The best part of the season for Kevin, which was the Spurs series.
The best part of the season for Phil: the two 6-game win streaks, and Vince Carter’s season.
The playoffs were Mike Conley’s national coming out party.
The worst part of the season for Phil: Lackadaisical Marc Gasol, and also losing to the Spurs because of lackadaisical Marc Gasol.
What to make of Gasol playing Eurobasket again
The worst part of the season for Kevin: Chandler Parsons’ 20-minute rehab starts.
Will Parsons ever play in a Grizzlies uniform?
A shoutout to Vince Carter’s age-defying 40th year.
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Music Video Monday was saddened by the news last week that director Jonathan Demme passed away at age 72.
Jonathan Demme (1944-2017) with Denzel Washington on the set of Philadelphia.
Demme was a 22 year-old film publicist when he had a fateful run-in with Francois Truffaut, in which the legendary French New Wave director encouraged him to switch careers and go behind the camera. In 1971, he got a break from Roger Corman’s low-budget production unit to direct movies about bikers and women in prison (the infamous Caged Heat). Over the course of a 46-year career, he would become the first director to ever win Best Picture for a horror movie with Silence of the Lambs (which is also one of only three films to complete the Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress trifecta.) His next film, Philadelphia, won Tom Hanks his first Best Actor Oscar.
Demme’s love for film was only equaled by his love for music. The movie that first brought him mainstream recognition was 1984’s Stop Making Sense, a documentary about the Talking Heads’ tour that today is recognized as the greatest concert film ever made. Unlike Woodstock, which split the focus between the multitude of performers on the stage and the cultural revolution going on in the crowd, Stop Making Sense is an intimate portrait of a band at work. In the film’s celebrated opening, David Byrne wanders out onto an incomplete stage and declares “I’ve got a tape I want to play.”
Music Video Monday Special Edition: Jonathan Demme (4)
The Talking Heads’ most famous song “Once In A Lifetime” was named as one of the most important musical works of the Twentieth Century by NPR and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But upon its initial release in 1981, it baffled American audiences, and didn’t even crack the Billboard Hot 100. Byrne’s vocals were inspired by listening to AM radio preachers as the band toured America, and in Stop Making Sense, Demme expertly revealed the song’s origins. In a single, unbroken 4 minute 34 second shot, the camera starts out on keyboardist Bernie Worrell before panning down to Byrne, who sings in an ecstatic, Pentecostal trance. Then Demme cuts to a slightly different angle, revealing a five-shot of Byrne, Worrell, Jerry Harrison, Lynn Mabury, and Ednah Holt arranged against black like a Caravaggio portrait. In all, there are four shots in five and a half minutes. No other moment in his storied career reveal Demme’s deft touch, his loving fascination with the human form, and his unerring instinct for marrying music and image. It was this performance, one of the greatest ever captured on film, that made “Once In A Lifetime” the classic it is today.
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in 1985, Demme directed two music videos. The first was for postpunk standard bearers New Order. Like Stop Making Sense, it concentrated on the process of musical creation, but instead of a thousand-seat theater in Los Angeles, the band is gathered in an anonymous studio recording “The Perfect Kiss” while only the director and the engineer looks on.
Music Video Monday Special Edition: Jonathan Demme (2)
Demme’s other 1985 video was “Sun City”. The fight against apartheid in South Africa was on top of the mind for many young people in the mid-80s, and E-Street Band guitarist Stephen Van Zandt helped organize an artist’s boycott of the South African resort Sun City. To call attention to the protest, he produced a star-studded song along the lines of “We Are The World”. Rarely heard these days, the hip hop inflected “Sun City” is clearly the best of the big benefit singles of the era, featuring verses from Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash, Afrikka Bambaataa, as well as Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffan from the Temptations, Hall and Oates, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and, of course, the ubiquitous Bono. Demme’s video is a great little slice of 80s analog video cheese.
Music Video Monday Special Edition: Jonathan Demme
Demme would continue to work with his favorite musicians throughout his career, including making three documentaries about Neil Young. His final film has a Memphis connection. Justin Timberlake + Tennessee Kids, a chronicle of the last night of the singer’s latest tour, earned a rare 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s been a huge hit for Netflix, who produced it, and is currently for offer in its entirety on the streaming service. It’s a fitting epitaph for Demme, who, more than any other director of his or any other era, understood musicians and loved the music.
Music Video Monday Special Edition: Jonathan Demme (5)
For 23 years, my parents threw the finest Kentucky Derby party in New England. This was their way — as native Tennesseans — of bringing a considerable slice of the American South to Main Street (literally) in my tiny hometown of Northfield, Vermont. However chilly or damp the first Saturday in May might have been, our house throbbed with Yankees eager for another mint julep or a chance to stuff their wallets with an exacta. (My dad created a computer program to manage the almost-casual betting action. Stories became legends.) There were even a few ladies in big hats. Derby Day was an event at the Murtaugh place.
Then I became a father on May 6, 1999. Sofia arrived on a Thursday, two days before Charismatic won the 125th Run for the Roses. Thanks to a Leap Year in 2000, Sofia’s first birthday arrived on Derby Day, and we celebrated in Northfield, with both sides of our family and scores of guests convinced Fusaichi Pegasus would become the first favorite to win the Derby since Spectacular Bid 21 years earlier. (They were right.) The most important two minutes of the day were lost on our baby girl, as she napped throughout the race in her car seat.
