Author: Chris McCoy

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Film Review: “Under the Skin”

Scarlett Johansson

  • Scarlett Johansson

The other day, I looked out my window and saw one of Midtown Memphis’ many giant hawks sitting on my fence. When I got up to go to the window for a closer look, I discovered that the hawk was not alone—there was a squirrel on the fence, too. It was staring at the hawk, frozen in abject terror. The hawk, on the other hand, showed no emotion. It was just going about the business of being a predator, calculating how to best to capture and eat the squirrel. It didn’t care how the squirrel felt about it.

In Under the Skin, Scarlett Johansson plays a hawk, and dozens of average men of Glasgow, Scotland play squirrels. Johansson is an unnamed alien going about her job, which is to use her sex appeal to lure men to a secluded place where they are … well, we’re not really sure what happens to them, but it ain’t good. The process that the — not “victims”, “prey” — are subjected to is even more terrifying because of its incomprehensibility.

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Filmmaker Jonathon Glazer, a former music video director whose excellent 2000 feature debut Sexy Beast could not be more different from Under the Skin, reportedly worked on this film, based on a science fiction novel by Michel Faber, for 9 years, and it shows. Glazer and cinematographer Daniel Landin have created a work that is more visually stunning than most films with 10 times Under the Skin’s budget. Their meticulous compositions, which use every square inch of screen space, are a good reason to see it in a theater. The first half is a battle between dark and light, chaos and order, noise and information. The wordless beginning, in which Johansson takes the identity of a murdered woman, empties out the trick bag to put the viewer in her head, including sound design that strips the information content from human speech, leaving just the meaningless babble that the alien hears. Her lair is simple and featureless, and when humans are brought into it, they look gangly and alien. But when the humans are seen in their own environment, they fit in seamlessly, and it is Johansson, and thus the audience, who is alien.

In Her, Johansson constructed a compelling character just using her voice. Under the Skin is the opposite: She and Glazer construct a compelling, and yet completely alien, character with just her body. Her sparse line deliveries are flat and detached. She — assuming the aliens have sexes like humans — is a lure who knows just enough about sexuality to get the job done. Late in the film, when she attempts actual sexual intercourse, she is baffled by its mechanics. Johansson is of course beautiful, and frequently in a state of undress, but her body is not exercised to perfection like it is when she plays Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Prowling the streets of Glasgow, she looks like a normal woman; only we are aware of the horror that lurks underneath. That inversion of the mundane and the exotic is at the heart of this remarkable film’s success.

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Heathers

When it premiered, 25 years ago this spring, Heathers was a flop, unable to even recoup its $2 million budget. But it found an audience on home video, probably thanks to Winona Ryder and Christian Slater on the VHS box, and today, it’s Entertainment Weekly‘s 5th best high school movie ever. If you graduated from high school from 1989 to 1995, and you weren’t a cheerleader, you’ve probably got fond memories of this movie back in your brain somewhere. But does it hold up, or is it one of those things you’re going to be embarrassed about liking when you were younger?

I have good news: Heathers is even better than you remember. Ryder, who had her 16th birthday on the set, is riveting in what was supposed to be her first real movie star role. Slater, who was 18 at the time, is also fantastic, even though he’s pretty much doing an impression of The Shining-era Jack Nicholson. For Memphian Shannen Doherty, Heathers marked the transition from playing a kid on Little House on the Prairie to being a super famous teenager on Beverley Hills 90210.

A movie like Heathers simply couldn’t be made today, for it is one of the blackest comedies ever put to film. Screenwriter Daniel Waters takes no prisoners while skewering a media and society that glamorized teen suicide while claiming to be horrified by it. Slater’s J.D. wears a black trench coat and pulls out a gun in the cafeteria. This being 10 years before Columbine, he just gets a suspension. Teenage sex (including outright date rape), drug use, and arson are played for laughs. One of the reasons Ryder’s and Slater’s Bonnie and Clyde performances are so remarkable is that they remain pitch perfect, and even sympathetic, in an environment that is otherwise completely gonzo. Director Michael Lehmann’s inventive compositions are the visual equivalent of the film’s relentlessly snappy dialog. If you just remember it as a teen comedy, the film’s Kubrickian precisions will be the most surprising thing upon rewatching. It’s as if Mean Girls was shot like A Clockwork Orange.

Waters and Lehmann would team up again two years later for the disastrous Hudson Hawk. All great satires predict the future, and Heathers‘ cynical take on everyone exploiting tragedy to their own ends rings even more true today than it did in 1989. And maybe that’s why Heathers seems more transgressive in 2014, where you can make all the torture porn you want, but a comedy about a couple of kids who try to blow up a school is just not going to fly. That the film is still extremely funny is just icing on the cake.

