Author: Chris McCoy

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Film Features Film/TV

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa. (Courtesy Warner Bros.)

When Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) sizes up Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) for the first time, she’s standing alone in the middle of the wasteland, bloodied and bruised. They are the only two survivors of a brutal desert battle which has left the road behind them littered with twisted steel and broken bodies. Furiosa has “a purposeful savagery” which makes her an ideal candidate for promotion to Imperator in the army of Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). Jack offers to take her under his wing  — she’s just killed most of his crew, so he needs the help driving the War Rig. 

By the time she gets her field promotion, Furiosa has already lived four lives. She was a carefree youth, privileged to live in The Green Place, a matriarchal society that retained a high level of technology in a sheltered secret valley. At age ten (Alaya Browne plays Youngest Furiosa), she is taken captive by raiders from the Biker Horde of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), and forced to live in a cage as his “daughter.” When Dementus makes a play for Wasteland dominance by taking on Immortan Joe, Furiosa is traded, along with a doctor (Angus Sampson) as part of an armistice deal. She is sent to the vault where Immortan keeps his harem, where she first shaves her head as part of an elaborate escape plan. With sons like Rictus Errectus (Nathan Jones) and his slightly brighter brother, Scrotus (Josh Helman), it’s easy to see why Immortan Joe would need Furiosa, who is always the smartest person in the room, to breed future “Warlord Jr’s.” Furiosa escapes the rape chamber to live for a while disguised as a War Boy while she bides her time, and plots her ultimate escape back to the Green Place. 

Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his minons. (Courtesy Warner Bros.)

We first met Furiosa in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, where she staged a high-octane escape from the Immortal Man’s Citadel, and took his five perfect wives with her. It was the fourth installment in director George Miller’s Mad Max series, which began as gonzo Australian Oz-sploitation in 1979 and broke into the American popular imagination in 1981 with The Road Warrior. Max, a former Aussie highway patrolman turned wasteland legend, was played in the first three films by Mel Gibson, then by Tom Hardy in Fury Road. Even though his name was in the title, Hardy’s Max was utterly upstaged in Fury Road by Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. Her indelible performance elevated the film from one of the best action films ever made to one of the best films ever made, period. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga began life as an anime series intended to accompany Fury Road if it had been made as planned in the mid-’00s. Furiosa retains the episodic structure, with cards announcing chapter titles. It is framed as the remembrance of The History Man (George Shevtsov), who shared Dementus’ cage with Furiosa. Miller has said the Mad Max films are folk legends of the future told by those who are trying to rebuild human society after the combination of ecological collapse and nuclear war have laid waste to the planet. Fury Road is told in close-up, zoomed in on three hard days in the wasteland. Furiosa begins with a zoom in from space onto the Australian outback, signaling that Miller is working in a different register. The intricate chase scenes, which Miller does better than anyone ever has, still pop. “Chapter 3: Stowaway”, which reportedly took five years to plan and six months to film, rises to Fury Road’s heights. 

Chris Hemsworth as Dementus (Courtesy Warner Bros.)

But Miller is more concerned with the people in the wasteland. Fury Road bore the mark of silent stunt genius Buster Keaton. Furiosa’s Bildungsroman, the story of how the child became the woman, and the woman became the hero, is in the mode of an Akira Kurosawa samurai epic. That’s why the 15-year story’s climax, the 40 Day Wasteland War, takes place largely off screen. Furiosa both starts the war and finishes it. The piles of burning corpses tell you everything to you need to know about what happened in between. 

To hear Dementus tell it, Furiosa’s problem is that she has hope. She saw the Green Place. She knows life doesn’t have to be a brutal scramble for survival, where your first instinct is to loot your buddy’s corpse. Hemsworth is deliciously unhinged on the surface, but he is, like Hamlet, “mad in craft.” At least at first. As the years go by, the level of brutality needed to control a hoard of cannibalistic bikers starts to take its toll. This is by far the best performance of Hemsworth’s career. 

