This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, we talk about the Indie Memphis Film Festival with Film/TV Editor Chris McCoy. We bring you interviews with Indie Memphis executive director Kimel Fryer, plus Hometowner directors Anwar Jamison (Funeral Arrangements), Thandi Cai (Bluff City Chinese), Michael Blevins (Marc Gasol: Memphis Made), Jaron Lockridge (Cubic Zirconia), John Rash (Our Movement Starts Here), and Jasmine Blue (Big Time). As if that’s not enough, we also get the skinny latte on the Grind City Coffee Xpo from Daniel Lynn.
The mission of the Indie Memphis Film Festival is to bring films to the Bluff City which we could not see otherwise. Some Indie Memphis films return to the big screen the next year, like American Fiction, which screened at last year’s festival and went on to win an Academy Award for writer/director Cord Jefferson. For the last 27 years, it has been an invaluable resource for both beginning and established filmmakers in the Mid-South. Early on, the festival launched the career of Memphis-based director Craig Brewer, whose recent limited series Fight Nightwas a huge hit for the Peacock streaming service. Many others have followed.
This year’s festival brings changes from the norm. First of all, it takes place later than usual, with the opening night film, It Was All a Dream, bowing on Thursday, November 14th, and running through Sunday, November 17th. There will be encore presentations at Malco’s Paradiso on Monday, November 18th, and Tuesday, November 19th. “We are having encores because our biggest complaint is that we have too many films back to back that people want to see. So that was a direct response to our audience,” says Kimel Fryer, executive director of Indie Memphis.
Opening night film It Was All a Dream is a documentary by dream hampton, a longtime music writer and filmmaker (who prefers the lowercase) from Detroit, Michigan. Her 2019 film Surviving R. Kelly earned a Peabody Award and was one of the biggest hits in Netflix history.
“I’m really excited to see how everyone thinks of our opening night film,” says Fryer.
It Was All a Dream is a memoir, of sorts, collecting hampton’s experiences covering the golden era of the hip-hop world in the 1990s. “I really enjoyed watching it, especially seeing footage of Biggie Smalls, Prodigy from Mobb Deep, Method Man, and even Snoop Dogg before they became icons. They’re just hungry artists. Even Q-Tip is in it, and the other night, Q-tip was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. So I was thinking about that as I was watching the awards. He was such a baby in this field, he had no clue 20, 30 years from now he was going to be on this stage,” says Fryer.
The festival is moving in space as well as time. While the festival will return to its longtime venue Malco Studio on the Square, there will be no screenings at Playhouse on the Square this year. The 400-seat Crosstown Theater will screen the opening night film and continue screenings throughout the long weekend. On Saturday at 11 a.m., it will also be the home of the Youth Film Fest. “This is the first year we’re combining the Youth Film Fest with the annual festival,” says Fryer. “That’s really cool, being able to allow the youth filmmakers to still have their own dedicated time, but also to be able to interact and see other films that are outside of their festival. We do have some films that are a little bit more family-friendly than what we have had in the past.”
Flow
Among those family-friendly films are a great crop of animated features, including Flow by Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis. Flow is a near wordless adventure that follows a cat and other animals as they try to escape a catastrophic flood in a leaky boat. The film has garnered wide acclaim in Europe after debuting at the Cannes Film Festival, and will represent Latvia in the International category at the Academy Awards.
“I thought it was interesting because, of course, when Kayla Myers, our director of programming, selected these films, we had no idea some of the more recent impacts from the hurricanes and things of that nature would happen,” says Fryer.
Boys Go to Jupiter
Julian Glander’s Boys Go to Jupiter is a coming-of-age story about Billy 5000, a teenager in Florida who finds himself tasked with caring for an egg from outer space. First-time director Glander is a veteran animator who did the vast majority of the work on the film himself. The Pittsburgh-based auteur told Cartoon Brew that he and executive producer Peisin Yang Lazo “… did the jobs of 100 people. I have no complaints — it’s been a lot of work, but it feels really good to make a movie independently, to not have meetings about everything and really own every creative decision.”
