G-WIZ (aka Gene Williams) looks smooth, suave, and cut in his latest music video. But that’s not how he was feeling when he wrote the song. “‘(Won’t Letcha) Take It From Me’ was written from the standpoint of going through my own personal Hell,” he says. The song is a reminder to himself about “… finding peace in the chaos, and guarding my peace of mind vigilantly. ”
Philip Safarik of Aktiv Films shot the video at Carolina Watershed, with the assistance of Darius “Phatmak” Clayton, and shares the director credit with Williams. The idea for the video was just to show some of the beauty of the city of Memphis, and introduce the world to us and our music,” says G-WIZ. “Shout out to my amazing band, Deneka Lewis, Joseph Higgins, Jimmie Allen, Brennan Austin, and David Higgins, for helping me bring this music to fruition!”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Ted Leibowitz, the host of the long-running indie-rock-oriented internet radio station BAGeL Radio, likes to point out the rare “self-titled, non-debut album that doesn’t suck.” Bands’ first albums are often self-titled, since they’re trying to introduce themselves to the world. But sometimes, when an act is getting stale, the band will try to reinvent their sound and release an album that is self-titled to signal that they’re getting “back to the basics.” Usually, this ends in disaster. But every now and then it works — like Cloudland Canyon’s self-titled fifth album.
“We were thinking it would be kind of cool for some reason to have people not really know what the title was. Like Big Star’s Third record, shrouded in mystery,” says Cloudland Canyon’s bandleader Kip Uhlhorn. “We have another title, but I kind of chickened out about it. It’s written on the sleeve.”
Even if the record had officially carried the title which graces the cover, God Bless Kip Uhlhorn, it would still have been a roller-coaster, nine-song journey through Uhlhorn’s hard drives. He started in the plague year of 2021, after he had taken a five-year break from playing and recording to raise his young son. “It worked out well because there are songs that I had for a long time that I always kind of set aside. It was like, ‘Oh, this could be really good, but it’s not done yet.’ Almost all of them were like that.”
The opener “Circuit City” is a bouncy castle of ’80s synth pop that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Soft Cell record. “Recursive Excursions” drips with the narcotized seduction of Warhol-era Velvet Underground. Uhlhorn hands over vocal duties to Elyssa Worley for “LV MCHNS,” which beeps and bloops to sound like a long-lost Ladytron song.
The varied soundscapes reflect Cloudland Canyon’s varied discography. The band started in the early 2000s, when Uhlhorn met Simon Wojan, who was, at the time, touring with King Khan and the Shrines, the frenetic soul revue fronted by Arish Ahmad Khan. Uhlhorn, a Memphis native, was living in New York, and Wojan was in Germany. “He started coming over like every six months and we’d just work on music all day. Then we’d mail it back and forth before email was capable of doin’ that. It was really hard to do. We would record on like mini discs and stuff.”
Those recordings formed the backbone of Cloudland Canyon’s first album, Requiems Der Natur 2002-2004. Wojan plays on several tracks of the new album, as do other Uhlhorn collaborators such as Sonic Boom from Spaceman 3, former Panther Burns drummer Ross Johnson, Lahna Deering, Zach Corsa, Justin Jordan, and Memphis Flyer music editor Alex Greene. Despite all of the personnel changes, Cloudland Canyon’s songs flow smoothly into one another, making for an album that rewards repeat listening. The centerpiece “Future Perfect (Bad Decision)” floats away on an irresistible refrain, “Come on and make a bad decision.”
When it came time to put together a band to play the new songs live, Uhlhorn tapped longtime friend Graham Burks. “We’re friends. We grew up going to the same elementary school, and Kip and I came up through the Antenna, punk rock and all that,” says Burks. “I found my way into electronic music, and Kip was doing similar things. We were both in the Memphis hardcore scene and went on to play in bands with a bunch of synthesizers. We’ve just kind of always stayed in touch and had common interests. Then we had kids at the same time and we’ve just always been kind of weaving in and out of each other’s lives.”
