmmaker in America.

—Published in the Globe and Mail. 1997

No secret to Mike Leigh's appeal

New to video this week, Secrets and Lies offers the neophyte a painless and rewarding introduction to the distinctive work of offbeat British writer/director Mike Leigh. Leigh has been active in British television and cinema for 25 years but has largely been confined to cult status on this side of the Atlantic, mostly in communities served by more discriminating video stores. Nominated for five Academy Awards this spring, Secrets and Lies has finally catapulted Mike Leigh into the North American mainstream.

Nobody else makes films quite like Leigh does. They tend to revolve around a series of common themes: the slow death of British working class life; how people in families tend to destroy each other; the monstrous side of human nature; and—potentially most disturbing—how utterly hilarious all of the above can be, provided you’ve a mind to see it that way. A visit to a Mike Leigh film is a visit to the post-Thatcher human zoo, a place where budget cuts have forced the keepers to mix incompatible species together in cages, where they all drive each other crazy.

Leigh’s films are also largely collaborative efforts: for the most part, he and his stock company of actors come up with the whole script in rehearsal. They will start with a basic idea or theme, improvise around it for weeks or months, expanding and polishing characters and action. Then Leigh writes it down as a conventional script, everybody goes in front of the cameras, and they make a movie.

This way of doing things tends to produce movies for actor-watchers rather than plot-watchers; films where feelings and emotions are more important than narrative. Watching the final product is sometimes unnerving; like being invited to observe a two-hour experiment in which the lunatics are invited not only to run the asylum, but to write the rules and design the therapy as well. You are never unaware that something very different from your average Hollywood script is unspooling before you.

The strength of this process is—when the experiment comes off successfully—that you are presented with the kind of characters which rarely come from a screenwriter hunched alone over a typewriter. When it doesn’t work—and there are places in all of his films when it doesn’t—you get characters who the natural-selection process of normal scriptwriting would have consigned to extinction. It’s as if both actor and director fall prey to Stockholm syndrome during those months they’re locked up together, and some material sticks around that really should have been spiked. You also get storylines that are pretty whacked out—or at most a provisional actors’ aid: characters show up, get into each other’s way, and people cry.

All of the above are on display in Secrets and Lies. Secrets and Lies was the winner of the 1996 Palm D’or at Cannes (which it didn’t entirely deserve) and Brenda Blethyn won the award for best actress (which she deserved in spades). It is perhaps Leigh’s most conventional and accessible film to date, even having what could be described as a plot: Hortense—middle-class, black and cultured—when her adoptive mother dies decides to search for her biological family. Her pursuit leads her ultimately to Cynthia—working-class, white, unstable and completely unprepared for this intrusion from her past, particularly for the unflattering light it throws on her current unhappy life.

As you might have guessed from the title, Secrets and Lies is a movie about families, silence and untruth being simultaneously the glue that holds them together, and what makes life within them miserable. This is not exactly a startlingly fresh insight into the human condition, (“We’re all in pain,” Cynthia’s brother complains, “why can’t we share our pain?”) but it’s a thoroughly reliable starting point for great bits of actor-business, and actor-business is what the man’s movies are all about.

The most brilliant, ferocious piece of actor-business in a Mike Leigh film was rendered by David Thewlis in 1993’s Naked—another performance honoured by the Cannes festival. Thewlis—who looks like a drowned rat that somebody’s had a go at with a pair of garden shears—plays Johnny, a borderline psychotic and paranoid philosopher who cuts a swath through the lives of his ex-girlfriend and a half-a-dozen others one ugly weekend. Naked is a comedy—or at least there are some set-pieces that are as insanely funny as anything you're going to see on a screen this year—and yet it's also the bleakest movie you may ever have laid eyes on. Naked is what you might call kitchen-toilet drama; think of a Tom Stoppard-scripted evening of bear-baiting and you’ll get some idea of what you’re in for.

Thewlis later reported that he approached nervous-breakdown territory on the set of Naked, and you get a sense of that kind of actor commitment throughout the Leigh canon. Life is Sweet, High Hopes, Abigail’s Party and (if your video shop is particularly zealous) half a dozen other Leigh titles together offer more dedicated, interesting performances than we are likely to get from a year’s worth of Hollywood product.

To venture through Mike Leigh’s back catalogue is more often than not to glimpse the best of what low-budget filmmaking can be; to have a tantalizing look at what a cinematic universe would be like if the players in the drama had to do all those mundane things like developing plot and narrative, and actually coming up with their own words. As you might expect, it’s a wild and anarchic place with flights of profundity and dead ends butted up against one another.

And yet it all has the inescapable feeling of reality to it: in the lives we actually live, we too are actors in a sometimes bleak comedy that has no writer. Mike Leigh makes films the way we live our lives—making it up as we go along, on a modest budget, and with a lot of help from our friends. His is the cinema of human solidarity.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

Adaptations and Jane Campion

Jane Campion is surely one of the most impressive talents to have arrived on the  cinematic scene in the last ten years. She is a complete filmmaker: her images are exciting and literate; her stories original and absorbing. Her first three features—Sweetie, An Angel at my Table and The Piano —together memorably showed not just great promise but the arrival, fully-formed, of a tremendous contemporary cinematic artist. So why then did she go and try to film Henry James’ virtually unfilmable novel The Portrait of a Lady?