My father died in 2005, and Derby Day in Vermont moved into the history books. But the event remains a pivotal date on the sports calendar, and particularly for my family. Sofia celebrated her seventh birthday on Derby Day in 2006. A friend from high school (and New England) joined us in Memphis and we made mint juleps and cheered Barbaro on to victory as though we were among the 157,000 in attendance at Churchill Downs.
Little girls love horses, so the older Sofia grew, the more heartfelt her interest in the Derby became. In 2008, she — along with millions — felt her heart break when Eight Belles, a beautiful filly, collapsed after finishing second to Big Brown in the Derby. With compound fractures in both front ankles, Eight Belles was euthanized on the Churchill Downs track. Try rationalizing that for your 9-year-old daughter. The Eight Belles Stakes (for filly sprinters) is now an annual feature of Derby Day.
Two years ago, when American Pharoah became the first thoroughbred since 1978 to win the Triple Crown (Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont), there was discussion of horse racing going mainstream, filling whatever gaps there might be in American spectator sports between football, baseball, basketball, golf, and such. If anything, it’s gone the other direction. Casual fans were drawn to the Triple Crown events largely out of curiosity over the drought, hoping to witness what might never be witnessed again. (Ask Chicago Cub fans about this phenomenon.) With the drought over, the next Triple Crown winner will be merely another Triple Crown winner, still in the shadow cast by American Pharoah and 37 years of anticipation.
But this is the Kentucky Derby. Among single-day sporting events in the United States, what else compares? The Super Bowl? There were 90 Derby days before the first “NFL-AFL World Championship” in 1967. The Daytona 500 or Indy 500? A horse on four legs for two minutes is more beautiful than any machine on four wheels for four hours. “Pageantry” is an overused word when it comes to sports (see: college football), because it should be a term exclusive to the Kentucky Derby.
Because of another Leap Year, Sofia has gone 11 years without a birthday on Saturday, but she turns 18 as the Kentucky Derby turns 143 this weekend. She was finishing first grade in May 2006 and is now bound for Wesleyan University. Her taste for mint was based entirely on a flavor of ice cream at age 7. (Okay, I hope she holds off a few more years on the bourbon-infused cocktails.) Sofia has even developed an appreciation for fashionable hats.
Enjoy the greatest two minutes in sports this Saturday. (My pick: McCraken.) I’ll be celebrating the greatest 18 years (so far) of my life.
In the beginning of The Lost City of Z, Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), an officer in the British Army, gets notice that he is being called from his sleepy post in Ireland to an uncertain mission of exploration in South America. “It will be a grand adventure,” he is told.
Fawcett had experience as a cartographer and had traveled “all around the empire,” sometimes as a spy. Bolivia and Brazil were on the verge of war over a border dispute, so, to keep the peace, the British were sending Fawcett to map out the full extent of the border by finding the source of the Rio Verde. The catch was the “green river” got its name because it ran straight through the heart of the Amazon jungle. He and his team of surveyors were being sent where no man had ever gone before.
Once he’s in country with his team, Corporals Costin (Robert Pattinson) and Manley (Edward Ashley), Fawcett discovers that the part about going where no man has gone before is not strictly true. At best, he’s going where no white man has ever gone before. As he and his crew struggle up the river, an Amazonian guide tells him that the jungle was once home to an ancient civilization that was, in its day, the equal of the great cities of Europe. It was a place of “gold and maize” now lost to the encroaching jungle.
Fawcett soon learns the harshness of the jungle. Almost immediately, the confident Englishman starts losing members of his expedition to native arrows, piranhas, and, worst of all, infection and disease. But Fawcett was more stubborn than the jungle, and he finds the idyllic falls where the river begins. While they’re surveying the site, he stumbles across a cache of pottery shards in what should be a trackless forest. He takes the artifacts to be proof the tribesman was telling the truth.
Thus begins an obsession that will last the rest of Fawcett’s life, bringing him fame and fortune but costing him everything. In a raucous meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, he proclaims that the “savages” of the jungle are “made from the same clay” as white men. He will return to the Amazon to find evidence of the ancient lost city, which he calls Z — only he pronounces it “zed,” because he’s English and all.
That the meetings of geographical societies used to be such animated affairs is one of the revelations of James Gray’s film. Another revelation is that Gray has amazing classical chops. Old school film grammar evolved for a reason, to tell complex stories visually, and with emotional heft. The Lost City of Z is a testament to the contributions of masters like David Lean. His visual compositions import information clearly and efficiently while also being quite beautiful in the process.
Other recent obsessive, man-vs.-nature stories, such as Iñárritu’s The Revenant, are hyper-focused on the details of the task and toll of surviving in the wilderness. Gray, who also wrote the screenplay, lets us know not only the harrowing difficulties Fawcett faced in the jungle, but also the man he was back home. Our hero spends almost as much time with his wife Nina Fawcett (Sienna Miller) in England as he does in the Amazon. Nina is the long-suffering mother of three who keeps the hearth warm through her husband’s long absences. Fawcett is obsessed with finding the lost city but also acutely aware of the emotional toll his obsession has on his family and himself. Gray wants to make Fawcett into T. E. Lawrence — trapped between worlds, driven by impulses he doesn’t fully understand — and Hunnam rises to the occasion as best he can. Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia wore his heart on his sleeve, while Hunnam’s Fawcett is a strictly stiff-upper-lip type.
The subtext running through the story is the English establishment’s unquestioned philosophy of white supremacy and how that clashes with Fawcett’s observations. The issue comes to a head when World War I breaks out just as the explorer is returning from an unsuccessful expedition, and Fawcett is drafted to lead a battalion into battle. Next to the scenes of industrialized slaughter in the Somme, the kindly cannibals of the Amazon seem pretty civilized.
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