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Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Carl Sagan kicked off his classic science television series Cosmos by defining the scope of his endeavor: “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”

Writing a book that covers all that ground, much less making good TV out of it, is nearly impossible. But Sagan pulled off both feats in 1980, creating a worldwide phenomenon that sharpened a generation’s interest in science. The 13-part Cosmos was the best-rated show on public television for more than a decade until Ken Burns’ The Civil War topped it, barely. With an estimated half-billion total viewers worldwide, it remains one of the most-watched and most influential shows in the history of the medium.

Sagan was the right guy in the right place at the right time. The Brooklyn-born astrophysicist worked for NASA at the dawn of the space program and was one of the driving forces behind the army of robotic space probes that fanned out across the solar system in the 1960s and ’70s. But he was not one of NASA’s self-styled “steely-eyed missile men,” the former military engineers and aviators who turned their expertise in creating nuclear-tipped rockets toward peaceful ends. Sagan was one of what they called “The Long Hairs” — a professorial type who preferred smoking weed over swigging scotch and who regarded space exploration as something of a mystic vision quest rather than a series of engineering challenges to be overcome.

By 1980, Sagan was the author of a half-dozen classics of popular science writing. Already a minor celebrity, he was appearing regularly with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show to discuss new scientific breakthroughs. He took his position as the de facto public face of science very seriously, and Cosmos‘ scientific rigor and clarity became the standard that all subsequent popular science shows aspired to. But Sagan the mystic, who had grown up on a diet of pulp science fiction, was obsessed with the possibility — he would say inevitability — of extraterrestrial life. Cosmos did not shy away from speculating what forms that life may take, and how we might learn about them. This drew hoots of derision from some of his fellow scientists but proved to be a hit with audiences.

In the ensuing 34 years, Cosmos became the template for documentary television, both great and terrible. Today, cable shows like Ancient Aliens take Sagan’s tone of breathless wonder and cynically use it to peddle ratings-grabbing hokum. Perhaps the anti-Cosmos was the 2001 Fox “documentary” that accused NASA of faking the moon landing, so it is kind of ironic that the same channel would choose to produce a rebooted Cosmos intended to both update the series’ increasingly dated science facts and introduce a new generations to Sagan’s sense of wonder.

Astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, hosts the revamped Cosmos.

But it’s not very ironic when you consider that it was Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane who got the series greenlit. MacFarlane has made billions and billions of dollars for Fox, and when Sagan protégé Neil deGrasse Tyson approached him about redoing Cosmos, MacFarlane decided to cash in some of his chips. MacFarlane’s clout apparently buys a lot, including what was claimed to be the biggest premiere in television history: Ten networks, 45 countries, and dozens of languages.

The new series is completely worthy of the hype. Tyson, working with Sagan’s widow and co-writer Ann Druyan, has updated the look, feel, and pacing of the series for 21st-century viewers without sacrificing its spirit. This is no mean feat, considering that Sagan had 90 minutes per episode while Tyson, working on commercial television, has less than half that. But the first two scripts, directed by former Star Trek: The Next Generation producer Brannon Braga, have been models of narrative economy, revamping Sagan’s most successful motifs while discarding some of his more esoteric digressions.

The show’s framing device, the Spaceship of the Imagination that takes the host from the edge of the observable universe to the mutating DNA of a prehistoric polar bear, has transformed from a dandelion seed into something that looks like a variable-geometry guitar pick. Another of Sagan’s great ideas, the Cosmic Calendar, an extended metaphor that helps make sense of the mind-destroying expanse of time by compressing the history of the universe into a single year, where the entirety of human history is contained in the last 14 seconds of December 31st, has lost none of its power in Tyson’s hands.

Tyson lacks the depth of Sagan’s hard science pedigree, but he is a fearless evangelist for the scientific method. His day job is running New York’s Hayden Planetarium, where he made his bones by breaking the news to the non-astronomer peoples of Earth that Pluto is not a planet.

It was reported that a Fox affiliate in Oklahoma had edited out the 15-second mention of evolution in the first episode, but the second episode made the attempted censorship futile. Tyson uses the same rhetorical gambit that worked for Charles Darwin in On the Origin Of Species, starting with the familiar example of animal breeding (artificial selection) to explain the mechanism behind evolution (natural selection).

Comparing the second episodes of the two series highlights the strengths and weaknesses of both. Sagan used a story about medieval Japanese crab fishermen as his example of artificial selection, an artful but willfully obscure choice; Tyson traces the evolutionary history of the dog, something that everyone can relate to emotionally. Sagan devoted an entire segment to telling the full story of life on Earth from biogenesis to the present in what remains the clearest and most compelling explanation of evolution ever set to film. Tyson opts to tell the specific story of the evolution of the eye (which even Darwin said was the biggest hole in his theory) as a way to both educate the audience about the nuts and bolts of natural selection and to preempt a common counter-argument.

