Author: Chris McCoy

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Film Features Film/TV

Dream Scenario

This is what dreams are made of — Nic Cage, just being Nic Cage.

This bit of wisdom was posted on Twitter by user @maplecocaine in January 2019: “Each day on Twitter there is one main character. The goal is never to be it.” Social media promised to fulfill the techno-utopian dream of the internet by connecting every human being on the planet, but there was a reason that, even before the carnage of pandemic information warfare, Twitter’s heaviest users called it a “hellsite.” The reality of universal connection is that you’re a few milliseconds away from every asshole on Earth. Fame has unpleasant side effects, and that goes double for internet fame, which can be both unexpected and unintentional. When everyone knows your name, you become less of a human being and more of a symbol. Elon Musk is currently finding this out the hard way.

Fame in the internet age is the subject of Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario. Like many directors before him, his best decision was casting Nicolas Cage as his lead. Cage plays Paul Matthews, a biology professor at a sleepy Midwestern liberal arts college. Paul has done some pioneering work on hive minds, which he calls “antelligence,” but his book on the subject is languishing while his former colleagues get all the credit. 

One day, he notices a lot of strangers staring at him on the street. Then, he runs into his ex-girlfriend Claire (Marnie McPhail), who tells Paul she’s been dreaming about him. This doesn’t go over very well with Paul’s jealous wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson), but she takes some comfort in the fact that he’s not doing much, just watching the dream unfold along with the dreamer. Soon, other people realize that Paul is the weird guy showing up in their dreams, and he becomes an internet sensation. His biology lectures go from sparsely attended to overflowing. Paul is, at first, amused and excited about his newfound notoriety. Maybe he can use his fame to get his book published. But he can’t help but be a little disappointed that he never seems to actually do anything in the dreams but watch.

But as the phenomenon spreads, Paul gets his wish, and his image becomes an active participant in dreamtime. For some people, his presence is benevolent. For others, like Molly (Dylan Gelula), it’s erotic. But most people see Paul trying to murder them in ways director Borgli has way too much fun staging. 

Paul’s celebrity sours. The endorsement contract with Sprite, which marketing guru Trent (Michael Cera) painstakingly negotiated, is suddenly off the table. When Paul tries to hook up with his dream lover Claire IRL, it leads to one of the least erotic sex scenes ever committed to film. Even though real Paul has done nothing wrong, he is barred from his daughter’s school and forced to make an apology video. Naturally, that only makes things worse. 

As usual, Cage is better than the material — and nobody does “schlub” better. But in this case, Borgli’s screenplay is thoughtful, and his execution is always impeccable. When the metaphor gets stretched thin, Cage is there to beam a goofy smile or wet his pants or do literally anything asked of him with manic charisma and superhuman intensity. Dream Scenario is a comedy that gets in your head. 

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Napoleon

Military victories aside, Napoleon went 0-1 on the battlefield of love.

The theatrical cut of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon should really be called Napoleon and Josephine.

Apple Studios paid a reported $200 million for Scott’s epic, which traces Napoleon Bonaparte’s rampage across Europe from 1793 to 1815, and ends with his death in exile in 1821. Scott, now a sprightly 85 years old, is not the first director to attempt to conquer the conqueror. After he completed 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, Stanley Kubrick spent the next two years deep in pre-production on a Napoleon biopic that was to have starred Jack Nicholson. MGM ultimately balked at the cost, and Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead. The tens of thousands of pages of Kubrick’s prep work ultimately fell into the hands of Steven Spielberg, who is using the material as a basis for a seven-part limited series for HBO.

Scott’s ultimate vision for Napoleon will be revealed when it is released on Apple TV+ next year. It is reportedly more than four hours long. Joaquin Phoenix, who last worked with Scott in Gladiator, portrays Napoleon not as the brash, confident Frenchman who rewrote the rules of warfare, but as a capable soldier torn by self-doubt who succeeds almost despite himself. Unless you have a working knowledge of European history, The Little Corporal’s military and political career will seem pretty incoherent. I can’t be the only history nerd who turned to his wife when it was over and said, “Where was the Battle of Trafalgar?” With all of the care that Scott put into filming the battle scenes, there’s just no way he wouldn’t tackle the biggest naval engagement of the century, so I assume the HMS Victory is in pieces on editor Claire Simpson’s hard drive right now. The lack of the naval side of the story deprives the film of one of three antagonists who had Napoleon’s number during his life: Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, who died in the process of proving the French dictator was beatable. The second was the Duke of Wellington, who finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo by adapting his tactics.

