Month: September 2007

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

2 Days in Paris

2 Days in Paris, Julie Delpy’s intimate, exhilarating new film, doesn’t have much in common with genteel, starry-eyed rom-coms like Before Sunrise or Before Sunset. Warm, fuzzy memories of those two chatty but precious Richard Linklater films, which paired Delpy’s French intellectual fantasy chick with Ethan Hawke’s pretentious, scheming American backpacker, are effectively obliterated when we get our first glimpse of Marion and Jack (Delpy and Adam Goldberg, well-muscled and well-wrapped in a blanket of Cape Fear tattoos), a couple in their mid-30s who are taking the overnight train from Venice to Paris; Marion is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a gun that’s pointed at her boyfriend’s chest.

In interviews, Delpy has compared Marion’s impulsive, surprisingly confrontational behavior to Robert De Niro’s actions in Raging Bull, and, at times, the movie plays like an extended verbal prizefight between a sharper Jake LaMotta and an early Albert Brooks-style wiseass. Jack and Marion are older and freer with their insecurities and jealous barbs than most young lovers would ever dare, and they give in to sudden outbursts of frustration and hostility more often than couples of any age probably should. Their struggles and confessions provide most of the forward momentum of the film, which is loose, awkward, nosy, and, in the finest French New Wave tradition, dotted with eclectic movie allusions, from Last Tango in Paris to Voyage in Italy to M.

Delpy, who also wrote, produced, and directed, is as good as she’s ever been, but Goldberg is quick and vulnerable enough to match her throughout. The supporting cast largely stays in the background, although the exuberance and high spirits of Marion’s parents (played by Delpy’s real-life parents) are like something out of Renoir’s later movies, as is the fat, bored housecat whose expressionless gaze steals a scene or two.

Opens Friday, September 21st, at Ridgeway Four

Categories
Opinion

Ten Inconvenient Truths

1) There is a very good chance that the winner of the mayor’s race will be rejected by half the voters and a good chance that the winner will be rejected by six out of 10 voters.

2) Things could be worse, and maybe they have been. In 1971, 1975, and 1979, a charismatic mayoral candidate given to fits of ego, arrogance, candor, and foibles in his bachelor lifestyle rallied his political base while writing off the “other” racial group and won a narrow victory. His name was Wyeth Chandler, and he was mayor from 1972 to 1982. The Peabody was closed. Downtown was emptying out. The Martin Luther King Jr. assassination was a recent memory, not a chapter in the history books. Firemen went on strike as buildings burned. Chandler got almost all the white vote and almost none of the black vote.

3) Willie Herenton increasingly refers to himself in the third person. This is not a good thing in Memphis or any other city.

4) Herenton has seemingly written off many of his former supporters, although his special assistant, Pete Aviotti, thinks he will get 65 percent of the vote. When Chandler hunkered down with his white base in 1975 and 1979, black Memphians, who were then slightly in the minority, said it was tragic. If Herenton gets almost none of the white vote after serving 16 years, it will be no less tragic today.

5) Herman Morris is Republican retro, from his supporters, who include John Ryder, Minerva Johnican, and Lewis Donelson, to his big house in Midtown, which was lit up like Christmas while his neighbors were still in the dark after Hurricane Elvis (luck of the grid, it was said) to his membership on corporate boards that pay more for meetings than most people earn.

6) It is well and good that Morris, who grew up in Binghamton, went to Rhodes and Vanderbilt Law School and has a very nice family. But it is telling that, until he was a candidate for mayor, he did not often attend neighborhood meetings in either his current or former neighborhoods of Evergreen and Vollintine-Evergreen.

7) If there was a public institution less open to scrutiny than MLGW under Morris (and Herenton, who appointed the board), it would be hard to name it. The place was a fortress. Its board made a mockery of open meetings by going into executive session in the morning and a perfunctory public session after lunch. Sure, the notorious Morris VIP list included Mom and some corporate chiefs. But it also included Morris pals at The Commercial Appeal, which conveniently low-balled the details of the retirement package Morris sought and Herenton rejected back in 2003.