Rounding out the band is Corbin Linebarier. “Kip was kind of piecing this record together as he’s getting back into music and then he’s got this record and he’s got this great opportunity to play in Austin,” says Burks. “We all play in bands that use similar technology footprints, between what I do with Loose Opinions and what Corbin does with General Labor. We thought it was gonna be kind of a pain to put these songs together, but it came together pretty quickly.”
“It sounds better live than it ever has,” says Uhlhorn.
On Saturday, August 5th, 9 p.m., Cloudland Canyon will play a rare Memphis show at Bar DKDC with General Labor and fellow synth enthusiasts Optic Sink. Uhlhorn says his recent return to form has been rejuvenating. “Once I started doing it again, I was like, ‘I can’t believe I just didn’t do this at all for so long!’”
Foxx, Parris, and Boyega deliver near-perfect performances in this film.
They Cloned Tyrone seems like one of those movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf or Snakes on a Plane where they came up with the title and worked backwards. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, have you seen Sharknado? They made six of them!
Whatever method director Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier used to come up with the concept, they should keep doing it. To me, They Cloned Tyrone is a very pure form of science fiction. Even after towering masterpieces like Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The War of the Worlds, sci-fi struggled to gain acceptance in the literary mainstream. The genre was mostly relegated to cheap pulp magazines with pictures of little green men menacing scantily clad women on the cover. But many of the stories inside those lurid covers, from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” were serious works of art.
They Cloned Tyrone leans hard into disrepute with an appropriately sleazy Blaxploitation setup: Fontaine (John Boyega) is running a two-bit drug trafficking operation that is threatened by his better-capitalized rival Isaac (J. Alphonse Nicholson). One typical day on the job, he violently evicts one of Isaac’s guys from his territory and shakes down pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and his ho Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) for some money he’s owed. But after the shakedown winds down, Isaac’s enforcers catch up with Fontaine. Slick Charles and Yo-Yo see him gunned down in the parking lot. They’re shocked when Fontaine shows up the next day, none the worse for wear, demanding the money they already paid him.
Fontaine, it seems, is a clone. But who cloned him, and why? (We meet Tyrone much later in the story. Spoiler: He’s a clone, too.) Yo-Yo obsessively collects Nancy Drew books, and she’s itching to play girl detective in real life. The three not-quite friends start to see weirdness everywhere; little things they overlooked or took for granted start to take on a sinister aura. What is fake and what is real starts to get hazy. So does the question of who is fake and who is real. And just because you’re a clone, does that mean you’re not you? Since Fontaine is a clone — albeit one with a mixture of fake and real memories — whose side is he really on? Does he even know?
Imagine if Philip K. Dick wrote Hustle & Flow, and you’ll get a sense of what They Cloned Tyrone is like. Taylor is heavily influenced by Craig Brewer’s Memphis hip-hop opus. Parris plays Yo-Yo with the same sass-mouth accent Paula Jai Parker used as Lexus. Yo-Yo even says she’s just trying to get enough money to get back to Memphis. Very relatable.
Throwing DJay and Shug into They Live in the hood makes for some wildly entertaining scenes. But Taylor and Rettenmaier have a lot more on their minds than trash talk and jump scares. They stretch their premise into allegory like Jordan Peele, whose epochal Us is another clear influence.
Three near-perfect performances from Boyega, Foxx, and Parris keep all the plates spinning. When confronted by big weirdness, they freak out appropriately, then get down to the business of saving their hood. Boyega plays multiple scenes with himself but never looks like he’s bluescreening it in. Foxx’s “Playboy World Pimp Champion 1995” is funny but never demeaning. (Get well soon, Jamie Foxx! The world needs you!) Parris is constantly revealing new layers of Yo-Yo, who is largely responsible for keeping the plot moving forward. In the final act, when the screenplay starts to struggle to stick the landing, all the hard work the actors have done keeps the increasingly strange proceedings grounded in reality. They Cloned Tyrone smuggles gold inside a trash bag as only good sci-fi can.