The third antagonist was Josephine, whose defeat of Napoleon on the battlefield of love was complete and total. If you’re like me and have only ever seen Vanessa Kirby in big budget shoot-’em-ups like Mission Impossible, her performance as the Empress will be a revelation. The moment she catches Napoleon’s eye across one of the First Republic’s ever-present cocktail parties, with her fresh-from-the-Terror prison punk haircut, she understands this would-be conqueror needs to be dominated. “What is this costume you’re wearing?” she asks.

“It’s my uniform!” Napoleon huffs.

In Scott’s telling, their epic struggle of wills rewrites the map of Europe. When Napoleon, fresh off victory of the Battle of the Pyramids, hears that Josephine has taken another lover, he abandons his campaign against the Mamluks and rushes home to confront her. When he senses she is attracted to power, he joins in a coup to overthrow the republic, then systematically betrays his allies until he’s the only one left standing.

Scott’s depiction of Napoleonic warfare is equal parts beautiful and brutal. The Battle of Austerlitz, where Napoleon’s troops drive the Prussians into a frozen lake, is sure to be studied in future film classes. Depicting Napoleon as an insecure braggart who lucks his way into an empire is a controversial choice, but when paired with Josephine’s strategic provocations, his arc makes sense. It’s the chemistry between Kirby and Phoenix that gives this epic its fire.

Napoleon
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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: “The Robots Are Here” by T. Jarrod Bonta

Let’s face it. Die Roboter are here. We’ve had plenty of warning, but soon, they will be smart enough to discover Battlebots is a thing, and we’re going to have some real uncomfortable conversations.

But before our new silicon overlords herd us into the Comfort Pens for correctional electrode implantation and re-education, here’s a newcomer to Music Video Monday. TJB2023i with the Cybertronics is T. Jarrod Bonta’s jittery synth-punk project with Danny Banks, Matthew Wilson, and John Paul Keith. The song was recorded by Scott Bomar at Philips Recording. Bonta made the bonkers video himself, with plenty of stop motion mayhem and a box-bot costume that must be seen to be believed.

If you’d like to see your music video on Music Video Monday before perishing in a robot apocalypse, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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Film Features Film/TV

Thanksgiving

Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving carves up a whole lot more than just turkey.

In 2007, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez were at the top of their game. The two directors had come up from the indie underworld at the same time in the early ’90s. Tarantino’s Kill Bill films were critical and commercial successes, and Rodriguez was doing both mainstream blockbusters with Spy Kids and cutting-edge animation with Sin City. They teamed up to make a tribute to the shameless, cheap exploitation films of the drive-in era. Grindhouse was a double feature condensed into a single movie by leaving the middle reel out of each film. Rodriguez’s contribution was Planet Terror, a hyper-violent zombie sci-fi flick starring Rose McGowan as a go-go dancer with a machine gun leg; Tarantino’s was Death Proof, a car chase movie starring Kurt Russell as a murderous stuntman driving a sinister black hot rod.

Tarantino and Rodriguez invited their film bro buddies to make trailers for movies that could never get made which ran before and between the two features. Rob Zombie did one for “Werewolf Women of the S.S.”; Edgar Wright did a hilarious voice-over riff called “Don’t.” But strangely, three of the trailers for films that “could never get made” actually ended up getting made. Rodriguez made “Machete” around legendary Mexican-American stuntman Danny Trejo, and it spawned two successful feature films. (I’m still waiting for Rodriguez to complete the trilogy with Machete in Space.) Then there was the self-explanatory Hobo with a Shotgun from Canadian filmmaker Jason Eisener, who got his slot in Grindhouse by winning a South by Southwest Film Festival contest. And now, there’s Thanksgiving by Hostel director Eli Roth.

The original trailer had to be cut down a bit to avoid the entire film being slapped with a NC-17 rating. Roth’s feature just squeaks under the bar for an R rating, but it is every bit as demented and shameless as the trailer. As the name suggests, Roth’s film is smack dab in the middle of the slasher horror tradition of Black Christmas and Halloween. Like John Carpenter, who Roth is clearly channeling here, the jump scares and arterial spray are flying cover for unsparing social satire.

Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is like Halloween in Salem — the epicenter of holiday vibe. That’s why it feels so off that RightMart owner Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) has decided to open his big box store on Thanksgiving, while he enjoys a greeting-card-worthy Thanksgiving dinner with his family. One of the hallmarks of the grindhouse slasher pics is that almost everyone you meet is an insufferable jerk, so it’s more satisfying when they inevitably get killed. Thomas’ daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) is the least unsympathetically portrayed character in the film, but still, she’s the one who inadvertently starts a riot on Thanksgiving when she lets her obnoxious friends into the RightMart before it officially opens at 6 p.m.

