Author: Greg Akers

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

TV Review: Veep

CREDIT: Paul Schiraldi

It seems as though not enough has been made about the greatness of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and her current show, Veep, which just completed its third season — if it’s possible that an actress who has won consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series could be considered having gone “under the radar.” Louis-Dreyfus is best known for playing Elaine from Seinfeld, the kind of career stele so monumental it threatened to overshadow anything else she’d ever do.

Her performance in Veep as U.S. Vice President Selina Meyer, 14 years after Seinfeld ended, topples that possibility. Meyer may even be a better character than Elaine — though it should be caveated that I’m the kind of revisionist who prefers Futurama to The Simpsons and The Dark Knight Rises to The Dark Knight.

The premise of Veep is that the second-most powerful person in the free world, the American VP, a heartbeat away from the presidency, is so unimportant and ineffectual a figure that they are shut out of White House decision-making, assigned humiliating tasks, and roundly ignored except for the occasional political blunder.

Paul Schiraldi

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Sam Richardson

Louis-Dreyfus is, at the risk of hyperbole, exquisite in the role. She has the right mix of intelligence, polish, and charisma to be believable as an electable politician and attractive running mate but adds to it enough inelegance, foolishness, and insensitivity to prove she doesn’t merit anything greater. Meyers’ political ambition is matched only by her ability to unwittingly thwart it. Parks and Recreation‘s Amy Poehler is the only one in the medium who matches Louis-Dreyfus’ timing, delivery, and chops for physical comedy.

Meyer belittles her staff, cursing to a degree worthy of a sailor’s swear jar — everybody on the show does, actually. But what makes Veep‘s crudeness so endlessly enjoyable is that the characters (i.e., the actors and writers) seem to be constantly searching for the single greatest putdown a scenario can have. Veep‘s style is to keep a scene going past the point of when the critical plot information is conveyed, just to watch characters interact. The dialog is either improvisational or wielded so that it appears organic to the situation. My all-time favorite: Meyer calls the tall, unctuous White House liaison, Jonah (Timothy Simons) a “jolly green jizz-face.”

In addition to Jonah (my favorite character on the show after Meyer), the Veep ensemble is stacked with greatness: chief of staff, Amy (Anna Chlumsky); personal assistant, Gary (Tony Hale); spokesperson, Mike (Matt Walsh); political operative, Dan (Reid Scott); office administrator, Sue (Sufe Bradshaw); prez chief of staff, Ben (Kevin Dunn); strategist, Kent (Gary Cole); and Selina’s daughter, Catherine (Sarah Sutherland). There’s no duplication in personality in the group, except that they are all beloved fools and jackasses.

Veep was created by Armando Iannucci, who directed and co-wrote the amazing political-diplomatic film satire In the Loop. Though Scottish, his ear for bureaucratic idiocy is so strong — or else the notion so universal — he evinces a firm grasp of the farcical machinations and absurd argot spoken inside the Beltway.

Categories
Book Features Books

A Q&A with Noir Author Megan Abbott

In a decade, Megan Abbott went from publishing her dissertation about “the solitary white man moving through the city” in mid-20th-century American hard boiled fiction (book title: The Street Was Mine, 2002) to subverting classic period noir settings with women-character-driven stories in Edgar Award-winning fashion (Die a Little, 2005; The Song is You, 2007; Queenpin, 2007; Bury Me Deep, 2009) to contemporizing noir themes in teenage settings, coming of age as criminal loss of innocence (The End of Everything, 2011; Dare Me, 2012). That last one — a cheer noir with an ostensible villain cheerleader every bit as dangerous as the head of a fictional crime syndicate — put Abbott further into the cultural conscious than ever before. The book has been optioned for a film with Natalie Portman attached to star (though it may end up hitting the screens as a TV series).

In the fall 2013 and spring 2014, Abbott served as the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss. There, she taught MFA and undergrad writing classes and worked on her next novel. She also participated in the SRO Noir at the Bar event at Proud Larry’s in February, along with notable local writers Ace Atkins, Tom Franklin, Jack Pendarvis, and William Boyle. That night, she read from her new novel, The Fever, based on real happenings a few years ago in Le Roy, New York. Eighteen high school girls developed vocal and motor tics. There were theories about what was causing it — environmental toxins, fracking, the HPV vaccine, or simply a case of “mass hysteria.” Abbott began writing her fictionalized version the day she heard about the incidents. “It was like I had been waiting to write a story about that kind of case, and then that kind of case happened,” she says. It’s the book that appears to be about to permanently ensconce Abbott on the Rand McNally of the publishing world.

The Memphis Flyer sat down on a May afternoon with Abbott at the literary seat of power in Oxford, Square Books. Earlier that day, she had finished teaching her last class, and within a week she would be heading back to her home in New York.

Memphis Flyer: How was teaching at Ole Miss?

Megan Abbott: Their writing is exemplary here. It’s a really vigorous [creative writing] program. They’re committed, they believe in writing, and they take it seriously.

Did you learn anything about your own writing teaching others to write?

I couldn’t have articulated before about how important it is to make weird choices in your writing. When you make a weird choice, you’re drawing a line with the reader, and when you get the reader across that line, you have them forever — or for the book at least. Because you’re asking them to think about or ponder or feel something they didn’t think they were going to have to feel. It’s the theme of all the books I loved as a kid, and it’s still how I value [a] story. Though it isn’t the content that has to be weird, sometimes it’s the sentence structure or language.

I read a lot of spooky stories and a lot of true crime as a kid. You remember Archie comic books? I used to love them. They have a very glorified view of America and teenager-dom. But I bought an issue once that had a Betty plotline. She looks in the mirror one day and has red blotches on her cheeks, and she can’t explain it. She’s horrified. It turns out to be some kind of familial curse, and there’s a vampire in it, and a ghost, and a gypsy … . What was happening was, the publisher was experimenting with doing an Archie version of Dark Shadows. But it blew my mind because it’s not what you expect when you read Archie. And because of that, my mom gave me Jane Eyre to read. So it turned me on to these Gothic books.

What do you think of them killing off Archie in the July issue?

I know someone who’s a publicist for them, the crime writer Alex Segura. He told me about it in advance. We were talking about how it would be great to have a noir Archie, and he said, “Wait until you see what’s gonna happen.” But, I have a feeling the reports of his death are greatly exaggerated.

Did you read the Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips Criminal storyline [The Last of the Innocent] that has the Archie take-off in it?

Yes. In fact I know Ed now, but I didn’t when I read it. I’ve written for some of the back pages in Criminal, because he has a similar idea about breaking the thing that looks perfect; it’s sort of the Twin Peaks thing. It opens up to this dark matter inside.

You’re from Michigan?

Right outside of Detroit in Grosse Pointe. But the town has an unbelievably stark dividing line. There’s one street where it turns from Detroit to Grosse Pointe, and nothing passes between them. All the perils and troubles of Detroit never seem to touch Grosse Point, which will be 1954 forever. I didn’t grow up in the affluent side of Grosse Point — I lived near the freeway. That’s how we used to divide it, if you lived by Lake St. Clair or if you lived by the freeway, and how many digits you had in your address. The fewer digits you had, you were closer to the lake. It’s where all the auto magnates built these big houses. It has a yacht club and a hunt club. It’s always had that reputation of being old money and hasn’t changed that much.

Is the community in The End of Everything that same kind of suburban place as Grosse Pointe?

In my head it is, though not as wealthy and class isn’t so much an issue. Visually, that’s what I was picturing. There is a lake there, and you can’t go in it. I had references to that in The End of Everything, and [when the book was in production] there was a fact-checking question about lakes not having currents. I was like, wow, you don’t know the Great Lakes.

What about in The Fever. The same kind of place?

It’s more of a small town. I was thinking of it like a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, with a really contained place. A panic has a bigger effect there.

You had a normal upbringing, nothing too crazy?

It was alarmingly uncomplicated. [Laughs.] It was a book-loving household. My dad is a professor at Wayne State and a writer. My mom wrote on the side and now writes short stories. My brother is a compulsive reader. We passed around books constantly. That made its mark on me more than anything specifically in my childhood.

Were you allowed to read anything you wanted?

Yes. We used to go to used bookstores a lot. Because of the dramatic quality of the covers, I was drawn to true crime at an unhealthy age — not that it really had an unhealthy effect, because it didn’t do anything to me. But the books terrified me, and you love to be scared as a kid. I remember reading at an early age Helter Skelter and Hollywood Babylon. I liked looking at the pictures in the middle of the book and reading all those tales of women who marry men who are con artists who then kill them. I read mysteries like Agatha Christie as a kid, but I didn’t discover crime fiction until high school.