We live in a world that is, even more so than Sagan’s 1980, defined by a constant state of technological change, evolving scientific revelations, and the menace of global catastrophe. To make good decisions about our future, we must understand the wonders and perils of science. Tyson does not flinch from the unknowns, throwing down a challenge to young viewers to be the ones who finally decipher science’s greatest mystery: the origin of life itself. But he makes no apology for Cosmos’ mission: to deliver a strong dose of science fact to a country, and a world, in sore need of it.

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Sundays, 8 p.m.

Fox

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The Existential Horror Of The Winter Olympics

sochilogo.jpeg

The universe is a vast, uncaring place built on a foundation of random meaninglessness overlaid by a thin veneer of order that gives us insignificant humans an illusion of hope. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Winter Olympics.

Consider Hannah Kearney, U.S. women’s mogul skiing gold medalist in 2010, returning to defend her medal run on the second night of the Sochi games. On her final run, the 27-year-old national hero’s balance faltered for a microsecond while slamming into a snow mound at 50 miles per hour. She recovered with superhuman grace and strength, crossing the finish line with poles triumphantly upraised. She came in third, less than a point behind a pair of Canadian sisters, Justine and Chloe Dufour-Lapointe. Dry-eyed, she told an interviewer moments later that her career had ended in that microsecond.

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Consider Shaun White, the Tony Hawk of snowboarding whose gold medal performances at the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympics legitimized the sport in America. In NBC’s endless human interest segments, White appeared ready to complete an Olympic trilogy with his familiar Muppet hair shorn, his baggy boarding togs replaced with a tight black outfit that evoked Luke Skywalker’s black fatigues from Return of the Jedi that represented the loss of youthful illusion.

White bowed out of the urban skateboarding-inspired slopestyle boarding event to save his joints, shredded from a lifetime of impacts, for the halfpipe competition, where he had won half the Olympic gold medals ever awarded. He fell twice in his first run, recovered in his second for a respectable score that was 4.5 points behind the winner, Switzerland’s Iouri Podladtchikov. White’s score on his qualifying run was a full point higher than Podladtchikov’s winning score, but it didn’t matter; for the first time in the history of the sport, no American medaled in the men’s halfpipe.

White gave his snowboard to a kid from the Make-A-Wish foundation.

Glowered over by Vladimir Putin, a symbol of the failure of post-Cold War democracy in Russia whose very name screams “supervillian,” kicked off by a Hunger Games-level spectacle, the Sochi games have been plagued by unusually warm weather. Organizers have taken extraordinary measures to keep the all-important snow from melting, but their slowly failing efforts to stave off the effects of climate change will look like foreshadowing in future history books. The halfpipe was the most visible victim — in a qualifying run, a female snowboarder coasting straight and level after pulling off yet another impossible trick hit a pool of meltwater and faceplanted. Concussed, she was helped off the pipe by a coach; she didn’t know where she was.

You might think the timed sports such as downhill skiing and speed skating would be “fairer” than sports where judges arbitrarily assign point values to performances, but no.

Consider Bode Miller, America’s greatest male skier. Like White, Miller qualified strong, but on his final run, clouds flattened the light, making surface detail difficult to discern on the artificial snow. Miller was undeterred, and, with his skis roaring across the ice like jet engines, he had the best time on the top of the hill. Then he hit the biggest jump — known as the Lake Jump because it makes skiers think they will fly off the mountain and land in a lake two miles below — and a random gust of wind made him soar slightly too high. He finished a statistically insignificant 0.27 seconds behind the leader, landing him out of the medals. Perhaps he can take some solace in the thought that the very act of trying to time events down to the hundredth of a second was exposed as folly in 1905 when Albert Einstein revealed that the illusion of simultaneous events is a trick the universe plays on us.

Even the on-air talent is not immune to Sochi’s cruel sense of humor. Bob Costas, apparently broadcasting from Superman’s Fortress Of Solitude, battled an increasingly gruesome case of pinkeye until he woke up blind and had to hand off to corporate tool Matt Lauer. Nor could one take solace in the jovial, zen sport of curling, where one match was decided by an errant bit of carpet fiber that had landed on the ice, diverting a rock at a crucial moment.

For every winner, there are dozens of losers, separated only by random quantum fluctuations. And yet still they come, Olympians on skates, skeletons, and snowboards, to hurl themselves down mountains and break the only bodies they will ever have against uncaring ice. As I write this, freestyle skiers are flying off a suicidal ramp, gyrating wildly in the air, and, almost to a woman, crashing into the desperately groomed snow below.