For Roth, the FightMart riot is his Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan. Fully feral American consumers tear each other to pieces over discount waffle irons. The security cameras make the rioting shoppers look like rats in a maze driven crazy by some kind of perverse psychological experiment. It’s the first of a series of blistering images Roth conjures using the familiar tropes of Thanksgiving.

A year later, the Wright family business has settled a bunch of lawsuits, and Jessica and her friends are the subject of harassment on social media. Then, a new, much more threatening harasser appears, using the pilgrim name John Carver. I had never really thought of how terrifying the traditional Plymouth Rock pilgrim outfits were until Roth showed me one dismembering people with an axe. Sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) asks Jessica to help find the killer before he finds them. But there is no shortage of suspects who carry grudges from the FightMart riot, so Jessica’s amateur detectives have their work cut out for them.

The ironic part of Thanksgiving is that it started as a joke about a low-budget exploitation film that was too weird to be made, and now, 16 years later, it’s become a really good low-budget exploitation film. Roth hits that elusive sweet spot between stupid and smart. It’s gross, it’s in shockingly bad taste, it indicts its audience simply by existing, and yet, you can’t look away. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Thanksgiving
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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: “Pandemic Dance” by The Pop Ritual

Does the return to the working week have you feeling stressed and anxious? Are you ground down by the relentless machine of late capitalism? The Pop Ritual has a music video for you!

Memphis’ own Industrial noise assault team released a pair of new EPs in 2023, Columns I and Columns II. “Pandemic Dance” goes hard like it’s 1993, and you’re in the cage at 616. (Young people, ask a Gen Xer what that means.) If you’re in workforce hell, take heart in the knowledge that it’s Thanksgiving, which means a three day week—2 1/2, tops, if we’re being honest. Let The Pop Ritual help you grind it out.

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

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Film Features Film/TV

The Marvels

The Marvels is … another Marvel movie, for those looking to complete their MCU checklist.

You never want to be the last person at the party. Whether you lost track of time because you were having so much fun, or if your plan was to stick around long enough for the good drugs to come out, now it’s just you and the host, and it’s awkward. That’s what The Marvels feels like. 

The best thing about the sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel is that it’s only 105 minutes long, although it seems longer. Twice, the film pauses for flashbacks to other Marvel properties in a vain attempt to make the audience care about what’s happening onscreen. Things got pretty rough on Hala after Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel (Brie Larson, hair fabulous), destroyed the Supreme Intelligence, an AI which ruled the Kree Empire. Now, a new Kree leader has emerged, Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), who retrieves a legendary Quantum Band from deep beneath her planet, which gives her vast and narratively undefined powers. But Quantum Bands come in pairs, and the other one belongs to Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), aka Ms. Marvel, a South Asian teenager from New Jersey who apparently had a TV show on Disney+. Kamala is a cartoonist who idolizes Captain Marvel so much she plagiarized the name, and for a brief sequence, her doodles come to life. The quaint little hand-drawn animation sequence screams, “We know you would rather be watching that cool animated Spider-Man movie.”

That’s the flaccid flavor of The Marvels, which is basically just a bunch of warmed-over bits and pieces of things you might remember enjoying in the past, stuck together with little regard for narrative coherence. When Dar-Benn tries to use her newfound power to open permanent interstellar wormholes, big enough to do things like fly a conquering starfleet or steal a planet’s worth of water, both Captain Marvel and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) are sent to investigate. Space-time shenanigans ensue that leave Kamala, Monica, and Carol switching places whenever they use their powers. 

You might be thinking, “Oh, like Freaky Friday, where two people’s personalities switch bodies? It’s fun to watch two actors switch characters!” Alas, no. In this case, the quantum entangled bodies physically switch places. Instead of mining the premise for fun comedy bits, the three actors just scream and flail around a lot. The permutations are used up quickly. What if Captain Marvel, who can fly, switches places with Kamala, who can’t fly, while she’s flying? What if they switch places while they’re both fighting Kree assassins? Could the problem be solved with a training montage? (Also, that’s not how quantum entanglement works.) 

Dar-Benn is using the wormholes to steal the resources her dying planet needs from places that have an emotional connection to Captain Marvel, who her people rightly call The Annihilator. That’s how we get to Aladna, the musical theater planet, where everyone communicates via song and dance. This rejected Rick and Morty gag would be remembered as a new nadir for Marvel Studios if, a few minutes later, we were not treated to a scene set to “Memory” from the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical Cats, where feline-shaped Flerken eat everyone on Nick Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) space station. Don’t worry, it’s for their own good. 

