GloRilla‘a got another hit on her hands with “Yeah Glo!” The song’s only been out for 10 days, but it’s already got more than four million views on YouTube. Like most tracks from the 901’s favorite diva, it’s incredibly catchy. Glo looks back on where she’s been, and can hardly believe how far she’s come.
UK-based director Troy Roscoe knows that Glo can act, and he gives her opportunities to show off her chops as different versions of herself. But my favorite shot can simply be called “POV MONEY.” You’ll know it when you see it.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Before embarking on a musical biopic project, all filmmakers should be required to watch two films: First, Walk The Line, the made-in-Memphis story of Johnny Cash’s romance with June Carter, which is probably the best musical biopic ever made; then Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which skewers musical biopics so expertly it almost killed the entire genre.
Director Reinaldo Marcus Green has clearly studied Walk The Line for Bob Marley: One Love. It takes roughly the same approach to its subject, isolating one specific story line out of an artist’s rich and complex life story to illuminate the character behind the music. In this case, it’s the story of the recording of Exodus, Marley’s 1977 album which Time called the greatest musical achievement of the twentieth century. After a brief opening sequence where young Nesta Robert Marley (Nolan Collingnon) and his mother Cedilla (Nadine Marshall) move from the plantation to Kingston, we meet adult Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) as the already rich and famous king of reggae. Jamaica in the mid-’70s was riven by what amounted to a low-intensity civil war between supporters of democratic socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley and his reactionary rival Edward Seaga. As the violence intensified, Marley was asked to play the Smile Jamaica concert, which was intended to, if not unify the country, at least convince people to stop killing one other by bringing them together in a shared love of reggae. During the promotional press conference, Marley refused to take sides, instead declaring that all Earthly rulers are “Babylon”, and that true peace could only be achieved through Rastafarianism, the cannabis-infused Pan-Africanist cult descended from Judaism which reveres Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie as a liberationist messiah.
His message does not go over well with the Powers That Be, and someone (probably Seaga, but maybe the CIA) ordered a hit on Marley. Two days before Smile Jamaica, as the band was rehearsing, gunmen infiltrated Marley’s family compound and shot Marley, his manager Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh), and wife Rita (Lashana Lynch). As his band fled the country, the wounded Marley promised to keep his commitment to his people and perform one song. When Marley took the stage in front of 80,000 people at Smile Jamaica, he showed the crowd his still-bloody gunshot wounds, and launched into “War,” whose lyrics Marley adapted from Haile Selassie’s 1963 speech to the United Nations. “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation; that until the color of a man’s skin is of no more importance than the color of his eyes, and until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained.”
As you can see, Green and his three screenwriters have a much more complex job than, say, the makers of Bohemian Rhapsody. The Smile Jamaica sequence is more compelling than Queen at Live Aid, but you can be forgiven if you come out of One Love not knowing who was fighting whom, or why they wanted to kill a popular musician. The film’s fundamental flaw is that Bob Marley doesn’t deserve the Walk The Line treatment—he deserves Malcom X, a sweeping historical biography which connects all the dots. The filmmakers sense this, and try to cover some ground with flashbacks. Unfortunately, these flashbacks often come in exactly the way Walk Hard parodies, with the artist remembering his trauma as he walks onstage.
But my job as is not to review the film that “should be,” but rather the one that exists. Yes, Bob Marley: One Love is a stodgy, conventional biopic, but at least it’s done well. Ben-Adir, one of the most talented actors of his generation, disappears into the role. He struggles mightily to rise above mere mimicry of Marley’s distinctive patois and reveal the legend’s inner life. When Ben-Adir and Lynch are together as Bob and Rita, the film crackles with life—only to lose the momentum with meandering scenes in London recording studios and swanky Paris parties. Green and Ben-Adir take pains to emphasizes their hero’s spirituality. A smoky Rastafarian ceremony makes clear that reggae is, like American soul, thinly secularized religious music. One Love sees Marley as a Rasta Apostle Paul, an evangelist who refined the message of a revolutionary cult into a universalist religion.
For a glimpse into the fuller story, I recommend the 2012 documentary Marley. While Bob Marley:One Love is far from perfect, at least its heart is in the right place.
Ahh, Valentine’s Day, that Hallmark holiday which celebrates love by rubbing it in singles’ faces. Midtown gloom-meister Harry Koniditsiotis understands your pain, and wants to help you. His new single with gothsemble Switchblade Kid is “more of an acceptance of a relationship’s end and moving on to better things.”
“Love Has Gone Away” boasts a subtly bumping beat to help you cry it out on the dance floor. “The video was filmed way back during lockdown as the album was being recorded,” says Koniditsiotis. “Surrounded by piles of dead leaves and flashing lights, the band looks like they are having a backyard Lynchian seance calling Laura Palmer in the Black Lodge”
If you’re over your heartbreak by April, Koniditsiotis invites you to Midtown Con, the annual comic/toy/record convention he throws, happening this year on April 27th at Black Lodge. “The Memphis one, not the one in Twin Peaks, sadly.”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Eric Roberts and Clare Grant in THE PRIVATE EYE (photo courtesy Illusion Islands)
Film noir, as the crime pictures of the 1940s and 1950s came to be called, left a deep imprint on popular culture. Even if you haven’t seen The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, or Out of the Past, you are probably a fan of something those films inspired, like True Detective. Classic film noir often revolved around a femme fatale, a sexy, duplicitous woman with an agenda of her own, often seen secretly pulling the strings of a twisted criminal conspiracy. Actresses like Jane Greer, Barbra Stanwyck, and Faye Dunaway have done their best work as femme fatales. That’s why Clare Grant was excited to play Michelle, the female lead in the new neo-noir film, The Private Eye.
