Month: March 2007

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Better With Age

CREDIT: Gary Miller

Complaining about Austin’s South By Southwest Music Festival almost seems to be a prerequisite for going there.

Standing outside the gloriously grungy dive bar Beerland Friday night, waiting to see his old Oblivians bandmate Jack Yarber play, ex-Memphian Greg Cartwright, of the Reigning Sound, let loose a hard-to-refute litany: “The clubs, the cabs, the hotels, the airport. Everybody’s getting rich except the musicians.”

Cartwright was in town to support Mary Weiss, the former teen-queen lead singer of the ’60s girl-group the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack”) whose recent comeback album (Dangerous Game) Cartwright produced, wrote most of the songs for, and, alongside his Reigning Sound bandmates, played the music on. But Cartwright made clear he was no great fan of the festival.

What do bands get, if not paid? A shot at stardom, allegedly. A chance to play in front of an audience heavy with industry tastemakers from around the world.

Earlier Friday night, on stage at Buffalo Billiards, Eef Barzelay, of the now-Nashville-based Clem Snide, mocked this function of the festival with acid sarcasm: “Validate me, industry,” Barzelay said, gazing out into the crowd. “Give me the keys to your kingdom, dream weavers.”

These are more than valid perspectives, and the crushing crowds, both lined up at clubs and creating perpetual gridlock in the streets of downtown Austin, had me thinking this third trip to SXSW would probably be my last.

Gary Miller

From left: Isaac Hayes, William Bell, and Eddie Floyd

But then, Saturday afternoon, I somehow found myself standing 15 feet from the stage as hip-hop legend Rakim led a killer 10-piece live band through a riveting hour-and-a-half-long set. Stalking the stage like a hungry shark, Rakim looked and sounded like it was still 1987. Just one man, one mic, and the most dizzyingly precise flow in rap history. Best live hip-hop show I’ve ever seen. Just when I thought I was through with SXSW, it pulls me back in.

The truth is, with 1,500 or so musical acts playing multiple gigs nearly around the clock for four days, there are as many different festivals as there are participants. And though SXSW is ostensibly geared toward breaking new, emerging bands, for this participant and seemingly for many others, the highlights this year came from artists long past their cultural heyday, with Rakim possibly topped by a band of Memphis soul brothers celebrating a 50th anniversary.

Last year, the big Memphis story at SXSW was the showcase debut of local punk/garage-rock label Goner Records. Goner, under the direction of co-founder Eric Friedl, was on the scene again this year, co-sponsoring a Thursday night showcase along with smaller Memphis imprint Shattered Records. But the big Memphis story was also perhaps the story of the festival itself: a concurrent Thursday night showcase celebrating the 50th anniversary of Stax Records.

An artist’s rendering of Isaac Hayes — on hand to “host” the showcase — adorned the cover of The Austin Chronicle‘s Friday daily section. In their showcase review the next day, the Chronicle wrote, “Austin during SXSW 07 may be known for its cutting-edge acts, but on this night, Fifth Street might as well have been McLemore Avenue in 1963 Memphis.”

Gary Miller

Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn and Steve Cropper

The Stax action in Austin got started earlier Thursday, where an afternoon interview session with Stax artists devolved into a free-for-all of fandom and genuflection, a mostly baby-boomer group of reporters and critics armed with albums, CD jackets, and other appropriate canvases for their musical heroes to autograph.

Of course, if anyone in Austin deserved to be worshiped and salivated over, it was these Memphis legends — Hayes, the remaining members of Booker T. & the MGs, Eddie Floyd, and William Bell. And they proved it later that night in a mostly excellent, occasionally thrilling revue-style showcase in celebration at blues warhorse Antone’s.

I showed up at Antone’s more than half an hour before the scheduled 7:30 start time, and the line to get in was already snaking around the block and growing fast. The number of people in line seemed to be about four times club capacity. In three trips to SXSW, I haven’t seen anything quite like it. In fact, I barely got in.

Inside, the Stax crew proved worthy of such attention. Isaac Hayes strode across the stage clad in a red dashiki and sunglasses to offer an introduction: “Tonight is about some very special music. It’s about 50 years of soul music. We’ve come together to celebrate Stax. Can you dig it?”

Chris Herrington

The Reigning Sound and Mary Weiss

And, with that, Booker T. & the MGs took flight, launching into “Melting Pot.” Booker T. Jones set the foundation on organ, childhood friends Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn flanked each other on guitar and bass, and modern-era addition Steve Potts kept the beat. There were moments when the quartet lapsed into playing like a very good contemporary blues bar band instead of playing like BOOKER T. & THE MGS, but when Cropper launched the opening riff of “Hip Hug-Her,” you could feel the room levitate, and from then on it was flawless: Cropper lashing out with precision riffs, Dunn crouched down, pushing the music along, Jones leading the band from behind his Hammond, mostly stone-faced but flashing a big toothy grin when “Green Onions” got the whole room dancing. Standing up close, it was hugely entertaining to see all the eye contact and subtle nods that help orchestrate a sound among musicians who have been playing together for 45 years.

After a 40-minute set, the band was joined by original Stax star William Bell, who rivaled Rakim as the most impressive individual performer I saw all week. With a gaggle of Memphis VIPs — including Soulsville matriarch Deanie Parker, Big Star’s Jody Stephens, and Bo-Keys bandleader Scott Bomar — grooving away in the balcony, Bell ripped through a few of his biggest hits. Doing “Never Like This Before,” he sounded like his prime years never ended. But an impassioned reading of his trademark “You Don’t Miss Your Water” was the night’s highlight, Cropper delicately lacing guitar riffs into the title refrain and Jones’ organ lines circling the verses like an ice skater’s figure eights. At the end, even the guy running the soundboard stood up and applauded.

