Tom Cruise hangs on in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning pt. 1.
After many pandemic-related delays and a storm of publicity, Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are back with Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Pt. 1. This time, the Impossible Mission Force is sent to take down The Entity, an advanced AI that has gained sentience and is threatening humanity. How does that lead to Tom Cruise jumping a motorcycle off a frickin’ mountain? We’re about to find out.
John Boyega stars with Jamie Foxx in They Cloned Tyrone, a sci-fi action comedy which pays homage to/sends up 70s Blackspolitation films. Teyonah Parris, David Alan Grier, and Kiefer Sutherland also star. Expect multiple Tyrones.
Hey, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is still in theaters, and it’s still good! Harrison Ford’s victory lap as the beloved archeologist/adventurer delivers the Spielbergian action beats you crave — even if James Mangold is at the helm this time.
While the big studios pour six-digit budgets into tent poles expecting to hit home runs, Blumhouse moneyballs the game with consistent base hits like Insidious: The Red Door, which made its $15 million budget back in two days.
On Wednesday, July 19, at Crosstown Theater, Indie Memphis will present a selection of short films from the Odú Film Festival in Brazil, which is a production of the Black Freedom Fellowship. These shorts include “Ara” (“Time”) a ghost story from director Laryssa Machada imagining a dialogue with her grandfather, whom she posthumously discovered was gay.
“Ara”
Then on Thursday, July 20, Crosstown Arts Film Series presents John Waters’ Female Trouble, the film which introduced viewers to the immortal drag legend Divine.
We Need Your Help!The issue of public safety is at the forefront of the 2023 Memphis mayoral election. The Memphis Flyer and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism are partnering on a series of stories examining the state of public safety in our city, and we want to know what’s important to you. Follow this link to MLK50 to fill out a short survey letting us know what questions you have for the candidates. We’ll get the answers you need to make an informed decision in this election which will determine the future of Memphis.
(l to r) Sabrina Wu, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu, and Ashley Park
The road trip comedy is an ancient and hallowed form of trash cinema, encompassing everything from It Happened One Night to Bob Hope’s career to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Adele Lim knows a good road trip story when she sees one. Crazy Rich Asians, the film she wrote in 2018, was a light romp about Asian-American immigrants going back to discover their roots. That’s the same territory she explores with her directorial debut, Joy Ride — only this time, she explores it with exploding rectal cocaine balloons.
Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola) have been best friends since they met as primary-schoolers in their suburb, White Hills. True to the name, Audrey and Lolo are the only Asian kids in their school. Audrey is the adopted daughter of white parents, while Lolo’s parents own the local Chinese restaurant. The friends, who never miss an opportunity to turn a photo op into a flippy, are a perfect match. Audrey’s the overachiever brought out of her shell by Lolo’s free spirit, and in turn she keeps Lolo from diving off the deep end. Together, they terrorize White Hills until they leave for college and go their separate ways.
Lim and writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao set the plate for the adult hijinks to ensue with such verve, I would have watched an entire film of the adventures of Young Audrey and Lolo.
Flash forward to the present day, where Audrey is an overachieving associate at a white-shoe law firm who regularly bests her office of hard-charging white males on the squash court. Her boss Frank (Timothy Simons) taps her for a crucial trip to Beijing, where she will close big deal with Chao (Ronny Chieng), a Chinese tycoon. Lolo is living rent-free in Audrey’s garage while she pursues her art projects, which include an “adult playground” with vagina-shaped slides. Audrey takes Lolo along as her translator, warning that this is not a fun-filled girl’s trip, but a serious business venture. But Lolo has already invited her cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), a nonbinary Gen Z K-pop stan.
In Beijing, Audrey meets up with her college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu), a successful actress on the set of her TV show The Emperor’s Daughter. Lolo, as Audrey’s childhood best friend, is instantly jealous of her college best friend. When the fast friends learn that Audrey is meeting Chao in a swanky nightclub, they tag along. Audrey first struggles to keep Chao on task, and then struggles to not vomit from the Thousand Year Old Egg shots. When she loses that struggle, the only way to salvage the deal is to accept Chao’s invitation to his mother’s birthday party. He insists she bring her birth mother, whom Audrey has never met. The gang sets out on a high-speed train trip through “real China” to find Audrey’s parentage, which results in one raunchy comedic misunderstanding after another.