Any good femme fatale has secrets, but Michelle’s duality goes deeper than most — and, as we eventually learn, isn’t entirely her fault. “I love film noir. It’s a huge reason why I was drawn to this role,” says Grant. “I love mysteries, and I really loved the dual reality that this character gets to live in this movie. It was a fun challenge for me as an actor to figure out which scene is which reality and how I would interact with my co-stars depending on which reality I’m in.”
Grant is a native Memphian who was an early protege of director Craig Brewer, who cast her as the lead of his pioneering 2009 web series set in the Memphis music scene, $5 Cover. Since then, Grant moved to Los Angeles and married Seth Green, the Buffy The Vampire Slayer actor who went on the create the Adult Swim stop-motion series Robot Chicken. She created her own Team Unicorn troupe which created a series of pop culture spoofing videos, and she has appeared in numerous films, including the Memphis-made vampire epic Daylight Fades, Iron Man 2, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and what she calls a “blink and you’ll miss it” bit part in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. She also voiced bounty hunter Latt Razzi in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which fulfilled a lifelong goal for this self-professed geek girl. “I love those movies, and it’s so fun to be on sets of that size and just be able to be a part of that world. But my Star Wars credit is one of my favorite jobs I’ve ever had. I can’t believe I got to do that!”
The Private Eye is an indie project directed by Jack Cook and starring comedian Matt Rife. “I’ve been friends with Matt Rife for about 10 years,” Grant says, “and once he got on board with the project, he basically just went out of his way to cast people that he was friends with, and knew would be right for the part.
“He pitched the movie to me, and at first I laughed at him because I was like, ‘Man, I can’t be your love interest in the movie! I’m too old for you. And then he pointed out that that’s kind of the point is that my character is … well, without giving too much away, it’s supposed to be a part for someone who can play both young and old.”
Rife, whose standup comedy tour will be coming to the Orpheum on February 16th, plays a down-on-his-luck private eye living a marginal existence in contemporary Los Angeles. He affects a fedora-wearing tough guy persona, complete with grizzled, cynical internal monologue, courtesy of veteran character actor Eric Roberts. Michelle comes into his life as a mysterious client who clearly knows more than she’s letting on, just as in any good film noir.
Grant says Cook was the driving force behind the film. “This was his baby. This is his official directorial debut, and he was a lovely human. He had a really enthusiastic and passionate persona throughout the entire thing, and he was so open to collaboration — which I absolutely appreciate — while maintaining his point of view. I love it when directors have strong points of view, because I feel like directors with strong point of views make good movies. But he wasn’t so strong in his parameters that he alienated other opinions, and he was looking for collaboration. And as an artist, that’s such a wonderful thing to experience … I just focused on the material and tried not to let anything influence me as far as the performance went, but I definitely voiced my opinion on how I thought my character should be dressing and how her hair and makeup should be. I was very particular about wanting that to remain very noir, even in the moments in the film where it felt a little more current.”
As you might expect from a film with Rife in the lead, The Private Eye does have some self-aware comedy elements. At the Los Angeles premiere, Grant says, “The crowd was rowdy and excited and laughed in all the right places — and laughed in places I didn’t expect anyone to laugh in! … It’s nice to have movies that don’t rely too much on CG and big set pieces and big explosions to get people to just sit in a seat and watch a good story. And this is just a good story with a lot of twists and some fun mystery. It’s an homage to classic movies, and it’s an opportunity to get back to the theater in a time where we’ve all spent so much time away.”
Walter Huston, Tim Holt, and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
It’s been a while, but “Never Seen It” is back, baby! In this highly irregular feature, I sit down with an interesting person and show them a well-known film that they have never seen before. Then we talk about it.
Chris McCoy: What do you know about TheTreasure of the Sierra Madre?
Billups Allen: You know, it’s funny you asked, because I’ve had this movie on my list to watch, but I don’t really know much about it. I know that Bogart is in it, and I know the “stinking badges” line, and I know it’s kind of a heist movie.
126 minutes later …
CM: Billups Allen, you’re now a person who’s seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. What’d you think?
BA: Of course it was terrific. It’s a classic. Look at that, a hundred percent on Rotten Tomatoes! Not that that matters, but still, very few movies have that. I loved it.
CM: I love it, too. This is a desert island movie for me. It’s funny, this came out in 1948, and one of my other top five desert island movies, Out of the Past, came out the same year. I guess it was a great year for movies.
BA: When I was watching this, I was wondering what Westerns came out this year. Do you think of this as a Western in any capacity at all?
CM: Well, what do you think?
BA: It has a lot of the tropes of a Western. It has the bravado, but it’s not quite a Western.
CM: Tim Holt was a big Western star at the time. He was a star of B-movies, and this was the highlight of his career. So if you saw him in a movie in 1948, you would say, yeah, it’s a Western. But the late ’40s were the height of the noir movement. So it’s really structured more like a noir than it is like a Western.
BA: That’s true. I’m thinking of the shooting and stuff too, like, the way the shadows work.
CM: The look is definitely influenced by noir. I think this one of John Huston’s best looking pictures.
BA: Yeah, really. It looks great.
CM: I love The Maltese Falcon, but it’s very much staged like a play, and this is a lot more cinematic.
BA: It’s very cinematic in the desert scenes, when they’re all riding. I loved it when they see the bandits coming down the valley.
CM: Huston stays in their point of view. It’s not like, here’s a long shot, and then we’re gonna get a closeup of like Gold Hat the bandito on his horse, like you would do today.
BA: And you can feel that. It makes you feel sort of trapped. It is a theme through all this. You feel trapped yourself because even though you can see ’em coming, there’s nothing you can do. You just have to wait and see what they’re gonna bring. And in a situation like that, watching it, even with everything I know about movies, I didn’t fully know what was coming. I didn’t know if that was gonna be a fight, I didn’t know what it was gonna be. It’s like watching a snake come up the hill.
CM: Maybe one of the things that’s not Western about it is that the Indians are the good guys.
BA: Yeah, that’s what I mean. It’s a very early time in movies for that to be the case, you know?