“I don’t get to play with him near enough,” Cropper said, as Bell exited stage left. “He just made my day.”

Bell was followed by Eddie Floyd, who pounded out his classic “Knock On Wood,” among other hits (including Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man”), and Bell and Hayes rejoined the stage for a group reading of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.”

Chris Herrington

Alicja Trout

After braving the long line for the Stax showcase, I headed to the opposite end of club row and was greeted with another reminder of the popularity of Memphis music as a smaller but more frenetic crowd gathered outside the bar Red 7 hoping to get into a Norton Records showcase. The New York-based rock-and-roll label had Memphis’ Sam the Sham (of “Wooly Bully” fame) on the bill, but the real attraction was ex-Memphian Cartwright and his Memphis-born Reigning Sound, who played a typically dazzling solo set and then stayed onstage as the backing band for Weiss.

Cartwright and crew ripped through songs from all three Reigning Sound studio albums and reached back to the Oblivians for Cartwright’s take on the gospel standard “Live the Life.” Though Weiss was the ostensible headliner, outside, waiting to get in (another close call), every person who walked up was asking the same question: “Is this the line for the Reigning Sound?”

It had been a long haul for the band to get to Austin. After playing live on Late Night With Conan O’Brien Tuesday night — Weiss sang perhaps Cartwright’s greatest songwriting achievement, “Stop and Think It Over,” which Cartwright released on the last album from his band the Compulsive Gamblers and which Weiss covers on Dangerous Game — the band had driven to Austin in two days.

After closing their own set, the Reigning Sound took a short break and then came back out to back Weiss who, according to The Austin Chronicle the next day, was playing only her second live show in more than 40 years. The rust was apparent. Weiss used an easel with a folder of laminated song lyrics during the set and was a little rattled by a particularly bright stage light. But her nervousness only enhanced her charm, working her way through a set of songs from Dangerous Game with an easy smile and still-girlish grace.

If Stax, Weiss, and Rakim made my SXSW something of a geezer fest, I apparently wasn’t alone. Veteran artists such as Pete Townshend, a reformed Stooges, a reformed Meat Puppets, Robyn Hitchcock (with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck), and the Buzzcocks (I heard them rattling off “I Don’t Mind” through the chain-link fence of a day party en route to meet up with my wife and immediately regretted not being able to see them play) seemed to be the talk of the festival.

Which doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of buzzed-about or buzz-worthy younger bands on display. Locally, Goner/Shattered featured Memphians the Boston Chinks and Jay Reatard, while Memphis acts River City Tanlines, Tearjerkers, Harlan T. Bobo, and Viva L’American Death Ray Music had official showcases Friday and Saturday night. On Sunday, local blogger Rachel Hurley curated an unofficial day party for Memphis indie-rock bands.

After leaving Austin last March as the most impressive Memphis act in town, River City Tanlines made a repeat bid at their showcase at Beerland late Friday night. Frontwoman par excellence Alicja Trout was in particularly ferocious form, hair flailing as she staggered through her fierce guitar solos as if they were windstorms threatening to knock her over.

But as splendid a presence as Trout was, comparing the Tanlines Friday night to other loud-fast bands at the festival — including the Reigning Sound — revealed that the band’s true weapon is their rhythm section of bassist Terrence “T-Money” Bishop and drummer John “Bubba” Bonds. Bishop and Bonds kept the Tanlines from descending into pure blaring noise whenever the band dove into hyperspeed. But the duo’s real value came through when the band slowed down a little, especially in the moments when Bishop’s loping, locomotive bass lines acted as the lead instrument. That the Reigning Sound is still the better band is only because Cartwright is a songcraft savant. But I didn’t see a rock band in Austin that motorvates quite like the Tanlines.

Among non-locals, the most buzzed-about new acts this year tended to be British (Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse, the Pipettes, the Young Knives), Scandinavian (Peter, Bjorn, and John) or from New York (Oakley Hall, Earl Greyhound). I sought out Allen and Winehouse, whose current albums (Alright, Still … and Back to Black, respectively) I really like, and I came away impressed at how well each performer holds up live.

Fronting a guitar-free six-piece band (drums, bass, keyboards, trombone, trumpet, sax) that ably fleshed out the hip-hop, reggae, and, most impressively, New Orleans R&B accents on her debut album, Allen displayed the musical smarts and force of personality that make Alright, Still … (released in the U.S. in January) an early album-of-the-year candidate.

Her seven-song set mined Alright, Still … for sardonic British hit singles “LDN” and “Smile” and knockout album tracks such as “Knock ‘Em Out” and “Friday Night.” With her polished, melodic pop songs, smart but conversational lyrics, and Everygirl good looks, Allen would seem to have more American crossover appeal than Brit sensations past. Wednesday proved that she can transform her glorious studio pop into an utterly charming live show.

Like Allen, Winehouse is getting tons of good press for an album that deserves it. Back to Black, released in the U.S. this month, is a classic soul/jazz approximation that hits the mark in every way — vocally, conceptually, and, most impressive, musically.