Like the actual hard-boiled classics?

I was working my way through the canon, and I knew of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett from the movies, but I didn’t even read most of those until grad school. I picked hard-boiled fiction for the thesis so that I could read them.

There wasn’t a bigger reason than just that you wanted to read them?

I didn’t think they got enough attention. Once I read one or two, they were so great to me, and important and influential, that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been taught them in a class before. And I had gone through countless English classes by then. They’re still not taught enough. And there’s no reason you couldn’t teach Hammett’s Red Harvest in an American Literature class. And it wouldn’t be another dissertation on William Faulkner — which I would’ve absolutely enjoyed, I partially came to Ole Miss because I love Faulkner. But I felt like it would be fresher terrain.

You went to the University of Michigan, and then to NYU for grad school?

I started out wanting to study psychology, and then film, and then, like many others, I landed in English, because you get to talk about books all the time. I wanted to move to New York with two of my girlfriends, so I applied to NYU for the master’s program to give me a reason to go there. I ended up getting my Ph.D., too, because I wanted to talk more about books!

When in all this did you begin to write?

I took a few workshops as an undergrad, and it wasn’t until I started working on my dissertation that I wanted to write something in noir town. I had read Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, which feels noir when you read it. I started writing about 50 pages of The End of Everything, but I had no idea how to write a novel. It became a crime novel when I discovered crime fiction. I had a situation but I didn’t know what the book was.

There seems to be a change between the classic noir settings of your novels up to Bury Me Deep and the more contemporary novels from The End of Everything on. Do your agent and publisher suggest that you try certain types of books?

I wanted to do something different for myself creatively [with The End of Everything]. I could write mid-century party scenes forever and never get tired of it. But I thought it would be harder to write closer to present day, because it didn’t feel glamorous to me. Once I started writing the book, I figured out how to make it interesting to me. It was good to take that risk. Somehow I could bring the themes of the earlier books into this world and they would take different shapes.

In the last three books, there’s a character who a little obsessively observes another family, or idolizes a friend or an older sibling. Is that kind of a glamour you’re talking about?

I meant more like an atmosphere or mood, but you’re more right because I do always have the character see something else in some enchanting way. And that’s the energy that pushes the book that they want in that world.

There’s a mystery to that idea, too, because there’s always something darker behind the door.

And ultimately the darkest person is usually the one looking. As a David Lynch fan, you know where that comes from. That always happens.

Kyle MacLachlan in the closet in Blue Velvet.

Exactly. Addie in Dare Me is in many ways my darkest character of all. Which was surprising. But, “It lurks in all of us,” right? The Fever is the only time I don’t exactly do that — they’re probably the nicest protagonists.

There’s a theme of compulsion running through your books: Characters are doing things that are bad for them, and they cannot help it, and they want to do it.

Definitely. That is, to me, the thing of everything. [Abbott laughs.] It’s the only thing I understand that drives a story. Unexpected compulsive behavior is like how all of the plots are propelled in my books, along with the idea that in the end we trap ourselves and then we can maybe save ourselves. What’s really interesting to me isn’t bringing the reader to a catastrophic place but having them identify with the character and have them go places they didn’t think they would go. And then coming out of it somehow.

Is there an element of addiction to it, even beyond compulsion? In Queenpin, the protagonist is in a relationship with a guy, and she knows her boss might kill her because of this, and it doesn’t matter, she cannot stop it. That’s an addiction; the thing you’re doing will probably kill you and it doesn’t matter.

Addiction absolutely applies, but I think how I framed it in my head was like in Double Indemnity, with Walter, and there’s a line in the book where he knows that Phyllis is bad, that he’s going to get caught, and he wants to peep over the edge and he can’t stop himself, which is compulsion. It’s not nihilism, but more a sense of one’s destiny. Which is why I’ll never leave the noir sensibility, because I do believe in that. These are people driven by the Freudian death drive: They don’t want to die, but they want to go to the edge. That’s what’s so funny in Queenpin, because it was weird to have a female character express that. Vicki Hendricks does that in Miami Purity. She does the plot of The Postman Always Rings Twice and switches the genders. In the case of Queenpin, it’s a power test with Gloria, too. She’s in many ways a practical person. It’s so weird thinking about it now. Because they just want it and they don’t necessarily want to stop and then they don’t want to stop and they don’t want to stop and they don’t want to stop. And the protagonist is young, too. Which is a reason I knew teenagers would be good to write about, because they don’t always think through the ramifications of their choices.

Your novels share the characteristic of a young woman character who encounters a new, dangerous world in a noir setting, and your more recent novels seem to literalize the idea within the context of the humid violence of coming of age.

Yeah, and you’re making yourself in some way, so it’s got to be painful, and everything matters so much. It’s funny to think of yourself at that age and why you felt certain ways about yourself so keenly. That’s a way to bring those noir themes but make it realistic. That is your world when you’re a teenager. You read that and you remember being that age.

Do you have a lot of teen readers?

Increasingly, especially after Dare Me. Based on the early responses of the YA bloggers, that will probably be true of The Fever. YA and adult fiction are merging in a strange way that wasn’t true in my day — in my day there wasn’t even a thing called YA. A lot of adults I know read YA, and a million teenagers read adult books. I’m not purposely trying to write a book so an adult and a teen could read it — I don’t know how to thread that needle — but I’m glad they can. I’m especially glad when teens don’t find my books condescending, especially young girls, who are often treated as objects or drama queens or a pop culture parody in some way. I’m sure there are cheerleaders who found that Dare Me isn’t like them, but some have told me that it is, and that it’s actually even more extreme. There are a lot of former cheerleaders at Ole Miss, as you can imagine, and I had a student in class who said her experience was just like Dare Me.

Speaking of Twitter, I know through your account [@MeganEAbbott] that when you were young you were fascinated by the Michael Rockefeller disappearance. And now the new book has come out about what happened [Carl Hoffman’s Savage Harvest].

Oh, yeah!

Do you think there’s something about being a kid and a fascination with the idea that the whole world is mysterious? I fixated on disappearances and weird things and the show In Search Of and Time-Life Books … .

We had the same childhood!

What is it about childhood that makes us respond to those things?

When you’re a kid you feel you’re not allowed into the adult world and that there are secrets being kept from you — and there are literal secrets being kept from you. I remember my parents would have parties and I would be upstairs and try to hear what they were talking about, and they were laughing and they were drunk and were telling bawdy stories, and I thought, I want to know what’s going on! What am I not being told? What is out there? And I think kids are natural investigators — that’s why there are so many kid detective stories and series, it’s about that pursuit: I need to know, I need to know! And if it’s spooky you need to know more.

When I watch those clips of In Search Of on YouTube, I get terrified. I don’t even know if I would want a child to watch it. It gave me nightmares. The Michael Rockefeller book is the scariest book I’ve ever read, but it couldn’t just be what’s in this book; it was summoning back to years of childhood and that there were headhunters and cannibals out there and they were looking for you.

Another one like that is the movie Picnic at Hanging Rock. Give me a sneak peak of the essay you wrote for the new Criterion Blu-ray edition [being released June 17th].

I knew the film as a kid, and I saw it again in college. Criterion asked me to write the essay maybe because of The End of Everything. But watching the movie again after writing The Fever, I realized the movie is about hysteria. I wondered how much it had affected me more than I knew. My essay is about how the movie works because of its famous unresolved ending. Whatever theory we’ve been developing in our head about the mystery in the movie, we’re stuck with it. We know that it’s ours, our mind produced that, whether the girls were raped and killed or they were eaten by cannibals or whatever theory we had: We have to own it. That’s why people got so mad about the ending. There was a story [director] Peter Weir told about a studio executive throwing a coffee cup at the screen during an early screening. And I didn’t even know [the film] was based on a book [by Joan Lindsay], but it’s really good. It’s very short, and when they published it, they chopped off the last chapter, because it explains the mystery. It’s very creepy, but the book is much better without it.

That’s what makes it so powerful, because you just don’t know. The girls were swallowed by the land.

And it has a ripple effect on everybody. When I was a kid I know I was told it was based on a real life case, even though it wasn’t at all. People still think it is.

With Picnic, there’s a connection between the natural world and how portentous it is for these young girls. When I was reading The Fever and the lake that figures into the plot so much, it reminded me of Hanging Rock in the film. Everything kept going back to the rock, and whether it was the cause of the mystery or not, it didn’t matter so much as its importance to these girls.

