Month: February 2006

Memphis to the Motor City

Post author By Andria Lisle
Post date February 3, 2006

Mary Ramirez can’t wait to leave the Motor City.

“Everyone in this town is screwed. I’m ready to get the fuck out of here,” the Detroit Cobras’ guitarist says, bitching about rising gas prices, the recent announcement that Ford will lay off 30,000 workers, and the junkies, bums, and thieves who roam the neighborhoods around Wayne State University.

“And the Super Bowl — what a joke,” Ramirez says with scorn, happy that on Sunday, February 5th, when the Seattle Seahawks and the Pittsburgh Steelers clash on Ford Field, the Detroit Cobras will be in Memphis, preparing to take the stage at the Hi-Tone Café.

While they don’t play here often, the Detroit Cobras are Bluff City favorites. The punk-meets-R&B cover band parlays obscure Southern soul singles such as Dan Penn’s “Slippin’ Around,” a seldom-heard Stax side called “Weak Spot,” and Bobby Womack’s “Baby Help Me” into sneering garage-rock anthems and turns guitar-gospel tunes such as the Staple Singers’ “You Don’t Knock” into smoldering party songs, one-upping well-meaning DJs with fiery, live renditions of their favorite records. Think the Royal Pendletons led by a sharpened knife, in the person of singer Rachel Nagy, a self-described hardass who tosses off lyrics with a breathtakingly casual insolence.

According to Ramirez, she and Nagy belong to “the cult of Greg Cartwright.” It’s a perfect match: On their 1998 debut, Mink, Rat or Rabbit, the Detroit Cobras initiated a relationship with their cover of “Bad Man” (a song ex-Memphian Cartwright and then-bandmate Jack Yarber wrote while in the Compulsive Gamblers), which the Cobras rechristened “Bad Girl.” Last year, they recruited Cartwright to help record their third album, Baby. Now, the Reigning Sound frontman occasionally tours with the group, filling on second guitar. And yes, Ramirez confirms, Cartwright will appear with them in Memphis.

“Greg is phenomenal,” she says. “I’m not intimidated by him. I’m just in awe. He has a musical sensibility that’s so natural, and he’s an extremely hard worker. With the Cobras, he doesn’t just give us what we want. He gives us what we need.

“And,” she adds with a chuckle, “of anyone playing with this band, he gives me the least amount of trouble.”

On many levels, Baby, which was released in mid-January on Chicago’s Bloodshot label, has upped the ante for the Detroit Cobras, which Ramirez insists started as a party band “because we lived in a cold place with nothing to do, and we craved social activity.”

For the last few years, music-industry pundits have focused their gaze on Detroit, anxious to see which, if any, garage bands might replicate the White Stripes’ good-luck streak. With one song, “Cha Cha Twist,” already plucked from Baby to provide the soundtrack for a Coca-Cola commercial, the Detroit Cobras just might be it.

“People are accusing us of selling out, but I want to know who am I selling out to?” Ramirez asks. “It ain’t a commercial for shit I don’t like. And the song is called ‘Cha Cha Twist’ — it’s not something deep! Who cares! We’d probably do it for a case of beer and a hundred bucks each.”

Ramirez points to “Hot Dog (Watch Me Eat a),” the Detroit Cobras’ first original song, which was inspired by the Web site WatchMeEatAHotDog.com.

“We came up with this stupid song, and we were like, yes! This song isn’t deep on any level. It’s silly. Greg tried to intellectualize it with lyrics about putting hot dogs on the grill, but we said no way. I was trying to use that song to get a free box seat at Tiger Stadium, because I love baseball. Think about it: If ‘Hot Dog’ got used by the Tigers, I’d be a hero. Detroit would love me!

“Right now,” Ramirez insists, pointing to the legion of Motown tunes, Led Zeppelin riffs, and Iggy Pop songs used to hawk items on TV, “commercials are better than radio. I tap my toe when I hear this stuff on TV, which is more than I can say for what I hear on the radio these days. The Detroit Cobras were born in reaction against radio, built in reaction to the radio sucking.”

Being from Detroit, the Cobras have gotten a first-hand lesson in how to “sell out” the right way.