The only thing worse than suffering Sochi’s slings and arrows is not trying. Consider Evengi Plushenko, Russian figure skater, the biggest sports star in his country of 143 million. The 31-year-old battled through a spinal injury to help bring the Russians their first gold medal of these games in the team competition. As he took the ice for the individual competition, the hometown crowd gave him a standing ovation. But, instead of beginning his routine, he turned furtive circles, grimacing. Finally, he went to the judges, leaning heavily on their table to relieve his injured back as he withdrew from competition. He shook off coaches’ efforts to support him as he disappeared beneath the bleachers, inconsolable.

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Murphy’s Law

There was a time when Hollywood made good, B-level sci-fi action movies, and that time was the 1980s. There was a lot of crap, of course, but for every Arnold Schwarzenegger ham sandwich like The Running Man there was a RoboCop: a movie that smuggled ideas along with its cheap thrills.

In Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 subversive masterpiece, officer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is a beat cop in a hyper-violent future Detroit. Gravely wounded in the course of ferreting out a bank robber with ties to the corrupt public/private partnership that runs the city, Murphy is transformed by scientists working for the corporation Omni Consumer Products into a cyborg law enforcement machine. In theory, the film’s themes — cybernetic body horror, technological anxiety, corporate malfeasance, and authoritarian bloodlust — make RoboCop ripe for a remake in the strange, fearful world of 2014.

Director José Padilha certainly seems to have been inspired by the subversive spirit of Verhoeven’s original as well as the Dutch director’s even more overtly satirical Starship Troopers. But where the original RoboCop was elegantly cutting, this version is ungainly and ornate.

Verhoeven was the master of having the surface text and subtext flowing in two different directions at the same time, where Padilha feels he must underline and circle the satirical elements Verhoeven introduced with clever world-building. Maybe most of the problem lies in the fact that Verhoeven was making a sci-fi action movie, and this RoboCop, in keeping with the times, is a superhero origin story.

Verhoeven’s vocabulary was taken from The Terminator and Dirty Harry (channeled through the comic book Judge Dredd). This version wants to walk the line between Iron Man and Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. Just as in Marvel movies these days, Samuel L. Jackson shows up to frame the proceedings, now playing a right-wing TV blowhard named Pat Novak who cheers on Omicorp’s operation exporting American-style techno totalitarianism to “sunny Tehran.” RoboCop‘s opening sequence is by far the best thing about the movie, promising a cutting satire of military industrial politics with cool robots and big explosions.

But then the creeping Batman-itis sets in, weighing the film down with unneeded plot complexity, a RoboCop outfit designed to look like Christian Bale’s Batsuit, a Batcave-like techno-lair, and extended, shaky-cam action sequences that seem like low-budget versions of those in The Dark Knight. Not only is there an actual Batman, Michael Keaton, as the twitchy Omni President Raymond Sellars, who wants to import repressive military technology to American soil for profit, but there’s also Gary Oldman, wearing his Commissioner Gordon glasses while playing RoboCop’s creator and protector Dr. Dennett Norton.

The movie’s biggest problem is its lack of Peter Weller, who, in one of the great performances in science-fiction film history, animated RoboCop’s struggle to regain his humanity with an operatic physicality. The Killing star Joel Kinnaman can’t quite fill those metallic boots, and he ends up looking lost and confused instead of tortured and stoic.

There’s a great movie to be made about the creeping militarization of domestic policing and the role of technology in our lives, and sometimes that seems to be the film that Padilha wants to make. But wrapping these ideas once again in the RoboCop label invites comparisons to the franchise’s superior past. Maybe every generation gets the RoboCop it deserves. I’m just not sure what we did to deserve this one.

RoboCop

Now playing

Multiple locations

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Adventure Time: Oxford Film Fest Winners

Adventure Time fan art with an autograph by animator Kent Osborne

  • “Adventure Time” fan art with an autograph by animator Kent Osborne

The 11th Annual Oxford Film Festival brought large, enthusiastic crowds to its new location at the Malco Oxford Commons theater as well as to its traditional home base at The Lyric. Local and regional films such as Killer Kudzu and Memphis-made Being Awesome and Meanwhile in Memphis were crowd favorites, and a Mississippi shorts screening proving particularly popular. A panel discussion with animator Kent Osborne from the Cartoon Network’s hit show Adventure Time packed in fans of all ages.

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Eliza Hajek (SAGIndie), actor Barry Nash (Bob Birdnow), & producer/DP Ryan Scafuro (Bending Steel) Friday night at The Powerhouse

  • Eliza Hajek (SAGIndie), actor Barry Nash (“Bob Birdnow”), & producer/DP Ryan Scafuro (“Bending Steel”) Friday night at The Powerhouse

The slate of winners for the festival’s Spirit of the Hoka awards, announced at a gala ceremony at The Lyric, was topped by Teddy Bears, a dark comedy by writer Thomas Beatty, who co-directed with Rebecca Fishman.

