Month: December 2008

Categories
Music Music Features

SNAP! Honors Isaac

When the great Isaac Hayes passed away in August, it was an enormous loss for the city of Memphis, but few corners of the city felt the loss as intensely as that little patch along East McLemore that is the heart of a place called “Soulsville.”

The former location of Stax Records — which Hayes helped build into a cultural titan, first as a session player and songwriter, later as the label’s signature recording artist — is now home to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and the Stax Music Academy. The former is home to Hayes’ gold-plated Cadillac, among other artifacts. The latter, which educates and mentors local kids via the music that provided so many original Stax artists with a better, fuller life, is home to his spirit.

Hayes was an early supporter of the Soulsville Foundation, which operates the museum and academy, along with, now, the Soulsville Charter School. And he was on the foundation’s Board of National Ambassadors from 2005 until his death.

Now, this week, Soulsville pays tribute by honoring Hayes with its SNAP! After School Winter Concert, dubbed “Go Down Moses: A Tribute to Isaac Hayes.”

The SNAP! After School program mentors local high school students through music education and performance opportunities. With this year’s annual winter concert, the kids will present a musical journey through Hayes’ life and career, with a set list expected to include such Hayes-written or -recorded gems as “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” “Walk On By,” “Never Can Say Goodbye,” “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” and “Theme From Shaft.”

And they’ll have some help. Academy artist-in-residence Kirk Whalum, a Memphis native and celebrated jazz and gospel saxophonist, will join the kids, as will R&B vocalist Dave Hollister (formerly of Blackstreet), former Bar-Kay Ben Cauley, local jazz/soul guitarist Gary Goin, and members of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. Also on the bill is the Soulsville Symphony Orchestra, a rhythm and string orchestra from the Soulsville Charter School.

In addition to honoring Hayes in musical form, Soulsville will give a posthumous presentation of its first Soul Circle Award, designed to honor someone in the music field who has “exhibited the qualities and characteristics that are integral to the Soulsville Foundation’s vision of celebrating music and empowering youth through creativity and education.” Hayes’ old songwriting partner, David Porter, will accept the award on his behalf.

The idea for the award preceded Hayes’ death, but the magnitude of his loss left little doubt who the first recipient should be.

“Isaac’s style and genius made him a living embodiment of everything that made Memphis so unique and special,” Marc E. Willis, President and CEO of the Soulsville Foundation said. “He was one of the earliest supporters of our mission of serving Memphis youth through music and performance.”

The SNAP! Winter Concert takes place at 7 p.m. Thursday, December 18th, at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre. Tickets are $10, with reserved tickets available exclusively at the Stax Museum Gift Shop. For more information, see StaxMusicAcademy.org.

BMA Noms Announced

The Blues Foundation has announced nominees for the 30th annual Blues Music Awards, set to take place on May 7th at the Cook Convention Center in Memphis. West Coast-based band the Mannish Boys lead the way with six nominations. Among the nominees with strong local connections is Greenville, Mississippi’s Eden Brent (who records for the Memphis-based Yellow Dog label), who is up for acoustic album and artist of the year and best new artist debut. In the later category, she’ll compete with north Mississippi upstarts Cedric Burnside & Lightnin’ Malcolm and locals Delta Highway. Among instrumentalists, Brent is up for best pianist, Burnside for best drummer, and Memphis stalwart Billy Gibson for best harmonica player. See Blues.org/BluesMusicAwards for more information.

Categories
Special Sections

Rudy Williams

CREDIT: Courtesy Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau

For years, 67-year-old trumpeter Rudy Williams, known as both the “Ambassador of Beale” and the “Mayor of Beale Street,” has performed for tourists and passersby on Memphis’ world-renowned street. Williams has been quoted as saying, “I just want to keep a part of what used to be on Beale Street alive today.” These days, he toots his horn in front of King’s Palace Café. He greets travelers, tells jokes and stories, and serenades onlookers with Memphis blues, trumpet-style. Williams, a longtime Beale Street fixture, has been honored with a brass note on Beale’s Walk of Fame.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Face to Face

I have 146 friends. And counting.

Of course, some of my friends are people I’ve never met. Some of my friends are actually my family. And some of my closest friends aren’t my friends at all.