“I remember when Jack White first came back to Detroit after the White Stripes got big,” Ramirez says. “He’s a smart guy. He was already making a package when he had no money. And now he has the ability to take advantage of opportunities without selling himself short. Someone asks, ‘Do you want to do a commercial?’ You don’t say no. You say, ‘Well, what’s the commercial for?’ That’s what I’ve learned from watching Jack.

“Luckily,” Ramirez says, “in Detroit, you can hustle. You can sustain yourself short-term, and it’s a good breeding ground. Like Memphis, it’s so broken down that you can live pretty cheap.”

Music Record Reviews

Record Reviews

Post author By
Post date February 3, 2006

The Greatest

Cat Power

(Matador)

With a dose of Memphis soul,

an indie songwriter makes her old sound new again.

In 2005, Chan Marshall recorded The Greatest, her seventh record as Cat Power, in town at Ardent Studios. She recruited an impressive roster of local musicians that included Mabon “Teenie” Hodges and Leroy “Flick” Hodges of Al Green’s Hi Rhythm Section, among others. However, unlike other artists who’ve made local records — John Hiatt and actor/eyebrow cultivator Peter Gallagher, to name two recent examples — Marshall is no mere tourist in Memphis, nor has she made a nostalgia record. The Greatest features her typically accomplished guitar work, artfully rudimentary piano playing, and deeply questioning and compassionate songwriting. In other words, it sounds recognizably like a Cat Power record but with a much richer sound, greater scope, and flashes of sophisticated horns.

However, in this new setting, Marshall’s vocals sound more soulful and assured, which is no real surprise. On “I’ve Been Thinking,” her 2004 collaboration with Handsome Boy Modeling School, she showed a surprising new side, eschewing her usual folksy wallflower vocals for a low, smoky coo. The Greatest lives up to that track’s considerable promise, showcasing a singer still finding new ways to use her instrument. Marshall layers her backing vocals throughout the album, chanting the title on “The Greatest” like a Greek chorus and adding doo-wop filigrees to “After It All.”

This performance is matched by songwriting that flirts with autobiography through a veil of metaphor and insinuation. The title track recasts her as a pugilist, but the violence and hostility, not to mention the push-and-pull between indefatigable hopes and dashed expectations, are definitely applicable to her music career, which has been tugged along by her brittle persona and famously awkward live shows. She briefly addresses this aspect of her reputation on “Willie.” Over her ace backing band, she examines pop music’s primary subject matter — romance — and delves into what inspires her music and sanity, namely generous friends and lovers. We’ve come to expect this type of deeply personal, slyly coded song from Cat Power, but she still finds ways to make it sound new. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: A-

Look for more on Cat Power’s Memphis-based band in next week’s Flyer.

The Moon Was Blue

Bobby Bare

(Dualtone)

Bobby Bare boomerangs back after a 20-year retirement for a standards album that’s nobody’s idea of standard and crazy great. Bare scored Nashville hits from the mid-’60s through the mid-’70s but is probably best known now as father to rocker Bobby Bare Jr., who co-produced this album. Filled with songs Bare always wanted to record, The Moon Was Blue pairs known quantities (“Shine on Harvest Moon” and “Everybody’s Talkin'”) with out-of-left-field choices (Shel Silverstein’s heartbreaking “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”). Bare’s heavy baritone anchors tunes that sometimes threaten to float away on quirky instrumentation. No matter. Once this sinks into your skin, you’re likely to follow Bare anywhere he cares to roam. (“Are You Sincere,” “Everybody’s Talkin’,” “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”) — Werner Trieschmann

Grade: A-

Healthy White Baby

(Broadmoor)

Taking its name from a line from Raising Arizona, Chicago-based Healthy White Baby is Laurie Stirratt and Danny Black’s new band, their first following the break-ups of Blue Mountain and the Blacks. This debut, released on Stirratt’s Broadmoor label, is no-frills country-blues-rock that makes a virtue out of a lack of ambition or pretension. But the band shows just how durable that equation is with songs like “Look You in the Eyes” and “I Was Trying” aiming for the gut. Stirratt and Ryan Juravic form a tight rhythm section, but the band’s real vigor lies in Black’s guitar and surprisingly catchy, pop-song melodies. (“Soul,” “It’s Over,” “Home”)

— SD

Grade: B+

Healthy White Baby plays Proud Larry’s in Oxford Saturday, February 4th. Showtime is 10 p.m.; cover is $8.