The documentary feature Hoka was won by Bending Steel, Dave Carroll and Ryan Scafuro’s affecting chronicle of a would-be modern day Coney Island strongman named Chris “Wonder” Schoeck.

Actor Barry Nash won a special jury prize for his white-knuckled performance as a maimed motivational speaker in Bob Birdnow’s Remarkable Tale of Human Survival and the Transcendence of Self.

In the shorts, Evan Curtis’ stop-motion Snowdysseus took the Hoka in the animated category, and dynamic ink drawing Virtuos Virtuell by Maja Oschmann and Thomas Stellmach won the experimental crown.

Winners in the fest’s increasingly crowded Mississippi categories included Jimbo Mathus’ expressionist puppet epic Poor Lost Souls for music video. Landscapes of the Heart: The Elizabeth Spencer Story, Rebecca Cerese’s portrait of the 90-year old Mississippi writer, won the state documentary crown, while Jackson Segars’ Mississippi farm family saga Evergreen took home the narrative feature Hoka.

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Awesome Again

As they prepared for their 11th year of bringing the latest and greatest independent films to Mississippi, the Oxford Film Festival staff had a record number of films to choose from. “We got 300 more submissions than we thought we would,” says Melanie Addington, the festival’s development director since 2006. “There are so many good films out there, it makes it hard to choose. But we’ve only got three days to fit all these great films in.”

This year’s festival will kick off on Thursday, February 6th, at The Lyric with a live broadcast of the Thacker Mountain Radio show followed by the premiere of the made-in-Oxford film Killer Kudzu. “For each of the past four years, the festival has been producing our own film,” Addington says. Killer Kudzu represents a number of firsts. For one, it was the first of the community movies that was the result of a screenplay competition instead of a collaborative writing process.

“We had so many great entries that it was hard to choose. We have so many good writers in our area,” Addington says. “We picked one from Felicity Flesher, a young student studying film. It’s really fun. It’s totally B-movie schlocky horror.”

Director Meaghin Burke is also the first female director to helm an Oxford Community Movie.

The made-in-Oxford film Killer Kudzu

On Friday, the festival kicks into high gear at the Malco Oxford Commons theater with some Memphis-made films including Indie Memphis winner Being Awesome, directed by Allen C. Gardner. The bittersweet comedy will screen at 4 p.m. with Corduroy Wednesday’s zombie apocalypse comedy short Songs In the Key Of Death. At 8 p.m., another Indie Memphis winner, Robert Allen Parker’s documentary Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution, will bring the sights and sounds of the last three decades of Memphis music to the festival screen. Also of note Friday are the documentary Bible Quiz, director Nicole Teeny’s chronicle of a group of kids competing in a national bible knowledge championship, and the mesmerizing narrative feature, Bob Birdnow’s Remarkable Tale of Human Survival and the Transcendence Of Self. Actor Barry Nash, whose amazing performance as the titular Birdnow anchors the virtually one-man film, will be in attendance.

Among the notable films on Saturday is a pair of documentaries. Bending Steel is an acclaimed tale of a man who is obsessed with resurrecting the Coney Island strongman tradition and overcomes both his own emotional isolation and the physical hardships of performing feats of inhuman strength. Screening with Bending Steel is A Man Without Words. This short by New Orleans filmmaker Zack Godshall tells the inspiring story of sign-language teacher Susan Schaller’s efforts to teach a 27-year-old deaf man to communicate. “I cried like a baby when I saw it,” says Addington.

“I’m excited about some of our panels we have this year,” says Addington. “Hummie Mann, a Hollywood composer, and Scott Bomar from Memphis are going to show a scene they scored and break down how they did it. It’s going to be a very interactive.” “Breaking Down the Score” is scheduled for Saturday at 1 p.m. Other panels include a discussion of animation with Spongebob Squarepants and Adventure Time storyboard artist Kent Osborne.

Saturday night ends with the Oxford Film Festival’s now-legendary award ceremony at The Lyric, where winning narrative, documentary, and short films will receive the festival’s Hoka Award. Director and veteran actor Jason Ritter will be presented with a special Hoka for Achievement in Film.

“We’re really trying to better our game,” Addington says. “We always want it to be better than last year so people get more excited.”

Oxford Film Festival

Thursday, February 6th, to Sunday, February 9th

Various locations in Oxford, MS

oxfordfilmfest.com

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Film Reviews

Philomena

Philomena

By Chris McCoy

Philomena is a film about different worlds colliding: the old world of conservative, Catholic Ireland collides with the sexually liberated 21st century; British media and political elites collide with the working class; and England collides with America — or at least its concept of “America.”

