Recent Future is a relatively new band with Charlie Davis of Trash Goblin and David Johnson of James and the Ultrasounds. The two have been friends since meeting in 1998 at Tennessee’s Governor’s School for the Arts. They decided to form Recent Future during the pandemic, when “the world’s uncertainty and upheaval, mixed with the personal reflection, anxiety and ultimately, hope, of new fathers,” says the band.
The melding of personalities takes visual form in Recent Future’s “Top of the Moon.” The video leans on analog CRT technology and some disturbing and surreal splitscreen images to reinforce the mood of doomy synth disco.
You can see the band live this Friday, March 7 at B-Side with Jon Hart & the Vollontines and Magic Hours. But first, get into the groove:
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com
On this week’s edition of the podcast, Toby Sells talks about his cover story “The Battle for Midtown.” Zoning and housing are hot topics, as the Memphis 3.0 plan is up for review.
Theo James plays two brothers who share knowledge of a very bad little monkey toy. (Photo: Courtesy of NEON H)
The best rediscovery from last year’s Time Warp Drive-In lineup was Creepshow. The 1982 anthology film was directed by Night of the Living Dead’s George Romero and written by Stephen King, in one of the horror writer’s rare outings as a screenwriter. An homage to classic horror magazines from infamous comic publisher EC, Creepshow consists of five stories, two of which were adaptations of King’s previously published short stories, “Weeds” and “The Crate.”
If you’re just looking for a film where Leslie Nielsen murders Ted Danson in a startlingly creative fashion, Creepshow is for you. For my money, it is a masterpiece collaboration between two legends at the top of their game. King himself had a cameo as the hapless farmer who is slowly eaten by an alien plant in “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.” (Verdict: Great writer, not a great actor.)
In hindsight, what Creepshow reveals is that Stephen King is funny — or at least, some of his older stuff is funny. Before he got into epic fantasy with The Dark Tower, before The Shining and Carrie created the expectation that he had to be psychologically profound, and before he was the most adapted author in the world (a whopping 412 film and TV credits, according to IMDb), King wrote a lot of short stories that exhibited a rather fiendish sense of humor.
Maybe some of those short stories needed to be funny because they were published in magazines like Playboy and, in the case of “The Monkey,” Gallery. (For my online readers, pornography was once primarily distributed via still images in magazines. Many of these skin mags also published words written by respected authors. It was a win-win. The writers got paid top dollar, while the publishers could yell, “I publish Norman Freakin’ Mailer!” when they were inevitably dragged into court on obscenity charges. Hence the old joke, “I only read Playboy for the articles.”)
“The Monkey” was later gussied up and expanded for publication in King’s 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew. It provided the book’s cover image of a wind-up, cymbal-banging monkey doll. According to director Osgood Perkins, that was changed to a drum-banging monkey for his adaptation because Disney trademarked the cymbal-banging monkey for Toy Story merchandise.
Perkins’ last film, Longlegs, was an unexpected jolt of horror surrealism that took off thanks to a bravado performance by Nicolas Cage — and really, are there any other kinds of Cage performances? The Monkey doesn’t brood like most of today’s art horror (I’m looking at you, Nosferatu) because it’s too busy doing slapstick.
The film opens in a dingy pawn shop some time in the 1990s. Capt. Petey Shelburn (Severance’s Adam Scott) bursts in, demanding that the owner take back the monkey he sold him. The owner cites his “no returns on toys” policy, which is clearly posted on a sign behind the counter. But Petey insists that this is no toy. If the monkey plays his drum, bad things will happen. The owner has just enough time to scoff at the notion before he is impaled by an improperly secured speargun. Petey responds by taking a flamethrower off the wall (yes, this is the kind of place that sells fully loaded flamethrowers) and melting the monkey into plastic and metal sludge.
But it takes more than a convenient flamethrower to keep a bad monkey down. Petey disappears, leaving his wife Lois (Tatiana Maslany) and their two kids Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Coventry) alone and destitute. Later, when the twins are middle schoolers, Hal finds a hatbox deep in his dad’s old closet, marked “organ grinder monkey. Turn the key and see what happens. Like life.”
