Me And Orson Welles: Mercury Probe

I have never been on one of Richard Linklater’s sets, but it’s hard to imagine him doing what Orson Welles does in his new film Me and Orson Welles and yelling at the assembled cast and crew, “You are all adjuncts to my vision!” My impression of Linklater — formed by watching his best films, Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Before Sunset — is of a director who’s the opposite of a control freak, someone more than happy to hand over large portions of his film to actors, musicians, even animators and trust them to make some huge creative decisions. The Welles we meet in Me and Orson Welles, meanwhile, is the world’s biggest credit hog, a man who isn’t happy being the director, producer, and star of his stage version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; he has to have people think he designed the set as well. (He’d probably claim credit for the script if he thought he could get away with it.)

A backstage comedy? Set in 1937 New York? And starring Zac Efron? Me and Orson Welles is an exceedingly square project for a laid-back Texas hipster like Richard Linklater, but on its own terms, it’s a fun, albeit minor little picture that delves into a great, unexplored period in Welles’ life, when he was racing all over New York, putting on plays, acting in radio shows, and seducing every pretty girl who crossed his path, even with a pregnant wife back home. (This period supplied some of the best anecdotes in This Is Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich’s lively collection of Welles interviews. I’m sure all the stories are heavily embroidered, but it’s still a blast to hear Welles talk about how arriving at the radio studio for a live broadcast and being told moments before going on air what character he was playing.)

Christian McKay, an actor previously unknown to me, looks more like the comedian Joe Lo Truglio than Orson Welles, but he does a top-notch Welles imitation — the amused purse-lipped smile, the casually silver-tongued oratory, the ability to make every speech, every gesture, into a performance everyone in the room will want to pay attention to. There’s an amusing joke early on in the film where Welles spots a book with John Gielgud’s photo on the cover and wonders aloud if there’s a man alive more in love with the sound of his own voice.

That book is the property of Richard Samuels (Efron), a stagestruck teenager who hustles his way into Welles’ Mercury Theatre troupe just when they’re putting together their legendary 1937 modern-dress version of Caesar. Of course, when Richard joins them, the only thing legendary about the show is its level of disorganization — opening night keeps getting delayed, the company is running out of cash, and the cast is feeling a little crushed under the weight of Welles’ ego. But Welles is so confident and charismatic, so skilled at convincing everyone of the brilliance of his vision, that no one dares leave — least of all Richard, who gets two scenes as Brutus’ servant Lucius. In one, he even gets to sing, accompanying himself on the lute. (Actually, Welles can’t afford a lute, so they’re using a disguised ukulele.) In the process, Richard falls for Welles’ assistant Sonja (Claire Danes) and learns a thing or two about love, art, and Shakespeare in the process.

I am a total sucker for backstage comedies, especially the ones where opening night looks like it’s going to be a total disaster but miraculously turns into a triumph instead (that's pretty much all of them, right?), and sure enough, I fell for Me and Orson Welles as well. Efron’s fine in the male ingénue role, Danes looks very fetching in her ’30s blouses, and Eddie Marsan makes a strong impression as John Houseman — you believe Welles must be a genius, because there’s no way Houseman would have put up with working for him otherwise.

And even if it’s not the most daring film Linklater has ever made, it feels like it must have been a fun way to keep his creative batteries charged. Near the end of the film, Linklater shows Welles, flush with triumph, worriedly asking himself, “How do I top this?” Linklater is hopefully asking himself the same question.

The Musicgoer: Tom Waits' Glitter And Doom Live

TOM WAITS
Glitter and Doom Live
(Anti)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

Tom Waits is one of the great live performers in music today, but he’s been curiously ill-served by his live albums: Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) suffers from a weak lineup of songs, while Big Time (1988) suffered from the same arty, alienating affectations as the film it accompanied.

But now, with Glitter and Doom Live, Waits fans have the live album they’ve been waiting for — and right from the opening number, “Lucinda/Ain’t Goin’ Down” (a medley of two songs from his Orphans compilation), this music has a loose, infectious energy that’s been missing from Waits’ last few studio albums. His growl is guttural as ever, but I had forgotten what a flexible and variable instrument it is — there are at least three different registers Waits can growl in, depending on the mood of the song, from the junkyard dog aggression of “Singapore” to the drunken, sentimental keen of “Fannin Street” to the nasal, half-senile twang of “I’ll Shoot the Moon.”