At the center of these collisions is Philomena Lee, played in this true story by Judi Dench. Philomena is a retired nurse, pushing 70 years old with a modest pension, a beautiful adult daughter, and a painful secret. In the early 1950s, when she was a naive, 18-year-old, Catholic girl from Ireland, she had a one-night fling at a carnival with a handsome young man and wound up pregnant. But post-war Ireland was not a good place to be a pregnant teenager, so her father placed her in the local convent home for unwed mothers. After almost dying in a horrific breech birth, which the nuns believed was her punishment for sexual immorality, Philomena was expected to work for the convent in virtual slavery for four years until the 100 pounds the sisters had supposedly spent on the health care and room and board for her and her apple-cheeked son, Anthony (played at various ages by Tadhg Bowen, Harrison D’Ampney, and Sean Mahon). But, before the four years are up, Anthony is adopted by a mysterious but clearly very rich couple and taken away from Philomena, never to be seen again. Believing she was atoning for a mortal sin, Philomena tells no one about her loss and goes on with a normal life until, on what would have been Anthony’s 50th birthday, she decides to set out to find her long-lost son.

Enter Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan, who also co-writes), an Oxford-educated, BBC White House correspondent turned spin doctor for Tony Blair. After being sacked from his political job after a public scandal, he’s depressed and trying to rebuild his career when he finds out about Philomena’s quest at the same posh cocktail party where he meets a tabloid editor named Jane (Anna Maxwell Martin), who is looking for a human-interest story. So the cynical journalist and the hopeful pensioner set out to find a long-lost child.

Is Dench going to get an Oscar nomination for this? Probably yes. Whether delivering an extended retelling of the romance novel she just read or staring longingly at images of her lost offspring, Dench is the linchpin that director Stephen Frears hangs the film on.

Besides Dench’s fierce eyes, the most interesting part of Philomena is watching the picture of the lost son unfold as the buddy-cop pairing of Dench and Coogan ferret out his life story.

The film’s biggest problem is that Philomena never really changes. She starts the film as the model strong, wise, working-class matriarch, and, even though she undergoes what should be life-changing revelations, that’s pretty much where she stays. Sixsmith’s swing from depressed journo to slightly less depressed journo is wider, but Coogan’s job is to support Dench’s Oscar clench, so Frears keeps him on a short leash.

For a film that ostensibly celebrates a more humane, feminist sexual morality over the patriarchy of the past, Philomena is surprisingly old-fashioned. The good guys are good, just a little misunderstood. The bad guys are irredeemable. The wrap-up is just a bit too tidy. But that probably won’t matter to this film’s potential audience, who want to see The Dench unleashed in a juicy, tearjerker of a role. If that sounds appealing to you, then Philomena will not disappoint.

Black Nativity

Black Nativity

By Chris Davis

Apart from gorgeous photography and heavenly voices, the best thing about Black Nativity, a predictable slice of holiday ham, is that it isn’t titled Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity. Even though everyone involved clearly wanted to trade on the great African-American poet’s name and legacy, as well as the look and feel of modern Harlem, no one wanted to have to spend too much time figuring out how to make the original play’s groundbreaking collage of traditional gospel music and pure pageantry work on film.

A better name for Black Nativity might be “Preacher Stories” because the new musical’s narrative is built from a collection of heavily symbolic (and overly convenient) situations reminiscent of the anecdotes a preacher might use to illustrate moral points about temptation, forgiveness, or redemption. The central figure in this story isn’t Jesus or Mary or Joseph or Langston Hughes but a troubled but good-hearted kid named Langston whose mom works two jobs and still can’t make the note. He’s sent from the streets of Baltimore to Harlem, where he stays with middle-class grandparents he’s never known and where he meets an angel, dreams dreams, and buys a gun from a Very Special Thug.

Apart from clumsy storytelling and wince-worthy dialogue about Christmas miracles, the worst thing about Black Nativity is that it’s being released on the big screen, not hyped on the small one. With a handful of genuinely Capra-esque moments to keep the tritest bits in check, Black Nativity has a lot in common with holiday specials from the 1970s and ’80s. Like The Waltons Homecoming or even A Christmas Story, it feels like it was created to be taken in at home, such as it is, over Thanksgiving leftovers, such as they are

With hip-hop beats and echoes of medieval liturgical drama, this Nativity sometimes gets the spirit of Hughes, if not the letter. Honest, unfussy performances will help it weather the critical shitstorm it probably deserves. It will enjoy a happy afterlife on cable.

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Goner Guide

Thursday, Sept. 26

Gonerfest traditionally opens with a low-key, outdoor show at the gazebo at the corner of Cooper and Young. This year, however, the opening promises to be a lot less low key, with Japanese legends Guitar Wolf bringing their brand of acrobatic, primal, ultra-high-energy garage primitivism to the neighborhood that is not aware of what is about to hit it.

