Month: December 2017

Categories
Beyond the Arc Sports

Heat 107, Grizzlies 82: One Thought

CREDIT: Joe Murphy (NBAE/Getty Images)

Joe Murphy (NBAE/Getty Images)

Chandler Parsons

Last night’s game between the Grizzlies and Heat was a close one until the fourth quarter, when things really got out of hand. During the final twelve minutes of action, the Grizzlies managed to give up 37 points to Miami, including 8 of 9 from 3-point range. It was an abysmal performance to cap what had been an uneven (but not terrible) game to that point, with the Grizzlies starting out on top before slowly surrendering the lead to the Heat and then very slowly losing ground right up until they hit the breaking point at which they apparently decided they wouldn’t win and throw in the towel.

I usually have five thoughts after games this season, but honestly, there’s not much to say about what happened last night. Interim head coach JB Bickerstaff already said it in the postgame presser: the effort wasn’t there. For a team with a long and storied history of winning close games at a pace that statistical analysis could never quite figure out, last night was a kind of opposite, the bizarro reflection of a beloved playoff team caving in on itself on a Monday night in a building that was 2/3 full.

One Thought

★ The Grizzlies are bad. They just are. At this point, it doesn’t matter when Conley comes back, because—even though there’s no doubt that he will make the team better, and more cohesive—the damage has already been done. Not necessarily to the season. New Orleans and Oklahoma City both lost last night; even as bad as they’ve been the Griz aren’t really out of the playoff hunt yet. But they’ve been exposed.

They have a lot of players that just aren’t very good. A team that has to rely on Mario Chalmers and Ben McLemore to soak up major minutes at the guard spots will not win basketball games. A team that has to rely on Jarell Martin’s defense to make it through stretches of bench play will not win basketball games. A team that has to rely on Marc Gasol to do everything everywhere and somehow keep his faith in his teammates intact will not win basketball games. To refer back to the OKC game, a team with three guys who miss a collective four free throws, each of which could’ve won them the game, will not win basketball games.

There’s not much in the way of analysis that hasn’t already been done at this point. The Grizzlies are bad.

Why?

That’s the fun part: we already know why. That part has already been discussed to death here and elsewhere on the basketball intertubes. They don’t have enough good players. Since moment one of the regular season, they’ve been missing at least one projected starter, and with Conley missing as much time as he has, it’s usually been at least two.

The late lamented David Fizdale’s rotations didn’t make a whole lot of sense once Conley went down. But while Bickerstaff’s are different, he’s facing the same fundamental problem: the depth that a lot of us, myself included, talked ourselves into during the preseason simply isn’t there. This team isn’t good enough to play 11 guys when Conley and Selden are both out; they simply don’t have enough real NBA players to pull off that long of a rotation. Mario Chalmers, Ben McLemore, and Jarell Martin shouldn’t be playing at all, and yet, through necessity and, in McLemore’s case, the desire to get something out of him and prove he was worth the bad contract to which the Grizzlies signed him, they’re playing. (Important to note here that Martin was only in for the final 1:52 last night, after playing a bigger role in the OKC game and getting a DNP-CD in the Toronto game. His spot, at least, seems to be vanishing out from under him as he continues to fail to distinguish himself as a player with any NBA skill.)

The problem now, as illuminated last night by the team’s total collapse down the stretch of a very winnable game, is that they look like they know they’re not very good. They folded last night, and it was obvious. Bickerstaff conceded as much after the game. But that doesn’t help Gasol’s mental state, it doesn’t help the young guys gain the confidence they need to play through these sorts of stretches (which are bound to happen to every team in every season, if not to this degree), and it doesn’t change the fact that this was a mediocre team this year even if everything went right. Everything has not gone right. So while I’m not sure it makes sense to lament the possibilities of the 2017-18 Grizzlies, who were probably bound for a seven or eight seed and a first-round exit in the best case scenario, it’s certainly true that they weren’t supposed to be this.

This is the worst Grizzlies team since 2008-09, minus the promise of Rudy Gay, Mike Conley, OJ Mayo, and Marc Gasol maybe becoming something someday. It’s a dead end right now. There are young guys who could be good in a couple of years, but there’s no future core being established, no Three Year Plan. They’re just bad right now. And they know it. And that’s why they folded last night. I don’t see any reason to expect anything different from them, if that’s how it’s going to go.