Exactly. That emerged entirely organically. In the real case The Fever is based on, there was no lake. Part of it came from me growing up by a mysterious lake. Once I started thinking of the lake, its creepiness grew in my head: the smells and the feel of it. That it would have all this small town legend associated with it. You couldn’t go into the water. I remember people drowning in Lake St. Clair. When you’re a kid, that stuff lives in your brain. I love the Salem Witch Trials, and in that case, there’s the idea that these girls felt guilty about this thing they had done in the woods. I realized I had unconsciously wanted to do a version of that, and in the case of The Fever, it becomes the lake. It happened organically, and it became creepier and creepier and I couldn’t let it go. Nature scares me a little, it really does! Maybe it’s living in New York too long. But that lake was the nature of it, and it felt like a death trap. It was beautiful, but deadly. [Abbott laughs.] Plus, it’s really fun to describe. I researched the algal bloom and became fascinated by it. It was glamorous to me, strange and exotic.

How difficult was The Fever to write?

It was one of the easiest. I knew the story really early on, but I wanted it to stay frightening and to keep multiple possibilities floating and keep the ending a surprise. The challenge was to convey the bigness of the event in this small place.

Was there anything like that community-wide fear when you were growing up?

There was a time when I was a kid there were a lot of missing kid cases getting attention because of the Adam Walsh case. There were a lot of school meetings about it. They had the parents put a sign in their windows that was a fluorescent orange letter E. I don’t know what it stood for, but it meant that it was a safe place, so if you thought someone was following you, you could go into that house. Even as a kid, it seemed insane, because if you wanted to kill a kid, wouldn’t you put the sign in your window? You wouldn’t even have to go look for them, they’d come to you!

Is there anything you’re taking from your time in Oxford that has really stood out that might make it into a book, or is it too soon to say?

Yeah, the landscape and the way it’s a magical place; Oxford at night, especially. It’s so beautiful and mysterious, and it’s so different from the North and the Midwest. It will be after I’ve been gone awhile and am reflecting on it, but some glimmer will come.

Do you know what the next book you write from scratch will be?

I have a list of six ideas, and I need to see which one takes. I’ve narrowed it down. I’ve had a lot of false starts with books. It happened with The End of Everything. There are a few I won’t ever go back to because they didn’t catch fire.

Does your next book [now in revision] have a name yet?

It’s called You Will Know Me. It’s about a family with a child prodigy. They’ve always struck me as interesting families because of the way the power works. And then there’s a crime, obviously. I will consider that my Oxford book. I was well into it before I came here, but in Oxford I really pushed through the second half of it.

Is there a certain era you’d like to write about?

I’d like to do something in the 1910s or early ’20s. It was a time of great hucksterism and con artists. And also, like with the Helen Spence case [depicted in Daughter of the White River by Denise White Parkinson], there were still a lot of parts of America that were local in a way where there’d be local justice and rules, and outsiders could be dangerous.

When did you begin to really feel success as a writer?

There are always moments where you feel different, and then you get knocked back down. [Abbott laughs.] It’s filled with failure, and petty indignities, and large indignities. I’ve had great luck and beyond lucky to work with Reagan Arthur, the rock-star editor everyone wanted to work with. She edited Kate Atkinson and George Pelecanos and many others. But in the end you’re stuck with the book, and stuck with the page, and it’s not working, and often you feel like it’s so easy for some writers, and some are struggling more than you. You know how on Mad Men, the agency is growing, then it gets smaller, and they lose Lucky Strike — that’s how publishing feels. You feel like you’re on top of the world, then they pull the rug out from under you.

You’re headed home to New York soon?

Yeah, but I’ll be back in Oxford quite a bit. I’m guest-curating an exhibit at the museum, I’m on a few MFA committees, and I have a lot of good friends here. I can’t quit this place.

Has the collegiality in Oxford been good?

Yeah. It’s a writers’ town, or a book lovers’ town. New York is many kinds of towns, but in terms of books it’s a publishing town, with the business aspect of it. In Oxford it seems it’s more about words, so it’s been like being in this big bubble bath for a year. You just talk about books all the time. Everyone has rich personal histories, people like to go out and talk until the wee hours.

Is it still a novelty that you’re a woman writing crime fiction?

I’ll admit, in many ways it works to my advantage. I stand out more. But it’s true of crime fiction and other genres: Books written by men are considered bigger and more meaningful and significant because they’re written by a man. And when they’re written by a woman, they’re thought of as domestic or about relationships. Tom Perrotta, whom I love, writes about families or domestic issues or suburbia, and his books are important. But there are a lot of women who write about domestic issues or suburbia, and they’re considered Women’s Fiction.

It’s a genre in and of itself.

What does Women’s Fiction mean? I know what men’s fiction is: everything. [Abbott laughs.] But, I’ve never had a male reader say, “You write okay for a woman!” It’s just still this ghost out in the culture at large, a cliché we can’t let go of.

Your love of Mad Men is well known to me. Are you liking the season?

Yes! Don’t you think it’s great? It’s almost too good, it’s breaking my heart. Oh god, I don’t know what I’m going to do when it’s over, though I think they’re smart to end it. You quit while it’s this good.

You often write about Pete Campbell after an episode.

I love Pete. He’s really complicated, and no one gives him credit for it. They’re not watching the show carefully. He’s far more advanced with social issues than anybody else in that world. He’s self-destructive in interesting ways — in that plotline where he had the affair with the Gilmore Girl [Alexis Bledel], she sees a depression in him, a deep emotional sadness he can’t see. He always surprises me. The actor [Vincent Kartheiser] is so unafraid of looking foolish or gross. Don is always so slick, even when he’s grimy he looks gorgeous. Pete will just go there, he’ll fall, get punched — Billy Wilder would have loved him. He would’ve made Pete the center of the show.

Give me 3 books, TV shows, and movies that are important to you.

Mad Men, Deadwood, and Twin Peaks for TV.

For movies it would be In a Lonely Place, Sunset Boulevard or one of many Wilder movies, and Mulholland Drive, which I get in many arguments with people about. Blue Velvet is the more perfect film, but Mulholland Drive is the more complex.

For books, The Sound and the Fury, Farewell, My Lovely would be my Chandler, and Wuthering Heights. I read it far too young, I skipped all the dialect, but it spoke to me, and every time I’ve read it since, it’s rewarded me more.

So, Chandler over Hammett?

Yeah, he’s more personal to me. Hammett is the deeper thinker and politically more in tune with me, the way he sees the world in some ways. But Marlowe is probably my favorite character ever. I’ve read those books a lot, and they still surprise me.

Do you feel like you’ll ever catch up on everything you want to read?

No, and isn’t that a great feeling? You’re worried you might have hit the bottom, and you realize there’s a bottom beneath the bottom. A false floor.

You wrote the screenplay for Dare Me? Is that progressing?

That was one of the harder experiences, adapting my own stuff. It’s still in play. There’s been TV interest in it, too. Which in part I think it might be more suited towards. TV’s where it at! [Abbott laughs.] People have been interested in it as a series, because you could build it out and keep switching the power, the ascent and descent, like a crime family show, or Game of Thrones, for that matter. It’s interesting, given how important TV has become to my creative mind recently. There are so many doors opening up, there are so many shows that are more specific than they used to be. You remember 15-20 years ago, I’d watch almost anything because there weren’t that many choices. And now you can find things that feel like they’re made for you.

Have you been pulled in that direction?

I’ve gotten offers, but you have to move out to L.A., and I don’t know how that would be. But I know a lot of writers who are doing it. The collaborative element interests me, writing in a group like that seems really fun.

The Fever (Little, Brown and Company) is released on June 17th. Abbott will be at Square Books in Oxford on June 24th at 4 p.m.

