Author: Chris McCoy

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Film Features Film/TV

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Kingdom of the Planet of Apes is a fun summer blockbuster.

When French writer Pierre Boulle wrote La Panéte des singes in 1963, it was meant as a wry commentary on human hubris. His most successful book to date was a war story which was adapted by director David Lean as The Bridge on the River Kwai. Boulle, who didn’t speak English, won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 1957. His novel, which was translated in the UK as Monkey Planet, became an unexpected hit in England, and was promptly optioned by 20th Century Fox. Boulle thought the book was unfilmable, so he was shocked when Planet of the Apes became a huge hit in 1968. At the Academy Awards that year, Planet of the Apes beat 2001: A Space Odyssey for Best Costume Design. (Legend has it that many Academy voters chose PotA because they thought Kubrick had used real apes in 2001’s “Dawn of Man” sequence.)

The enduring vision of Boulle’s premise has echoed across the decades, with five films and two television series in the 20th century and, beginning with a Tim Burton-directed remake in 2001, for films in this century. In this future world, the humans, who have lost the power of speech and reason, live in captivity and servitude to a society of primates. Gorillas are the warrior class, orangutans are the priestly class, and chimpanzees are scientists.

The last three PotA films, beginning with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, tell the story of how our world got that way. A medical test chimp named Caesar (Andy Serkis) is infected with an experimental virus, designed to treat Alzheimer’s disease, that increases his intelligence. But when the virus escapes from the lab, it has the opposite effect on humans, and a global pandemic ensues which threatens the existence of humanity. Cloverfield director Matt Reeves helmed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, drawing a long and complex portrait of Caesar as a wise leader of his people — uh, apes — while a crippled humanity fights for survival. Reeves evolved a patient, detailed style, which proved to be perfect for this version of PotA, but turned positively turgid when he took on the superhero genre in The Batman.

Wes Ball of Maze Runner fame took over for the latest film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which picks up the story many generations after the death of Caesar. Noa (Owen Teague) is the son of the chief of Eagle Clan, a group of chimps who live in harmony with nature. When he leads an expedition to gather new falcon eggs to raise in the village aviary, he strays into the forbidden Valley Beyond. When he returns, he is followed by a group of masked gorillas armed with electric lances. Eagle Clan, having never seen electricity before, is quickly overwhelmed by the raiders and kidnapped for parts unknown. Noa escapes and sets out to find his stolen tribe. Along the way, he meets Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan who belongs to The Order of Caesar, a monastic order dedicated to their namesake’s two moral laws: Apes Together Strong, and Ape No Kill Ape. Together, they discover Mae (Freya Allan), a human who, they soon learn, can talk. They track the mysterious raiders until they are ambushed on a bridge and dragged back to an armed camp on the shoreline. There, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) is trying to break through a huge vault door set in the side of a sea cliff. He believes there is game-changing human technology behind the door, and that Mae knows how to open it.

Kingdom is a much more conventional sci-fi adventure story than Reeves’ meditations on the responsibilities of leadership. Its sweeping vistas of Los Angeles in ruins make for some compelling cinema, and Ball knows how to concoct a good slam-bang action sequence. Unlike the old days of Roddy McDowall emoting behind a thick mask, these apes are all motion-capture CGI creations, which sometimes causes confusion, as Noa’s chimp brethren all kinda look alike. Teague’s Noa makes a serviceable and pleasingly vulnerable hero, but he can’t live up to the masterful mo-cap performance of Andy Serkis. Sure, it’s blander than its predecessors, but taken on its own terms, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes remains a fun summer blockbuster.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
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Music Video Monday: “Hello, Is That You?” By Wyly Bigger

Wyly Bigger’s new album on MadJack was produced by Mark Edgar Stuart and features a full cast of Memphis players, including drummer Danny Banks, guitarists Jad Tariq and Matt Ross Spang, sax legend Jim Spake, and Stuart himself on bass.

“Hello, Is That You?” is the rollicking first single. “This track is actually a cover of an old tune by a group called The Red Tops out of Vicksburg, Mississippi,”says Bigger. “A couple years before she passed, my grandma gave me her collection of 45rpm singles from the ’50s. I was digging through them and saw a label I’d never seen before, so I threw it on the turntable, and really dug the sound. Come to find out, it was the only recording The Red Tops ever did — just that A-side (“Sewanee River Rock”) and B-side (“Hello, Is That You?”). I started playing “Hello” at some of my shows, and when it came time to start picking a cover or two for the album, I pitched that one to Mark, who produced the record, and he was into it! The original is a bit more big-band-ish, so we decided to rock it more and make it fit my sound better.”