Memoir of a Snail
The festival’s third animated film, Memoir of a Snailby Australian animator Adam Elliot, is the story of Grace (Sarah Snook), a young woman who escapes the tedium of her life in 1970s Melbourne by collecting snails. When her father dies, she is separated from her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and put into an abusive foster home. We follow Grace as she navigates a difficult life, full of twists and turns, with only her snails as a constant comfort. “Memoir of a Snail is an adult animated film,” says Fryer. “Bring the kids at your own risk.”
The spirit of independence is what puts the “indie” in Indie Memphis. The festival has always been devoted to unique visions which question the status quo. Nickel Boys, the centerpiece film which will screen on Sunday night at Crosstown Theater, is by director RaMell Ross. “I’m really excited about that film,” says Fryer. “But also, it uses film as a critique. It’s based on the novel from Colson Whitehead that won a Pulitzer Prize.”
Nickel Boys takes place in 1960s Florida, where a Black teenager, Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp), is committed to a reform school after being falsely accused of attempted car theft. There, he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the two become fast friends. The film is shot by Jomo Fray, who was the cinematographer behind All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, which opened last year’s Indie Memphis festival. It is highly unusual for its first-person perspective, which shifts back and forth between the two protagonists, so that you are put in the perspective of the characters, who are battling to keep their humanity in a deeply inhumane environment.
Fryer says bringing radical artistic works like these to Mid-South audiences is central to the organization’s mission. “I think that’s honestly one reason why people like Indie Memphis. Don’t get me wrong, people do like to see the very well-known films, the more commercial films, the ones that get a lot of press. But I think the people who enjoy coming to Indie Memphis also enjoy seeing things outside of the box, seeing things that push the narrative. And it makes sense when you think about Memphis. Memphis is never going to be this cookie-cutter place, and people who live here love it because it’s not.”
Funeral Arrangements
This year’s festival has a strong local focus, with seven features in the Hometowner category. One of the locals is a 15th anniversary screening of Funeral Arrangements by Anwar Jamison. The writer/director is low-key one of the most successful Memphis filmmakers from recent years, having produced, directed, and starred in Coming to Africa and its sequel, which were both big hits in Ghana and other African countries. Funeral Arrangements was his debut feature.
Funeral Arrangements Anwar Jamison
“Man, talk about a passion project,” Jamison says. “I just think back to being in film school in the graduate program at the University of Memphis, and now, it’s a full-circle moment because I’m teaching at the University of Memphis, and I have grad students and I’m working on these projects. I look back like, ‘Wow! That was me!’ And now I understand why my professors were telling me no, and that I was crazy to try to do a feature film for my final project, when I only needed 15 minutes. But I’m like, ‘No, I have this script!’ We had a bunch of young, hungry crew members. No one had done a feature, whether it was the crew or the actors. We had a lot of theater students in it, and everybody was just like, ‘Wow, this would be cool!’ They all saw my vision. I had the script, being that I come from a writing background, and everybody really jumped on board to make it happen. I feel like it was the perfect storm of young creativity and energy, and it really showed in the final product. I’m proud of it!”
The idea for the film began with an incident at work. “Most of the things I’ve written start out as something that happened in real life, and then I take it and fictionalize it,” Jamison says. “It was based on an experience I had working a job that really was like that. I couldn’t be absent again, so I really lied to the supervisor and told him I had to go to a funeral. And he really said, ‘Bring me the death notice or the obituary.’ In real life, I didn’t do it, and he didn’t bother me. I ended up keeping my job. But as a writer, in my mind it was like, ‘Whoa, that would be funny. What if the guy really went to a funeral, and now he gets caught up in a situation?’ It just came from there.”
It was this idea that got Jamison’s talent noticed. “When I was an undergrad, actually in the very first screenwriting class that I took, my professor called the morning after we had the final project, which was to write the first act of a feature film. I’m like, ‘Why is this professor calling me?’ And she was like, ‘I really enjoyed the script. Could we use it as the example in class to read for the others?’ That let me know I was onto something.”
