This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, we’re all about podcasting! Sonosphere creator and host Amy Schaftlein joins Chris McCoy to talk about her pioneering music podcast, her day job at United Housing, and The Brutalist. Read this week’s cover story here.
Even if you don’t know what brutalism is, you’ve seen it in action. “Brutalism” is a term given to an architectural style which arose after World War II. Prewar movements such as Art Nouveau and Art Deco had lots of showy bits. Look at the ornate staircase railings in turn-of-the-20th century houses or the intricate glasswork of Tiffany. Art Deco’s architectural masterpiece was the Chrysler Building in New York City, a soaring spire of glass and steel whose crown mimics the rays of the rising sun.
Brutalism shed all of that. For architects like Mies van der Rohe, the beauty of a building lies not in the sculptural ornaments you can make from steel, but from the inherent qualities of the steel itself. The name is derived from a French term for raw concrete. Brutalist buildings often have long expanses of featureless concrete walls. It was somewhat of a utopian project; good architecture could help people live better, cleaner lives. By the late ’60s and ’70s, brutalism came into favor with large institutions like government buildings and college campuses. In Memphis, the Southern College of Optometry’s central tower on Madison Avenue is a prime example of brutalism done well.
But the style has not always aged so gracefully. Many brutalist concrete exteriors got grungy as the years passed. Street artists love to use the blank walls of government buildings as a canvas for graffiti. When the BBC conducted a survey in 2008 to determine the 12 most hated buildings in the UK, eight of them were brutalist. But the style still has many champions, especially in the former Soviet bloc, where brutalism produced many unique works.
When we first meet László Tóth (Adrien Brody) in The Brutalist, he is on a boat to America. When a cry arises from above, he and the other passengers race up the deck to catch their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. Director Brady Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley make the visuals match both the ecstasy and disorientation of the moment by following László up the ladder with a handheld camera. When he finally sees Lady Liberty, the camera swoops and rolls, eventually ending upside down, with the torch seemingly hanging from the top of the screen.
Corbet and Crawley shot The Brutalist in VistaVision, a format devised by Paramount Pictures in the 1950s which uses a 35mm negative to produce an image wider than old-fashioned TVs, but not as wide as 70mm widescreen or the 16:9 ratio of most flatscreen TVs. The director said he wanted to shoot this story in a format which matched the time period, and he makes a stirring case for the now-obsolete format. The Brutalist offers striking compositions, which, true to form, highlight the beauty of everyday objects. When László, the impoverished immigrant, takes a job building a loading dock crane, we see it as he sees it — a steel colossus standing against the bright blue firmament.
László makes his way from New York City to Philadelphia, where he is taken in by his cousin Attilla (Alessandro Nivola), who gives him great news. László was separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) when he was snatched from Budapest by the Nazis and thrown into the Dachau concentration camp. He had given them up for dead, but they are still alive. László longs to bring Erzsébet to America, but she is trapped in Hungary by the Soviet occupation. Plus, László is living in the store room of Attilla’s furniture showroom, so he must improve his station before he can expand his family.
Then, opportunity comes from an unexpected quarter. Attila and László are contacted by Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), who wants them to renovate the library in his father’s mansion as a birthday surprise. During the job interview, László reveals the depth of his vision. He studied at the Bauhaus, an early modernist art and design school in Germany which was declared not Germanic enough when the Nazis took power in 1933. In Europe, he had his own architecture firm and built many buildings, to great renown, before the fascists destroyed the tolerant, liberal society which allowed him to flourish.
The old library is a dusty mess with a cracked Tiffany glass skylight. When László gets done with it, it’s a clean, modernist space with built-in shelving of light wood with massive doors to protect the rare books from sunlight. In the center is a reading chair with a built-in book holder. When the homeowner Harrison (Guy Pearce) returns unexpectedly, he’s furious, partly because he says they have destroyed his room without permission, and partly because he saw a Black man, Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), on his property. At first, Henry refuses to pay for the work, and Attila blames László’s radical designs. But when a Look magazine journalist profiling Harrison sees the library and gushes about it in print, the wealthy magnate seeks out László to apologize and commissions a great building, which will be László’s American masterpiece. The long road to completing the building, which involves navigating both the conservatism of conventional architecture and the anti-Semitism of the Pennsylvania WASP elite, will consume László’s being.