He almost, but not quite, upstages the Furiosas. Anya Taylor-Joy has the unenviable assignment of following a titan like Charlize Theron. Fortunately, she has help from Alyla Browne, a 14-year-old newcomer who is completely at home chewing through a motorcycle fuel line. As the traumas pile up, and the flamethrowers roar, she slowly comes into focus. Will she be a monster, like Dementus, or a protector, like her mother? Then, in one epic moment on the top of a speeding war rig, Taylor-Joy looks into the camera, and there she is, our Furiosa, ready to fight the whole rotten world. 

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Film/TV TV Features

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A.

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. (Photo: Courtesy HBO)

Jamila Wignot was nervous. It was Friday night, May 17, 2024, at Crosstown Theater in Midtown Memphis, and she was about to premiere the first episode of her latest HBO documentary series Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. to a hometown crowd. The sold-out house was full of Memphis music royalty: David Porter, Al Bell, Deanie Parker, Eddie Floyd, the list goes on.

“It’s like somebody was just saying to me, ‘Didn’t Janis Joplin get booed in Memphis?’ And I was like, ‘Exactly!’ That’s why I was nervous,” Wignot says on a Zoom interview a few days later.

Turns out, she needn’t have worried. The crowd responded to “Chapter One: ’Cause I Love You” with a Cannes-level standing ovation. During the Q&A after the screening, Deanie Parker, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music’s first CEO, seemed taken aback. “This really has been an emotional experience for me,” she says. “I think it’s because, while we achieved a lot, we did it in about a decade — which is astounding! We made a mark globally.”

Booker T. Jones, Donald “Duck” Dunn, David Porter, Al Jackson Jr., Bonnie Bramlett, Delaney Bramlett, Isaac Hayes, and Steve Cropper (Photo: Courtesy Don Nix 
Collection/OKPOP)

Wignot says her involvement with the Stax story started as she was finishing up her last documentary, a portrait of modern dance pioneer Alvin Ailey. “I’ve been working in documentary filmmaking, particularly historical documentary filmmaking, for a long time. But I came out of a kind of PBS model of documentaries that were narrated by a kind of ‘Voice of God’ narrator. They used archival [film and stills], but there were very specific ways that you had to use it at that time. With Ailey, I finally got to do the kind of documentary filmmaking that I like to do, which is first-person, kind of witness-driven documentary filmmaking. As a kid, I saw Eyes on the Prize and thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’ When you are hearing from somebody who was there on the front lines, and then you’re seeing them in the archival footage, it all just feels very immersive and alive and urgent.

“On the heels of that, I was then approached first by Ezra Edelman and Caroline Waterlow who made O.J.: Made in America. We’d all been friends for a very long time. Ezra said, ‘I’m working with this company, White Horse Pictures, and we’re looking for somebody who wants to direct a series on Stax Records, and do you think you’d be into it?’ And I was just immediately like, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’”

Bruce Talamon and Isaac Hayes at the 1972 Wattstax concert (Photo: Howard Bingham)

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. skillfully blends interviews with the surviving players and extensively researched archival footage from the label’s heyday. “I don’t bother to interview RZA, who’s a diehard fan of the label. There’s no Justin Timberlake, there’s no Elton John, there’s no Paul McCartney. I was not interested in having the kind of secondary fan in there, just appreciating it. I wanted to understand how the label came together, the experiences of the people on the ground, and then let the music do the work of generating enthusiasm.”

The story is one of triumphant highs, stunning reversals of fortune, and missed opportunities, such as the time The Beatles tried and failed to schedule a recording session at the Stax studio on McLemore Avenue. (“Had that happened, for sure Ringo and Paul would’ve been up in this documentary!” says Wignot.)

