I prove I’m a human all the time. (Photos: Dreamstime.com)
Thanks to a single post on TikTok, a question rocketed through social media and emerged into real-world conversations. Since the spirit of inquiry is in the Memphis Flyer’s DNA, we set out to explore the “man-bear quandary” and find a definitive answer. Our investigation spawned many other pressing questions. The following conversation took place entirely within the writer’s head.
Let’s say you’re walking alone in the woods. Which would you rather meet: a man or a bear?
I don’t know. Can you give me more details?
No. Man or bear?
I choose bear.
Let’s say you’re walking alone in the woods. Would you rather meet a woman or a bear?
Is the bear male or female?
It doesn’t matter. It’s a bear.
It does matter! Is it a mama bear defending her cubs? Or is it a male bear with a belly full of salmon he just pulled from the rushing stream at the bottom of the hill?
I don’t know! It’s a non-bear-nary bear! Woman or bear, that’s the choice.
Bear.
If your sister or mother or daughter were walking alone in the woods, would you rather she encounter a bear or a man?
I’m gonna go with bear again.
You’re doing this all wrong.
That wasn’t a question. How are my answers wrong?
I’m trying to make a point about misogyny and sexual assault. Men are supposed to choose the man because bears are dangerous. Women are supposed to choose the bear because it’s not as dangerous to them as a man. About 20 percent of women will experience sexual assault in their lifetimes. Don’t you think that’s bad?
Of course sexual assault is bad! Listen, if you really want to make a dent in the Memphis crime rate, get to work fixing the TBI crime lab. I’m just not sure questioning what a man, a bear, or the pope does in the woods is the best way to make your point.
Don’t bring religion into this. It’s a social-media gotcha question. Your response says a lot about you. Can you think of a better way to determine moral worth?
No, I guess not.
Right. So, why do you keep choosing the bear?
If all I know is gender, I’m going to have to assume the worst. People have all kinds of agendas. But bears only have bear agendas. They’re not out to get you. They’re just doing their bear stuff. Stay out of their way and leave them to it. Bears can be dangerous, sure, but at least you know where you stand with a bear. If the choice is Jane the friendly forest ranger or a bear, I’ll choose the forest ranger. If it’s Tweakin’ Joe defending his secret meth lab, I’ll take the bear. Plus, bears don’t have guns.
Aha! You just chose the woman over the bear!
No, I’m choosing the park ranger. Women do meth, too. It’s all in the details. Is this like the Voight-Kampff test from the movie Blade Runner, where they try to determine if you’re a replicant by asking you weird empathy questions?
You’re walking in the desert, and you see a tortoise on its back, baking in the sun. Why aren’t you turning the tortoise over?
Of course I’m going to turn the tortoise over! I’m not a robot.
How do I know you’re not a robot? How do YOU know?
I prove I’m a human on the internet all the time.
Please choose all the images which contain a bear.
Exactly! Like an AI doesn’t know what a bear looks like.
Has the AI ever seen a bear?
AIs don’t “see” anything. It’s just making educated guesses about what comes next. AI is just spicy autocorrect.
Doesn’t “making educated guesses about what comes next” also describe human thought processes?
This is getting ridiculous. You can’t measure my humanity by asking about my reaction to animal encounters. The man-bear quandary is just another “Would You Rather?” question designed to stir up meaningless debate on the internet. Good for procrastinating when you should be writing, but that’s it. Would you rather fight one man-sized chicken or five chicken-sized men?
Obviously, the man-sized chicken.
You obviously don’t play Dungeons & Dragons. A man-sized chicken is called a “dinosaur.” They get two claw-attacks and one bite-attack per round. Smoosh a couple of the tiny men, and the rest will have to pass a morale check or retreat.
Would you rather duel Aaron Burr with pistols at 10 paces, or fight Abraham Lincoln in a pit with a broadsword?
The world of Vesta is
endlessly complex. (Photo: Courtesy Netflix)
In writing class, they teach about the different kinds of conflicts a story can center around. Person vs. person is the most common, but there’s also person vs. self, person vs. fate, and person vs. society. Person vs. nature (formerly known as “man vs. nature”) is not nearly as common as it was a hundred years ago, back in the days of frontier and jungle adventure magazines. That’s one of the reasons the sci-fi animated series Scavengers Reign is so refreshing. Its take on the classic story of a shipwrecked crew struggling to survive in a hostile wilderness is simple at first, but becomes more fascinating as complexities emerge. In fact, “emerging complexity” is one of the overarching themes of the 12-episode story. Creators Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner are fascinated with the interplay of life-forms, both cooperation and conflict, which create a functioning ecosystem. The world they have created is unlike anything you’ve seen.
