Month: November 2013

Fly on the Wall

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date November 21, 2013

Grand Divisions

“This ain’t no longer just a fight for snake handling. This is a fight for freedom of religion.” So said embattled pastor/snake handler Andrew

Hamblin who pleaded not guilty last week in front of a group of supporters wearing red to symbolize their gang affiliation or, as most media outlets described it, the “blood of Christ.” Hamblin, pastor of Tabernacle Church of God in LaFollette, Tennessee, and star of the reality show Snake Salvation, is fighting misdemeanor wildlife possession charges for keeping copperheads, rattlesnakes, and other poisonous snakes that pretty much every church-going soul living west of Nashville will reflexively behead with a shovel.

Memphis, England

Anglophenia, a BBC America blog chronicling “British Culture with an American Accent,” recently listed “10 Things British About Memphis.” A few of the choices make perfect sense, like the Tennessee Shakespeare Company, which is dedicated to staging the works of England’s most enduring dead playwright. The Memphis Cricket Club and the Peabody Hotel’s afternoon tea are both decidedly British, and the Brooks Museum’s Victorian “Crazy Quilt” is a pretty savvy choice. And then there’s number eight: the Memphis Geek Club Meet-up, which was chosen because “the group loves and celebrates all things in the Geekdom,” including Doctor Who, Lord of the Rings, and Monty Python.

To Booze

I’ve never seen the ghost of Elvis on Union Avenue, but I’m pretty sure this is a spirit photo of Joni Mitchell, who turned 70 earlier this month.

Happy birthday, Joni. And well played, Kimbrough!

Film Features Film/TV

Deep in the Heart

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date November 21, 2013

Even with six weeks to go, it’s safe to say 2013 is the best in film since 2003. Two offerings opening in Memphis this week — Dallas Buyers Club and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire — continue that trend.

Dallas Buyers Club is a true story based on the life and particulars of death of Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), a Texas bull rider who contracted the AIDS virus in the mid-1980s. The film starts in 1985. Rock Hudson is in the newspapers for having the deadly disease culturally thought of as a homosexual problem.

After an accident at work, Woodroof is taken to the hospital. The usual tests are run, but they come back with unusual results: He has tested positive for HIV. He doesn’t believe Drs. Saks and Sevard (Jennifer Garner at her most compassionate and Denis O’Hare), much less their prognosis that he has a month to live. “There ain’t nothing out there that can kill fucking Ron Woodruff in 30 days,” he says.

More than anything, Woodroof struggles with the news because he is not gay, as he tells everyone who knows his diagnosis. This usually comes out in some variation on, “I ain’t no faggot, motherfucker.” His temperament is so stabby because he’s a Texas cowboy, the apex of aggressive masculinity, who, we see through several early cock-and-bull scenes, rides the rodeo for fun, has a lot of sex with women, and can hold his liquor (and cocaine).

The first act follows Woodroof for those 30 days he’s been sentenced to, during which he loses all his friends, fights to be legitimately treated by the health-care industry, gives up and illegally procures the new drug AZT from a hospital orderly, and goes to Mexico to be treated by an expatriate physician, Dr. Vass (Griffin Dunne).

There, the doc tells Woodroof AZT is toxic and is killing him. Vass prescribes instead a battery of meds and dietary supplements not approved by the FDA but in common use elsewhere in the world. Woodroof gets better — not cured, of course, but not at death’s door. And he hatches a plot with Vass to get the medicine into the hands of other AIDS victims back home.

With the help of Rayon (Jared Leto), a transgender woman with AIDS, Woodroof organizes the Dallas Buyers Club, selling not drugs but memberships to a plan that consequently includes medicine. He makes an enemy of Sevard, whose patients are leaving traditional medical routes for the buyers club, and ultimately the FDA. Saks is in the moral middle ground. She believes in science but also wants health care to be more about cures than profit.

Director Jean-Marc Vallée tells the story with appreciated economy. The script (by Craig Borten, who interviewed Woodroof years ago, and Melisa Wallack) contains a few cutesy missteps. (“Screw the FDA, I’m going to be DOA.”) But Dallas Buyers Club is an exceptional film about living with severe illness, and considerably accessible considering the subject matter. The 80s must’ve sucked to live during as an adult.

