Last weekend, thousands flocked to the Radians Amphitheater at Memphis Botanic Garden for Mempho Fest. The Memphis Flyer‘s own Michael Donahue was on hand to take party pictures for his We Saw You column. I tagged along with a video camera to record the legendary newsman in action. But don’t take my word for it — watch him get swarmed by fans and charm the masses with his easygoing style.
We’ll soon be opening up nominations for the 2025 edition of the Memphis Flyer’s 20<30. Every year we honor the best and brightest young people Memphis has to offer, thanks to our readers and staff nominations. We’ve had some exceptional honorees in the past, and are looking forward to a new crop of Memphis talent. (GloRilla, call us!)
One of our alumna from 2011 has made a name for herself. When I revisited some of our past winners for Memphis Magazine in 2019, I caught up with Audra Barr Watt, who already had successful career as a health care executive and was the mother of two young boys, Nolan and Isaac. Nowadays, Audra’s career has taken her to the Nashville area, where she’s pursuing her musical ambitions. She just released her first music video.
“The chance to capture the bittersweet journey of watching my sons grow up in ‘Bullet Trains’ was incredible,” she says. ‘In just four minues, this video takes me from the anxious excited of pregnacy through the chaos of toddler years, school days, and into a glimpse of their future as they move out on their own.”
Directed by William Gawley. the video has already accumulated more than 23,000 views on YouTube. “I’m grateful to those who encouraged me to share it with the world, and I’m humbled by how many people have connected with it, especially during this time of year, when kids are going back to school.”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
It is beyond dispute that Francis Ford Coppola is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. That would still be true if he had retired in 1972 after The Godfather won Best Picture. By the time Marlon Brando was sending a Native American rights activist to accept his Best Actor Oscar, Coppola was already making The Conversation, a film about what surveillance does to individuals and society so far ahead of its time that we’re just now catching up to it. Then there was The Godfather Part II, which for my money is actually better than the original. With Apocalypse Now, he tackled Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a book which none other than Orson Welles had tried and failed to adapt. It remains the definitive screen treatment of the Vietnam War. And there are so many more: Bram Stoker’s Dracula; The Rainmaker, which was filmed in Memphis; the list goes on.
Coppola semi-retired from filmmaking in the twenty-first century to concentrate on his other love, winemaking. The one that got away, the idea that he was never able to convince any studio to finance, was Megalopolis. A few years ago, Coppola sold some of his Sonoma County winery land for $500 million. The filmmaker, now 85 years old, put $120 million of his own money on the line to make his dream project real.
There’s an internet meme that men are always thinking about the Roman Empire. Coppola certainly has spent a lot of time thinking about Ancient Rome, specifically the era from 70-27 AD when the 480-year-old Republic decayed into the Roman Empire. It’s no coincidence that this period was also an obsession of the Founding Fathers. When Benjamin Franklin was walking out of the Constitutional Convention, a person on the street asked what kind of government they had come up with. Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Megalopolis opens with a shot of the Chrysler Building bathed in golden light. But in this near-future world, it’s not in New York City, but in New Rome. Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) steps out onto the roof, and for a moment it looks like he’s going to jump. As he steps over the ledge, he says, “Time, stop!” — and it does! The artist, Laurence Fishburne’s voiceover tells us, has the power to control time.
Catalina has a Nobel Prize for inventing Megalon, a miracle material with near-miraculous properties. He wants to use it to transform New Rome into a utopia, a “school city” which will create happiness and prosperity for all. His rival is New Rome’s popular mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who thinks Catalina is a “reckless dreamer who will destroy this world before we can build a better one.” Catalina’s mistress is a TV presenter named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), and the only thing bigger than her love for him is her ambition. When he refuses to marry her, she takes up with his uncle Crassus (Jon Voight), an elderly banker who has backed his nephew’s work but doesn’t approve of his hedonistic lifestyle.
But it’s New Rome, so hedonism is the order of the day. Sex and drugs are everywhere. There are chariot races and gladiatorial games in Madison Square Garden. The mayor’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) seems to be a creature of decadence until she meets Catalina. At first she’s attracted to Catalina just to piss off her father, but then she discovers the depth of his imaginings and makes it her mission to unite the two warring houses. Meanwhile, Crassus’ son Claudio (Shia LaBeouf) is scheming to overthrow both of them and take power for himself at the head of a fascist movement he recruited out of the disaffected people left behind by Catalina’s utopian gentrification.