Joy Ride is the kind of post-Animal House comedy Hollywood used to mass-produce, with a difference. Lim’s directorial style is an unapologetically female gaze — this film is filled with good-looking men with their shirts off. She’s at her best when playing in the Bridesmaids mode of women finding freedom through over-the-top raunch, such as when our heroes disable a basketball team with a night of cocaine-crazed sex, or the Cardi B-inspired musical number that results when the gang is forced to impersonate a K-pop band. The only reason it doesn’t fall into a pit of sentimentality when the search for Audrey’s mom gets serious is that the excellent ensemble cast steps up to sell it. It’s that camaraderie that makes Joy Ride worth it.
Bluff City indie rockers Daykisser have a new EP called “Dunes.” Produced by Calvin Lauber at Memphis Magnetic Recording, the new songs refine the band’s sound into a shimmery sheen of guitars and Jesse Wilcox’s vocals.
Blake Heimbach directed the music video for “Everything” in a spare style. “Stylistically, I knew I wanted a black-and-white color grade and room lighting that would complement the big choruses,” says Wilcox.
In the room full of lights with Daykisser is Brian Andrews, a professor of architecture at the University of Memphis. We see glimpses of Andrews’ visual impressions of the song, until he finally presents a finished sketch to the band. If your Monday is getting you down, Daykisser will help you soar.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Patrick Wilson directs and stars in Insidious: The Red Door.
Summer movie season is in full swing this second weekend in July.
The highest profile release is Insidious: The Red Door. The Blumhouse horror dynasty made their bones with Paranormal Activity and the first film in the Insidious series. For this one, star Patrick Wilson, who plays long-suffering paterfamilias Josh Lambert, takes the director’s chair. Rose Byrne returns as Renai, who somehow hasn’t had a major breakdown after a decade of jump scares. Their son Dalton (Ty Simpkins, all grown up) isn’t so lucky. As he’s trying to work through his trauma, the spirits who bedevil the family return. This one’s low-budget and high-impact, just like I like ’em.
Four Asian-American women on a “work trip” to China decide to cut loose in Joy Ride. The directorial debut of Crazy Rich Asians writer Adele Lim stars Emily in Paris’ Ashley Park and Stephanie Hsu of Everything Everywhere All At Once fame. This one’s giving off serious Bridesmaids vibes.
Remember Bio-Dome, the Pauly Shore comedy vehicle from the 1990s? Or Spaceship Earth, the 2020 documentary about the extremely weird history of Biosphere, the experimental environment simulator facility in the Arizona Desert which was the inspiration for Bio-Dome? Well, this isn’t either one of those. Biosphere is, instead, a film by indie legend Mark Duplass and director Mel Eslyn, starring Sterling K. Brown and Duplass as two guys trying to ride out the end of civilization. Will the laughs get bigger as the oxygen runs out?
On Sunday at 4 p.m., Fathom Events’ Hayao Miyazaki retrospective continues with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The 1984 film, set on a future Earth ravaged by environmental degradation, was way ahead of its time and represented the beginning of Miyazaki’s most creative period. The trailer, which is very 1984, is just a taste of the wild visuals in store.
On Thursday, July 13, The Marriage of Maria Braun pops up at Crosstown Theatre. Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s postwar trilogy began in 1979 with this box office hit, which examined the ennui of German life in the 1950s. It’s now considered a classic of European cinema.
The film that has had the most lasting influence on action cinema is Buster Keaton’s 1926 masterpiece The General. Inspired by an actual Civil War train chase across Tennessee and Georgia, The General contains some of the most incredible stunts ever performed for film — all of them done by Keaton himself.
There’s a straight line between The General and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the 1981 Steven Spielberg/George Lucas collaboration that perfected the kinetic filmmaking style the two friends had been groping towards with Star Wars, Jaws, and 1941. Their not-so-secret weapon was Harrison Ford, who didn’t quite do all of his own stunts like Keaton, but who still did a lot more stuff than Lucasfilm’s insurers were comfortable with.
When Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, the rights to Indiana Jones came with it, and soon after the House of Mouse pointed out that Spielberg, Lucas, and Ford had signed a five-film deal in 1979. That meant that even after the classic 80s run of Raiders, Temple of Doom, and The Last Crusade, and 2008’s much-maligned Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, they were owed one more. Thus was born Indiana Jones and the Contractual Obligation, aka Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Spielberg and Lucas fulfilled their contractual obligations by executive producing this go-round, handing off directorial duties to James Mangold, and a script cobbled together from years of false starts.