The Brutalist is a stubbornly old-fashioned film. At 215 minutes, it comes with an intermission, which would have made bloated recent fare like Avengers: Endgame more tolerable. (Lawrence of Arabia, by comparison, is 216 minutes and also had an intermission.) Brody is brilliant as the enigmatic Hungarian, so passionate about his art but chilly even towards his own wife. And why doesn’t Guy Pearce get more work? He’s every bit Brody’s equal as the rich industrialist who uses his talented friend for clout. If The Brutalist stopped after the intermission, it would be a near-perfect film, an immigrant story in the vein of The Godfather Part II. Unfortunately, Corbet can’t quite stick the landing, and it falls apart at the end. But that’s okay. Endings are hard. Architecture is forever.
The Brutalist
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When T. Jarrod Bonta heard Casper Rawls do “Don’t You Know Who We Think We Are?,” it made a big impression.
“I first heard the song at the Continental Club,” he says “I was underage, and had to sneak in to hear him play. Later on, I had the pleasure of working with him many times throughout the years I lived in Austin, and I still do when I make it down that way.”
Bonta loved the song, written by Rawls and Suzy Elkins, so much he made it his own.
“I had the honor of recording this song at the historic Sam Phillips recording studio, with some of my favorite Memphis musicians: Danny Banks on drums, Matthew Wilson on bass, John Paul Keith on guitar, and engineered by Scott Bomar. Everything was recorded live, just like the big boys do it, no overdubs, this was the first take. It sounded like rock and roll to me!”
Bonta’s animated visuals have a charming, handmade quality that fits the song’s vibes.
“The video is inspired by the lyrics of the song, A lot of these images are merely the way I sometimes see the world. I’ve never played a grand piano underneath a highway overpass before, but I think it would be cool!”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
The Memphis Flyer podcast is back after a little New Year’s hiatus. In this episode, Chris McCoy and Alex Greene talk about the legacy of Sam Moore, and the season 2 premiere of Severance.
Do you ever feel like a different person at work? Everyone has a work persona they put on, especially if you deal with the general public. For some people, the difference between their work self and private self is vast.
Severance, which just debuted its second season on Apple TV+, takes this observation to extremes. What if, instead of just watching your language and putting on a fake smile for work, you became an entirely different person? That’s what happens to Mark (Adam Scott) every time he steps into the elevator at Lumon Industries. He’s an “Innie,” someone who has had a chip implanted into his brain which creates a kind of split personality. When he’s in the office, he’s a macrodata refinement specialist, and not even he knows what that means. The work he and his co-workers perform just looks like staring into a computer screen and dragging random numbers and letters into a box. He doesn’t even know what criteria he’s applying.
When he’s not at work, Mark is a depressed mess, a widower whose pain is so acute he chose to spend a third of his life with his mind wiped. He has no idea what goes on in the basement of Lumon Industries, and, at least at first, he doesn’t care.
In season 1 of Severance, Innie Mark went from the model Lumon employee to being suspicious of his employer. And there’s much to be suspicious of. The Innies are indoctrinated into a weird cult of personality around late Lumon founder Kier Eagan (Marc Geller). When onboarding his newest co-worker Helly (Britt Lower) goes wrong, Mark takes the blame and gets a taste of the “benevolent” company’s discipline practice. At first, Mark’s suspicions fall on deaf ears, as Irving (John Turturro), a stickler for the rules, will hear no dissent. Eventually, Mark wants to know what his Outie is like, and, with the help of a secret group of formerly severed people, devises a plan that allows him to “wake up” outside. While there, he discovers a picture of himself with his wife and realizes that she is not dead. His Innie knows her as the company’s wellness specialist, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman).
Season 1 ended with a big bang, as Innie Mark and Innie Helly disrupted a company event to reveal that Lumon is torturing the Innies. It was hard to imagine where showrunner Dan Erickson and executive producer Ben Stiller could go after that. It seems that they weren’t so sure either, so season 2 comes three years after season 1. Granted, they were interrupted by the WGA/SAG strikes, but the long-cooking first episode of the new season is promising. It takes place entirely within the confines of Lumon’s stark white, retro-futuristic offices. Innie Mark is back, and this time, it seems, he’s a willing subject. But he’s got a secret agenda — to find Ms. Casey, who has disappeared from her wellness center, and reconnect with the wife he thought he had lost.