Coppola wrote, produced, and directed Megalopolis. The direction is near flawless. The old master can still toss off stunning visual riffs at will, and since he doesn’t have to answer to frightened studio execs, Coppola has created a visual feast of a film that is completely unlike anything else coming out of Hollywood this century. The closest thing to it is probably Federico Fellini’s Satyricon, but really, there’s no comparison with anything.
Coppola’s problem is the writing. This is an art film, not a plot-heavy blockbuster, but a little more coherence would have gone a long way. Coppola wrote Megalopolis in fits and spurts over 40 years, and it shows — you can even tell how far along he was in the script when 9/11 happened. And yet, the language is frequently poetic and beautiful in its own right.
Most of the cast is clearly so happy to be working with a legend like Coppola that they’re game for anything. Only the strongest survive this chaotic swirl of images with their dignity intact. Adam Driver flawlessly delivers the entire “To be or not to be” speech from Hamlet while walking on an unstable catwalk above a model of his utopian vision. Aubrey Plaza’s seduction of Shia LaBeouf will be the stuff of legend. Giancarlo Esposito switches freely between Latin and English without breaking a sweat. The less confident are set adrift, like the hapless Nathalie Emmanuel.
Megalopolis is not for everyone. Actually, it’s not for anyone except Coppola. He no longer cares what you think. He’s strolling through a century of cinematic history, contemplating the possibilities destroyed by the pursuit of profit and personal power. It’s up to you to get on his level, and that may be a daunting task. This is not cinematic prose, but poetry, with all the obscurity and difficulty that implies. It’s a meditation on the role of the art in the world, made by a genuine artist who is deeply ambivalent. It’s self-indulgent semi-autobiography. It’s a political manifesto against fascism delivered at this critical juncture in the American experiment. You can’t say they don’t make ’em like Megalopolis anymore, because they never did.
Singer/songwriter Alice Hasen‘s new EP is called Dream of Rain. “The EP explores themes of climate change and mental health,” she says.
For the first single, “Hold Still,” Hasen incorporated strings into her folk rock sound. “With dreamy vocals, it explores themes of denialism, evoking a perfect world where nothing is wrong. One listener described it as, ‘What an angel would sing to me as I die.'”
Nolan Dean directed and shot the video, which features Hasen’s guitarist Walt Busby as a musician who tries to summon the muse (played by Hasen) in his attic. “She quickly overtakes him, sending him into a trance where he imagines a dream world,” says Hasen. “The group scenes were filmed on Buck Island on the Mississippi River, and feature friends from both the Memphis community and the Mississippi Delta community, hailing from Helena, Arkansas, and Clarksdale, Mississippi. Having lived in Clarksdale for four years, I was grateful to incorporate folks from both communities, and also to film in such a special and otherworldly setting. The water level was at a record low, making for huge expanses of beach and sky.”
Here’s the world premiere of “Hold Still.”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
There’s an embarrassment of riches in movie theaters this rainy weekend. Let’s get right to them.
Megalopolis
Francis Ford Coppola, legendary director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, worked on the idea for an epic story inspired by the history of the Roman Empire, but set in New York City, since the 1980s. Frustrated by the conservatism of the Hollywood machine which couldn’t understand his vision, at age 80, he sold his wineries in Sonoma County, California, and spent $120 million of his own money to make it himself. An all-star cast flocked to his side to be a part of the great project: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Talia Shire, Laurence Fishburne, Nathalie Emmanuel, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and Aubrey Plaza, who plays a TV host named Wow Platinum. The people who have seen the film seem to either love it or hate it. Check out the spread of reviews on Google, which is like nothing I’ve ever seen:
I’ll let you know my opinion in next week’s issue. Meanwhile, here’s the trailer.
My Old Ass
Speaking of Aburey Plaza, she also co-stars in this very different film from writer/director Megan Park. It’s Elliot’s (Missy Stella) 18th birthday, and she’s ambivalent about leaving home for college. When her friends give her some psychedelic mushrooms, she sees her future self, played by Plaza, who tells her what it’s going to be like to be her for the next couple of decades — and also to avoid a guy named Chad (Percy Hynes White).