8) Carol Chumney will speak truth to power, but what if she had the power? As a candidate, her favorite word often seems to be I, as in “what I did.” Being mayor is about “we.” An election is partly a popularity contest. In other circumstances, Chumney’s distance from her council colleagues would be understandable, even admirable, given that two of them were indicted. As a mayoral candidate, it’s a legitimate concern.

9) What about me? asks John Willingham. True, candidates have run on flimsier credentials, and Willingham is a former elected county commissioner with the endorsement of the local Republican Party steering committee. But when he had a one-on-one shot at an already weakened Herenton in 2003, he got about 30 percent of the vote. Only in college football do you expect a rematch after losing 70-30.

10) Chumney and Morris have a better chance than Willingham, but he won’t support either of them. Enough said.

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Will UM/UCF Game Be All Wet?

University of Central Florida will host the University of Memphis in their brand-new stadium on Saturday. Will our city officials be paying attention? You can bet theirs will be, as a situation with opening-day concessions has caused an uproar.

From the Orlando Sentinel: “UCF President John Hitt today blasted the concession contractor at Bright House Networks Stadium for failing to stock enough bottled water for sale at last Saturday’s inaugural game, saying the firm must do better ‘or their successor will.’

Fans were angered when bottled water ran out during the third quarter of last week’s game. There were no public water fountains installed at the stadium. Officials plan to ramp up the number of bottles — from 30,000 to 135,000 — to be sold for this week’s game and to have at least 10 water fountains working.

To read more, go here.

Categories
News

Local Rally for the Jena 6 Thursday

A “wear black” vigil is scheduled for Thursday September 20, from 4:30p.m. to 6:30p.m. on the corner of Central Avenue and East Parkway to show support for the “Jena 6.”

A series of conflicts between black and white residents of Jena, Louisiana began in September 2006 when a group of black students at Jena High School sat beneath a tree on campus that local custom had reserved for white students. The next day, three nooses were seen in the tree.

Fights between students in the aftermath of that event led to the arrest of six African-American students on attempted murder charges. One of the six has already been found guilty of aggravated second-degree battery, and a conspiracy charge.

The case has brought national attention due to the lack of charges against whites who participated equally in the violence following the noose incident. Rallies are planned across the country on Thursday.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Homefront wounds exposed.

How am I to feel about Paul Haggis? The creative force behind two of the last three Best Picture Oscar winners (writer of Million Dollar Baby and writer/director of Crash), Haggis is hotter than anybody not named Apatow in Hollywood. But Million Dollar Baby left me feeling sucker-punched with melodrama in the last act, and Crash left me feeling bullied into a corner and browbeaten with lofty message.

But Haggis is also the guy who helped breathe life into James Bond in Casino Royale and acquitted himself admirably as co-author of Clint Eastwood’s WWII diptych (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima).

And now he’s made In the Valley of Elah. Inspired by actual events, the plot is about a soldier, just back from Iraq, who has gone missing, and the concerned father, Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), who investigates his disappearance. The movie kicks up all kinds of dust about combat stress, the horrors of war, the loss of patriotism, and parents coming to grips with the wages of their convictions. This was, I told myself going in, the exact kind of movie Haggis would ruin for me. I’m pleased to report I was wrong.

The bulk of the film is dressed up like a mystery. Hank is a classic red-stater, of the strong and silent mold: former military investigator, pickup-truck driver, prays before meals, drinks Beam. When Hank gets the call from the Army that his son has gone AWOL, he doesn’t believe it: The son he raised would never have been derelict in his duties. Hank’s wife Joan (Susan Sarandon) is a bundle of nerves over it. In the course of Hank’s search, he enlists the aid of Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a townie cop near the army base.