Harry Koniditsiotis’s Memphis goth rock supergroup Switchblade Kid has a new full-length record, 3. How does Koniditsiotis, the entrepreneur behind 901 Toys and Midtown Con, the producer and engineer at 5 & Dime Recording, and frequent DJ, find time to continue to make great tunes himself?
He’s got help from bandmates Bryan Jet, Tim Kitchens, Tony Luttrell and Julia Mulherin. Koniditsiotis says “Shot,” the first single from 3, is “a post punk rockabilly stomper full of dreamy reverb and feedback guitars, perfect for your upcoming Goth beach party or late-night fast driving.”
The video, Koniditsiotis says, is inspired by Tim Broad’s classic clip for “Girlfriend in a Coma.” The layered video images are the visual equivalent of the layered guitars and synths which are Koniditsiotis’ trademark as a producer. Take a look, and a listen.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Barbie opens with a parody of The Dawn of Man, the wordless opening sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. On Saturday, you can see the real thing at the Time Warp Drive-In’s July edition, A Real Horrorshow: The Dark Visions of Stanley Kubrick. It’s a redo of one of the most popular programs in the Time Warp’s ten-year history. Here’s the fabled “3 Million Year cut” that Greta Gerwig appropriated with a wink.
The auteurist evening begins with The Shining, another of Kubrick’s films that has been endlessly parodied since its release in 1980. People have been trying to approach the sheer creepy power of this scene for the last 40 years, and no one has got it right yet.
Both The Shining and the third film of the evening, A Clockwork Orange, have been featured on my Never Seen It series — which I swear I’m going to get back to soon! The 1971 film is a pioneering work of dystopian sci fi, and features one of the greatest opening shots of all time.
On Thursday, August 3rd, Crosstown Theater’s film series presents Five Easy Pieces. The film by director Bob Rafelson cemented Jack Nicholson’s reputation as the best actor of his generation.
Why pick Barbie or Oppenheimer when you can do both?
It began as an internet joke. Barbie and Oppenheimer were both scheduled to open on July 21st. Wouldn’t it be weird to watch both of them back-to-back?
Counter-programming is a long tradition among film distributors. Whenever there’s a big “boy” movie, like The Dark Knight, someone with a “girl” movie, like Mamma Mia!, will schedule it for release the same weekend. The theory behind “Dark Mamma” (which really happened in 2008) is that maybe girlfriends and grandmas who are not into Batman can be scraped off of a family outing by the promise of something they would actually like.
By that logic, the hot pink good cheer of Barbie is the perfect foil for the dark, brooding Oppenheimer. No one expected the audience reaction to be “Let’s do both!” Maybe that’s because the studio execs’ conception of who their audiences are and what they want is deeply flawed and out-of-date.
On the surface, the two films couldn’t be more different. But there are a lot of parallels. Both Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig are writer/directors with exceptional track records. Both got essentially free rein to do what they wanted. In Nolan’s case, it was because Universal wanted to lure him away from Warner Bros. In Gerwig’s case, the film was greenlit just before the pandemic and Warner Bros.’ takeover by Discovery. In the chaos, executives focused on rescuing The Flash, and no one cared enough about “the girl movie” to interfere with Gerwig’s vision.
Both films are, relatively speaking, mid-budget. Nolan kept the ship tight at $100 million; Gerwig ended up spending $145 million. For comparison, Marvel films can’t even roll camera for less than $200 million, and Warner Bros. will lose $200 million on The Flash alone. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny cost an eye-watering $295 million after Covid delays.
More unexpected parallels emerge on screen. Both main characters face a reckoning for what they brought into the world. In J. Robert Oppenheimer’s case, it’s the atomic bomb. In Barbie’s case, it’s unrealistic expectations of female perfection.