The video was conceived, directed, shot, and edited by Landon Moore. It features Bigger rocking and rolling in some familiar Memphis locations. “For the video, we wanted to shoot it in a place that was relevant to my career with people who were important to me. So we went with Earnestine & Hazel’s, one of my favorite spots in town to play with my band, and I invited a bunch of friends and family to be in it.”

Take a look.

If you would like to see your video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Fall Guy

Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt

Hollywood is not exactly a place where justice flourishes. But aside from all of the sexual assault, and the way some white guys keep failing upward, one of the biggest injustices in Hollywood is the fact that there is no Academy Awards category for stunt work. 

I don’t know if you’ve looked at a movie lately, but stunt performers are getting more screen time than ever. Many great pioneers of cinema built their reputations on hair-raising stunts: Think Charlie Chaplin roller-skating backwards on the edge of an abyss in Modern Times, or Buster Keaton riding on a locomotive cow catcher, batting railroad ties off the tracks in The General. Jackie Chan, the king of the Hong Kong stunt performers, has broken so many bones his injuries were shown as outtakes in his film’s credit sequences. Chan’s pain became part of his star attraction. 

It’s not like stunt work is not artistic. Look at the greatest film of the 21st century, Mad Max: Fury Road, and tell me the pole cat attack, where the performers are swinging on 20-foot poles mounted on vehicles traveling 80 miles per hour, is not artistic. Even if you do define “art” more narrowly, there’s still the existence of technical categories like Best Sound Design and Best Visual Effects. Stunt work is every bit as necessary for the success of the film as the talented professionals in those categories.

And look, if you want to jazz up the rating of the Academy Awards (and who doesn’t want jazzier ratings?), adding categories where Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious could win something is just the ticket. 

One person who definitely agrees with me on this, the most pressing issue of our time, is director David Leitch. He’s a former stunt performer himself, having been at one time Brad Pitt’s stunt double of choice, before directing the star in Bullet Train. He’s also the co-creator of the John Wick franchise, which has taken fight choreography into the realm of modern dance. The Fall Guy is his love letter to the world of stunt performers. It’s the rare action movie that really feels like it’s made with love. 

It’s also relentlessly inside baseball because there’s nothing film people like more than films about themselves, or “self-reflexivity” in film theory-speak. The Fall Guy is ostensibly based on a TV series from the 1980s starring a post-Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors as a stunt man who solves crimes. (In the 1980s, it was a requirement that every TV star had to solve crimes. But I digress.) In a weird way, The Fall Guy owes a great deal to Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night, the 1971 romantic comedy about a film set that’s always on the verge of falling to pieces but never quite does.  

Leitch’s star is Ryan Gosling, and to say he’s perfect for the role of Colt Seavers is a profound understatement. The source material is a notoriously rich vein of Reagan ’80s masculinity, with Majors driving a truck and singing country music between bringing in bounties. Gosling brings some much needed Kenergy to the role. This Colt Seavers cries to Taylor Swift songs. There’s not too many actors who could convincingly make a phone confession of their love to their girlfriend, director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), while also fleeing from assassins in a stolen speedboat. 

Jody and Colt met years ago when she was a camera op and he was the preferred stunt double for megastar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). While filming Tom’s latest sci-fi blockbuster, their relationship evolves from a semi-recurring, on-set fling (which is a fairly common thing in the film world) to something more serious. Then, producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) insists Colt do another take of a dangerous high fall. Colt’s luck runs out, and he wakes up on a stretcher with a broken back. 

Eighteen months later, Colt is hiding out in Los Angeles, working as a valet at a Mexican restaurant, when Gail catches up with him. Jody is directing her first big feature film, a passion project she and Gail have worked for years to put together. They need Colt for a big stunt, a dangerous cannon roll on a beach. Jody has personally asked for him, Gail says, to support her as she tries to make good on her first big break. More inside baseball: Jody’s “passion project” is apparently a remake of the 1983 movie Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, a 3D debacle so notoriously awful it is nowadays only watched by sick cinematic masochists such as myself. 

Colt arrives on set in Sydney and pulls off the spectacular stunt, which in real life broke the Guinness World Record for most on-screen rolls by a car — a fact the film-within-a-film’s stunt coordinator Dan (Winston Duke) points out. But Jody’s not happy to see Colt. She was crushed when he cut off contact after the accident, and tells him via bullhorn as she repeatedly sets him on fire. “That was perfect! Let’s do it again!” 

When Colt confronts Gail, she reveals the real reason he’s been brought on board. Tom Ryder has gone missing, and since he and Colt used to be tight, Gail thinks he would be the best at discreetly tracking down the wayward movie star before Jody and Universal Pictures find out he’s gone AWOL. 