Jamison says he’s ready to celebrate the past and looking forward to the future. “I have the third Coming to Africa that I’m preparing for, and I hope to do in 2025, if all goes well, and wrap that up as a trilogy. But what I found, once you get there, there’s just so many stories that connect the diaspora and Ghana in so many ways. There’s so many natural stories to tell that I would love to keep telling them.”
Bluff City Chinese
“I actually got into filmmaking through fashion,” says Thandi Cai. “I was working in textile art for a while, and I was making a lot of costumes. A lot of the things that I was making didn’t really make sense in our reality right now, so I was starting to build stories around the costumes I was making. Then I wanted to create films out of those costumes and realized, ‘Oh, this is a potential career that I could follow!’ So then I started doing videography commercially, in addition to all these little small fashion films on the side. Film and video started becoming more of my storytelling practice, and a tool of how I could explain and share what I was learning with the world.”
Bluff City Chinese
They began work on their documentary feature debut Bluff City Chinese in 2020. “It originally started out as an oral history project. And because, like I said, I think film is such a powerful tool, I started recording oral histories visually. But then didn’t know what we were going to do with it.”
Several people suggested Cai apply for an Indie Grant. The Indie Memphis program, originated by Memphis filmmaker Mark Jones, awards two $15,000 grants each year, selected from dozens of applications by local filmmakers. Cai was awarded the grant in 2022. “I really didn’t have very high expectations of getting it, so I was just blown away and really grateful that we did.”
Indie Grants are nominally for short films, but Cai said their project grew to 45 minutes. “It was just a huge, huge help. I think it made a really big difference because prior to getting that money, the vision for the documentary was very DIY, really lo-fi. I was not expecting this to be a full-fledged film, really. It was like, let’s try to get these oral histories out there by whatever we need to do to get it out there. To be able to have that money to really just dive in and see how far we could take the actual production value was just enormous. And yeah, it’s much more beautiful than I ever thought we could make it, and I think that will just help us be able to share these stories with more people.”
Cai grew up in Memphis, but they say it wasn’t until later in their life that they were aware of the long legacy of Chinese immigrants who had made Memphis home. “That’s the crazy part! Growing up as a Chinese American in Memphis, I didn’t learn about any of this until 2020, and it was only because of all the things that were happening in the world, and especially to people who look like me. That’s why I’m pushing this film so hard because this isn’t something that a lot of us get to learn when we’re growing up. There haven’t been a lot of discussions or platforms that are sharing these stories. I consider a lot of the people that we talk about as my ancestors or my elders or my community members, but I didn’t meet a lot of them until very recently. I really hope that no matter how late someone is in their journey, that when they do find this connection to their roots, they feel like they can just jump in and embrace it.”
Marc Gasol: Memphis Made
Director Michael Blevins is the head of video post-production for the Memphis Grizzlies. “Basically, the way I describe it is anything that gets edited, it comes through me and my team,” he says. “So the intro video that gets played before the game, I will edit that, and commercial spots or behind-the-scenes stuff about the current team.”
Marc Gasol: Memphis Made
Before coming to Memphis in 2016, Blevins had previously been with the Chicago Bears, the Houston Astros (“I believe we had one of the worst records in baseball history,” he says), and the San Francisco 49ers. “Then I came here, and I overlapped with the subject of the documentary, Marc Gasol, for his last three seasons in Memphis. So I got to know him and Mike Conley really well.”
Blevins normally works on a very quick turnaround, but the world of documentary films is quite different. It requires patience and flexibility. “In a project like this, the scope becomes bigger. In terms of production, in terms of lining up interviews, shooting, all that stuff, we were able to spend seven months on it. But in the same time, you then have 50 interviews. You got to tell an hour-and-a-half story basically. So a month or two to edit something in a vacuum sounds great compared to the usually quick turnaround of a current NBA team. But then you want to tell a story perfect because it is telling his whole story of his professional basketball career. So it’s not like with current content, when there’s always another game coming up. This is it. It’s a little dramatic, and he has a sense of humor, so we laugh about it. But it’s like writing somebody’s obituary. You’re not going to get another chance to do it. It’s their basketball career.”