Jones is perfectly cast. The script fails him in tracing Hank’s growing disillusionment with his country and its institutions, but Jones sells each moment he’s given. Also, apparently, when Theron tries to look plain and not ethereally beautiful, it means she’s serious about a role. It’s the equivalent of Robin Williams’ beard. In Elah, her acting’s mostly fine, but some of the dialogue is too tin for her ear.

In the Valley of Elah is solemnly anti-war (little “w”). Its depictions of soldiers broken by the experience are universal. But Haggis sets the film very specifically — November 1, 2004 — making it a historical drama. American flags fly in front of every house and on cars. Bush’s voice echoes on the radio, and the Iraq War fills TV screens. One character says, “They shouldn’t send heroes to a place like Iraq.” In this sense, the film is anti-War (big “W”). Haggis doesn’t successfully spell out what makes Iraq different from any other war, especially with Vietnam looming a generation ago. But I believe that he believes it. And, in 2004, the cuts were fresh enough to wound faith.

In the Valley of Elah

Opening Friday, September 21st

Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

After Violence

A subterranean favorite best known for “body horror” flicks (They Came From Within), coal-black comedies (The Brood), squishy remakes (The Fly), and outré exercises (Crash — the car-wreck sex-cult movie, not the platitude-packed Oscar winner), the superb Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg went mainstream a couple of years ago with A History of Violence. A director-for-hire studio product, the film boasted Cronenberg’s biggest budget ever and marked his first film set in the United States since 1983’s The Dead Zone. But as mainstream entertainment, A History of Violence was a bit of a Trojan horse. It honored Hollywood convention but only in the service of interrogating it.

On the surface, Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is an aesthetic sequel to A History of Violence. Both films open with bloody, unsettling pre-credit sequences. Both cast Viggo Mortensen as an outwardly calm man capable of great violence and pair him with a striking blonde (Maria Bello in Violence, Naomi Watts in Eastern Promises). And both films chart the disruptive intersection of a seedy criminal underworld and middle-class domestic normalcy.

But where Violence only seemed old-fashioned, Eastern Promises really is. Emotionally and morally, A History of Violence left the viewer in an uncertain, unsettling place. Eastern Promises‘ denouement is more abrupt and less tidy, but it sets the moral world in order in the manner Hollywood films are expected to.

But if Eastern Promises is a less ambitious film than is the norm for Cronenberg, it’s still a fine one. A filmmaker of great technical skill and visual economy, Cronenberg hooks the viewer from the beginning with a crisp opening sequence that sets the entire plot in motion with two deaths and a birth. You can further sense his sure hand with the way key bits of back story are parceled out.

Eastern Promises was written by Steven Knight and covers the same London-immigrant-underworld milieu as his Dirty Pretty Things. Here, Watts plays Anna, a midwife of mixed British and Russian ancestry who pockets the diary of a hemorrhaging, unidentified 14-year-old who dies while giving birth. Attempting to translate the diary in order to find the newborn’s family, Anna is pulled into the world of the London-based Russian mob, led by menacing restaurateur Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his weak, erratic son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Kirill’s mysterious driver/bodyguard Nikolai (Mortensen) takes a protective interest in Anna.

Mortensen’s Nikolai is a classic screen creation. A brooding, mysterious, and dangerous figure, Nikolai’s body is covered in prison tattoos that are markers of experience within the Russian mob. These tattoos take on a key narrative role when they’re used by a couple of revenge-seeking Chechens to (mis)identify Nikolai in a bathhouse. The ensuing savage, two-on-one knife attack is the film’s centerpiece, with Mortensen’s full nudity ratcheting up the vulnerability and queasiness of the scene.

Though Mortensen’s Nikolai is iconic, Watts also functions as part of the visual design, seen often riding a motorcycle through the London streets in a constellation of black — jacket, boots, helmet, sunglasses — broken up by blond hair and tight blue jeans.

If this visually striking, expertly directed film falls short of Cronenberg’s usual standards, it’s because of a script that’s too conventional, something underscored by a key revelation about Nikolai’s motivation that suggests a lesser, more procedurally oriented crime film than what Eastern Promises strives to be.