But wait, there’s more: a bonus disc of Waits stage banter — 36 minutes of animal trivia, tall tales, and shameless puns. (“Shrimp never give anything to charity,” Waits observes. “That’s because they’re shellfish.”) The official title is Tom Tales, but I like to think of it as Having Fun With Tom On Stage.

Vampires, Cyborgs, And The Men Who Love Them: Two By Park Chan-Wook

The waiflike beauty looks up at the strong, handsome, silent man, who seems at that moment like the embodiment of every kind of forbidden love. Strands of long, dark hair in her eyes, she begs him to change her into a vampire like himself, so they can be lovers forever. He shakes his head and gives her a pained reply: “No.” He knows what torment it is to thirst for blood, and he would never inflict such agony on anyone, least of all on the woman he loves.

That scene that I’ve just described does not come from New Moon — psych! Fooled you, right? — but from Thirst, one of two recent films from Korean director Park Chan-Wook that I watched over the last couple of days. And I think I’m finally, belatedly, coming around to the commonly held view that Park is one of the most original genre filmmakers on the scene today, with a command of colour, camera movement, and special effects that’s on the same elevated plane as guys like Peter Jackson and David Fincher, and a feel for female characters that neither of those guys can match.

The protagonist of Thirst is an idealistic but disillusioned priest played by Song Kang-ho, who volunteers as a test subject for some kind of experimental vaccine in hopes of at last making a tangible difference in somebody’s life. Somehow, in a turn of events I couldn’t quite follow, the vaccine turns Song into a vampire — he acquires superhuman strength, a strong aversion to sunlight, and a condition that causes hideous blisters to break out on his skin if he doesn’t drink human blood.

At first, Thirst looks like it will concern itself with the moral dilemma of a priest who must kill others to stay alive. But the most fascinating character turns out to be Kim Ok-bin, who plays the wife of Song’s childhood friend Shin Ha-Kyun, a hopeless, sickly mama’s boy for whom she feels nothing but contempt. Kim and Song would be drawn passionately to each other even under normal circumstances, but Song’s vampirism adds an erotic charge to the situation that makes their passions pretty much uncontrollable and they conspire to drown Shin in the lake and marry soon after. (The story is based on Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, but it also feels like a Korean version of a James M. Cain story... crossed with True Blood.)

Kim gives an extraordinary performance; she starts out as a helpless victim, quietly suffering under the thumb of her impassive mother-in-law, in the habit of running down the street in her bare feet in the middle of the night just to feel a momentary burst of freedom. Then she’s a young woman in love — there’s a great sequence in Thirst where Song holds her in his arms and jumps from building to building, Park’s camera perched just behind Song’s shoulder and looking down on Kim’s giddy laughing face. (There’s a comparable scene in the first Twilight movie, but Park does an infinitely better job than Catherine Hardwicke did of conveying the giddy rapture of vampire love.) Then she’s a femme fatale, plotting her husband’s murder while also seducing Song into making her into a vampire too. And then she’s just a bloodthirsty force of nature, eagerly embracing her new identity as a vampire, poking a weird double-bladed weapon into her victims’ necks and marveling as the blood burbles out of the wound, literally like water from a drinking fountain. It’s one of the best “monstrous female” roles in recent horror movies, and Kim sells every moment of it with a physical commitment that is by turns feral and kittenish.

At 135 minutes, the plot of Thirst meanders more than it should, but the visuals are never less than inspired. (The scenes where Shin’s moronically grinning ghost keeps interrupting Song and Kim’s most intimate moments are both creepy and wildly funny.) Park always tries to find interesting ways of shooting even conventional scenes — just look at the fluid editing and camera placement of that first mahjongg game, for instance.

And the climactic sequence, in which Song and Kim meet their end, is beautifully conceived both visually and emotionally, with Kim resisting death, then gradually resigning herself to it as long as she can be with her lover.

* * * * *

But the film that really converted me into Park Chan-Wook fandom was his previous effort, a one-of-a-kind fable titled I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK. With its lack of violence (except for a couple of key scenes), it’s candy-coloured visual palette, and its risky, offbeat comic tone, it’s the odd film out in Park’s career — it’s hard to believe it’s the work of the same guy who made Oldboy — but it’s also hard to imagine another director making it.