Tweet of the Night

Mario Chalmers is, indeed, washed.

Heat 107, Grizzlies 82: One Thought

Up Next

Misery. Suffering. The rending of garments. Weeping and gnashing of teeth. Having been cast into outer darkness.

Categories
From My Seat Sports

1997-2017: Twenty Years of Memphis Sports

CREDIT: Tic Price

December is a month for reflection. Particularly when it comes to sports. Players of the Year. Coaches of the Year. Teams of the Year. Everywhere you turn, a top-10 list. (Be patient, loyal readers. You’ll get one next week.) If we look back at 12 months of Memphis sports, it’s been a year of considerable highs (a PCL championship for the Redbirds, the AutoZone Liberty Bowl for the Tiger football team) and considerable lows (farewell Tony Allen and Zach Randolph, thousands of empty seats for Tiger basketball games at FedExForum).

But why stop at 12 months? Why not a larger perspective, a lengthier sample size, as it were, for the state of Bluff City sports? Let’s go back to this precise month 20 years ago — December 1997 — and draw a few comparisons.

• In December 1997, the Memphis Tiger football team had just completed its third straight losing season under coach Rip Scherer. The mammoth upset of Tennessee 13 months earlier had proven to be a merely a magical moment and not a reset button on the program’s growth from regional also-ran. Scherer was (and is) a decent and honorable man, but his teams had trouble scoring 70 points in a month, something the 2017 Tigers did in a single game. Twice. Memphis hadn’t played in a bowl game in a quarter century back in ’97. This year’s AutoZone Liberty Bowl will be the biggest postseason game in the program’s history and mark the fourth consecutive year Memphis has gone bowling in December.
Tic Price

• In December 1997, Tic Price was leading the Tiger basketball program. But toward what? The first-year coach managed to get Memphis to the 1998 NIT but was chased out of town a year later under a cloud of scandal, having been involved romantically with a Memphis student. Don’t tell me we’ve reached the lowest point in Tiger history when no one wants to see the Tigers play Samford in an NBA arena. I was here in 1999.

• In December 1997, the Tennessee Oilers — that’s what they called themselves for two years — were wrapping up their lone season in the Liberty Bowl, unable to fill the stadium even at the epic height of NFL popularity. Bud Adams was using Memphis as a rest area for his franchise, on its way to Nashville after nearly 40 years in Houston. Having been spurned for an expansion franchise five years earlier, Memphis resented its “home” team, so much that the Oilers chose to play at Vanderbilt in 1998 instead of, as originally planned, a second season in the Liberty Bowl. Memphis had been big league for exactly four months. Sort of.

• In December 1997, Dean Jernigan had announced that the St. Louis Cardinals’ Triple-A affiliate was moving to Memphis, to play in the most palatial stadium ever built for a minor-league team. But what did we know then about AutoZone Park? Or the joys of Triple-A baseball? No brick had been placed; no Redbird hitter had entered a batter’s box. Since then? Memphis has helped feed the most successful franchise in the National League, the Cardinals winning four National League pennants and a pair of world championships since 1998. Along the way, the Redbirds have won three Pacific Coast League titles themselves, including a 91-win season here in 2017.

• In December 1997, the Grizzlies were playing their third NBA season. In Vancouver, British Columbia. Shareef Abdur-Rahim was the face of the franchise. There weren’t even rumors of an NBA franchise calling Memphis (and the Pyramid) home. Today? We complain about losing streaks and the possibility — now likelihood — that our NBA team may have its playoff streak end at seven years. Two players (Allen and Randolph) will have their numbers retired in the near future and two more (Marc Gasol and Mike Conley) are destined for the same recognition.

The last 20 years have been the best such period in Memphis sports history, a pair of decades impossible to top between now and 2037. But let’s give it a try. There are seats to fill at FedExForum and an NBA championship parade to attend.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Letterman Jacket

Today’s Music Video Monday is a message from outer space!