The cheerless result of this attempt arrives in video stores this week, and it is not a happy sight. Sumptuously mounted, (so much devotion and hard work goes into the visual design and art direction of any period film that to criticize is to feel the crunch of innocent spines under your boots), decently cast and intelligently presented, Portrait is nevertheless so complete a failure that it leads you to question the idea of adapting classic novels to the screen at all. If Jane Campion can’t get under the skin of a great book, who can?

Or perhaps the real question is, why try? Those books generally regarded as world’s great novels have never made the world’s greatest movies, and adaptations of classics have never proven to be any director’s best work. In 1992 Sight and Sound magazine polled 200 critics and filmmakers to draw up their list of the 200 or so greatest films ever made, and precisely two were (loose) adaptations of classics: Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight—based, respectively, on Conrad and Shakespeare.

The urge to adapt classic novels to the screen is a habit that filmmakers fall into and out of periodically, and lately we seem to have been through a flood stage. Adaptation has usually been a reaction against the cinema of the day by someone who wants to be literate and respectable—something like Samuel Goldwyn’s production of Wuthering Heights comes to mind, as does as the entire career of James Ivory. (The only thing necessary to note about the parade of recent Jane Austin adaptations is that none of them have made particularly compelling movies. They have been stolid, safe entertainment for those weary of the Die-Harding of Hollywood, or people who might have read the books if reading were less work.)

But Campion’s attempt at adapting James smacks of a more reckless agenda. Given the constraints of a theatrical feature—that is, telling a story in visual terms in no more than about two hours—you should film a classic only when you know it will make a good movie. (This is often not much more than picking the right dead white guy to adapt: Kipling makes good movies; Henry James doesn’t.) Campion is after tougher game: she desperately wants to put across to the viewer what she got out of a memorable book. “If only I could make a movie out of this,” she must have thought, and with that impulse Jane Campion regressed from a filmmaker into an evangelical reader.

To allow reader aesthetics to overpower hard-nosed filmmaker logic like this and try and film the unfilmable is to inevitably court viewer bewilderment: People who read the novel will think that the book was better; people who didn’t read it won’t be able to figure out what the hell you’re after. Campion surely must have anticipated this. Or perhaps she didn’t: I have a friend whose ambition is to transfer great works of literature to the screen. She has never seen a good movie made from a book she has liked. She still thinks it a viable ambition.

Last year’s Jane Eyre was not so obviously the work of an evangelical reader, but the unfilmability is similar, even though as one of literature’s great dysfunctional romances it seems tailor-made for the 90’s. The abused title character is locked up in an attic by her Aunt Hideous and then packed off to the Tuberculosis School for Orphans. Here she spends years so wretched that by the time she’s ready to enter the workforce she’s unable to express any emotion whatsoever. She gets tangled up with the master of Dismal Mansion, who also has cold coffee running through his veins, and a terrible family secret scrabbling about in the attic. When he finally proposes to her you expect him to say something like “darling, won’t you be my enabler?”

But there are only one or two ways you can translate material like this into even remotely cinematic terms. First, you can abandon fidelity with the novel, give it to David Cronenberg and go for the psychotic love story to end all psychotic love stories. Or—if you prefer that your project make back it’s investment—you can do what the producers did here and give it the Suffering Brad Pitt treatment—Legends of the Fallen.

As such, it’s terminally underpowered: as with Portrait, most of the important action is internal—things there that the characters can’t express but that the narrative voice of a novel can reveal. Director Franco Zeferelli can show nothing more than surfaces, which are mute and truncated: major emotional moments pass so quickly that only somebody raised on a steady diet of TV commercials could really be moved by it. The final product is neither good Bronte, nor good cinema.

And unfortunately, that’s the choice awaiting the filmmaker who wants to adapt a classic: you can make either a bad paraphrase of a novel or a good movie. Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady is a bad paraphrase of a novel, and you have to hope that it’s failure kills that evangelical reader within her and drives her back to her regular job—making good movies.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

Sylvester Stallone is my Kind of Man

There may be no actor alive today who has managed to survive as many bad films as Sylvester Stallone. For that matter, few stars have survived being an indifferent actor with as much panache; certainly no one in the history of cinema has as endearingly triumphed over being so mediocre an actor/writer/director. I like the man: with 25 starring vehicles in 20 years—14 of which he wrote and five of which he directed himself—Sly is the lumpen filmgoer’s very own renaissance dude.

Alas, fate has not been as kind to Stallone lately, as a quick viewing of Daylight—released on video this week—will attest. Daylight is not the ideal stripped-to-the-waist Stallone vehicle: Sly’s hero is somewhat subdued and unsure of himself, and his performance fails to distract you from the sinking feeling that what you are watching is not much more than a remake of The Poseidon Adventure. It has most of the old Irwin Allen thumbprints: It’s set in a collapsed automobile tunnel between New York City and New Jersey; it’s got fires and rising water; and it’s got a supporting cast of caterwauling idiots who appear to have been locked up in a room and forced to watch The Towering Inferno for about six weeks. It’s got everything except Shelly Winters, and she is profoundly missed.