Eastern Promises

Opening Friday, September 21st

Multiple locations

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Let’s Hear It for Austria

On a recent Monday night, 26 Memphis wine aficionados came together for a night of food and wine at Tsunami. The reason? Austrian wine.

Austrian wine and Chef Ben Smith’s Pacific Rim cuisine might not be easily connected in most people’s minds. More than likely, Austria doesn’t cross people’s minds at all when it comes to wine. But after that dinner, every single person was a convert.

Austria produces less than 1 percent of the world’s total yearly wine output. That beautiful trickle is finally making its way down to Memphis thanks to Chicago-based importer VinDiVino. Known more for their Italian portfolio, VinDiVino only recently began importing Austrian wines. Back in 1993, they started with only one, the dessert-wine superstar Alois Kracher. Today, they import wines from 28 different Austrian wineries.

Prager, one of Austria’s best-known wineries, has taken Riesling’s sullied reputation as a cloying, syrupy wine and transformed it into something astonishing. Credit master winemaker Toni Bodenstein, who handcrafts fruit from the Wachau district into the purest dry Rieslings in the world.

“We are blessed with three distinct climates within the Wachau region,” Bodenstein says. “The steep hills, nearly 1,000 meters high, provide different sun exposures and micro-climates. [Also] in the ’80s, the Austrian government adopted strict wine laws, which forced winemakers to cut yields. These laws forced the level of quality up considerably.”

Prager wines offer a bounty of citrus and stone fruit flavors and aromas, along with vibrant minerality and racy, mouthwatering acidity. Those who fancy full-bodied whites will be blown away by the weight and texture of Bodenstein’s Rieslings. Tasting one that has been left out on the counter for two hours is eye-opening. Never before has a room-temperature white wine been so beautifully alive, balanced, and beckoning. Pork, something most Memphians are religious about, is a wonderful match for Prager Rieslings.

The Achleiten vineyard in Central Wachau is a steep, sloped vineyard, terraced with ancient stonework that dates back to medieval times. Kersten Klamm of Freie Weingartner Wachau coaxes very modern, rich Grüner Veltliner and Riesling from this historical vineyard.

“It’s the specific soil climate and the steep terraced vineyards that determine the unique style of our wines,” Klamm says. “Wachau wines are always very mineralic with lots of finesse and a great aging potential. Our main white grape, Grüner Veltliner, combines the finesse and elegance of a Riesling with the structure and complexity of a Burgundy.”

In the Wachau, there are three distinctive levels of ripeness. Steinfeder wines, named after an indigenous grass, are fairly light in alcohol and very fresh and fruity. Wines with the Federspiel designation are fuller in body and ripeness with an alcohol level between 11 and 12.5 percent. The term “Federspiel” was the name of the leather whip used to call back falcons in the old days. Smaragd, named after a lizard that lives in the vineyards, is the designation given to the ripest and most precious wines.

The important thing to remember is that no matter how ripe the wines, they are always dry.

Whether quenching a thirst induced by triple-digit heat or pairing an incredible meal with a perfect wine, Memphis wine drinkers should look to the small country of Austria to provide wines for both occasions.

Recommended Wines:

FWW Domane Wachau Federspiel Terrassen Grüner Veltliner 2006, $16.99

FWW Domane Wachau Smaragd Achleiten Riesling 2005, $35.99

Weingut Stadt Krems Sandgrube Grüner Veltliner 2006, $17.99

Loimer Kamptal Grüner Veltliner 2005, $19.99

Prager Federspiel “Steinriegl” Riesling 2005, $30.99

Categories
News The Fly-By

Outer Limits

CREDIT: David Seymour | dreamstime.com

For more than a year, I’ve driven out to Collierville at least once a week because of roller derby.

When people would ask me for directions to the bouts, I’d tell them to get on Bill Morris Parkway and drive until it ends. You’ll pass Winchester, the Mike Rose soccer complex, and the Avenue at Carriage Crossing shopping center, and when you see the orange barrels and can’t go any farther, that’s when you know you’re there.