Naturally, the boys respond to the cryptic instructions by turning the key, and they are disappointed when nothing seems to happen. Then, Lois sets off on a date, leaving the two boys with the babysitter Annie (Danica Dreyer), who takes them out for dinner at a hibachi grill. But while the chef is flirting with Annie, he gets distracted and accidentally chops her head off.
At this point, I can hear the horror host Joe Bob Briggs gleefully rattling off, “Speargun impalement! Hibachi decapitation!” There will be many, many more Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater-worthy deaths before this monkey is done.
Lois tries to comfort her traumatized kids with a speech, which Maslany of Orphan Black fame absolutely nails. Death, she says, is the inevitable outcome of life. “Everything is an accident, or nothing is an accident. Same thing either way.”
Needless to say, the bickering brothers are not comforted. Further experiments with the monkey lead to more random loss of life, until Hal turns the key to try to do away with Bill. Instead, Lois dies suddenly of a rare brain hemorrhage, leaving the brothers to be raised by their swinger uncle Chip (our director, sporting over-the-top muttonchops).
Twenty-five years later, Hal and Bill (now played by Theo James) are estranged. Hal is a deadbeat dad to his son Petey (Colin O’Brien), fearful that the monkey might return. When their aunt dies hilariously, Hal is called back to his hometown, where he learns that a series of deaths has happened, each more unlikely than the last. Is the monkey loose again? Is Bill behind it? Will someone swallow a million wasps? (The answer to the last question is a resounding yes.)
Perkins is letting his freak flag fly in The Monkey, and it pays off big time. Gore in film is only horrifying if it is grounded in realism. As Sam Raimi realized in Evil Dead II, at a certain point, spurting blood becomes funny. The Monkey hits that sweet spot. James is great as the two brothers who hate each other, and the young actor Coventry is even better. Maslany, Scott, and Elijah Wood leave big impressions in small parts. This film is crass, utterly tasteless, and exactly what I needed to see on a doomy Sunday afternoon.
The theme of the 2024 Oxford Film Festival is “Stories That Shape Us.” The annual festival runs from Thursday, Feb. 27 to Sunday, March 2, with screenings taking place at the Malco Oxford Commons Cinema in Oxford, MS.
“Mississippi has always been a place where stories flourish,” says Oxford Film Festival Board President Mike Mitchell. “From music to literature to film, our state is a cornerstone of storytelling. That’s why, this year, we’re thrilled to amplify the creative voices that are putting Mississippi’s stories on the global stage.”
The opening night film is Chasing Rabbits, which is the directorial debut of novelist Michael Farris Smith. The McComb, Mississippi native has published seven novels, including Nick, a prequel to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; and 2023’s Salvage This World, a sci fi novel set in the climate change-ravaged Gulf Coast of the future. Chasing Rabbits is a neo-noir film about a truck stop waitress who seeks revenge after her home is vandalized, and, in true noir fashion, things get out of control. 2017 Memphis Film Prize winner McGhee Monteith stars, along with Davis Coen and Stephen Garrett.
“A House for My Mother” (Courtesy OFF)
Opening the opening night program is “A House for My Mother.” Directors Pilar Tempane and Dr. Benjamin Nero. The short documentary traces the 88-year-old Dr. Nero’s life, from growing up in segregated Greenwood to becoming the first Black dentist from the University of Kentucky to his lifelong friendship with Morgan Freeman.
On Friday, the doc A Life In Blues: James “Super Chikan” Johnson gives the audience a big dose of the ol’ down home. Johnson is a Clarksdale, Mississippi native who is still slinging the blues at age 73. Vancouver-based filmmaker Mark Rankin and producer Brian Wilson bring the story to house rockin’ life.
On Saturday, March 1 is Stella Stevens: The Last Starlet. Andrew Stevens produced and directed this documentary about his mother, the Mississippi-born and Memphis-raised actress who stared in more than 50 films and television series, including Girls! Girls! Girls! opposite Elvis Presley. Stevens nearly 50 year career spanned the waning days of the studio system and the New Hollywood of the 1970s, appearing alongside everyone from John Cassavettes to Jerry Lewis.