The Wild Robot
Dreamworks Animation’s latest is by Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon animator Chris Sanders. Lupita Nyong’o voices ROZZUM, a robot who washes up on a tropical island with no memory of how it got there. Sanders’ film is based on a beloved children’s book by author Peter Brown.
Paul McCartney and Wings: One Hand Clapping
In 1974, Band on the Run was the biggest album in the world. Filmmaker David Litchfield joined Paul McCartney and his band at Abby Road Studios for four days to shoot them rehearsing for their upcoming tour. The completed film failed to sell, and sat on a shelf for decades. Its 4K remaster finally saw the light of day, and now it’s getting rave reviews.
It’s not often that I can sum up my thoughts on a movie in one sentence, but this is one of those times.
The Substance is what you would get if David Cronenberg directed Sunset Boulevard.
Obviously I need to write more about the new film from French writer/director/producer Coralie Fargeat, but that’s the gist of it. It is a film that is fantastical in both outlook and execution, but is primarily concerned with a down-to-earth problem that affects millions of people: body dysmorphia.
The Substance starts with a very simple image that both tells you exactly what its eponymous substance does and establishes the film’s color palette. A single egg yolk is on a blue-green background. A syringe filled with a green substance (the universal horror/sci-fi film symbol for “This stuff is exotic, powerful, and dangerous”) injects the egg yolk. A few seconds later, the yolk divides, and a second yolk, identical to the first, appears right next to it.
The implications of this extremely basic but powerful image will play out over the next 141 minutes. We then go to a time lapse of a crew working on a patch of concrete. Slowly, their assignment emerges from the little details of their craft. They’re making one of the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s dedicated to Elisabeth Sparkle.
Los Angelinos have the same attitude towards the Walk of Fame that Memphians have about Graceland. It’s for tourists, and it’s terminally tacky. But I love the Walk of Fame and make a point to visit it when I’m in Hollywood. It’s very revealing about the real nature of the American film industry and the culture it created. For the last century, we’ve been minting new stars, mostly to give people a reason to go to the movies. When it’s brand-new, the star is the ultimate symbol of success in the entertainment field. But the thing about the Hollywood Walk of Fame is that it’s a public street. If you have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, people walk on your name all day, every day. Most of the 2,798 stars feature familiar names like Lucille Ball or James Cagney. But do you know who Clyde Cook was? Or Gloria DeHaven? Fame can be fleeting, especially for women in Hollywood.
Elisabeth Sparkle’s star is slowly weathered and cracked over the years and the millions of people who walk over it. Finally, in the present day, someone drops a hamburger on it, and it is stained red with ketchup. This is the first hint of red in a film that will soon be dripping with blood.
We never see Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) in her heyday, but through some side dialogue, we learn that she once won an Oscar. These days, she’s doing pretty good for herself, though. She’s got a popular aerobics show reminiscent of Jane Fonda’s Workout. (Fonda won two Oscars, and her Workout series are among the bestselling home video products of all time.) The hall she walks down to get to her studio is lined with images of her past triumphs. But today is her 50th birthday, so she’s getting fired by her producer, the unsubtly named Harvey (Dennis Quaid, dripping slime). In true Hollywood fashion, it doesn’t matter to Harvey that Elisabeth is great at her job and looks amazing. He wants someone younger.
While driving home, distracted after a disgusting lunch with Harvey, she gets into a car wreck. One of the doctors who examines her has a strange air about him and declares that she is a “perfect candidate.” When she gets home, she discovers a thumb drive marked “The Substance” wrapped in a torn piece of paper that says, “It changed my life!”
When she plugs the drive into her TV, she sees an infomercial for The Substance, which promises to make a new, better you. Reluctantly, but almost compulsively, she calls the number on the screen, where a mysterious voice gives her an address in one of the sleazier neighborhoods of L.A. From a group of lockers, she picks out her number, 503, and finds a box with lots of medical equipment and simple, Ikea-like instructions.
There’s a great moment when Elisabeth takes The Substance where Demi Moore does that disappointed “this edible ain’t shit” face, right before it kicks in. The Substance splits Elisabeth in two, with a younger, prettier, and more energetic version emerging from a gaping hole in her back. The younger version, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), must first get to work stitching up the older version’s gaping wound. Elisabeth’s consciousness can live in Sue for only one week at a time, and Sue must have daily injections of stabilizer, which she must harvest from Elisabeth’s inert body.