She is missed almost as much as the loud, over-the-top Stallone character that used to be Sly’s sole stock-in-trade. It was the one thing he did that was fun to watch and it has been largely missing from his recent work. It is as if he became suddenly embarrassed to be making $20 million a picture just for doing what comes naturally, wanted to try his hand at real acting, and the studio hacks were dumb enough to give him a shot.

It is perhaps the most expensive failed experiment in recent Hollywood memory. Sly’s crisis-of-conscience cop in Daylight and the quieter, gentler killers he is asked to play in movies like The Specialist and Assassins and are simply boring. When Stallone is quiet, he disappears; he needs to be noisy in noisy movies, going hand-to-hand and chin-to-chin with monsters or machines or flamboyant bad guys even bigger and more obnoxious than he.

You can boil it down to a rule: If it would look out of place on the cover of a Marvel comic book, he shouldn’t do it. In Daylight he pulls extras and supporting players around a set, argues, and looks worried. It’s a role that would give even a real actor trouble; getting Sly to do the existential shtick is like asking Shopenhauer to write the first draft of Die Hard.

He is not much fun to watch in The Specialist, either, playing a free-lance bomb designer who spends a lot of time communicating with other people through e-mail—the cinematic equivalent of watching paint flake off a stove. Stallone characters should never be given a quiet profession: You don’t ask Batman to run a soup-kitchen and you don’t ask Sly to operate a laptop computer and furrow his brow. The only interesting bit he participates in personally in The Specialist is a bit of clutch-and-grab with Sharon Stone in a hot shower, where he and Stone appear to be comparing pecs. (He wins.)

Ironically, the producers have chosen to give the bulging-eyes-and-neck part in The Specialist to Rod Steiger, who single-handedly almost saves the picture by delivering Hollywood's most preposterous racial impersonation in years—a Cuban Mafioso, decked out with a Frito Bandito accent where "you" is pronounced "Jew". The scriptwriters then sprinkle the word "You" into his lines like grass seed: "Jew want to kill me, Jew bastard? Well, Jew gonna die!" It sounds like an anti-Semitic rant every time he opens his mouth.

There is no such levity to save Assassins—bad guy Antonio Bandaris really is Spanish and for the most part leaves his accent in the dressing room. Once again, Stallone is virtually inaudible and invisible, leaving the viewer to ponder some of the movie’s more questionable conceits—like casting Vanya on 42nd Street’s Julianne Moore as an action heroine. This proves a less satisfactory experiment than its converse might have been, i.e., casting Stallone as, say, Uncle Vanya or Richard III. (Actually, it’s a shame Al Pacino didn’t bring Sly along for a few scenes in his Looking for Richard. It would be interesting to see Richard III given the Stallone twisted-lip and knotted-temple treatment: Imagine Rambo declaiming “now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,” and try to keep a shiver of excitement from running up and down your spine.)

It would work, I swear it: With the iconic Stallone acting at full steam, there is no good or bad performance; no appropriate or inappropriate role; the jollies you get from Sly as Richard III are exactly the jollies you’d get from Sly as Rambo III. It’s an in-joke on the part of a pectoral type with the gift of self awareness; an actor who knows that—like Rocky’s—his stardom is a fluke, a cosmic joke not to be taken very seriously.

When he moves outside the icon, he vanishes; he’s not fun to watch any more. The unfortunate trend established by his last few movies looks likely to reach some kind of apotheosis in this summer’s Copland, a serious actor project for which he’s gained weight and surrounded himself with people like Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro. His performance in Copland promises to be restrained, earnest, and nothing that a hundred other real actors couldn’t do a lot better. Copland is not just the end of an era, it’s three movies past the end of an era.

I think I’ll prefer to remember Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd—a lousy movie but the archetypal Stallone performance: overblown, overwrought—most of the time it looks as if the cords in his neck are about to explode—and over-everything. Judge Dredd is the most splendid Stallone performance of all for a very simple reason: in a movie full of bombs going off, property destruction without end, and a soundtrack designed to make your ears bleed, Sly is still the biggest, loudest thing on the screen. We shall not hear his like again.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

Broken by the Waves: Lars Von Trier in 1996

A movie, according to Danish writer-director and ex-wunderkind Lars Von Trier, should be like a stone in your shoe. His latest film, released on video this week, is called Breaking the Waves and it fits the description perfectly. Breaking the Waves won the Grand Prix at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for its lead actress Emily Watson, and has generated a lot of critical acclaim. My reaction was viscerally contrary: I thought Breaking the Waves was designed to make me feel like I was having nails driven through my feet.