Letterman Jacket are smart, poppy Memphis rockers Isaac Erikson, Keegan Linton, Allison Droke, Sarah Gosney, and Michael Galligher. Erikson also shot and directed this video for “Earth Boys Are Easy”—named, presumably, for the 1988 Julien Temple film which featured a memorable interstellar tryst between Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. The video, which shares its namesake’s easygoing wit, appeared in this year’s Indie Memphis Hometowner Music Video competition.

Music Video Monday: Letterman Jacket

If you would like to se your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Music Music Features

Europa My Mirror: Quintron’s Tales From the Road

CREDIT: Rush Jagoe

Quintron, arguably the best one-name performer since Prince or Cher, is no stranger to Memphis. Due to his indefatigable touring, he’s actually acquainted with much of the world, but he has a special affinity with Memphis’ indie spirit, typified by his organ work on albums by the Oblivions and his own releases on Goner Records.

And by “indie spirit,” I don’t mean “indie” in the generic alt-rock sense, but an imagination that follows its own muse, conventions be damned. One could guess as much by his unpredictable songs, his one-man-band approach, his self-made Drum Buddy (an analog rhythm machine), and the puppet shows staged by his colleague and partner, Miss Pussycat, during his performances.

Now, with Europa My Mirror, a book just released by Goner, he’s also an author. Ostensibly a chronicle of Quintron’s last European tour, it exudes the sweat and stink that all road-hog troubadours know well. Indeed, it should be required reading for any aspiring beat monkey bedazzled by the possibilities of a song, some gear, and a tank full of gas.

But Quintron takes it far beyond any swaggering account of leather-clad riff mongering, peppering his tale with philosophical asides, wry humor, and a sharp eye for character. His wide-ranging approach avoids pretentiousness by keeping it conversational. And therein lies the charm of Europa My Mirror.

The narrative is conversational but not rambling, clocking in at just over 100 pages, including amusing illustrations by Miss Pussycat.

“I like the idea of writing a book in public, the way you do a show, in real time,” Quintron told me. Indeed, many fans first read these writings as posts on social media as the tour unfolded, and it’s not for nothing that the last words of the book are “Sent from my iPhone.” But Quintron does cop to a good bit of editing and rewriting. “It’s mostly been tightened and expanded on from the original journals. It’s just fleshed out, with the removal of some bad-habit Americanisms.”

Unlike with many rock memoirs, there is plenty of bigger-picture stuff, as in his description of Terrier, a Madrid band he loved: “Like all great bands, the real power is in the musicians’ eyes and body language, and of course, the tone of each sound, fitting together with the others to form perfect little air-puzzles.”

Quintron is equally thoughtful about the cultures he samples. Considering the ubiquity of McDonald’s, he notes that “Even the smallest European village might have a butcher shop. Unpasteurized handmade cheese is literally everywhere, and if you want fresh fish, you go to the fishmonger and not to the gas station freezer.”

He and his sound guy go to a Golden Arches near Lisbon to study the local particulars by way of the familiar. It’s part of the spirit of inquiry Quintron brings to being a stranger in a strange land. Even being refused entry into a “big gay disco” in Berlin can jump start his musings.

And this is where the “mirror” comes in. For though he revels in the alternative universe that Europe can offer, Quintron seizes the opportunity to reflect on our own cultural biases. “It really does serve as this sharp-focus mirror. You don’t realize what it means to be an American or what America means when you’re swimming in it, when you’re drowning in it. But when you’re removed and you’re surrounded by something else, it comes into focus.”

Ultimately, though, Quintron doesn’t romanticize the Old World. “I don’t know if I could truly be an expatriot,” he says. “Maybe I’m wrong, but artistically I feel like I have to be close to the ground I came from to produce honestly. I don’t know if I could move someplace else and have anything to say. But plenty of people did. I should try it. Maybe if things keep going down the toilet, we’ll all try it.”

Categories
Beyond the Arc Sports

Thunder 102, Grizzlies 101: Five Extremely Dumb Overtime Thoughts

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

Larry Kuzniewski

The Grizzlies lost in spectacular fashion on Saturday night after leading by as many as 20 points, before turning in a 9-point third quarter and one of the most mystifyingly mindless fourth quarters I’ve ever seen from a Memphis team. Then, after Marc Gasol, Tyreke Evans, and JaMychal Green each missed at least one free throw, the game went to overtime, where the Grizzlies again played bad basketball—and make no mistake, the Thunder were every bit as bad, if not worse—and lost in overtime.