But, as with Allen, I wasn’t sure if this studio pop could really translate live. Which is why I was happy to catch Winehouse at a day party Friday without her full backing band. Armed with only an acoustic-guitar-wielding sidekick, Winehouse — a frankly scary-looking little thing whose current single opens with the kicker “They tried to make me go to rehab/I said, NO, NO, NO” — stepped to the microphone without Back to the Black‘s genius production to protect her and put those songs across naked, nothing but words, voice, and a bare melody. I left a believer.

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The Festival’s New Groove

In 2006, the Memphis Film Forum opened its seventh edition of the Memphis International Film Festival with a special sneak preview of New Orleans Music in Exile, Robert Mugge’s downbeat documentary about Crescent City musicians coping with the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. As the closing credits rolled at the Paradiso theater and the attending filmmaker received his due ovation, Cowboy Mouth, a hard-touring New Orleans band prominently featured in Mugge’s film, launched into “Jenny Says” and electrified a near-capacity crowd at Newby’s, miles away on the Highland strip.

The timing of these two potentially synergistic events was purely coincidental. There was no official cross-promotion, no shuttle service trafficking festival attendees between the two venues. Was the Memphis International Film Festival failing to capitalize on this happy accident and its host city’s reputation as the primal nexus of modern American music? Could be.

“Our identity is about to change,” says Memphis Film Forum chairman Lisa Bobal. “The nature of living in a musical city like Memphis means we always get this great selection of music-oriented films. So in the future we’ll be moving more toward becoming a film and music festival.”

With its International Masters series and a selection of movies and music videos from around the globe, MIFF’s 2007 festival has plenty to offer fans of world cinema. But for all the foreign affairs, this year’s 58-film lineup has an unmistakably Southern accent. Oh Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?, which opens the festival, is an effective concert film showcasing John Maxwell, an actor who has spent the last 26 years touring the world in a lyrical one-man show about Mississippi modernist William Faulkner.

Four very different documentaries — Living the Blues, Iron City Blues, Hard Times, and The Clarksdale Jook Joint Jam — explore and exploit different facets of the music that made Beale Street famous. The apocalyptic short film Quincy & Althea is a black comedy set in post-Katrina New Orleans with landscapes as futuristic and frightening as they are familiar.

“All of this happened on its own,” Bobal says.

Over the next five years, the Memphis Film Forum and its new concert-promoting sponsor, TCB Entertainment, will actively transform MIFF into an event that celebrates cinema all day and music all night.

The epiphany to change directions struck at the International Film Festival Summit, when Bobal was talking to Film Threat editor and author of The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide, Chris Gore, who was shocked to discover that a festival in Memphis didn’t have a strong musical component. When he asked why she didn’t capitalize on the city’s musical reputation, Bobal only had one answer.

“We’re all volunteers,” she says. “We just haven’t had the manpower … . But now with TCB as our sponsor, I’m confident we can step up the entertainment.”

There’s no ongoing musical component attached to this year’s festival, although Craig Schuster, a songwriter and pianist with a flare for Detroit soul and Southern rock, will play the festival’s Rat Pack-themed awards party at the Warehouse, 36 G.E. Patterson, on Saturday, March 24th. Admission to the party is $10 at the door, though festival-pass holders get in free.

Blues Notes

Films about hard times, disaster, destruction,disruption, and lawn-mower racing.

It’s 1958, and a 22 year-old, trench-coat-clad Dan Rather reports from the scene of an unspeakable terrorist attack on the American homeland: “Right now I’m standing in front of Clinton High School in Clinton, Tennessee,” he says. “Last night, it was rocked by a bomb blast. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the state fire marshal are investigating.”

The Clinton 12, Keith Henry McDaniel’s exhaustive, interview-driven documentary about the first integrated public high school in the South after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, is a detailed portrait of dark and troubled times. James Earl Jones narrates the story of a black and white community that stood shoulder to shoulder — prejudices intact — to fight for justice against a wave of violent racial hatred. Its score is all improvisational jazz, but the interviews ring with the unmistakable sounds of white Southern gospel and gutbucket blues.

It’s just one of several films selected to appear at this year’s MIFF that deals with hardships and cultural unrest and that causes voices to be raised in song. Doug Lenox’s short film Quincy & Althea uses an uneventful domestic squabble between the title characters as a device to put New Orleans’ shattered, hopeless landscape on the big screen. Though set in New York, Cadillac Man tells the true blue story of a homeless man who finds success as a writer but is incapable of returning to a more conventional lifestyle.

Four other documentary films take a close look at the occasionally joyous, often sorrowful music born of hardship. Collectively, these films exult and exploit the song of the South and present a clear, sometimes disquieting picture of the 12-bar form we call the blues.

Living the Blues

Everybody knows the romanticized image of the bluesman. He’s a hard-drinking, fast-loving rapscallion with a guitar tuned by Satan and a gift for signing bad recording contracts. The familiar image doesn’t seem quite so romantic in Tim Bryant’s documentary, Living the Blues, an intimate portrait of nine elderly and often obscure blues artists, including Precious Bryant, Neal Pattman, and Etta Baker.

Bryant’s filmmaking style is visually static. The stories and music, however, are vibrant, colorful, and occasionally explosive. Pattman, a salty shouter and harmonica virtuoso, talks about losing his arm and the constant need to “come up fighting.” Rufus McKenzie angrily declares that he’s never been out of slavery and sadly recalls a time when a seemingly kind white couple served him a sandwich in their dog’s bowl. This film is the real deal, filled with loss, fury, joy, and, of course, music.

Iron City Blues

Biker and blues artist Big Mike Griffin wasn’t afraid to visit Iron City, Tennessee, a secluded town on the Alabama border that hasn’t had a police officer on the town payroll since the last one was run off in 1989.