[Updated Thursday, June 12, 2014, 1:52 p.m. for grammar]

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Sweet Thereafter

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Memphis Flyer (our first quarter quell, as it were), I have chosen my personal favorite film from each year since the Flyer began publication. Then, for each of those films, I unearthed and have excerpted some quotes from the review we ran at the time. — Greg Akers

1989: #1 Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch (#2 Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee)

“While all the scenes in Mystery Train are identifiable by anyone living west of Goodlett, their geographical relationship gets altered to a point where we start to trust Jarmusch more than our own memories.” — Jim Newcomb, March 8, 1990

“Filmed primarily at the downtown corner of South Main and Calhoun, Jarmusch does not use the Peabody Hotel, the Mississippi River, Graceland, or most of the other locations that the Chamber of Commerce would thrust before any visiting filmmaker. His domain concerns exactly that territory which is not regularly tread by the masses, and his treatment of Memphis is likely to open a few eyes.”
— Robert Gordon, March 8, 1990

1990: #1 Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese (#2 Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder)

“This may not be De Niro’s best-ever performance, but he’s got that gangster thang down pat. His accent is flawless, his stature is perfect, and, boy, does he give Sansabelt slacks new meaning.”
— The Cinema Sisters, September 27, 1990

1991: #1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron (#2 The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme)

“Terminator 2 is an Alfa Romeo of a movie: pricey, sleek, fast, and loaded with horsepower. By comparison, the first Terminator was a Volkswagen. On the whole, I’d rather have a Volkswagen — they’re cheap and reliable. But, hey, Alfas can be fun too.” — Ed Weathers, July 11, 1993

1992: #1 Glengarry Glen Ross, James Foley (#2 The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann)

“Mamet’s brilliantly stylized look at the American Dream’s brutality as practiced by low-rent real estate salesmen who would put the screws to their mothers to keep their own tawdry jobs doesn’t relax its hard muscle for a moment. In the hands of this extraordinary cast, it is like a male chorus on amphetamines singing a desparate, feverish ode to capitalism and testosterone run amuck.”
— Hadley Hury, October 15, 1992

1993: #1 Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater (#2 Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg)

“Dazed and Confused is a brief trip down memory lane. The characters are not just protagonists and antagonists. They are clear representations of the folks we once knew, and their feelings are those we had years and years ago. Linklater doesn’t, however, urge us to get mushy. He is just asking us to remember.”
— Susan Ellis, November 4, 1993

1994: #1 Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino (#2 Ed Wood, Tim Burton)

“Even though Tarantino is known for his bratty insistence on being shocking by way of gratuitous violence and ethnic slurs, it’s the little things that mean so much in a Tarantino film — camera play, dialogue, performances, and music.”
— Susan Ellis, October 20, 1994

1995: #1 Heat, Michael Mann
(#2 Toy Story, John Lasseter)

“I’m sick of lowlifes and I’m sick of being told to find them fascinating by writers and directors who get a perverse testosterone rush in exalting these lives to a larger-than-life heroism with slow-motion, lovingly lingered-over mayhem and death, expertly photographed and disturbingly dehumanizing.”
— Hadley Hury, December 21, 1995

1996: #1 Lone Star, John Sayles
(#2 Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Although Lone Star takes place in a dusty Texas border town, it comes into view like a welcome oasis on the landscape of dog-day action films … Chris Cooper and Sayles’ sensitive framing of the performance produce an arresting character who inhabits a world somewhere between Dostoevsky and Larry McMurtry.”
— Hadley Hury, August 8, 1996

1997: #1 L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson (#2 The Apostle, Robert Duvall)

L.A. Confidential

“L.A. Confidential takes us with it on a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we’ll go to hell or, if we do, whether we’ll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes … to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least the possibility of trust.”

— Hadley Hury, October 2, 1997

1998: #1 Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg (#2 The Big Lebowski, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Spielberg is finishing the job he began with Schindler’s List. He’s already shown us why World War II was fought; now he shows us how. … Spielberg’s message is that war is horrifying yet sometimes necessary. And that may be true. But I still prefer the message gleaned from Peter Weir’s 1981 masterpiece, Gallipoli: War is stupid.” — Debbie Gilbert, July 30, 1998

1999: #1 Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson (#2 The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan)

“Magnolia is a film in motion; there’s a cyclical nature where paths are set that will be taken. It’s about fate, not will, where the bad will hurt and good will be redeemed.”
— Susan Ellis, January 13, 2000

2000: #1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee (#2 You Can Count On Me, Kenneth Lonergan)

“Thrilling as art and entertainment, as simple movie pleasure, and as Oscar-baiting ‘prestige’ cinema. Early hype has the film being compared to Star Wars. … An even more apt comparison might be Singin’ in the Rain, a genre celebration that Crouching Tiger at least approaches in its lightness, joy, and the sheer kinetic wonder of its fight/dance set pieces.”
— Chris Herrington, February 1, 2001

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2001: #1 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg (#2 Amélie,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

“What happens when Eyes Wide Shut meets E.T.? What does the audience do? And who is the audience?”
— Chris Herrington, June 28, 2001

2002: #1 City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
(#2 Adaptation., Spike Jonze)

“The mise-en-scène of the film is neorealist, but the cinematography, editing, and effects are hyper-stylized, as if The Bicycle Thief had been reimagined through the post-CGI lens of Fight Club or The Matrix.”

— Chris Herrington, April 3, 2003

Lost in Translation

2003: #1 Lost in Translation, Sofia
Coppola (#2 Mystic River, Clint Eastwood)

“Lost in Translation is a film short on plot but rich with incident; nothing much happens, yet every frame is crammed with life and nuance and emotion. … What Coppola seems to be going for here is an ode to human connection that is bigger than (or perhaps just apart from) sex and romance.”
— Chris Herrington, October 2, 2003

2004: #1 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry
(#2 Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino)

“This is the best film I’ve seen this year and one of the best in recent memory. Funny, witty, charming, and wise, it runs the gamut from comedy to tragedy without falling into either farce or melodrama. Its insights into human loss and redemption are complicated and difficult, well thought out but with the illusion and feel of absolute spontaneity and authentic in its construction — and then deconstruction — of human feelings and memory.”
— Bo List, March 25, 2004

2005: #1 Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee (#2 Hustle & Flow, Craig Brewer)

“The film is a triumph because it creates characters of humanity and anguish, in a setup that could easily become a target for homophobic ridicule. Jack and Ennis are a brave challenge to the stereotyped image of homosexuals in mainstream films, their relations to their families and to each other are truthful and beautifully captured.” — Ben Popper, January 12, 2006

2006: #1 Children of Men,
Alfonso Cuarón (#2 The Proposition, John Hillcoat)

“As aggressively bleak as Children of Men is, it’s ultimately a movie about hope. It’s a nativity story of sort, complete with a manger. And from city to forest to war zone to a lone boat in the sea, it’s a journey you won’t want to miss.”
— Chris Herrington, January 11, 2007

2007 #1 Zodiac, David Fincher
(#2 There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson)

“[Zodiac is] termite art, too busy burrowing into its story and characters to bother with what you think.”
— Chris Herrington, March 8, 2007

2008: #1 Frozen River, Courtney Hunt (#2 The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan)

“Frozen River is full of observations of those who are living less than paycheck to paycheck: digging through the couch for lunch money for the kids; buying exactly as much gas as you have change in your pocket; popcorn and Tang for dinner. The American Dream is sought after by the dispossessed, the repossessed, and the pissed off.”
— Greg Akers, August 28, 2008

2009: #1 Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze (#2 Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron)

“I know how ridiculous it is to say something like, ‘Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best kids’ movies in the 70 years since The Wizard of Oz.’ So I won’t. But I’m thinking it.”
— Greg Akers, October 15, 2009

2010: #1 Inception, Christopher Nolan (#2 The Social Network,
David Fincher)

“Nolan has created a complex, challenging cinematic world but one that is thought through and whose rules are well-communicated. But the ingenuity of the film’s concept never supersedes an emotional underpinning that pays off mightily.”
— Chris Herrington, July 15, 2010

2011: #1 The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick (#2 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson)

“The Tree of Life encompasses a level of artistic ambition increasingly rare in modern American movies — Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood might be the closest recent comparison, and I’m not sure it’s all that close. This is a massive achievement. An imperfect film, perhaps, but an utterly essential one.”
— Chris Herrington, June 23, 2011

2012: #1 Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow (#2 Lincoln, Steven Spielberg)

“Zero Dark Thirty is essentially an investigative procedural about an obsessive search for knowledge, not unlike such touchstones as Zodiac or All the President’s Men. And it has an impressive, immersive experiential heft, making much better use of its nearly three-hour running time than any competing award-season behemoth.”
— Chris Herrington, January 10, 2013 

2013: #1 12 Years a Slave, Steve
McQueen (#2 Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón)

“Slavery bent human beings into grotesque shapes, on both sides of the whip. But 12 Years a Slave is more concerned with the end of it. McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley are black. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t be notable but is. If you consider 12 Years a Slave with The Butler and Fruitvale Station, you can see a by-God trend of black filmmakers making mainstream movies about the black experience, something else that shouldn’t be worth mentioning but is.”
— Greg Akers, October 31, 2013

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Cold in July is a joyful throwback to 1980s thrillers.

Quentin Tarantino killed the non-ironic action movie the way Nirvana killed hair metal. It probably needed to be done, but let’s not pretend something of value wasn’t lost.

Remember when cinematic violence could be menacing, gratuitous, and funny, but also earnestly delivered all at once? When a thriller could be grippingly serious but with character transformation rather than character depth, and themes rather than social commentary? When everything didn’t have to be hyper-clever, it could just be nicely pulled off?