Gosling and Blunt are breezy and charming, and the supporting cast all understand the assignment. The whole point of the now-forgotten TV series was to cut to the chase, forget about all those pesky story beats, and get to the good stunts. The Fall Guy is at its best when it’s putting its small army of crack stunt performers through their paces with the safety wires and crash bags fully visible for once. It only makes the stunts more harrowing by emphasizing the human frailty of the performers. 

The Fall Guy
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Music Video Monday: “Camouflaged in a Color Wheel” by Misti Rae

You may have seen Misti Rae Holton perform her music, or seen her visual art. In the pandemic and post-pandemic era, she’s been recording with her husband, musician and producer Adam Holton, and engineer (and longtime friend of Music Video Monday) Graham Burks. Her first single is “Camouflaged in a Color Wheel,” a proggy mini-opera reminiscent of Kate Bush.

Misti Rae directed and created all of the imagery in the music video, which was edited by Laura Jean Hocking (who, in the interest of full disclosure, is this columnist’s wife). “Creating my own music video from my art has always been a dream,” says Misti Rae. “Following my dream helped me to survive a nightmare: the pandemic. I hope the song and video help you along in your healing journey as creating and sharing it has helped me in mine.”

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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News News Feature

Santa Parade Brings “Hoes” to Beale Street

Here in Memphis, we’re accustomed to seeing groups of Elvis lookalikes around town. But imagine 300 variations of Santa Claus going up and down Beale Street. Yet that is exactly what happened on Sunday, April 28th, as attendees to the International Santa Celebration ended their convention with a jolly parade on Beale.

The event is held every two years with the primary host being IBRBS (the International Brotherhood of Real Bearded Santas). There were dozens of workshops at the Renasant Convention Center covering everything from marketing and using social media to working with special needs children to wardrobe tips to using American Sign Language to the technicalities of booking agreements, and much more.

For more on the IBRBS convention, read my Memphis Flyer cover story.

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Film/TV

Challengers

Zendaya is Tashi Duncan, tennis phenom who catches the eye of childhood frenemies.

There’s an old saying in Hollywood: Men like movies where things explode, women like movies where relationships explode. Well, ladies, Challengers is here to bring the boom.

I know this is the 2020s, Hollywood has always been sexist, and things are not nearly as binary as they once seemed. But we can all, as moviegoers, agree that we like to watch beautiful people doing stuff. In the case of Challengers, “stuff” is tennis and sex.

The people involved are all beautiful to a point that challenges the anatomically possible. Take Josh O’Connor, who plays vowel-challenged tennis pro Patrick Zweig. The sizzling 33-year-old has done so many crunches, his six pack abs have evolved into an eight pack. I know this because I counted his quivering abdominal bulges during the extended nude scene with his frenemy Art Donaldson, played by the also-nude Mike Faist. When Patrick corners Art in the sauna to confront and/or make peace before the championship match which serves as Challengers framing device, Art greets him with “Put your dick away.” But this is not that kind of movie.

Art and Patrick have been friends since they were 12 years old, when they were roommates at an elite tennis academy. The doubles partners are so completely obsessed with making it in professional tennis, they ignore the simmering sexual tension between them. But one person who can see it is Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), the hot tennis phenom who catches Patrick’s eye, and also Art’s eye, as she demolishes an opponent on center court. When they approach her at the after-party, she gives an impromptu lesson on the art of the game. One can not truly play tennis at the highest level until one can fully know their opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. “Tennis is a relationship,” she says.

Being Zendaya, she’s naturally irresistible to Art and Patrick, who invite her back to their room without specifying who is expected to do what with whom. Tashi’s got an idea, best summed up as “Let’s you and him fuck.”

After the late night hotel scene devolves into ménage interruptus, Tashi declares that whoever wins the Junior Championship match between Art and Patrick gets her phone number.

When Art and Patrick next meet on the court, it’s not at the U.S. Open, but 13 years later at Phil’s Tire Town Challengers Tournament in New Rochelle, New York. It’s the bottom of the barrel in professional tennis, and that’s where Patrick lives now. More accurately, he lives in his Honda in the parking lot. Art is a major tennis champion on the comeback trail after shoulder surgery. He’s here to pad his win numbers by beating up on some chumps. That was Tashi’s idea. She’s his coach now, after suffering a gruesome, career-ending knee injury in college, as well as his wife and baby mama. Their three-way sexual obsession will come to a climax on the court.