At first, things go great. Sue tries out for the show which will replace Elisabeth’s show, and immediately gets it. Harvey is glad to work around Sue’s strange one-week-on, one-week-off schedule. The show, now named Pump Up With Sue, is more popular than ever.
But none of this renewed success brings Elisabeth any comfort. She spends most of her non-Sue time watching Sue on television, and becoming increasingly more resentful of her younger, “better” self. For her part, Sue starts to hate reverting to Elisabeth, and starts disobeying The Substance voice’s explicit instructions not to try to stay young longer than a week. This has disastrous and extremely gross consequences for both of them.
Fargeat has a wicked satirical sense and an unerring eye for disorienting shots. The close-ups of gyrating body parts and Moore and Qualley’s near-constant nudity quickly go from titillating to disquieting. When The Substance starts to play havoc with Elisabeth’s body, Fargeat shoots the results as unsparingly as any Cronenberg gross-out fest.
The Substance is a profound work of body horror about the lengths women will go to to feel attractive in the toxic patriarchy of celebrity culture. It’s a comment on both the abusive culture created by the Harvey Weinsteins of the world and on the miracle drugs like Ozempic, which promise to make you skinny and shiny without consequence, at least if you can afford it. To paraphrase Cronenberg’s Videodrome, The Substance has a philosophy, and that’s what makes it dangerous.
The Substance
Now playing
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This is Best of Memphis week at the Memphis Flyer! We asked our readers who they think is the best of nearly everything in Memphis. You can see the full results here. We celebrated the winners at the Best of Memphis party last Wednesday night at Railgarten, with musical guest Salo Pallini.
This year, after much outcry, we finally created separate categories for original artists and cover bands in the music category. We’ve also got categories for rappers and singers. Let’s start with our Best Rapper, Memphis meteor GloRilla. Coincidentally, she just released a new music video “Hollon,” to prime the pump for her upcoming debut full-length Glorious.
The best in the Local Bands category is Lucero, a perinnial favorite of Flyer readers who have been touring relentlessly in support of their 2023 album Should’ve Learned By Now. Here’s the lyric video for “One Last F.U.”
Thank you to everyone who voted in the 2024 Best of Memphis! If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
On Wednesday, Sept. 18th, the day our Best of Memphis 2024 list was released to a waiting world, the winners gathered at Railgarten for a celebration.
I was there with my trusty iPhone camera to record the event for posterity. Thanks to Salo Pallini for the music, and for everyone involved in making this party a raving success.
One strange thing about the pandemic is the effect it had on art. Economically, it weakened and destroyed arts organizations of all stripes. It’s even harder to make a living as a musician or actor today than it was in 2019 — and it’s not like it was easy in the Before Time. It’s also interesting that there is not a lot of great art that came from enduring the worldwide trauma.
It’s not like artists weren’t doing anything during the pandemic. Trapped in their homes for months at a time, working through anxiety, artists made a lot of art. Some of it, like Bo Burnham’s Inside, was pretty good. But once the pandemic was over, audiences were also over it. Nobody wants to think about the dark, scary days of the pandemic, so nobody wants to see movies or listen to music which brings those feelings back. Turns out, this is not a new phenomenon. Very little memorable art came out of the 1918 flu pandemic. After the mass death, people just wanted to party.
But there is at least one great work of art which happened as a result of a pandemic. The Decameron was written by Giovanni Boccaccio after the Black Death swept through Italy in 1348. In it, a group of young people flee the pestilence in Florence to hole up in a secluded country villa. There, they pass the time by spinning stories, some real, some made up. The 100 short stories Boccaccio wrote were revolutionary, both for the beauty of his prose and the positively liberated way he viewed women. The stories were sometimes funny, sometimes bawdy, and sometimes tragic. Chaucer was inspired by The Decameron to make his own loosely connected tome of short stories in English, The Canterbury Tales.
Producer Kathleen Jordan responded to Covid lockdown by revisiting The Decameron. The book’s episodic nature makes it perfect for television adaptation. In the pilot episode, “The Beautiful, Not-Infected Countryside,” the young nobles of Florence are invited to ride out the wave of infection at Villa Santa, the estate of the Visconte Leonardo. Pampinea (Zosia Mamet) is Leonardo’s arranged fiancé, but she has never actually met the guy. She sets off to the villa with her impressive dowry and loyal servant Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson). Unbeknownst to Pampinea, Misia has stowed her commoner lover Parmena (Tazmyn-May Gebbett) in a barrel for the trip. It’s a dangerous gambit because not only is lesbianism frowned upon in heavily Catholic medieval Italy, but also because Parmena is showing signs of the plague.