Scavengers Reign begins with its castaways, survivors from the crew of the cargo ship Demeter 227, already stranded on the planet Vesta. Azi (voiced by Wunmi Mosaku), the capable quartermaster, is paired with her robot Levi (Alia Shawkat). Their escape pod landed safely on open ground, and Azi uses an omniwheel motorcycle to scout the surrounding terrain. When Levi starts acting odd, Azi discovers that a fungus-like alien life-form has been growing on the robot’s circuitry — and the robot likes it.
Photo: Courtesy Netflix
Ursula (Sunita Mani), a biologist, was in the escape pod with Sam (Bob Stephenson), the captain of the Demeter. Their landing was a little rougher, but they have managed to salvage enough gear to communicate with the fatally damaged ship still in orbit. In the pilot episode, “The Signal,” the pair travel to retrieve a battery from another crashed escape pod. Once they get there, they see that the crew have all been killed by some unknown environmental hazard, which they then have to face. But that’s business as usual on this planet.
The occupant of the third escape pod has it the worst. It landed in a tree-like plant hundreds of feet tall, and Kamen (Ted Travelstead) has been trapped inside for weeks. He is finally rescued (if you want to call it that) by a creature he names Hollow. Imagine a cross between a platypus and a koala bear with psychic powers which it uses to dominate other life-forms. Instead of making little green tripod-thingies bring them yummy berry-like spheres, Hollow latches onto the human and demands Kamen hunt for him. In Kamen’s mind, it speaks to him in the form of Fiona (also voiced by Alia Shawkat), Demeter’s robotics engineer. Hollow uses Kamen’s guilt over their dysfunctional relationship against him, and his already fragile psyche slowly crumbles.
Sam and Ursula succeed in contacting the ship, and they manage to activate the automatic landing sequence. At first, they’re worried it might land on top of them. Then they discover they didn’t get that lucky. The Demeter lands many kilometers away from all three parties. The first half of the story is taken up with their increasingly frantic and costly attempts to make it to the ship. Once there, they will find that this world has even more surprises in store. As the show progresses, flashbacks start to fill in the details of how they got here, and who they were before they were lost in space and written off by their employers.
Anime’s dominant visual style has become so pervasive that I hear stories from art teachers about begging their young students to try to draw something else. Scavengers Reign owes a debt to Miyazaki’s sense of grandeur and deliberate pacing, and Akira’s pervasive body horror. But Bennett and Huettner’s aesthetic is more like the French illustrator Moebius. The world of Vesta is endlessly complex, with many animals and plants living in such close symbiosis that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Our heroes are constantly dodging predators, both animals and plants. But many of their interactions with the native flora and fauna aren’t so cut and dried. When Ursula is trapped inside a living wall of thorns, Sam freaks out. But Ursula insists she was never in danger, and in fact might have even been communicating with the giant plant-like organism. What were they saying? She doesn’t know. But as the story progresses, the survivors slowly learn to stop trying to conquer nature, and start trying to live in harmony with it. That’s what makes this beautiful and thought-provoking show such a treasure.
Unapologetic artist A Weirdo From Memphis is hitting the road this summer with label mates PreauXX, Kid Maestro, and CMajor. They’ll be appearing at Offbeat in Jackson, Mississippi on June 15, at the California Clipper in Chicago on June 22, at Seasick Records in Birmingham, Alabama on June 28, at the Platypus in St. Louis on July 13, and then two nights in NYC at Heaven Can Wait on July 27 and the Bed-Stuy Art House on the 28th.
AWFM’s got a new single and music video to wow the crowds. “Hysteria” is a horrorcore-style grinder which features a guest verse from prolific New Yorker RXK Nephew. “Its an unexpected blending of universes between two unhinged artist that both value being themselves over more traditional approaches,” says AWFM.