But I can’t say that anymore. Last month, a new section of Bill Morris opened. The new stretch runs from Highway 72 to Piperton, cutting the drive considerably.

The project, part of Memphis’ new outer loop, cost taxpayers $36 million and brings Fayette County closer than ever before. But — no offense to Fayette County — is that really a good thing?

USA Today ran a story last week about more people being on the road earlier than ever before to beat morning rush hour. According to recent census figures, one worker out of every nine left for work before 6 a.m. in 2001; in 2006, it was one worker in every six.

The newspaper noted that the “commuter-creep” — partially a result of suburban sprawl — affects everything from “the breakfast-food industry to television viewership, from traffic-signal timing to newspaper delivery times,” as well as family relationships and personal health.

People are literally going to work too early and getting home too late to see their families. All because they’re trying to get to work on time.

I’m not against development. Whenever I hear people disparage suburbanites or say that they “hate the suburbs,” I find it ironically close-minded. Many of the city’s most beloved neighborhoods were once considered suburbs. The style of the houses may be different, but the basic idea is still the same: Give people a place where they have their own space but are not completely isolated.

There are also powerful incentives to living and building outside developed neighborhoods. Because of codes and zoning regulations, it’s often easier, not to mention cheaper, for developers to build on previously undeveloped land than to reuse land in the heart of the city.

Let’s say you want to build a new shopping center. You’ll want to attract a national retailer as a tenant, but they’re going to want a certain number of parking spaces for their customers and that can mean a lot of land.

Despite the reasons for sprawl, people are beginning to see the problems it causes. A Pew Center for Civic Journalism study found that Americans are beginning to think of sprawl as important an issue as crime, taxes, and education. Probably because sprawl affects all those things.

I recently heard one urban planner theorize that women, specifically suburban soccer moms, are “driving” a national movement back to the city limits. This is a group that spends large portions of their time in cars, shuttling children from one activity to the next, getting groceries, and doing errands. Who could blame them for wanting to consolidate their destinations?

Add in high gas prices and the inner loop of a city looks pretty good.

On a community level, sprawl has contributed to the financial problems of Shelby County, creating false growth through migration and coring once-vibrant areas.

The problem, however, is that sprawl is akin to gaining weight. Once it’s there, it’s difficult to get rid of it.

But there may be a way. On Thursday, the local Urban Land Institute and the UrbanArt Commission are presenting a free screening of Save Our Land, Save Our Towns, a film about the causes and effects of urban sprawl along with possible remedies.

Journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Hylton began his study of sprawl after the high school across from his house was closed and demolished because of declining enrollment. Visiting Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Oregon, Hylton found that codes and zoning laws can have an enormous impact on sprawl.

Incentives and tax credits can also help. If building is easier and more inexpensive outside the city, something has to be done to make redeveloping land within the city limits more attractive.

But, for those who have the means, there’s one simple solution for both extra weight and urban sprawl: Just move.

Categories
News The Fly-By

The Cheat Sheet

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

The Tennessee Vols travel to Gainesville to play the University of Florida, seeking redemption for their previous two losses to their hated rival. Well, make that three losses. Florida wins 59-20, handing UT coach Phil Fulmer his worst defeat in 20 or so years. We knew the Gators had some bite, but we really didn’t expect them to chew their opponents up and spit them out on national television.

Greg Cravens

The Memphis area has a new annual attraction: the Delta Fair and Music Festival. Held at the Agricenter, this event was a hit, with just one hitch. Fair officials had to fire a clown, after he used “ethnic and racial slurs” to con people into buying tickets to the dunking tank where he was perched. What a bozo — a real one, not the funny-clown kind.

It happens every year, it seems. Three students at Southaven High School are expelled for bringing guns to school. Kids today just don’t understand that whole concept of show-and-tell, do they?

