Tragic actors
Jim Carrey
Every time this gifted comedic actor tries on a straight face and doesn’t get an Oscar nomination, someone cries “snub.” Look, Carrey was effective in “The Truman Show” and proved himself an expert mimic in “Man on the Moon,” but he seems as natural as polystyrene in his attempt to capture James Stewart-type charm in “The Majestic.” When Carrey’s track record comes within spitting distance of Stewart’s, we’ll talk.
— Mark Caro
Ian McKellen
The great ones — John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Alec Guinness — are all gone, and now we’re left with Ian McKellen to serve as a prime example of English stage performance. Well, he’s OK. He’s capable of reining in his hamminess to present a respectable portrayal, but there are times when his elaborate rhetoric drowns the character in a sea of elocution. And he has yet to give the kind of towering performance that can define a great actor’s career.
— Richard Christiansen
Televised traumas
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John Madden and Pat Summerall
With their relentless cliches, their silly and nonsensical tidbits about points wholly irrelevant to the game at hand, their ongoing love affair with their own trivial observations at the expense of insights about the action on the field, Madden and Summerall have become the Quipsters of the Midway. Madden, a former standout coach, and Summerall, a former star player, used to be consummate professional broadcasters. They knew their stuff and conveyed that stuff succinctly and often humorously. Then they began reading their own glowing reviews and suddenly every quirk — Madden’s affection for the tailgate parties outside the stadiums, Summerall’s sly teasing about Madden’s proclivity for hard-nosed football players — was magnified and mass-produced. Still inexplicably beloved by many, these two have become that awful thing: abject parodies of themselves.
— Julia Keller
`I Love Lucy’
The year 2001 marked the 50th anniversary of a show that I have tried many, many times to like. I’ve watched all the famous ones, the ones about the grape-stomping and the conveyor belt at the candy factory, the ones in which Lucy and Ethel get into all manner of wacky scrapes and are forced to beg forgiveness from their much-put-upon spouses, Ricky and Fred, and I still don’t get it. The show always strikes me as loud, coarse, obvious, unfunny and misogynistic. I’m not blaming Lucille Ball, any more than I could blame Imogene Coca for the ditsy roles she was forced to endure in 1950s television, but neither can I celebrate a series that turned women into shrieking, goggle-eyed clowns desperate for their husbands’ approval. As the show hit the half-century mark, cultural writers were supposed to drag out all their positive adjectives to heap atop its bobbling red head, but I just couldn’t do it. We deserved better than “I Love Lucy,” and so did Lucille Ball.
— Julia Keller
Uneasy listening
Eric Clapton
Granted, he’s a great guitarist. Granted, he’s sold tons of records. But what has Clapton done in the last 30 years to justify the hype? The driving force in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the Yardbirds, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominos, Clapton hit his creative peak in 1970 with “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” and has been coasting ever since. His ’90s comeback was built on middle-of-the-road melodrama such as “Tears in Heaven” and a defanged remake of “Layla” that belies his legend. Once an architect of blues-rock who quit the Yardbirds for making too many concessions to pop, Clapton has embraced pop in a big way in the last three decades. He regularly sells out arenas, but he’s also been selling his legacy short.
— Greg Kot
Diana Krall
A so-so pianist and barely adequate vocalist, Krall stands as a testament to the power of saturation marketing. Though performers of comparable skill are playing Ramada Inns across the country, Krall a few years ago emerged as the hottest-selling name in jazz. Her meteoric rise owed to waves of relentless promotion, her managers shrewdly covering her CD jackets with images of Krall in slinky garb and come-hither poses. The soft-core pictorials had little to do with Krall’s music and did not do much for her standing among serious jazz listeners, but they sure moved product. What a pity that legions of Krall’s fans have yet to hear what great jazz singing and pianism are all about.