For the video, AWFM and crew traveled to Los Angeles to work with filmmaker filo5ofi, with whom the rapper had collaborated early in his career. Instead of some some California sun-and-fun street footage for the video, AWFM says “it was filmed in an L.A. hotel in the middle of one of the most unprecedented rain storms in 20 years.”
Stay dry, stay fly, and take a look:
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Bukka White and Jimmy Crosthwait onstage at the the Overton Park Shell in The Blues Society. (Photo: Randall Lyon | courtesy of The Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane)
For director Augusta Palmer, The Blues Society is a personal project.
Her father, music writer Robert Palmer, was a member of the group of hippies and weirdos who first brought Black blues artists from Memphis and Mississippi to the Overton Park Shell. They were among the first to acknowledge the deep debt that popular music owed to these artists. Robert Palmer went on to write the bestselling music tome Deep Blues in 1981.
On Friday, May 31, The Blues Society opens in Memphis at Studio on the Square.. The opening weekend will feature a series of Q&A’s with the director and some Memphians involved in the project. On Friday, Grammy-winning author and filmmaker Robert Gordon will moderate a discussion with the director and musicians Jimmy Crosthwait and Chris Wimmer. On Friday, June 1, Indie Memphis executive director Kimel Fryer will moderate a discussion with director Palmer and editor Laura Jean Hocking. On Wednesday, June 5, Robert Gordon will return with Memphis radio legend Henry Nelson.
Barry Lincoln inside Mr. Lincoln's Costume Shoppe.
Mr. Lincoln’s Costume Shoppe, a Midtown landmark for more than three decades, will close on Friday, May 31, 2024.
Barry Lincoln, the longtime owner and shop’s namesake, is retiring after building his business into a must-visit spot for Memphians wanting to look sharp for Halloween.
I interviewed Mr. Lincoln himself about how he got into the costuming business, and why he’s leaving it all behind. But the good news is, he wants to sell the shop. So, maybe this is one Memphis tradition that can continue.
Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa. (Courtesy Warner Bros.)
When Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) sizes up Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) for the first time, she’s standing alone in the middle of the wasteland, bloodied and bruised. They are the only two survivors of a brutal desert battle which has left the road behind them littered with twisted steel and broken bodies. Furiosa has “a purposeful savagery” which makes her an ideal candidate for promotion to Imperator in the army of Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). Jack offers to take her under his wing — she’s just killed most of his crew, so he needs the help driving the War Rig.
By the time she gets her field promotion, Furiosa has already lived four lives. She was a carefree youth, privileged to live in The Green Place, a matriarchal society that retained a high level of technology in a sheltered secret valley. At age ten (Alaya Browne plays Youngest Furiosa), she is taken captive by raiders from the Biker Horde of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), and forced to live in a cage as his “daughter.” When Dementus makes a play for Wasteland dominance by taking on Immortan Joe, Furiosa is traded, along with a doctor (Angus Sampson) as part of an armistice deal. She is sent to the vault where Immortan keeps his harem, where she first shaves her head as part of an elaborate escape plan. With sons like Rictus Errectus (Nathan Jones) and his slightly brighter brother, Scrotus (Josh Helman), it’s easy to see why Immortan Joe would need Furiosa, who is always the smartest person in the room, to breed future “Warlord Jr’s.” Furiosa escapes the rape chamber to live for a while disguised as a War Boy while she bides her time, and plots her ultimate escape back to the Green Place.
Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his minons. (Courtesy Warner Bros.)
We first met Furiosa in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, where she staged a high-octane escape from the Immortal Man’s Citadel, and took his five perfect wives with her. It was the fourth installment in director George Miller’s Mad Max series, which began as gonzo Australian Oz-sploitation in 1979 and broke into the American popular imagination in 1981 with The Road Warrior. Max, a former Aussie highway patrolman turned wasteland legend, was played in the first three films by Mel Gibson, then by Tom Hardy in Fury Road. Even though his name was in the title, Hardy’s Max was utterly upstaged in Fury Road by Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. Her indelible performance elevated the film from one of the best action films ever made to one of the best films ever made, period.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga began life as an anime series intended to accompany Fury Road if it had been made as planned in the mid-’00s. Furiosa retains the episodic structure, with cards announcing chapter titles. It is framed as the remembrance of The History Man (George Shevtsov), who shared Dementus’ cage with Furiosa. Miller has said the Mad Max films are folk legends of the future told by those who are trying to rebuild human society after the combination of ecological collapse and nuclear war have laid waste to the planet. Fury Road is told in close-up, zoomed in on three hard days in the wasteland. Furiosa begins with a zoom in from space onto the Australian outback, signaling that Miller is working in a different register. The intricate chase scenes, which Miller does better than anyone ever has, still pop. “Chapter 3: Stowaway”, which reportedly took five years to plan and six months to film, rises to Fury Road’s heights.
