Chris McCoy talks with Kip Uhlhorn and Alex Greene of Cloudland Canyon about their new live score to the short films of Stan Brakhage. Plus, Spring Arts Guide and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.
Author: Chris McCoy
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Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Last weekend’s Academy Awards ceremony saw many firsts. Sean Baker became the first person to win four Oscars for a single film, taking home Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Screenplay (previous record holder: Walt Disney). Best Supporting Actress Zoe Saldana became the first Dominican-American to win an Oscar. Paul Tazewell’s work on Wicked made him the first Black man to win Best Costume Design. Best Animated Feature Flow became the first movie from Latvia to win an Academy Award. In the documentary category, No Other Land’s co-director Basel Adra became the first Palestinian filmmaker to win an Oscar. The film has another, more dubious distinction: It is the first feature in recent memory to win without securing a distribution deal in the United States.
The fact that no distributor would touch a documentary co-directed by a Jewish Israeli (journalist Yuval Abraham) and a Palestinian which calls for peaceful coexistence between the two peoples is a shocking state of affairs, one that hopefully an Oscar statuette will soon change. But our information environment has always been more subject to manipulation than we would like to admit.
That’s one of the themes of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the Oscar-nominated documentary by Johan Grimonprez. Of all of the films about international diplomacy, this one sounds the grooviest.
In the 1950s, fallout from the end of World War II meant that waves of new countries were being created as European colonial empires collapsed. Meanwhile, the United States and the Soviet Union had begun the 50-year nuclear standoff known as the Cold War. The “First World” of the capitalist West saw the communist East as dead set on expanding their economic and social revolutions. Meanwhile the “Second World” of the communist Eastern Bloc saw a capitalist West that was actively seeking their downfall. Both sides were, in their own way, correct.
The emerging nations were caught in the middle. Collectively, they became known as the Third World. By 1960, the emerging nations, which included India, threatened to outnumber the First and Second worlds in the United Nations. The two blocs competed for the allegiance of the third world nations in a variety of ways. Sometimes, that meant fomenting an actual rebellion led by ideologically simpatico local politicians. But more often, it was by soft power. The previously colonized peoples of Central Africa were hungry for American music. So the State Department decided to give it to them. Louis Armstrong became America’s jazz ambassador and embarked on a series of goodwill tours through Africa. At one stop in what was then the Belgian Congo, he was mobbed at the airport and played an impromptu show to tens of thousands of people, backed by a local marching band who was on hand to greet him. More government sponsored tours followed, including such jazz luminaries as Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Nina Simone, and Abbey Lincoln.
Not coincidentally, around this time the Belgian Congo became just Congo, declaring independence in January 1960. Patrice Lumumba won the first election as prime minister, despite the fact that he was in a Belgian jail at the time for inciting an anti-colonial riot. Lumumba was a savvy politician who understood that the emerging nations of Central Africa could play each side of the Cold War off the other. He dreamed of creating a United States of Africa that would consolidate the peoples and resources of the central continent into a powerful nation. When he visited the U.S., he was rebuffed by President Eisenhower but welcomed in Harlem by Malcolm X and John Coltrane.
Grimonprez crosscuts the complex story of Lumumba’s rise and fall with the musicians and artists who were sucked into the intrigue. Armstrong realized he was being used and threatened to immigrate to Ghana. Roach and Lincoln led a protest that turned into a brawl in the United Nations Security Council. Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev, who ought to know, said that Lumumba was not a communist. CIA chief Allen Dulles, who appears smoking a pipe and dripping evil, admitted that he may have overreacted when the CIA assisted the counterrevolution led by now-infamous dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’s stylish use of memoirs by people who were there, as well as copious archival footage, seeks to tame the sprawling Congo Crisis. But you can be forgiven if you end the film with your head spinning from all the details. It’s the expertly curated playlist of mid-century jazz and R&B that keeps things on track and provides the film’s beating heart.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is now available on VOD via Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime.
Recent Future is a relatively new band with Charlie Davis of Trash Goblin and David Johnson of James and the Ultrasounds. The two have been friends since meeting in 1998 at Tennessee’s Governor’s School for the Arts. They decided to form Recent Future during the pandemic, when “the world’s uncertainty and upheaval, mixed with the personal reflection, anxiety and ultimately, hope, of new fathers,” says the band.
The melding of personalities takes visual form in Recent Future’s “Top of the Moon.” The video leans on analog CRT technology and some disturbing and surreal splitscreen images to reinforce the mood of doomy synth disco.
You can see the band live this Friday, March 7 at B-Side with Jon Hart & the Vollontines and Magic Hours. But first, get into the groove:
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com
On this week’s edition of the podcast, Toby Sells talks about his cover story “The Battle for Midtown.” Zoning and housing are hot topics, as the Memphis 3.0 plan is up for review.