After more than 60 films screen, the awards ceremony will be held on Saturday night. The winning films will receive encore screenings on Sunday.
For details about the entire program, individual tickets, and passes, visit the Ox-Film website.
Valerie June has a new album for Concord Records ready to drop on April 11th. The 14-song Owls, Omens, and Oracles was recorded with producer M. Ward, and includes collaborations with the Blind Boys of Alabama and Norah Jones. The singer/songwriter will be hitting the road on March 27th for a tour that will wind through the U.S. this summer. No word on a Memphis date yet, but we hope Val will come home to play for us.
“Joy Joy” is the first single, giving you a taste of what to expect on the new album. “Everyone has felt moments of darkness, depression, anxiety, stress, ailments, or pain,” says June. “Some say it takes mud to have a lotus flower. This song reflects on the hard times we might face: to fail, to fall, to lose, to be held down, to be silenced, to be shut out yet still hold onto a purely innocent and childlike joy. I come from a heritage of ancestors who lived this truth by inventing blues music. Generations after they’ve gone, the inner joy they instilled in us radiates and lifts cultures throughout the world. From the world to home, what would a city council focused on inspiring inner joy for all of a town’s citizens look like? As the times are changing across the planet, what would it look like to collectively activate our superpowers of joy?”
This gorgeous video is directed and edited by Taylor Washington. Take a look, and get some joy in your Monday.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Anthony Mackie takes up the shield as Captain America in the hot garbage that is Brave New World.
While watching Captain America: Brave New World, I had a realization that Disney will be making Marvel movies for the rest of my life.
There have been 35 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) since Iron Man debuted way back in 2008. This is not exactly a new phenomenon in the hundred-plus years of commercial filmmaking. There have been 52 movies and serials starring Tarzan, beginning with Tarzan of the Apes made by the National Film Corporation of America in 1918, and continuing until 2016’s The Legend of Tarzan.
But MCU pictures are a different beast. Tarzan was a guy who lived in the jungle with Jane (star of 1934’s Tarzan and His Mate), who solved jungle-style problems, which differed from year to year (he fought the Leopard Woman, found the magic fountain, etc.). The MCU presents a unified story, now at more than 60 hours long — at least theoretically. But what happens when you’re telling a unified story, and you get to the part called Endgame, but you want to keep going for, say, 13 or 14 more movies?
The answer that Captain America: Brave New World suggests is, you flail until you fail.
Reader, I try to go into every film with an open mind. If it’s a genre I don’t generally care for, I try to evaluate it on its own terms. Is the film succeeding in what it’s trying to do, even if I don’t like what it’s trying to do? But the MCU is mightily trying my patience. What is Captain America: Brave New World even trying to do? It doesn’t know.
Actually, that’s not true. Executive Producer Kevin Feige is trying to make money for his corporate overlords, and, judging from the $190 million opening weekend, he will likely succeed. But that’s not your problem, or your win. You want to see a well-made, entertaining movie. Captain America: Brave New World is not that.
That’s a shame because the previous Captain America stories had been some of the highlights of MCU. Chris Evans hung up the shield at the end of Avengers: Endgame, when Steve Rogers chose to use the time travel tech that won the Infinity War to go back to the 1940s and romance Peggy Carter. He tapped Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon (aka Anthony Mackie) to be his successor. When we pick up with Sam, it’s after the events of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier miniseries, which aired on Disney+. (I know nothing about that part of the story because it contained my least favorite Marvel character of all time, Bucky Barnes.) He’s down in Mexico, leading Seal Team 6 on a mission to recover a mysterious package from the clutches of the Serpent Society, led by Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito). What starts as a simple MacGuffin retrieval immediately goes south. The buyer for the package declined to show up to the rendezvous, and the frustrated Sidewinder is taking out his frustrations on a group of nuns. While Captain America (who, the film reveals, speaks both Spanish and Japanese) saves the clergy, his new sidekick Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), who has taken up the mantle of the Falcon (which is to say, Sam’s old super-suit) retrieves the package.