Chris Hemsworth as Dementus (Courtesy Warner Bros.)
But Miller is more concerned with the people in the wasteland. Fury Road bore the mark of silent stunt genius Buster Keaton. Furiosa’s Bildungsroman, the story of how the child became the woman, and the woman became the hero, is in the mode of an Akira Kurosawa samurai epic. That’s why the 15-year story’s climax, the 40 Day Wasteland War, takes place largely off screen. Furiosa both starts the war and finishes it. The piles of burning corpses tell you everything to you need to know about what happened in between.
To hear Dementus tell it, Furiosa’s problem is that she has hope. She saw the Green Place. She knows life doesn’t have to be a brutal scramble for survival, where your first instinct is to loot your buddy’s corpse. Hemsworth is deliciously unhinged on the surface, but he is, like Hamlet, “mad in craft.” At least at first. As the years go by, the level of brutality needed to control a hoard of cannibalistic bikers starts to take its toll. This is by far the best performance of Hemsworth’s career.
He almost, but not quite, upstages the Furiosas. Anya Taylor-Joy has the unenviable assignment of following a titan like Charlize Theron. Fortunately, she has help from Alyla Browne, a 14-year-old newcomer who is completely at home chewing through a motorcycle fuel line. As the traumas pile up, and the flamethrowers roar, she slowly comes into focus. Will she be a monster, like Dementus, or a protector, like her mother? Then, in one epic moment on the top of a speeding war rig, Taylor-Joy looks into the camera, and there she is, our Furiosa, ready to fight the whole rotten world.
Jamila Wignot was nervous. It was Friday night, May 17, 2024, at Crosstown Theater in Midtown Memphis, and she was about to premiere the first episode of her latest HBO documentary series Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. to a hometown crowd. The sold-out house was full of Memphis music royalty: David Porter, Al Bell, Deanie Parker, Eddie Floyd, the list goes on.
“It’s like somebody was just saying to me, ‘Didn’t Janis Joplin get booed in Memphis?’ And I was like, ‘Exactly!’ That’s why I was nervous,” Wignot says on a Zoom interview a few days later.
Turns out, she needn’t have worried. The crowd responded to “Chapter One: ’Cause I Love You” with a Cannes-level standing ovation. During the Q&A after the screening, Deanie Parker, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music’s first CEO, seemed taken aback. “This really has been an emotional experience for me,” she says. “I think it’s because, while we achieved a lot, we did it in about a decade — which is astounding! We made a mark globally.”
Booker T. Jones, Donald “Duck” Dunn, David Porter, Al Jackson Jr., Bonnie Bramlett, Delaney Bramlett, Isaac Hayes, and Steve Cropper (Photo: Courtesy Don Nix Collection/OKPOP)
Wignot says her involvement with the Stax story started as she was finishing up her last documentary, a portrait of modern dance pioneer Alvin Ailey. “I’ve been working in documentary filmmaking, particularly historical documentary filmmaking, for a long time. But I came out of a kind of PBS model of documentaries that were narrated by a kind of ‘Voice of God’ narrator. They used archival [film and stills], but there were very specific ways that you had to use it at that time. With Ailey, I finally got to do the kind of documentary filmmaking that I like to do, which is first-person, kind of witness-driven documentary filmmaking. As a kid, I saw Eyes on the Prize and thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’ When you are hearing from somebody who was there on the front lines, and then you’re seeing them in the archival footage, it all just feels very immersive and alive and urgent.
“On the heels of that, I was then approached first by Ezra Edelman and Caroline Waterlow who made O.J.: Made in America. We’d all been friends for a very long time. Ezra said, ‘I’m working with this company, White Horse Pictures, and we’re looking for somebody who wants to direct a series on Stax Records, and do you think you’d be into it?’ And I was just immediately like, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’”
Bruce Talamon and Isaac Hayes at the 1972 Wattstax concert (Photo: Howard Bingham)
Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. skillfully blends interviews with the surviving players and extensively researched archival footage from the label’s heyday. “I don’t bother to interview RZA, who’s a diehard fan of the label. There’s no Justin Timberlake, there’s no Elton John, there’s no Paul McCartney. I was not interested in having the kind of secondary fan in there, just appreciating it. I wanted to understand how the label came together, the experiences of the people on the ground, and then let the music do the work of generating enthusiasm.”