Wignot’s approach is immediate and visceral. In one priceless take, shot in Booker T. Jones’ Nevada home, the Stax organist and arranger walks us through the creation of the timeless instrumental “Green Onions,” explaining how the song works from a music theory standpoint. It’s a little like watching Albert Einstein sketch out the equations for general relativity on a cocktail napkin.

“The thing that’s so incredible about Booker T. Jones is, he’s quite a quiet guy. Put him in front of a crowd and he’s like, ‘I’m ready!’ But then put him in a more intimate setting, and that’s not his milieu, which I love about performers. So he walked in and he said, ‘Oh, I’m feeling a little bit nervous and shy.’ He looked amazing, that blue suit and the hat, everything styled to perfection. And he said, ‘I’m going to sit at the piano and just start playing. It helps me settle down.’ As we were finishing up our setup, Booker T. Jones — Booker T. Jones! — is giving us a private concert. You’re trying to act like it’s very normal and not to go full fan-girl on him, just like, ‘How is this happening?’ The cameraman is like, ‘The light’s going to go here?’ And we’re like, ‘The guy is doing his thing RIGHT NOW.’

“Finally, I said, ‘[‘Green Onions’], it’s such a classic, that song. Since the process of working in Stax was so spontaneous, it could feel like things just kind of emerged out of nothing, give it to me. What’s the thought process? How do you get to this song?’ He was already at the piano, and he just started explaining it. It’s hands down one of my favorite scenes in the whole series. … Once you understand how ‘Green Onions’ came about, do you really need a famous person to talk about how much they love that song?”

The fact that Stax soul was chronically underappreciated by both the music industry and music press is a recurring theme in the series. In the intro, Parker promises to tell uncomfortable truths about how the powers-that-be never really wanted the company to succeed. The racial discrimination of the Jim Crow-era South is never far from the surface of the story, such as the time the label’s first breakout star, Carla Thomas, had to ride the service elevator to get to a meeting with the head of Atlantic Records.

It wasn’t until the Stax/Volt Revue toured Europe in the spring of 1967 that the Black musicians realized what it was like to be respected for their music, and not judged for the color of their skin. The segment of “’Cause I Love You” documenting the tour is powerful, says David Porter. “You could see a little bit of it, as an artist looking at the film, but to be there and to see that energy and that spirit was all over that space. There were people who were enjoying that music just breaking down and crying, getting tremendously emotional when they looked at Otis Redding, or Sam & Dave, or Eddie Floyd. It was something to see.”

Sam Moore acts as an informal narrator for the story of the tour, as you see his younger version hyping up a crowd of Norwegian teens. “There’s so many different films that have been able to make use of this material,” says Wignot. “Thank God it exists, but I was thinking, how do you take something that’s been often seen and give it a new life, a new kind of vitality? … When Sam Moore started talking about his love of the church, I wanted to get that in there, but not the way it is often told, up front. That’s the story of how R&B came together, in a way. It’s so central to what moves him as an artist. We have him talking about the power of the preacher to communicate. I just love in documentaries when you see somebody thinking. Then he says, ‘I would do anything to get that crowd to do a show with me.’ And that is so powerful because he’s not just trying to ‘turn them on.’ Even there, there’s a collective exchange, ‘Come with me, let’s do this together. …’

“The challenge of scenes like that, is how do you do it so that the music gets to live, so that we experience it as viewers as if we were there in the concert? But you’re adding just enough commentary that you’re not speaking on top of the scene, and you’re communicating what was going on emotionally for the performer. So there’s a real balance of too much dialogue versus too little dialogue, and understanding that the material is incredible in and of itself.”

“Chapter One” ends on the high note of the tour, says Wignot. “Episode one builds the way that ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ builds as a song. It was informed by Jim Stewart saying he thinks that that’s the song that best sums up the kind of spirit of Stax. It’s collaboration. It starts with one thing and then another thing gets laid on top and another. It just kind of builds over time and then becomes this big, explosive powerhouse climax of a song.”