Afterwards, Cap and Falcon are summoned to an audience with the new president, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford). Ross was one of the bad guys in The Incredible Hulk (2008), when he was played by the late William Hurt. But now, he’s shaved his mustache, cleaned up his reputation, and won the election as a reformer. Sam is naturally suspicious of the guy who has always had his own agenda of personal ambition, but now he’s the president, so it’s Captain America’s duty to obey orders. At least that’s how this Cap interprets his role.
President Ross reveals his plan for world peace, or something like it. The giant Celestial monster that tried to emerge from the Earth during the climax of The Eternals ended up as a stone head and hand protruding from the Indian Ocean. It turns out, the package Cap and Falcon were sent to retrieve is a sample taken by the Japanese which proves Celestial Island is extremely rich in adamantium, the fictional super-metal that Wolverine’s claws and skeleton are made of. Unlike vibranium, the other super-metal whose sole source is controlled by Wakanda, the adamantium reserves are up for grabs because the terra nova of Celestial Island belongs to no one. Rather than risk a war, President Ross is trying to negotiate a treaty that will share the new super-resource with the world.
While Ross is making his presentation, an assassination squad led by Sam’s mentor Isaiah Bradley, himself a product of postwar super soldier research, tries to shoot him. Now, Captain America has to a) find out who’s behind the assassination attempt while b) clearing his friend Isaiah’s name and c) preventing a war. Director Julius Onah and his five credited writers have a lot of goals to fulfill, and they attempt it by shuffling Cap and his ever expanding cast of sidekicks through a series of incoherent battles and strained conversations.
The Captain America movies have been showcases for some of the best action sequences the MCU has produced, such as the famous airport confrontation in Civil War. Nothing attempted here even comes close to that standard. I will applaud Brave New World for not attempting the Marvel Third Act, where our heroes fight a large number of faceless adversaries. Instead, Cap faces off against the Red Hulk (who, it must be noted, is not even the primary villain) in D.C.’s cherry blossom orchard. This sounds great on paper, but it looks like absolute ass. Maybe it’s the extensive reported reshoots leading to a rushed final assembly, but this film feels like three or four films haphazardly spliced together. Mackie is game, clearly giving the role his all, but he never stands a chance because the material is hot garbage. I have trouble faulting Onah, as he is the latest in a series of semi-disposable helmers appointed as scapegoats. Brave New World bears the mark of a film made by feuding, status-obsessed middle managers. This is not filmmaking; it’s brand management disguised as entertainment.
Captain America: Brave New World Now playing Multiple locations
Memphis rapper NLE Choppa is sick of the city’s gun violence problem. The 22-year-old is already a rap vet, having released his first single at age 16. His new single “Can We Live?” is dedicated to those we have lost, like Young Dolph and Choppa’s friend Tae Grape.
“I know some kids toting guns before they learn to tie they shoe/No more bedtime stories, they putting shit to sleep too.” Choppa raps.
The music video for “Can We Live?” was shot in Tom Lee Park, and features a cameo from Mayor Paul Young. Take a look:
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
“I knew what we had, and I wanted to knock everyone’s socks off with it.” — Jimmy Page (Photo: Courtesy Sony Pictures)
Given the oodles of gushing praise for the band written over the last half century, it’s kind of hard to believe that Rolling Stone’s music critics absolutely hated Led Zeppelin. “Dull and repetitious” is how the house organ of rock-and-roll described their 1968 debut album. It continued on like that for the better part of a decade, with reviewers going out of their way to trash records that are now unassailable castles in rock Valhalla.
There’s a lot of critical stuff you can say about Led Zeppelin. They had some good songs, but their legions of mediocre imitators over the years have soured their reputation. The issue of cultural appropriation in the popular music of the 20th century is often very fraught and complex, but in the case of Led Zeppelin, it’s pretty cut and dried. Jimmy Page heard Chicago electric blues and said, “Do that, but louder.” As Page says in Becoming Led Zeppelin, the music he heard as a teenager in the quiet Midlands of England “sounded like it was coming from Mars, but really it was coming from Memphis.”