The story is one of triumphant highs, stunning reversals of fortune, and missed opportunities, such as the time The Beatles tried and failed to schedule a recording session at the Stax studio on McLemore Avenue. (“Had that happened, for sure Ringo and Paul would’ve been up in this documentary!” says Wignot.)
Wignot’s approach is immediate and visceral. In one priceless take, shot in Booker T. Jones’ Nevada home, the Stax organist and arranger walks us through the creation of the timeless instrumental “Green Onions,” explaining how the song works from a music theory standpoint. It’s a little like watching Albert Einstein sketch out the equations for general relativity on a cocktail napkin.
“The thing that’s so incredible about Booker T. Jones is, he’s quite a quiet guy. Put him in front of a crowd and he’s like, ‘I’m ready!’ But then put him in a more intimate setting, and that’s not his milieu, which I love about performers. So he walked in and he said, ‘Oh, I’m feeling a little bit nervous and shy.’ He looked amazing, that blue suit and the hat, everything styled to perfection. And he said, ‘I’m going to sit at the piano and just start playing. It helps me settle down.’ As we were finishing up our setup, Booker T. Jones — Booker T. Jones! — is giving us a private concert. You’re trying to act like it’s very normal and not to go full fan-girl on him, just like, ‘How is this happening?’ The cameraman is like, ‘The light’s going to go here?’ And we’re like, ‘The guy is doing his thing RIGHT NOW.’
“Finally, I said, ‘[‘Green Onions’], it’s such a classic, that song. Since the process of working in Stax was so spontaneous, it could feel like things just kind of emerged out of nothing, give it to me. What’s the thought process? How do you get to this song?’ He was already at the piano, and he just started explaining it. It’s hands down one of my favorite scenes in the whole series. … Once you understand how ‘Green Onions’ came about, do you really need a famous person to talk about how much they love that song?”
The fact that Stax soul was chronically underappreciated by both the music industry and music press is a recurring theme in the series. In the intro, Parker promises to tell uncomfortable truths about how the powers-that-be never really wanted the company to succeed. The racial discrimination of the Jim Crow-era South is never far from the surface of the story, such as the time the label’s first breakout star, Carla Thomas, had to ride the service elevator to get to a meeting with the head of Atlantic Records.
It wasn’t until the Stax/Volt Revue toured Europe in the spring of 1967 that the Black musicians realized what it was like to be respected for their music, and not judged for the color of their skin. The segment of “’Cause I Love You” documenting the tour is powerful, says David Porter. “You could see a little bit of it, as an artist looking at the film, but to be there and to see that energy and that spirit was all over that space. There were people who were enjoying that music just breaking down and crying, getting tremendously emotional when they looked at Otis Redding, or Sam & Dave, or Eddie Floyd. It was something to see.”
Sam Moore acts as an informal narrator for the story of the tour, as you see his younger version hyping up a crowd of Norwegian teens. “There’s so many different films that have been able to make use of this material,” says Wignot. “Thank God it exists, but I was thinking, how do you take something that’s been often seen and give it a new life, a new kind of vitality? … When Sam Moore started talking about his love of the church, I wanted to get that in there, but not the way it is often told, up front. That’s the story of how R&B came together, in a way. It’s so central to what moves him as an artist. We have him talking about the power of the preacher to communicate. I just love in documentaries when you see somebody thinking. Then he says, ‘I would do anything to get that crowd to do a show with me.’ And that is so powerful because he’s not just trying to ‘turn them on.’ Even there, there’s a collective exchange, ‘Come with me, let’s do this together. …’
“The challenge of scenes like that, is how do you do it so that the music gets to live, so that we experience it as viewers as if we were there in the concert? But you’re adding just enough commentary that you’re not speaking on top of the scene, and you’re communicating what was going on emotionally for the performer. So there’s a real balance of too much dialogue versus too little dialogue, and understanding that the material is incredible in and of itself.”