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The Monkey
The best rediscovery from last year’s Time Warp Drive-In lineup was Creepshow. The 1982 anthology film was directed by Night of the Living Dead’s George Romero and written by Stephen King, in one of the horror writer’s rare outings as a screenwriter. An homage to classic horror magazines from infamous comic publisher EC, Creepshow consists of five stories, two of which were adaptations of King’s previously published short stories, “Weeds” and “The Crate.”
If you’re just looking for a film where Leslie Nielsen murders Ted Danson in a startlingly creative fashion, Creepshow is for you. For my money, it is a masterpiece collaboration between two legends at the top of their game. King himself had a cameo as the hapless farmer who is slowly eaten by an alien plant in “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.” (Verdict: Great writer, not a great actor.)
In hindsight, what Creepshow reveals is that Stephen King is funny — or at least, some of his older stuff is funny. Before he got into epic fantasy with The Dark Tower, before The Shining and Carrie created the expectation that he had to be psychologically profound, and before he was the most adapted author in the world (a whopping 412 film and TV credits, according to IMDb), King wrote a lot of short stories that exhibited a rather fiendish sense of humor.
Maybe some of those short stories needed to be funny because they were published in magazines like Playboy and, in the case of “The Monkey,” Gallery. (For my online readers, pornography was once primarily distributed via still images in magazines. Many of these skin mags also published words written by respected authors. It was a win-win. The writers got paid top dollar, while the publishers could yell, “I publish Norman Freakin’ Mailer!” when they were inevitably dragged into court on obscenity charges. Hence the old joke, “I only read Playboy for the articles.”)
“The Monkey” was later gussied up and expanded for publication in King’s 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew. It provided the book’s cover image of a wind-up, cymbal-banging monkey doll. According to director Osgood Perkins, that was changed to a drum-banging monkey for his adaptation because Disney trademarked the cymbal-banging monkey for Toy Story merchandise.
Perkins’ last film, Longlegs, was an unexpected jolt of horror surrealism that took off thanks to a bravado performance by Nicolas Cage — and really, are there any other kinds of Cage performances? The Monkey doesn’t brood like most of today’s art horror (I’m looking at you, Nosferatu) because it’s too busy doing slapstick.
The film opens in a dingy pawn shop some time in the 1990s. Capt. Petey Shelburn (Severance’s Adam Scott) bursts in, demanding that the owner take back the monkey he sold him. The owner cites his “no returns on toys” policy, which is clearly posted on a sign behind the counter. But Petey insists that this is no toy. If the monkey plays his drum, bad things will happen. The owner has just enough time to scoff at the notion before he is impaled by an improperly secured speargun. Petey responds by taking a flamethrower off the wall (yes, this is the kind of place that sells fully loaded flamethrowers) and melting the monkey into plastic and metal sludge.
But it takes more than a convenient flamethrower to keep a bad monkey down. Petey disappears, leaving his wife Lois (Tatiana Maslany) and their two kids Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Coventry) alone and destitute. Later, when the twins are middle schoolers, Hal finds a hatbox deep in his dad’s old closet, marked “organ grinder monkey. Turn the key and see what happens. Like life.”
Naturally, the boys respond to the cryptic instructions by turning the key, and they are disappointed when nothing seems to happen. Then, Lois sets off on a date, leaving the two boys with the babysitter Annie (Danica Dreyer), who takes them out for dinner at a hibachi grill. But while the chef is flirting with Annie, he gets distracted and accidentally chops her head off.
At this point, I can hear the horror host Joe Bob Briggs gleefully rattling off, “Speargun impalement! Hibachi decapitation!” There will be many, many more Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater-worthy deaths before this monkey is done.
Lois tries to comfort her traumatized kids with a speech, which Maslany of Orphan Black fame absolutely nails. Death, she says, is the inevitable outcome of life. “Everything is an accident, or nothing is an accident. Same thing either way.”
Needless to say, the bickering brothers are not comforted. Further experiments with the monkey lead to more random loss of life, until Hal turns the key to try to do away with Bill. Instead, Lois dies suddenly of a rare brain hemorrhage, leaving the brothers to be raised by their swinger uncle Chip (our director, sporting over-the-top muttonchops).
Twenty-five years later, Hal and Bill (now played by Theo James) are estranged. Hal is a deadbeat dad to his son Petey (Colin O’Brien), fearful that the monkey might return. When their aunt dies hilariously, Hal is called back to his hometown, where he learns that a series of deaths has happened, each more unlikely than the last. Is the monkey loose again? Is Bill behind it? Will someone swallow a million wasps? (The answer to the last question is a resounding yes.)