Defensively, the Thunder are very good this year—second in the NBA coming into last night. That’s certainly part of why the Grizzlies struggled so mightily on offense, but it’s not the whole story. As ever, the Grizzlies made things hard for themselves as much or more than the opponent did, and so yet again they lost a game they should’ve won. Dallas, Brooklyn, and now this; when they miss the playoff by three wins, this particular encounter will seem even more frustrating than it did as it happened.

But I have five thoughts on what happened, which is all I could think to do in response.

Five Thoughts

★ It doesn’t matter who the coach is if the players make dumb plays. At some level, a lot of the Grizzlies’ mistakes last night Have to do with low basketball IQ. Making a bad pass. Shooting bad shots. Making poor decisions in the flow of the offense. Some of this is coaching: guys have to know the scheme so they can fall back on it when times get tough. The coaching flux has made some of that harder than it should be, but it’s not the whole explanation. You only have to look as far as Ben McLemore’s abysmal missed 360 dunk against Toronto: it’s one thing if he’s wide open on a break and tries that and misses, but there were two (2) Toronto defenders closing in on him. He didn’t even have time to attempt that dunk in the first place. That’s a sign of a player who makes bad decisions.

The Grizzlies are a young team, and most of that youth is made up of guys who weren’t highly-ranked first round guys. They’re guys the Grizzlies have taken a flier on, and while they all seem to show some sort of promise, they’re not players who are great at improvising on the fly, falling back on the scheme or the system to know what to do. When things go wrong, they improvise, and they’re just not good at it. That’s not a good sign for the Grizzlies going forward, because these guys need to play in a more cohesive way, but they’re learning it all on the fly without any time to practice under a new coach. Unless they start playing both smarter and harder, they’re still not going to win many more games, especially against teams able to take away the first and second options of the pretty simplistic offensive sets they’re running right now.

Larry Kuzniewski

★ Tyreke Evans is a good starting point guard. Part of this is a comparison to the other alternatives on the Grizzlies. But the other part is Evans stepping up to a challenge. After being a ball-stopper when he was coming off the bench, Evans has actually passed the ball well upon being moved to the starting lineup. Last night he finished with 29 points, 13 rebounds, and 5 assists. I think he’ll probably get a triple double at some point this season. Evans is a massively talented player when things are going right for him. And while I still think he could do more to get other guys more involved, his transition into being the facilitator the Grizzlies need him to be at this point in the season has been encouraging, and if he can keep growing into the role and developing his chemistry with Gasol (we saw some of this in their two-man game in overtime), he may end up putting up exactly the same kinds of numbers Mike Conley would.

Larry Kuzniewski

★ Speaking of point guards, Mario Chalmers is really bad. It comes from a good place—he’s trying to help the team win—but Chalmers’ play has been disastrous. He’s taking bad shots, he’s not running pick and roll cleanly, he’s making bad passes, he’s not finishing at the rim at all, he’s not defending, and he shows no signs of getting better at any of those things. He’s been struggling all year long, and Fizdale no doubt felt a special connection to Chalmers because of the time the two of them spent together in Miami, but… it’s bad. Several people said this to me on Twitter last night and I agree: Toney Douglas last year was better. That’s not a typo: Toney Douglas.

★ The Grizzlies’ third quarter struggles are mystifying. It’s like they’ve yet to make a halftime adjustment all season, while the other team always makes the right one. Last night, the Thunder held the Griz to NINE POINTS in the entire third quarter. The whole time, the Grizzlies had no answers, no options. They’d been totally strangled by the Thunder’s halftime adjustment. It happens every game. No lead is too big for the Grizzlies to choke away in the third quarter by coming out of the break totally lax and unfocused. I don’t know if they all need to be rendered to some kind of intelligence agency black site and deafened by heavy metal music until they’ve been reprogrammed to play hard after halftime, or what. If I were Robert Pera, that option would be on the table.