No film epitomized Marvel’s bland corporate competence better than Captain Marvel. The MCU’s high floor/low ceiling was excusable when it felt like Kevin Feige was going somewhere with all of it. After the big payoff of Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel films have been treading water. Now, our favorites like Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson are off counting their money, the plots are nonsense, and the shoddy CGI is showing. Find your coat and call a Lyft, this party is over. 

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Music Video Monday: “Run It Up” by Stokes

There be monsters in today’s Music Video Monday.

R. Alan Ingalls from Newbern, Tennessee (which we’re going to say is close enough to Memphis to satisfy the Flyer’s “locals only” rule for Music Video Monday) is the auteur behind Stokes’ “Run It Up.” Not only did he record, mix, and master the song, he also directed, filmed, and edited the video with The Attention Co.

The super spooky video was shot on location at The Zombie Trail and Corn Maze, where our intrepid MC is menaced by pumpkin monsters, skeletons, and … money? I can relate to that last one. Take a look.

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

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Film Features Film/TV

Priscilla

Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi as Priscilla and Elvis

One choice forced on director Sofia Coppola could have sunk her adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s Elvis and Me before it ever set sail. Sony BMG, which now owns the rights to Elvis Presley’s music, refused to cut her a deal for the use of The King’s music for the film, perhaps because they just backed Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic last year. Without Elvis’ music, how can you tell the story of his relationship with his wife, whose favorite song was “Heartbreak Hotel”?

Instead, Coppola makes the lack of “Heartbreak Hotel” or “Jailhouse Rock” or the apropos “Suspicious Minds” into one of Priscilla’s greatest virtues. On stage, Elvis became a Dionysian demigod, and as mythology tells us, the gods do not play by the same rules as us puny humans. But without the songs to perform, Elvis (Jacob Elordi) is just another dude — an incredibly good-looking and charismatic dude, to be sure, but it’s easier to see the red flags when he’s no longer divine. That’s how 24-year-old Army private Elvis Presley seemed when Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) met him when she was a 14-year-old high school freshman at the American high school on a military base in West Germany. It takes some convincing to get her father, an Air Force captain (Ari Cohen), to agree to let his very underage daughter spend time with the most famous sex symbol on Earth, but Elvis could be quite convincing. In the end, his conditions were that Elvis pick up and drop off Priscilla himself, and have her back by 2200 hours.

Priscilla is, naturally, starstruck, as are all the other folks who gather to party in Elvis’ off-base housing. But the Elvis she discovers behind closed doors is wounded, lonely, and missing his recently deceased mother. The romance that blooms between them is positively wholesome, and for a very good reason alluded to in one of the film’s few musical moments. At a party, Elvis plops down at the piano and tears through Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On.” Shortly before E was charming ’Cilla in Germany, Jerry Lee’s musical career went into a tailspin because of his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown. So when Elvis’ tour of duty was over, he returned to the states and started publicly dating Nancy Sinatra. When Priscilla was 17, she moved to Memphis, quietly taking up residence in Graceland. (Those who attended Immaculate Conception High School will be quite amused by its depiction in Priscilla.)

According to the only person who knows for sure, Elvis and Priscilla didn’t consummate their relationship until she was 18, and they were married. But that only makes this relationship a little less icky to contemporary eyes. Yes, Priscilla enthusiastically consented at every turn, and the 10-year age difference was culturally acceptable in the South at the time. But as Priscilla languishes in Graceland with only the office staff and cook Alberta (Olivia Barrett) to talk to, it becomes clear that Elvis sees her mostly as a possession. To the Memphis Mafia, she was little more than a PR problem. Coppola slyly outlines the tangle of relationships when Elvis gifts her a poodle, then Dee Presley (Stephanie Moore) chides her for playing with it on the lawn where the fans who gather at the gates of Graceland could see her.

This kind of elliptical storytelling is Coppola’s trademark, and she has rarely done it better than in Priscilla. In her own way, Coppola is as meticulous a director as Wes Anderson. Often, the camera lingers on the impeccable production design, while plot points float by in the little details and callbacks.

On the surface, Coppola’s languid Priscilla couldn’t be more different than Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic Elvis, but the two films share one thing in common: If you can’t tune into the director’s unique wavelength, it’s going to turn you off. From Lost in Translation to Marie Antoinette to Somewhere, Coppola keeps returning to lonely young women who see beauty in the world that others miss. In Priscilla, she has found her perfect subject.