Cold in July remembers; it takes place in 1989 — not just as a setting but as a state of mind. It’s the middle of the night, and the Dane family, husband Richard (Michael C. Hall, who doesn’t get enough credit as a thoroughly outstanding actor), wife Ann (Vinessa Shaw), and their son, Jordan (Brogan Hall), are sound asleep. That is, until the parents hear an intruder in their home. Richard gets his pistol from a shoebox in his closet, loads it with shaky hands, and ventures down the hallway to confront the burglar. The confrontation goes south, and Richard shoots the unknown man dead.

The police, in the person of Detective Ray Price (Nick Damici) have no qualms about calling it self-defense. Price says the perp was Freddie Russell, a known criminal. Richard is nevertheless devastated; he’s not a violent man. He wants to know if Freddie had any family. Just the one, he’s told: a dad who just got out on parole from prison.

You see where this is going, right? Ben Russell (Sam Shepard) rolls into town, all scary and mysterious, and starts threatening the Dane family. He wants an eye for an eye, which means young Jordan is in danger since Richard killed the Russell scion. Ben is an almost supernatural force of evil: In his first appearance, he just shows up in the frame, looming over an unsuspecting Richard, and he manages to get past a squad of police to get to the Dane family. It’s all very Cape Fear — though Cold in July‘s homage is to Scorsese’s 1991 over-the-top remake rather than the hardboiled original.

But, Cold in July (based on a novel by Joe R. Lansdale) is tricking you. I won’t spoil the finer points of the narrative, but when you think you’ve got where it’s going figured out, its plot takes left turns. The film’s references go from period, ’80s and ’90s domestic horrors like Unlawful Entry, Pacific Heights, and Flesh and Bone to period action thrillers like Blind Fury, The Hitcher, The Osterman Weekend (I might have Rutger Hauer on the brain), Road House, the Dolph Lundgren version of The Punisher, Blood Simple played straight, or even a human-scale Commando.

All that, plus Hall sports a sweet ‘stache and mullet, and Don Johnson shows up as a private detective named Jim Bob Luke, who wears loud country-and-western shirts and a cowboy hat and drives a red convertible with fuzzy dice and a hula girl on the dash. And it works!

The score, by Jeff Grace, is straight up synthesizers and rock guitars. The whole endeavor is appreciatively cheesy, including the direction from Jim Mickle — but there are no hints of mockery. It’s a #throwbackthursday kind of film: outdated hair and fashions and concepts not better off forgotten.

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, and Edward Hopper

Spoiler alert: If you aren’t current on Mad Men, be aware of thematic and plot revelations in this review. And, if you don’t know what Mad Men is, Google it and get busy catching up. Also: Consider where you may have gone wrong in your life.

“Previously on” the Flyer‘s TV review page: Contemporary scripted TV is our equivalent of masterpieces of fine art. Our museums and galleries are HBO, AMC, Showtime, the basic networks, FX, Netflix, and Hulu. The Sopranos is a Caravaggio; Parks and Recreation is a Keith Haring. Breaking Bad is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death.

Mad Men is an Edward Hopper. It’s Nighthawks and Chop Suey and Office in a Small City and Intermission and a dozen more, all rolled into one: gorgeous, perfectly designed, lonely, contemplative, sexy, and gender-inclusive. Creator Matthew Weiner paints Mad Men with pure confident brilliance. Mad Men is social commentary with the benefit of decades of perspective.

The big knock commonly advanced about Mad Men is that nothing much ever happens in the show. The times that the show has truly shocked viewers can probably be counted on one hand: A lawnmower comes to mind, as does a man’s severed nipple. But, taking place during the tumultuous history of the 1960s, Mad Men usually prefers to let the big moments happen in the public consciousness and take the personal histories at a more glacial pace. Pacing is actually Mad Men at its most honest: The world may change overnight, but people don’t.

Weiner ramped up for Mad Men as a writer on The Sopranos. His episodes, including “Chasing It,” “Soprano Home Movies,” and “Luxury Lounge,” are more sociological, observational, and digressive than most other Sopranos episodes. Weiner never seemed as interested in the big plot points of the New Jersey crime family as he was with what effect this was having on individuals. In Mad Men, he doesn’t recreate the scenes of those seismic national events but instead focuses on what they mean for the characters — similar to how author James Ellroy explores “the private nightmare of public policy” in his Underworld USA trilogy.

Last Sunday, Mad Men‘s Season 7 signed off until 2015 with “Waterloo,” a half-season finale in the middle of a bifurcated final round of episodes. (Don’t get me started about how annoying a network ploy this is.) But, at this point, I’m ready to stop debating if Mad Men is the best show of all time: It almost doesn’t matter what happens in the show’s final seven episodes, Mad Men has surpassed other great hour-long shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, M*A*S*H, Breaking Bad, and whatever else is presumptively the title-holder. (And comparing the relative value of dramas versus comedies is too difficult and too dependent on preferences. Apples to apples, I’ll take Parks and Recreation over any other comedy and Mad Men over any other drama.)

Until late in Season 7, Mad Men hadn’t yet tipped its hand about ultimate intentions: Is it a show about things falling apart or coming together? As “Waterloo” ends, things are hopeful. Don finally has the inclination and means to simply do and enjoy his work. Sally picked the earnest nerd over the cynical football player. Peggy found her voice. Things may change again in the second half of the season. Mad Men might do its thematic version of the Altamont Free Concert. Either way, it’s a cultural alchemy that is a joy to behold.

Watching Mad Men isn’t like watching paint dry, it’s like watching a great painting dry: Hopper’s Morning Sun oxidizing into immortality.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Release of Cigarette Girl

This weekend sees the climax of May’s Mike McCarthy love-in. Friday night, May 23rd, Black Lodge Video hosts the DVD release party for Cigarette Girl, McCarthy’s latest feature, first released in 2009 and remastered and handsomely packaged by Music+Arts Studio. The DVD includes a director’s commentary from McCarthy, loads of special features, and a CD of Jonathan Kirkscey’s brilliant score. The party starts at 9:30 p.m., and it will include live music from Mouserocket and Hanna Star (McCarthy’s daughter).

Saturday night is the main event, with a marathon of McCarthy’s films showcased just where they ought to be: at a drive-in. Time Warp Drive-In celebrates 20 years of Guerrilla Monster films with a screening of Cigarette Girl, Teenage Tupelo, The Sore Losers, Superstarlet A.D., Elvis Meets the Beatles, Midnight Movie, and more. Among the “more”: live music from the Subtractions and popcorn baptisms (!).

Time Warp Drive-In is the work of McCarthy, Malco’s Jimmy Tashie, and Black Lodge’s Matthew Martin. They launched Time Warp Drive-In last Halloween season with a “Shocktober” screening of horror classics such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Evil Dead 2.

“Let’s have fun,” McCarthy says of the concept. “I talk about the past a lot, but I’m actively living in the present and looking forward to the future. But I want the past to travel with me.”

In April, Time Warp Drive-In settled into a regular format, screening the last Saturday of each month. April was tagged Soulful Cinema, with Hustle & Flow, Purple Rain, Superfly, and Coffy; June has road classics like Two Lane Blacktop and Bullitt; July celebrates Stanley Kubrick’s birthday; August memorializes death week with a selection of Elvis films; August also revs up for bike films such as The Wild One and Girl on a Motorcycle; September honors Tim Burton; and October brings Shocktober back with more horror.

“I can’t say enough nice things about Jimmy Tashie at Malco,” McCarthy says. “He is this presence who understands the 20th century and what the drive-in was originally there for.”

McCarthy’s films will look great projected in the Memphis night air. 

Cigarette Girl DVD Release Party

Friday, May 23rd, 9:30 p.m.

Black Lodge Video

Time Warp Drive-In Presents the Underground Cinema of Mike McCarthy

Saturday, May 24th, dusk

$10 per person

Malco’s Summer Drive-In

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Belle Review

London, 1769. The harbor of the slave-trading capital of the world is thick with cargo and commerce: in other words, people as chattel. Into this scene steps one who is by all appearances another piece of property: a brown-skinned girl walking beside a man of wealth.

From there, though, appearances fail the truth of the matter. The little girl is not a slave but rather a free daughter. The nobleman, Captain Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode), is her father, the offspring of a miscegenist relationship that wasn’t borne out of exploitation but of love. The beloved mother has died, though, and Lindsay has orders back to sea, so he is taking his daughter, Dido Elizabeth Belle, into the care of his family. “I am here to take you to a good life,” he promises.