★ As bad as both of these teams are, neither is really out of the hunt yet. The second half of last night’s game was one of the dumbest, worst things I’ve seen in all my time covering the Grizzlies. Both teams tried to choke away the game on several occasions, and neither team could manage to lose until the very, very end of overtime. But. As crappy as it looked, both of these teams could still make the West playoffs. It’s less likely for the Grizzlies than it is for Oklahoma City, but both of these teams have gotten off to significantly worse starts than expected, and such is the state of the Western Conference that neither has fallen so far that the season can’t be salvaged. Give the Grizzlies another couple of weeks, and my 44-win prediction for the season may become totally impossible to reach instead of just very unlikely. But for two potential playoff teams, the Grizzlies and Thunder sure both looked like two lottery teams last night.

Tweet of the Night

It’s probably not the solution to the Grizzlies’ backup point guard problem, but it’s hard to imagine he’d be worse, and they’ve barely put a dent in the number of days he can be called up to the big club, so I fully endorse this hashtag from Caleb McNiece:

Thunder 102, Grizzlies 101: Five Extremely Dumb Overtime Thoughts

Up Next

The Heat are here on Monday, they travel to DC to play the Wizards on Wednesday, and then it’s another Friday/Saturday home back to back against the Hawks and Celtics. At this point, I’d call the Hawks game the only one they should win, but “should” is mostly meaningless in the context of this year’s Grizzlies. They’ve only won one game since breaking an 11-game losing streak, and they’ve got a new 3-game streak going. I’m not to “tank the season” territory yet, because I’m not sure what that even looks like on a team with Conley and Gasol on it, but it would appear that they’re tanking the season quite by accident all on their own.

Categories
Sports Tiger Blue

Tigers 90, Bryant 72

A Memphis Tiger team desperate for a consistent shooter inserted Jamal Johnson into the starting lineup Saturday afternoon and the freshman from Birmingham made the case for regular membership in that quintet. Johnson hit six of 11 attempts from three-point range, including a buzzer-beater as he fell out of bounds at the end of the first half to help the Tigers improve to 6-2 and stay undefeated (6-0) at FedExForum. The game was the first of four Memphis will play in the cross-regional Gotham Classic. (The only game to actually be played in New York City will be next Saturday’s tilt with Louisville.)

Johnson played a game-high 33 minutes and was supported by junior point guard Jeremiah Martin, who also hit six three-pointers (in seven attempts) and led the Tigers with 24 points (two shy of his career high) and seven assists (with only one turnover). Martin wasn’t so much impressed with Johnson’s point total (18) as he was with out easy he made the transition from bench to starter. “We didn’t know [Johnson] was going to be in the lineup,” said Martin after the game. “He was excited. I was messing with him during pregame, to see if he was nervous. I was glad to see him look so comfortable.”

The Tigers, for a change, started the game with a strong push, taking a 15-6 lead before the Bulldogs closed the margin and tied the score at 20 midway through the first half. The lead exchanged hands a few times before the Tigers began a 22-0 run with less than five minutes to play before halftime. Johnson keyed the run with three treys, including the buzzer-beater and the Tigers’ first two field goals after the break. The lead grew to 21 points in the first two minutes of the second half and Bryant never again closed within 10.

“We shot the ball well today,” noted Tiger coach Tubby Smith. “That’s something we haven’t been doing. We changed the lineup, and Jamal was a big boost for us. We had a lot more assists [26] than turnovers [16] and that was huge. We found Mike Parks in transition some, and we need our big guys to play better inside for us.”

Junior forward Kyvon Davenport scored 15 points, giving the juco transfer eight straight games in double figures (matched only by Martin among his teammates). Senior forward Jimario Rivers added 11 points and a team-high six rebounds.

The loss drops Bryant to 1-9 for the season.

With five more games before the start of conference play, Smith suggested a significant step may have been taken toward stabilizing the Tigers’ rotation of players. “[Jamal] is a guy who can make shots when he’s open,” said Smith. “But he got into the lineup not just because of his shooting. His defense is solid; he doesn’t take a lot of chances. Fundamentally sound. He’s getting stronger. Going forward, I think this is something that will inspire him.”

The Tigers will next host Albany on Tuesday night (tip-off at 8 p.m.). The Great Danes beat  Bryant, 84-68, on December 6th.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Give Booze. It’s Always the Right Size

I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in a week. I have pneumonia, and my nightly toddy has been replaced with steroids, antibiotics, and endless rounds of cough syrup.