It’s set in a mental institution, but the kind of mental institution you only find in movies (or more accurately, in animated cartoons), where the rooms are cheerful, the doctors are benevolent, and the patients are all charmingly quirky, childlike misfits — a man who only walks backwards, an old woman who thinks she’s a mouse. Our heroine is Im Su-jeong, who believes that she is a cyborg: she prefers to converse with “other” mechanical objects like radios and lamps instead of doctors, and at dinnertime she consistently refuses food and instead daintily licks batteries to recharge herself. (Her toes light up, one by one, in rainbow colours to indicate her power level.) If she doesn’t start taking food, she will die of starvation before she can complete her cyborg mission — but since her mission is to massacre every doctor in the hospital as revenge for their treatment of her mentally disturbed grandmother, perhaps they’re lucky her toelights are nearly out.

Because of the nature of her role, Im Su-jeong gives a more limited performance than Thirst’s Kim Ok-bin, but if anything, she’s an even more striking onscreen presence, with her wide eyes, her blonde eyebrows, and her unbelievably thick, doll-like mop of hair. It’s a mask of a face that can convey sadness, innocence, and psychosis equally well, depending on the situation, and in a couple of brilliantly executed fantasy sequences in which her fingers turn into gun barrels and her mouth unhinges like a ventriloquist dummy to spew out bullets, she’s like a mechanical angel of death, impassive, indestructible, terrifying, and kind of adorable too.

I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK is apparently Park’s only significant financial flop, and its weirdly whimsical tone is certainly not going to be to all tastes. (Big aside, grown-ups acting like children have always been a tough sell at the box office.) But I found myself genuinely invested in the relationship between Im and a fellow patient (played by the pop star Rain), who hatches a brilliant plan that may save her from starvation but not her increasingly dangerous delusions. Plus, I’ll say it again, Im has one of those endlessly fascinating, unearthly faces — like Tilda Swinton or Willem Dafoe or Samantha Morton — that a person could look at for hours without ever getting bored.

And Park’s virtuoso visuals don’t hurt, either — I’m a Cyborg contains several elaborate single-take shots that manage to dazzle you with their technique while still feeling effortlessly graceful. The movie does takes place in kind of a bubble — all the images and the characterizations are a cartoon version of the human world — and I wondered after watching it if Park was even capable of writing three-dimensional people. But then I saw Thirst and my concerns completely vanished. To me, Park now seems like someone who wants to keep pushing his films into bold, unpredictable new territory, and that’s really exciting. They’re kind of nuts and they’re certainly not for everyone... but that’s more than OK with me.

The Road: Visions Of Gehenna

According to legend, Terrence Malick tried to shoot as much of Days of Heaven as he could at the “magic hour,” those brief, beautiful minutes of the day just after the sun has set but there’s still light in the sky. I don’t know what you’d call the opposite of the magic hour (the tragic hour?), but that’s the time of day when most of John Hillcoat’s The Road takes place. (The cinematographer was Javier Aguirresarobe, who has a very different movie opening this week: the Twilight sequel New Moon.)

It’s some unspecified number of years in the future, and the world has fallen victim to some unnamed global cataclysm that has wiped out all the plants and animals and turned everything else to ash. The only living creatures are a handful of human beings, most of them far from home, aimlessly wandering this landscape of mud and cinders and trying to stave off starvation. Some stay alive by robbing others, some have resorted to cannibalism, and some — like Viggo Mortensen and his 12-year-old son Kodi Smit-McPhee — try to abide by some semblance of a moral code even as they forage through the ruins of civilization, shivering in their trashpicked clothes, hoping that maybe, by some miracle, they’ll find a can of food somewhere that everyone else has overlooked.

I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s original novel, although I saw it with a friend who tells me that it’s a pretty faithful adaptation, give or take a few minor Hollywood concessions. I found I responded to it mostly as a thought experiment: if all the plants and animals were wiped out overnight, how would the devolution of the human race play out? On that level, I found The Road to be an unsettlingly convincing vision of the future: the bandits, the demolished homes, the mud that seems to have soaked through everyone’s clothes, right down to their bones. And that lonely image of Mortensen and Smit-McPhee at the “end” of their journey, huddled together on a grey, dismal beach under a piece of plastic sheeting, wondering if there’s another father and son on the other side of the ocean doing the same thing, hits just the right note of bleak yearning for the comfort of strangers. The scene that moved me the most, though, is the one where Mortensen and Smit-McPhee discover a piano in an abandoned beach house — something about the idea of art and music and all other forms of human beauty being lost forever just tears me up inside.