The struggle between style and substance is never very far from the surface of Von Trier’s work—and consequently the surface is unfortunately never very far from anything else. This is not a problem in a film like 1991’s Zentropa—which won both a Special Jury Prize and the backhand-complement ‘Grand Prix de la Technique’ at Cannes. Zentropa is pure Cannes-bait; a calling card for its maker as the most terrible enfant of them all, and it succeeds at every level it deigns to pursue—mainly superficial politics and deep flashiness.

The pursuit of deep flashiness is a problem in a work like Breaking the Waves, which stakes out tougher ground: Von Trier is chasing a Christian metaphor here; a parable of faith, piety and redemption, none of which have ever reared their heads in his work before. In a 1995 interview he let on that he might not have the appropriate tools for the job: “With Breaking the Waves, we are treading on the verge of kitsch—it’s melodrama’s answer to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

Unfortunately, that’s an apt description of the movie. Breaking the Waves tells the unhappy story of Bess, a simple and pious soul from a tight, religious Scottish community with little of the congeniality that Bill Forsyth found there in films like Local Hero and Comfort and Joy. Indeed, you might call this Severe and Joyless: Bess is looked at with extreme suspicion by the community elders when she marries a Scandinavian oil-rigger rather than one of the young men from her own town. Isolated and extremely lonely, she prays one day for her new husband’s speedy return from the North-Sea oilfields, and gets her wish in the most terrible way possible: he has an accident and comes back paralysed and on the edge of death.

For reasons that are hard to remember after the fact, Bess’s husband asks her to indulge in a strange regimen of morale-boosting: she is to take on a series of lovers and then describe the goings-on to him; in a perverse way, she’ll really be making love to him, and that will keep him alive. That at least is the theory.

The gimmick is that it seems to work: she picks up guys; he gets better. After a while, she notices that she doesn’t even have to tell him about her trysts; it is as if merely through her self-sacrifice and self-debasement the mercy of the lord shines upon her husband.

It’s around this point—perhaps even earlier, depending on just how committed you are to a religious vision based on sacrifice and degradation—that Breaking the Waves starts to unravel; that a religious film in the tradition of Ingmar Bergman and Von Trier compatriot Carl Theodore Dreyer morphs ominously into a religious film as given us by Cecil B. DeMille.

Bess’s behavior naturally gets the community up in arms; she is persecuted and abused, and we are shown that her faith is pure as the driven Ivory Snow while the village’s is ring-around-the-collar corrupt. Ultimately, she makes her way to a personal Calvary where, Christ-like, her sacrifice redeems the one she loves. Even if you do believe in God, the final frames of Breaking the Waves are pretty hard to take—Frank Capra does The Passion of Joan of Arc. There is a big, ugly barrier reef lurking at the end of Breaking the Waves and Lars Von Trier crashes into it, taking all hands down with him.

The video archive provides a happier prospect. Virtually all the Von Trier that matters is available, and that amounts to two films: the aforementioned Zentropa (a real treat if you’ve got a big screen and hi-fi, or better yet, a rep. cinema showing it up the block) and The Kingdom, a 4 1/2 hour project for Danish television which, along with Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, is perhaps the best TV miniseries ever made.

Described by dust-jacket publicists desperate for North American reference points as a combination of E.R. and Twin Peaks, The Kingdom is a apocalyptic, occultish medical drama set in a decaying, byzantine Copenhagen hospital. It is not the most heroic of places: a malingering patient fakes symptoms so she can conduct seances for the patients; a doctor who has taken up residence in the basement runs a black market in vital goods and keeps a mock graveyard of patients killed by incompetent surgeons; the ghost of a child murdered years ago haunts an elevator shaft; and so on and so on—two dishwashers with Down’s syndrome periodically pop in to keep the audience informed about just what is going on.

The Kingdom is probably the best introduction to Lars Von Trier’s work—it is certainly the most flat-out enjoyable—and it reveals in Breaking the Waves a spiritual wrong turn in the career of someone more suited to social satire. The Kingdom displays a variety of spirituality more in line with its creator’s talents: we live our lives surrounded by spirits all right; but this time they’re pissed off and determined to give us grief. Rather like the director himself.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

"For Your Consideration"

Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces the names of this year’s Oscar nominees. All the big Hollywood noses are being blown, promotional machinery has moved up to war-alert status, and strung-out studio publicists break down and cry on streetcorners for no reason at all. Scared? You should be.

So what exactly determines who gets an Oscar nomination? A favourable release date, picture prestige, momentum, studio hype, liberal sentiment, distributor intimidation, greased palms—and of course a consensus among a body of film craftspeople that someone actually deserves an award based on their work in a given film. This last, needless to say, happens very rarely.

For strict entertainment value, though, nothing tops the last-ditch struggle waged every year in the January issues of Variety magazine for the hearts and groins of Academy members—the notorious “For Your Consideration” studio advertisements. Here, the level of hyperbole climbs to a pitch that’s shameless even by Hollywood standards. For example:

Full page. Dark background. Portraits of Denzil Washington, Gene Hackman and Tony Scott surround a menacing, scarlet-tinged submarine. “For Your Consideration” the text reads, “for best picture—Crimson Tide” 

Crimson Tide? That can of cold-war surplus naval-beef that sank with all hands last spring? Yup, and a lot more consideration is asked as well: best actor (twice), direction, cinematography, sound, editing... 12 categories altogether. It's like Billy Ray Cyrus has just asked to play Roy Thompson Hall with the Toronto Symphony.