Filomena (Jessica Plummer) desperately wants to get out of Florence and maybe meet some marriageable men at the villa, but she and her servant Licisca (Tanya Reynolds) are stuck tending to her elderly father, who is infected with plague. When he finally passes, their trip to the villa has scarcely begun before the pandemic tensions boil over, and Licisca pushes Filomena over a bridge. When she arrives at the villa, Licisca assumes her mistress’ identity.
Panfilo (Karan Gill) and Neifile (Lou Gala) present as an extremely pious couple. But the secret to their chaste lifestyle is that Panfilio is gay. Once at the villa, they both become infatuated with Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel), a himbo doctor in the employ of Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), who is as wealthy as he is arrogant.
The visitors to the villa are greeted by Sirisco (Tony Hale), the steward of the villa, and Stratilia (Leila Farzad), the cook, who have a dark secret: Leonardo, the master of the house, died of the plague after he issued his invitation. As long as no one finds out, the servants can continue to be master of their own fates. The ensuing struggle for control of Leonardo’s property provides much of The Decameron’s overarching plot. The ensemble cast doesn’t tell stories as much as they live them, in the awkward and socially charged interactions that make up the series’ humor.
What keeps you off-balance in The Decameron is that anyone can die at any time. And they do, in various states of indignity and hilarity. The series’ casting is outstanding, and each of the ensemble gets a turn in at least one great scene. Neifile gets stuck in a well and won’t come out until God himself rescues her. The militaristic Tindaro is also a hypochondriac, and his doctor is milking the delusion for all its worth. As the social order breaks down, a group of mercenaries show up, and the nobles discover their claim to privilege disappears in the absence of guys with swords who will obey their commands.
As you might expect from such an episodic format, The Decameron is ultimately uneven. Some of the situations fall flat. But when the combination of talented comic actors and absurd situations click, it’s a morbidly good time.
The Decameron is streaming on Netflix.
Today we have a world premiere music video, which is a collaboration between two Memphis originals.
General Labor is Thomas Corbin, Elijah Posten, and Carlos Carrasco. “Illuminator” is a throbbing, screaming synth punk symphony.
“Though we work in repetitive, clock-synced instrumentation that rides on rails, we try to always leave space for magic,” says Corbin. “We draw heavily from Surrealist techniques and Oblique Strategies for finding our words and instrumental composition, so that the meaning seems to be coming from ‘somewhere else.’ For that reason, the lyrics are largely open to interpretation.
“However, in retrospect, ‘Illuminator’ seems to describe a fearless pursuit of wisdom and truth, trusting a process of transformation that carries one through the dark night of the soul. If this thread of meaning is followed, ‘Illuminator’ appears to be about ego death. It’s about finding the flame that burns inside of us all and harnessing it in a way that serves a higher purpose rather than fueling the will of self.
“The lyrics reflect a journey of self-discovery, transformation, and enlightenment through philosophical and alchemical lenses. It describes a search for hidden truths beyond the visible world, symbolizing the pursuit of deeper understanding by tapping into one’s subconscious mind, guiding the seeker toward a greater self-awareness.
The short answer is that we have no idea what it means!”
Thomas Corbin
“The alignment of senses that metamorphoses the seeker from a shadow self to illuminated self signifies the culmination of alchemical philosophy where body, mind, and spirit harmonize, and where the excess ‘dross’ of character flaws and maladaptations are burned off, revealing the purified gold within. That’s the long explanation, anyway. The short answer is that we have no idea what it means!”
The video was shot at a collaborative performance between the band and Graham Burks’ circuit-bending visuals.
“The live performance featured in the video was recorded at Black Lodge, to whom we are incredibly grateful for letting us pursue such an ambitious experiment,” says Corbin. “We wanted to stay true to this attitude of subconscious exploration and truth-seeking through artistic expression.
“There was no real concept other than to find the magic in the moment, all the way from the song’s inception to the audiovisual performance, recording, and current debut in video form.”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.