It was important to Blevins to go beyond the surface image of the star basketball player and uncover the emotions that drove him. “Marc is a super competitive guy, and the big thing was, as the people that knew him say — and a lot of people didn’t realize this from the outside — is that competitiveness would spill over a lot of times in terms of trying to deal with teammates. That’s one of my favorite segments in the film. It’s like 20 minutes about different stories people were telling about Marc being very competitive and looking back at everything through a different lens of today. And I think he looks at it very differently, where he felt like he could have been better. But he knows in his head, and different players say it in the film, they needed him to be like that. If that was a spillover of him chewing him out during the game and then after the time-out was over, he was going to give it all and make a play on defense to save that guy, or make a play on offense to set that guy up. It was going to be worth it. But I think athletes, and all of us in general, as we get older, sometimes if you reach success or you’re happy with what your career has done, you start to look back and think, ‘What was the cost of that?’”
Cubic Zirconia
Jackson, Tennessee, native Jaron Lockridge’s Cubic Zirconia is the only locally produced narrative feature in a field of thoughtful documentaries. “I’ve been filmmaking now since about 2016, and just self-producing feature films, and going that route now that technology makes it easier. I just decided to jump out there and don’t take no for an answer.”
Cubic Zirconia Jaron Lockridge
Lockridge, who began as a writer, produces, directs, lights, shoots, and edits his films. “When I found quickly that I couldn’t afford to hire people to produce my work, I just became that multi-tool to start producing my own work, and getting to this point now.”
Cubic Zirconia takes place in what Lockridge calls The Stix Universe, which is tied into his self-produced web series. “It’s a good old-fashioned crime mystery, I like to say. It’s similar to something like Prisoners or maybe even a touch of Se7en, for people who like those type of movies. It follows a missing family, and these detectives are trying to find some answers to what happened. When they locate the deceased mother of this missing family, then it’s just an all-out blitz to find the children and figure out the ‘why’ behind it all. You’ve kind of got to pay attention. But when it comes to the end and you realize what’s happened, I believe it’ll be a shocker to a lot of the audience members.”
Keith L. Johnson stars as the police detective on the case. “I’ve worked with him several times before. He’s one of my regulars, so we just have a great chemistry together to the point where I can just give him a script and give him very little direction. He just understands my work.”
Memphians Kate Mobley and Kenon Walker are also veterans of the Stix Universe. Terry Giles is a newcomer. “He was one that I haven’t worked with before, and he was a very pleasant surprise. He only has a small time on the movie, but when you see him, you notice him. He commands the screen, and he’s a talent that I’m looking forward to working with again. I’m very excited about the performances in this movie.”
Passes and individual screening tickets are on sale at imff24.indiememphis.org. There, you can also find a full schedule for this weekend’s screenings and events.
Jeff Hulett’s new album Little Windows hits the streets this Friday, November 15. The singer/songwriter will celebrate with a record release party at The Cove, beginning at 8 p.m. MVM previously featured Hulett’s first video from the record, “Let Go Of The Let Down.” The second video is “Spinning Plates,” directed by Memphis ex-pat Chris Weary.
“It is about the rat race, and spinning your wheels to get ahead,” says Hulett. “Where does it end? When is enough, enough? ‘Spinning Plates’ is something we all do, but boy do I have many irons in the fire — many of which I need to and should shed. Many of my songs are notes to myself. Usually, advice I don’t follow.”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, political columnist Jackson Baker and Chris McCoy talk about the election and try to come to grips with what just happened. Check it out on YouTube.
Harper Steele and Will Ferrell started working on Saturday Night Live on the same day in 1995. They soon learned that their senses of humor were very compatible. Steele wrote many of the sketches that made Ferrell SNL’s standout star of the ’90s. Years in the SNL pressure cooker at 30 Rock built their camaraderie, and their friendship continued after 2002, when Ferrell left the show to pursue his movie career and Steele became the show’s head writer. They went on to collaborate on several films, including 2020’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.