Farther along in the same issue, 12 Monkeys wants 12 nominations. An ad for Seven suggests it deserves 14. Both propose something for Brad Pitt, and it ain’t speech therapy. A host of marginally decent films use what might be called the cluster-bomb approach—if you fire enough bullets, maybe something will fall over. Ergo, Restoration suggests it merits 12 nominations, The Crossing Guard 14, While You Were Sleeping 10, Othello 15, Smoke 13, A Month by the Lake 12, Muriel’s Wedding 10. All of course will deign to be candidates for Best Picture.

After a while it’s a relief to come upon a movie that admits it just might not qualify for the big one, like Casper. Instead, (for your consideration...) how about best director, actor, actress, supporting players, visual effects, art direction—maybe a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for whoever did Eric Idle’s makeup. All in all, a mere 14 categories.

Why is all this hype so endearing? Part of it is the sheer rigidity of the model: “for your consideration” is ubiquitous among the ads, yet it seems hopelessly arcane, a Mafioso attempting Shakespearean English. Read enough of them, and your thoughts assume the same pattern. (“For your consideration, the forced sterilization of Mickey Rourke”)

(Actually, in making their pitch for Thelma and Louise a few years back, MGM tried to break out of this convention: “MGM proudly draws the Academy’s attention to the following individual achievements,” it read—and then dumped the names of two-thirds of the cast and crew into 17 categories. It didn’t help: aside from an award for the screenplay, T&L came away empty-handed, and MGM has mostly toed the conventional line ever since.)

Part of the allure is just the breathtaking arrogance of some studio visions. If the universe were to unfold as, say, Disney would have it, this year’s best picture nominations would all be Disney Films: Crimson Tide, Toy Story, While You Were Sleeping, Unstrung Heroes, and Mr Holland’s Opus or Nixon, depending on which way the wind is blowing. If you include the Disney subsidiary Miramax, they’re pushing 14 titles for best picture—that’s enough cluster-bomb to turn the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion into a Highway of Death.

But mostly it’s the charm of somebody making a hopeless pitch for a rotten product. Last year, Universal pitched Jon Avnet’s The War—I’d forgotten it, too—for every Oscar category there was, except maybe Best Animated Short. Net nominations? Zero. This year, Universal has pitched Waterworld for 11 awards, including best picture. Why did they stop there? Why not Kevin Costner for Best Actor—hell, if you’re sending that rocket all the way to Neptune, why not have it visit Pluto as well?

Ultimately, you have to wonder just how successful any of this tub-thumping can really be. It’s one thing to gently remind academy members of a good performance they may have forgotten; (“for your consideration: Kathy Bates, Best Actress for Dolores Clayborne”) it’s quite another to debase the coinage beyond recognition (“for your consideration: Sabrina, Best Picture”).

In 1992, six studios pitched 19 films in Variety for a total of 204 nominations. They got 31, three resulting in actual awards. Last year, eight studios pitched 25 films for 234 nominations. Result: 26 nominations, 4 Oscars. Slim pickings, and when you think of it, even if you always know when the pitch fails, you can never really know if it worked—you might have gotten the award without the ad. So why do it? Well, because just like chicken soup or beta carotene, it probably won’t help, but it just might!

This year, eight studios pitched 40 movies for 370 nominations. In a fall as full of lousy movies as 1995’s was, the studios obviously think anything can happen. Scared? I sure am.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

No, Virginia, there isn't a Santa Claus movie

Christmas has always posed something of a challenge to Hollywood—that is, how to take advantage of a season where, despite the universal triumph of blood-for-bucks corporatism in every other sphere of human existence, visions of sugar-plums still dance in people’s heads, and peace on earth and goodwill seem to be the mass illusions of choice. How can you squeeze money out of as wimp-assed an audience as this?

One would think it might be with a steady seasonal supply of wimp-assed movies on Christmas themes, like It’s a Wonderful Life, or A Christmas Carol or Miracle on 34th St. But if you take a look at what has actually played in movie theatres over the last 50 years, it comes as a bit of a shock that those three—along with a few later titles like 1983’s A Christmas Story and 1994’s The Santa Clause—are just about it; the number of theatrical features having Christmas as their genuine raison d’être  can be counted on the fingers of not much more than a couple of hands.

So, why is a movie theatre at Christmas so rarely a Christmassy place? One reason is probably cynicism brought on by the debasing of the coinage: To a big movie studio, anything released after American Thanksgiving that’s not hard-core porn or has the word ‘Alien’ in the title now seems to count as a Christmas movie. A Disney representative with whom I broached the subject began by saying “well, last year we released 101 Dalmatians....”

 I’m sorry, but 101 Dalmatians is not a Christmas movie. Neither is Die Hard 2, even if it is set at Christmas. Father of the Bride, Junior, Richie Rich and Little Women, all recent Christmas releases, aren’t Christmas movies. A Christmas movie is about Yuletide: It is a film in which either Santa Claus or angels appear, and Bruce Willis doesn’t.