Perkins is letting his freak flag fly in The Monkey, and it pays off big time. Gore in film is only horrifying if it is grounded in realism. As Sam Raimi realized in Evil Dead II, at a certain point, spurting blood becomes funny. The Monkey hits that sweet spot. James is great as the two brothers who hate each other, and the young actor Coventry is even better. Maslany, Scott, and Elijah Wood leave big impressions in small parts. This film is crass, utterly tasteless, and exactly what I needed to see on a doomy Sunday afternoon.
The Monkey
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The theme of the 2024 Oxford Film Festival is “Stories That Shape Us.” The annual festival runs from Thursday, Feb. 27 to Sunday, March 2, with screenings taking place at the Malco Oxford Commons Cinema in Oxford, MS.
“Mississippi has always been a place where stories flourish,” says Oxford Film Festival Board President Mike Mitchell. “From music to literature to film, our state is a cornerstone of storytelling. That’s why, this year, we’re thrilled to amplify the creative voices that are putting Mississippi’s stories on the global stage.”
The opening night film is Chasing Rabbits, which is the directorial debut of novelist Michael Farris Smith. The McComb, Mississippi native has published seven novels, including Nick, a prequel to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; and 2023’s Salvage This World, a sci fi novel set in the climate change-ravaged Gulf Coast of the future. Chasing Rabbits is a neo-noir film about a truck stop waitress who seeks revenge after her home is vandalized, and, in true noir fashion, things get out of control. 2017 Memphis Film Prize winner McGhee Monteith stars, along with Davis Coen and Stephen Garrett.
Opening the opening night program is “A House for My Mother.” Directors Pilar Tempane and Dr. Benjamin Nero. The short documentary traces the 88-year-old Dr. Nero’s life, from growing up in segregated Greenwood to becoming the first Black dentist from the University of Kentucky to his lifelong friendship with Morgan Freeman.
On Friday, the doc A Life In Blues: James “Super Chikan” Johnson gives the audience a big dose of the ol’ down home. Johnson is a Clarksdale, Mississippi native who is still slinging the blues at age 73. Vancouver-based filmmaker Mark Rankin and producer Brian Wilson bring the story to house rockin’ life.
On Saturday, March 1 is Stella Stevens: The Last Starlet. Andrew Stevens produced and directed this documentary about his mother, the Mississippi-born and Memphis-raised actress who stared in more than 50 films and television series, including Girls! Girls! Girls! opposite Elvis Presley. Stevens nearly 50 year career spanned the waning days of the studio system and the New Hollywood of the 1970s, appearing alongside everyone from John Cassavettes to Jerry Lewis.
After more than 60 films screen, the awards ceremony will be held on Saturday night. The winning films will receive encore screenings on Sunday.
For details about the entire program, individual tickets, and passes, visit the Ox-Film website.
Valerie June has a new album for Concord Records ready to drop on April 11th. The 14-song Owls, Omens, and Oracles was recorded with producer M. Ward, and includes collaborations with the Blind Boys of Alabama and Norah Jones. The singer/songwriter will be hitting the road on March 27th for a tour that will wind through the U.S. this summer. No word on a Memphis date yet, but we hope Val will come home to play for us.
“Joy Joy” is the first single, giving you a taste of what to expect on the new album. “Everyone has felt moments of darkness, depression, anxiety, stress, ailments, or pain,” says June. “Some say it takes mud to have a lotus flower. This song reflects on the hard times we might face: to fail, to fall, to lose, to be held down, to be silenced, to be shut out yet still hold onto a purely innocent and childlike joy. I come from a heritage of ancestors who lived this truth by inventing blues music. Generations after they’ve gone, the inner joy they instilled in us radiates and lifts cultures throughout the world. From the world to home, what would a city council focused on inspiring inner joy for all of a town’s citizens look like? As the times are changing across the planet, what would it look like to collectively activate our superpowers of joy?”
This gorgeous video is directed and edited by Taylor Washington. Take a look, and get some joy in your Monday.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
This week on the Memphis Flyer podcast, Kailyn Johnson and Chris McCoy talk about school board shenanigans, Dru’s Place and the future of gay bars, Captain America: Brave New World, and watching Hamilton while the world burns.
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Captain America: Brave New World
While watching Captain America: Brave New World, I had a realization that Disney will be making Marvel movies for the rest of my life.
There have been 35 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) since Iron Man debuted way back in 2008. This is not exactly a new phenomenon in the hundred-plus years of commercial filmmaking. There have been 52 movies and serials starring Tarzan, beginning with Tarzan of the Apes made by the National Film Corporation of America in 1918, and continuing until 2016’s The Legend of Tarzan.
But MCU pictures are a different beast. Tarzan was a guy who lived in the jungle with Jane (star of 1934’s Tarzan and His Mate), who solved jungle-style problems, which differed from year to year (he fought the Leopard Woman, found the magic fountain, etc.). The MCU presents a unified story, now at more than 60 hours long — at least theoretically. But what happens when you’re telling a unified story, and you get to the part called Endgame, but you want to keep going for, say, 13 or 14 more movies?