I’m still thinking about booze, though — when I can keep my eyes open, I’ve been using my strictly enforced downtime to complete my holiday shopping. In some cases, that means making shopping lists of items like a traditional bottle of Kahlua for a friend, or the de rigueur locally-brewed growlers that I export personally from Memphis to my brother in rural Georgia. In other cases, that means searching virtual store shelves for something that looks truly unique.

If you’re a film buff like me, you’ll love the labels used by the vineyard Killibinbin, located halfway around the world in Langhorne Creek, South Australia. A few of the bigger liquor stores in town stock Killibinbin Sneaky Shiraz, which was bottled in 2013. The wine inside the bottle tastes fruity and crisp, while the bottle label features a very noir drawing of a dame in a trench coat on the label. Priced at under $15 a bottle, I’d pair it with a Blu-ray of a Hitchcock flick, or a copy of John Huston’s 1941 masterpiece The Maltese Falcon. Granted, Sam Spade is more of a whiskey drinker, but the Sneaky Shiraz is still a classy gift.

Along the same lines, a case of Francis Ford Coppola’s Director’s Cut — either a Chardonnay or a Zinfandel — would make a great gift alongside a box set of The Godfather. “I like to drink wine more than I used to,” Vito Corleone sagely noted to his son, Michael, in Coppola’s sprawling Mafioso epic. Your lucky recipient can make it through all 539 minutes of the organized crime saga and have a few bottles left over.

Shopping for a world traveler? The black-and-white vineyard maps that grace the bottles of Portuguese imports from Churchill’s Estates are so elegant that these bottles don’t need wrapping. Churchill’s Estates Douro 2012, a peppery red wine, can be procured locally for under $20 per bottle.

Globe trotters might also appreciate a bottle of Boarding Pass, a Spanish Shiraz by R Wines that comes emblazoned with a fun, but no-nonsense blue-and-white label. I’ve found it on local shelves for just under $20.

Graphic design lovers should seek out the popular Willamette Valley, Oregon, vineyard Mouton Noir. The winery has a great-looking — and tasting — line of reds and whites from the mid-2010s that run between $16 and $42 per bottle. Look for their O.P.P. — Other People’s Pinot, an earthy and spicy Pinot Noir with a simple white label slapped on the bottle. It retails for $21, while the winery’s Mouton Noir Lieu-dit 2013, which bears a charming, if crudely-rendered, black sheep on the label, sells for $25.

Stroll down any good shop’s aisles, and you’ll see it all, including bottles bearing blooms, bicycles, birds, and time bombs. Be aware that purchasing a wine by label alone can backfire on you — sometimes the product inside tastes underwhelming in comparison to the kitschy artwork on the outside of the bottle. For under $15, it’s worth the experiment. For much more, I recommend deferring to store personnel, who generally excel on solid recommendations at all price points.

In some cases, I’m eschewing labels altogether: For a group of girlfriends, I’ve purchased Memphis-centric “We Grind Here” foam sleeves from a local purveyor. As soon as I’m well enough to resume my shopping in person, I’ll purchase cans of wine (Underwood, at $7/can) to slip inside each koozie. The Grizzlies might not be doing well, but these will make great stocking stuffers, and they’re perfect for popping into your purse for an outdoor hang-out. Don’t tell Santa, or my doctor, but I went ahead and bought a koozie for myself, too.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Disaster Artist

Have you ever been at your job, or at school, or on the playing field, and felt like you’re faking it? It doesn’t matter if you’re actually good at something. All of your successes have been sheer dumb luck. One day, you’re going to be exposed as a fraud in front of all these people.

If these thoughts have ever crossed your mind, you’re not alone. It’s a full-blown psychological phenomenon called impostor syndrome. In the words of Wikipedia, “Despite external evidence of their competence, those exhibiting the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved.” The doctors who discovered imposter syndrome in the 1970s first identified it in highly successful women, but later studies found that 70 percent of the population had felt like that at one time or another. But the case of Tommy Wiseau raises the question: Is it still impostor syndrome if you actually are an impostor who is bad at their job?

