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Film Features Film/TV

Nickel Boys

One of my favorite film noirs is Dark Passage, a 1947 Warner Brothers film by director Delmer Daves. Humphrey Bogart stars as an escaped convict trying to clear his name. With the help of Lauren Bacall, he gets facial reconstructive surgery in an attempt to evade police. What’s great about Dark Passage is that the entire first hour of the film is shot from a first-person point of view. We hear Bogart’s voice, but we never see his face — at least not until he gets a new one. POV had been used before, but never so successfully. Only a handful of other films have attempted such a trick, most recently the 2015 shoot-em-up Hardcore Henry, which played on modern audiences’ familiarity with first-person shooter video games. 

Done well, POV camera helps a viewer identify more deeply with a character because we see what they see, which is why director RaMell Ross chose to shoot Nickel Boys in the first-person perspective. Based on a 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys tells the story of Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp as a child, and later Ethan Herisse), a Black teenager in 1962 Tallahassee who is generally quiet, studious, and likes to read stuff like Pride and Prejudice. The Civil Rights era is in full swing, but life is still tough for Black kids in Jim Crow-era Florida. Luckily, Elwood’s grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is very supportive, and he has a great teacher (Jimmie Fails) who sees his potential. When he gets an opportunity to take college classes at the Marvin Griggs Technical School, he jumps at the chance. Lacking transportation, he decides to hitchhike to his first class. But it turns out that the man who picks him up is driving a stolen car, and the police don’t believe Elwood had nothing to do with it. So Elwood finds himself at Nickel Academy, a reform school that is notorious for its cruelty towards its charges. When Elwood arrives in the back of a police car, the two white punks he rides with are dropped off in front of a nice-looking Antebellum building. The Black kids live in dilapidated dorms out back. 

The nerdy Elwood doesn’t get along with the other kids at the school, but Turner (Brandon Wilson) stands up for him, and the two become friends. When he gets mixed up in a restroom altercation with bully Griff (Luke Tennie), Elwood finds out exactly how brutal the Nickel Academy is. Administrator Mr. Spencer (Hamish Linklater) personally whips Elwood so badly that when his grandmother arrives for a visit, they won’t let her see him. Instead, she runs into Turner, who can’t assure her that everything is all right. 

Elwood and Turner try to survive Nickel Academy, as we switch back and forth between their viewpoints. Later, in flash-forward sequences set 20 and 30 years in the future, the POV changes, so we see the back of Elwood’s head (now played by the dreadlocked Daveed Diggs) as he encounters people from his past he might rather forget. 

Herisse, Wilson, and Tennie offer solid performances, and Ellis-Taylor’s turn as a loving grandmother who is losing the fight to bring her kin home brings the tears. But they all get overshadowed by the film’s technical achievements. The POV shooting works, for the most part, but Ross has trouble committing to the bit. His intention is to make us feel Elwood and Turner’s visceral fear and despair, but when he intercuts the action with archival footage to represent the passage of time, as well as the occasional dream sequence, it undercuts the effect he’s going for.  

Whitehead based Nickel Academy on the Dozier School for Boys, a Florida reform school that was shut down in 2011 after 111 years of burying, sometimes literally, “undesirable” young men. But the problem of minority juveniles caught in an uncaring and cruel system hasn’t gone away. As Turner observes late in the film, “There’s Nickels all over this country.” 

Nickel Boys opens in theaters Friday, December 13th.

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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: “Let’s Be Free” by Richard Wilson

Singer/songwriter Richard Wilson’s soulful, jazzy guitar is the center of his sound. On “Let’s Be Free,” it’s the sound of liberation.

To accompany the song, which was recorded with Scott Bomar at Sam Phillips Recording Services, he opted for a simple performance video, bathed in red light. “Sail away/Let’s be free …”

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

Memphis Flyer Podcast Dec 5, 2024: Winter Arts

This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, Chris McCoy and Abigail Morici talk about the Winter Arts Guide, Tsunami, Wicked, and Andrea Morales’ photography exhibit at the Brooks Museum. Check it out on the Flyer’s YouTube channel.

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Film Features Film/TV

Wicked

Antiheroes are everywhere these days. The concept of the hero who exemplifies the virtues of the society that produced them dates to the dawn of storytelling. Achilles was a strong and brave Greek hoplite whose toxic vanity was part of the package. Red Horn was a model Mississippian sportsman who challenged giants of the underworld to a game of tchung-kee. Luke Skywalker was a farm boy turned fighter pilot who learned to master his emotions and fight for the greater good. 

The antihero, on the other hand, never embodies their society’s virtues, but instead exposes its vices. In Homer’s Iliad, Thersites, the “ugliest man who came to Troy,” calls out Agamemnon’s vainglory and gets beaten to death for his troubles. Don Quixote turns the virtues of the Medieval knight on their heads, changing steadfastness into stubbornness, faith into delusion. If America had universal healthcare, high school chemistry teacher Walter White would never have started cooking meth to pay for cancer treatment. 

