This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, Kailynn Johnson talks about her cover story “Business Unusual”. MATA is in crisis, and we’ve got all the details. Plus, an Anora review, Marcella Simien’s new album, and more.
Author: Chris McCoy
Categories
Anora
Sean Baker has a thing for sex workers. The fiercely independent director’s 2015 breakthrough work Tangerine followed Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), a transgender sex worker, who just got out of prison and is ready to take revenge on her cheating boyfriend. In his next film, The Florida Project, a stripper named Halley (Bria Vinaite) loses her job for refusing to have sex with clients, and is thrown into extreme poverty with her six-year-old daughter. Baker’s 2021 film Red Rocket starred Simon Rex as Mikey “Saber” Davies, a down-on-his luck porn star who returns to his Texas hometown, looking for a way to get back on top.
Now, in his latest venture, Baker has created his latest, and greatest sex worker character yet, Anora “Ani” Mikheeva. Played by Mikey Madison, whose breakthrough role was as Manson Family murderer Susan Atkins in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Ani is a stripper in a high-end Manhattan gentleman’s club called HQ. She lives with her sister in Brighton Beach, where her Russian immigrant grandmother taught her the language of the home country. Those Russian language skills come in handy when her boss tells her to look after a high roller named Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn).
I love films about work, particularly ones about the differences between the masks we wear in the public personae we bring to the workplace, and who we think we really are. That dichotomy is never greater than for a sex worker. From the moment Ani meets Vanya, her carefully constructed stripper facade starts to crumble. Vanya is too good to be true. He’s a 21-year-old college student who never goes to class with a seemingly unlimited supply of money. When she realizes he really digs her, she naturally decides to get busy exploiting him for all he’s worth, performing “forbidden” acts in the private room as the money rains down. When he asks her for a private session, she says yes. When she arrives at his home, she’s taken aback. This skinny kid lives in a waterfront mansion with gorgeous views of the city. The private sessions go so well, he invites her to his New Year’s Eve party. The mansion is lit up and filled to brim with well-heeled young revelers and disco lights. As the party is still raging, they retire to his bedroom, where he asks for a week of her time, in exchange for $10,000 cash. What’s a girl to do but say yes?
Ani is dazzled by the money, the drugs, and Vanya’s disarming, boyish look. For her $10K week, they could just lounge around the house and get freaky, but instead, Vanya loads up his friends into a private jet and they head to Las Vegas, where they can get “the good ketamine.” It is there that Ani, and the audience, get their first taste of who Vanya really is. They are greeted at the door of the luxury hotel and casino by the manager, who assures Vanya that he can have his usual suite as soon as they’re finished kicking out the guests who are staying there now. Vanya, it turns out, is Ivan Zakharov, the son of a ruthless Russian oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov) with ties to Russian organized crime in America.
The trip plays out like a fever dream of wealth, as the boisterous friends float from pool to party to IV hangover bar and back again. Ani never wants the party to end, and when one morning, Vanya professes his love for her and asks her to marry him so he can become a citizen and escape from the clutches of his dysfunctional wealthy family, she says yes. Since they’re already conveniently in Vegas, the happy couple ties the knot in a wedding chapel on the Strip. The bride wore blue jeans and a bustier.
Just as Ani’s mask totally slips away, heir honeymoon is interrupted when Vanya’s parents get wind of the nuptials. They task Toros (frequent Baker collaborator Karren Karagulian), a Russian Orthodox priest/gangland fixer, with arranging an annulment. He sends two goons, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) to get to the bottom of the situation. Their arrival at the mansion is a 20-minute tour de force of queasy slapstick which veers from the hilarious to the horrifying.
The world Baker builds is at once exotic and all too real. Madison is absolutely perfect as a Cinderella who gets a glimpse of ultimate upward mobility, only to have it all crash down around her in a flurry of broken glass, baseball bats, and trashed SUVs. Anora is a gorgeous film that walks the line between screwball comedy and tragedy. Only someone with mad skills like Sean Baker can choose to do both.
Those of us who were at the Indie Memphis Film Festival this weekend were treated to a great bloc of music videos. R.U.D.Y. had two music videos in the mix, including the pleasingly lo-fi “Show Improvement.”