What Hollywood counts as a Christmas theme has become overly-comprehensive probably because Christmas as a stand-alone movie subject is simply a tough sell—for one thing, people who are into Christmas tend to be huddled around the fireplace, not the box-office of the local octoplex. And the most seasonal, creative will in the world is also no insurance against a film generating indifferent business: The best Christmas movie ever made was One Magic Christmas—a film I have seen reduce planeloads of viewers to tears—and on its release in 1985 it flopped. Sometimes it’s better to simply do whatever you do best and call it Christmassy. Father Christmas gives way to Christmas fodder.

For a while not so long ago, Fodder Christmas was actually pretty good to us, as Hollywood used December as launch-time for a great swack of any given year’s prestige films. Audiences softened up by the season would generate revenue and build Oscar credibility for movies that would have perished in the heat of a summer release. For a time, Christmas became a celebration of the season’s other miracle: Hollywood made money by giving us good movies.

It doesn’t look much like that any more. In a typical Christmas release ten years ago, Hollywood gave us three of that year’s five Oscar nominees—Rain Man, Working Girl, and The Accidental Tourist. The last three nativities have seen only one—last year’s Jerry McGuire. Six of the eight Oscar winners immediately before 1990 were December launches. Since then, there has been only one—Schindler’s List in 1993. What happened?

What happened in 1990 was Home Alone—a lump of coal in our collective cinematic stocking that grossed half-a-billion dollars worldwide, spawned two sequels, and made its author, John Hughes, the most powerful and influential writer/producer in the world. Home Alone set the template for the next generation of holiday movies and stripped the last vestiges of sentiment from the Christmas movie season. It showed that the secret to making money at Christmas is the same as for the rest of the year, that is, with blockbusters designed to make $100 million in three weeks, supported by 2500-screen openings and carpet-bomb advertising.

Accordingly, the big nativity-season hits from the last three years have been films like Jumanji, Dumb and Dumber, Grumpier Old Men, Mrs. Doubtfire, Scream and Michael. These are movies that don’t simply take advantage of our seasonal good will the way Driving Miss Daisy or Out of Africa did; instead they bulldoze it completely, make their money and then vanish, leaving nothing behind. (Can anybody remember anything at all about Michael? Neither can I.)

 Still, Home Alone’s  most profound influence was in the video market, where it made as much money the next Christmas as it had on its initial U.S. release. (Two years later, retail sales of the Home Alone 2: Lost in New York video did even better, considerably outgrossing the theatrical release.) If Home Alone perfected the recipe for the theatrical Christmas money-maker, Home Alone on video showed us its future—which is out of the theatre and under the Christmas tree. (The ghosts who visited Scrooge were never this cruel: They showed him Christmas yet-to-come only once; he didn’t have to watch it on video the next year with Tiny Tim .)

For the Christmas feature, a movie theatre is rapidly becoming not much more than way-station on its journey to video. (One gets the impression that next week’s theatrical release of Home Alone 3 is designed mostly to give it credibility for a video release next Christmas) If it sees a theatre at all, that is—this year’s only big-studio Christmas subject is being released direct-to-video: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas. The real battle of the Christmas movies this year is going to be a fight for your VCR between Beauty and last year’s big theatrical release, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Jingle All The Way—a story, ironically, about a guy trying to buy his son a Christmas gift.

In a more reflexive movie, Arnold would probably have bought him the Beauty and the Beast video, since in the final analysis, TV is probably where all this stuff belongs. TV has always been a more Christmas-friendly medium than the movies—in fact, it’s likely the place we all got the notion that there was some kind of golden age of Christmas movies in the first place. There is some poetic justice to the process coming full-circle: Television—or more precisely, television’s constant need to fill empty broadcasting space with product—has given us our vision of Hollywood’s Christmas past. Now TV (or at least that part of it hooked up to a VCR) is poised to deliver Hollywood’s Christmas yet to come as well.

Meanwhile, back at the multiplex, things are in a state of flux and December 1997 is shaping up to be a holiday movie season explainable only in terms of chaos theory: In a month that promises to be as productive and exciting as a multi-vehicle freeway collision, American distributors are releasing close to 30 movies in 30 days—Disney is opening four movies on Christmas Day alone. Hidden away somewhere among them, there’s even an actual Christmas movie, a little independent film from France called Will it Snow for Christmas?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have been given a Canadian release. Perhaps it’ll be on video in time for next Christmas.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997

Shed No Tears for Douglas Sirk

When a popular artist finally gains critical acclaim it’s tough to decide who to cheer for first: the artist now justly recognized or the critics who have finally smartened up. Such is the case with director Douglas Sirk, whose career is being exhaustively profiled in Cinematheque Ontario’s “Masters of Melodrama”—along with a mini-retrospective of his most enthusiastic disciple, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Sirk was critically derided during the 1950’s as a mere purveyor of lushly mounted “women’s pictures” with paperback-profound titles like Imitation of Life or All That Heaven Allows or Written on the Wind. Over the last couple of decades, though, his oeuvre has been reevaluated by the critical-academic community and is now more highly regarded than that of most of his “serious” Hollywood contemporaries. What’s happened is that they have caught up to a public that was in Sirk’s corner all along: All his films are stupendously watchable; they made money—many were hits—and he was probably able to get more profundity and style on the screen through the side door than somebody like Orson Welles was ever allowed to shovel in up front.