His great-aunt, Lady Mansfield (Emily Watson), great-uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson), and Lady Mary Murray (Penelope Wilton), have a sharp disagreement over whether they will accept Belle into the family, but a word of approval from Lady Mansfield settles it. Lindsay bids adieu to his daughter, exits the stage, and promptly dies. That leaves Belle to grow up in the care of a group of aristocrats who are unsure how to handle presenting her to the rest of a disapproving society.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw is the Belle of the ball.

For Belle (played nicely by Gugu Mbatha-Raw), that’s the bad news. The good news is that her father did right by her. He owned up to her paternity rather than owning her. He provided her a space he knew would accept her, despite the unique situation. And he left her with an inheritance of 21,000 pounds a year — a considerable sum that will make for an attractive dowry once she comes of age. The great fear is that she’ll become an old maid, like dear Lady Mary. Belle can hypothetically marry into a good family with that kind of coin. But will a family in good standing in society overcome the surface stigma from her skin color to embrace the surface legitimacy from her wealth? And that’s not to even broach the subject of love.

The careful, nuanced plot has a lot to offer. Instead of simply presenting a biopic about overcoming racism, it builds a case that it was but one of many levels of societal failure. Belle doesn’t just have to remember her race but has to navigate other waters that tide against her: She’s an illegitimate woman in a paternalistic place that values lineage and marriage.

Her cousin, Elizabeth Murray (Sarah Gadon), doesn’t fair much better. A case could be made that she has it worse. Even though she’s smart and comely and of noble birth, she doesn’t have the financial title to bring to a marriage. Belle and Elizabeth come of age being courted by Oliver and James Ashford (James Norton and Tom Felton — Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter films) and their madam of a mom (Miranda Richardson). James gropes Belle at a party. “How dare you?” she accuses. “With ease,” he says.

The film’s subplot involves Lord Mansfield, who so happens to be the Lord Chief Justice of England, embroiled involving insurance and slaves as property. How he rules could strike a blow to the heart of slavery in England — an economic death sentence for the nation, slavers argue — or could further entrench the institution.

Belle is based on a true story. It is a noble film — perhaps more generously good-hearted than it is actually good — though Amma Asante’s film is good. There are some lofty ideals well said and backed by musical swells. But, a noble film is often worth the while — and there’s something about a film like it released sometime other than during the year-end Oscar season that suggests more genuine than cloying intentions.

Belle
Opens Friday, May 23rd
Ridgeway Cinema Grill

Categories
Sing All Kinds We Recommend

“Nashville” is Returning to Nashville to the tune of $5.5 million

nashville2.jpg

Memphis’ frenemies in the state government continue to do right by Middle Tennessee. ABC’s drama Nashville is returning to production in the Tennessee capital for its third season despite threats the cast and crew might relocate to Austin or Georgia if they didn’t receive enough economic incentives.

The state is ponying up $5.5 million just for the one production. City, CVB, and private incentives fill out the overall package, which hits $8 million.

[jump]

The Tennesseean has the story.

Nobody in Memphis would begrudge Nashville Metro, the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp, and Ryman Hospitality Properties for seeing the advantage of incentivizing the production. However, we have witnessed a pattern of neglect for film and TV productions outside of Middle Tennessee from the state coffer overlords. The Memphis Flyer‘s Hannah Sayle did a story on just that thing last year.

Asked this morning about the news, Linn Sitler, Memphis & Shelby County Film Commissioner, said, “We have been assured that Tennessee state government is looking out for Memphis projects it deems just as valuable for Memphis as Nashville is to Nashville.”

I hope what Sitler is being told is true. Whether or not the HBO/Cinemax series Quarry would be “valuable for Memphis” according to the Tennessee Economic and Community Development Commission remains to be seen. The pilot shot last year in North Mississippi after it couldn’t get incentives to film in Memphis, even though it was set in the city. The series has not been ordered yet by HBO/Cinemax, so the point might be moot. Nevertheless, for now the trend continues: Projects in Middle Tennessee, especially Nashville, get funding. West and East Tennessee don’t, even when there’s Hollywood interest.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Cult King Mike McCarthy Celebrates 20 Years of Underground Movie-making

CREDIT: Dan Ball

Midnight Movie

April 2014, Clarksdale, Mississippi — Filmmaker Mike McCarthy stands inside an old movie theater, shooting a scene he describes as “the death of cinema.” He has found a good location for it: The interior space is accented with moldering ceiling tiles, burlap walls, painted concrete, and frayed carpet runners. A crewmember, Jon Meyers, cranks up a fog machine. McCarthy and the rest of the crew — Jesse Davis, Kent Hamson, Kasey Dees, and Nathan Duff — are preparing a scene built around a casket near the screen at the bottom of the theater well. Inside the casket, the corpse — actor Anthony Gray — is wearing a hat. Looking on from above him are the scene’s mourners, actors Zach Paulsen, Kenneth Farmer, and Brandon Sams.

From 9 a.m. until midnight on a Saturday, the cast and crew have to capture everything they need for Midnight Movie, a lengthy trailer for a script McCarthy has written. Ideally, someone will see the finished trailer and help finance the making of the actual feature.

Dan Ball

Mike McCarthy

But all that is later. Right now, the production has to shoot about 15 scenes at four locations in one day. On the shoot, McCarthy is lively, funny, confident, and efficient. He improvises, but everything is well set up and prepared for, and he trusts the opinions of his crew. He knows what’s in his mind and knows what he sees; he only needs to know what’s in the camera lens.

“Guys, crank up the grieving,” he directs the actors. Paulsen plays Brandy/Randy, whom the script describes as “a small-town cross-dresser with big dreams … a ‘Frankenfurter’ inside a Tennessee Williams bun.” Paulsen is wearing the same coat that D’Lana Tunnell wore in McCarthy’s seminal 1995 film, Teenage Tupelo. Farmer plays Charlie, an homage to Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come. Sams is Eraserhead, with an appropriate hairstyle. A scene filming later in the night will feature Alex and Henry Greene as Jodorowsky’s El Topo and son.

“Make it be like the Cecil B. DeMille of this kind of thing,” McCarthy says. After a clock check, McCarthy puts his producer hat on and says, “We’re doing all right on time, but barely. Which is the way it always is.”

After the scene, the crew helps Gray (who plays murdered theater owner Ray Black) out of the personal-sized tomb. It’s an expensive-looking prop. McCarthy names a funeral home in Memphis he has worked with before. He’s a filmmaker who needs coffins sometimes.

Cult of personality

Robin Tucker

Mike McCarthy (center) directs a scene from Cigarette Girl with cinematographer Wheat Buckley (left) and star Cori Dials (right)

May 2014, Memphis — It looks as if Mike McCarthy’s brain has exploded all over the walls and ceiling of the attic of his Cooper-Young home, as if his mortal cranium can’t contain all of the immortal pop culture that resides within it. Every flat space of wall and ceiling angles features the images of Elvis Presley, David Bowie, Bettie Page, Frankenstein’s monster, Brigitte Bardot, Godzilla — and a score more — and is stuffed with the artistic output of Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Michael Moorcock, Camille Paglia, David F. Friedman, Marvel Comics, Famous Monsters, the Replacements, and, crucially, items related to McCarthy’s own work. Here, in the inner sanctum, he keeps scripts, props, art, comic books, a drum set, and the first magazine he was published in, and on and on.

“My psychosexual stuff is over there in that corner,” he says, pointing in the attic, though he could just as well be talking about a patch of real estate in his mind.

McCarthy has consumed, internalized, and analyzed American pop culture in the 20th century. What he has produced in turn is a filmography — including the features Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis (1994), Teenage Tupelo (1995), The Sore Losers (1997), Superstarlet A.D. (2000), and Cigarette Girl (2009) and the short films Elvis Meets the Beatles (2000) and Goddamn Godard (2012) — that interprets that pop cultural cosmos into a visionary underground art. Many filmmakers, Memphis obsessives from around the world, and other non-mainstream consumers revere him.

Among those influenced by him are the filmmakers Craig Brewer and Chris McCoy.

“I feel like I took a college course from Mike McCarthy,” Brewer says. “Since the time I started making films in Memphis, he has always served as my hero in everything in life. He’s passionate about making movies, and he is passionate about the region he lives in, and the history, and how to honor and preserve that history. I ran from home and the ideas that came from [my] surroundings, where Mike was embracing it and perhaps even exorcising demons through his work.”

Brewer helped edit Superstarlet A.D. so that he could learn how to edit his own film, The Poor & Hungry, and Brewer produced, shot, and edited Elvis Meets the Beatles, which he calls “one of the best experiences of my life.”