CM: Like, 30 years ahead of its time!
BA: I think they play with that in the scene where they approach the fire and the first thing you see is the blade drop, like they’re preparing to swing those blades! But in the end, they were just holding them.
CM: That’s Huston directing your emotion by controlling what information you have. You see that it’s a blade, but you don’t see that the guy who is holding it.
CM: Here’s the big question: Is Fred C. Dobbs the hero of this film?
BA: Dobbs? Hmm … I don’t know if this is too out-there, but a lot of the time I was watching it, I was thinking about the three characters, they’re all doing things that I could have done. It’s like one person in three people, you know what I mean?
CM: Yeah, it’s like, sometimes you get paranoid, and sometimes you’re kind of like Walter Huston, like Howard.
BA: I saw Howard as the all-seer, you know what I mean? Then we have the middle, who is Curtin, and then we have Bogart’s character, Dobbs, who sort of dubious, you know what I mean? I wouldn’t think of him as the hero, but he’s like the protagonist of the film, though. I think they’re like the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. They go together. You could see yourself reacting in any of these ways, depending on how you felt about it. And it’s all because of the how close they were to the treasure. So when the treasure got farther away, Howard was less attached to it. He had lived it, and was old enough or wise enough to know if it goes away, he’s gonna be okay. He kind of taught that down, but he only taught it to one of ’em. The other one died because of his greed and his inability to see the big picture. He was focused on the prize. How do you feel about him?
CM: I think Dobbs is the villain of the piece, but because he gets the most close-ups, and he’s Bogie, you assume he is gonna be the hero. Huston leads you along for the first half of the movie. It’s like, maybe he is a good guy, but then there’s always little flashes.
BA: Like when he throws the water in the kid’s face in the beginning.
CM: At one point near the end, you said, “He’s so mean!”
BA: I did say that. He was tough character.
CM: This is one of the most paranoid films ever made. The Parallax View has nothing on his film.
BA: The closer he got to being able to steal everybody’s gold, the more miserable he was, and the more he plotted with himself to try to get away with something. At one point, he crossed the line he couldn’t cross back from, when he shot Curtin.
CM: Tim Holt has one of my favorite scenes of all time. There’s a scene where Dobbs is in the goldmine, and there’s a collapse. Curtin walks up to the door of the mine, and he almost doesn’t help him. He almost walks away. Then he’s like, nah, I can’t be that guy. I feel like the same thing has probably happened to Howard like two or three times, you know? He’s been through it. He knows who he is. But there’s this moment when Curtin has to decide what kind of a guy he is, and he decides that, no, I’m not the kind of guy that kills people for money. I’m the kind of guy that works for the common good. And then Dobbs has that same moment, where he has to make the decision, and well, every time he has to make a decision like that, Dobbs chooses Dobbs.
BA: Absolutely. That’s why I think it’s interesting to watch it from a point of view of, ‘I could’ve gone either way myself,’ you know what I mean? I would like to think I’m the kind of person that would help Dobbs, but after some of the things he had done up to that point, you’re thinking the practicality of it would’ve have just been to leave him there. It is interesting in how it pulls you in so many directions.
CM: And then when Cody, the other guy, finds them … I think this is why I love film noir and I love John Huston. Everybody’s smart, and they’re all plotting against each other. Because in real life, people are stupid. Nobody really sits around and dissects the situation. It’s a very screenwriter thing to do, to sit around and dissect everybody’s motives. Cody is like, ‘Okay, here’s your choices: One, you can kill me. Two, you can cut me in. Or three, I can go to town and file a claim and throw you guys off your gold mine. I would choose two, but you guys gotta choose what you choose.’ And that’s exactly the moment you’re talking about. ‘Cause it’s like, I could see killing him, and I can see not killing him. It’s just a question of what kind of guy you are.
BA: Or how desperate you are to make what you’re doing work at that point. You know, if you’re early days in it, you might be more willing to share it, but the longer Dobbs is in it, the more he’s gonna work to keep what he has.
CM: He says, ‘I’m not gonna do that.’ He says at the beginning, we’re gonna make our goal, and then we’re going to get out. He has a chance in the beginning to make that choice, when they beat up the the deadbeat boss.
BA: He has a chance to take all the money there and he doesn’t do it. Corruption is a big theme.
CM: This film was based on a book by a a guy named B. Traven.
BA: I noticed that. Have you read the book?
CM: No. But nobody knows who B. Traven really was. It’s a pen name. All we know is that he lived in Mexico, and he was probably a Communist. There’s all these socialist themes that run throughout this film. For example, the first time you meet Howard, he is explaining his theory of value. Why is gold worth a lot of money? Because a lot of labor went into finding it. You know, the capitalist answer to “Why is gold worth money?” is that everything is worth whatever the market will bear. If people are stupid enough to want gold that bad, then we will sell it to you.
BA: I didn’t think about that. Walter thinks a hundred percent in terms of labor.
CM: The theme that that runs throughout it is, are you going to choose to work with the collective, or are you gonna choose your own selfish motives?
BA: When you put it that way, there really is a message there, isn’t there? Dobbs is the greedy capitalist.
CM: When we were watching it, you said something about symbolism. I was like, yeah, man, everything in this picture is symbolic.
CM: The one thing you knew going in was that line, “We don’t need no stinking badges!” It just kind of sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?
BA: You think you’re gonna see it coming, but you don’t. It just pops in there in a way, like a lot of those famous lines do, I guess.
CM: Because it’s so earned. That dude who was Gold Hat [Alfonso Bedoya], he was always the Mexican guy in Westerns and stuff. This was the role where he got to really have depth, and look: You got Walter Huston, who won Best Supporting Actor. You have freakin’ Bogart at the top of his game. But who does everybody remember? They remember the character actor.
BA: That’s the moment. I think Bugs Bunny referenced it, and it was in The Three Amigos. Down through the ages, it’s a classic.