Wiseau is the writer, director, and producer of The Room, the 21st century’s leading contender in the race for the Worst Film Ever. Even in Hollywood, a place where strange things roam, Wiseau is a weirdo. First of all, he wears a lot of belts. Not different belts at different times, but rather, many belts, all at once. He claims to be from New Orleans, but his accent is clearly Eastern European. No one knows how old he is — which, come to think of it, is really not that uncommon in Hollywood. And nobody knows where he got the enormous pile of money he used to make The Room. But one thing is certain — he didn’t have the faintest idea how to make a movie.

Dave (left) and James Franco make movie magic with their film about the making of The Room.

If you’ve never seen it before, The Room is kind of indescribable. Imagine a movie about love and betrayal made by an alien who has only the roughest idea of what humans look like and how they behave. In a recurring scene that epitomizes the whole thing, Wiseau and his friends Mark and Denny throw around a football while having vague conversations. At no point do you get the impression that any of them know what a football is for, or have ever seen a football game before, or even understand what kind of emotions a person throwing a football in the park with his friends would likely experience.

And yet, in the decade since it was released, The Room has found a large and enthusiastic audience among people who love bad film. There’s something endearing about the film’s hardscrabble ineptitude that you don’t get from $100 million debacles like Dracula Untold. Among the cult of The Room was James Franco, who was compelled to adapt The Disaster Artist, a memoir by Greg Sestero, who played Mark in the original production. In a deeply nested irony, the movie about the making of the worst movie ever made is actually really good.

Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber take inspiration from Ed Wood for the well-paced script, which wrings laughs from the increasingly ridiculous situations that arise during production without stooping to open mockery. Dave Franco, the director’s brother, stars as Greg Sestero, a blandly handsome, marginally talented guy who meets Wiseau in a San Francisco acting class and soon finds himself moving to L.A. to pursue stardom with the long-haired mystery man. Then, after years of frustration and an impeccably staged run-in with actual producer Judd Apatow, Wiseau decides he has had it with the audition treadmill and proclaims, “Hollywood reject us! We do eet on our own!”

It’s the familiar rallying cry of the indie filmmaker, even if delivered in a funny accent. James Franco, the comedic leading man who directs William Faulkner adaptations in his spare time, surely knows that feeling. He and his co-conspirator Seth Rogen, who plays The Room‘s beleaguered script supervisor, have been an insurgent force in mainstream filmmaking for a decade now. You don’t make The Interview without getting a few doors slammed in your face. Some actors would just get the weird tics down and ham it up, but Franco’s portrayal of Tommy Wiseau is a living portrait of impostor syndrome. You cringe with every inappropriate gesture, idiotic utterance, and awful decision, while also feeling a flash of recognition of all the times you’ve faked it and gotten away with it.

The Disaster Artist seems like it started as an excuse for Franco and Rogen’s crew of Hollywood stoner buddies to recreate their favorite hilariously bad scenes from The Room, but when Wiseau cries in the lobby at his labor of love’s disastrous premiere, the audience sniffles along. By directing and acting in a movie about a bad actor/director, Franco the movie star made himself vulnerable — and created the best film of his career.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Waiting for Godot, J & K Cabaret, Elves, Fairies, Ghosts, and Actors

The holidays are a time of reassurance when we celebrate familiarity and comfort in all things, from food and drinks we consume to the entertainment we gobble up like sugar cookies and milk. It’s the caroling time of year when area playhouses turn to beloved titles like A Christmas Carol, Peter Pan, or maybe even the Santaland Diaries for folks who prefer their cocoa on the bitter side. But the Tennessee Shakespeare Company isn’t like other area theaters. The Bard-minded professional troupe has always gone its own way and, true to form, TSC has another kind of classic in mind for this season of giving — a widely celebrated, often misunderstood clown show penned in the wake of WWII, at the dawn of a frightening atomic age. Samuel Beckett’s austere comedy Waiting For Godot is the 20th-century “bounded in a nutshell,” as Shakespeare might say — a slapstick hymn to eternity in all its terrifying glory.

Waiting for Godot, J & K Cabaret, Elves, Fairies, Ghosts, and Actors

TSC’s founding director Dan McCleary says he’s wanted to produce Godot for years, but he waited for the right moment and the right group of people. “To work as a clown means that you feel everything very deeply, whether it’s joy or loss,” he says, considering what it takes to fill the ragged pants and ill-fitting shoes of Beckett’s famous hobos Vladimir and Estragon, who, in the face of a random, sometimes malevolent-seeming world, turn to one another for affirmation and survival. “Clowns feel things very deeply, then in the next breath they let it go. So clowns have short-term memories.