“As you go forward with each of these segments, you’re gonna find that it is gonna get heavy. It’s gonna get fun, it’s gonna get powerful because it is alive,” says Porter. “The camaraderie that was between us, enjoying it, was shown in this film. It was a different time, and not a sweet time. We applauded what Jim [Stewart] was doing, giving us the freedom to go into the studio and do that. Everybody worked together in such a cohesive way, and there was a love and magic that happened in a continual way from day to day, hour to hour, all the way to the midnight hour. All that we would do, we’d have fun doing it. Because music is never good unless you can feel the joy inside of doing it.”

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. is now streaming on Max.

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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: The Stax/Volt Revue

Sam Moore on stage in Norway, April 7, 1967.

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Normally, we use Music Video Monday to highlight the latest work by Memphis musicians and/or filmmakers. But this Music Video Monday is a little different. We’re going to look back to one of the most significant moments in Memphis music history — and it didn’t even happen here.

Tonight, Stax: Soulsville USA premieres on HBO. I’ll have a lot more to say about the four-part documentary series in the coming days, but right now, I want to focus on one of the doc’s most thrilling moments. In 1967, Stax Records, then a startup regional record label, sent its stars on a whirlwind tour of Europe. As director Jamila Wignot reveals in episode 1, the BBC wouldn’t play American R&B, so pirate radio stations based on boats in international waters sprang up to meet the teenage demand for new music. When the Stax/Volt Revue hit European stages, the performers were shocked to discover that the kids in the audience were primed to go nuts.

This footage of the revue in action was shot in Norway on April 7, 1967. You’ll see Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the MGs, and Otis Redding in their prime. Strap in, put those headphones on, and hit play.

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

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Film Features Film/TV

NOW PLAYING: Fantastical Visions

I Saw The TV Glow (Courtesy A24)

The week of May 17-23 at the movies offers lots of fun choices, including the premiere of a film I’ve been most excited about for months:

I Saw The TV Glow

Jane Schoenbrun’s psychological horror about teenage fandom is already being hailed as one of the best movies of the year. Owen (Justice Smith) bonds with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over their mutual love for the YA series The Pink Opaque. Years later, with adulthood’s problems pressing down, Maddy reappears in Owen’s life, telling him they can escape into the fictional world of the show — but there’s a price to pay for a permanent trip to TV land. 

IF

Young Elizabeth (Cailey Fleming) has an imaginary friend named Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) that only she can see. The catch is, she can also see other kids’ imaginary friends, including the ones whom their companions outgrew. Her neighbor Cal (Ryan Reynolds) has the same ability, and together they try to reunite the abandoned Imaginary Friends (IFs) with their former kids. This live action/animated hybrid features a huge cast of voices, including Steve Carell, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Maya Rudolph, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, and, in his final role, the late Louis Gossett, Jr.

Back to Black 

Marisa Abela stars in this biopic of singer Amy Winehouse, who scored major hits in the 00’s and set the record for the most Grammys won in one night. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson tries to separate the tabloid hype from the real person, who died in 2011 at age 27. 

The Blue Angels

This new documentary takes IMAX back to its roots as the biggest documentary format. The U.S. Navy’s aviation demonstration team features some of the best pilots in the world. The film gets up close and personal with them, as they get up close and personal with each other while flying F-18s at 300 mph.

Flash Gordon

The Time Warp Drive-In returns for May with the theme Weird Realms. It’s three sci-fi movies from the ’80s that feature extreme visuals unlike anything else ever filmed. In the early 1970s, after George Lucas had a major hit with American Graffiti, he wanted to do a remake of Flash Gordon, which had started as a comic strip before being adapted into one of the original sci-fi serials in the late 1930s. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis refused to sell him the movie rights to Flash Gordon, which he had purchased on the cheap years before, so Lucas decided to do his own version. That became Star Wars, and you may have heard of it. After Lucas struck gold, De Laurentiis decided to finally exercise his option. His Flash Gordon, which featured visuals inspired by the classic comics, didn’t impress sci-fi audiences upon its 1980 release, but has proven to be hugely influential in the superhero movie era. The best parts of the film are the Queen soundtrack and Max von Sydow (who once played Jesus) chewing the scenery as Ming the Merciless. To be fair, there’s a lot of scenery to chew on.