Music Music Features

Looking for the Blues

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date February 3, 2006

First things first: a hearty congratulations to the winners of the 22nd Annual International Blues Challenge, which took place over the weekend in and around Beale Street. South Florida bluesman Joey Gilmore, along with his band, won first place in the band contest Saturday night. Earlier in the day, Memphis-connected singer Eden Brent, representing the Mississippi Delta Blues Society of Indianola, Mississippi, won in the solo/duo category. The Albert King Award for “most promising” guitar player went to Zack Weisinger of the third-place band Jill West & Blues Attack. San Diego’s Aunt Kizzy’z Boyz took home second prize in the band contest. The prize for best self-produced CD went to Back in Bluesville by New Jersey’s Roxy Perry.

Unfortunately, this year marked the second straight year I missed the IBC finals. Last year, paternity leave and family obligations provided the excuse. This year, a sudden sickness waylaid me, and I spent the night in bed instead. Even culled down to the finals, the IBC showcases a lot of pedestrian bands (an earlier finals inspired a taxonomy of contemporary blues bands: Blues Brothers, Kid Jonny Wayne Vaughan, Blues Hammer, Available For Your Next Corporate Function, etc.), and the wait from the final band’s set to the announcement of the winner feels endless. But all that aside, I regret missing it, because I sincerely believe that the International Blues Challenge is one of the city’s very best music events.

This year, the Memphis-based Blues Foundation drew more than 130 acts from 33 states and seven foreign countries to Beale Street, each act sponsored by a blues society affiliated with the foundation and many of the acts bolstered by the support of society members also making the trip. Those numbers swelled even more by the scores of journalists, record-label representatives, publicists, and established blues musicians in town for the weekend. Is there any better use of Beale Street as a showcase for the city?

Though I missed the finals, I didn’t miss the weekend entirely. Friday night, I judged a semi-finals round at B.B. King’s on Beale. As a generalist amid a sea of blues specialists, judging these contests always makes me a little uncomfortable. But in each of the two previous years I’ve served as a semi-finals judge, the band I’ve awarded the highest marks has gone on to win the whole contest. I could tell Friday night that my little streak would end this year. For starters, there were no clearly outstanding bands on the bill. But I also detected that I wasn’t seeing things the same way as my fellow judges, one a West Coast blues journalist, the other a Midwestern label owner.

Both were nice, smart guys who knew and cared more about contemporary blues than I do. But as blues specialists, they clearly were looking and listening differently from me. They were investigating the details, plumbing the minor variations that genre specialists tend to fixate on. “He peaked too early on that first solo,” the label owner remarked to me during one set. I didn’t notice. I was just looking to see if there was any there there. And I saw it — no, felt it — once on Friday night. The band was Ron Teamer & Smokin’ Gun, from Kansas City.

For his second song, Teamer pulled up a chair and sat down, strings of beads falling from the end of a V-shaped guitar made functional for how easily it lodged onto Teamer’s knee. A slight African-American man, he sang as slowly and deliberately as he played, the soulful grain of his voice working against the utter ease of his delivery. It was a simple soul-blues number — at first I mistook it for a cover of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” — and Teamer’s drummer drove it along with a steady, hypnotic beat that crept up my spine and shamed his flashier counterparts from other bands.

I felt his beat, felt Teamer’s song, felt something for the first and only time all night. My West Coast journalist companion went to find out if Teamer had any physical ailments that would require him to sit. My Midwest label-owner colleague allowed that “he sings with great feeling” but concluded — fairly — “there isn’t much of a band there.” I looked down at my score sheet and tried to put them in the finals. They didn’t get there and wouldn’t have won if they did. But for that one song out of the 40 or so I heard that night, the blues was most definitely alive.