CM: Walter Huston, absolute classic performance.
BA: He very much deserved to be nominated for that performance.
CM: He does the archetypal “crazy prospector dance.” I don’t know if it was the first one, but it’s the best one.
BA: Now that I’ve thought about the socialist aspects of it, one thing that came up twice was the virtues of fruit picking. It’s a simple life of hard labor that you’re supposed to strive for. Like, it was gonna be [Curtin’s] reward for doing this. And the other guy, the letter guy [Cody] could have had that already. But he walked away from it, and he got killed.
CM: All of these people are pursuing happiness — or at least that’s what they think they’re doing. Cody had what the film ultimately comes to define as happiness. He had that already, but he followed greed.
CM: One of the reasons I’m a big Huston fan is ’cause he’s so literary. This movie has like twice as much dialogue as a contemporary movie. It’s dense as hell.
BA: I feel like it had less soundtrack too, fewer music cues. It left you to figure things out. When the Gila Monster thing happened, there was a sharp music cue, and I thought, this is the first one I can remember.
CM: You’re absolutely right. A modern director would be trying to lead your emotions more. John Huston is not here to hold your hand through this. And if people speak Spanish in this movie, you better know Spanish, because he ain’t telling you what they’re saying.
BA: You could get the gist. I like that when movies do that a little bit, at least.
CM: Scorsese did that in Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s super effective in this movie, because you don’t feel like you miss anything, you understand what’s going on here. There’s an extended scene in Spanish at the end where the bandits get back to town. I don’t speak Spanish, but I know exactly what went on.
BA: I think it’s interesting that when they started, they were all expatriates. They never really say how they ended up in that situation, but I kind of like that. It makes the story kind of take place in limbo. The beginning reminded me a lot of the French movie where they moved the dynamite, they remade it with Roy Schneider.
CM: Sorcerer?
BA: That was the remake … [It’s The Wages of Fear, 1953] Both movies follow that structure. They start with these guys, and they’re just hanging around this company town with no jobs and no money. They get mixed up in this plot to move a bunch of dynamite that has melted to a point where it’s dangerous to be around. The rub is they could blow up anywhere along the line.
CM: So, it’s important that these are people out of their regular context.
BA: Right, they’re out of their element, without much hope of doing anything.
CM: It is structured like an experiment. All the major characters are guys. There are some women in the film, but they don’t really do much. This is not Bechdel Test compliant at all. But in a way, if one of our three heroes was a woman, it changes the dynamic. The whole thing is designed to remove all the variables until you get down to just greed. That’s what ultimately is motivating them — how they relate to their own avarice. One way or the other, it determines their actions. It’s really an exploration of greed. But if one of ’em was a woman, it would be different. If one of them was Mexican, it would be different. It would complicate things.
BA: I never even thought about it in the extreme, but it’s important that they’re all out of their element to begin with. They’re kind of put in this position where they have to figure something to do, but it’s gotta be unorthodox. They’re kind of trying to get out of where they are. They cannot just blend in.
CM: They try to blend in! Talk about another socialist theme, they tried to do regular hard work, and it’s all like ‘Oh, come on! Get with the team! We’re all family here! We’re working 18-hour-days building this family oil derrick!” You know, the first bad guy in the movie — and the only clear-cut villain in the whole thing is an oil man, right? He just flat out rips ’em off.
BA: Bogart is playing against his normal type. I know he’d played bad guys before, but he was particularly …
CM: Just nasty.
BA: Yeah, not only nasty. Devious to an almost modern point, beyond how things were written at that time
CM: He might as well be Dexter.
BA: It’s funny you just said that. ‘Cause I was thinking of Anthony Hopkins; paranoid and scheming almost to a Hannibal Lecter level. It’s compelling to watch him, because he’s unpredictable and it makes the film unpredictable. Has he been this way the whole time, and we just don’t see it until the situation brought it out? Or is the situation making him act like a maniac? Bogart’s maniacal performance was definitely special, I think.
CM: He does so much with his body. When Cody first shows up, Curtin and Howard are sitting around the fire, and their body language is very relaxed. “Let’s see who this guy is. We don’t have to jump to any conclusions.” But Bogie’s hovering over him, bowed up on him. Then later, when he and Curtin are by themselves, he’s like “Hey, we should steal Howard’s cut.” He is balled up, wrapped around himself in an absolute manic state. It’s a brutal performance.
BA: Especially because the image of him is so cool and collected in other movies.
CM: Nothing phases Rick Blaine.
BA Nothing gets to Phillip Marlow.
CM: Finally, when the banditos catch up with him, that scene really stood out to me this time, because it all plays out on his face. You can see him scheme, you can see the wheels turning, and you can see when he realizes it’s over.
BA: Then they figure out who killed him by who was wearing his boots later. I love that. That was great.
CM: Oh, the boots! Yes! That scene, right after Gold Hat and the two surviving banditos kill Dobbs, the whole movie plays out again in fast motion.There’s three of them, and they immediately turn on each other over the treasure. They’re sitting on $105,000, and they don’t even know it! They turn on each other over boots and a shitty hat.
I generally don’t get too bent out of shape about the Academy Awards. I guess my attitude comes from a lifetime of disappointment stemming from the fact that Oscar voters don’t like the same things I like. Academy Awards nominations and wins are best viewed as conversation starters, not any objective (whatever that means) measure of the best films of the year.
Having said that, Past Lives was ROBBED! Yes, I’m YELLING ABOUT IT!
Maybe it seems strange to be crying — no, YELLING foul about such a quiet film that has been lavished with accolades. Yes, it is nominated for Best Picture, and writer/director Celine Song was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Both of these nominations are well deserved. But Past Lives deserved more.
The film opens in millennial Seoul, South Korea. Na Young and Hae Sung (played as children by Seung Ah Moon and Seung Min Yim, respectively) are middle-school classmates. Just as they move from fast friends to puppy love, they are separated when Na Young’s family immigrates to Toronto, Canada.