Such is the nature of Facebook, a social networking site that allows users to “connect and share with the people in your life.” (And, though Facebook doesn’t advertise this, people who aren’t in your life. Yet. But they will be.)

I got into Facebook via my sister. She spent last summer in Europe, and her camera was stolen early in her trip. To see her photos, purloined from her friends’ cameras, one just needed to log onto Facebook.

There’s a lot to like about Facebook. There’s the photo sharing that initially drew me in. You can see what your friends are doing or thinking about, if they’re in a relationship, and exactly how old they really are. To the day. Heck, West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin reportedly even has a deal to make a movie about it.

(The thing where people “tag,” or identify, you in a horrible photo and inevitably all your “friends” see it before you can untag yourself — that I like less. And whatever you do, don’t comment on those bad pictures or you bring extra attention to them.)

All its features aside, Facebook makes something explicit I’ve long thought: Memphis is one giant small town.

Ever since logging in, I find myself having conversations with friends, acquaintances, and yes, family members that concentrate on one central question: “Do you know so-and-so? They just friended me, and I saw they were your friend, too.”

It’s the social networking equivalent of a cop canvassing the neighborhood. Only they’re trying to figure out how, or if, you both know this person.

When a friend and I replayed a version of this conversation a few days ago, I was once again struck by what a tightly woven community Memphis is, even before the worldwide web.

She asked me about one of my Facebook friends, because she was wondering if he was one of these people who friends everyone their friends are friends with.

I said I didn’t know but told her what I could about him. It turned out she had been friends with him in high school and thought that he had friended me through her.

Last week, I walked into a coffee shop to interview someone I had never met. I saw a person who was about the right age, the right gender, and she had a copy of the Flyer on her table. She looked up as I approached, so I asked her if she was the person I was meeting.

She wasn’t. But then I realized that I knew her anyway, in part because her face always pops up on my “People You May Know” feature on Facebook.

I’ve long had this idea to link Memphians with a cluster diagram, such as: Blair is married to Chuck, who worked with Nate, whose sister is Serena, who was in a book club with Veronica, who started an advocacy group with Blair.

Or: Brenda used to work with Kelly, who then worked on a project with Steve, who teaches at the University of Memphis, where Brendan goes to school, and Brendan is cousins with Dylan, who dated Brenda.

Once you start looking at the connections, it can be a veritable soap opera.

I mean, if it take six degrees of separation to connect everyone in the world, it probably only takes one or two to link everyone in Memphis.

The irony is that, for all the connections, I often think of Memphis as a bifurcated city. For starters, there is our joint government, which makes people choose between city interests and county ones.

Though legal segregation ceased long ago, self-segregation still exists. There seem to be two Memphises, divided along color lines. I think it’s gotten better since I first moved here, and certainly initiatives like Wendi Thomas’ Common Ground are helping, but you can still see the division in restaurants, churches, and meetings.

And in a town as small as Memphis, that seems like a big problem.

Categories
Art Art Feature

The Majors

Impressionism: Barbizon Paintings from the Walters Art Museum” at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens is an elegant exhibition rich in insight regarding how a loose-knit group of friends, known as the Barbizon painters, impacted the way we look at art.

All the key players are here: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Gustave Courbet, Jules Breton, and Rosa Bonheur, one of the most noted female painters of the 19th century.

Because Corot and the other Barbizon painters wanted to experience nature up close and personal rather than filtered through the mists of time or the noble deeds of the powerful, they fled a sooty, fetid, politically unstable Paris for Barbizon, a tiny village bordering 45,000 acres of wilderness known as the Forest of Fontainebleau. With sometimes loose and spontaneous brushwork, they attempted to capture the ever-shifting patterns of atmosphere and light in Fontainebleau’s ancient woods, rocky gorges, and marshy flatlands.

There are elements of Romanticism and classicism in Souvenir of Grez-sur-Loing, Corot’s serene, soft-edged, silver-toned painting of a medieval church and stone bridge, while Rousseau’s large, looming masterwork The Frost Effect pulls us into a wide expanse of frozen fields north of Paris. The horizon, directly ahead, is nearly black. Above us, windswept, golden-red clouds race like flames across the sky. Rousseau’s staccato brushwork allows us to feel as well as see nature’s immense energy and the sharp edges of the frozen earth.