But I think what really bothered those Rolling Stone writers was that Zep was never considered “authentic.” Of the four members — guitarist Jimmy Page, drummer John Bonham, singer Robert Plant, and bassist John Paul Jones — only Plant was “from the street.” Plant says he was living out of a brown suitcase, drifting from gig to gig when Jones invited him to his house for an audition.
(Photo: Courtesy Sony Pictures)
Page and Jones had both been session musicians in London for years before the Zeppelin took flight. One of the things I learned from Becoming Led Zeppelin is that they met while on the session for the James Bond theme “Goldfinger.” Yes, that’s half of Led Zeppelin playing smooth jazz behind Shirley Bassey. Later, Page backed Donovan, the psychedelic folkie who was Bob Dylan’s nemesis.
For me, it’s revelations like that which make the first hour of Becoming Led Zeppelin a fairly gripping watch. Director Bernard MacMahon made his name in the documentary world with the BBC miniseries American Epic. Those four films traced the lasting influence of recorded music on democracy. His assignment here is a little simpler: Tell everyone how awesome Led Zeppelin was, in their own words.
And how awesome were they? Pretty damn awesome. MacMahon unearths some stunning footage from the band’s early years. Some of it has been widely seen before, like the Yardbirds cameo in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Page joined the Yardbirds as a side gig when Jeff Beck got sick, and then stayed with the band until they broke up in 1968.
MacMahon does a good job keeping the famously bombastic band sticking to the facts of the story. Then Page describes the guitar that Jeff Beck gave him, which stayed with him throughout the band’s career, as “the great sword Excalibur.”
It’s also possible that Rolling Stone’s hatred of Zep stems from Page coming off as the bad guy who had hijacked the beloved Yardbirds, a narrative which is not even hinted at in Becoming Led Zeppelin. And yet we know those early reviews still sting because the film devotes quite a bit of screen time to detailing the pains. Time has clearly been on Jimmy Page’s side in this argument. To hear him tell it, he didn’t care about what the critics said because he didn’t have to. When the Yardbirds split up, he paid for Led Zeppelin’s debut record out of pocket. Jones shocked his friends and family by giving up a steady paycheck as an in-demand commercial music arranger and joining Page to make loud rock. Plant passed his audition by singing a folk song popularized by Joan Baez, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” and insisted they get Bonham to play drums. Bonham agreed, if they could match the 40 quid a week he was making with his current band. After a short European tour as The New Yardbirds, that proved to be no problem. The Who’s drummer Keith Moon suggested the name Led Zeppelin about the same time Page took them into the studio.
To anyone familiar with the horrors of the recording industry, the next part of the story is the most shocking. Page took the completed master tapes to New York City to pitch directly to Atlantic Records’ Grand Poobah Jerry Wexler and secured a contract giving him complete creative control. As I do in many of the documentaries about Boomer-era musical legends, I found myself thinking, “Wow, the biggest difference between them and the also-rans is that they had really good lawyers.”
Page, the longtime studio rat, had plenty of time to absorb how the industry worked, and when his time came,“I knew what we had, and I wanted to knock everyone’s socks off with it,” he says.
The recordings speak for themselves, and for a big chunk of the film’s second hour, MacMahon allows them to do just that. Seemingly every time the band was in front of a camera from 1968 to ’70 is in this film. Veteran editor Daniel Gitlin makes the most out of the wildly variable film quality. Finally, in the climactic “Whole Lotta Love” sequence, he gives the film over to the kind of psychedelia the band was so deeply associated with in the 1970s. These “laser Zeppelin at the planetarium” bits hit pretty hard, while bearing the clear influence of the incredible Bowie doc Moonage Daydream. But Becoming Led Zeppelin never climbs to that film’s artistic heights. We get only the band’s perspective, which in this case means quite a bit of whitewashing. Even though their tours were notoriously decadent, Plant only mentions drugs once, in passing. So if you’re looking for dirt, it ain’t here. But if you’re looking for thunderous riffs delivered on a giant Dolby sound system, Becoming Led Zeppelin’s got ’em.
Becoming Led Zeppelin Now playing Select Malco theaters