The second film on the Time Warp bill is The Dark Crystal. Muppet master Jim Henson considered this film his masterpiece, and the puppetry work is unparalleled in film history. If you’re only familiar with the story through the Netflix prequel series (which was also excellent), this is the perfect opportunity to experience the majesty of the original.

The final Time Warp film was Ridley Scott’s follow-up to Blade Runner. Legend has it that the unicorn shots in Blade Runner were actually Scott using that film’s budget to shoot test footage for Legend. A really young Tom Cruise stars with Mia Sara in this high fantasy adventure. Again, the best part of the film is the villain. Tim Curry absolutely slays as Darkness, while sporting one of the best devil costumes ever put to film.

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Film Features Film/TV

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Kingdom of the Planet of Apes is a fun summer blockbuster.

When French writer Pierre Boulle wrote La Panéte des singes in 1963, it was meant as a wry commentary on human hubris. His most successful book to date was a war story which was adapted by director David Lean as The Bridge on the River Kwai. Boulle, who didn’t speak English, won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 1957. His novel, which was translated in the UK as Monkey Planet, became an unexpected hit in England, and was promptly optioned by 20th Century Fox. Boulle thought the book was unfilmable, so he was shocked when Planet of the Apes became a huge hit in 1968. At the Academy Awards that year, Planet of the Apes beat 2001: A Space Odyssey for Best Costume Design. (Legend has it that many Academy voters chose PotA because they thought Kubrick had used real apes in 2001’s “Dawn of Man” sequence.)

The enduring vision of Boulle’s premise has echoed across the decades, with five films and two television series in the 20th century and, beginning with a Tim Burton-directed remake in 2001, for films in this century. In this future world, the humans, who have lost the power of speech and reason, live in captivity and servitude to a society of primates. Gorillas are the warrior class, orangutans are the priestly class, and chimpanzees are scientists.

The last three PotA films, beginning with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, tell the story of how our world got that way. A medical test chimp named Caesar (Andy Serkis) is infected with an experimental virus, designed to treat Alzheimer’s disease, that increases his intelligence. But when the virus escapes from the lab, it has the opposite effect on humans, and a global pandemic ensues which threatens the existence of humanity. Cloverfield director Matt Reeves helmed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, drawing a long and complex portrait of Caesar as a wise leader of his people — uh, apes — while a crippled humanity fights for survival. Reeves evolved a patient, detailed style, which proved to be perfect for this version of PotA, but turned positively turgid when he took on the superhero genre in The Batman.

Wes Ball of Maze Runner fame took over for the latest film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which picks up the story many generations after the death of Caesar. Noa (Owen Teague) is the son of the chief of Eagle Clan, a group of chimps who live in harmony with nature. When he leads an expedition to gather new falcon eggs to raise in the village aviary, he strays into the forbidden Valley Beyond. When he returns, he is followed by a group of masked gorillas armed with electric lances. Eagle Clan, having never seen electricity before, is quickly overwhelmed by the raiders and kidnapped for parts unknown. Noa escapes and sets out to find his stolen tribe. Along the way, he meets Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan who belongs to The Order of Caesar, a monastic order dedicated to their namesake’s two moral laws: Apes Together Strong, and Ape No Kill Ape. Together, they discover Mae (Freya Allan), a human who, they soon learn, can talk. They track the mysterious raiders until they are ambushed on a bridge and dragged back to an armed camp on the shoreline. There, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) is trying to break through a huge vault door set in the side of a sea cliff. He believes there is game-changing human technology behind the door, and that Mae knows how to open it.