“I’m 6′-10″ and had my trusty 40-cal. Glock with me,” he says. “So I felt really secure.”

Scott Jackson’s Iron City Blues is a frustrating but ultimately fascinating snapshot of a scary and occasionally bizarre world of meth, moonshine, kids racing lawn mowers — and bodies floating in the river. It’s also a less-than-satisfying document of how Big Mike turns his experiences in Iron City into a blues song.

“As far as I know, nobody’s ever made a documentary about how a blues song is made,” Jackson explains. “And I thought that would be an interesting way to approach the film.” Unfortunately, Big Mike and his “A-Team” of musicians aren’t nearly as interesting as Iron City’s last police officer, a mayor who can’t help “looking the other way,” or Monkey Tidwell, a 73-year-old gnome who loves his whiskey and knows where all the bodies are buried.

At its best, Iron City Blues captures a quirky, undeniably intimidating community of gun-toting rebels who would rather die free than live by somebody else’s rules. And then there’s Big Mike’s blues, which isn’t bad, but it can’t hold a candle to cigar-chomping children who delight in shooting blue lights off cop cars.

Hard Times

Scene from The Clinton 12

Filmmaker Damien Blaylock has martial artist turned musician Steven Seagal to thank for his recent exposure to the blues — and for Hard Times, a documentary portrait of St. Louis’ best-dressed harmonica player, Big George Brock.

“I was in Memphis working on a project for [Seagal]. He was bringing in all these guest artists, and that’s where I met Big George,” Blaylock says. It’s also where Blaylock and Roger Stolle, the blues and folk-art enthusiast behind Cat Head productions in Clarksdale, Mississippi, came up with the idea for creating a short promotional film about Brock’s life and career as a St. Louis tavern owner who’s played with artists like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed.

“We realized pretty quickly that we were going to have to do something bigger than a short,” Blaylock says.

Hard Times follows Brock from St. Louis to the Mississippi cotton fields where he was born and raised. Even if all the close-up shots of Brock’s giant, ring-laden hands picking cotton are ultimately exploitive, any one of them would make a great album cover.

“I guess [my film] could be seen as propaganda,” Blaylock says, explaining why he only interviewed Brock and nobody else. “My goal was to make it a detailed portrait of him and his world.”

The Clarksdale jook joint jam

While driving through Mississippi working as consultant for the Robert Johnson estate, musician and producer Gary Vincent had an epiphany. “All the juke joints are disappearing,” he says. “There are lots of reasons: hip-hop, drugs … .” Vincent realized that somebody needed to preserve the authentic spirit of the Mississippi roadhouse on film.

Hard Times

Initially, Vincent planned to make live recordings of the regional musicians who play Ground Zero Blues Club, actor Morgan Freeman’s fabulously funky blues club. “But I realized that if we produce a lot of unknowns, we won’t sell a lot of product,” Vincent says. That’s when he came up with the idea of The Clarksdale Jook Joint Jam, a series of concerts shot at Ground Zero and featuring a slate of established recording artists playing alongside the bluesmen who influenced them.

“I don’t buy into the theory that real blues has to sound ratty,” Vincent says. “But you can make it too slick. Fortunately, you can’t make people like George Thorogood or Delaney Bramlett sound too slick.”

The first installment of The Clarksdale Jook Joint Jam preserves the authentic spirit of Delta juke joints by paring Delaware destroyer George Thorogood, whose inescapable hit “Bad to the Bone” has been featured in countless films and TV commercials, with Muddy Waters’ and Howlin’ Wolf’s saxman Eddie Shaw. The concert doc opens with Thorogood telling a whopper about how he gave Shaw and the Wolf their start in show business. Cute.

Being William Faulkner

Even director Jimbo Barnett isn’t quite sure what to make of his film Oh Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?

“It’s always a tough sell putting a stage play on film,” Barnett says, “and I guess that’s why we tried so hard to disguise it as much like a movie as we could.”

Barnett has little need to worry, though his “disguise” — glamour shots of Maxwell walking through Oxford, Mississippi — is about as effective as putting a pair of sunglasses on an elephant.

Oh Mr. Faulkner is unmistakably a cinematic document of a live event, in the spirit of Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia. As Maxwell (playing Faulkner) holds forth on such topics as race, politics, and the death of his brother, the film captures the dark humor and cantankerous nature of one of literature’s most difficult personalities. If anything, the artificial construct is refreshing. The famously pithy author springs vividly from the screen, holding viewers in his thrall from the first grumpy salutation.

“That’s all because of John Maxwell,” Barnett says. “He’s a true Mississippi treasure.”

Memphis Flyer: It can’t be easy living in such close quarters with William Faulkner for 27 years.

John Maxwell: Well, I only know a very small part of who Faulkner was, and I don’t claim to do a definitive portrait. When I walk out on stage, I hope Faulkner is there with me. But he’s not around if I’m not on stage. Right now, I’m living in a kind of dream bubble. I never thought that I could make a living as an actor in Mississippi. But I have.

What was the inspiration for creating the piece?

I came up with the idea for doing a one-man show about Faulkner when I was teaching community college in Jackson, Mississippi. His letters had just come out, and when I read them, I told my wife Sandy, “I don’t know if I can do this, but I think there’s material here for a play.”

What was the attraction?

I guess it’s like reading any of the classics. I was attracted to the author’s internal rhythms. It goes beyond the cerebral and touches the soul. I know some people get tangled up in Faulkner’s convoluted sentence structures, but I grew up on a cotton farm in Pickens, Mississippi, and I know these rhythms. When I read these books, I have an emotional response — deep, archetypal kinds of feelings.