Severance’s metaphorical depiction of the alienation of labor in late-stage capitalism has struck a nerve. It’s not heavy-handed because it follows the rules suggested by the premise and expands on them to reveal more pieces of the bigger puzzle. The parade of heavy-hitting acting talent, including Patricia Arquette and Christopher Walken, doesn’t hurt either. Ultimately, the mystery boxes (why is Mark’s wife alive? What does Lumon Industries even do, anyway?) driving the plot are not the point. It’s the atmosphere of impersonal despair with a happy face plastered on top that makes Severance compelling television.
Severance is streaming on Apple TV+.
Public transportation is a big issue in Memphis. As Flyer writer Kailyn Johnson has reported, MATA is in deep disarray. Maybe it’s time to hand things over to the real professionals. Maybe it’s time to call in GloRilla.
And why not? GloRilla has a track record of success. Her debut long player Glorious peaked at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Her tour with Megan Thee Stallion was the hottest thing in stadiums not involving Taylor Swift. This weekend, she’ll make her national television debut as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.” She’s unstoppable.
As we see in her latest music video, “Hollon,” Glo knows how to do mass transit right. Directed by Troy Roscoe, the video shows our hero in the driver’s seat where she belongs. If riders are at first turned off by her cannabis-forward commute, they come around by the time they reach their destination, which we can only assume is Party Central. Get on the bus.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com
The thing Robert Eggers does better than any other director is fully inhabiting the historic worlds of his films. His characters are not 21st-century humans wearing horned helmets plopped into a longboat. In The Northman, the pagan Vikings blame the Christians for a series of gruesome murders because “their god is a corpse nailed to a tree.” In his first film, The Witch, the devil stalking his Puritan settlers is real because it’s real to them — even as Eggers hints that the actual reason bad luck has befallen their settlement is that they suck at farming.
When he approached his long-gestating passion project, a remake of Nosferatu, he gravitated towards the source material, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Eggers works in the high melodrama of vaudeville theater and silent film, challenging you to throw yourself fully into the gloom.
The original Nosferatu is a haunted film. Director F.W. Murnau and star Max Schreck had both spent time in the trenches of World War I. The German producers didn’t get permission from the English estate of Bram Stoker, and when the author’s widow successfully sued, the court ordered all copies of the film destroyed. Luckily, they missed a few, and Nosferatu became one of the founding documents of modern horror. It’s also one of the few works of art to deal with the 1918 influenza pandemic, as the appearance of the vampire Count Orlok in Berlin is accompanied by a mysterious plague.
Nosferatu follows the broad outline of Dracula, but with a few important exceptions. It begins with Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a teenager in early 19th-century Prussia, being visited by a mysterious spirit. After it leaves, she seems to have epileptic convulsions. Years later, Ellen is a respectable young woman married to Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a real estate agent hustling for a promotion. Thomas is assigned to visit “a very old account” in the Transylvania’s Carpathian mountains. No one knows why Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) wants to buy the ruined mansion down the street from Thomas and Ellen, but they’ll take his money anyway.
Once Thomas arrives in Transylvania, it becomes clear nothing is normal. The local Romani are on an active vampire hunt, and when they hear where Thomas is going, they rightly freak out. The count licks Thomas’ blood and makes him sign a document in a language he doesn’t understand. But even though that sounds like something a health insurance CEO would do, the mad alchemist Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) rightly surmises that Count Orlok is a “nosferatu.” Once he has completed the real estate transaction and left Thomas for dead, the Count menaces an increasingly desperate Ellen, wanting to possess her body and her immortal soul.
Eggers plays all of this absolutely straight, as he has with all his movies. There is no winking to the camera. None of these characters have read Dracula, or seen What We Do in the Shadows, so every revelation of vampire lore is news to them. (The original Nosferatu, by the way, is the origin of the trope that vampires die when exposed to sunlight. Bram Stoker’s Dracula just didn’t like it.)
To describe Depp’s performance as “melodramatic” is a monstrous understatement. She goes full Linda Blair: shaking, foaming at the mouth, and performing a really impressive back bend while possessed with Count Orlok’s dark magic. Hoult equals her freak as the terrified husband trying to keep it together as he is faced with one mind-destroying horror after another. Dafoe pronounces every syllable like he’s driving a stake into the heart of a vampire.