Twelve years pass. Na Young has Westernized her name to Nora Moon, and is now played by Greta Lee. She has moved to New York City for her education and to pursue a career as a playwright. Hae Sung (now played by Teo Yoo) is finishing up his hitch in the South Korean military and trying to figure out what to do with his life. Hae Sung does some internet searches for Na Young, but since he’s unaware of her name change, they come up empty. He puts out an open call for help in reconnecting with his long lost not-quite-girlfriend via Facebook, and word gets back to now-Nora via the Korean diaspora. It seems she has never stopped thinking about him, either.
From opposite sides of the world, they reconnect on period-appropriate video conferencing app Skype. (Song may be the first director to induce nostalgia with Skype’s “boodle-oodle-oodle-oop” incoming call alert sound, but she probably won’t be the last.) It’s these conversations where Teo Yoo and Greta Lee shine. They’re subtle, quiet, and totally relatable. Nora and Hae Sung are hesitant at first. They’re happy to see each other, for sure, but also feeling each other out. Emotions are complicated on both sides. A lot can change in 12 years, especially when that time period is half a lifetime. They become each other’s comfort, something to run to after a hard day. But the distance between them seems unbridgeable. Eventually, Nora breaks it off, saying she wants to devote herself to her career by taking a slot at a prestigious writer’s retreat, while Hae Sung goes to China for language lessons. The first person Nora meets at the writer’s retreat is Arthur (John Magaro), a fellow writer, and they immediately hit it off.
Then, 12 more years pass. Now Nora and Arthur are married and living in New York City, both with reasonably successful careers, but no children. Out of the blue, Nora gets a message from Hae Sung. He’s going to be in New York on business and was wondering if they could finally get together and see each other in real life for the first time since Seoul. Nora accepts, but when they finally do lay eyes on each other, things become a lot more fraught and complex than either one of them ever imagined.
Lee, who has been low-key brilliant in Russian Doll and What We Do in the Shadows, absolutely deserved a Best Actress nomination for her work as Nora. She juggles conflicting motivations and feelings with remarkable subtlety — which is perhaps a strike against her with an Academy that tends to equate good acting with MORE acting.
The same with Teo Yoo. In lesser hands, Hae Sung would have been a whiny loser or a John Cusack-ian perfect (yet kinda toxic) boyfriend. Instead, he’s a successful, otherwise well-adjusted guy who is following a deep impulse he doesn’t fully understand. And while we’re at it, John Magaro could have easily come off with a Best Supporting Actor nomination as the long suffering Arthur.
Maybe if it had been released in 2024, Past Lives would have gone on to a big Oscar sweep. But 2023 was the best year for film in recent memory, so the competition is crowded with worthy nominees. Even the ones I would have swapped out for Past Lives (I’m looking at you, Maestro) are still well-made and enjoyable films. Just like the star-crossed lovers it portrays, there’s an alternate world where things worked out better for Past Lives.
Past Lives Now Streaming Hulu and Amazon Prime Video
Memphis was well-represented at last night’s Grammy Awards. The album of long lost Stax demos, Written In Their Soul, won for Best Liner Notes, an award which was accepted by Stax’s PR person turned champion Deanie Parker and Memphis writer/director Robert Gordon.
Bobby Rush, now entering his ninth decade, won Best Traditional Blues Album for All Of My Love For You.
Supergroup boygenius—Pheobe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and former Memphis punk rocker Julien Baker—won three Grammys, including Best Alternative Album for The Record. “Not Strong Enough” won both Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance. Watch Baker get emotional while accepting the group’s third award of the evening.
The music video for “Not Strong Enough” was shot by the band themselves while hanging out in Southern California, and edited by Jackson Bridgers. The video shows off the group’s low-key appeal, which charmed the nation on the summer’s blockbuster tour which climaxed with a sold-out Halloween show at the Hollywood Bowl. The visuals may be unassuming, but the music is powerful.
You don’t have to win a Grammy to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday. All you have to do is email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Origin weaves together stories from contemporary America, the Jim Crow South, Nazi Germany, and colonial India.
In 1915, D.W. Griffith’s TheBirth of a Nation revolutionized film. It became the first big crowd-pleasing blockbuster by basically inventing the modern chase scene. Covering the Civil War and Reconstruction in its epic three-hour length (it was also the longest American film to date), the adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman is horrifically racist in its depiction of Black Southerners and glorification of white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan. Even as the film was raking in the dough at the box office, its blatant racism was called out by everyone from the NAACP to The New Republic.
Griffith responded to his critics with his next film. Intolerance was another three-hour epic which pushed at the boundaries of the form — this time by crosscutting between four stories from four different time periods, each about a different historical tragedy brought about by hate. Griffith’s response to his critics was not so much an apology as an observation: “Everybody hates for different reasons.”
It is ironic that, more than a century later, director Ava DuVernay would use the same technique as Griffith in a film that tries to place the American experience of racism into the larger context of world history and anthropology. In Origin, she weaves together stories from contemporary America, the Jim Crow South, Nazi Germany, and colonial India, trying to find the commonalities. These stories are recounted in the 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson; the film is the dramatized story of the writing of the book. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor stars as Wilkerson, who became the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. (In more Griffith-related irony, Ellis-Taylor also starred in Nate Parker’s 2016 film about the Nat Turner slave rebellion, The Birth of a Nation.)
When we meet Isabel, she’s trying to find her mother (Emily Yancy) an assisted-living facility and figure out what to do with the house she grew up in. Her husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) is a great help to her, even as they navigate the tricky social ins and outs of an interracial marriage. Meanwhile, the editor of The New York Times opinion page (Blair Underwood) is trying to get her to write about the Trayvon Martin killing, which was then fresh in the headlines. When her husband dies suddenly, Isabel deals with her grief by throwing herself into a new book, which neither she nor her agents or editors really understand.