Does the passage of time change the play — either how you perform it or how audiences respond?

Well, my age affects it, certainly. I was 35 when I started doing it, and I’m 62 now. I used to have to age up, now I try to age down. And there are parts I play much differently than I did when I started. At some point, I realized I just needed to trust the material, settle in, and ride it to wherever it took me.

You’ve performed all over the world. Is any one audience better than the other?

I don’t like to generalize large groups of people, but Southern audiences are usually the best. They understand storytellers. They see the twinkle in Faulkner’s eye, and they get it. I feel no moral responsibility to tell the truth, but as a storyteller, I do have an ethical responsibility to entertain.

Memphis International Film Festival Schedule

Thursday, March 22, 2007

7:30 p.m. A Very Small Trilogy of Loneliness 7 min.

Short

Oh Mr. Faulkner, Do you Write? 83 min. Feature

Friday, March 23, 2007

2:30 p.m. International Masters – The Flower of Evil

– Claude Chabrol 104 min. Feature

2:30 p.m. Hello Again Everybody/Messenger

80 min. Documentary

4:30 p.m. The Silent/Beautiful Dreamer

116 min. Short/Feature

4:30 p.m. Soul of Justice/Building Bridges

75 min. Documentary

7:30 p.m. The Clarksdale Jook Joint Jam/Iron City Blues

97 min. Documentary

10 p.m. International Masters – All About My

Mother – Pedro Almodóvar 101 min. Feature

Midnight Cutting Edge Shorts: A.W.O.L., Broken,

Deface, The Grass Grows, A Perfect Day,

The Projectionist 95 min. Shorts

Midnight Music Videos: Gone,

The Squares-I’m Sorry You’re Perfect, Lost, She’s a Dog,

Slowly Surfacing, Twenty, Rock ‘N Tokyo

164 min. Music Videos

Saturday, March 24, 2007

10 a.m. Of Good Courage 61 min. Documentary

10 a.m. The Clinton 12 88 min. Documentary

Noon Hard Times/Living the Blues

109 min. Documentary

Noon Mojave Phone Booth 88 min. Feature

2:30 p.m. Comedy Shorts: Alive and Well,

And Now a Word From Our Sponsors,

Bye Bye Benjamin, The Frank Anderson, Karma Cafe,

Quincy & Althea 73 min. Shorts

2:30 p.m. An American Opera

92 min. Documentary

4:30 p.m. Animated Shorts: Barney the Terrier,

Everything Will Be Okay, Idea Development, Mirage,

Nasuh, Saul Goodman, The Waif of Persephone

76 min. Shorts

4:30 p.m. Forgiven 83 min. Feature

7 p.m. Isaac Hayes Tribute Feature

9:30 p.m. International Masters –

The Devil’s Backbone – Guillermo del Toro 106 min.

Feature

9:30 p.m. MIFF 8 awards party at

the Warehouse

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Noon Forfeit 83 min. Feature

Noon Stirring it Up/By the Side of the Road

142 min. Documentary

Noon International Masters – All About My Mother

– Pedro Almodóvar 101 min. Feature

2 p.m. Do Not Go Gently/Cadillac Man

93 min. Documentary

3 p.m. Cutting Edge Shorts: Grace, Broken,

Making Do, Pop Foul, Raw Footage, Rosario, Tell

Tale, Thomas in Bloom 108 min. Shorts

4:30 p.m. A Map for Saturday 90 min. Feature

5 p.m. Vanaja 111min. Documentary

7:30 p.m. International Masters –

Goodbye, Dragon Inn – Ming-liang Tsai – 82 min.

Feature

7:30 p.m. Last Flight Home 70 min. Documentary

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International Masterworks

The Memphis International Film Festival truly earns its name this year by featuring 58 films from 13 countries. One excellent point of entry into worldwide cinema MIFF provides is the International Masters Series, screenings of four notable films from four preeminent filmmakers, presented in glorious 35mm format on the silver screens of Studio on the Square.

Note: Ming-liang Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn was not available for screening. It plays Sunday, March 25th, at 7:30 p.m.

All About My Mother, Spain, 1999

In Pedro Almodóvar’s masterpiece All About My Mother, Esteban (Eloy Azorín), a young man who wants to be a writer, celebrates his 17th birthday with his single mother, Manuela (Cecelia Roth), by going to see a staging of A Streetcar Named Desire. Esteban is in awe of the actress portraying Blanche DuBois, Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes, who also stars in The Devil’s Backbone, another film in the International Masters Series), so he and his mom wait for her after the show to get an autograph. Chasing after Huma’s taxi, Esteban is fatally struck by a car.

So it is that Almodóvar quickly removes the character that most resembles himself. Esteban clearly is awed by his mother, Huma, Blanche, Stella, and, in another reference, Bette Davis in All About Eve. These women inform Esteban’s sensitivity to life and inspire his passion for writing, just as they clearly do Almodóvar. But All About My Mother isn’t so much about Almodóvar’s passion for these feminine icons as it is about the women themselves. This is no fetishistic work of idolatry nor is it a trumped-up platitude on the sanctity of women.