“Out of extremes comes a play of tremendous compassion and understanding and inquiry,” McCleary says, describing Godot as beautiful in timing and grace. “It’s always struck me as a fine seasonal, holiday play. It’s very funny.”

Waiting for Godot, J & K Cabaret, Elves, Fairies, Ghosts, and Actors

Speaking of very funny, the J&K Cabaret is back starring Jenny Madden and Kim Justis. I’ve written a lot about this pair over the years, and about this show, which owes its origin to a very funny production of Parallel Lives.

Count on music, comedy, bigger comedy, and generous performances from two of the city’s most gifted and committed entertainers.

A Christmas Carol is back at Theatre Memphis, Peter Pan‘s flying around Playhouse on the Square, and Junie B. Jones is at Circuit. And Santaland Diaries too.
 

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Opinion Viewpoint

Protect Net Neutrality

The free flow of information is critical not only to facilitate our commerce, but to ensure that our democracy thrives. While the First Amendment protects us from government attempts to suppress speech, protections from large corporations that use their market dominance to act as self-appointed information “gatekeepers” are not constitutionally guaranteed.

9th District Congressman Steve Cohen

Yet the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is supposed to protect and promote the public interest in the telecommunications industry, has undertaken an aggressive effort to repeal strong legal protections for net neutrality that ensure that information can flow unimpeded on the internet. As a result Americans could soon wake up in a country where online dissent has been diminished or sidelined. The informed commentary of marginal groups seeking to shape opinion could be blocked, slowed down, or otherwise given disfavored treatment by internet service providers serving their own commercial or even ideological interests and stifle the dissemination of accurate but unpopular views.

This fear of a top-down corporate suppression of opinion is not far-fetched. It’s the predictable consequence of a plan long sought by broadband service providers: To repeal the FCC 2015 Open Internet Order, which mandates equal treatment of content over the internet by broadband service providers. The commission’s chairman, Ajit Pai, has scheduled a vote to do just that on December 14. The FCC should reject this effort.

Chairman Pai’s plan would be a catastrophe for both technical innovation and civil discourse. Without net neutrality, a handful of dominant corporations that are both broadband providers and content providers could be in a position to stifle competing content and would have an obvious economic incentive to do so. Not only would this prevent new innovators from entering the marketplace, it would also allow such companies to decide what content is available to their customers and would also allow them to make access to competing content difficult if not impossible. In addition to being bad for consumers, such content discrimination is bad for democracy, for it potentially impedes citizens’ ability to receive the information they need to understand proposed policies, debate them and, if necessary, organize opposition to them.

The proposed FCC order repeals the strong net neutrality framework established in 2015 and would repeal the 2015 Order’s bans on blocking, throttling or paid prioritization – three of the gravest threats to equal access. Current rules prohibit broadband providers from blocking a website, slowing a website down or providing differential speeds for different websites based on whether the content provider has paid for faster service. This type of conduct by broadband providers could limit or block access to political dissent, marginal or minority views and complex ideas that help a healthy society function.

I have joined more than 40 of several of my colleagues in asking the FCC to abandon this extremely unpopular plan and to maintain strong net neutrality protections.

Strong net neutrality protections have proven to be one of the most important consumer protections of our time. Net neutrality is extremely popular because people realize slowing streaming speeds to discourage consumers from some sites just doesn’t seem fair. Blocking access to competitors seems unfairly restrictive. Rigging the market for the profit of a handful of internet service providers doesn’t appeal to people already rightly suspicious of corporate control of their lives.

Beyond all that, the proposed rule is not good for competition, innovation or creativity. Broadband investment has continued to surge under the open rules and could decline in a pay-to-play internet world. Slowing or crippling access to some websites is not innovation. A free internet permits access to all users, regardless of ability to pay. We don’t want an internet in which an elite has access to critical information or services and others are priced out.

The end of internet neutrality cannot be allowed to occur without a fight. What the FCC chairman has proposed would change the way we communicate, and not for the better.

Congressman Steve Cohen represents Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District.