Residents of Collierville petition authorities to have their community declared a “quiet zone” because they are annoyed by those pesky trains that roll through their town at all hours — you know, the same trains that have been passing through Collierville since the early 1800s. What’s next? Complaints about those noisy FedEx jets?

This seems to be how our city does things: We pay thousands to a consultant to study options for a new football stadium. Then, when they give us their expert opinion, we — in this case, officials in the Herenton administration — decide not to release it, claiming it is filled with errors. Such as the one that disagrees with the administration’s take on this whole mess? After people complained, the report will be made available to the City Council.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: (AP Photo/Troy Maben)

“Idaho senator Larry Craig quit his Senate seat,

saying that he wanted to spend more time not being gay.”

— David Letterman

The arrest of Senator Larry Craig (Perv-ID) in an airport bathroom sex sting and his vacillations about resigning make writing a column just plain fun. Craig said he kept the incident quiet so he could consider his options. It was yet another good decision by bathroom-stall enthusiast “not gay” Craig, deftly avoiding a media circus.

The mix of politics and religion has always been a hypocrite-magnet and brings to mind my award-eligible column about the Rev. Ted Haggard (who opposed gays even as he was hiring a male hooker and buying drugs with church money in a hotel room) entitled, “Ministers Should Do More Than Lay People.”

But this story floors me. At first, I thought Craig was like many of our grandfathers and dads — an out-of-touch old man who did not know the gay signals. After all, he was caught in this sex sting in a state that elected a pro wrestler as governor. Perhaps they took a hard line on bathroom-stall toe-tapping for fear it would lead to more musicals. Then, when his fellow GOP leaders did not defend him, and he did not even get a “you’re doing a heckuva job” out of President Bush, I figured that Craig probably had a history of such conduct.

The Democrats were handed yet another election-year gift and thought they had seen the last of yet another GOP right-winger. There they were, standing around Craig’s twitching body, poking him with a stick (which I bet he likes), when suddenly the Craig camp (a camp you do not want to send your son to) said he might not resign. Dems, who were afraid they might actually have to come up with a reasonable alternative agenda to defeat the GOP in the fall, fretted.

Gays were torn over whether to be happy that Craig was forced to reveal his actions or offended that this creep is gay.

Craig’s June guilty plea in Minneapolis and rumors that he had done this before in a train station in Washington, D.C., created a dilemma for Democrats. On one hand, they had a great chance to embarrass a Republican, but they had to do so by condemning a gay guy who supports public transportation. When events defy logic, you can rest assured politicians are involved.

Craig said that he is not a guy who will go down easy. I bet the arresting cop disagrees. Standing beside his wife and adopted kids, he said that he wanted a do-over on his guilty plea. His defense is going to be — and I am not kidding — that his plea was not intelligently arrived at. Now if you ever wonder why our legal system is messed up, look no further than Senator Craig — a “lawmaker,” remember.

I would argue that, unlike openly gay males, closeted ones like Craig hurt their families by perpetuating a fraud about their sexual orientation. For you homophobes out there, you should be more supportive of those who come out. Richard Simmons is not going to sneak up on you in a bathroom in his candy-striped short-shorts. He’s out. It’s the guys with secret sex lives who are the problem.

I have long said that the GOP is misguided when it espouses minimal government and individual freedom yet seems obsessed with pushing laws to make it difficult for consenting adults to do what they want as long as no harm is done to anyone. We haven’t caught bin Laden. We’re running massive federal deficits. We have bigger problems than persecuting people for what they do in private with a consenting partner.

It is hard for Craig to think about the surge when he is constantly fighting an urge.

Incidentally, what sort of cop signs up for sitting in a toilet and tapping his toe in hopes that a gay dude will hit on him? The cop from the Village People?

It is comforting to know that our phones, e-mails, and bathroom stalls are now monitored by our government. It seems the only two things they are not watching are their spending and our borders!

Ron Hart is a Southern libertarian who writes about politics and life. His e-mail address is RevRon10@aol.com.