The music video is an homage to one of R.U.D.Y.’s favorite shows. “Home Improvement was one of my favorite shows growing up. It was only right we showed some love. The ’90s babies will understand lol,” he says. “In this world of madness we must always strive to Show Improvement. A lot of time it’s tempting to settle for the bare minimum. It’s not enough to show up. We MUST SHOW IMPROVEMENT.”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Director David Goodman is an associate professor of film and television production at University of Memphis. His new film, Adopting Greyhounds, premieres at Indie Memphis on Sunday, November 17th, at 5 p.m. (Get tickets here.)
I spoke with Goodman about the film, dogs, and editing. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me how this project got started.
I always meant to catch a race over the years. I never got a chance to, and some folks that I knew had come through the area and filmed one of the races on 8mm [film]. I remember seeing that and thinking it looked neat. Then I heard it was closing, and that piqued my interest, because in making the kind of documentary films that I make, it’s hard to find an ending sometimes, to find a way for everything to feel like it comes to a conclusion. The idea of racing ending really got me. I started my whole train of thinking in terms of this being a documentary. So I reached out to some people, and it took quite a number of months to get in touch with some of the folks who ran the adoption center. I really wanted to focus on what happens to the greyhounds after they finish racing. So I wanted to look at racing from across the road, so to speak, because the adoption organization was really across the street from Southland Racing. So I reached out to them and I just started a relationship and began filming. I thought greyhounds were cool dogs. I’ve seen a lot of people with adopted greyhounds in Memphis, and it sparked my interest that this aspect of the Mid-South was going to be gone.
Do you have dogs?
I’m a dog owner. I’ve almost always had a dog, and while filming this documentary, two stray pit bull/boxer mix dogs turned up in our driveway, and we ended up keeping them. I actually was considering adopting a greyhound, but it just so happened that some other dogs showed up that ended up living with me, my wife, and family.
How long did you work on it?
I started filming in February 2022 and filmed throughout the year until January 2023. Racing was set to end in December 2022. Then I stuck around to film a little bit of the final weeks, as well. So, a year of filming, and basically a year of editing the footage down. The way that I approach documentaries, or try to, is from a more observational perspective. I go into a space, and I just film the processes and conversations that people have. I try to avoid sit-down interviews or at least I did in this documentary. What would naturally happen is people would speak to me while I was holding the camera, or they would speak to one another. And in that way, I try to capture more naturalistic scenes that happen in a space, and try to convey the story in that way, rather than creating an interview-driven narrative.
It’s kind of a Les Blank-like technique, it seems.
Oh, yes, that’s right. Les Blank, Frederick Wiseman, and a lot of my mentors, David Appleby, who did plenty of work in interview-based documentaries, but his earlier films followed this more observational approach.
It’s a direct cinema, ’60s kind of vibe.
Yes, it’s definitely an approach that you don’t see as often these days.
Why do you think that is?
I think it takes less time to do that. You can go in and interview someone, and you can really shape a narrative more clearly. With a more observational or direct cinema approach, I think the experience can be that there are more questions for a viewer. A lot of popular modern documentaries are constantly sort of answering questions very explicitly, with people speaking the answers. Whereas, I think it’s more fun to watch a film and kind of try to figure out a world and be dropped into it without exposition and too much set up. It’s just more of a challenge, I would say, to piece together things, and there’s more mystery to it.
Did you edit this yourself?
I did, yes.
That’s where it gets really daunting, in that phase especially, because you end up with this pile of undifferentiated footage, and you’re like, ‘Wow I could continue to put this together in different combinations until the heat death of the universe!’ It’s hard to know when you’ve got it right.
It really is. And with documentaries, the editing becomes the writing of the documentary in a lot of ways. There’s prep, and there’s consideration of structure when filming, but nothing ever goes exactly as planned. New things, unexpected things, happen, and as the person out there in the field, filming, I inevitably get attached to stuff. You gotta wrestle with yourself as the editor. Definitely on this project, I felt the need to begin thinking maybe for the next one I’ll get an editor.
Let me ask you about greyhounds. I get the impression that they’re very skittish dogs.
They’re much like any other dog. They have certain different kinds of ailments than other dogs. Their skin is very delicate, and the way they’re built, they’re prone to certain injuries. All of the greyhounds I encountered were very friendly.
What opinion did you come away with about racing?
You know, that’s a good question. It’s one of those questions I avoid. I tried to not have an opinion, and I felt like I had the luxury of not having to form an opinion because I was really focused on the adoptions and where these dogs go from here. I remained as unbiased as I could, and I just wanted depict the things I saw and tried to avoid the politics of the issue and just look at the dogs and all the work that goes into transitioning them to the next phase of their lives.