In between the serene, silver tones of Romanticism and the light-filled landscapes of the Impressionists, Rousseau and the rest of the Barbizon painters forged a vision that brought them face to face with an implacably fierce and beautiful world.

Through January 11th

The comprehensive, beautifully mounted exhibition “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero,” at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, explores the genius of a sometimes misunderstood South American master best known for his oversized human figures that speak of the exuberance, the excesses, and ultimately the indomitability of the human spirit.

The 100 paintings, drawings, and bronzes selected from Botero’s extensive private collection include many of his masterworks, such as the frighteningly expressive 1959 painting, Boy from Vallecas, in which the features of a dead child appear to dissolve and flow down his misshapen face.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Souvenir of Grez-sur-Loing (ca. 1865-70);

The thin line between ripeness and rot is signified by the tiny worm that has eaten its way to the surface of Botero’s massive, pulpy, pale-green 1976 painting titled Pear.

Botero transforms a brothel in a small provincial town in his 2001 painting The House of Marta Pintuco into a memento mori and morality tale by introducing, at the far right, a cross-eyed baby sitting on the floor, unattended. Far left, an old woman, with a poignant expression of wistfulness and regret, looks through an almost closed door at the prostitutes and their clients eating, drinking, smoking, sleeping, and taking turns lovemaking.

Botero’s 2004 graphite drawing A Mother compresses into one image the terror and violence in Botero’s homeland, Colombia, a country torn apart by drug wars and extreme political factions since the 1960s. In this work, a woman lifts her child, throws back her head, and wails.

Trapped by pomp and circumstance, puffed up with self-importance, and dressed in the full regalia of royalty, the princess Margarita inflates to the point of bursting in Botero’s signature painting After Velazquez.

Some of Botero’s largest, most profound, and sensual works stand in front of the museum. The one-ton, seven-foot-tall bronze The Rape of Europa reenvisions the myth of the maiden raped by the god. Instead of whisking Europa away against her will, in Botero’s version of the story, Jupiter, who has transformed himself into a bull, stands powerful, patient, and ready. Europa caresses the bull’s rump with her left hand, strokes her own hair with her right hand, and twists in the direction of Botero’s nearly 12-foot- long Smoking Woman whose mounds of Rubenesque flesh look as soft as the bedding on which she lies.

Nearby is the 10-foot-tall bronze sculpture Hand with beautifully shaped, slightly bent fingers that appear to caress the air. This could be Botero’s ingenious portrait of himself as well as all painters/sculptors who sense the world with their fingers as well as their eyes.

Sunlight plays across the polished peaks and valleys of all these bronze forms. Their green and golden-brown patinas are earthier and more sensual than the paler, porcelain complexions of Botero’s paintings. Surprisingly, these huge metal sculptures are some of the most electrically charged, alive works of Botero’s career.

Through January 11th

Fernando Botero, The Rape of Europa (1999)

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Third World Fairy Tale

Slumdog Millionaire opens on the precipice of a climax: Gangly 18-year-old “tea boy” Jamal (Dev Patel) sits in the crosshairs of the Indian version of the television game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?. He is one question away from the game’s ultimate prize of 20 million rupees, and the game’s producers break to let anticipation build overnight — and to investigate how an uneducated kid could have gotten so far.

“What the hell can a slum dog possibly know?” a Mumbai police interrogator asks in between actions the Bush administration would no doubt label “harsh interrogation techniques.”

How Jamal, a street urchin turned low-level laborer, could have advanced so far is the mystery of the movie, and four possible explanations are offered: “lucky,” “cheated,” “genius,” “it is written.”

Back in the police office after the rough stuff has done no good, Slumdog Millionaire moves into a pleasing double-helix structure, intertwining dual flashback sequences — Jamal’s hardscrabble life story and his unlikely question-by-question negotiation of the game — around his police interrogation, linking the two by showing just how Jamal came to know all the answers. (For instance, when Jamal knows the name of an Indian cinema action star, we see how, as a child, Jamal fought through excrement to get his autograph.)

