Month: November 2008

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Time After Time

Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai may be familiar to most Memphians as the director of this year’s locally filmed My Blueberry Nights, which was his English-language debut. But he made his name, at least in the West, with a series of sleek, frenetic, über-modern, über-urban ’90s films — Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together. Even when he’s gone period, as on the early Days of Being Wild or his career-best In the Mood for Love, it’s still been in urban settings.

For that reason, Ashes of Time is the outlier in Wong’s filmography. Made in 1994 — Wong took a break on post-production for the epic to make Chungking Express on the quick — it’s a wuxia film, the historical strain of martial-arts films. It is set in ancient China, amid a stark landscape of peasants and warriors. In setting, it couldn’t be more different from Wong’s other work.

And yet, thematically, it fits into Wong’s oeuvre perfectly. Few filmmakers have so consistent a tone and set of concerns as Wong, whose films almost always hinge on memory, loss, and romantic longing. With Ashes of Time, he imposed these themes on the wuxia genre, and the themes won.

Though considered a seminal work of modern international cinema, Ashes of Time never had an official American release, until now. With Ashes of Time Redux, Wong has re-edited and refurbished the film, cutting it down to 93 minutes (from the original 100-minute run time), adding digital tinting to enhance the color, and adding a new score from Yo-Yo Ma.

Shot by Wong’s longtime collaborator Christopher Doyle, Ashes of Time Redux is — like all Wong films — visually rich. Shot in the Chinese desert, Doyle mixes breathtaking, almost surreal landscape shots with extreme close-ups on the film’s all-star (in Chinese cinema terms) cast. Set in a “time of eclipse,” Ashes feels less like a historical piece than a missive from a past dystopia or an alternate world.

But Ashes of Time Redux is as difficult to follow as it is beautiful to look at. The film is structured around five seasons and passages from a Chinese almanac. At the center of the plot, such as it is, is Leslie Cheung as the agent Ouyang Feng, who hires famous bounty-hunters for people in need. In and out of Ouyang’s house drift assassins-for-hire and those who need them, many of them haunted by romantic regrets. All the while, Ouyang fixates on the woman (Maggie Cheung) who married his brother.

It is a highly elliptical, heavily mannered film. The action scenes are few and almost abstract, with more emphasis on natural beauty and human brooding. Wong tames the Chinese action cinema, for better or worse, into a film that fits his own character — one that luxuriates in melancholy. It is gorgeous, frustrating filmmaking.

Ashes of Time Redux

Opening Friday, November 7th

Ridgeway Four

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Clint Eastwood’s latest Oscar bid disappoints.

Clint Eastwood ought to be a more memorable and significant filmmaker than he is. Throughout his prolific career — he’s made at least seven films per decade since the 1970s — he’s told plenty of interesting stories about crime, dishonor, and corruption, history, combat, and heroism. He’s a solid if unspectacular craftsman who seldom releases movies without merit. But with the exception of four Westerns (most recently 1992’s Unforgiven), two unusual biopics (1988’s White Hunter, Black Heart and 1989’s Bird), and 1993’s heartbreaking A Perfect World, Eastwood’s films are curiously detached and curmudgeonly, with few memorable emotional or stylistic high points. When this strained seriousness is overindulged, it results in negligible work like Changeling, Eastwood’s fictionalized retelling of an actual 1920s Los Angeles missing-child case.

An emaciated and frightened Angelina Jolie stars as Christine Collins, a telephone-company supervisor whose young son is abducted one day while she’s at work. Five months later, the LAPD discovers her son and returns him to her, but she immediately suspects that he’s not her child — for one thing, this new boy is three inches shorter. The LAPD, though, is unwilling either to accommodate Collins or renege on its own story, so she begins a tentative struggle with the cops that eventually wins her an extended stay in a Los Angeles psychopathic ward — where, it turns out, she’s not the only woman who’s fought the law unsuccessfully. While she attempts to free herself, an ominous new case with terrible implications further undermines the police department’s credibility.

With Changeling, Eastwood is toiling in the shadow of numerous Southern California crime pictures, so he manufactures a mannered, opaque neo-noir world of light and dark that smudges the allusions to superior works like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Unfortunately, his lighting scheme doesn’t enhance character or illuminate any larger social anxieties. His actors struggle to define themselves against this creeping blackness as best they can, but the sparse natural lighting and the bisecting shadow schemes swallow up everyone from concerned minister Gustav Briegleb (a restrained John Malkovich) to concerned detective Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly).