The Memphis Flyer is seeking nominations for candidates for the 20<30 Class of 2025. This is our 15th year of highlighting the best and brightest of young Memphis.
We’re asking you to help us identify the Bluff City’s future leaders. Nominate your friends, your colleagues, the outstanding young members of your community. Candidates must be no older than 29 on January 1, 2025. Send a brief bio/summary of the nominee’s work and activities and a photo to under30@memphisflyer.com. Use “20<30 Nomination” in your subject header. Deadline for nominations is January 3, 2025. The 20<30 Class of 2025 will be revealed in the February 6, 2025 issue of the Memphis Flyer.
When he was growing up, Caleb Suggs wanted to be a zoologist. “But when I went to Germantown High School, they have a TV station in their school, so I got involved with that and that kind of set me on my path to major in broadcast journalism and film. When I was at University of Memphis, I got my first film job through the journalism department. My teacher, Roxanne Koch was directing a documentary on the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination. I got a producing gig, and I edited it and narrated the movie through the film department. I got to do my first film that I directed in 2020, and I have made films every single year since then with my brother. We started the film production company called Studio Suggs in 2021.”
Suggs’ film in Indie Memphis 2024 was the brain child of Debbie Robertson at WKNO-TV. “They came to me, because they knew about what I did in video and film, and pitched to me the idea, because they really wanted um to have something that showed up our local HBCU,” says Suggs. “They saw that other cities had some kind of documentary or program that highlighted their HBCUs, but Memphis didn’t have one. So they wanted them to put LeMoyne-Owen College on the map and raise more awareness.”
Suggs says making The Magic of LOC: LeMoyne-Owen at 160 was as much of a learning experience for him as it will be for the audience.. “I actually didn’t know much of anything about LeMoyne-Owen College at all until we started the project. … I had no idea that it was really the students who spearheaded the desegregation of Memphis, and how they were the main ones doing the sit-ins in town. I learned what the draw was for HBCUs. You know, I’ve never been to an HBCU. I went to the University of Memphis. So I got first-hand experience about the culture. The first thing we shot for the documentary was their homecoming week. It was their 160-year anniversary. Seeing how everybody down there was really a family, and seeing how tight the connections were was something that was just completely new to me.”
Suggs, who had directed indie comedies like “Homeboys Haunted”, was new to documentary helming. “I would say that documentaries are easier than narratives on the front end, but way harder on the back end,” he says. For narrative films “… you plan everything out — the lines, the camera movement, the lighting, everything — all the work at the front end. Then for me, because I typically edit everything, I direct, I know how everything has been shot and pieced together. It’s easier for me to get the skeleton of the film, and then really, editing just becomes putting on the finishing touches. For documentary, you’re showing up and you can’t really set too much stuff up, because you’re just kind of dropping in and following people or setting up interviews. The hard part becomes taking what everyone said and trying to build a skeleton from what you have, rather than from what you’ve planned out. Documentaries just take a lot more time, and a lot of playing around until you kinda get the feeling of the movie and the aesthetic from the words that people give you, not from something that you pre-plan. So especially for something like this, going in where it was my first experience with it. We just had to figure out the vibe of school before we could figure out the real tone and feeling of the movie, and the aesthetic that came with it. The movie is called The Magic of LOC, and it has this magical type of theme to it. We didn’t even know that until we walked in and started interviewing people.”
Suggs says he loves to show his work at Indie Memphis. “I think it’s cool that we have a film fest to go to in town! It gives a lot of people here in town something to do with their movie, once they make it. It gives them something exciting to put it in, instead of just on Youtube. It gives you an audience. It gives you a way to meet other filmmakers. It’s just an overall cool experience. When I was first graduating college, and I had my first movie, that was just like the goal. It is the holy grail of where my movie could end up. Now that I’m a bit older, I’ve gone to other festivals, I realize Indie Memphis is a lot better than a lot of other film festivals around the country.”
The Magic of LOC: LeMoyne-Owen College at 160 screens Saturday, November 16 at 3:15 pm at Studio on the Square. Tickets are available at the Indie Memphis website.
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.
Categories
A Festival of Dreams
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 Night was 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.”
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.
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.”
The festival’s third animated film, Memoir of a Snail by 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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.