A character comments, “A woman is her hair, nails, and lips.” It’s with this physical descriptive of womanhood that the film immerses itself. The women who inhabit the film — mothers, daughters, lesbians, actresses, or transsexuals — take their cue of what a woman is from what famous women look and act like. The ensemble cast enriches the film with a unique personality that is worthy of the cinematic and literary allusions it makes. Almodóvar continually casts characters in the light of new references to famous roles so that as soon as you’ve got a grasp on the symbolism, the role orientation changes. That the film feels as unscripted as everyday life while turning in on itself like a golden spiral tattles on Almodóvar’s greatest worth as a filmmaker: as a writer.

Screening Friday, March 23rd, 10 p.m.; Sunday, March 25th, noon

The Flower of Evil, France, 2003

If you didn’t know Cahiers du Cinéma iconoclast and French New Wave instigator Claude Chabrol was still making movies, don’t feel left out. Chabrol hasn’t gotten a lot of play in the States, or at least not much that could be felt in Memphis, for some time now. That the 77-year-old Chabrol is still churning out pictures about every year and a half perhaps is only mildly surprising. That he’s still got some game, however, 60-plus features in, is more unexpected.

In The Flower of Evil, Chabrol’s 2003 familial mystery, Francois (Benoît Magimel) comes home to France, after spending four years in America, to find his step-mom Anne Charpin-Vasseur (Nathalie Baye) in the thick of a mayoral campaign, his father Gérard Vasseur (Bernard Le Coq) chafing at the thought of it, his aunt Line (Suzanne Flon) a dear presence, and his step-sister/cousin Michèle (Mélanie Doutey) as hot as ever. Skeletons long locked in the Charpin and Vasseur family closets are rattled by an anonymous leaflet distributed to smear the candidate: namely, that Aunt Line murdered her own father, a Nazi sympathizer, years before (a mystery set up in the film’s opening sequence).

Next comes a surprising little scene: the family discussing the leaflet, casually acknowledging in their conversation that every word is true. Just when you expect the murder to be the focus of the film, it gets resolved. In its place is the real thrust of The Flower of Evil: how the two old French families, the Charpins and the Vasseurs, keep playing out lives that echo down generations. “Time doesn’t exist,” one character says. “Life is a perpetual present.”

Measuring life in generations rather than individuals gives the film a unique perspective on death, especially for a murder mystery: The Flower of Evil doesn’t see murder as the ultimate affront. It’s a change of pace that gives the film an insouciant air. From a writer/director who has killed scores of characters in a long career, it’s perhaps a most appropriate statement on mortality.

Screening Friday, March 23rd, 2:30 p.m.

The Devil’s Backbone, Spain/Mexico, 2001

What is it about 1930s and ’40s Franco Spain that attracts Mexican writer/director Guillermo del Toro so? Del Toro has gotten all kinds of pub from his 2007 Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth, set in Fascist Spain at the height of World War II. But that film marked a return to the setting for the filmmaker. His first sortie there was his excellent 2001 ghost story, The Devil’s Backbone. In it, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), the son of a leftist soldier, is sent to a school of “Reds looking after Reds’ children.” There, Carlos encounters the ghost of a boy who disappeared months before. Unlike in most other ghost stories, though, The Devil’s Backbone isn’t about the specter so much as it is about evil men who continue to live.

The film has a killer central image: a dud bomb unexploded after an air-raid drop, embedded in the middle of the school’s courtyard. The explosive device serves as a kind of opposite to Alfred Hitchcock’s theoretical bomb: It’s inert, never threatening to go off, irrelevant to the plot but full of meaning nonetheless.

The core question in The Devil’s Backbone is, What is a ghost? Is it “a tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect in amber.” Whatever the answer, the film is sure to haunt you for some time.

Screening Saturday, March 24th, 9:30 p.m.

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Memphis Redbirds Report

Baseball just might be bery bery good to us at AutoZone Park this year.

A surplus of prospects? Have those four words ever been used in the St. Louis Cardinals farm system? Such may just be the case this season, particularly among starting pitchers and outfielders. Read St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Derrick Goold’s report from Jupiter, Florida.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Screenplay gimmicks just a ruse in Premonition.

A woman burns her hand on a stovetop, and halfway around the world, her twin sister feels the pain. A man has a dream that the plane he’s scheduled to be on is going to crash, so he skips the flight, only to find out that it did, indeed, go down. A woman is informed that her husband has been killed in a car accident, but the next day he’s alive and well. That last is the enigma at the heart of Premonition, a would-be brainteaser with no brains, a film that isn’t half as interesting as one of those old commercials for Time Life Books’ Mysteries of the Unknown series.

Sandra Bullock stars as Linda Hanson, stay-at-home mom of two girls, kinda happily married, and about to get the shock of her life: Her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) has been killed in a car accident. After the sheriff gives her the bad news, Linda floats through the rest of her day in a numb fog, finally succumbing to sleep. When she wakes up, her husband is still alive.

She pieces together that she has inexplicably woken up several days before his death. She floats through this day in a confused fog and goes to sleep wondering if it’s all a dream. In the morning, she wakes to a house full of family and friends getting ready to go to the funeral of her again-dead husband.

And on and on and on. The plot unfolds linearly for Linda, as it does for the audience, but the chronological order of days is scrambled. Linda tries to understand what’s happening to her, complicated by the discovery of little mysteries such as a dead crow in her backyard, the cut-and-stitched face of one of her daughters, and a bottle of lithium prescribed for her by a doctor she’s never heard of.

Luckily for the audience, the days unfold with perfect, classic mystery-revelation timing. Apparently, this is meant to be meat enough for entertainment. Tiny riddles in Premonition do have solutions — pointlessly mundane solutions and never mind how they don’t hint at the larger question of why this is happening to Linda. No explanation is given that has any traction.