Kingdom is a much more conventional sci-fi adventure story than Reeves’ meditations on the responsibilities of leadership. Its sweeping vistas of Los Angeles in ruins make for some compelling cinema, and Ball knows how to concoct a good slam-bang action sequence. Unlike the old days of Roddy McDowall emoting behind a thick mask, these apes are all motion-capture CGI creations, which sometimes causes confusion, as Noa’s chimp brethren all kinda look alike. Teague’s Noa makes a serviceable and pleasingly vulnerable hero, but he can’t live up to the masterful mo-cap performance of Andy Serkis. Sure, it’s blander than its predecessors, but taken on its own terms, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes remains a fun summer blockbuster.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Now playing
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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: “Hello, Is That You?” By Wyly Bigger

Wyly Bigger’s new album on MadJack was produced by Mark Edgar Stuart and features a full cast of Memphis players, including drummer Danny Banks, guitarists Jad Tariq and Matt Ross Spang, sax legend Jim Spake, and Stuart himself on bass.

“Hello, Is That You?” is the rollicking first single. “This track is actually a cover of an old tune by a group called The Red Tops out of Vicksburg, Mississippi,”says Bigger. “A couple years before she passed, my grandma gave me her collection of 45rpm singles from the ’50s. I was digging through them and saw a label I’d never seen before, so I threw it on the turntable, and really dug the sound. Come to find out, it was the only recording The Red Tops ever did — just that A-side (“Sewanee River Rock”) and B-side (“Hello, Is That You?”). I started playing “Hello” at some of my shows, and when it came time to start picking a cover or two for the album, I pitched that one to Mark, who produced the record, and he was into it! The original is a bit more big-band-ish, so we decided to rock it more and make it fit my sound better.”

The video was conceived, directed, shot, and edited by Landon Moore. It features Bigger rocking and rolling in some familiar Memphis locations. “For the video, we wanted to shoot it in a place that was relevant to my career with people who were important to me. So we went with Earnestine & Hazel’s, one of my favorite spots in town to play with my band, and I invited a bunch of friends and family to be in it.”

Take a look.

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

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Film Features Film/TV

The Fall Guy

Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt

Hollywood is not exactly a place where justice flourishes. But aside from all of the sexual assault, and the way some white guys keep failing upward, one of the biggest injustices in Hollywood is the fact that there is no Academy Awards category for stunt work. 

I don’t know if you’ve looked at a movie lately, but stunt performers are getting more screen time than ever. Many great pioneers of cinema built their reputations on hair-raising stunts: Think Charlie Chaplin roller-skating backwards on the edge of an abyss in Modern Times, or Buster Keaton riding on a locomotive cow catcher, batting railroad ties off the tracks in The General. Jackie Chan, the king of the Hong Kong stunt performers, has broken so many bones his injuries were shown as outtakes in his film’s credit sequences. Chan’s pain became part of his star attraction. 

It’s not like stunt work is not artistic. Look at the greatest film of the 21st century, Mad Max: Fury Road, and tell me the pole cat attack, where the performers are swinging on 20-foot poles mounted on vehicles traveling 80 miles per hour, is not artistic. Even if you do define “art” more narrowly, there’s still the existence of technical categories like Best Sound Design and Best Visual Effects. Stunt work is every bit as necessary for the success of the film as the talented professionals in those categories.

And look, if you want to jazz up the rating of the Academy Awards (and who doesn’t want jazzier ratings?), adding categories where Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious could win something is just the ticket. 

One person who definitely agrees with me on this, the most pressing issue of our time, is director David Leitch. He’s a former stunt performer himself, having been at one time Brad Pitt’s stunt double of choice, before directing the star in Bullet Train. He’s also the co-creator of the John Wick franchise, which has taken fight choreography into the realm of modern dance. The Fall Guy is his love letter to the world of stunt performers. It’s the rare action movie that really feels like it’s made with love. 