But it’s not hard to see why a serious-minded Eisenhower-era critic raised on a diet of East of Eden and On the Waterfront might find Douglas Sirk a bit difficult to digest. Consider the storyline from Magnificent Obsession: Mr. Irresponsible, millionaire playboy, survives a boating accident with the speedy intervention of an emergency crew equipped with the community’s only resuscitator. On the other side of the lake, a beloved physician-philanthropist dies because the needed resuscitator isn’t there. Mr. Irresponsible, wracked with guilt, decides he must take Dr. Philanthropist’s place as the community’s quiet benefactor. Overplaying his hand, he also tries to take Dr. Philanthropist’s place at home with his wife. Spurning his advances, Mrs. Philanthropist is hit by a car and is struck blind. While recuperating, she develops a friendship with a guy she meets on the beach, unable to see that it’s Guess Who.

Mr. Irresponsible anonymously pays for her to see the finest specialists in Europe. He visits her there, and she falls in love with him. He tells her who he actually is. She breaks off the relationship. The European specialists turn out to be powerless, so Mr. Irresponsible decides to give up this millionaire thing, goes to medical school, and becomes a famous brain surgeon. Not too many years later he learns she’s fallen into a coma. He rushes to the scene, operates, restores her sight, and is there at her bedside when she awakes. A heavenly choir sings, and our serious-minded critic loses his lunch on the way back to his typewriter.

I can sympathize. To one raised outside the melodramatic loop, an encounter with Magnificent Obsession—or any other of his 50’s films—can be pretty disconcerting: The speed with which plot complications pile up against each other is breathtaking (like a video of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead stuck on fast forward); characters just up and say what’s on their minds directly and bluntly; and the search for love and its myriad setbacks is the centre of existence for everyone—maybe even for God as well. It’s philosophically simple and easy to digest—all the crackers are from way down there in the heart of the barrel, where they’ve had a chance to get all warm and fuzzy—and Sirk aims straight for the heart, using strictly below-the-belt techniques.

To spend time in the company of a Sirk film is to be seduced into accepting melodrama as legitimate artifice, and once you’ve bought into the process—for me, it happened about midway through the opening credits to Written on the Wind—it proves an astonishingly flexible genre. Take A Time to Love and a Time to Die, released in 1958 and one of the best (and least-known) American war movies ever made. It is a startling film: In an era of chauvinistic U.S. war movies peopled by caricature Nazis and the clones of Sgt. Rock, Sirk chose to shoot a paraphrase of All Quiet on the Western Front in actual bombed-out German locations, giving us WW2 from the point of view of the losers, both military and civilian.

Not surprisingly, he finds the most important action away from the front, in a romance between a German soldier on leave and a woman he meets while searching for his parents through the rubble of his home town. Their affair is tragic, on-the-run, and portrayed with enough conviction to make you believe that what they are going through—not gunshots exchanged between soldiers—is the real tragedy of war. A Time to Love and a Time to Die is Sam Pekenpah’s Cross of Iron directed as if it were Kings Row—which turns out to be an even better idea than it sounds.

Being even better than it sounds is a trait of Sirk’s work, especially for one unfamiliar with the real sophistication of his apparently weeping universe: Behind every tear is a dig at contemporary society; bubbling up through the soap is a wail of horror at what people will do to remain unhappy.

What seems little more than a parade of well-off women’s romantic misalliances is more like a cry of dismay at the hellish trappings of contemporary American life: all the men who aren’t Rock Hudson are weak, alcoholic or deceitful; the suburb is a women’s prison; and kids are like pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (When two grown children abandon their mother after destroying her romance in All That Heaven Allows, they buy her a television set. “Turn the dial,” they tell her, “and you have all the company you want.”) Even the titles are heavy with social irony: There is no tomorrow in There’s Always Tomorrow; in All that Heaven Allows, nothing is allowed.

Given this implicit social critique, it has been fashionable of late to dress Sirk up as some sort of a lefty subversive. This does him no favor, since he’s after something potentially more difficult, and that is taking melodrama seriously: Our emotional lives are what is most important to us; social convention does kill the quest for love; the stuff that glues us together as a society does tear us apart as individuals. To him, these axioms obtain no matter who’s on top socially; there is no implication that the poor have it any better. (The rich certainly get no help from their social position: In There’s Always Tomorrow, wealthy toy manufacturer Fred MacMurray feels like a robot in his suburban existence. You can almost see his eyes mist over when he runs into old flame Barbara Stanwyck—no doubt reminiscing about the good ol’ days when life meant something and the two of them plotted to bump off her husband in Double Indemnity.)