There’s plenty of memorable material here, as cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle follows kids through Mumbai’s garbage-strewn slums, pulling up from street level to show the vastness of the jagged jumble of corrugated tin-roof shacks. This beginning to Jamal’s childhood story hints at a Dickensian aspect that takes full flower when Jamal and his brother — alone on the streets after their mother is killed in an anti-Muslim raid — are scooped up by a local Fagin and taken to an orphanage of sorts that turns out to be the headquarters of a begging operation. Here, some children are blinded with hot liquid, because “blind singers earn double.”

Though this makes for a memorable journey — bits like Jamal and his brother scamming Western tourists at the Taj Mahal — Slumdog always feels artificial. British director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) doesn’t have a feel for this kind of crowded, destitute, modern setting, which some other contemporary filmmakers — Mira Nair in Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding, Fernando Meirelles in City of God — have brought to similar material.

Or maybe that’s not what he wants. Slumdog Millionaire is essentially a Third World pop fairy tale. It reminds me a little of Kung Fu Hustle, another movie everyone loved but me. It’s got a crackerjack title and an interesting premise, but the final product is not quite as lively or original as it sounds. The plotting becomes increasingly conventional as the two narrative strands move toward a dual climax, and the end result is so formulaic that it’s hard to work up a suitable emotional investment.

Slumdog Millionaire

Opening Friday, December 19th

Ridgeway Four

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Just Like Home

CREDIT: by Justin Fox Burks

Push open the front door to Fork It Over Gourmet Market in Cooper-Young, and the place feels like home. Whimsical animal paintings hang on warm gold walls, and the oak floors are clean and glossy.

Walk past the fireplace to the next room, and the bungalow gets even better: Dinner is waiting — not just one choice, but a delicious assortment of entrées, side dishes, and desserts. Cod poached in spicy tomato broth with green olives? (It’s yours.) Gouda mashed potatoes or baked fennel with Parmesan? (They’re vegetables. They must be healthy.) Dark chocolate cake with lime curd? (Go ahead. Live a little.)

While Fork It Over is new to the neighborhood, dozens of families already know about Michelle Campbell‘s home-cooked meals. She’s been catering for two years, as well as preparing and delivering dinners ordered online from an eclectic menu that changes weekly. Last month, Campbell opened her retail location on Young Avenue, selling hostess gifts, picnic accessories, frozen soups, and gourmet dinners to go.

“I’m trying to offer food that people recognize but with a new twist, like chipotle mac and cheese,” Campbell says. “I want to provide a solution for dinner that is healthy and affordable.”

Day to day, the market schedule works like this: On Sunday, Campbell e-mails her new menu to customers and posts it online. Typically, she offers four entrées, six side dishes, appetizers, and desserts. An entrée and two sides cost $12.50 per person.

On Mondays, Campbell cooks like crazy in a refurbished commercial kitchen provided, in part, by the Thomas Boggs family. “My stove and refrigerator came from their catering kitchen,” says Campbell, who worked for Huey’s as a part-time bookkeeper during college at CBU. “I can’t say enough about how generous the family has been to me.”

By Tuesdays, the freshly prepared food is ready for purchase at Fork It Over or delivery to homes and businesses. On Friday, any food left in the case is sold for half-price because the business is closed Saturday and Sunday.

“We clean out the case by the end of the week,” Campbell says, “and, usually, we end up feeding our neighbors.”

Fork It Over Gourmet Market, 2299 Young, Tuesday through Friday, 10:30 a.m. to

6:30 p.m., forkitovercatering.com

(832-2190)

Farther east, on Wheelis Drive, another young entrepreneur is whipping together meals for people who are too busy to cook.

With help from four part-timers, Bradford Williams prepares dozens of casseroles that are then frozen and sold on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “We make family-friendly food, and we have a drive-through window,” says Williams, owner of Curb Side Casseroles. “It can’t get any easier than that.”

Although Williams has been cooking since she was a youngster (her dad owned a small restaurant in Millington called the Pampered Pig), her fondness for casseroles came about by a catering request to make Christmas gifts for the faculty at Hutchison School.