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Music Video Monday: “The Start of Spring” by Schaefer Llana

Those of us who spent the last week recovering from the 26th annual Indie Memphis Film Festival saw a lot of Memphis talent strutting their stuff on the big screens. Many of the 16 works in the Hometowner Music Video category have been previously featured on Music Video Monday, including both the jury award winner “If You Feel Alone At Parties” by Blvck Hippie, directed by Josh Shaw, and the Audience Award winner “Arkansas is Nice” by Bailey Bigger, directed by Joshua Cannon.

Cannon also directed a second music video in the competition. “The Start of Spring” by Schaefer Llana. Cannon and cinematographer Sam Leathers, a frequent collaborator with Cannon’s Studio One Four Three, shoot Llana in moody lighting, and an 8mm film-like aspect ratio. Llana herself evokes Kate Bush in both her songcraft and her spooky onscreen presence.

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

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Theater Theater Feature

Beetlejuice: The Musical

Isabella Esler as Lydia and Justin Collette as Beetlejuice star in Beetljuice: The Musical. (Photo by Matthew Murphy, 2022)

It’s easy to be queasy about the IP era. The obsession with pre-existing intellectual properties that has enthralled the American film industry for most of this century has metastasized through more of the arts. The appeal to producers is obvious. Somebody else already did the hard work to lodge the idea of Barbie into your head, and imbue it with positive associations. That makes you more likely to get up off your couch and go see a movie with Barbie in it. 

It’s easy to say “In the good old days, they made original films with original stories. Now, all they do is IP adaptations.” and you’re not wrong. The flood of IP has crowded out original ideas, and made it more difficult for original films and theater works to break through. But any appeal to “the good old days” is always suspect. Believing that producers were more original in the “good old days” vastly overestimates the creativity of the ordinary working producer and playwright throughout history. Shakespeare based Romeo and Juliet on an existing story by Italian writer Matteo Bandello. Gone With The Wind was an adaptation of an existing IP. Stories evolve and mutate through different media. That’s just how stories work. The problem with the current IP era is that the film studios and Broadway producers are too risk-averse to give virtually any new ideas the kind of resources they need to thrive. 

But the cowardice of capital is not the problem of the producers of or audience for Beetlejuice: The Musical. With music and lyrics by Australian musical comedian Eddie Perfect and book by Scott Brown and Anthony King, this version of the 1988 Tim Burton masterpiece leans heavily on nostalgia. I am familiar with every beat in Beetlejuice, from Michael Keaton’s big-swing take on a malevolent demon as coke-fueled party guest from hell to Winona Ryder’s pitch perfect turn as the OG goth girl who’s not sure if she listens to Siouxsie and the Banshees because she’s sad, or if she’s sad because she listens to Siouxsie and the Banshees. 

In retrospect, Beetlejuice was a harbinger of “cozy” horror, and this production leans into it. This being Broadway, Lydia’s mother is now fridged instead of just divorced. The teenager’s pining for her dead mother sands a little bit of the Gen X cynicism off of Lydia’s angst. Beetlejuice, however, remains the crass pervert from the afterlife that never met a fourth wall he didn’t break. I occasionally wondered if the manic proceedings onstage would make any sense at all to someone who has no fond memories of a possessed Catherine O’Hara singing calypso. 

But really, it didn’t matter. Because the real point of the Broadway musical is watching a talented, road-hard ensemble go to town for two hours. The twin leads of Beetlejuice: The Musical, Justin Collette and Isabella Esler, are more than up to the challenges of this super technical production. Collette brings out the carnival barker in Michael Keaton’s characterization, taking control of the crowd from the opening curtain. Esler’s Lydia leans more toward Jenna Ortega’s playfully wicked Wednesday than Ryder’s existentially wounded romantic. But could Winona’s Lydia have sung with such verve and power? Only if it was calypso, and only if it was authentic. 

What makes this such a difficult show and precise show for the cast, which includes a punishingly physical turn as Delia by Kate Marilley, is the intricate production design. Burton’s Beetlejuice is an ADHD whirlwind of psychedelic images, impossible to recreate on the stage. But director Alex Timbers gives it the old college try with the help of an elaborate and seemingly infinitely flexible set. Projection mapping, the combination of technologies familiar to Memphians who experienced Christopher Reyes’ Exploratorium of Baron Von Opperbean installation in 2020, enables lightning fast scenic mood swings. Also, there’s a giant sandworm puppet that eats people. 

The moments in Beetlejuice: The Musical where the needs of Big Musical Theater bumps up against idiosyncrasies of the source material are offset by the performers’ talent and energy. Tim Burton’s boldest vision is having quite a nice afterlife.

Beetlejuice: The Musical runs through Nov. 5 at the Orpheum Theatre.