The story starts out strong, but once Thomas and Orlok return to save/eat Ellen, the plot languishes in gothic ennui. Fortunately, Eggers drops one killer composition after another, so there’s always something incredible to look at onscreen. We never get the full picture of Count Orlok, who is always shaded in darkness, until the film’s extremely disturbing climax. It’s not a new observation to say that sex and death are always intertwined in horror, but few works have gone as far as Nosferatu in making the subtext so easy to read.
The Memphis Music Initiative (MMI) is one of the most successful arts nonprofits in Memphis. They promote music education and provide young people with opportunities to work in the music business. Last January, they released a music video that humorously addressed the frustrations of the nonprofit life. As they put it, “We’re here to serve the underserved market of fundraising jams.”
Director and producer Princeton James put together the extensive list of talent for “I Hope Like Hell We Get This Grant.” Patterned after an old cable TV ad for compilation albums by companies like K-Tel, the video brings you hits such as “Giving Tuesday” and “When I Hit The Check.” After racking up tens of thousands of views (presumably among burnt-out nonprofit staffers worldwide), the video was just nominated for a Regional Emmy Award. “We are honored to receive this nomination on behalf of the entire team, which reflects the extraordinary talent of our Memphis creatives, community partners, and staff,” says Amber Hamilton, President of the Memphis Music Initiative. “At MMI, we believe in pushing boundaries to lift the voices of grassroots organizations doing transformative work. This video is our rallying cry — cut the check and trust the experts on the ground.”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
There’s one detail that everyone who was at the 1965 Newport Festival seems to agree on: Bob Dylan wore a polka dot shirt.
Dylan’s three-song set at the annual music festival was one of those moments where an artist challenged their audience so intensely that it broke brains. In 1913, the Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring caused a literal riot in the theater. Fifty years later, when Dylan takes the stage in the sleepy Rhode Island town armed with a Stratocaster and backed by Chicago electric blues disciple Mike Bloomfield, the audience which had made him a star shouts “Judas!” in this film. It is a moment that has become fraught with meaning. Depending on which side of the Great Folk Divide you fall on, it was either a rejection of the folk movement’s New Deal ideology or a declaration of artistic independence from hidebound tradition.
The Newport set is the climax of Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric, which James Mangold has adapted into A Complete Unknown. Timothée Chalamet is the latest in a surprisingly long list of actors who have played Bob Dylan onscreen — including Bob Dylan himself.
If you want a film that uses Dylanesque artistry to explore the mythic aspects of Bob Dylan, it’s Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. This is a music biopic by James Mangold. His Walk The Line, which was filmed in Memphis, set the standard for the genre. It was skewered so effectively by Walk Hard: The Dewy Cox Story that many people have become allergic to the basic beats that appear in every musician’s story.
Mangold and his star overcome self-parody by sheer force of execution. His actors sing all of the songs live on set, a Herculean task that is a bit easier for Chalamet, who must growl like Dylan, than it is for his co-star Monica Barbaro, who must sing like Joan Baez. The contrasting grit and glamor of the folk movement’s two greatest stars is what made their pairing palatable, and gave it a hint of danger. Baez recognizes Dylan’s talent as soon as she hears him sing in a cramped Greenwich Village basement. But she’s one of the few people who doesn’t immediately worship him, which makes her irresistible to him. The self-possessed Baez never gives an inch; when he betrays her onstage in front of a crowd of restless proto-hippies, she calmly sings on without him.
Joan didn’t need Bob, but Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) does. Based on the real Suze Rotolo, who appears with her then-boyfriend on the cover of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, Sylvie is the New York sophisticate who introduces the weird boy from Minnesota to the big city. Dylan takes first the bohemian folk scene, then the cocktail party circuit by storm.
And that’s where his polka dot shirt comes in. Dylan’s appearances at the 1963 and 1964 Newport Folk Festival brought him to national attention, and his album sales took off like none of the other folkies who he emulated and idolized ever did. By 1965, he had turned the Beatles on to marijuana and was dressing like a Soho hipster instead of wearing the populist work shirt uniform favored by his mentor, Pete Seeger (Ed Norton). For the folkies, it was the first sign that their standard bearer was going to betray them.