“They wanted to send casseroles home with each teacher, so I agreed to make three or four different kinds,” Williams recalls. “After that, people wouldn’t stop calling asking for more.”

At first, Williams cooked from her home but later moved to a church kitchen as demand for her casseroles grew. By mid-summer, she was converting a garage near the Racquet Club into a commercial kitchen, where she now cooks six different casseroles, garlic French bread, spaghetti sauce, and homemade sweet pickles.

So why are casseroles so popular? “Convenience and taste,” Williams says. “They are an easy alternative to going out to eat.”

William’s casseroles (in three sizes) are an updated spin on classic favorites: black bean and spinach enchiladas, chicken spaghetti, and breakfast combo with sausage and egg. She mixes up her menu with holiday surprises (blueberry French toast casserole for Christmas morning!) and a weekly special.

“Last week, our special was chicken pot pies made with sweet potatoes,” Williams says. “We were sold out by 2 o’clock.”

Curb Side Casseroles, 5130 Wheelis,

Tuesday and Thursday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.,

curbsidecasseroles.com (761-0287)

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Let Them Eat Pie

CREDIT: by Justin Fox Burks

Ivory Winfield was a beautician for 31 years — a beautician famous for her tasty sweet-potato pie. Everyone was always asking her to bake them pies and cakes. So three years ago, she sold her house and used half of the money to convert her beauty salon in Orange Mound into Grandma’s Desserts, Etc.

“I knew I knew more about cooking than I did about doing hair,” Winfield says.

Grandma’s is pick-up and delivery only. The sweet-potato pie is Grandma’s number-one item, selling more than 100 at Thanksgiving. Other pies on the menu — ranging in price from $11 to $35 — include pecan, honey walnut, chess, and turtle cheesecake. Cupcakes are $12 a dozen (try the Italian cream), and among the options for cakes ($22 to $35) are red velvet, German chocolate, and caramel.

The “Etc.” is an important part of Grandma’s. Winfield offers jalapeno cornbread, lasagna, dressing, and other non-dessert items, selling from $5 to $40.

Winfield opened Grandma’s for her family.

“She wanted to leave a legacy for her grandkids,” says Elnora Johnson, one of Winfield’s five children. Elnora, along with her three sisters, splits her time between baking and doing hair at the family-owned Chaparral Salon on Winchester. Elnora laughs and says, “We were all doing hair, and then we just got thrown into Grandma’s Desserts.”

by Justin Fox Burks

Winfield’s 12 grandkids, ranging in age from 5 to 41, also help out. “Some are in college and some have other jobs, but they all work here at one time or another,” Winfield says. The older kids mastered the recipes while growing up, and the others are learning. Those who don’t cook help out in other ways. Winfield’s 5-year-old granddaughter often helps by sweeping the floor. “She wears a cap just like the rest of us,” Winfield says proudly.

Ryan Johnson, Elnora’s 18-year-old son, had been taking phone orders and washing dishes for the past three years when he was recently promoted. “I made my first sweet-potato pie about two weeks ago,” he boasts. Ryan explains that one day there were no dishes to do so he offered to cut the pies. (His grandma has a special way of cutting them.) Winfield was impressed. Since then, she’s let him try a few of her easier recipes.

“I don’t cook fancy,” Winfield says. “I cook regular, old-fashioned food just like my mama did 50 years ago.” All of the recipes used at Grandma’s Desserts are Winfield’s or her mother’s.

Elnora credits the bakery’s success to word-of-mouth and their booth at the Memphis Farmers Market downtown, where they sell a variety of cakes and pies by the slice, brownies, cookies, and an assortment of other delights. “We did great,” Elnora says. “It’s really helped business.”

Winfield says she feels confident that her family could carry on without her. But she’s not going anywhere just yet. “She’s very active,” says Elnora. “She does more than I do.”

Winfield still does hair at least one day a week and also sits with elderly people at night. But her favorite thing to do is to cook. Being surrounded by family makes it even more enjoyable. “When we’re all cooking, I tell everyone to turn off their cell phones and let the [business] phone ring,” she says.

Don’t worry, though: Winfield says they always check their messages.

Grandma’s Desserts, Etc.