Wilkerson’s book was a huge bestseller in the wake of the Black Lives Matter summer and seriously engaged with scholarship studying oppression around the world. It identifies eight “pillars of caste,” including the belief that the oppressive social order is the will of god and that the upper castes are “pure” and must be protected from contamination by the impure lower castes.
The problem DuVernay has as a filmmaker is that her subject is nonfiction, and heavy with sociological theory. Her solution is to smuggle the ideas in through Isabel’s personal melodrama like a science-fiction writer smuggles ideas with spaceships and lasers. We learn the history of liberationist Dr. B. R. Ambedkar by traveling to India with the writer and visiting his museum, for example. It doesn’t always work. At times, I felt like Caste would have been better served with a documentary series that explored each of the pillars in turn. In the last third of Origin, Isabel breaks out the whiteboard to help explain her theories, and we sit in on documentary-style interviews with both scholars and ordinary people. Four-time Tony winner Audra McDonald shines in one interview as a Black woman whose father named her “Miss” so white people would be forced to use a term of respect. These are the film’s most compelling and memorable moments.
Even with the attempts to make its message more palatable, Origin does not shy away from the big picture. The script even engages with the biggest critique of Caste when a German Marxist (Connie Nelson) points out that the origin of American racism was in service of capitalist exploitation of free labor, while Nazis sought to completely exterminate their out-caste group, the Jews of Europe. Wilkerson and DuVernay argue that even though people might think their hate is unique, in the end, it all looks the same.
Today on Music Video Monday, we bring you some big rock. Line So Thin’s “Here I Am” has a monumental sound which expresses a very personal sentiment.
“Really for me, ‘Here I Am’ is about the journey of struggle that comes with love and commitment,” says Line So Thin’s Dustin Allen. “Saying, ‘We can make this work, just don’t try and change each other.’ We accept each other for all that we are, the good and the bad, and realizing it was all worth it in the end.”
Blake Heimbach directed the music video, which was produced by his Hotkey Studio. It stars the band, plus MVM frequent flyer Alexis Grace and Ben Abney as a quarreling couple, and Memphis Flyer writer Jon W. Sparks lending gravitas.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Every year, the Memphis Flyer asks our readers to nominate outstanding young people in Memphis who are making a difference in their community. We chose the top 20 from an outstanding field of more than 50 nominations.
Memphis, meet your future leaders, the 20<30 Class of 2024.
Sara Barrera Economic Development Manager, Downtown Memphis Commission
After studying sustainability at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Barrera returned to Memphis to earn a degree in urban planning from the University of Memphis. She found the Downtown Memphis Commission to be a perfect fit for her talents and interests. “It’s been really rewarding to get to work with some small business owners that are trying to open up their first business, or people who are venturing out into neighborhoods that have been neglected for a long time and want to take on renewed faith in getting some stuff established out there.”
Courtney Blanchard Chief of Staff, Greater Memphis Chamber
A native Memphian, Blanchard interned at the Tennessee legislature before working at the economic development and governmental affairs office at the University of Memphis. She followed her mentor, Ted Townsend, to the Greater Memphis Chamber, where he is now the president and CEO. She describes her role as “The Convener” for the business organization. “We’re very intentional about the economic development that we work with at the Chamber because we don’t want the tide to just drive for some, we say that if the tide hasn’t risen for everyone, we’re not doing our job. We can’t leave anybody behind.”
Briana Butler Associate Attorney, Baker Donelson
“I’ve known since a very early age that I wanted to be a lawyer,” says Butler, who was only the second person in her family to finish college. “I didn’t really know what that would look like, but I knew I wanted to go to law school.”
Her dreams were complicated when she became pregnant. “I had my son at 18, so it was my second semester of freshman year of college, a particularly difficult time.” She managed to juggle the demands of both young motherhood and higher education, graduating magna cum laude from the University of Memphis in only three years and earning a degree at Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. At 23, she achieved her goal of landing a job at Baker Donelson. “Every single day, I feel like I’m taking a class. … If you have a seemingly unrealistic goal — which, my goal was unrealistic — create a very detailed plan. It gives you small little chunks that are more doable and more realistic to get you to the seemingly unrealistic goal.”
Sarah Cai Co-Owner/Chef, Good Fortune Co.
The mind behind Downtown’s favorite noodle shop grew up in Memphis, until her father moved the family to Guangdong, China, when she was 13. “When I was in college, I started working in hospitality and one of my mentors actually recommended that I try being a line cook, since he noticed I had a lot of passion for food. I tried it and absolutely loved it.
“My dad’s from China, my mom’s from Indonesia, so they were immigrants to this country. As we were growing up, they would always take us home as they could afford it, a trip every few years or so. From a young age, I was exposed to whole different types of culture, all different types of cuisine. And so I think being exposed to such variety of cuisine really helped develop my palate and also gave me a lot of experiences that people have never had before. When I decided to open Good Fortune, I was like, I think it’s got to be in Memphis. It just felt right to me.”
Lionel Davis II Energy & Infrastructure Executive, Johnson Controls
“I’ve always been somewhat of a tinkerer; some may call it mischievous,” says Davis, who turned his talents into a mechanical engineering degree and moved to Memphis from Little Rock for his current job. “We spend over 90 percent of our time in buildings, and the pandemic highlighted the value of indoor air quality. These are things that my company and my industry have prioritized.”
Davis serves as the first Black president in the 80-year history of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)’s Memphis chapter, as an assistant basketball coach at Binghampton Christian Academy, and as the former co-chair of the young adult ministry of Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church. “I really feel as though once you understand that your life is not solely meant to enrich yourself, the greatest among us is the one who serves the least among us.”
Ahmad George Artist
“I’ve always been drawing, I’ve always been doodling,” says George. “My high school teacher, Mr. Adair, who’s passed now, sadly, he really saw a future for it in me.”