In her Memphis Flyer review of Barbie, Kailynn Johnson writes, “The idea of a doll visiting the real world and learning to adjust to a life that’s not so fantastic was always in the cards for Barbie — the 2000 movie Life-Size starring Tyra Banks walked so Gerwig could run with Barbie. As she is catcalled by construction workers in Venice Beach, Barbie realizes misogyny did not end with Supreme Court Barbie. She suffers an existential crisis when she realizes that her very brand is determined by an all-male team led by Mr. Mattel (Will Ferrell). … Gerwig uses Barbie to explore the nuances of feminism, but the film never feels too heavy or takes itself too seriously. She carefully sandwiches some of the deeper moments with satire. It helps that Mattel isn’t afraid to laugh at itself.”
Barbie may have benefitted from low expectations from those who were unfamiliar with Gerwig’s near-perfect filmography, but expectations couldn’t have been higher for Nolan, the inheritor of Stanley Kubrick’s “Very Serious Filmmaker” mantle. Big, complex, and messy, Oppenheimer doesn’t lack for ambition. I wrote in my review, “The Trinity bomb test, which comes about two hours into this three-hour epic, is a near-silent tour de force of fire and portent. The scientists’ queasy victory party, held in a cramped Los Alamos gymnasium, may be the best single scene Nolan has ever done. … If only the whole movie were that great.”
The weekend box office results exceeded everyone’s expectations. Barbie raked in $162 million domestically — the biggest opening haul of the year, and the biggest ever by a female director. Oppenheimer did $82 million, a stunning result for a talky three-hour movie about nuclear physics. Overall, it was the fourth-largest grossing weekend in film history.
Viewers who rolled their own Barbenheimer double feature on some internet dare to experience the most intense psychic whiplash possible found two well-made movies, each with their own voice and something to say. Instead of competition, these two films have lifted each other up and inspired real conversation. The tribal question of “which one is better?” has, so far, been secondary. (It’s Barbie, FWIW.)
In Hollywood, unexpected success is more upsetting than unexpected failure. The public’s embrace of original, creative, filmmaker-driven pictures over legacy franchises systematically drained of originality by cowardly executives is now undeniable. As the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes grind on, and the studios plot to break the creatives’ will, audiences have sent a clear message about who is necessary and who is expendable.
Barbenheimer (Barbie + Oppenheimer) Now playing Multiple locations
The Cold Blooded Three front man has a new album, Where Wasn’t I?, and his new single “Hate This” harkens back to Reager’s Memphis punk roots. The video is directed by David Stockwell.
“This is the second of three videos shot to green screen in Graham Burks’ (Loose Opinions) garage,” says Reager. “The director, David, really tried to match the frenetic energy of the song visually, and I think he nailed it. The song was written in a period of personal chaos and fractured friendship, the manic vibes really sell it. Yes, those are Ric Flair ‘woos’ in the chorus.”
Listen for me on an upcoming episode of Reager’s Back To The Light podcast. If you’d like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Geologists divide time into epochs, which can last tens of millions of years. The end of one epoch and the beginning of another is marked by clearly definable features in the geological record, such as the layer of extraterrestrial iridium laid down at the end of the Cretaceous by the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs. All of human history has taken place in the Holocene epoch, but recently, the effects of climate change and industrial society have led scientists to the conclusion that we are living in a new epoch. The Anthropocene is defined as the time when human actions became more important to the state of planet Earth than natural activity. The Anthropocene’s beginning is represented by a layer of radioactive fallout from Cold War atomic bomb tests which will remain visible in the soil and rocks for millions of years.