The first night of Gonerfest 10 opens at the Hi-Tone with the Blind Shake, a Minneapolis three-piece in the noisy Hüsker Dü tradition, whose fantastic second full-length album Key To A False Door just dropped. Next up is the confusingly named Octa#Grape, a sort-of San Diego supergroup led by former Trumans Water noisemeister Glen Galloway, and then the reverb-drenched Frenchmen Catholic Spray. Detroit’s Tyvek plays straight-ahead, pogo-worthy punk appropriate to their hometown’s reputation. Their previous Gonerfest sets have been pits of riotous energy. The first Memphis band on the bill is Ex-Cult, who played one of their earliest shows at last year’s Gonerfest and have since gathered a following by barnstorming the nation supporting Ty Segall. Closing the first night is New Orleans’ organ wizard Quintron, whose headlining set at Gonerfest 6, which wound up a tired bunch of punks into a giant, all-night dance party ­— as Eric Friedl says, “It was a big, sweaty mess” — and is on the shortlist for best Gonerfest performance ever.

Friday, Sept. 27

Friday kicks off with an afternoon show at the Buccaneer featuring the ramshackle Florida rock of Gino and the Goons and poppy Swedes The Martin Savage Gang.

The Hi-Tone show begins with a trio of Tennessee’s finest. Fronted by Memphis noise rock legend Richard Martin and including Friedl, the indescribable True Sons of Thunder must be seen to be believed. (“We don’t know what we’re doing, but we’ve been doing it for 8 years, so we must be doing something right,” Martin says.) Viva L’American Death Ray Music marks a rare appearance from a pair of Memphis’ favorite sons, Nick Diablo and Harlan T. Bobo, who have decamped to Brooklyn and France, respectively. Nashville’s Cheap Time are Gonerfest veterans with deep Memphis roots and solid, assured songwriting by leader Jeffery Novak.

The first of two Seattle bands at the fest is Head, a favorite of Goner’s Zac Ives. Detroit’s Human Eye, led by Detroit’s Timmy Vulgar, brings their psychedelic blacklight stage show and sci-fi weirdness back to the Gonerfest stage, where they dominated two years ago.

The big story of the tenth Gonerfest is Friday night’s headliner. “Mudhoney is by far the biggest band we’ve ever had play,” Ives says. The Seattle band was there at the conception of the ’80s “Seattle sound,” and their first single, “Touch Me I’m Sick” marked, if not the beginning of the grunge era, then at least the first time most people outside the Pacific Northwest heard the sound that turned rock-and-roll inside out and made the former underground the mainstream. They were labelmates on Sub Pop with Nirvana, and Mudhoney just released their tenth album, Vanishing Point, on the venerable label. In 1998, they recorded the album Tomorrow Hit Today under the tutelage of the late, legendary Memphis producer Jim Dickinson. Where others from that era either flamed out like Nirvana or went arena rock like Pearl Jam, Mudhoney has stuck to its guns, keeping the tempos up and the lyrics snotty. Many, if not most, of the bands playing at Gonerfest owe a stylistic debt to Mudhoney, whether they know it or not.

Saturday, Sept. 28

Gonerfest Saturday afternoons are in many ways the heart and soul of the festival. The festival invades Murphy’s in Midtown with 10 bands alternating on two stages, one inside and the other in the parking lot.

“That’s one of the shows that people from Memphis usually come to,” Ives says.

“It’s a good way to check out Gonerfest without the whole ‘subway ride to hell’ thing,” Friedl adds.

This year’s Saturday includes sets from Memphis punk provacateurs Manatees and Harlan T. Bobo’s newest project, the hard-rocking Fuzz. Other highlights include Gonerfest stalwarts Digital Leather, a synth-punk project by former Jay Reatard collaborator Shawn Foree; Oxford’s Talbot Adams; and Austin art-punks Spray Paint. Closing the afternoon show is Wreckless Eric, a British punk rocker who was there at the creation of the sound in 1977, and whose long and varied career has seen at least 17 albums under many different names and has taken him all over the world.

For those who have survived the preceeding two days, Saturday night at the Hi-Tone is stacked with talent. The night kicks off with the spacey, soulful sounds of Iowa’s Autodramatics and ’90s Australian punkers Onyas, featuring guitar strangler John “Mad” Macka, will throw down before Memphis’ own Msr. Jeffrey Evans leads his CC Riders out of retirement. Next up are Alabama synth weirdos Wizzard Sleeve, who are Gonerfest vets and perennial Memphis favorites. The penultimate band is Destruction Unit, led by former Memphian Ryan Russo. “They are one of the best bands on the planet,” Friedl says. “They’ve got this kind of Hawkwind thing going on, with everyone flying around the stage for 45 minutes.”