George attended the much-missed Memphis College of Art and devoted themself to their painting. After successful gallery appearances in Miami and Spain, George recently had their first solo Memphis show at Crosstown Arts, “The Molasses Man and Other Delta Tales.” They describe their art as a kind of uncanny realism. “I like the psychological aspects and sensory aspects of art. I want to make people feel things, and not necessarily an overwhelmingly sad or bursting with happiness feeling.”
George’s painting, TheMolasses Man, from their Crosstown show was acquired by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art this past November.
Sondra Pham Khammavong ALSAC/St. Jude Talent Acquisition Liaison, Asian Night Market Founder
The native Memphian plays an important role at ALSAC. “I recruit students nationwide to join our internship program,” she says.
But you probably know the fruits of Khammavong’s other passion. When she founded the Vietnamese Student Association at the University of Memphis, she was following in her family’s footsteps. “My grandpa was one of those first [Vietnamese] that did come here to Memphis. So I’m just excited to continue the foundation that he started and the roots, even though I was born here in America, but just want to keep that heritage going and now that I have kids, just to be able to incorporate them into the culture.”
Most recently, she helped create the Asian Night Market, which attracted more than 8,000 people to Crosstown Concourse. “The Asian Night Market is the first in this city where we brought all the vibrant Asian cultures to one place with something that people love, which is food,” she says. “It was so amazing to see the city come together for a diverse event. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that, especially for the Asian community.”
Alexa Marie Kintanar FedEx Express Avionics Engineer
After a stint as an Apple Genius piqued her interest in electronics, Kintanar got an internship at FedEx. “I tried it, and I caught what they call the aviation bug from the get-go,” she says. “I saw how massive this technology was and how impactful it could be around the world, and we saw a lot of that actually during the pandemic.”
Kintanar is the first-generation offspring of Philippine-American immigrants. “A lot of what I wanted to do was make them proud — take all the hard courses, get all the scholarships. But also at the same time, make sure I loved what I was doing because I knew from a very young age that if you don’t love what you’re going to do, then it’s torture. You can’t have a job that you hate.”
She pays her good fortune forward as a member of REACH Memphis. “I participate in a lot of mentorship programs. Currently at FedEx, I work with the outreach program to Memphis City Schools for aircraft maintenance. We go to schools with students who don’t have as many opportunities, or aren’t aware of the opportunities that they have.”
Brooks Lamb Author, Farmer, Land Protection and Access Specialist, American Farmland Trust
This Rhodes College graduate’s passion is the land. “Most of my work lies in trying to support small and midsize farmers because they have been getting squeezed and undervalued and underappreciated for quite a long time.”
His two books are about our relationship to the Earth. “Overton Park: A People’s History looks at that in a more urban-focused, very Memphis context, and the way that people have really served as stewards of the park for generations. My newest book is called Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place. It looks at the challenges that small and midsize farmers face, paying particular attention to challenges from farmland loss and farmland conversion from sprawl, haphazard real estate development, and challenges from agricultural consolidations. For farmers of color, there are issues of systemic racism and injustice in the past, but also still very much in the present.”
Emma Less Senior Manager of Development, Overton Park Shell
“I don’t think you can grow up in Memphis and not appreciate music,” says Less. And there is no better place to appreciate music than the Overton Park Shell. “I remember going in high school and being so impressed that it was a place for everyone, and that you could hear really amazing bands. … I think there’s a lot to be said about the fact that it is free, and that means that you can decide to come the night of, and enjoy it with all your friends. You don’t have to worry about getting tickets and planning ahead, and that also means there’s more opportunity for anyone to be able to come regardless of their ability to pay for music and the arts.”
Less’ fundraising work aims to keep the music free. “Every time I carry the bucket through the crowd, it’s always just so lovely. It’s something that came from when the Shell was first built in 1936, and they passed a hat around. It’s always been important that the community has the buy-in and feels that they’re a part of the Shell, because it is theirs, too. Whether you’re giving us $5 or $5,000, it doesn’t matter.”
Richard Massey West Tennessee Vice President, Tennessee Young Democrats
The Marion, Arkansas, native is currently a sophomore at the University of Memphis, majoring in political science and legal studies. “What really propelled me to get involved in Memphis was the modern-day lynching, which I would describe it as, of Tyre Nichols at the hands of the Memphis Police Department, who deprived that man of his life in the most repugnant manner imaginable just 80 yards away from his mother’s residence. That propelled me to go to the city council, the first city council meeting of 2023, following the death of Tyre Nichols and demand a slate of important police reform measures.”
Massey has also been involved in labor issues and in fighting anti-LGBTQ bills in the state legislature, a body he hopes one day to join. “I think it’s important to remind the naysayers, those people who want to undermine youth contributions to these pivotal conversations, that the youth are at the forefront of every major issue affecting Memphis.”
Savannah Miller Director of New Works, Playhouse on the Square
Miller, a writer and dramatist who graduated from Dartmouth College and has already had five of her own plays staged, took over the New Works program in 2023. Under her watch, entries surged to more than 500 plays and musicals from playwrights all over the globe competing for two slots on the Playhouse on the Square stage.
“I would love for Memphis to be on the map as a place for writers. Before I first came here, I was thinking music. I was thinking visual arts. I was thinking history. I don’t know if I was thinking so much writers and theater artists, but I should have been because we have an amazing pool of talent here in Memphis. I feel like my job as a curator of voices is to showcase that to the world, to get these opportunities out there to people, and let other folks outside of the Mid-South see what we’re doing here in Memphis.”
Jessica Morris Counselor, Christian Brothers High School
Morris originally wanted to be a therapist, she says. “However, the more I researched, the more I realized that many mental health issues arise in childhood. Yet in the state of Tennessee, there is only one school counselor for every 458 students. I realized that school counselors have a more preventative effect on student mental health. This convinced me that I belong on the front lines, helping teenagers develop into healthy, emotionally stable adults.