— Howard Reich
Pat Metheny
Once upon a time, Metheny mattered. His fleet guitar technique and fluid style made him a dynamic force in jazz in the 1970s and ’80s, but with vast commercial success Metheny became an unintentional self-caricature. His fans stuck by him, but he rewarded them with increasingly banal, vapid music making — so many notes unfurled to so little purpose. While Metheny churned out musical pablum, a new generation of players — led by steeped-in-swing artists such as trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and pianist Marcus Roberts — rendered Metheny’s doodlings inconsequential by comparison. Yet the man keeps picking away at his instrument, blissfully unaware that the world of jazz has long since passed him by.
— Howard Reich.
What’s wrong with these pictures?
Frida Kahlo
Kahlo began to paint while recuperating from a bus accident that left her partly disabled and in constant pain. Her nearly 30 years of paintings — about 200 of them — all are focused on her agonies of body and mind. The directness with which she presents aspects of her victimhood has in the last quarter century brought her high status. However, a theatrical advertising of misery — she once had herself carried into the opening of an exhibition while in bed — is also present in the paintings, and their primitive style does not present enough aesthetic gratification to distance viewers from the artist’s solipsism. It’s a mystery how raw self-involvement took her beyond an original following of feminists and Latin Americans living in the United States.
— Alan G. Artner
Bruce Nauman
Nauman is an explorer who, by turns, has been involved with sculpture, photography, performance art and video. He is adored by artists because of a freewheeling approach to artmaking that frequently has bordered on the whimsical and inane. The quantity of his ideas has been more valuable than their quality; in that sense, he has been like a late 20th Century reincarnation of the Dadaist Man Ray. Beyond questioning the parameters of art and the role of the artist, however, Nauman’s works do not hold much interest and frequently diminish with repeated viewings. His is a case of an artist with creative ideas and strategies inspiring others without having solid, memorable work of his own.
— Alan G. Artner
Musical excess
Maria Callas
Almost 25 years after her death, Callas has become more than a great singer. She has become a cult, an image, an idol — the martyred saint of Italian opera. The Callas industry has surrounded her with a veritable Holy Grail of books (innumerable biographies picking through her troubled life in search of any new scandalous tidbits) and recordings (can “Callas Sings in the Shower” be far behind?). Callas cultists whitewash the imperfections in her vocalism while pumping up her contribution to the art of singing beyond proportion or reason. Callas’ vocal flaws — the unequal registers, the wobble above the staff, the shrillness and hardness of tone — have been absorbed into the myth, turned into virtues to be imitated by would-be successors. Callas was, without question, an important artist, an emotionally intense interpreter who changed the course of opera and raised the musical stakes in the latter half of the 20th Century. But deifying her has only cheapened her art and distorted her memory.
— John von Rhein
Arturo Toscanini
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It’s hard for us to imagine, at a time when classical music is fighting for crumbs of recognition in some quarters, the enormous influence Toscanini wielded in America during the 1930s and ’40s in the expansion of the symphonic audience and the shaping of American mass culture, thanks largely to RCA’s vast promotional outreach. Toscanini was regularly proclaimed “the world’s greatest conductor,” a meaningless judgment a worshipful press parroted long after his death in 1954. The electric intensity of Toscanini’s finest interpretations is well documented on his best recordings, but the great majority of them reveal the emperor as naked: an aged, willful maestro brutally lashing the music forward in an all-purpose, streamlined, inflexible adrenaline-rush of sound. As was said years later about one of Toscanini’s successors, Georg Solti, this isn’t music, it’s madness.
— John von Rhein.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
While it’s hard to find a music critic who has much good to say about the zillionaire composer who gave the world “Cats,” “Evita,” “Sunset Boulevard” and other blockbuster musicals, theater critics routinely circle their wagons around Lloyd Webber. But he hasn’t had a bona fide hit since “Sunset Boulevard” (even that one has yet to recoup its costs) and a honest critical reappraisal of his music is long overdue. In truth, his scores — which shamelessly crib from better composers, usually Puccini — are a triumph of mediocrity. Compared with the inventive, sophisticated wit of Stephen Sondheim’s shows, Lloyd Webber’s musicals seem like slushy, sentimental, commercial claptrap. For the West End and Broadway hitmeister, the well of inspiration appears to have run dry. Actually, it was never a very deep well to begin with.
— John von Rhein.