That not-so-subtle pun is inspired by Luca Guadagnino. The Italian director never saw a phallic symbol he didn’t want to wave in your face, including rackets, strategically placed balls, and, in one homoerotic tour de force, churros. He’s banking on Zendaya’s star power to bring his film across the finish line (to mix my sports metaphors), and she’s perfect at playing a terminally competitive obsessive who gets turned off when her lovers don’t want to talk tennis in bed.

Challengers is visually stylish with a throbbing Reznor/Ross score. Its biggest problem is that all three of its main characters are irredeemable jerks, so it’s hard to root for anyone in this love triangle. If Guadagnino’s purpose is to show how a life focused solely on competition is an empty existence, punctuated by hot but ultimately unsatisfying sex, then he wins game, set, and match.

Challengers
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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: “Gardening Light” by Out on the Eaves

Patrick Carey cut his teeth in the storied Athens, Georgia, music scene. He and longtime collaborator Matt Stoessel form the core of Out on the Eaves. They recorded their first album as Out on the Eaves, The Ride Out at Memphis Magnetic Recording with Scott McEwen. “The album carries through it a clear sequence of timeless concepts,” says Carey. “A need for a home inside us and for peace within it. A place within us we can always come back to, yet how to find peace without it. A bargain we make to remain independent of fear. The boundaries we reshape for love.”

The Ride Out was released on Red Curtain Records. Carey says the single “Gardening Light” is “… a Southern Gothic scavenger hunt across chiming valleys and ghost strewn hillsides, with sweet maple steel and burnt honey harmonies calling you along to the heart of the horizon.” In the video, directed by Leanna and Patrick Carey and shot by Sean Clark, the singer walks through a lonely forest, looking for a lost keepsake.

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing: Boy Kills World, Zendaya Plays Tennis

Zendaya stars as Tashi Duncan in Challengers.

A couple of premieres takes on all comers at the box office this weekend, including interesting holdovers and a couple of notable anniversary re-releases.

Challengers

Zendaya stars as Tashi Duncan, a teenage tennis whiz who must rebuild her life after she suffers a career-ending injury. She reinvents herself as a coach and marries Art (Mike Faist), a fellow tennis champion, and coaches him to success in the pros. But when Art’s career takes a turn for the worse, he must face off against his arch rival Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who just so happens to be Tashi’s ex. Fireworks, both personal and professional, ensue. 

Boy Kills World

Bill Skarsgård, who you might remember as Pennywise from It, stars as Boy, who is actually a man. The Boy-man’s family is murdered by Famke Janssen, who was the best Jean Gray in any X-Men movie, but I digress. Rendered deaf and mute by the attack, Boy is rescued by a mysterious shaman (revered stuntman Yayan Ruhian) and taught the means for revenge. Bob’s Burgers’ H. Jon Benjamin provides the voice in Boy’s head. 

Civil War

Alex Garland’s searing cautionary tale about an America at war with itself is an unexpected hit. Kirsten Dunst stars as Lee, a journalist on a mission to get from New York City to Washington, D.C., to interview the President (Nick Offerman) before the White House falls to the Western Forces. In this clip, Lee and her partner Joel (Wagner Moura) try to buy some gas in West Virginia.

Alien 

Ridley Scott’s seminal sci fi horror film returns to theaters for a victory lap on its 45th anniversary. Sigourney Weaver’s star-making turn as Ripley set the standard for tough-girl protagonists for decades. The alien xenomorphs will be the most terrifying screen monster you’ll see this, or any other, year. Take a look at the original trailer from 1979, which causes 21st century horror trailers to hide behind the couch.

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Music Music Features

Cooper-Young Porchfest ’24 Mixtape

Little Baby Tendencies at Cooper-Young Porchfest ’24 (Photo: Chris McCoy)

Last Saturday, April 20, 2024, was the fourth annual Cooper-Young Porchfest. More than 100 bands played on porches, in driveways, and on lawns all over the neighborhood. The weather was cool, and it was a little cloudy, but the tunes were hot all over the Coop.

I was there with a camera trying to see as many sets as I could, which was just a tiny fraction of the talent on display. In the “Cooper-Young Porchfest Mixtape” you’ll see performances from Bluff City Vice, Cloudland Canyon, Dead Soldiers, Little Baby Tendencies, Above Jupiter, and the Walt Phelan Band, with a little bit at the end featuring Moth Moth Moth’s front lawn drag show. Settle in for some of the best music the Memphis scene has to offer.

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Film Features Film/TV

Fallout

Fallout works as well as on the TV screen as it does in the computer monitor.