At the same time, I’m not sure what the point of a movie like The Road is, other than to watch numbly as the last few sparks of humanity fizzle out before you. I can handle a good cinematic bummer with the best of them, but there’s something so relentlessly grim and airless about this movie right from its basic conception that I found myself resisting it even as I admired the haunting images of crumbling highways and burned-out buildings, and respected the way Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall refuse to milk any moments for sentiment. (Although in the final scene, they do seem to be straining to supply a concluding note of uplift.) I get the feeling that McCarthy’s book would offer me a little bit more in the way of ruminations on the nature of survival and the legacy of the human race that go missing when you boil the book down to the essential incidents of the plot.

And even as I say that, I’m wondering if I’m being a philistine — isn’t one of the purposes of art, after all, to force you to confront difficult truths? And it’s true: partly because it envisions such an extreme, hopeless setting, The Road does make you feel the full, elemental horror of the possible end of humanity in a way that other post-apocalyptic stories don’t. (My God, even Omar from The Wire is barely hanging on, and if motherfucking Omar is having trouble surviving, what chance do the rest of us have?)

Simply getting a movie this bleak made and into movie theatres, I suppose, represents some kind of accomplishment. But unless it turns into one of those fluky movies, like The Passion of the Christ, that audiences connect with on some masochistic level precisely because they are so punishing, I can’t see The Road being an accomplishment that many people will share.

Not Quite Hollywood: The Tradition Of Koala-ty

My "HIdden Gem" DVD pick this week for CBC Radio is Not Quite Hollywood, director Mark Hartley's high-octane documentary about the golden age of Australian exploitation movies. I tend to recommend a lot of movies about movies in these segments, and I don't know if that's something listeners find a little tiresome, but Not Quite Hollywood contains so many amazing stories and captures such a wild-and-woolly period of filmmaking history that I couldn't resist. I don't know how interested I'd be in watching a steady diet of these movies — especially the sex comedies, which look pretty dire — but when they're all edited down to 30 seconds of highlights, they can't help but seem pretty exciting.

And I do have a lot of fondness, personally, for one of the titles Not Quite Hollywood lingers over: Dead End Drive-In, which was the very last film to play the Hyland theatre in my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. Some of my favourite teenage moviegoing memories take place there, from its days as an arthouse cinema (allowing me to see everything from Betty Blue to a revival showing of Brian De Palma's Sisters on the big screen) to its later years as an exploitation house, where I once saw Trancers on Christmas Eve, perhaps one of my favourite movie nights of all time. Dead End Drive-In seemed like a fitting farewell to the old place — of all the movies in Not Quite Hollywood, that's the one I wound up feeling most eager to rewatch.

Meanwhile, you can click here to listen to the CBC segment. Enjoy!

The House Of The Devil: Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Marked For Death

So many directors are remaking classic horror movies from the ’70s and ’80s, and yet it’s occurred to almost none of them to do what Ti West has done in The House of the Devil and come up with an original horror story but set it in the ’80s. In fact, judging from the scene in which the main character bops around to The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads to Another” (on cassette!), I’m going to precisely peg the film’s setting as early in the winter of 1983. With that one creative masterstroke, West removes his story from the world of cellphones, text messages, and irony and places it in the golden age of urban legends, of seductively eerie stories about Satanic cults operating in pleasant New England neighbourhoods, of serial killers with hooks for hands, razor blades in Halloween apples, and babysitters who find out the phone calls are coming from inside the house!

And in fact, The House of the Devil begins with its heroine, a young woman named Samantha (played by a pretty newcomer named Jocelin Donahue, who recalls such “perfect girlfriend” actresses from the early ’80s as Karen Allen and Brooke Adams) answering an ad for a babysitter. But when she arrives at her clients’ huge house somewhere out in the Connecticut boondocks, the husband (Tom Noonan) tells her there’s actually no baby — she’ll be taking care of his elderly mother-in-law while he and his wife (Mary Woronov) go out for the night.

Something doesn’t quite add up with his story — he insists that the mother is so private and self-sufficient that Donahue probably won’t even need to check in on her, but he’s also desperate enough to pay her $400, which is a ridiculous babysitting fee today, and even more so in 1983. And as a cash-strapped college student, Donahue can’t turn down that kind of money, so she swallows her misgivings and resolves to spend a few hours in Noonan’s big old creaky-spooky house. And did I mention it’s the night of a lunar eclipse?