One way writers pull off this trick is to retell a story from the villain’s point of view. John Gardner made Beowulf’s enemy into a hero of society’s outcasts in Grendel. In 1995, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked did it with The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West. Maguire gave L. Frank Baum’s antagonist a name, Elphaba, and framed her alleged wickedness as political propaganda. After all, isn’t the fake wizard lording over the land of Oz the real villain of the story? 

Wicked became a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 2003 and has been running constantly ever since. In retrospect, it’s baffling that a film adaptation took so long. After years in development hell, director Jon M. Chu has finally created a worthy big-screen version. 

One element common to antiheroes is that their ambitions are always doomed to failure. We hear of Elphaba before we meet her. She’s already been killed by Dorothy Gale, and the Munchkins are celebrating with a song, “No One Mourns the Wicked.” But for Glinda the Good Witch of the North (Ariana Grande), the celebration is muted. She knew Elphaba from back in the day, when they were roommates at Shiz University. Glinda, who was then Galinda, was the child of privilege studying sorcery for prestige. Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) was a wild magic talent who almost didn’t get admitted to the prestigious university at all. She was only there to help her wheelchair-bound younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) when an accidental display of her magic powers brought her to the attention of Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). Elphaba and Galinda become the best of frenemies. Elphaba’s green skin marks her as a permanent outsider, and she carries a big chip on her shoulder. Galinda is the apex mean girl, complete with an entourage of sniveling sycophants (Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James, perfectly despicable). Yet both sympathize with, and kind of envy, the other. They compete for the attention of Madame Morrible, but when she’s summoned to see The Wizard, a sublime Jeff Goldblum, Elphaba insists on taking Galinda with her. In this telling, the Wizard is a tyrant, bent on removing Oz’s talking animals from society. Elphaba’s selfish wish was for the Wizard to change her green skin to a more socially acceptable color, but instead she decides to petition Oz the great and powerful on behalf of the oppressed animals. 

Wicked cannot be faulted for its craftsmanship. Chu’s crew has created an Oz that feels vibrant and alive, from Elphaba’s swirly glasses to the Wizard’s massive clockwork train. Erivo is flawless as the long-suffering outsider whose glimpse into the inner workings of the elite radicalizes her to drastic action. Likewise, Grande lends depth to the Good Witch while belting out the Broadway bangers. 

Wicked’s biggest problem is that it’s Hobbit-tized. At 180 minutes, it’s longer than the stage show, but it only tells half the story. Showstopper “Defying Gravity” still leads into the intermission, but in this case, the intermission is going to be a year long. None of the new material feels necessary, but with Erivo and Grande leaving it all on the screen, you probably won’t mind. 

Wicked
Now playing 
Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: “Sunshine” by Jacob Church

It’s the Monday after Thanksgiving. All the leftovers have been eaten, and all the naps have been taken. It’s time to go back to work. If you’re anything like Music Video Monday, you’re not dealing with it very well.

Jacob Church is here to deliver a wake-up call. The Memphis rocker is channeling Cheap Trick to get you up and running. “Sunshine” is a thick slab of feel-good pop. In the video, directed by bassist-turned-auteur Landon Moore, Jacob picks up the band and drags their asses to rehearsal, where they quickly get their mojo back. We’re doing the same for you.

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

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News

Memphis Flyer Podcast November 27, 2024: Happy Thanksgiving!

This week on the Memphis Flyer podcast, Chris McCoy and Abigail Morici talk Thanksgiving food, and our annual Black Friday Local Gift Guide. Happy Thanksgiving!

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Film Features Film/TV

Gladiator II

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” That’s Karl Marx, who was not, of course, talking about Gladiator II. He was talking about real capital-H History, the kind we’re all living in. But like Gladiator II, our era of historical do-overs is rapidly descending into the farcical. 

After decades of excellence, director Ridley Scott won his Best Picture Academy Award for Gladiator in 2000. The film also earned A Beautiful Mind star Russell Crowe a Best Actor trophy and made him a household name. Yet since the film ended with Crowe’s character, the unsubtly named Maximus, dying in the Colosseum, the prospects of a sequel were unlikely. But finally, the Hollywood history-repeating machine came calling, and Scott, fresh off telling the story of Napoleon with Gladiator co-star Joaquin Phoenix, strapped on his armor for another bout in the arena. 

Like the first, Gladiator II begins with a battle. This time, it’s in the North Africa province of Numidia, where farmer Hanno (Paul Mescal) and his wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen) are called to defend their home against the invading legions of General Acacius (Pedro Pascal). After a spectacular opening sequence, the city falls, and Hanno is thrown into the arena for the first time. His first opponents are baboons, which is actually a thing Romans did. But these are obviously CGI creations, which makes it look like the Geonosis arena scenes in Star Wars: Episode 2 – Attack of the Clones. This is not a serious historical epic, like Kubrick’s Spartacus or Scott’s Napoleon. It’s more like a half-remembered, sword-and-sandals melodrama from the 1950s, like Quo Vadis, which Spartacus was a reaction against. 

