Arts Reviews

He was in living rooms across America dishing out fatherly advice. He had a cheery disposition while watching people bite the dust or get socked in the groin. He was a phenomenal comedian. He was Bob Saget. The Philadelphia native and comedy icon passed away unexpectedly on January 9 and left the country stunned. Bob was a figure you always thought would be around forever. There were so many nights we spent watching Bob as Danny Tanner navigate the seemingly impossible job of single fatherhood. For nine years, we watched him and his TV family grow up. We grew with them. Memories of Full House are burned into the minds of all who watched and loved him. He was a big part of so many American families' bonding experiences, which is one reason his death was so devastating to so many.

The actor Sidney Poitier, who has died at the age of ninety-four — a month shy of his ninety-fifth birthday — has justifiably been celebrated as one of the last remaining actors from "Old Hollywood." Poitier continued to act until 1997, with his final role being a somewhat anti-climatic appearance as an FBI director in the indifferent remake of The Day of the Jackal. But his heyday came in the Fifties and Sixties, when he established himself as the first bona fide African-American box office draw and a performer of rare force and charisma.

I sat down to watch Adam McKay’s Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up over the Christmas break with an unusual burden of expectation. Half the people I’d known who had seen it — admittedly, mainly those on the right — had denounced it as unfunny, heavy-handed agitprop, whereas their politically opposed brethren praised it as "timely," "inspiring" and "important." Would I finish watching it and sign up for a series of Greta Thunberg podcasts, or smash my television in and take to the streets, hollering? To be honest, the film is neither offensive nor clever enough to arouse such strong opinions.

Bob Dylan has just concluded the first leg of his revitalized “Never Ending Tour,” which was paused, along with the world, after March 2020. Scheduled to travel to Japan last April, Dylan canceled his dates in Tokyo and Osaka, and presumably sheltered at home in California. He wasn’t resting, though. Just after midnight on March 27, 2020, his website posted a nearly 17-minute-long song, “Murder Most Foul,” circling around and about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Excited rumors of a record of new Dylan songs proved true when Rough and Rowdy Ways, his 39th studio album, was released on June 19, 2020. A year and a half later, Dylan and a newly constituted band finally took the record on tour.

The box office news from earlier this December was mixed. The stupendous success of the latest Spider-Man sequel, No Way Home, indicated that fears of the Omicron variant have not deterred audiences from coming out in the millions: it grossed $260 million at the US box office and $600 million globally. But it also trampled other less franchise-friendly films. Guillermo del Toro’s new picture Nightmare Alley debuted to a dismal $3 million, and Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story will be one of the director’s greatest flops, having grossed a mere $18 million in the US so far. The chances of either film — expensively mounted period pieces from A-list directors — recouping their production budgets at the theater, let alone their advertising costs, is zero.

Ah, Christmastime, the season for pheasant dinners, fancy ties, the land of Toyland from which you can never return, the time of year when everyone falls in love, when snowmen fly away to Snowland to become Eskimos, and when kids run around crying “dickory dock!” Right? All of these are bits and pieces from old Christmas songs that have mostly been forgotten, whose imagery and language failed to take hold in the general imagination. It’s quite fascinating how such a small number of songs, from a very narrow moment in American life, have contributed so heavily to defining the mood and feel of our secular Christmases.

Frank Capra was almost too embarrassed to pitch his greatest film to Jimmy Stewart. At the time, both men were veterans in a post-war slump. Capra was losing his first confidence in a shelved Cary Grant vehicle-that-wasn’t, a script that had been torturously adapted from a short story by a fractious committee of writers. He stumbled through the premise for Stewart, trying to explain that the story starts in Heaven, and it’s about this fellow who thinks he’s a failure in life, so an angel named Clarence has to come down and stop him from jumping off a bridge, except Clarence can’t swim so the fellow has to save him… Here Capra paused, mopping his brow to confess, “This doesn’t tell very well, does it?

YouTube just sent me down a spiral rewatching old Glee clips. I was never a Glee fan per se, but it was one of a handful of shows I watched when my kids were in Peak Mode, old enough to be interesting as people but not yet old enough to realize I was not interesting. My kids are adults now; did TV help form them? It did. And what we all learned, and especially how we learned it, is a lesson on the failure of 2021 wokeness to achieve change and instead just piss people off. In 2021, Glee strikes me as influential. When it first aired, it was thought of as, at least in a suburban way, edgy. I’m sure eyes all across Brooklyn are rolling but they miss the point. Glee being suburban was the point.

Casting was recently announced for the film Renfield, an apparently humorous and contemporary take on the character of Count Dracula’s long-suffering assistant. The actor Nicholas Hoult, who has displayed fine comic timing in projects such as The Favorite and The Great, is to star as Renfield, and he will be joined by the hyphenate actress-rapper-comedian Awkwafina. Yet the most exciting news is that none other than Nicolas Cage will be playing Dracula. After a decade in which he has largely eschewed mainstream Hollywood, it's a career comeback that even the undead would be delighted by.

There's a new film out about the Beatles. It's about them being in the studio doing stuff that you do in studios. It's really good. Have you heard about it? Of course you have. I am referring to the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Get Back, Peter Jackson's reanimation of the Beatle Band’s last days in the bunker. It's a bit like Downfall, but without Hitler. As a middle-aged doctor of rock 'n' roll, I am required to take the cultural temperature of what we now call Heritage Rock. This is the music that middle-aged (and rising) men like when they can't keep up with young people’s music anymore. Think Neil Young, and that pretty much covers it. And when Neil Young is not re-releasing live albums from his pomp, then think the Beatles.

My wife, who spent much of her childhood in Northern California — and whose grandparents owned orchard land and kept horses and other animals — always laughs at me during our yearly trip to the county fair. The reason is my fear of walking past the horse stalls. I’m a transplant to rural Michigan from New York City. Farm animals were an abstraction for most of my life. I pass by rows of Clydesdales, hindquarters facing me on either side in uncomfortable proximity, and imagine my own demise if one should decide to kick. My father is no horseman, but he's had a long career in manufacturing. He can make or fix most anything. (Once, in the ‘70s, he fell from a catwalk onto a floor where F-14 Tomcats were being assembled below.