Yet there’s a hint of what such cool-eyed professionalism can accomplish in two consecutive scenes occurring halfway through the film. In the first scene, Collins tries to avoid the Catch-22 of life in the psych ward: If she’s hysterical and outraged by her wrongful incarceration, she’s clearly mentally unstable, but if she’s calm and collected, she’s emotionally withdrawn. During her informal evaluation scene with the menacing head doctor, each reaction shot inches closer and closer until the scene climaxes with a huge close-up of Collins’ shaken, tear-stained face.

The second scene is another two-actor affair between Detective Ybarra and a young kid about to be deported. The scene between Ibarra and the kid is a ghoulish inversion of the scene between Collins and the doctor, as the kid tries to convince the detective that his gruesome testimony is true. How these two simple, sharp, chilling scenes wormed their way into a film as diffuse and unsatisfying as this one, though, is anyone’s guess.

Changeling

Now playing

Multiple locations

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Okay. This is it. I am writing this on the day before

the 2008 United States presidential election, and I am trying not to

run screaming into the streets in search of a psychiatrist who still uses electroshock

treatments. I’m pretty sure I have that syndrome — that election-related stress and trauma disorder — or something

like that. And I hate it. I want my life back.

On the one hand, I am certainly no diehard “patriot” of the only country in the world that has dropped a nuclear bomb on another one and has spent more than half a century wringing its hands about other countries having the same capability. It just doesn’t make sense to me. (But, then, a lot of things don’t.) So common sense would have it that I shouldn’t really care who wins this election. On the other hand, I look around at all of the poverty, injustice, bigotry, and egomaniacal us-vs.-them worldview that plagues the United States and makes us the laughingstock of the planet, and I want that to end. I want it to end because I want the country in which I live to be better than that. Maybe I am a patriot and just don’t know it.

What I do know is that there are three words I never want to hear again as long as I live: “Joe the Plumber.” By the time this issue of the Flyer hits the streets, the election will be over, I hope. I say “I hope” because of the chance that the outcome could be rigged, as it was in 2000. And my election-stress syndrome is in high gear and has me worrying that there’s a slight chance that the results won’t be confirmed immediately. And that means that the words “Joe the Plumber” might be spoken again, and I just don’t think I can take it. Call me crazy (a lot of people do!), but I firmly believe that John McCain’s campaign managers, in true Karl Rovian style, paid Joe the Plumber to attend the Barack Obama campaign stop in Ohio and told him to say the things he said so they could have some kind of thin thread to hang onto as the election neared and they could obnoxiously invoke his name over and over and over and over and over and over and over again to the point that his moniker might be listed in the next Oxford English Dictionary.

Nothing against the guy personally, but are we so dumbed down that, in what has turned out to be the most important election of this century, Joe the Plumber has become the symbol of everyman? If you are a Wikipedia freak like me, you probably know that there is now an entry on Joe that has — count them — 69 references. The entry has a table of contents with 12 chapters, and the article is as long as Ronald Reagan’s funeral. Silly me. I thought this was the first election in the history of the United States in which a black man has a chance to become the president, thereby changing the course of history forever and moving us into the real world and helping heal more than 200 years of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow persecution, and whispering at the water coolers about how blacks aren’t that bad as long as they stay in their place. But I suppose for many people, Joe the Plumber is more important than that — even if he did have his facts wrong on Barack Obama’s tax plan and will be, if Obama is elected, one of the people who gets a tax break. Now that Joe the Plumber has launched a congressional campaign, maybe he will come to understand this as he attempts to win an office with a salary we the people will pay.

See? I am losing it. Even I am writing about Joe the Plumber, whose name I never want to hear again. It’s madness. All I want, as I have written here before, is for Shirley Chisholm to come back from the dead and hold my hand through this. And that’s because there’s a lot at stake here. This is not Saturday Night Live. It’s our chance to show the rest of the world that we are not a nation of freaks. But I fear that we can’t show them something that we’re not. I hope that by the time this paper hits the streets, that fear will prove to have been unfounded. I am a nervous wreck.

Categories
Hot Properties Real Estate

Don’t Judge a Bungalow by Its Cover

Generally, bungalow layouts are predictable: a porch across the front, a bay off to one side, and an interior hall that has two bedrooms and a bath that open off of it and connect the front of the house and the kitchen. Usually, you’d wish that the rooms could be just a bit bigger — but not inside this Evergreen bungalow!