“Chapter One” ends on the high note of the tour, says Wignot. “Episode one builds the way that ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ builds as a song. It was informed by Jim Stewart saying he thinks that that’s the song that best sums up the kind of spirit of Stax. It’s collaboration. It starts with one thing and then another thing gets laid on top and another. It just kind of builds over time and then becomes this big, explosive powerhouse climax of a song.”
“As you go forward with each of these segments, you’re gonna find that it is gonna get heavy. It’s gonna get fun, it’s gonna get powerful because it is alive,” says Porter. “The camaraderie that was between us, enjoying it, was shown in this film. It was a different time, and not a sweet time. We applauded what Jim [Stewart] was doing, giving us the freedom to go into the studio and do that. Everybody worked together in such a cohesive way, and there was a love and magic that happened in a continual way from day to day, hour to hour, all the way to the midnight hour. All that we would do, we’d have fun doing it. Because music is never good unless you can feel the joy inside of doing it.”
Normally, we use Music Video Monday to highlight the latest work by Memphis musicians and/or filmmakers. But this Music Video Monday is a little different. We’re going to look back to one of the most significant moments in Memphis music history — and it didn’t even happen here.
Tonight, Stax: Soulsville USA premieres on HBO. I’ll have a lot more to say about the four-part documentary series in the coming days, but right now, I want to focus on one of the doc’s most thrilling moments. In 1967, Stax Records, then a startup regional record label, sent its stars on a whirlwind tour of Europe. As director Jamila Wignot reveals in episode 1, the BBC wouldn’t play American R&B, so pirate radio stations based on boats in international waters sprang up to meet the teenage demand for new music. When the Stax/Volt Revue hit European stages, the performers were shocked to discover that the kids in the audience were primed to go nuts.
This footage of the revue in action was shot in Norway on April 7, 1967. You’ll see Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the MGs, and Otis Redding in their prime. Strap in, put those headphones on, and hit play.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
The week of May 17-23 at the movies offers lots of fun choices, including the premiere of a film I’ve been most excited about for months:
I Saw The TV Glow
Jane Schoenbrun’s psychological horror about teenage fandom is already being hailed as one of the best movies of the year. Owen (Justice Smith) bonds with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over their mutual love for the YA series The Pink Opaque. Years later, with adulthood’s problems pressing down, Maddy reappears in Owen’s life, telling him they can escape into the fictional world of the show — but there’s a price to pay for a permanent trip to TV land.
IF
Young Elizabeth (Cailey Fleming) has an imaginary friend named Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) that only she can see. The catch is, she can also see other kids’ imaginary friends, including the ones whom their companions outgrew. Her neighbor Cal (Ryan Reynolds) has the same ability, and together they try to reunite the abandoned Imaginary Friends (IFs) with their former kids. This live action/animated hybrid features a huge cast of voices, including Steve Carell, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Maya Rudolph, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, and, in his final role, the late Louis Gossett, Jr.
Back to Black
Marisa Abela stars in this biopic of singer Amy Winehouse, who scored major hits in the 00’s and set the record for the most Grammys won in one night. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson tries to separate the tabloid hype from the real person, who died in 2011 at age 27.
The Blue Angels
This new documentary takes IMAX back to its roots as the biggest documentary format. The U.S. Navy’s aviation demonstration team features some of the best pilots in the world. The film gets up close and personal with them, as they get up close and personal with each other while flying F-18s at 300 mph.
Flash Gordon
The Time Warp Drive-In returns for May with the theme Weird Realms. It’s three sci-fi movies from the ’80s that feature extreme visuals unlike anything else ever filmed. In the early 1970s, after George Lucas had a major hit with American Graffiti, he wanted to do a remake of Flash Gordon, which had started as a comic strip before being adapted into one of the original sci-fi serials in the late 1930s. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis refused to sell him the movie rights to Flash Gordon, which he had purchased on the cheap years before, so Lucas decided to do his own version. That became Star Wars, and you may have heard of it. After Lucas struck gold, De Laurentiis decided to finally exercise his option. His Flash Gordon, which featured visuals inspired by the classic comics, didn’t impress sci-fi audiences upon its 1980 release, but has proven to be hugely influential in the superhero movie era. The best parts of the film are the Queen soundtrack and Max von Sydow (who once played Jesus) chewing the scenery as Ming the Merciless. To be fair, there’s a lot of scenery to chew on.