Everything’s been adapted into a movie. Since the time of the Lumière brothers and Edison, moving picture producers have frantically looked around for things to base their stories on. If these things come with a built-in fanbase, all the better. Short stories, novels, poems, Shakespeare, musical theater, folklore, urban legends, fairy tales, pulp science fiction, high fantasy, romance, board games both real and fictional, animated versions of live action films, live action versions of animated films — you name it, somebody’s made a movie of it.

But video games are one medium that filmmakers have persistently had trouble translating. Since even the most primitive games have to have a character to identify with and a modicum of story built in to help the action feel meaningful, you would think it would be easy to do. But all you have to do to disabuse yourself of that notion is look at a few minutes of 1993’s Super Mario Bros. The writing was on the wall long before The Angry Birds Movie took its place among history’s worst attempts at entertainment. Last year’s big hit The Super Mario Bros. Movie was, if not a masterpiece, at least a crowd-pleaser.

Future attempts to adapt video games (and you know they’re coming) should study Amazon’s Fallout. Based on the video game series that began in 1997, this Fallout is produced by Westworld’s Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, who also directed the limited series’ first three episodes. The premise of the Fallout games begins with a global thermonuclear war in 2077.

You are usually someone who survived the initial conflagration in one of the several dozen self-sufficient underground vaults located around the ruins of the United States who emerge after a couple hundred years hiding from the radiation. The new world is full of recognizable bits and pieces of the old, remixed with fire and time to create a fantastical (and fantastically dangerous) landscape. The stories that unfold in the post-apocalyptic world are usually basic fetch-quests, but it’s the richness of the world-building, and the dark jokes that emerge when you look too hard at the details, that has made Fallout such an enduring title.

The showrunners wisely avoid a slavish retelling of one of the stories from the games, although elements of the classic stories, such as the broken water purifier which acts as the first game’s catalyst, do occasionally surface. The pilot begins on the day the first bombs fell. Affluent Los Angelenos of 2077 are obsessed with the trappings of 1950’s and ’60s America, right down to hiring TV cowboy Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) as entertainment for a kid’s birthday party. He and his daughter Janey (Teagan Meredith) survive the initial bombings by riding away on horseback. When we next see Cooper, he has mutated into a red-faced undead ghoul whose nose long ago rotted off (or, as we come to learn, was perhaps harvested for spare parts by Snip Snip, a rogue medbot voiced by Matt Berry). The Ghoul is now a bounty hunter, roaming the Wasteland catching and killing humans, mutants, and other creatures in exchange for vials of drugs that keep him alive — or at least suspended between life and death.

In Vault 33, underneath what used to be suburban Los Angeles, Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) is ready to get married. Since she’s cousins with all the guys in her vault, she follows tradition and sends a telegram to Vault 32, asking for a breed-able male. Instead of marital bliss, 33 accidentally open their doors to raiders from the above world, led by Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury). The vault dwellers barely survive the raid, and Lucy’s father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) is kidnapped in the process. Lucy defies her vault’s ruling council, led by Betty (Leslie Uggams), and opens the door to the outside world to go looking for her father.

Meanwhile, Maximus (Aaron Moten) is not having fun. He’s a squire in the Brotherhood of Steel, a quasi-military, quasi-religious secret order who search out surviving pre-war technology to use for their own ends. The fascistic order ain’t easy if you’re on the bottom rung of the hierarchy, so Maximus is elated when he gets the nod to accompany Knight Titus (Michael Rapaport) on a mission into the wasteland to find Dr. Siggi Wilzig (Michael Emerson), a scientist who has escaped from the high-tech facility known as the Enclave with some sensitive technology whose function is a mystery. Once they’re on the ground, the cruel Titus is injured, Maximus lets him die, then takes his power armor to seek his own fortune.

These three characters’ lives and destinies intersect in strange ways out in the American Wasteland, where nothing is ever quite what it seems. The show mines the game’s long history mostly for vibes. Watching the Brotherhood’s iconic power armor lumber through the ruins is a big thrill. The whiplash mixture of extreme danger and black humor work on the TV screen as well as in the computer monitor. The game’s stories are kept pretty basic on purpose, so that your game play experience can fill in the emotional gaps — after all, those ghouls are shooting at you! The casting gives this adaptation a crucial edge. Purnell’s wide-eyed “okey dokey” and matter-of-fact approach to violence are perfect. Moten’s Maximus is a tightly-wound ball of trauma who you want to see do the right thing, but who often doesn’t. Goggins dominates the screen with ghoulish badassery, but then reveals a more complex side over time. Fallout’s popularity is heartening, as it shows an appetite in the audience for moral complexity to go with the game’s gonzo visuals.

Fallout is streaming on Amazon Prime.