During this time, Steele had a secret. She was constantly battling gender dysphoria. After going through a messy divorce in the mid-2010s, Steele started journaling about the persistent feelings. Then the pandemic hit and like many people during that time of turmoil, Steele came to the realization that when it was all over, something would have to change. In 2022, Steele started writing emails to her family and friends announcing that she would be transitioning. The new name she chose for herself was Harper, after novelist Harper Lee.
The revelation was less than shocking for many people who had known Steele for a long time. Soon after Ferrell received his email, while he was on the set of a movie, an idea was born. Steele was notorious among friends for going on long, meandering road trips, stopping at greasy spoons, roadside attractions, and small-town dive bars. Steele was fearless, but now as a trans woman, America looked quite different. The small towns Steele loved to visit aren’t exactly known as beacons of tolerance for transgender people. So the two friends decided to embark on an epic, 16-day, 3,000-mile cross-country road-trip from New York City to Los Angeles to introduce the newly transitioned Harper Steele to the country, with Will Ferrell along as moral support.
Production-wise, Will & Harper is a bare-bones affair. It’s just the two stars in a vintage Jeep Grand Wagoneer, followed by a production van captained by director Josh Greenbaum. Originally, the idea was to do comedy sketches at various points along the way, but that plan was pretty much instantly abandoned. Instead, the two friends just have deep conversations in the car and visit the kinds of places they had gone to many times before while going amok in America. Along the way, they cover topics that are familiar to anyone who has ever had a friend come out as trans. Ferrell asks questions about what it’s like to suddenly have boobs (it’s awesome, according to Steele) and whether she’s going to date men or women (at age 61, Steele is ambivalent about it).
Greenbaum’s direction is clean, focused, and often subtle, picking up on little moments like the time when the two friends are chilling with some cheap beer in a West Virginia Walmart parking lot, and a passerby yells, “Will! You’re still the man!”
“And she’s the woman!” Ferrell yells back.
Surprisingly, the pair encounter very little overt transphobia in real life, even when Steele goes alone into an Oklahoma dive bar with “Fuck Biden” signs on the wall. They go to an Indiana Pacers game, where they sit courtside and meet Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb. He is friendly, as a politician normally is, but later they learn that he has signed a bill banning gender-affirming treatment for minors. In Peoria, Illinois, they meet a trans woman named Dana, who has lived openly in the small town for years and recounts a mixture of acceptance and fear among her neighbors. In Steele’s Iowa hometown, they visit her sister, who was immediately accepting, and Steele rides a unicycle while wearing heels. But their luck runs out in Amarillo, Texas, where they stop at the Big Texan steakhouse. As they eat their meal, the patrons crowd around and take pictures with their phones. Later, Steele reads off a litany of hateful online comments the pics generated.
And that, to me, is one of the lessons of Will & Harper. Social media makes it easy to hate. It transforms flesh and blood people into images and archetypes. It makes dehumanization into a sport and reduces identity to demographic categories to be pitted against each other. This increases platform engagement at the cost of our sanity. Of course, transphobia has always existed in real life, but it’s harder to hate someone in person. That’s why this election season, with its constant background of transphobia designed to activate Republican voters, has been so awful and dispiriting. Will & Harper is a great documentary that proves the way to defeat hate is through courage, love, and a liberal dose of laughs.
General Labor just released their second album, The Airtight Garage. Thomas Corbin says the album was recorded in 2023, when General Labor was still a four-piece band. It’s available on a double cassette with the techno punk band’s first album Galaxy Motors from Memphis cassette label Machine Duplication Recordings.
“From petty beef and LSD-fueled baseball to presidential elections and the end of the world, this album spans the emotional gamut,” says Corbin. “The opening track ‘Calculator’ seems the most innocuous, but it actually serves as a sort of surrealist mission statement for the band. The simple chorus, “I don’t trust your calculator,” aggressively screamed over stabbing synths and squealing, affected guitars is a pretty direct encapsulation of the band’s love/hate relationship with technology, using complicated gear to express our technophobia.”