Dallas Buyers Club‘s great success comes largely via McConaughey, who lost considerable weight for the part. McConaughey’s Woodroof is skin-and-bones rancor with a Dale Earnhardt mustache. His irascible, slow acceptance of others and then himself comes through in his relationship with Rayon. The film doesn’t overplay the odd-couple dynamic of the pair. Instead, it simmers, allowing the characters to get under each other’s skin and convey warmth and goodwill in nontraditional ways. Leto, too, is fantastic. Both will be showered with awards-season accolades.

Dallas Buyers Club

Opens Friday, November 22nd

Ridgeway Cinema Grill

Film Features Film/TV

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date November 21, 2013

The Hunger Games was a fun movie that had more going on thematically than you usually get from Hollywood spectacles ostensibly aimed at a YA audience. Plus, to quote my Flyer review, “the baseline lesson of The Hunger Games is don’t trust whitey, and I think that’s a good one to teach kids.”

The sequel, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, is thankfully cut from the same cloth. It starts a few months after the last ended. Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) is back home in Panem’s District 12 (American Appalachia). She still illegally hunts game, but her family is better off than they were at the beginning of the Hunger Games cycle. Now they all live, along with Katniss’ boy toy Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and mentor Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), in mansions in Victor’s Village, part of their prize for having won the Hunger Games. Katniss’ pal Gale (Liam Hemsworth) works in the coal mines, and they still have a chaste, platonic-plus relationship.

Katniss suffers from PTSD, which is intensified when she and Peeta are forced to go on a victory tour of Panem, including District 11 (the South), which we last saw in riot after the tragic death of their tribute, Rue. In Catching Fire, District 11 is illustrated with cotton fields and impoverished faces. The crowd demonstrates its appreciation for Katniss, but the Capitol stormtroopers see it as political defiance and murderously respond. It’s a horrifying, effective scene.

Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) — lord, these names — takes over as the head gamesmaker who wants to make the event mean something. Every 25 years, the Capitol throws a curve ball to remind the districts that they are subjugated. The dastardly twist in this year’s Hunger Games: It pits previous victors against each other, a sudden-death all-star game. So back into the fray goes Katniss, like a premise too profitable to quit.

Catching Fire is on surest ground when the games begin, contextualizing the entertainment value of the battle scenes for the real audience better than the first film did; you don’t really want any of these gladiators to die. Lawrence, Hutcherson, and Harrelson are all very good. Jena Malone and Sam Claflin stand out in smaller roles. And Stanley Tucci returns as the scenery-chewing showman Caesar, filling a role that might’ve otherwise gone to Robin Williams, for which I am thankful.

Director Francis Lawrence capably administers the film. The districts have a tactile griminess and despair, and the Capitol is portrayed as a neon techno-Rome, equally shrewd and vapid.

Catching Fire is a significant upgrade over the book. The script by a couple Oscar winners, Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt, does a better job balancing Katniss’ vulnerability and strength — the book settles on passive — and finds a satisfying gait for the fastidious romantic three-legged race. Here’s hoping the third film is a tactical victory over its own disappointing source material.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Opens Friday, November 22nd

Multiple locations

News

Beale Street’s Future

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date November 21, 2013

Toby Sells reports on the latest developments in the city of Memphis’ plans for Beale Street’s future.

News

Merry Schadenfreude!

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date November 21, 2013

Bruce VanWyngarden pokes a little fun at Rob Ford and the battlin’ Cheney clan.

Politics Politics Beat Blog

The Pre-K Debate: Costs Versus Effectiveness

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date November 21, 2013

CREDIT: courtesy of Fox 13

Flinn and Whalum debate the referendum at Rotary

courtesy of Fox 13
Flinn and Whalum debate the referendum at Rotary

“We have to pay for things we need and things that will improve our city. Pre-K is one of those things”: That was how Shea Flinn, co-sponsor with City Council colleague Jim Strickland of the 2014 half-cent sales-tax ballot initiative, began his climactic public appeal on Tuesday.

That was in a one-on-one debate format with the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr., a leading referendum opponent, before a Memphis Rotary Club luncheon audience at the University Club. Some 40-odd minutes later, in his conclusion, Whalum objected, “In what by any standard is the poorest big city in the United States, with one of the highest illiteracy rates, we must not further burden the children of our city and their parents.”