It’s obvious from very early on that Noonan and Woronov are setting Donahue up as some kind of Satanic sacrificial lamb, but West holds back on providing just enough details to make every moment she spends in that house, prowling around half-lit corridors and slowly opening all sorts of squeaky-hinged doors, feel exquisitely suspenseful. I did some house-sitting when I was a teen, and there is definitely unusually unnerving about being alone at night in someone else’s home — even if you have their permission to be there. Factor in, as The House of the Devil does, the presence of some mysterious, unseen old woman who keeps making the floorboards creak and the plumbing moan, and you’ve got a total creepfest on your hands.

Aside from a couple of unconvincingly choreographed action beats during the climax, The House of the Devil also manages to deliver a satisfying payoff to all that ominous buildup... and the way West packs that payoff into the final three words of dialogue suggests a writer/director with a real flair for old-fashioned horror storytelling. I bet that if The House of the Devil actually had been made in the ’80s, people would still fondly remember it as “one of those movies that scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.” Luckily, it was made this year, so we probably won’t have to endure the shitty remake until at least 2029.

The Musicgoer: Connie Kaldor's Postcards From the Road

CONNIE KALDOR
Postcards From the Road
(Outside Music)
** (out of 5)

There’s a fine line between eloquent simplicity and mere banality, between familiar shared truths and shopworn sentiments, and far too often on Postcards From the Road, singer/songwriter and Canadian folk festival mainstay Connie Kaldor can be heard settling for the latter. These are songs about how hard it is to say goodbye, how hard it can be to put your finger on why you love the people you do, how your life might have been hugely different if you’d chosen another path, and how nice it feels to be in love. All perfectly legitimate subjects for songs, of course, but Kaldor doesn’t ring any fresh changes on them. Love is like a mountain. It makes your heart flutter like a bird. When romance ends, it leaves a hole inside you.

Kaldor’s warm, supple voice can make even weak material sound good, but even so, I'm afraid there's very little on Postcards From the Road that's worth writing home about.

The Damned United: Football Antihero

Peter Morgan is one of the few screenwriters who appears to have no ambitions to become a director, but whose scripts have such consistent themes that he practically qualifies as an auteur anyway. A typical Morgan script will dramatize a little-known footnote of ’70s history, and use that story as a springboard for pitting a cocky, callow, but likable young hero against a faded but still formidable legend. In The Queen, Tony Blair faced off against Queen Elizabeth; in The Last King of Scotland, a young doctor who had to square off against Idi Amin; and in Frost/Nixon... well, that one’s right there in the title.

In his latest film, The Damned United (and it feels right to call it a Peter Morgan film, even though Tom Hooper directed it), the two main characters will be less familiar to North Americans than to Brits. The cocky hero this time is football manager Brian Clough (Michael Sheen), whose leadership transformed Derby County from a laughingstock to contenders for the First Division title. His rival is Don Revie, the beloved manager of Leeds United, whose brutal style of play made them the dominant force in British football in the early ’70s. He also snubbed Clough during their first match against each other, and Clough has dreamed of revenge ever since. And so, when he’s hired as Revie’s replacement, Clough is more interested in repudiating Revie’s legacy than in winning games, or endearing himself to his new team.

And so the stage is set for one of the great fiascos in the history of British sport. Clough lasted a mere 44 days as Leeds’ manager before his poisonous relationship with his players and the Leeds fans resulted in his ouster... and cost him not just his friendship with his invaluable right-hand man, Peter Taylor but almost his entire sports career.

You don’t have to know anything about British football — God knows I sure don’t — to enjoy The Damned United. Morgan has always been more interested in character than setting, and he makes the film less a sports story than a study in bad management techniques. Michael Sheen, Morgan’s favourite leading man, is terrific as usual, especially in the scenes where Clough’s blinkered overconfidence gets the better of him. And with Timothy Spall as Peter Taylor, Colm Meaney as Don Revie, and Jim Broadbent as Derby’s tightwad team owner, the cast is practically an all-star team of ruddy-faced Irish and British character actors. Minor, but very entertaining.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox: Vulpine Intervention

Every frame of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s first foray into stop-motion animation, is so filled with wonders, you hardly know where to look. A book on a shelf, leaning against a TV set, titled Spices of the Jungle. A stalk of wheat worn in the breast pocket of a corduroy suit instead of a pocket handkerchief. A literal soapbox, which Mr. Fox climbs up on to make a speech. A painting in a badger’s law office that seems to suggest badgers fought in the Civil War. I think my favourite detail, though, pops up in the scene where young Ash Fox goes swimming with his cousin Kristofferson — if you look closely, you can see that the towel he’s drying himself off with was stolen from a hotel.