3108 Park (458-2197 or 292-7990)

grandmasdesserts.com

by Justin Fox Burks

‘I don’t cook fancy. I cook regular.’ says Ivory Winfield.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

It’s not fair! And I don’t care who that moron was

who first said, “Life isn’t fair.” I’m saying IT IS NOT FAIR THAT IT’S

NOT FAIR. Wait. That might have been Joan Crawford talking to her daughter Christina about always beating her at the swimming matches, in which case she was right. But damn it, it is not fair! Why does an Iraqi

journalist get to throw his shoes at George W. Bush and we can’t? If someone did that here, it would be an act of treason or something and the shoe thrower would be under the ground in a hidden bunker scarily close to Dick Cheney for the rest of his life. There’s probably something in the so-called Patriot Act that would allow for an American citizen who threw shoes at George to rot away forever in a secret place with no legal defense. No, wait … That would be Guantanamo Bay and he would be locked up with everyone else who has ever made it to that list and has never had a shot at a legal defense.

Readers, have you ever seen the film The Bad Seed? One of the best lines in it from the evil little murderer girl is, “LEROY! You’d better give me those shoes!!!!” She said this because she had used them to kill a little boy who beat her in the spelling contest. All of this seems eerily related somehow. George and the little psychotic girl and both of them stomping around demanding their way? It’s all coming together now. Except that the bad little girl is much more articulate. And, sigh, at the end of the film she gets struck by lightning rather than retiring to a tacky subdivision in Dallas. But back to the shoes and the man who threw them … That about sums up Bush’s eight years in office — like sheer poetry. Invade a country that has done nothing to ours; kill, bomb, maim, and torture hundreds of thousands of people, including women and children; tell the people you are coming to liberate them and then occupy and destroy their country; in the process, bankrupt the United States and cause a global financial meltdown; suffer the worst popularity ratings of any president in the history of this country; never apologize for or admit to making mistakes; put your party so far in the tank that they lose the White House; and then make a “final surprise visit” to the country you’ve destroyed and have a journalist hurl his shoes at your face while you are standing at a microphone expecting to be asked questions about all the good you have done.

It’s too bad Condoleezza Rice wasn’t there, so someone who lost everything during Hurricane Katrina could have pelted her with a pair. And they could have blasted Dick Cheney in the face with some shoes that they were really trying to throw at ducks or whatever it was he was hunting for when he shot that guy.

I think that after the election I was so relieved that my mind just turned to mush — or more to mush than it already was — and I ALMOST started to feel sorry for George because he has been such a miserable failure that I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be in his shoes (ha ha!) for the rest of his life. But now it’s starting to sink in that his entire regime is now going to be going away and there’s good reason why he’s probably not going to get the book deals and massive support for his presidential library and even better reasons why he won’t be out there making millions on the public and private speaking circuit. He can’t thread two coherent sentences together. You would think that after eight years of being the president, and being married to a former school teacher, he would have made some kind of progress somewhere along the way, but it just didn’t happen. It scares me to know that we have to wait until January 20th, when he and his minions are finally shown the door. Not that things are going to change overnight, but at least he’ll be out of sight and not causing so much damage that foreign journalists are throwing shoes at him. Bless that journalist’s soles.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Seven Pounds doomed by labored premise.

Seven Pounds opens with a trembling, tearful Will Smith calling 911 to report a suicide — his own. The rest of the film pulls back to show how his character — an apparent U.S. Treasury agent named Ben Thomas — got to that point.

The film’s high-concept screenplay, courtesy of television veteran Grant Nieporte, is the worst kind of artificial, labored, only-in-the-movies scenario, the most preposterous bits hard to pick apart without giving away the mystery at the core of the film. It is not dependent on a gimmicky twist ending as much as on a gee-wiz, would-be inspirational but ultimately downbeat premise that is revealed gradually. The whole story — rooted in a tragic auto accident in Ben’s past and some rather odd present-day behavior toward a motley crew of beleaguered strangers — only comes into focus, ostensibly, in the film’s final passages, though I suspect attentive viewers will have most of it figured out by the midway point.

The film is so driven by its cascading revelations that there’s no chance of truly rising above what’s on the page, but director Gabriele Muccino and star Smith do a better job of shaping this into a watchable movie than you might expect.