It’s also relentlessly inside baseball because there’s nothing film people like more than films about themselves, or “self-reflexivity” in film theory-speak. The Fall Guy is ostensibly based on a TV series from the 1980s starring a post-Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors as a stunt man who solves crimes. (In the 1980s, it was a requirement that every TV star had to solve crimes. But I digress.) In a weird way, The Fall Guy owes a great deal to Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night, the 1971 romantic comedy about a film set that’s always on the verge of falling to pieces but never quite does.  

Leitch’s star is Ryan Gosling, and to say he’s perfect for the role of Colt Seavers is a profound understatement. The source material is a notoriously rich vein of Reagan ’80s masculinity, with Majors driving a truck and singing country music between bringing in bounties. Gosling brings some much needed Kenergy to the role. This Colt Seavers cries to Taylor Swift songs. There’s not too many actors who could convincingly make a phone confession of their love to their girlfriend, director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), while also fleeing from assassins in a stolen speedboat. 

Jody and Colt met years ago when she was a camera op and he was the preferred stunt double for megastar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). While filming Tom’s latest sci-fi blockbuster, their relationship evolves from a semi-recurring, on-set fling (which is a fairly common thing in the film world) to something more serious. Then, producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) insists Colt do another take of a dangerous high fall. Colt’s luck runs out, and he wakes up on a stretcher with a broken back. 

Eighteen months later, Colt is hiding out in Los Angeles, working as a valet at a Mexican restaurant, when Gail catches up with him. Jody is directing her first big feature film, a passion project she and Gail have worked for years to put together. They need Colt for a big stunt, a dangerous cannon roll on a beach. Jody has personally asked for him, Gail says, to support her as she tries to make good on her first big break. More inside baseball: Jody’s “passion project” is apparently a remake of the 1983 movie Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, a 3D debacle so notoriously awful it is nowadays only watched by sick cinematic masochists such as myself. 

Colt arrives on set in Sydney and pulls off the spectacular stunt, which in real life broke the Guinness World Record for most on-screen rolls by a car — a fact the film-within-a-film’s stunt coordinator Dan (Winston Duke) points out. But Jody’s not happy to see Colt. She was crushed when he cut off contact after the accident, and tells him via bullhorn as she repeatedly sets him on fire. “That was perfect! Let’s do it again!” 

When Colt confronts Gail, she reveals the real reason he’s been brought on board. Tom Ryder has gone missing, and since he and Colt used to be tight, Gail thinks he would be the best at discreetly tracking down the wayward movie star before Jody and Universal Pictures find out he’s gone AWOL. 

Gosling and Blunt are breezy and charming, and the supporting cast all understand the assignment. The whole point of the now-forgotten TV series was to cut to the chase, forget about all those pesky story beats, and get to the good stunts. The Fall Guy is at its best when it’s putting its small army of crack stunt performers through their paces with the safety wires and crash bags fully visible for once. It only makes the stunts more harrowing by emphasizing the human frailty of the performers. 

The Fall Guy
Now playing
Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: “Camouflaged in a Color Wheel” by Misti Rae

You may have seen Misti Rae Holton perform her music, or seen her visual art. In the pandemic and post-pandemic era, she’s been recording with her husband, musician and producer Adam Holton, and engineer (and longtime friend of Music Video Monday) Graham Burks. Her first single is “Camouflaged in a Color Wheel,” a proggy mini-opera reminiscent of Kate Bush.

Misti Rae directed and created all of the imagery in the music video, which was edited by Laura Jean Hocking (who, in the interest of full disclosure, is this columnist’s wife). “Creating my own music video from my art has always been a dream,” says Misti Rae. “Following my dream helped me to survive a nightmare: the pandemic. I hope the song and video help you along in your healing journey as creating and sharing it has helped me in mine.”