The answer that Captain America: Brave New World suggests is, you flail until you fail.
Reader, I try to go into every film with an open mind. If it’s a genre I don’t generally care for, I try to evaluate it on its own terms. Is the film succeeding in what it’s trying to do, even if I don’t like what it’s trying to do? But the MCU is mightily trying my patience. What is Captain America: Brave New World even trying to do? It doesn’t know.
Actually, that’s not true. Executive Producer Kevin Feige is trying to make money for his corporate overlords, and, judging from the $190 million opening weekend, he will likely succeed. But that’s not your problem, or your win. You want to see a well-made, entertaining movie. Captain America: Brave New World is not that.
That’s a shame because the previous Captain America stories had been some of the highlights of MCU. Chris Evans hung up the shield at the end of Avengers: Endgame, when Steve Rogers chose to use the time travel tech that won the Infinity War to go back to the 1940s and romance Peggy Carter. He tapped Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon (aka Anthony Mackie) to be his successor. When we pick up with Sam, it’s after the events of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier miniseries, which aired on Disney+. (I know nothing about that part of the story because it contained my least favorite Marvel character of all time, Bucky Barnes.) He’s down in Mexico, leading Seal Team 6 on a mission to recover a mysterious package from the clutches of the Serpent Society, led by Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito). What starts as a simple MacGuffin retrieval immediately goes south. The buyer for the package declined to show up to the rendezvous, and the frustrated Sidewinder is taking out his frustrations on a group of nuns. While Captain America (who, the film reveals, speaks both Spanish and Japanese) saves the clergy, his new sidekick Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), who has taken up the mantle of the Falcon (which is to say, Sam’s old super-suit) retrieves the package.
Afterwards, Cap and Falcon are summoned to an audience with the new president, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford). Ross was one of the bad guys in The Incredible Hulk (2008), when he was played by the late William Hurt. But now, he’s shaved his mustache, cleaned up his reputation, and won the election as a reformer. Sam is naturally suspicious of the guy who has always had his own agenda of personal ambition, but now he’s the president, so it’s Captain America’s duty to obey orders. At least that’s how this Cap interprets his role.
President Ross reveals his plan for world peace, or something like it. The giant Celestial monster that tried to emerge from the Earth during the climax of The Eternals ended up as a stone head and hand protruding from the Indian Ocean. It turns out, the package Cap and Falcon were sent to retrieve is a sample taken by the Japanese which proves Celestial Island is extremely rich in adamantium, the fictional super-metal that Wolverine’s claws and skeleton are made of. Unlike vibranium, the other super-metal whose sole source is controlled by Wakanda, the adamantium reserves are up for grabs because the terra nova of Celestial Island belongs to no one. Rather than risk a war, President Ross is trying to negotiate a treaty that will share the new super-resource with the world.
While Ross is making his presentation, an assassination squad led by Sam’s mentor Isaiah Bradley, himself a product of postwar super soldier research, tries to shoot him. Now, Captain America has to a) find out who’s behind the assassination attempt while b) clearing his friend Isaiah’s name and c) preventing a war. Director Julius Onah and his five credited writers have a lot of goals to fulfill, and they attempt it by shuffling Cap and his ever expanding cast of sidekicks through a series of incoherent battles and strained conversations.
The Captain America movies have been showcases for some of the best action sequences the MCU has produced, such as the famous airport confrontation in Civil War. Nothing attempted here even comes close to that standard. I will applaud Brave New World for not attempting the Marvel Third Act, where our heroes fight a large number of faceless adversaries. Instead, Cap faces off against the Red Hulk (who, it must be noted, is not even the primary villain) in D.C.’s cherry blossom orchard. This sounds great on paper, but it looks like absolute ass. Maybe it’s the extensive reported reshoots leading to a rushed final assembly, but this film feels like three or four films haphazardly spliced together. Mackie is game, clearly giving the role his all, but he never stands a chance because the material is hot garbage. I have trouble faulting Onah, as he is the latest in a series of semi-disposable helmers appointed as scapegoats. Brave New World bears the mark of a film made by feuding, status-obsessed middle managers. This is not filmmaking; it’s brand management disguised as entertainment.
Captain America: Brave New World
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Memphis rapper NLE Choppa is sick of the city’s gun violence problem. The 22-year-old is already a rap vet, having released his first single at age 16. His new single “Can We Live?” is dedicated to those we have lost, like Young Dolph and Choppa’s friend Tae Grape.
“I know some kids toting guns before they learn to tie they shoe/No more bedtime stories, they putting shit to sleep too.” Choppa raps.
The music video for “Can We Live?” was shot in Tom Lee Park, and features a cameo from Mayor Paul Young. Take a look:
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.