Sirk’s films still work forty years on because he reaches us in the way we prefer to reach each other. To accept them on their own terms is to open yourself up to all sorts of unexpected delights—like Rock Hudson in his pre-Doris Days (if he had been hit by a car in 1959 he might well have become the thinking woman’s James Dean); or the magnificent suffering of Jane Wyman and the burnt-out seductiveness of Dorothy Malone (overheated in Written on the Wind and downright overdone in The Tarnished Angels); or an astonishing visual style where characters run an obstacle course through a world of suburban interiors lit as if they were dungeons from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Cumulatively, Sirk’s movies are as close to self-recommending as you are likely to get: Designed for the multitudes, they are finally starting to catch on with the merely smart.

Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997

Night of the living Peanuts

The Toronto Star TV Guide recommendation for Sept. 1, 1989 read: "For every season, there is a Charlie Brown special. From 1969, It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown has Charlie moaning about how the boys never won a game against the girls at summer camp. A great way to prepare the kids for that dreaded first day at school."

As soon as I read it, I felt a surge of nostalgia for those halcyon 1969 times when I took some time from my carefree days of evading the 106 neighborhood bullies in River Heights to watch the show's original broadcast. Peanuts was hot stuff then, being the world's most popular comic strip, and every Charlie Brown TV special was an event.

After I thought about it for a while, though, I realized was that the show's return for the nth time was probably more to prepare we adults for that dreaded day the kids go back to school---Charlie Brown is, after all, our symbol, not our kids'. Snoopy works for Metropolitan Life, now.

A scene drifted into my head: the family has all gathered around the television to watch It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown. Dad tells the kids that he watched exactly the same show when it originally came out in 1969. The program begins, and as the images flash by, the parents positively glow with emotion, secure in the certainty that the kids at this very moment probably feel exactly as they themselves did 20 years ago.

This is now expected to be a point of real contact between generations; a meaningful family moment, rather like taking Dad to see Field of Dreams, and then going home with him to get good and drunk and listen to all of his Benny Goodman records and a scratchy old copy of Tommy by The Who. It made me dewy-eyed just to think about it.

But then, there is also something vaguely sick about the whole idea of a group of otherwise intelligent adults re-experiencing their video childhood in front of the family, and then thinking that this somehow better connects them to their kids. Points of real communion between generations used to revolve around the concrete common experiences of growing up or growing older: A first day of school, or a last day of summer vacation. Childhood humiliations. Falling in love. First hot-wired car. Childhood victories. These are experiences our parents had, we had, and our children have. They are common episodes which jump generational boundaries to connect us.

But, witnessing all of the above second-hand in a Charlie Brown TV special as a point of family communion? Something funny is going on here: The way-back machine has crashed in flames, or at least does something radically different than it used to. Maybe the idea now is just to get in touch with your own childhood, and the guise of communing with the kids is just so much sentimental malarkey. Maybe Gil Scott-Heron was right: We just want to go back as far as we can, even if it's only as far as last week.

I may be making too much of this, but look at the commitment to a kind of diseased, second-order, bad-media nostalgia in recent offerings from the marketplace: ancient, adolescent-fodder comic books like Superman and Batman are now live-action movies, with live-action renderings of The Flintstones, Dick Tracy, and Boris and Natasha (from the 60's TV cartoon show Rocky and his Friends) on their way.

George Lucas remakes the garbage sci-fi serials of his youth as Star Wars I-III. Steven Spielberg remakes the garbage serials of his youth as Indiana Jones I-III. (Didn't these guys experience anything real when they were growing up?) Both make literally billions, as an entire generation resonates in harmony. In a weird variation, the old literally become young again in Freaky Friday, Like Father, Like Son, 18 Again, Vice Versa, Cocoon I & II, and Peggy Sue Got Married.

On TV, a seemingly endless parade of haggard reruns of Danger Man, Leave it to Beaver, Perry Mason, I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, The Honeymooners, Andy Griffith, and a truckload of others, wanders across the late-night TV screens of a host of sentimental yuppies, who are all coked up and trying to re-experience a childhood when those shows were the highlight of their existence. Hell, I'd love to rent a couple of episodes of The Outer Limits and wander back to the days when I was about nine, and had to sneak into the TV room to watch it. But that's a thoroughgoing bit of self-indulgence I would never inflict on someone a generation younger than I.

Star Trek movies. Remakes of Mission Impossible. Contemporary 60's radio. The Big Chill. Sequels. Gomer Pyle, USMC on video. The glorious moment when Team Canada's Paul Henderson scored the Only Winning Goal That Ever Really Mattered---that moment which brought history to a close, now available to be relived again and again. Millions mainline video reruns of their childhood while their children shave their heads and rerun the childhood of Nazi Germany in the streets of Anyville, Canada....

Aw, c'mon now. Meaningful contact between people who don't really know each other often takes the form of an exchange of artifacts; offerings left at the edge of the Other's village in the dark of night.

But this? This is crazy: When we awake it seems that the only artifact that the first TV generation has to offer the second is Watching.

-Published in Between the Lines, 1989