In the half-hour plus of dialogue that was book-ended by these remarks, the two main concepts embedded in the referendum were amply vented: the value to Memphis children of a proposed city-wide pre-Kindergarten program vis-à-vis the price taxpayers would have to pay for it.

Flinn emphasized the former, Whalum the latter. Flinn insisted that the referendum carried with it an “iron-clad guarantee” that the monies raised — somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars annually — would go into a touch-proof fund reserved primarily for pre-K and secondarily for property-tax reduction. Whalum responded that the language of the referendum focused not on pre-K but on the fact of a sales-tax increase, and that, he said, was what voters were being asked to cast their ballots for.

Flinn maintained that studies showed that pre-K was beneficial and would yield long-term economic results and that every dollar spent would “give you five dollars back.” Whalum said the proposed half-cent sales-tax increase was regressive, a further indignity heaped upon the poor, and that opponents of the referendum, like himself, were “for pre-K,” but “against this means of paying for it.”

Whalum was not all that sure what the various studies of pre-K had shown, for that matter, suggesting that claims of lasting benefits, especially beyond the third grade, were “unproven.” And, for his part, Flinn insisted that property taxes, the other basic financing method available, was perhaps as regressive for Memphians as the sales tax, especially since tourists and people who lived elsewhere but worked in Memphis helped pay the latter.

In a variety of ways and by various yardsticks, the two weighed advantages against costs. Pointed but thoughtful, their thrusts and counter-thrusts were a recapitulation in miniature of a longer, more wide-ranging and often more boisterous debate held the night before, in the presence of a lively crowd at the Hooks Main Library.

That one had been between Whalum and Barbara Prescott, the former Memphis school board member who had most recently headed up the Transition Planning Commission created by the legislature to advise on city-county school merger. And, however different in kind (and volume) it might have been from the Rotary debate, the problem discussed was essentially the same — that of costs versus value received.

There were — and are —numerous ways of carrying out such an evaluation, and essentially the city-wide debate, which has heated up seriously within the last two weeks, has taken place between those poles. The Memphians who go to the polls on Thursday, adding their judgment to those already cast by early voters, will determine to which side of the equation the pendulum tilts.

Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

A Visit to Soul Fish’s New Location

Post author By Hannah Anderson
Post date November 20, 2013

Soul Fish Café’s third location, at 4720 Poplar in the building previously occupied by Wolf Camera, opened its doors for business on November 14th.

The new Soul Fish has a simple, comfortable interior similar to the Midtown and Germantown locations. It has about double the seating capacity of the Midtown Soul Fish and about a dozen fewer seats than the Germantown location. The open floor plan, bare cement floor, and white wood-paneled walls make it feel like you are dining in a fish market in a small coastal town (minus the fishy stench).

I visited the new location on Sunday night with two family members. There is a large chalkboard listing the daily specials and dessert options, and same as the two other locations, Soul Fish’s regulaar menu features salads, po’boys, fish tacos, fried seafood, and a bunch of home-style vegetables and side items, among other offerings.

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I ordered one of the night’s two specials: grilled Idaho rainbow trout. I was not disappointed. The fish was tender and perfectly seasoned, and the hushpuppies that come standard with Soul Fish’s seafood dishes were delicious as always. My biggest challenge was choosing which side item to order, as my entrée came with just one. I chose the macaroni and cheese, which was a creamy, hearty addition to the lighter grilled fish.

Not ones to ever pass up dessert, we split a slice of the coconut cake, after a drawn-out discussion of whether to order it or the pecan pie. I think we chose wisely. The dense, moist cake had a fresh coconut flavor that was not overpowering.

Memphis Gaydar News

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Post author By Bianca Phillips
Post date November 20, 2013

Today (November 20th) is the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, when candlelight vigils across the country are held to honor transgender victims of violence.

Perpetual Transition, the Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center’s transgender support group, will hold a local vigil tonight at First Congregational Church at 7 p.m. Names of victims will be read, and there will be speakers.

Perhaps the most well-known local transgender violence victim was Duanna Johnson, the transgender woman who was beaten and called demeaning names by former Memphis Police officer Bridges McRae in 2008 after he had arrested her on alleged prostitution charges. Johnson was found dead from a gunshot wound in North Memphis later that year.