Book Features Books

A Time To Kill

Post author By Leonard Gill
Post date February 3, 2006

When Tristan Egolf’s new novel, Kornwolf, opens, there’s already big trouble in Stepford County in the great state of Pennsyltucky in 1992. This is farming country, the “Amish Basin,” due west of Philth Town (think Philadelphia), and to add to rising property taxes, rapid commercial development, a brand-new Sprawl Mart, and ongoing tensions between the “Dutchies” (aka the “Plain Folk,” the Anabaptists, which include the Amish) and the “Redcoats” (aka the “English,” which means reglur Amercuns), there’s a werewolf wreaking havoc. Or so it seems based on the widespread cases of breaking and entering, criminal trespassing, destruction of property, arson, and livestock killings in the towns of Blue Ball, Lamepeter, Laycock, Intercourse, and Paradise.

There’s even a blurry photo of the beast doing the dirty work, but how to describe it? Sort of a dog seen from the back, on its hindlegs, skin sores running. A mud-thrown kangaroo with a scorched pompadour. Richard Nixon with clotted fur and mange. Or is it, in the words of Owen Brynmor — a 30-year-old reporter newly returned to the area after a string of firings from two-bit newspapers, a prodigal son suffering from monster-size nicotine withdrawal and now working for the Stepford Daily Plea — “something right out of a waste dump in Jersey” or “up from the depths of a portable toilet”?

Looks to be, then, most anything taking the form of any body, so long as it’s hideous, ravenous, murderous, and a throwback to the Thirty Years War, when the legend of the “kornwolf” first came on the scene, the scene being 17th-century Germany when the country was rocked by sectarian bloodshed, religious persecution, its lands laid waste, its heretics burned at the stake, “The Time of the Killing.”

Sort of like what’s happening in Stepford County. Sort of, and to the tune of “Angel of Death” by Slayer off their album Reign in Blood — the very tune that sends an 18-year-old boy by the name of Ephraim Bontrager, son of an abusive, alcoholic Amish minister named Benedictus (who’s also operating a puppy mill) into fits of superhuman violence. (The flip side? To calm himself, Ephraim plays “Possum,” aka George Jones, to the tune of “A Good Year for the Roses.”)

Is Ephraim suffering from Maple Syrup Urine Disease (don’t ask), a condition prevalent among the Amish of Stepford? Or is it Glutaric Aciduria One, equally common among Pennsyltucky’s “Dutch”? Or is it a mix of schizophrenia, rabies, porphyria, psychomotor epilepsy, and manic depressive psychosis with hysterical neurosis of the dissociative type? Maybe it’s simply lycanthropy.

Grizelda Hostler knows. She’s Ephraim’s creepy aunt, Benedictus’ sister … Benedictus who married Maria Speicher, who died giving birth to Ephraim but whose brother, Jacob, went to “the Nam” and came back Jack Stumpf, the owner of a boxing gym and training ground for a junior welterweight champ named Roddy Lowe. Owen Brynmor gets to serve in Lowe’s corner (when he’s not investigating the history of werewolves) during a prize fight in Philth Town, but what Lowe has to do with this story, dunno, because the real fight occupies the gruesome, closing 70 pages, during which all hell breaks loose: Teenagers go nuts, a policeman gets a candle up his rectum, Grizelda loses her head, and the Blue Ball Devil reigns in blood. And yet, as the last line of Kornwolf reads, “this story never ends … .”

But it does. It’s Tristan Egolf’s third and final novel. At the age of 33, on May 7, 2005, he shot himself, leaving a fiancée, a daughter, and us with a book that starts satirically wicked good, gets midway confusingly, needlessly sidetracked, and ends up, sad to say, haywire.

Art Art Feature

In a Snap

Post author By Andria Lisle
Post date February 3, 2006

For two decades, beginning in the late 1920s, photographer Margaret Bourke-White went where no other woman — and few men — dared to go. She perched atop a construction crane over ladles of white-hot metal, balanced on scaffolding 1,000 feet above the Manhattan sidewalk, and shimmied through narrow mine shafts hundreds of feet underground.

While on assignment, earning an average of $100 per day, she risked life and limb, traveling by horseback through the Caucasus Mountains, surviving a torpedo run, accompanying an Air Force crew on a bombing raid, and photographing Holocaust survivors during the emancipation of Buchenwald. Always an intrepid journalist, she interviewed Gandhi mere hours before his assassination, photographed the devastation of postwar Germany, and chronicled the fate of sharecroppers here in the American South.