But without Ford, there’s no Indy. Any doubts that the 80-year-old Ford could still wear the fedora are quickly dispelled in The Dial of Destiny. When the action opens, Ford gets ILM’s patented de-aging treatment. It’s 1945, and the Third Reich is falling. Indy and his Oxford archeologist colleague Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) try to sneak into a German castle where Nazis are hoarding looted treasures. They’re looking for the Lance of Longious, the Roman spear that pierced Christ’s side, but in the ensuing fracas, Indy half-accidentally comes into possession of the Antikythera, half of a mysterious clockwork artifact from ancient Greece allegedly created by Archimedes.
Mangold’s assignment is to imitate the master, and the opening chase sequence, which pays homage to The General, is prime Spielbergian thrill-ride cinema. Then we flash forward to 1969, where a depressed, aging Indy is just trying to get some peace and quiet in his Brooklyn apartment. The script gets the old man jokes out of the way early, when Indy takes a baseball bat to hush up the hippies downstairs, who were blasting “Magical Mystery Tour” way too loud. The hippies are in a celebratory mood, because it’s the day of the ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts. It’s also retirement day for Indy, who has fallen from Princeton to a tiny liberal arts college. I guess it’s hard to get tenure when you’re a globe-trotting adventurer. His son with Marion, Mutt, has died in Vietnam, and the couple have split, leaving Indy with memories and whiskey.
Ford, who has phoned in performances in his time, comes alive in a scene where Indy tries to teach his class of bored, stoned co-eds about Archimedes. One student who is listening is Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who reveals herself to Indy as the daughter of Basil, and his goddaughter. Helena is in the family business, but her brand of archeology is closer to Indy’s mercenary Temple of Doom approach than the guy who exclaimed “It belongs in a museum!” She wants to know what happened to the Antikythera all those years ago. Also interested in the subject is Jurgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a former Nazi turned NASA rocket scientist, who believes the Antikythera holds the key to time travel. Indy’s retirement is upended by a three-way chase through the streets and subways of New York, as the ticker-tape parade is in progress.
Mangold takes a lot of big swings, and most of them connect. Waller-Bridge proves a much better foil for Ford than Shia LaBeouf was in Crystal Skull. There are some great sentimental cameos, but they’re handled deftly enough that it doesn’t become a nonstop nostalgia party.
Best of all is Ford, who doesn’t treat this as a victory lap. His joints are stiffer, but when he says he’s been shot nine times, you believe him. It’s a great joy to see anti-fascist icon Indiana Jones still out there punching Nazis. We need him now more than ever.
There’s a heck of a lot going on with the many oddballs in Wes Anderson’s new film, Asteroid City.
This morning, as I was scrolling Twitter over coffee, I saw a user complaining about the avalanche of Wes Anderson parody TikToks. They posted the “Reading of the Will” scene from The Grand Budapest Hotel to prove that none of Anderson’s legion of sarcastic imitators could touch the genuine hilarity of Ralph Fiennes deadpanning, “I sleep with all of my close friends,” or the flurry of punches that ends with an iris-in on a snarling Willem Dafoe. I was low-key shocked at how many Twitter users responded with variations on “OMG, is this from a real movie?”
Anderson is now in that weird space of being famous for being famous. His distinctive style, which first came together in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, has been around long enough to be ripe for parody. Apparently, some clout chasers didn’t know what, exactly, they were laughing at. It was encouraging to see a couple of those responders chime in later to say they had sought out The Grand Budapest Hotel and found it hilarious and touching. You can imitate the surface with flat performance and fussed-over mise-en-scène, but the qualities that make Anderson one of our greatest living filmmakers are more elusive. His secret sauce remains secret — perhaps even from the artist himself.
Asteroid City is the follow-up to The French Dispatch, which is not just a career peak for Anderson, but in the running for the greatest film of the 2020s. (It’s early, I know.) So it carries a very heavy burden of expectations. Normally, this is the point of the review where I say something like, “It’s the story of blah blah, who must yadda yadda to avoid an oopsie.” But I’m not sure whose story Asteroid City is. Is it Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), the war photographer on a road trip to the 1955 Junior Stargazer Convention who must decide when to tell his kids their mother died three weeks ago? Is it Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), the closeted gay playwright whose latest play, Asteroid City, is an examination of grief and hope in a Nevada desert scarred by craters from atomic bomb tests? Or is it Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), the director so obsessed with his production of Asteroid City that he sleeps in the theater? Or maybe it’s all of their stories, as told by Bryan Cranston, the host of a Playhouse 90-style anthology TV series that is staging a broadcast version of the play.