“I think today’s teenagers are facing a near-constant overload of technological stimulation,” she says. “My department’s role is to offer our students a safe, calming environment where they can talk with a trusted adult away from the noise and stimulation of their lives. We take proactive measures in talking to our student body about cyber-balance, how to evaluate one’s mental well-being, and how to ask for help.”
Jordan Occasionally Musician
Born a singer, Occasionally decided to devote their life to music full-time at age 15. They earned a music business degree at the University of Memphis. “I started releasing music during the pandemic in 2021, and it went viral on TikTok and the rest was history,” Occasionally says. “I can say that the local community has been very loving to and receptive towards my music, and it’s given me the courage to break into the L.A. market, or into the New York market, or even around across the globe, the UK market. I wouldn’t have been able to get there without Memphis loving me first.”
At the same time, they have embraced activism, organizing Black Lives Matter protests and advocating for the unhoused community. “Toni Morrison said that all art is political. … I feel like I had an obligation along with having a platform. Anytime you have a stage, what you do with it matters.”
Elijah Poston Musician/Director of Operations, Jack Robinson Gallery
A foundational member of the Smith7 Records collective, Poston began getting attention for his music at a very early age. He created the public access TV show Kids Do Positive Thingz to showcase young talent in the Mid-South. After graduating from Loyola’s music program, he designed the music theory curriculum at Visible Music College. The multi-instrumentalist taught guitar and released music from his band Doter Sweetly. Today, he can be found on drums with General Labor and is prepping new music from a new group, Great Fortune.
Meanwhile, the position at Jack Robinson Gallery has opened up new vistas for Poston, who has begun dabbling in poster design. “I obviously stay busy because when I’m not here, I’m doing General Labor. I’m teaching at the U of M. And when I’m not doing that, I’m doing one of the other projects that I’m doing. But it is a lot. I was very lucky to have been introduced to everybody here, and it ended up being a perfect fit.”
Amira Randolph Youth Leadership Program Manager, Memphis Urban League Young Professionals
“I feel a real devotion to my city,” says Randolph. “Every time that we as a community can come together and do things to refresh Memphis, to move it forward into time, to make it a safer place for everyone and be more inclusive, that just makes it even better. And so whenever there’s an opportunity for me to do that, use my talent to do that, then I’m going to take it for sure.”
Randolph got her devotion to service from her father Ian, and says she believes mentorship is the key to helping at-risk youth thrive. “That is my whole drive and purpose. I deeply, deeply care about our youth. I know how important it is to have somebody there. You can be surrounded by family and surrounded by friends, and you still need that person to guide you outside of that.”
Chloe Sexton Baker and Owner, Bluff Cakes
As a producer for WREG-TV, Sexton was responsible for the political talk show Informed Sources. “Baking was just kind of this hobby that I used to blow off steam. I left TV, and I went into marketing. When the pandemic hit, everybody lost their jobs, and I was terrified. I was trying to learn how can I take all the skills that I have with television, with writing, with storytelling, and with marketing, and blend that into making my little hobby something profitable that’s gonna help me survive a pandemic. That’s how Bluff Cakes came about. Oh, did I mention I was pregnant?”
Now, Bluff Cakes ships Sexton’s creations all over the country, where her more than 2 million social media followers gobble them up. “The best advice that I learned was, if you’re gonna throw yourself into the public eye, you need to grow a thick skin very fast. … Also, trust your gut. It’s not as important as people think it is to follow trends. I would say it’s wildly more important to start your own.”
Jake Warren Corporate Credit Analyst, First Horizon Bank
“Finance was just my bread and butter. I’ve always been a numbers guy, kind of my cup of tea,” says Warren.
He loves “being able to help others achieve their goals, whether it be an individual preparing for retirements, buying their first house, or just helping a small business continue to grow. The end product is really what I enjoy most. There’s a lot of things behind the scenes like lots of graphs, spreadsheets, making predictions, trying to figure out what the best game plan is for them. It is hard work, but at the end of the day, just seeing others succeed is what keeps me going.”
Warren was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at the age of 4 and was involved in the Make-A-Wish program. Now with CF in remission, he is on the Mid-South chapter’s board of directors. “Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time getting ready for an event with the Make-A-Wish Foundation we’re hosting in February. My kitchen is full of boxes of silent auction items!”
Brandon Washington Tennessee Young Adult Advisory Council
At age 15, Washington was thrown into the Tennessee foster care system. Now, he is a sophomore at Rhodes College, and ran for City Council Super District 19 in the 2023 elections, where he garnered more than 16,000 votes.
“I had just came from D.C., advocating up there for expansion of resources for foster care. Two or three weeks later, President Joe Biden signed into law the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which expanded SNAP benefits to include aged-out foster youth, which is something that we were advocating. I realized that young people, we don’t have to wait until we’re more experienced to make change. We can actually make change now. We just need the platform to be heard.”
Washington is an international studies major, with the goal of one day becoming secretary of state. As for Memphis City Council, “I’m already preparing to run in 2027 for the same position.”
Olivia Whittington Real Estate Manager, AutoZone
“I manage the opening of AutoZone stores from site selection all the way to store opening,” says Whittington, who studied urban planning at the University of Memphis. “It’s been a great experience for me, and I’ve learned a lot.”
When she’s not busy expanding the AutoZone empire, she volunteers with Memphis Animal Services, “doing videos and photography for the dogs that are on the ‘urgent list’, who are basically slated for euthanasia. Those get shared with Memphis Animal Services and then other rescue groups around the country. There are groups online that will share that information to try and find a foster adopter or rescue for those particular dogs. And it can be hard, because you can’t save all of them.”
She says she feels obligated to help find homes for these dogs in distress because “the problem won’t get any better if people just want to look away from the problem.”
[Ed. Note: An earlier version of this story listed incorrectly listed Amira Randolph’s as affiliated with the Boys and Girls Club of Memphis. She is no longer affiliated with the organization. The Memphis Flyer regrets the error.]