McCoy says, “In the early ’90s, I was involved with a group who were inspired by Robert Rodriguez and Steven Soderbergh to make an independent film. I co-wrote the script and we had about $20,000 pledged to the project. But this was before the days of digital, and just the film cost alone would have eaten up the entire budget, so we abandoned the project as undoable. And then, Mike McCarthy came along and proved that it could be done.”

Memphian Rick O’Brien has assisted McCarthy over the years with technical and production support. O’Brien says, “Step into the world of Mike McCarthy and you’ll experience a wild mash-up of 50 years of fringe-pop culture. Mike could be the bastard love child of Russ Meyer, John Waters, and Tempest Storm. Or maybe Elvis … only his mother knows.”

May is McCarthy month in Memphis (alliteration not intended.) Cigarette Girl is being released by Music+Arts, and McCarthy is screening many of his films at the May edition of the monthly Time Warp Drive-In at Malco’s Summer Avenue venue. His films are steeped in the traditions of exploitation cinema, including nudity and violence and rock-and-roll.

David Thompson

On the set of “Teenage Tupelo”

Watching them, you might think, where in the world did all this come from?

The man who fell to Memphis

1963-1993, Mississippi & Memphis — “Unless you can fixate on something, you don’t learn the true value of it,” McCarthy says. His own biography is something McCarthy is fixated on. Certain geniuses, such as James Ellroy or Alison Bechdel, possess a profound intellectual introspection. McCarthy fits in this category comfortably.

He was born in 1963. The way McCarthy’s mind sees things, there’s a numerology that glows in the structure of the universe. It’s personal and universal, and it can be observed if you sit still long enough. “I was born six months before JFK was assassinated, which was nine months before the Beatles got here,” McCarthy says. “So, 1963 was the last pure year of American pop culture and its influence around the world. The following year, the Beatles would arrive, and the European influence would follow, ironically based on Memphis music. I was conceived in the Lee County Drive-In in Tupelo, and I lived 14 years in the golden age of pop culture, before Elvis died.”

Much of McCarthy’s biography has been recounted in stories over the years, but, since the telling of it has evolved, it doesn’t hurt to set the record straight about exactly what happened and when. He was raised by John and Mildred McCarthy outside of Tupelo. His mother had been a Georgia Tann baby, one of the children who came out of the woman’s infamous Memphis black market adoption agency. His parents attended the famous 1956 Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, where Elvis performed. They can be seen at the top of the bleachers in Roger Marshutz’s famous photo of the concert.

McCarthy grew up at the end of a gravel road, raised on comic books, monster magazines, and other pop that managed to trickle down to him. “On a good night we might pick up Sivad,” he says, referring to Memphis’ monster movie TV host. McCarthy consumed the culture he “could pick up in an analog way, or what was in the grocery store in a spinner rack. Music, I knew nothing about, because corporations had already settled in on it. I didn’t know at the time that rockabilly had been created in my backyard.”

When he was 20, McCarthy learned on his own a staggering truth the consequences of which continue to reverberate: He was adopted. “There’s a certain amount of tragedy, but it’s kind of a cool tragedy, because I decided I would mythologize my gravel road. Instead of street cred, I’ve got gravel road cred.”

Charle Berlin

McCarthy meets cult filmmaker David F. Friedman

More bombshells: He was the second of four children his biological mother had. To this day, McCarthy doesn’t know who his biological father is. (His brothers do know who their dads are: “Another angst-ridden detail,” he says, laughing.) He did learn, however, that his biological mother also attended the Fair and Dairy Show, and, moreover, she also could be seen in the Marshutz photo — just a few feet away from the King’s outstretched hand.

When he was 21, McCarthy moved to Memphis. “The point where I should have looked into my past, I moved to Memphis and turned it into art,” he says. “It took me 10 years to focus my anger into an Elvis-oriented art plan.”

Eric Page

Distemper

He came to grad school at Memphis College of Art but dropped out and spent a few years playing in punk bands like Distemper and Rockroaches. He lived with his parents again to work on comic books, including material that would be produced by the renowned alternative publisher Fantagraphics.

He discovered the cult film subgenre. It changed everything. “I realized cult cinema was achievable on my own,” he says.

If those are the facts, the why of it all is left to McCarthy’s interpretation, both artistic and anecdotal, and is the basis for the mythology he has created in the film Teenage Tupelo and developed further over the years. He imagined that Elvis was his biological father: “All these things led to my breaking away from Mississippi, so that I could look back and mythologize with whatever details slowly came down to me from my adopted parents or my newfound brother at the time. So I reimagined the conversation my grandmother had with my mother when she was about to give birth to me. ‘You’ve already had one kid with this guy who left you, you’re certainly not going to keep this second kid.’ So I made my grandmother into a villain — who Wanda Wilson plays in Teenage Tupelo.”

Ground Zero

20th century, America — “Elvis is 21 at the Tupelo Fair and Dairy Show in 1956, halfway through the arc of his life,” McCarthy says. “That day he sings to both my mothers — and thousands of field hands and factory workers. He reaches the ascent of everything he will be. He conquers pop culture by 21, and then he just enjoys the downward slope. Sure, there are moments of greatness, but his life as art belongs on that day between Tupelo and his home on Audubon Drive in Memphis. So what does Tupelo do? They tear down the old Fairgrounds.”

Ground zero for American pop culture is the purity and naiveté of rock-and-roll at its inception, when the middle class consumed and supported uncorrupted artists. The era ended when rock-and-roll, a singularly racially integrated art form, became commodified by commercial interests and became the product called “rock.” American pop culture died to an extent when Elvis did. Punk was the last pure expression of rock-and-roll.

However, that isn’t to say that rock-and-roll is dead and buried, McCarthy argues, because the pure creations from decades ago are still relevant. Worshipping at the feet of this cultural deity is still a worthwhile endeavor — and don’t confuse it with nostalgia and sentimentality, he says, which “don’t apply to things that are still relevant.”

He sees the relevance of rock-and-roll, still lingering in the arifices of the past, and he fights to protect it. “Memphis should be a time capsule for that world, where blues music and country music combined to become rock-and-roll,” McCarthy says. “We don’t need to recreate it: It already happened. We can base an entire world on that model, if we would just stop tearing that world down.”

Creating a Monster

1994-2014, Memphis — As scarring as his biological drama was, McCarthy received considerable support and love from his adopted parents. One important attribute McCarthy would learn from his Greatest Generation parents was “a Depression-era ethic, so that I could deal with poverty when I came face to face with it later, when I decided to be an artist.” He would call upon that lesson time and again. His films were low budget; he didn’t make money off of them; and he struggled to make ends meet. Much of that was by design as part of an artistic austerity. “Being a filmmaker in America is the most narcissistic, self-centered thing you could be. It even approaches evil,” he says with a laugh.

“I always wondered why the circus is a metaphor for craziness,” McCarthy says. “If that were really true about the circus being ‘crazy,’ we would never take the kids because it would be too insane. In reality, the circus contains a big ol’ safety net. So the craziness is simulated, sort of like a film festival or video game. What happens when you remove the safety net? That’s the real circus. When you have no safety net, no guaranteed salary, no trust fund, no nonprofit — that’s the last 20 years of Guerrilla Monster.” Guerrilla Monster’s three rules were: Don’t ask permission; shoot until they make you stop; and deny everything.

Don’t call McCarthy’s films “indie.” He’s careful to draw a distinction between indie film and underground film: “The indie scene is basically mainstream filmmaking without money,” he says.

“I’ve been compared to Truffaut, Fellini, and Orson Welles, all by asking women to take their clothes off in the middle of the night in Mississippi with a camera.”

It’s now or never

Past, present, and future — Much of what occupies McCarthy’s brain is what is now gone. “I miss Memphis Comics. I miss Pat’s Pizza. I miss Ellis Auditorium. I already miss the Mid-South Coliseum. I identify with it. I miss me.”

McCarthy takes the time to note that he and the Coliseum were born in the same year, and suggests we drive over to appraise its current state of neglect. McCarthy was a founding member of Save Libertyland, active in preserving the WHBQ booth at the Chisca, worked at Sun Studio for a time, served as a tour guide in Memphis, and is a strong advocate for preservation. “These things will be important to smart people 100 years from now,” he says. “And they’ll blame us as a generation that created a serious criminal offense against the 20th century, the American century, by tearing down the rock-and-roll structures that were in place in Memphis at the time when all of this music was created, when all of this goodwill was created.”

Preservation probably isn’t exactly the right English word for it. McCarthy’s advocacy isn’t about stasis but about vitality. “The further you get away from the pulse of something, the closer you get to the death of it,” he says. “This bleeds into my dislike of historic markers, because we keep those people in business.” For a few years, he has been developing a documentary about it, Destroy Memphis (tagline: “See it while you can”).