The basic plot of Asteroid City (the play) is “a stranger comes to town.” The stranger is an alien (seen twice as stop motion animation, and once as Jeff Goldblum’s cameo), and perhaps the story is really about the sprawling cast’s reaction to its arrival. General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) reacts by imposing a quarantine on the Junior Stargazer Convention. Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) just wants to study the alien. Augie, at his lowest point in life, discovers romance in the person of Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a famous actress who likes to practice her nude scenes in front of her cabin window.
As you can see, there’s a lot going on. Each of the pieces of this sprawling puzzle works in their own way. Wright is Anderson’s new favorite monologist, and he delivers brilliantly. Schwartzman, Anderson’s longtime foil, pulls off a bewilderingly complex triple role as Augie, the actor who plays him, and Conrad Earp’s memory of his lost lover. Johansson, who has always had deeper chops than most of her roles require, lays on the affected mid-Atlantic accent of a spoiled, bored movie star reawakening her passions. Anderson goes from wide-screen to 4:3, and from a desaturated postcard color palette to stark black and white, fluidly and naturally. Practically every shot is perfectly composed joy unto itself.
The problem is, the parts don’t play well with one another. Cranston’s TV show, ostensibly the “top” layer of reality, adds too much metatextual complexity. The huge cast is fun, but it also means we don’t get to spend enough time with some of them.
Anderson superfans like me will have a grand time with Asteroid City, and hopefully, it will open up upon rewatch. But more casual viewers might end up lost in the director’s swirling cosmos.
“I do like a certain looseness of things in music, that feeling that things could fall apart,” says David Collins, guitarist and chief instigator of Frog Squad. “And that’s something I see in Memphis music a lot. It makes it feel more genuine.”
Frog Squad’s new album Special Noise features a murderer’s row of Memphis jazz talent, including bassist Khari Wynn, drummer John Harrison, percussionist Hector Diaz, sax mistress Hope Clayburn, tenor sax Franko Coleman, woodwind swinger Chad Fowler, baritone sax Aaron Phillips, and keyboardist Cedric Taylor.
In contrast with Frog Squad’s last outing, which meticulously adapted pieces by French Impressionist composer Eric Satie, Special Noise travels toward the ’70s fusion experiments of Herbie Hancock and Sun Ra. “Everything’s better when you have multiple people putting their input on it,” says Collins. “I can just bring in a rough sketch, and people play stuff over it I would never think of. It sounds cool that way and it brings things out of me that I wouldn’t play otherwise.”
The video for “The Inescapable Truth of the Void/Water Snakes” features majorly glitched out images of the band performing. Take a few minutes to bliss out with the Squad.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new project Asteroid City lands this weekend. The film is a star-studded trip to Arizona desert in 1955, where the Junior Stargazers Convention is gathering for a wholesome weekend. But this cozy scene is shattered when an actual alien arrives in a for-real spaceship. Is the alien good or bad? Will the play based on the low-key alien invasion make it to opening night? Frequent Anderson collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum are joined by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.
Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen in No Hard Feelings as Maddie, an Uber driver whose luck has run out. To stave off bankruptcy, she takes a Craigslist job as a surrogate girlfriend for introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). This sex comedy for people who hate sex and also comedy co-stars Matthew Broderick and Natalie Morales.
Speaking of alien invasions, the Time Warp Drive-In for June has three of them. First up on Saturday night June 24 throws Tom Cruise into a time loop. Edge of Tomorrow was a minor hit on release in 2014, and gained cult status since then—despite a late-game name change to Live, Die, Repeat. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star as soldiers fighting alien Mimics, whose time bomb is literal.
The kind of robotic mech suits the soldiers use in Edge of Tomorrow are straight out of Starship Troopers, the Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1959 which pretty much invented the idea. In 1997, director Paul Verhoeven omitted the armored spacesuits when he adapted the novel, focusing instead on subtly lampooning the book’s rah-rah militarism. Most people didn’t get the joke, but Starship Troopers is now regarded as a classic. Would you like to know more?