The first atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico in July, 1945, and the man history calls its father is J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was a brilliant physicist who had led a titanic effort to win a war by harnessing the very essence of the universe. Twenty years later, as the growing nuclear arsenals of the United States and the USSR threatened humanity with mass extinction, Oppenheimer was interviewed on television about what it was like when his bomb went off. He said he remembered a quote from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is about how a person can go from the pinnacle of scientific achievement to a hollowed-out husk of a man trying to atone for the evil he unleashed on the world. The three-hour epic, shot on IMAX film stock specially formulated for the task, is ostensibly based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But Nolan owes a conceptual debt to Michael Frayn’s Tony-award-winning drama Copenhagen. Frayn used repetition and multiple points of view to tell the story of a fateful conversation between physicist Werner Heisenberg, head of the Nazi nuclear program, and his mentor Niels Bohr, who was about to flee to the United States.
Nolan takes us through Oppenheimer’s rise and fall from two different points of view: One POV, titled “Fission,” is Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) defending his life choices to a committee which would ultimately revoke his security clearances and end his career. The other POV, titled “Fusion” is Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the first Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, as he faces a Senate confirmation hearing to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. Fission, which covers Oppenhimer’s chaotic personal life and the development of the bomb, is in color, while Fusion, which details the anti-Communist witch hunt which destroyed him, is in black and white.
In the color memories, Murphy embodies the quiet, enigmatic charisma described by those who followed Oppenheimer into the darkness of Los Alamos. In the creamy black and white of Fusion, he becomes the skeletal embodiment of the industrial death machine. Downey is unrecognizable as the duplicitous social climber Strauss. Matt Damon is outstanding as Gen. Leslie Groves, the back-slapping Army Corps of Engineers officer who is in way over his head overseeing the Manhattan Project. Jason Clarke gives the performance of his life as Roger Robb, the attack dog prosecutor who exposes Oppenheimer’s darkest secrets.
Nolan’s always had problems writing female characters, so the women don’t have much to work with. Emily Blunt is all drunken hysterics as Kitty Oppenheimer. Florence Pugh puts up a good fight as Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s doomed Communist mistress.
The Trinity bomb test, which comes about two hours into this three-hour epic, is a near-silent tour de force of fire and portent. The scientist’s queasy victory party, held in a cramped Los Alamos gymnasium, may be the best single scene Nolan has ever done.
If only the whole movie were that great. Oppenheimer is both too long and has too many cuts—a cinematic quantum paradox! At times, Nolan seems acutely aware that he’s making a movie about a bunch of weirdos writing equations on blackboards for years on end. He tries to spice things up by editing dense conversations about physics, philosophy, and politics like frenetic action sequences. In one gorgeous shot, we see Oppenheimer finally alone with The Gadget that will define a new geological epoch. It should be the tense calm before the storm, but Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame bury that gold in a blizzard of mediocre images. I found myself wishing Ludwig Göransson’s relentless, pounding score would just chill for a minute. The nonlinear structure that works so well in Copenhagen hobbles the forward momentum, and makes the complex story even more confusing.
Oppenhiemer is a return to form for Nolan after the fiasco of Tenet. There’s a great movie hiding amidst all of the formal pyrotechnics. But I guess it’s too much to ask for a lighter touch from a director who is about as subtle as an atomic bomb.
Run, Tom Cruise, run! Run he does in Dead Reckoning Part One.
Last summer, the movie business had been all but pronounced dead. Conventional wisdom said that audiences, locked out of theaters by the Covid pandemic (remember that?), were now permanently captured by streamers. Then Top Gun: Maverick roared into wide release to the tune of $1.5 billion, and by the end of the year, Paramount had reversed course, proclaiming that the studio would only produce films intended for theatrical release.
The rest of 2022 and 2023 have turned out to be fairly average years, box-office-wise. Numbers are down from 2019, which was a banner year thanks to Avengers: Endgame, but nothing like the catastrophe of 2021. Then, there were the twin failures of Ant-Manand The Wasp: Quantumania, which lost Marvel/Disney $120 million, and the $200-million bath Warner Bros. took on The Flash, which may end up being the biggest box office flop of all time.