Naturally, there is a Spartacus joke in Gladiator II, when a slave-master asks the assembled gladiators who fired an arrow at General Acacius, and they all answer, “I did!” Like Spartacus, Hanno is also destined to lead a gladiator rebellion against his masters. But where Kirk Douglas’ gladiator revolutionary is a common slave who organized a civilization-shaking rebellion while in chains, Hanno turns out to be yet another Hollywood chosen one on a standard-issue Hero’s Journey. His real name is Lucius. His father, we eventually learn, was Maximus, and his mother is Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), which makes him the rightful heir of Marcus Aurelius, the last “good” emperor of Rome. Not that the Roman Empire really respected such niceties, as Macrinus (Denzel Washington) points out. Macrinus is a scheming upstart power broker who latches on to Hanno/Lucius as a disruptive force to the rule of co-emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). 

Washington’s gleeful wheelings and dealings, as Macrinus whispers poison into the ears of the emperors, are easily the best thing about Gladiator II. He seems to know exactly the level of camp to bring to the proceedings. 

Washington’s greatness brings into great relief Gladiator II’s biggest failure: It lacks Russell Crowe. The original’s script wasn’t that great, either, which seems a chronic problem with Scott (I’m looking at you, Prometheus). But an actor with Crowe’s charisma can make the nonsense go down easier. When he bellowed, “Are you not entertained?” to the Colosseum crowd, Crowe filled up the screen. Paul Mescal, on the other hand, always looks a little lost in the arena. When Macrinus opines that he’s betting on Lucius’ all-consuming rage to help him survive the arena, I roll my eyes. Kirk Douglas’ Spartacus would have made mincemeat of him.

Still, there are pleasures to be had in Gladiator II. Scott still knows how to stage a battle scene, and the sweeping vistas of Rome provide some eye candy. If that’s all you’re looking for, it delivers. Otherwise, you can skip this Roman holiday. 

Gladiator II
Now playing
Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: “Lelia” by Marcella Simien

Last Saturday night, Marcella Simien debuted her new album To Bend to the Will of a Dream That’s Being Fulfilled with a unique show at Off The Wall Arts. Sculptor and Off The Wall proprietor Yvonne Bobo created a cylinder of screens, and Infinity Stairs‘ Graham Burks created immersive video to wrap around the performer. The resulting combination of music and video projection mapping were striking.

Marcella Simien sings at Off The Wall Arts while wrapped in Graham Burks’ video projection. (Photo by Chris McCoy)

Simien’s new album is a departure from her usual “swamp soul” sound, incorporating experimental electronic textures and vintage instruments. The first music video from the album takes a completely different tack. It’s a hybrid music video and documentary short by Memphis filmmakers Joshua Cannon and Brody Kuhar. The team traveled down to Louisiana to introduce us to Marcella’s family, including the song’s namesake, her great-grandmother Lelia Manuel Simien. It’s a beautiful, life-affirming work which will cause you to reflect on your family roots as we head into the Thanksgiving holiday.

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

Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2024 Award Winners

The 2024 edition of the Indie Memphis Film Festival, which began Thursday, November 14th, and concluded with encore screenings on Tuesday, November 26th, announced its award winners for its 27th session. This year, the audience served as the jury, filling out online ballots to grade the more than 100 films on offer from A to F.

Boys Go To Jupiter by Pittsburgh-based animator Julian Glander won Best Narrative Feature. It is the first animated film to win the honor in the 27-year history of Indie Memphis.

Best Hometowner Feature went to Jasmine Blue for Big Time, the portrait of her grandfather Sylvester Ford Jr., a Memphis educator, coach, and Civil Rights activist.

Union, co-directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, won Best Documentary Feature. The film follows the successful efforts to unionize the 8,000 workers at the Amazon Fulfillment Center at JFK Airport in New York City.

In the Sounds category, which includes music-based films, Dory Previn: On My Way to Where, directed by Julia Greenberg and Dianna Dilworth, took home the top honor.

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, directed by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, won Best Departures Feature. The category is dedicated to experimental, horror, and sci-fi films.

The Hometowner Narrative Short Film award went to “Freedom’s Village” directed by Kristen Hill. The short film is based on the story of a tent city that sprang up in Fayette County, Tennessee, when Black farmers were pushed off their land in the wake of a voter registration drive during the 1960s.

The Hometowner Documentary Short winner is John Beder’s “How to Sue the Klan,” which details a long-running legal effort to cripple the white supremacist militia.

Best Hometowner Music Video went to “A Spike Lee Joint” by Blvck Hippie, directed by Lawrence Shaw. This is Shaw and Blvck Hippie’s second consecutive music video win.

The National Narrative Short award went to Marissa Losoya’s “Beyond Failure.” The National Documentary Short award went to Hao Zhou’s “Wouldn’t Make It Any Other Way.”

The annual IndieGrant program, which awards $15,000 in cash and in-kind donations to two Memphis-area filmmakers, announced the winners, which were determined by a jury of filmmakers and producers and based on proposals submitted by Memphis filmmakers: Jacob Simmons’ “The End of the Song” and Ashley Ave’s “Voices of Faith: The Salem Harmonizer’s Story.” Both films are expected to to premiere at the Indie Memphis Film Festival in 2025.

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Art Film Features Film/TV News Opinion

Memphis Flyer Podcast November 21, 2025: The Mess at MATA

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.