Smith and Muccino previously worked together on 2006’s The Pursuit of Happyness, which, like Seven Pounds, was a kind of male weepie in which Smith played a damaged man plagued by some serious family problems. I liked The Pursuit of Happyness more than most critics — much more, really — because I thought its portrait of poverty was more detailed, more harrowing, and more spot-on than any Hollywood film in memory. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mainstream film that made the viewer so palpably aware of the value of a dollar to someone who doesn’t have many.

Seven Pounds doesn’t give Muccino and Smith nearly as much real-world material with which to work. The star/director duo give the film a gravity it would not earn in lesser hands, but the lingering pleasures are surely much more incidental than intended in a film driven by such a Big Idea.

The casting is haphazard. Woody Harrelson is awkward as Ezra, a blind salesman Ben berates over the phone, while Barry Pepper never does come into focus as a childhood friend helping Ben with his mysterious plan. Michael Ealy is terrific casting as Ben’s younger brother, but his role is too small. What the film does get right, and what almost makes the movie work in spite of itself, is casting Rosario Dawson as the principal object of Ben’s initially unexplained interest.

Smith and Dawson grow into a film couple that not only looks amazing together but have such charm that you yearn for movie-world wish-fulfillment to triumph over the film’s grim fidelity to its premise and let them have a cheaper, sunnier ending. Their connection is touching despite the heavy-lifting script manipulations that go into it. But it isn’t quite enough to save Seven Pounds.

Seven Pounds

Opening Friday, December 19th

Multiple locations

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

If the Shoe Fits, Throw It!

“This is a farewell kiss, dog,” shouted Al Baghdadia television reporter Muntadar al-Zaidi, while hurling his brogans Sunday in the general direction of America’s worst-ever president.

A relatively harmless gesture, yes, but a sweet one for millions of Iraqis, not to mention for hundreds of millions of other residents of planet Earth who, for nearly a decade now, have yearned for a nonviolent means of expressing their intense displeasure at the United States, because we’ve been governed by a mindless incompetent for eight ugly years.

But now that our long national nightmare of neocon nonsense is within weeks of ending, perhaps it’s time to congratulate Muntadar for setting the tone for the George W. Bush post-presidency.

Ah, and such a time that will be! With the complete sangfroid of the idiot non-savant that he is, always has been, and always shall be, the Decider joked about Muntadar’s shoe being a size 10, unaware, perhaps, that A) size doesn’t matter, and B) the die has been cast, and that he now has a special kind of foot-fetish future ahead of him on the hustings.

Remember the president’s famous “replenish the ol’ coffers” line in Robert Draper’s 2007 Dead Certain bio? Well, happily, Mr. Bush will now have more to put in that treasure chest than just dollars. Maybe he can cut a deal with Nike.

I suspect the Secret Service has a difficult task ahead of itself, one way or the other, as our immediate past president hits the road determined to make some real bucks. For wherever he goes on the post-presidential speaking-tour circuit, George W. Bush will have to duck for his supper as well as sing for it. Will his speaking tours require event organizers to tell attendees that they can only turn up at Bush-retrospective events if they come barefoot?

It’s no fun, but if and when you get hit between the eyes with a shoe, you hardly can call yourself a victim of armed assault. Yes, you’ll have a bigger shiner than if you were hit similarly with a cream pie, but the effect is more or less identical. The intent of the perps, in both cases, is to humiliate the recipient of their missiles, not injure them. The person “pied” or “shoed” is in no way maimed or incapacitated — rather, trivialized.

And has there ever been a public figure in American life more deserving of trivialization than George W. Bush? Has anyone ever been more worthy of complete humiliation on the public stage?

I think not. I do hope there’s a Herbert Hoover family reunion somewhere this holiday season, so that the descendants of our ill-fated 31st president can celebrate his escape from the moldy basement where the reputation of the “worst president of all time” historically gets put to rest. Someone should tell them to turn off the lights and move upstairs, before the celebration gets out of hand.

Poor W. There are an awful lot of shoes in his future.

Kenneth Neill is the founding publisher of the Memphis Flyer.