The band’s split personality finds expression in the “Calculator” music video. “When Nia Rincon revealed that she had been working on a fully AI music video for ‘Calculator’ that exemplified our tech-paranoia, we were super excited to see what her artistic vision would be. The uncomfortable, uncanny valley horror that comes with AI generated video proved really effective in getting our point across, and adds to the contradictory nature of the band by using the most current software available to express our trepidation for that very type of technological advancement.”
Here is the world premiere of “Calculator”!
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Louise Page’s music video “Green Ribbon” will be screening at the Porretta Film Festival in Bologna, Italy. (Photo: Courtesy Oddly Buoyant Productions)
Six Memphis filmmakers will have their work screened at the 23rd annual Porretta Film Festival just outside of Bologna, Italy, in December. Thanks to a grant from the Dr. O’Farrell Shoemaker Foundation, the Memphis & Shelby County Film and Television Commission partnered with festival director Luca Elmi to select six short films by Memphis directors to screen at the Festival del Cinema di Porretta Terme.
The short films were selected from more than 25 entries by the film faculty of LeMoyne-Owen College and the University of Memphis. They are “What Were You Meant For?” by Kevin Brooks, “The Devil Will Run” by Noah Glenn, “What Life Is” by Brandon Russell, “Loveshake” by Caleb Suggs, “Soul Man” by Kyle Taubken, and Louise Page’s “Green Ribbon” music video by Laura Jean Hocking. “Soul Man” and “The Devil Will Run” both won Best Hometowner Short Film awards at the Indie Memphis Film Festival.
Film Commission board chair Gail Jones Carson and vice-chair Alicia George will travel to Italy to represent Memphis. Porretta Terme is situated in Italy’s picturesque Tuscan region and has been famous since antiquity for its hot springs. The town also hosts a long-running, soul music festival, which has hosted many Memphis music luminaries over the years. The film festival will take place December 7 through 15, 2024.
(left to right) Bob Roy, Barbara Roy, Emily Guenther, and Stephen Guenther (Photos: Toby Sells)
This week’s cover story by Toby Sells is about Historic Haunts Memphis. We followed the Bluff City paranormal investigators as they explored Memphis’ haunted juke joint Earnestine & Hazel’s, and tried to contact the many spirits who supposedly reside there. On the Memphis Flyer YouTube channel, we’ve got video of the spooky expedition. Happy Halloween!
In the sixth and final season, the vampires of What We Do in the Shadows suddenly remember to awaken their forgotten roommate Jerry.
Happy Halloween, everyone! With the looming presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and fascist degenerate Donald Trump on everyone’s mind, this spooky season has been scarier than normal, but not in a good way. As we rush toward the inevitable day of judgement, I trust Memphis Flyer readers to do the right thing next Tuesday, so that one day soon, we will never have to look at that evil orange clown again.
Since real life is pretty frightening, you can flee to TV for horror that’s a lot more funny than it is scary. I’m talking about What We Do in the Shadows, which debuted its sixth and final season this month on FX and Hulu.
What We Do in the Shadows began life 10 years ago as a movie directed by Flight of the Conchords co-creator Jemaine Clement and Thor: Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi. Originally set in a normie suburb of Wellington, New Zealand, the film made great use of the mockumentary format. Many contemporary reviewers compared it to The Office with vampires, but it had more in common with the seminal 1992 mockumentary Man Bites Dog. In that film, which is rarely seen these days, a Belgian documentary film crew follows a psychopathic serial killer named Ben as he goes about his grisly business. His avuncular, sometimes goofy nature is contrasted with the brutality of his murders, and the film crew slowly moves from detached objectivity to complicity. The vampires in What We Do in the Shadows are also stone-cold killers, but they’re stone-cold because they’re undead monsters. The original film was a reaction to the ridiculously popular Twilight series, which took the “forbidden monstrous passion” subtext inherent in vampire stories since Bram Stoker, and made it the whole of the text.
Now, with Twilight fading in memory, What We Do in the Shadows has flourished. The TV series, which premiered in 2019, moved the setting from New Zealand to Staten Island, New York, where four vampires live together in a crumbling Victorian haunted house. There’s Nandor the Relentless, a 760 year-old former Ottoman warlord, played by Kayvan Novak. Nadja of Antipaxos (Natasia Demetriou) is a 500-year-old Greek Romani sorceress who, last season, briefly became a nightclub manager. Laszlo Cravensworth, played by the imitable Matt Berry, is a 310-year-old British noble who was turned by, and later married, Nadja.
Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) is the youngest of the coven, at 100. He is an “energy vampire” who feeds by boring his victims to death with long soliloquies about nothing. The only non-vamp in the mix is Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), who is Nandor’s familiar. But rather than a sniveling Igor type, mindlessly in thrall to his vampiric master, Guillermo is organized, thoughtful, and keeps the household running. He desperately wants to become a vampire himself, and in the fifth season it seemed he would get his wish. But he’s also a descendant of Van Helsing, Dracula’s arch enemy, so that complicates matters.
The main cast has been joined by a bevy of guest stars over the years, including the great Kristen Schaal as The Guide, a representative of the Vampiric Council who, a century ago, assigned the vampiric roomies to bring North America under the thrall of The Baron (Doug Jones), an ancient vampire lord. Needless to say, they haven’t made much progress towards that goal.
That’s where Season 6 kicks off. In the first of three episodes aired as the season premiere, the roomies suddenly remember to awaken their forgotten roommate Jerry, played by former SNLer Mike O’Brien. Jerry is a basic vampire who entered “super slumber” in 1976, leaving instructions that he be awakened in 1996. But Nandor and the crew got busy and kinda forgot. Jerry’s return serves as a wake-up call to our vamps. He’s baffled with the lack of progress at conquering the New World, and chalks it up to decadence. The Guide agrees and anoints Jerry as The Chosen One who will lead vampires to world domination. This leads the vamps to reconsider their comfortable, laid-back lives. But not too closely.
In the second episode, “Headhunting,” our vamps try to refocus themselves on their personal goals, which don’t really have anything to do with conquest. Laszlo returns to his scientific pursuits. He wants to reanimate dead tissue, like Dr. Frankenstein, and with the help of Colin and some gruesome slapstick, he pretty much succeeds. Meanwhile, in a subtle nod to The Office, Guillermo gets a job with another group of vampires, a private equity firm run by Jordan (Tim Heidecker). Nadja and Nandor, fearing their familiar’s betrayal, also infiltrate the firm to keep an eye on things.
The third episode, “Sleep Hypnosis,” is the funniest. Guillermo has moved out of the house and into the garden shed, to get a little much-needed independence from the vamps. This causes a power struggle in the house, as all four roomies want the space for themselves. When Colin complains to Guillermo that he can’t use his vampiric hypnosis on another vampire, the familiar recommends trying it when they’re asleep. It works, and as the idea spreads among the vamps, they take turns hypnotizing each other, with increasingly hilarious results.
So far, the final season has allowed the actors to stretch out and expand their characters. When Colin hypnotizes Nandor, Novak gets to do his dead-on Richard Nixon impersonation. Watching Guillermo interact with his new employer reveals that, for him, at least, the show has been a workplace comedy all along. So far, the final season shows every sign of What We Do in the Shadows going out while they’re at the top of their game. Unlike a certain monstrous presidential candidate, we’re going to miss these vampires when they’re gone.
What We Do in the Shadows Season 6 is now playing on FX and Hulu.
You might remember singer/songwriter Ted Horrell from his former band, The Central Standards, who won the Rock 103 Best Unsigned Band contest a few years back. Now, Horrell’s latest band, featuring David Twombly on drums, Eric Gentry on guitar, Casey Smith on bass, Dallas Pope on drums, and vocals from Natalie Duncan and Amy Gunnell, will celebrate the release of their album Mid-South Fare this Saturday, November 2 at Growlers. They call the band The Monday Night Card — which, not coincidentally, is the name of their first single.
Wrestling is a Memphis institution, and for decades, matches were broadcast from the Mid-South Coliseum. Big names and future superstars, from Jerry Lawler to Andy Kaufman to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, entered the squared circle on Memphis TV. The video for “The Monday Night Card” gives you a glimpse of the action in a montage directed by Ted’s brother Wilson Horrell.
If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