One of few females in an elite, male-dominated world, her work was published by leading magazines of the day, such as Fortune, PM, and Life, drawing comparisons to gifted photojournalist Walker Evans. Along with Charles Sheeler and Lewis Hine, she received commissions from fast-growing corporations such as Eastern Airlines, Otis Steel Mill, the Chrysler Corporation, and Lincoln Electric Company. Like those of Paul Strand and Alfred Steiglitz, her photographs — admired as much for their artistic qualities as for their journalistic integrity — hung in the Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Rockefeller Center’s vast rotunda.

A selection of Bourke-White’s industrial photographs, curated by Stephen Bennett Phillips of The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., is currently on display at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens.

Some 70 years later, these iconic images still bristle with vitality and movement:

Twin crescents of perforated metal flicker in a fireworks bath, an interactive sculpture Bourke-White found at an International Harvester plant. A Chaplinesque scene at Chrysler shows a trinity of colossal gears, dwarfing a worker toiling away below. An overhead shot of New York’s garment district resembles a set of pushpins, assembled willy-nilly on a bulletin board; the effect is startling, dizzying, and glorious. The curlicue gates intersecting the camera’s view of Cleveland’s Terminal Tower juxtaposes fanciful swirls with the no-nonsense architecture that rises, unimpeded, to pierce the sky. A close-up of women’s shoes becomes abstract art, a contrast of shadow and light.

“She was truly fearless, and she had an incredible sense of design,” Phillips says of Bourke-White. “I think people will be amazed that she took photos like these and surprised by the beauty of these images.”

Phillips credits a single photo, a circa-1935 image titled Steps, Washington, D.C., for piquing his interest in Bourke-White’s early, design-oriented work. The 11-by-13-inch photograph, donated to The Phillips Collection in 1996, is an astonishing study in black and white. Shot from the lower right side of a wide, stone staircase, which undulates like a gray ribbon across the paper, the image is a geometric tour de force — even including a black-suited man who hurries downward near the top of the frame.

“As a curator here, I’m responsible for understanding the collection,” Phillips says, “so it became my quest to understand Bourke-White’s concepts.” Captivated by Steps, he traveled to Syracuse University to peruse the photographer’s archives, which include her cameras, diaries, business and personal correspondence, and thousands of images. After an initial survey, he compiled 150 early photographs that highlighted her fascination with industrial design. In 2003, The Phillips Collection displayed the selected works and published a dazzling 200-page catalog, augmented with essays, historical transcripts, and extensive notes.

“People who have seen these photos love the fact that they illustrate American history,” Phillips notes. “Most people who know of Bourke-White think of her Dust Bowl-period photos or picture her in a flying suit right after the concentration camps were liberated. From the response we’ve gotten, people are very excited to see a different side of Bourke-White.”

Food & Wine Food & Drink

New Kid on the Block

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date February 3, 2006

Twenty-six-year-old Reinaldo Alfonso, who recently replaced the celebrated chef Jose Gutierrez at The Peabody’s grand eatery Chez Philippe, grew up in a busy Cuban kitchen in Miami. It was a flavorful world that revolved around good food and frequent family get-togethers. Inspired by the women in his life, his grandmother and mother, and “the whole Latin community,” he became fascinated with kitchen life and the special relationships that form over cutting boards and boiling pots. Every major event (and most of the minor ones) in the young chef’s life revolved around food.

“The family got together all the time, and we would cook and eat all day,” he says, allowing that Sunday feasts were particularly memorable.

“We always had rice and beans, tostones [fried plantains], vacca frita, which is different kinds of shredded beef, or maybe a chicken fricassee,” Alfonso says. “But no matter what we had, the table was never set until there was a good bottle of wine and lots of Cuban bread on the table. The wine and the bread, that was my dad’s thing. There had to be lots of bread for him to soak up all of the juices with.”

When he was 8 years old, the budding cook sat down beside his grandmother who was turning stale bread into pudding. He asked if he could help.