From outside, all you notice that’s atypical is that the porch is reduced to a small, covered entry with a brick archway, and — most unusual for a bungalow — the fireplace is on the front. It wouldn’t be much of a reach to suggest that the Spanish Colonial Revival, quite popular in the 1930s when this house was built, had just a little influence here.

Inside, the living room runs a generous 22 feet deep. The dining room benefits from a full-width bay that lets light stream in from three sides.

Both the living and dining rooms have gorgeous, native red-gum trim that includes a deep cove molding at the ceiling. The living room fireplace has an elegant Arts and Crafts, earth-toned tile surround and is flanked by back-lit, glass-doored bookcases.

The eat-in kitchen was renovated not long ago. One end has a breakfast area with an antique, stained glass chandelier. The other end has a built-in banquette and French doors to the rear courtyard. The cabinets are all painted. and there are plenty of them, which means that there’s also lots of counter workspace, including a breakfast bar.

The other half of the ground floor is equally surprising. The front

bedroom, entered only from the living room, is a master or guest suite with an updated but original full bath. The middle bedroom, like the dining room, is enhanced by another room-wide bay window and is now used as a media/family room. The full bath off the hall serves as the powder room and is also convenient to the back bedroom.

Upstairs has been fully renovated as an even larger master suite, with a bedroom 23-by-17 feet, and it has three pairs of large windows. Its bath has a claw-foot tub, a separate shower, and both toilet and bidet. The sink is installed in an antique cabinet.

Out back, the courtyard has a large paved area for seating and entertaining, a fairly recent development but a true patio, in keeping with the Spanish Colonial tone of the house.

The rest of the yard is lushly planted and has an arbor covered in flowering vines. A guest house provides overflow space and makes a nice rear edge for the courtyard. On the main house, a retractable awing over the French doors creates a sun screen for the summer but allows solar gain in the winter.

It’s rare to find a bungalow with rooms of this scale and with finishes and craftsmanship this good. It’s certainly not noticeably larger than average from the street, but all that proves is that you can’t judge any bungalow by its cover. •

267 Avalon

Approximately 2,500 square feet

4 bedrooms; 3 baths

$359,000

Realtor: Crye-Leike, 276-8800

Agent: Bill Malone, 359-4000

Categories
News

Local Home on HGTV

It’s amazing what you can do with a little concrete.

Local concrete artist Bernhard Meck’s Midtown home will be featured on an episode of HGTV’s “Look What I Did!” tomorrow night.

The HGTV show features home projects that were done without a design consultant or a contractor.

“It’s about the WOW! factor when people see the results and ask, ‘You did this yourself?'” says the show’s website. “It’s an extravagantly themed wall mural and mosaic tiled patio that tell complete stories, a backyard roller coaster for the grandkids, a personal water park with a series of pools and grottoes connected by caves and channels.”

For more, visit Mary Cashiola’s In The Bluff blog.

Categories
News

White Out?

Will there be a gathering of various White Power tribes in Memphis this weekend? It’s anybody’s guess, at this point, though former KKK Grand Wizard, Neo-Nazi, and member of the Louisiana state legislature David Duke says it will happen.

The fate of the conference has been uncertain since Whispering Woods Hotel and Conference Center, the Olive Branch facility where the conference was scheduled to take place, pulled the sheet out from under the group on Tuesday, citing concerns for the safety of guests and employees.

According to some local media reports, Duke said he would be in town yesterday, but he is apparently still a no-show. Fox 13 is reporting that the conference may have relocated to Germantown. Duke’s website suggests that the exact details will not be revealed until shortly before the event commences. If it commences.

Duke is calling the conference, “the first organized response to this Obamination.” Abomination. Get it? We’ll keep you posted as things develop — or not.

Chris Davis

Categories
News

Marijuana Legalization Talk Tonight at Rhodes

Terry Nelson worked in law enforcement for more than 30 years, serving in the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Department of Homeland Security. During his career, he participated in the seizure of more than 230,000 pounds of cocaine. Nelson retired from law enforcement in 2005 and soon after joined Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) because he believes the ongoing “War on Drugs” simply isn’t working. Nelson will give a presentation tonight at 8 p.m. in the Orgill Room of Clough Hall at Rhodes College.

Flyer: Why do you think marijuana should be legalized?