The second film on the Time Warp bill is The Dark Crystal. Muppet master Jim Henson considered this film his masterpiece, and the puppetry work is unparalleled in film history. If you’re only familiar with the story through the Netflix prequel series (which was also excellent), this is the perfect opportunity to experience the majesty of the original.
The final Time Warp film was Ridley Scott’s follow-up to Blade Runner. Legend has it that the unicorn shots in Blade Runner were actually Scott using that film’s budget to shoot test footage for Legend. A really young Tom Cruise stars with Mia Sara in this high fantasy adventure. Again, the best part of the film is the villain. Tim Curry absolutely slays as Darkness, while sporting one of the best devil costumes ever put to film.
Kingdom of the Planet of Apes is a fun summer blockbuster.
When French writer Pierre Boulle wrote La Panéte des singes in 1963, it was meant as a wry commentary on human hubris. His most successful book to date was a war story which was adapted by director David Lean as The Bridge on the River Kwai. Boulle, who didn’t speak English, won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 1957. His novel, which was translated in the UK as Monkey Planet, became an unexpected hit in England, and was promptly optioned by 20th Century Fox. Boulle thought the book was unfilmable, so he was shocked when Planet of the Apes became a huge hit in 1968. At the Academy Awards that year, Planet of the Apes beat 2001: A Space Odyssey for Best Costume Design. (Legend has it that many Academy voters chose PotA because they thought Kubrick had used real apes in 2001’s “Dawn of Man” sequence.)
The enduring vision of Boulle’s premise has echoed across the decades, with five films and two television series in the 20th century and, beginning with a Tim Burton-directed remake in 2001, for films in this century. In this future world, the humans, who have lost the power of speech and reason, live in captivity and servitude to a society of primates. Gorillas are the warrior class, orangutans are the priestly class, and chimpanzees are scientists.
The last three PotA films, beginning with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, tell the story of how our world got that way. A medical test chimp named Caesar (Andy Serkis) is infected with an experimental virus, designed to treat Alzheimer’s disease, that increases his intelligence. But when the virus escapes from the lab, it has the opposite effect on humans, and a global pandemic ensues which threatens the existence of humanity. Cloverfield director Matt Reeves helmed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, drawing a long and complex portrait of Caesar as a wise leader of his people — uh, apes — while a crippled humanity fights for survival. Reeves evolved a patient, detailed style, which proved to be perfect for this version of PotA, but turned positively turgid when he took on the superhero genre in The Batman.
Wes Ball of Maze Runner fame took over for the latest film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which picks up the story many generations after the death of Caesar. Noa (Owen Teague) is the son of the chief of Eagle Clan, a group of chimps who live in harmony with nature. When he leads an expedition to gather new falcon eggs to raise in the village aviary, he strays into the forbidden Valley Beyond. When he returns, he is followed by a group of masked gorillas armed with electric lances. Eagle Clan, having never seen electricity before, is quickly overwhelmed by the raiders and kidnapped for parts unknown. Noa escapes and sets out to find his stolen tribe. Along the way, he meets Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan who belongs to The Order of Caesar, a monastic order dedicated to their namesake’s two moral laws: Apes Together Strong, and Ape No Kill Ape. Together, they discover Mae (Freya Allan), a human who, they soon learn, can talk. They track the mysterious raiders until they are ambushed on a bridge and dragged back to an armed camp on the shoreline. There, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) is trying to break through a huge vault door set in the side of a sea cliff. He believes there is game-changing human technology behind the door, and that Mae knows how to open it.
Kingdom is a much more conventional sci-fi adventure story than Reeves’ meditations on the responsibilities of leadership. Its sweeping vistas of Los Angeles in ruins make for some compelling cinema, and Ball knows how to concoct a good slam-bang action sequence. Unlike the old days of Roddy McDowall emoting behind a thick mask, these apes are all motion-capture CGI creations, which sometimes causes confusion, as Noa’s chimp brethren all kinda look alike. Teague’s Noa makes a serviceable and pleasingly vulnerable hero, but he can’t live up to the masterful mo-cap performance of Andy Serkis. Sure, it’s blander than its predecessors, but taken on its own terms, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes remains a fun summer blockbuster.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Now playing Multiple locations