“She did the cutting. I did all the mixing and all the other messy work that kids love,” Alfonso says of his first kitchen duties. At 14, he took a job in a Spanish restaurant in Miami, washing dishes, mopping floors, peeling potatoes, and taking careful note of how the food was prepared.

“I started early, and I’m glad that I did,” Alfonso says, holding up his hands as if to say “look where it got me.”

The journey from his grandmother’s kitchen to the revered galley of Chez Philippe wasn’t terribly long. Alfonso’s commitment to fine dining and his desire to learn took him from Florida to New York and from the tutelage of one great chef to another. Although you can still hear Havana in his voice, Alfonso’s food took on a decidedly French accent.

“My food is 95 percent French, and my presentations are French,” he says. “But I use a lot of Asian ingredients — Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and even Indian — to heighten the flavor. I try to blend a little bit of everything I’ve learned, but I focus on simplicity and try to highlight ingredients for what they are. People are starting to realize that you don’t need to mess with food too much. They are coming back to the classics because the classic way of preparing food has been lost in the last few years.”

Alfonso likes simple pleasures. He likes to buy a pack of mini-Oreos, pour them in a bowl of milk, and eat them like cereal. He loves to fish and to scuba dive. There was even a time when his love for the water led him to consider a career as a marine biologist.

“I love fish. I love seafood. And I’m really happy about flying in the best, freshest seafood from all over the world,” Alfonso says. “Everything has to be extremely fresh and extremely well-done. I’m a stickler for details.”

At present he’s most excited about the yellowtail tuna — a buttery, fat-laden fish he’s shipping fresh daily from Japan. But that’s only the beginning.

“I will be using sea urchin soon,” Alfonso says. “I’m doing things slowly. I can’t bring out certain ingredients that might scare people off right away.”

With sweet and spicy appetizers like the “Lobster Cigar” (a spring roll stuffed with Maine lobster and daikon radish with Thai chili sauce) and entrées like roasted wild striped bass with peekytoe crab and leek ragout, Chez Philippe’s new menu already smells like a fresh ocean breeze. Steaks, ribs, and a miso-brazed lamb shank with cauliflower couscous and haricot verts (green beans) ensure that meat lovers won’t be disappointed either.

Chez Philippe’s desserts include ginger, pistachio, and star anise crème brûlée, an apple tart, and a banana spring roll with a heart of peanut and chocolate, as well as a variety of homemade ice creams.

“Over the past four years I’ve turned down several positions because I didn’t feel like I was ready for them,” says the young chef. “But this time it was different. This time there were more people motivating me to do this. There’s a little bit of weight on my shoulders, but I’m confident in what I do.”

Chez Philippe in The Peabody (529-4188)

davis@memphisflyer.com

Food & Wine Food & Drink

Full of Beans

Post author By Simone Wilson
Post date February 3, 2006

If restaurant openings were a disease, the number of new Mexican restaurants downtown and Midtown might be considered an epidemic.

The Complex is chiefly known as a bar and live-music venue, featuring the city’s hippest alternative acts. But it’s also the site of El Pollo Grille and Mexican Cantina. Bert Jamboa opened the Complex three and a half years ago and since then has worked on adding a kitchen. Although he says that the restaurant is still a work-in-progress, it’s open and serving standard Mexican fare — burritos, tacos, enchiladas, and the like — as well as all-American and all-Mexican breakfasts, which means you can get your short stack or L.A.-style huevos rancheros. The restaurant is open daily from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.

El Pollo Grille and Mexican Cantina, 704 Madison (692-9211)

Another hidden treasure can be found inside the Comfort Inn on Front Street. Sgt. Jalapeno’s Tortilla Factory Co. is a Tex-Mex family affair. Melissa and Victor Ortiz opened the restaurant in mid-December, temporarily abandoning Ortiz Tortilla Company, their Southaven restaurant.

“We are still making our own tortillas. We only closed the restaurant in Southaven temporarily,” says Victor.

It’s not just homemade tortillas at Sgt. Jalapeno’s. It’s homemade everything. The Ortizes moved here from Brownsville, Texas, where they operated Zelda’s Bakery, which specialized in Mexican pastries. When they came to the Memphis area in 1999, they brought along the flavors of South Texas and their concept of “food fast fare.”