The chronological confusion is ultimately just a ruse to distract from the film’s actual story, which, if told in order, would interest no one. The coup de grace from screenwriter Bill Kelly (Blast from the Past) is a genuinely putrid ending. The audience laughed in incredulity when the credits rolled following that.

The things that could save such a weak story conceit — performance, direction, emotional connect — don’t: Bullock is fine but mostly just has to frown convincingly, while McMahon barely registers as a presence, dead or alive. Director Mennan Yapo ably uses the camera to suggest greater forces at work, but since the script doesn’t produce the supernatural goods, the visuals serve as an irritant, retroactively. And the fertile emotional ground that could be harvested in such a story is left fallow. This is a movie that isn’t about the process of grief so much as it is the process of screenwriting. Premonition should be taught at Hollywood industry seminars about how to turn a script with nothing to say into a greenlighted movie.

Premonition

Now showing

Multiple locations

Categories
Music Music Features

Another Look

My initial reason for attending the South By Southwest Music Festival this year had nothing to do with covering the event. I tend to stay away from these industry-heavy, sycophantic cluster-you-know-whats.

I was invited to speak on a panel called “Comedy on the Music Circuit” Friday afternoon but arrived Thursday night and hit Beerland to catch some of the showcase being held by Memphis punk labels Goner and Shattered. For the two one-man-bands of the evening, the King Louie One Man Band and Yuma Territorial Prison Guards, the sound was turned down so low that it felt like a show in someone’s living room. After saying my hellos to various Memphis people, I made my way down the street to be hit by the wall of volume offered by Jesu, who, it should be noted, were PLAYING IN A TENT. Jesu is a rare case where volume and emotional force override the need to move around on stage to ensure a good live show. When the opening chords of “Friends Are Evil” commenced, it moved the fabric walls of the venue.

Later, back at Beerland, Memphis’ Jay Reatard played to a thick crowd, and this time, the sound was at an appropriate level. Though Reatard didn’t need any help, his performance benefited from the truncated SXSW set times by making more concise his newer selection of frantic pop. Strangely, one of Reatard’s SXSW appearances was a Saturday afternoon acoustic set at the Convention Center trade-show day stage.

My panel appearance was moderated by Commercial Appeal music writer Bob Mehr. It featured comedians David Cross and Zach Galifianakis, among others. I was the token “who the hell is that?” guy, chosen due to some comically incendiary columns that I write for a couple of music magazines and for the fact that, barring any major hiccups, my 2002 comedy CD Just Farr a Laugh will be reissued by Matador Records this summer with a second CD of unreleased material and a massive booklet. Despite my unknown status, I got some good cracks in and some good promotion.

On Saturday, it became even harder to trudge through the insanely thick crowds (in the streets and in the bars). Being St. Paddy’s Day, it was a bizarre combination of drunken redneck idiots in giant green foam hats and a hipster saturation that looked as if someone airlifted Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue and dumped it into the downtown streets of Austin. I saw some uninspired sets, but an excellent one was by Pink Nasty with the Black (playing Memphis at the Buccaneer on April 12th).

It was recovery mode Sunday afternoon. The 6 Degrees of Memphis showcase scheduled for the afternoon at the Flamingo Cantina sporadically suffered from the fact that most SXSW attendees were either in cars or on planes heading home. To illustrate the difference, imagine shoulder-to-shoulder confusion reduced to a post-attack street scene from The Day After. The crowd was unfortunately sparse during Jump Back Jake’s set of convincing Tony Joe White worship but bulked up during Antenna Shoes’ wonderful performance of dense pop. Antenna Shoes is the result of Memphian/Austinite Tim Regan (pictured, above right) being surrounded by his favorite Memphis musicians, including Paul Taylor on drums, Steve Selvidge (pictured, above left) on guitar, and members of Snowglobe and the Coach and Four. The crowd flagged at times but returned in full force for Snowglobe’s closing set. Despite the good times, I relish returning to the open arms of Memphis.

Categories
News

Ophelia Loves Justin Timberlake, But Sexy Won’t Be Coming Back to Tennesee

Don’t say Ophelia Ford isn’t working hard.

Sure the state senator has missed 13 out of 19 days of work (sweet gig if you can get it, no?), due to ambiguous “medical issues,” but don’t try to tell us the woman doesn’t have her priorities straight.

Ford introduced a resolution to honor Justin Timberlake “for his highly successful music career and for his meritorious service to the State of Tennessee.” But some of her coworkers disagree. Specifically, Raymond Finney, a Republican from Maryville, who is somehow offended by song titles such as “Rock Your Body” and “SexyBack.”

We completely understand Finney’s point. The last thing we’d want to do is bring “sexy” back to the senate. Everyone knows that’s a job for interns and pages.

Check out more on Finney vs Ford here.

Categories
News

Shelby County Sheriff’s Officer Gets More Charges

Thomas Braswell, the Shelby County Sheriff’s officer charged earlier this month with bribery, is also being charged with violating an individual’s civil rights and making false statements to a federal investigator.

Braswell’s bribery charge stemmed from his allegedly accepting $500 from a federal informant in return for personal information on police informants. The informant was posing a steroid and cocaine dealer. Braswell was arrested for that charge on March 6th. Now he’s also in trouble for allegedly seizing a Rolex watch during a police search of a residence.