Then, on May 2nd, the Writers Guild of America went on strike against the studios, and last week, the Screen Actors Guild joined them on the picket lines. Now, the doom and gloom is back in Tinseltown. The problem that the last few months has exposed is this: The alleged break-even point for a film like The Flash is $600 million. (I say “alleged” because “Hollywood accounting” is synonymous with “lying.”) This is not a business model; it’s a gambling addiction. And none of it is the fault of the writers who are paid a pittance by the flailing gamblers, or the actors, most of whom don’t earn the $27,000 a year necessary to qualify for SAG’s health insurance.
Enter Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Director Christopher McQuarrie and the returning Impossible Mission Force had their budget and schedule blown by Covid delays, but promised a big on-screen payoff. They delivered on that promise.
The film’s dense, fast-moving cold open harkens back to the franchise’s roots as a Cold War-era spy series. The Sevastopol, a Russian nuclear submarine testing out a new AI-powered stealth system, is discovered and fired upon by an American sub. When they return fire, the American sub is revealed to be a WarGames-style computer mirage, and their own torpedo turns against them. Meanwhile, back in Washington, CIA Director Kittridge (Henry Czerny, returning) is briefing DNI Denlinger (Cary Elwes) on the Entity, a cyberweapon that achieved sentience and escaped into the wilds of the internet after sinking the Sevastopol. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, running) is dispatched to retrieve a key that may be the key to controlling the rogue AI. But Hunt and IMF ops Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames, sitting) have other ideas. Burned by six films’ worth of betrayal and disavowal at the hands of their bosses, they decide that no one can be trusted with the Entity’s power, and vow to destroy it.
MI represents both the good and the bad of Hollywood in 2023. It is a $295-million film in a 25-year-old franchise built around an aging movie star and an intellectual property whose origin few remember. But unlike butt-ugly CGI fests like The Flash and Quantumania, all that money is on the screen. Yes, there’s CGI in MI, but that’s really Tom Cruise jumping a motorcycle off a cliff in the Alps. When the climax pays tribute to The General, they really drive a locomotive off a real bridge, just like Buster Keaton. Yes, it’s too long (geez, this is only part one?), but the story is clear and the editing brisk. Unlike too many big-budget gambles, I never felt bored and ripped off. Plus, Tom Cruise fighting an AI in the middle of a strike triggered by a threat to replace actors and writers with AI is just too perfect. I’m rooting for Cruise.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Now playing Multiple locations
Singer, songwriter and longtime friend of Music Video Monday Brennan Villines has a new single. “Ahead of Your Time.”
“This song is one of the most personal pieces I’ve ever composed,” says the pop maestro. “It’s an ode to my childhood and growing up confused about my queerness in a place that didn’t understand queerness. I didn’t have anyone to confide in or look up to and had to navigate life in a largely conservative and religious part of the world. I reference my early stages of rebellion, experimenting with drugs, smoking weed from apples, and listening to Neil Young with my best friend, Ben, all while trying to maintain the appearance of a moral Christian life I was raised with. I also touch on how lost and lonely I felt before coming out in my junior year of high school. It was an instant relief but created friction for a while with my family. One of the lines in the song is “your daddy loves you, just give it some time.” I hope that speaks to every queer person who has struggled in their familial relationships and who struggles with acceptance because now, I truly have a wonderful and loving relationship with both of my parents. Ultimately, this song is about reflecting on a beautiful and complicated nostalgia of my journey as a queer man.”
The video uses as its jumping off points one of the most iconic and loaded images in the history of popular music: the cover of Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 album Born the USA. Directing team Zac(h)ks inverted the flag to indicate distress, and put Villines and his steely jaw in front of it, along with a variety of special guests. “For the video, we decided to use a cast of LGBTQ folks holding up a photo of their younger selves. We wanted the video to be joyous and inspirational to those who are scared to come out in this world. Just over the past year, Tennessee has gotten wild with anti-lgbt legislation, drag bans etc. We chose to use an upside down American flag to represent the distress being caused in this country and to send the message to those conservative voices who preach about the value of freedom; are we really free if certain people don’t have the right to live their lives the way they want?”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