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

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News News Feature

Santa Parade Brings “Hoes” to Beale Street

Here in Memphis, we’re accustomed to seeing groups of Elvis lookalikes around town. But imagine 300 variations of Santa Claus going up and down Beale Street. Yet that is exactly what happened on Sunday, April 28th, as attendees to the International Santa Celebration ended their convention with a jolly parade on Beale.

The event is held every two years with the primary host being IBRBS (the International Brotherhood of Real Bearded Santas). There were dozens of workshops at the Renasant Convention Center covering everything from marketing and using social media to working with special needs children to wardrobe tips to using American Sign Language to the technicalities of booking agreements, and much more.

For more on the IBRBS convention, read my Memphis Flyer cover story.

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Film/TV

Challengers

Zendaya is Tashi Duncan, tennis phenom who catches the eye of childhood frenemies.

There’s an old saying in Hollywood: Men like movies where things explode, women like movies where relationships explode. Well, ladies, Challengers is here to bring the boom.

I know this is the 2020s, Hollywood has always been sexist, and things are not nearly as binary as they once seemed. But we can all, as moviegoers, agree that we like to watch beautiful people doing stuff. In the case of Challengers, “stuff” is tennis and sex.

The people involved are all beautiful to a point that challenges the anatomically possible. Take Josh O’Connor, who plays vowel-challenged tennis pro Patrick Zweig. The sizzling 33-year-old has done so many crunches, his six pack abs have evolved into an eight pack. I know this because I counted his quivering abdominal bulges during the extended nude scene with his frenemy Art Donaldson, played by the also-nude Mike Faist. When Patrick corners Art in the sauna to confront and/or make peace before the championship match which serves as Challengers framing device, Art greets him with “Put your dick away.” But this is not that kind of movie.

Art and Patrick have been friends since they were 12 years old, when they were roommates at an elite tennis academy. The doubles partners are so completely obsessed with making it in professional tennis, they ignore the simmering sexual tension between them. But one person who can see it is Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), the hot tennis phenom who catches Patrick’s eye, and also Art’s eye, as she demolishes an opponent on center court. When they approach her at the after-party, she gives an impromptu lesson on the art of the game. One can not truly play tennis at the highest level until one can fully know their opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. “Tennis is a relationship,” she says.

Being Zendaya, she’s naturally irresistible to Art and Patrick, who invite her back to their room without specifying who is expected to do what with whom. Tashi’s got an idea, best summed up as “Let’s you and him fuck.”

After the late night hotel scene devolves into ménage interruptus, Tashi declares that whoever wins the Junior Championship match between Art and Patrick gets her phone number.

When Art and Patrick next meet on the court, it’s not at the U.S. Open, but 13 years later at Phil’s Tire Town Challengers Tournament in New Rochelle, New York. It’s the bottom of the barrel in professional tennis, and that’s where Patrick lives now. More accurately, he lives in his Honda in the parking lot. Art is a major tennis champion on the comeback trail after shoulder surgery. He’s here to pad his win numbers by beating up on some chumps. That was Tashi’s idea. She’s his coach now, after suffering a gruesome, career-ending knee injury in college, as well as his wife and baby mama. Their three-way sexual obsession will come to a climax on the court.

That not-so-subtle pun is inspired by Luca Guadagnino. The Italian director never saw a phallic symbol he didn’t want to wave in your face, including rackets, strategically placed balls, and, in one homoerotic tour de force, churros. He’s banking on Zendaya’s star power to bring his film across the finish line (to mix my sports metaphors), and she’s perfect at playing a terminally competitive obsessive who gets turned off when her lovers don’t want to talk tennis in bed.

Challengers is visually stylish with a throbbing Reznor/Ross score. Its biggest problem is that all three of its main characters are irredeemable jerks, so it’s hard to root for anyone in this love triangle. If Guadagnino’s purpose is to show how a life focused solely on competition is an empty existence, punctuated by hot but ultimately unsatisfying sex, then he wins game, set, and match.

Challengers
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