Saturday night’s headliners are the Australian gut bucket rock legends the Cosmic Psychos. The highly influential band’s first three records, Down on the Farm (1985), Cosmic Psychos (1987), and Go the Hack (1989), have been rereleased on Goner Records, and the band is currently touring America. The documentary film Blokes You Can Trust, about the band’s origins as Australian farmers and the startling contrast between life on the farm and life on the road.

“It’s not just about the music. If you like good documentaries, you’ll love this movie,” says Friedl.

The film is screening five times during Gonerfest, and is a must-see, not only as an introduction to the bands long legacy but also because it’s a great, funny, and endearing film where you’ll find out that when, on the song “Down On The Farm,” Ross Knight sings “I love my tractor!” he really means it. The Psychos fun, down-to-earth, no nonsense rock-and-roll will be the perfect capper to a stacked Gonerfest lineup.

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Gonerfest at 10

Call it the accidental music festival.

In late 2004, Goner Records co-owners Eric Friedl and Zac Ives heard that King Khan & BBQ Show were touring. Things snowballed from there.

“We were just trying to do a show,” Ives says. “We did not know it would appeal to anyone outside of Memphis to the degree it did. King Khan & BBQ Show were doing a tour. We had a record from them and a record from King Louie. So we put them on Friday night and King Louie on Saturday night. The Black Lips were touring with King Khan & BBQ Show, so we put them on. Then we added local bands, and people started calling and wanting to come from all over the country and from Italy and England. They wanted to come to Memphis.”

Friedl recalls, “As a joke, somebody said, ‘You should call it Gonerfest!’ and we were like, ‘Sure! Great!'”

So in January 2005, Gonerfest 1 invaded the Buccaneer, a favorite hole-in-the-wall in Midtown. “Having a show at the Buccaneer is like having a party at grandma’s house,” Ives says. “It was so crowded, you couldn’t get to the bar. You had to go outside and walk around to the back door to get to the bathroom. It was nuts.”

After the initial, unexpected success, the pair held a second Gonerfest in late 2005, headlined by Memphis surf legends Impala and including many of the acts that would become festival staples over the ensuing years, such as Human Eye, the Limes, and Leather Uppers. In the age of the mega-fest, when Lollapallooza, Coachella, and Bonnaroo attract hundreds of thousands with mixed bills of indie rock, hip-hop, electronica, and revered classic acts, Gonerfest has quietly become a kind of gathering of the garage rock tribes; a showcase for the best of a certain strain of rowdy, primitive, punk-tinged rock-and-roll from all over the world.

“It’s grown every year,” Ives says. “Memphis has a mystique. I think we realized that, after the first show, it was an excuse [for people] to come to Memphis.”

Unlike Bonnaroo’s massive stages and vast field of tents, Gonerfest takes place in Midtown clubs like the Hi-Tone, Murphy’s, and the Buccaneer. “When you do a show at a space that is this small, where sometimes there isn’t even a stage, you take away some of the barriers between the people who are playing and the people who are watching,” Friedl says. “You’re going to be standing right next to the guy who is going to be onstage next.”

Ives says that, even as the festival expands, the intimate vibe is something they don’t want to lose.”We’ve filled up the Hi-Tone, but we’ve never felt a need to get into a larger venue.”

Gonerfest has become an international phenomenon, with acts from Puerto Rico, Denmark, France, Serbia, Austria, and even as far away as Tasmania braving long flights to play. “Eddy Current Suppression Ring came right when they were getting really popular in Australia,” Friedl says. “They knew a lot of people from Melbourne, and they brought a big crew that year. And then those people went back to Melbourne and told their friends.”

Japanese bands, such as the legendary Guitar Wolf, which will open the festival this year, have always been popular. And then there was Red Sneakers from Osaka.

“We just drove up to the store the week of Gonerfest, and there were a couple of Japanese dudes with their bags and equipment sitting out front of the shop. They were ready to play Gonerfest,” Ives says. But the Sneakers hadn’t actually been invited to play, and hadn’t contacted Goner, so Ives had to tell them there was no room for them on the bill. “But they were there when Jay Reatard decided he was too sick to play at Murphy’s on Saturday afternoon, and so they got to play, and they were amazing. That’s just sheer willpower.”

For both Friedl and Ives, the best part of the festival is the temporary community that springs up every fall in Midtown. Photographer Don Perry has organized an exhibit of the best images from the past festivals, which is on display at Crosstown Arts. The collection of images, capturing the drama of live performance and the fans’ sweaty ecstasy, acts as a sort of yearbook for a decade of rock-and-roll. “We bring all of these great people together for three days — bands, fans, the fans who are in bands,” Friedl says. “It’s really cool. Everybody is here, because they want to be here.”