Nelson: I want to be clear. We’re not for drug use because all of us have seen how it destroys families and everything else, but we’re for crime and violence reduction. We think that by legalizing we can reduce crime and violence in our country by about 80 percent because most of the crime and violence occurs in the distribution network.

If you arrest a kid who’s 18 or 19-years-old and give him a prison sentence because he doesn’t have the money to fight it, he’s going to have that felony record for the rest of his life. He’s going to be marginalized in society. He won’t be able to vote in some states and won’t be able to get a decent job. So we want to deal with the crime and violence issue and deal with the drug issue separately. Drug use is a social issue, not a criminal issue.

How would you approach the drug issue?

The drug problem is best addressed with education, and when that fails, treatment. Jail is not the answer for an addict because it won’t fix his problems, it will compound them.

Education is the key, and programs like D.A.R.E. don’t work because police teach those programs, and they lie to the kids. The cops tell these kids, whose older brothers and sisters or even parents smoke marijuana, that if they smoke, they’ll lose their mind and things of that nature. And they know it’s a lie.

What do you think would be the benefits of legalization?

There would be less crime and violence, and we’d have a more humane society. And our police could get back to doing police work. I could go out on any street in Memphis on any night and bust two kids with marijuana, but what have I accomplished? I just screwed them up, but I haven’t done any good for law enforcement. I took myself off the street for about 4 hours when people are really committing crimes. Our police officers need to focus on police issues. Lets focus on real crime, crime against people and property and leave people who are just hurting themselves alone.

Why do think the federal government won’t recognize that the “War on Drugs” isn’t working?

They just don’t have the political guts. In 1995 at the Hoover Institute, chiefs of police from all over the nation attended a seminar, and around 90 percent said the “War on Drugs” wasn’t working.

Unanimously, they voted for a panel to be established to study it, but the federal government ignored all of this. I was at the National State Legislators Conference about 2 months ago, and 82 percent of the staffers, state Senators, and congressman that came by our table agreed with us.

Why do you think marijuana has not been legalized?

It’s all about the money. There’s a lot of money made off of the drug war. The pharmaceutical companies make money off of drug-testing kits. There is money from helicopters being made and sold to police squads. The military also uses a lot of their budget for the so-called “War on Drugs.” And there are countless so-called criminals who have to pay to get themselves out of jail.

–by Shara Clark

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

How a McCain Detour Cost Democrats the Tennessee Legislature

CREDIT: jb

(Note: this piece has been updated and slightly revised according to new information, some of which modifies the core story as first I heard it — or thought I heard it. The sharp-eyed pair of geniuses who detected a minor discrepancy or two and charged me with imbecility will be pleased. Thanks, guys!)

Here’s one for you out there in Political-Junkie-Land: When
the import of this disclosure hits, all of you will have a moment of breathless
awe – after which the Republicans among you will see the corners of your mouths
form the comic mask, while the Democrats will go tragic. Here’s the deal:
Tennessee’s legislature may have just gone Republican – with all that this
entails for the future of state and even national government – because of a purely inadvertent detour on John McCain’s part.

That’s right: an improvised flight plan on the part of the defeated
Republican presidential candidate is what turned the Tennessee General Assembly
fire-engine red.

Tennessee Republican National Committeeman John Ryder and I
did a joint review of the just-concluded campaign on Thursday to the members of
the Memphis and Shelby County Homebuilders group in Cordova. I had made the
point that the state House of Representatives would have remained Democratic –
though just barely, by 50-49 – had the state’s District 2 state House seat gone
to incumbent Democrat Nathan Vaughn rather than to Republican Tony Shipley, who
eked out an apparent victory by 1 percent.

In the last week of the campaign
Shipley had spurted past Vaughn, who only days before had led his GOP opponent
by 6 points in a reliable poll.

The turnabout, I pointed out, owed a great deal to the
last-minute visit to the district by McCain, who attracted a good deal of
attention in Sullivan County when he spoke there on Monday, election eve, after
landing at the Blountville, Tennessee, airport.

No less an observer than state
Republican chairperson Robin Smith has attributed a deluge of late votes in the
northeast Tennessee area to that visit.

Ryder added the surprise clincher on Thursday: Though,
like everybody else – including ultimate Democratic presidential winner Barack
Obama, who did not deign to visit Tennessee himself – McCain had conceded the
Volunteer State to the McCain-Palin ticket, the Republican standard-bearer was
deeply concerned about Virginia (which he ultimately lost, if narrowly) and
scheduled an impromptu election-eve visit to southwest Virginia.