The Blob is an all-time classic of 1950s sci-fi. The 1988 remake, which provides the third film of the Time Warp, is well known among horror fans as one of the best remakes ever. Check out Kevin Dillon’s magnificent mullet in this trailer.
Pixar’s latest animated feature Elemental explores love in a world of air, fire, water, and earth. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a fire elemental who strikes up an unlikely romance with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental. Can the two opposites reconcile, or will they vanish in a puff of steam? Longtime Pixar animator Peter Sohn based Elemental on his experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in New York City.
On Wednesday, June 28, Indie Memphis presents Lynch/Oz. Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s remarkable video essay explores the ways images and ideas from The Wizard of Oz shaped the radical cinema of David Lynch.
On Thursday, June 29, Paris Is Burning brings the vogue to Crosstown Theater. Director Jeanne Livingston spent seven years filming the Harlem Drag Ball culture, where competing houses competed for drag supremacy. Paris is Burning is a landmark in LBGTQ film, and one of the greatest documentaries of the last 50 years.
If you see two animals with similar body plans — like say, a human and an ape — the theory of evolution suggests they both descended from a common ancestor which died out long ago. Unless, that is, they’re crabs. At least five separate lineages of sea life have adopted the basic crab form independently of each other. Apparently, if you live on the bottom of the ocean, a big, flat shell with multiple legs and pincers is the best design strategy. There’s even a name for this type of convergent evolution: carcinization.
Just as Darwinian evolution tends toward crabs, big-budget Hollywood films tend toward Batman. There’s even a name for this type of convergent evolution: Batmanization.
Take, for example, the most recent movie about Batman, The Flash. Now, you might be thinking, “Hey, The Flash is not about Batman. It’s about The Flash.” But that’s just you showing your superhero ignorance. I, an enlightened comic-book-movie-watching guy, understand that all films must be about Batman because the story of Batman is the perfect form toward which all films have been evolving since Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman.
The Flash represents the ultimate stage of Batmanization: Michael Keaton plays Batman again. I realize I may come across as a tad cynical when I write about Batman movies, but I am not made of stone. Michael Keaton stepping away from the role of Batman after Batman Returns was such a titanic psychosocial event that when Michael Keaton made a movie about it, Birdman, it won Best Picture. Take that, Wes Anderson!
In The Flash, it is revealed that Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) became The Flash because he lost his parents at a young age. Then, at a slightly older age, he was struck by lightning while being doused with chemicals, granting him the power of super-speed, which enables him to do things like save an entire neonatal ward full of babies while also microwaving a burrito.
Like Batman, he’s tortured by losing his parents. So when he accidentally discovers he can travel backwards in time by running faster than the speed of light, his first instinct is to go back to keep his mother from being killed by an unknown criminal, and his father from being convicted for the crime. Despite dire warnings against tampering with the timeline from his universe’s Batman (Ben Affleck), Barry does it anyway. But when he tries to return to his present, he is thwarted by a mysterious figure and ends up in a parallel timeline where his parents are still alive, but where young Barry Allen (also Ezra Miller) hasn’t become Flash yet. Also, there’s no Superman, so when General Zod (Michael Shannon) shows up like he did in Man of Steel, there’s no one to stop him. Flash discovers that a Batman (Michael Keaton) used to exist in this timeline, but he’s retired because he solved all the crime. Together, they try to track down Clark Kent, only to discover that Supergirl (Sasha Calle) made it to Earth instead. Can Old Awesome Batman save the planet with the assistance of The Flash and Supergirl and also The Flash?
If, unlike me, you are a cynic, you might point out that, from Warner Brothers’/DC’s point of view, it’s a good thing they backed up the money truck to Michael Keaton’s retirement villa because star Ezra Miller has recently been outed as a Messianic psychopath who was kidnapping children to build a Mansonoid cult in Vermont. Even worse, since this is a time travel/multiverse story, there’s usually two of him on screen at any given time.
And that’s why it’s good that The Flash didn’t do Flash stuff like fighting his arch enemy, the super-intelligent alien apeman Gorilla Grodd, but instead went on a time quest for Batman. Otherwise, we’d just be sitting in a theater staring into Ezra Miller’s cold, desperate eyes for 144 minutes, wondering how a creep like that was ever cast as a superhero in a $200 million movie.