According to a federal indictment, Braswell was questioned about the watch discovered in his truck during a police search after his arrest on March 6th. Braswell said he received the watch from a white male named “Jamie” in exchange for $400 to $500 worth of nutritional supplements. The next day, he said his story was false and claimed to have found the watch (along with a condom) in an envelope in his mailbox at the Sheriff’s office. The investigation is ongoing.

-Bianca Phillips

Categories
Art Art Feature

Best in Show

The black rods and white ovals that make up David Comstock’s large enamel paintings in the exhibition “Flow” are some of the most expressive and sexually charged artworks currently on view.

The stakes are high in the thickly impastoed board game of life and death that Comstock plays out on the walls of L Ross Gallery. Large ovals look like inner sanctums and the lens through which we look at life. Everything feels slowed down, and every sensation is recorded on Comstock’s collages of frayed canvases that resemble torn membranes and scarred skin.

A thick black rod surrounds the ovum at the center of Untitled Green 003. Other lines slash across the canvas. One of these lines arcs down, pierces the egg-shaped core, and infuses the canvas with spring greens.

Negative Positive 002, the smallest canvas in the show, is the rawest. In this X-ray (and x-rated) version of the game, a white rod explodes inside the painting’s pitch-black core. In Passing, we don’t see the rod pierce the “egg,” but the yolk is broken and flows across the surface of the painting in washes of ochre and lemon.

An ovum gets pierced in David Comstock’s Untitled 003

In Comstock’s board game, every rectangle and square looks like a moment of psychological, emotional, or physical checkmate. In painting after painting, the thick black lines that surround, slash across, and penetrate egg-shaped centers simultaneously suggest not only injury/death but also birth/nurturing/sexuality, making “Flow” one of the boldest games in town.

At L Ross Gallery through March 31st

Glennray Tutor’s meticulously rendered oils of brand-new toys tightly packed into heart-shaped boxes make me long for the gunk and disarray of burnt-out fireworks and broken action figures. The three extraordinary pieces in his current exhibition, “Recent Works,” at Jay Etkin Gallery, plumb the depths of human experience with marbles and comic books.

Three iridescent marbles, painted equidistant from the center of Trio, orbit like tiny planets on top of a romance comic book published in the ’50s. The shadow of a purple-pink cat’s eye falls across the faces of two lovers about to kiss. Another marble, a swirl of yellow-orange, tops the final frame where much of the image and many of the words are cut off by the edge of the painting. What’s left are bits and pieces that read, “Lovely sweethearts … Moon … down on us … so softly, so wisely … came true all over again.”

The course of love in Glennray Tutor’s Trio

Since the publication of this romance comic some 50 years ago, many moonstruck sweethearts have discovered that the course of love is not as predictable as that of the planets and their moons. Tutor’s experiments with marbles and true romance establish that this artist, in addition to being a skilled hyper-realist, is also a campy metaphysician whose insights are bittersweet and wise.

At Jay Etkin Gallery through March 24th

At first glance, Kit Reuther’s six large oils on canvas look like depictions of weeds blown across barren landscapes. A closer look at her exhibition “Organikos” at Perry Nicole reveals a seemingly inexhaustible variety of colors and forms scattered across expanses of canvas.

One idea leads to another in works such as Blueline, in which blue washes and expressive shadows create giant squids that shoot out streams of ink, dried grasses poking through crevices of snow, and the tendrils of seaweeds floating in a deep-blue sea.

Shapes in Marabisque morph from doodles to pearls in oyster shells to peas in pods into an oval mirror. Scumbled gray lines lie near the center, with the artist topping off her fertile free-associations by floating a child’s bright red whirligig above the briar patch of lines, while at the bottom, she sprouts daisies from an impasto of primordial green ooze.

Reuther’s method of generating a form then building on that idea to invent new forms reminds us that consciousness of the ever-evolving environment is not always best expressed by hyper-realism, vague impressionistic play of light, or the reductive geometry of minimalism. Reuther, with rich imagination, captures dynamic interaction in life between sensory stimuli and response.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through March 31st

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Do Say Gay

I’ve been thinking a lot about my Uncle Don this week. He was born in the 1920s, served honorably in World War II, then came back to civilian life and became a succesful pediatric dentist in St. Louis.

He lived a long and prosperous life, almost 30 years of it in the same elegant bluff-top home with his “roommate” Richard. When Richard died in the 1990s, Don started drinking too much. He died a few years later, sick and depressed, in a VA hospital in our small Missouri hometown.

He was a sophisticated man — a concert pianist in his spare time and an inveterate traveler. His presents were always fascinating, and the best thing I unwrapped most Christmases was usually something from his travels.

As was the custom with his generation (and with my Midwestern family), Don’s sexuality was never acknowledged. His brother (my father) often would say, “I wish Don would find a nice woman and settle down.”

By the time I was 16, I knew the score. And I’ve never figured out if my father was really clueless or just trying to protect me from the truth. I didn’t care. Don was cool.

I took my college girlfriends to St. Louis to stay at his groovy “bachelor pad.” He and Richard hosted dinner parties for us with artists and professors and bohemian types. I loved him. He was a wonderful uncle and a good man.

That’s why it infuriates me to hear the hypocrisy that came out of General Peter Pace’s mouth last week. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff called homosexuality “immoral,” adding: “I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is okay to be immoral.”

This guy is the military equivalent of my father — clueless or ignoring the obvious. Recent estimates put the number of gays serving in the U.S. military at around 65,000. Imagine if all those “immoral” folks decided to “tell,” without being “asked.”

What is immoral is asking people to fight and die for this country without letting them be who they truly are.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com