Here’s where the gremlins come in, as Ryder explained. The
closest airport available for the Arizona senator’s campaign plane to land was
Blountville, and that’s where he set down – in Tennessee, not Bristol,
Virginia, just on the other side of the state line. Tennessee is where the
airport is for the divided city – not Virginia. The long and the short of it is
that McCain ended up doing a well-noted rah-rah speech in the home town of Tennessee’s Republican Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey – a visit that
greatly facilitated the Republicans’ climactic Get-Out-the-Vote effort in what
just happened to the second district of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

The result: a flip of the vote there, whereby the GOP’s
Shipley got his unexpected narrow win over Democrat Vaughn, and the Tennessee
Republicans had their first majority in the state House of Representatives
since Reconstruction – by that aforesaid bare majority of 50-49. Small as that
margin is, it precludes any real prospects of desperate maneuvers by longtime
Democratic House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh of Covington to keep his Speakership. The
next Speaker, it would seem, is going to be Jason Mumpower, the intensely
conservative GOP House leader from that same northeast corner of the state.

Not just that: the Republicans, who picked up enough seats
in the state Senate to make their previous one-vote edge there more comfortable
(19-14) will be able, through their domination of both houses, to decide who the
state’s constitutional officers will be: the Secretary of State, the
comptroller, the treasurer. The composition of the 95 county election
commissions in Tennessee – mandated by state law to be 3-2 in favor of the
majority party – will now be Republican-dominated, not Democratic-dominated.

If the current numbers hold when the next legislative
election in 2010 is concluded, the Republicans – greatly assisted by the
aforesaid Ryder, a gifted lawyer and one of the GOP’s arbiters on
reapportionment issues – will handle post-census redistricting, both for the
state legislature and for Tennessee’s nine congressional districts. Guess which
party is likely to enhance the number of its friendly districts?

But who knows? Maybe at some point between now and then
President Obama can be induced to make a timely visit or two to Tennessee,
giving Democratic cadres the same kind of boost that an errant John McCain did
on the GOP’s behalf on Monday, November 3, 2008.

Categories
Special Sections

Mr. Pizza — Mario DePietro

ac67/1242247710-mariopizzaman.jpg Nobody who dined at Mario’s Pizza Palace ever forgot it. The stone cottage at 3836 Park Avenue was sheathed in handmade signs, urging patrons to “Protect Your Health Now!” and “Eat Well and Forget Di-Gel!” Diners crammed themselves into two little front rooms and munched on baked pizza and ravioli, sipped wine from mayonnaise jars, and were serenaded — in Italian, no less — by the feisty owner himself, Mario DePietro.

So many stories were told about (and by) Mario that it’s hard to sort them out: He won the indoor bicycle races at Madison Square Garden in the 1920s. He personally delivered an airplane-shaped chicken (huh?) to Charles Lindbergh after his transatlantic flight. He — and he alone — brought pizza to America from his native Naples, Italy (and for years displayed the battered tub he carried on his head as he walked the streets of New York peddling them).

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Cohen, Blackburn, Alexander Win Big

In the true spirit of “The Purloined Letter,” the Poe story in which vital evidence was overlooked because it was right before the eye, the runaway wins of three congressional incumbents may have escaped proper notice.

Hence an overdue statement of the obvious. 9th District congressman Steve Cohen won big, so did 7th District congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, and so did U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander.

Although the Election Commission, all these hours after the polls closed, seems still to be having difficulty making numbers accessible, these are the relevant percentages:

Democrat Cohen demolished three opponents with nearly 88 percent of the vote; his closest runnerup among three self-styled “independents” was Jake Ford with 5 percent of the vote, eking out Dewey Clark and Mary Taylor Shelby Wright with 4 percent each.

Republican Blackburn overwhelmed her Democratic opponent, Randy Morris, by 71 percent to 29 percent, and Republican Alexander beat his Democratic challenger, Robert Tuke, 65 percent to 31 percent statewide. Alexander won all but one of Tennessee’s 95 counties, losing only Haywood County to Tuke though his margin of victory in Shelby County was narrow, only 50.75 percent to 46.67 percent.

A fourth incumbent, 8th District congressman John Tanner, a Democrat, was unopposed.