And Mr. Fox probably doesn’t feel a twinge of guilt about it. As voiced by George Clooney and embodied by a charmingly stiff-jointed armature of fur and wire, he’s a man who isn’t happy unless he’s pulling some kind of caper — preferably one with multiple phases, allows him to wear a bandit mask, and ends up with him dining on freshly killed chicken.

He’s a vulpine version of two previous Clooney roles, Danny Ocean from Ocean’s Eleven and Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Art Thou? — a nonchalantly overconfident rogue, a little too much in love with the sound of his own voice, perpetually cooking up impossible schemes, but lucky enough to have a wife who keeps his most dangerous impulses in check. She’s named Felicity, she’s voiced by Meryl Streep, and she’s a fellow thief who demanded that they give up crime when she got pregnant. But in an eyebrow-raising moment (for a kids’ movie), we learn that Felicity was once a wild girl, “the town tart,” so perhaps she can empathize with her husband when he misses the old days when he could let his animal instincts off the leash. (Her hobby of creating landscape paintings of lightning storms suggests a woman still in love with the wild side of nature.)

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is based on a book by Roald Dahl, and it preserves his mordant sense of humour, especially in the characterization of the three scowling farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, who become Mr. Fox’s mortal enemies when he begins brazenly raiding their chicken coops and ciderhouses. They are all pretty mean customers, but Bean (voiced by Michael Gambon) is the worst of the lot — he looks more like an undertaker than an apple farmer, and he even employs a giant rat (voiced by Willem Dafoe) as his head of security.

But The Fantastic Mr. Fox is also clearly a Wes Anderson movie, with the same meticulously framed sets, flat compositions, and beautifully chosen soundtrack music (this time, old Burl Ives records rub shoulders with The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys), the same distinctive tone of melancholy whimsy, and the same tension between moody sons and flawed father figures as any of his live-action pictures. I’ve been a big fan of all of Anderson’s pictures — even less beloved efforts like The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and the underrated The Darjeeling Limited — but I can see where his detractors are coming from when they complain about his arch tone and his fussed-over sets and costumes choking off the emotions of his stories.

But in The Fantastic Mr. Fox, that fussy, obsessive quality is inherent to the form, and a filmmaking style that might seem oppressive when live actors have to submit to it becomes thoroughly delightful when all the characters onscreen are puppets. Just seeing the fur on Felicity’s face “boil” as the unseen animators adjust her expression is captivating: you’re seeing something move that shouldn’t be able to, and if you’re like me, it’s all you can do to keep from clapping your hands with pleasure at every nifty magic trick Anderson’s team of animators so deftly execute. The animation is arguably at its most charming when it’s at its most artificial — the stiff yet spry dance numbers, or the cross-section, ant-farm shots of the foxes tunneling at top speed through the earth.

In the film’s final scene, Mr. Fox gathers his family — which, like the families in most Wes Anderson movies, is not limited to blood relatives — in the aisle of a supermarket and gives a speech that captures the full spirit of the film. It’s a tribute to, of all things, the pleasures of artificiality. He holds up a hybrid piece of fruit — an apple genetically modified so that the skin has a white pattern on it, a little like Christmas wrapping paper, and says, “This apple looks fake, but it has stars on it.”

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is fake too, just like all storybooks. But it has talking foxes in it. And flaming pinecones. And an electric train. And a badger who’s also a secret demolition expert. It’s the most instantly enchanting movie I’ve seen in many a fox-month.

The Musicgoer: The William Blakes' Wayne Coyne

THE WILLIAM BLAKES
Wayne Coyne
(Speed of Sound)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

The Danish rock band The William Blakes may have named their debut album after the lead singer of The Flaming Lips, but judging from these 12 songs, Coyne is the least of their influences. The opening track, “Secrets of the State” conjures up memories of ’80s synth bands like Talk Talk and Blancmange, “Beginnings” has a room-filling sound that recalls The Arcade Fire (right down to the mid-song shout of “Let’s go!” just like in “No Cars Go”), and even on the track called “Wayne Coyne,” lead singer Kristian Leth frenetically quotes the “ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-se, ma-ma-makossa” breakdown from Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”

It’s a magpie album, in other words, and even if it’s hard to get a firm grasp on the band’s true identity, Wayne Coyne has a big, lush pop sound that will pass the time until they figure it out. My favourite track is “On Fire,” whose mix of jaunty melody and apocalyptic lyrics compares favourably with Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere.” Originality is overrated, anyway.