I keep using the word “betray” in this review. Mangold and Gangs of New York writer Jay Cocks’ screenplay may not please Dylan pedants. Great as he is, Bobbie didn’t write “Masters of War” in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, debut it in a Greenwich Village coffee shop, and bed Joan Baez all in one night. But Chalamet’s dead-on Dylan impression papers over the holes, and the film captures the essence of the time. A Complete Unknown is not a hagiography. Dylan might be a musical genius, but he’s a toxic boyfriend, and by the end of the film, both of his prime paramours know it. He is beloved by millions, but he is alone. As he rides off on the motorcycle that will almost kill him a few weeks later, he does not yet know the price he had paid for his freedom.
In the first year after dual writer and actor strikes rattled the Hollywood establishment, there was much fretting about lackluster box office returns in the first half, followed by much celebration in the second half. But there were gems everywhere for those who searched. We celebrate the best with Flyer Film Awards for 2024. But first, the worst.
Worst Picture
Borderlands
2024’s good video game adaptation was Amazon Prime’s Fallout series. The best thing you can say about Eli Roth’s epic flop is that everyone got paid in advance.
MVP
Timothée Chalamet, Dune: Part 2, A Complete Unknown
Muad’dib came alive as the cursed savior of Arrakis, torn between his love for Zendaya’s Chani and the imperial destiny he was bred for. Then, Chalamet sang 40 Bob Dylan songs, live on set, in A Complete Unknown and slayed every one of them. Give this boy some flowers.
Best Performance by a Nonhuman
Anxiety, Inside Out 2
Our Age of Anxiety found a mascot in the orange emotion, voiced by Maya Hawke, that invades our tween heroine Riley’s brain when she’s thrown into a competitive situation at hockey camp. I wish I had Inside Out 2 when I was growing up.
Best Interior Spaces
I Saw the TV Glow
Jane Schoenbrun’s ode to fandom is as inexplicable a film as you’ll see this year. Owen is a shy outsider who finds his people when he discovers a cult TV show called The Pink Opaque. He and his friend Maddy slowly lose their own identities as they tune out the rest of the world. But was it all a dream? Where does the dream end and reality begin?
Grossest Picture
The Substance
If Sunset Boulevard were directed by David Cronenberg, it would look something like The Substance. Coralie Fargeat directs Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkles, an aging star who will try anything to stay young, including a dangerous drug pushed by a secret organization. When Margaret Qualley bursts from her body as her younger self, she’s reluctant to get back in. Then the real body horror begins.
Best Animated Film
Boys Go to Jupiter
It was a banner year for animation, with the triumphal Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot, the plucky Latvian animal eco-fantasy Flow, and the epic Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim. But this tiny team from Pittsburgh, led by Julian Glander, made a joyously subversive story of a delivery boy trying to beat the system, and the alien egg he finds along the way.
Best Cinematography
Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross’ story of two Black boys sent to a brutal reform school in 1960s Florida works its empathetic magic through first-person camera work, courtesy of cinematographer Jomo Fray. Equal parts gorgeous and brutal, but never banal.
Biggest Performance
Chris Hemsworth, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Director George Miller’s origin story of his Fury Road protagonist is as epic as it gets, and Hemsworth has the juice as the biker warlord Dementus. Hemsworth’s words and deeds are as big as the Wasteland’s horizon, but he leads us through decades, subtly changing Dementus’ bluster to show his loosening grip on sanity. When he gets his comeuppance from Furiosa, you almost feel sorry for him. Almost.
Best Documentary
Union
Against all odds, the warehouse workers at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island successfully got their union recognized by the NLRB, after years of grinding organizing and union busting goons. You won’t find Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Sundance-winning documentary on Amazon Prime, and if Jeff Bezos gets his way, you won’t see it anywhere. The filmmakers are self-distributing, so seek it out.
Best Picture
Anora
Sean Baker’s masterpiece follows stripper and sometime prostitute Ani as she falls in love with one of her clients, the wastrel son of a Russian oligarch. But when they marry in Las Vegas, and his parents (and the Russian mafia of New York) get wind of it, the whole fantasy falls apart. Baker and Mikey Madison get my personal Best Director and Best Actor awards. Everything about Anora is perfect.