“I wasn’t born in the ’50s, where I could take advantage of the thriving middle class that spit out rock-and-roll, great movies, and great comic books — so great they were outlawed by the government. I worship those things. Those things are greater than any dogmatic religious principles.”

His thoughts on the subject are similar to those about Guerrilla Monster, which, he announces, may have reached its end. The fact is, he can’t afford to keep his cinematic pursuit going without financial backing. He has a family to support. “Underground films are fascinating to watch because you see struggle. I’ve been through 20 years of good old-fashioned punk rock struggle. Deliver me from struggle.

“In the ’90s,” he continues, “I used to say the voice of a dead twin told me what to do. Now I’m not sure. Sometimes I feel like I’ve lost my way. I feel like I’m in the prime of my filmmaking life, but I can no longer make films ‘on the cheap’ where I keep asking people to do things for me for free. Guerrilla Monster has served its purpose. ‘Twas reality that killed the beast.”

If he has to, he will focus on comic books, which carry much less budgetary overhead. “I probably have another 20 years before my hand starts to shake. You’ve only got so much time to create.”

What he really wants to do, though, is to get his films financed. He has a script, Kid Anarchy, based on a comic book he created in the 1980s with his friend George Cole. McCarthy, Cole, and Memphis filmmaker G.B. Shannon have written the script. It’s much more accessible than his past films. He thinks it could be his shot.

“I always thought Mike would be fantastic working with a solid producer and a solid script,” Brewer says. “He’s very professional and he’s really prepared.”

“If I got a million bucks to make Kid Anarchy, it wouldn’t be a Guerrilla Monster movie, it would be an indie movie with punk rock principles, closer to Richard Linklater or Mary Harron,” McCarthy says. “It’s about a 15-year-old boy in 1984 who gets kicked out of Memphis for being a juvenile delinquent. So, he goes to live with his religious aunt and uncle in northeast Mississippi, like a true fish out of water. He has to attend a new school, to pray before dinner, and he can’t listen to the Dead Kennedys anymore. It’s akin to Breaking Away, or every S.E. Hinton novel; it’s a ‘let’s discover the next Matt Dillon’ movie. It’s all that. But I can’t make it for nothing.”

In other words, it’s the McCarthy story told in reverse. Is the happy ending at the beginning or at the end of the story?

Producer John Crye, former creative director for Newmarket Films (where he oversaw the acquisition, development, and distribution of Memento, The Prestige, Whale Rider, Monster, Donnie Darko, and The Passion of the Christ), is helping McCarthy package the film in terms of investment and talent. “In this economy, the safest investments in film are with those filmmakers who can produce a $1 million film that looks like a $10 million film,” Crye says. “McCarthy proved with Cigarette Girl that he can make tens of thousands of dollars look like hundreds of thousands. The time is right for him to come out of the underground, work with a better budget, and start creating more commercially viable movies. Kid Anarchy is that. It is to Cigarette Girl what Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused was to Slacker.”

“The blues wouldn’t have been created without oppression,” McCarthy says. “Jesus wouldn’t be worshipped without crucifixion. But without any of that you don’t get resurrection. I want resurrection, I want to make money.

“I want to make Kid Anarchy. So crucify me.”

The Mike McCarthy/Guerrilla

Monster Films calendar of events:

* May 16: Mike McCarthy on WKNO’s “Checking on the Arts” with Kacky Walton

* May 17 : Malco’s Studio on the Square screens Cigarette Girl at 10 p.m.

* May 20: Cigarette Girl out on DVD, archer-records.com/cigarette-girl

* May 23 : Release party at Black Lodge, 9:30 p.m. With appearances by

Cigarette Girl stars Cori Dials and Ivy McLemore and live music from

Hanna Star and Mouserocket

* May 24 : Summer Drive-In screens Guerrilla Monster Films, featuring

Elvis Meets the Beatles, Cigarette Girl, Teenage Tupelo, The Sore Losers,

Superstarlet A.D., and Midnight Movie

For more about Mike McCarthy, including streaming videos of his films, essays, and the script for Kid Anarchy, go to guerrillamonsterfilms.com.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

If you’ve seen one Spider-Man origin story, you’ve seen them all. At least, that was the thinking behind why I never got around to watching anything more than bits and pieces of The Amazing Spider-Man, the Marc Webb/Andrew Garfield/Emma Stone 2012 reboot of the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire/Kirsten Dunst 2002-2007 film trilogy, itself natch an adaptation of the popular 1962 – present comic book series.

Spider-Man hangs out

My lack of interest wasn’t a knock on the appeal of the film, because I really really like Garfield (Never Let Me Go); I like Webb ((500) Days of Summer); and I possibly love Stone (Crazy, Stupid, Love). Instead, my not seeing The Amazing Spider-Man was because I just can’t keep up anymore with these comic book movie origin stories. I’m utterly fatigued.

Origins are the most overrated — or, the most over-emphasized — thing about comics. Apart from early issues in a series or occasional critical flashbacks, origin stories aren’t a part of the process or ongoing appeal of mainstream comics. You need to know Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered in front of him, but you don’t need to be told that every time he suits up to go punch the Riddler.

The comics medium has hammered out an appropriate ratio of origin to story. The comics-in-film medium decidedly has not: Marvel and DC films hemorrhage origin stories. The device at its most tediously redundant has Peter Parker bitten again by an arachnid in The Amazing Spider-Man and Superman’s Kryptonian-Kansas upbringing retold in last year’s Man of Steel. It means we’re subjected to an energy-neutral Thor film until he finally holds the hammer in the last 15 minutes, a moment of too-long-delayed orgiastic joy. In next year’s Fantastic Four reboot, no doubt we’ll have to witness another belabored cosmic ray exposure before being allowed to enjoy some be-flamed action.

Peter (Andrew Garfield) and Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) ponder mortality

When comic book films do this, it is of course because they have on their hands a built-in audience and a guaranteed box office success, and they want to prolong the tale they have to tell for as long as they can to ensure as many “safe” sequels as possible. An origin story doesn’t intrinsically have to be a delaying tactic. Consider Christopher Nolan’s commitment to the task in Batman Begins, where he asserts that the one pivotal moment where everything changes is far less interesting than the resultant psychological ramifications.

That’s a long way of saying I didn’t go out of my way to see The Amazing Spider-Man but happily consumed The Amazing Spider-Man 2. A visit to Wikipedia beforehand was more than adequate to get the plot particulars of the first film. Comically enough, the sequel very much has one foot in its origin.

The film starts with a recap of the last film: seriously. But before long it uses that regurgitation to trampoline into new plot points. Turns out, Peter’s parents (Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz) were hunted by Oscorp operatives but secreted away the truth of what they had discovered before they were killed. It’s a genuinely poignant scene, followed by a genuinely exhilarating one: Spider-Man slicing down city canyons with a whoop, pursuing a criminal and enjoying the chase. The tension in the sequence comes not from the Adidas-tracksuit-wearing bad guy, Aleksei Sytsevich (Paul Giamatti), who has commandeered an Oscorp truck carrying plutonium and is being pursued by all of the NYPD, nor from Spider-Man’s near-death rescue of a pedestrian, Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), but from the ticking clock of whether or not Peter can do all this and still make his graduation in time to hear his girlfriend Gwen Stacy’s (Stone) valedictorian speech.

Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) hangs by a silk thread

Peter loves Gwen but promised her dad (Denis Leary) before he died he wouldn’t endanger her life, so the couple breaks up; it makes Peter want to go jump off a building. Peter is reunited with his old buddy, Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan), but both young men are troubled by the legacies of dead father figures. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 continuously alternates these currents of dark and light moments, and Webb handles the switches with skill. It’s one of the best things about the film, and is ultimately what the film is about.

In addition to the aforementioned, the film services the needs of characters such as Peter’s Aunt May (Sally Field) and Oscorp functionaries Norman Osborn (Chris Cooper, maniacal laugh), Felicia (Felicity Jones), Smythe (B. J. Novak), and Menken (Colm Feore) — all of them plus the super-villainous transformations of Max into Electro, Harry into Green Goblin, and Aleksei into Rhino. If all that sounds like 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, well, sometimes it is. It makes up for it with an extra-long runtime. You may or may not see that as a positive.

The short end of the stick goes to Foxx, whose Electro effects and goofy psychosis is just too much. DeHaan fares much better in the script, and he brings to the table Leonardo DiCaprio’s looks and Brad Pitt’s voice. It’s a strange combo.

Spider-Man does whatever a spider can

Rising above it all is the chemistry between Garfield and Stone. They take their dialogue and deliver awkward line readings that sound spontaneous rather than scripted. Vive le Peter/Gwen.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
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