Food fast fare? It’s hard to explain but mouth-watering nonetheless. Try Sgt. Jalapeno’s smothered burrito, a 12-inch flour tortilla filled with Spanish rice, lettuce, tomatoes, your choice of meat, smothered with red sauce and topped with olives. It’s yours for $7.95.

The restaurant is open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Sgt. Jalapeno’s Tortilla Factory Co., 100 N. Front St. (526-0583)

Transplanting a little patch of their Mexican hometown of Guadalajara to Memphis is what Andreas Flores Jr. and his dad had in mind when they opened Quinto Patio on Beale Street across from the New Daisy Theatre. The restaurant serves traditional Mexican food for lunch and dinner, as well as Italian standards — a holdover from the restaurant’s former tenant, New York Pizza. A full bar will be available once the liquor license is in place, and a patio for outdoor seating is in the works as well.

The restaurant is open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 3 a.m. Friday and Saturday.

Quinto Patio, 345 Beale St. (523-7288)

Rio Loco’s opened last week in the old Buckley’s space about a block west of The Peabody. You can try their jumbo lime margarita for $6 during happy hour from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m. Or you can stop by for one of the daily lunch specials and get a demi-margarita, the jumbo lime’s little brother, which costs only $3.

Rio Loco’s is open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Rio Loco’s, 117 Union (523-2142)

Also opening: Las Margaritas Mexican Bar and Grille next week inside America’s Best Inns & Suites at 1837 Union; Garcia Wells Southwestern Grill in Overton Square this month; Happy Mexican Restaurante & Cantina next month at 385 S. Second St.; and Qdoba Mexican Grill at Poplar and Holmes in April.

Film Features Film/TV

Double Fault

Post author By Ben Popper
Post date February 3, 2006

Woody Allen has always struggled with a desire to write high drama. I say struggled because as an artist he is inarguably more successful, not to mention universally recognized, as a comedian. His own life has taken its tragic turns, and Allen has been successful with dramatic films such as Crimes & Misdemeanors, a work that bears no little resemblance to his newest, Match Point. In the former film, however, Allen was present as the comic relief, while in his new work the tone hews closer to Crime & Punishment. The strain of a full-on tragedy results in a film that is ambitious and enjoyable, if ultimately flawed.

The protagonist of Match Point is Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a former tennis pro who has come to London to try and make his way. He takes a job as a tennis instructor and, between backhands, befriends one of his pupils, a wealthy society lad named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode). Chris is soon introduced to the whole Hewett clan, begins dating Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and seems to be on his way to ingratiating himself into the good life. The catch: Tom’s bombshell fiancée, a struggling American actress named Nola played by successful American actress Scarlett Johansson.

I have to stop here and say a word about the acting in this film. I don’t know if Allen was trying out some kind of self-reflexive gag here, casting Johansson as a sexy American who can’t act to save her life, but despite my best efforts to focus on her attributes, her performance is downright miserable. Rhys-Meyers is not much better, while all the Brits and supporting characters do an outstanding job. (Note to Allen: Please, please get a better casting director!)

Nola and Tom break up, Chris and Chloe get married, and then, in a spot of bad luck, Chris and Nola meet again, rekindling his irrepressible lust for her. The film is best here, playing back and forth across the affair and marriage, intertwining British society humor with the domestic sphere that Allen has always captured so well.

The problem is that Allen goes too far. If he wants to write a tragedy without paying lip service to his comic past, fine with me. Here, though, that desire overrides Allen’s attention as a director. Chris is supposed to be a charming character, but Allen only shows him as a moody schemer. Many of the conversations between Chris and Nola sound less like dialogue than recitations of character motivations, the sort of from-the-heart claptrap that Allen should never let himself write.

Despite its flaws, I did enjoy Match Point. The tension builds palpably until you find yourself squirming for a way out. The film ends with a bit of finesse, and Allen’s philosophical musing on the role that luck plays in life doesn’t feel heavy-handed. With a better cast and sprinkle of levity, this could have been a brillant film. As it stands, I would say Allen has hit this one just out of bounds.

Match Point

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