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Taking a Hit

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, the Adam Sandler vehicle the director has referred to (with some mixture of cheekiness

and honesty) as an “art-house Adam Sandler film,” is essentially a love story about a man who discovers a gimmick to obtain cheap

frequent-flyer miles and then finds a reason to use them.

The film was seemingly designed with its lead actor in mind: Anderson riffs on Sandler’s icon status, offering an

alternative reading of the emotionally erratic, autistic man-child character Sandler has cultivated in a series of successful lowbrow comedies.

But Anderson’s use of his star is even cleverer. While Sandler is certainly a willing and active participant in the character

transformation (revelation?), Anderson also seems to be using the actor’s own discomfort at being in a “serious” movie to the film’s advantage.

Sandler plays Barry Egan, the owner of a Los Angeles-based company that distributes novelty items. Emotionally unstable,

lonely, and hounded by seven subtly harpy-like sisters, Barry seems to require intense

concentration just to make it through a workday.

He calls phone-sex lines just to have someone to talk to, and he’s so borderline obsessive, he discovers a loophole in a Healthy

Choice promotion that will allow him to obtain a million frequent-flyer miles by buying only $3,000 worth of pudding (this part is based

on a true story), despite the fact that he doesn’t plan on doing any traveling. (“Airline miles is like a

currency these days,” he explains to business partner Lance.)

Those expecting a typical Sandler comedy are cued in from the beginning that this isn’t another

Happy Gilmore or Waterboy. Rather than the sitcom-like flatness and conventionality of all other Adam Sandler vehicles, we get a meticulously designed world

composed of protective corners of shadow and great swaths of natural light, extremely careful framing, and an equally purposeful

deployment of color. Punch-Drunk Love is also remarkable for its disarming interplay of silence and noise. (This film won’t win an Oscar for

sound editing — some military or sci-fi/fantasy epic will — but it deserves one.) And there are no opening credits whatsoever.

There is something of the silent comedian in Sandler’s terse, iconic (he wears a bright-blue suit throughout the film)

performance, but the film finds its tension precisely in Barry’s inarticulateness. Barry’s most common piece of dialogue is a limp “I don’t know,” and

he has a penchant for beginning negative statements with an acquiescing “yeah”: When one sister tries to set him up on a blind date,

Barry’s response is “Yeah I don’t do that.” (“You don’t do anything,” she huffs.) When the phone-sex operator calls back the next day

to demand more money, Barry responds, “Yeah I can’t afford that.” But Barry’s wet-blanket exterior hides a rage that frequently

explodes — often at himself, sometimes at others.

Barry’s situation is most fully revealed during an extraordinary party sequence in which Sandler conveys profound

discomfort amid Barry’s flux of sisters and their husbands and children. This sequence does for the aggressive verbal play of siblings what

John Cassavetes’ Husbands did for the nuclear family: exposes it as a source of overwhelming anxiety. Endlessly recounting a cruel

childhood game in which they would torture Barry by calling him “gay boy,” Barry’s sisters disguise menace behind playfulness, and Barry

snaps, smashing a series of glass doors. Barry later confesses to one brother-in-law, a doctor, “I don’t like myself sometimes. Can you help me?

I don’t know what’s wrong because I don’t know how other people are. I sometimes cry a lot for no reason,” then breaks down in tears.

In any other Sandler film, the sequence would be played for comedy (the brother-in-law is actually a dentist), but here the audience is

likely to be unsure of how to respond.

Into this life comes Emily Watson’s Lena. Watson is a very unconventional romantic lead with her old-fashioned,

Kewpie-doll look and further ties the film to an older era (as does a gratuitous but lovely iris-in to Lena’s and Barry’s clasped hands). Lena

pursues Barry and falls for him. Why this seemingly together woman embraces a mess like Barry is a mystery. Why does she pretend everything

is normal when an anxious Barry smashes up a men’s room and gets them kicked out of a restaurant during their first date? Why does

she laugh so generously at Barry’s nervous anecdote about a lame radio deejay he finds humor in? It could easily be said that Lena’s utter

lack of motivation is the film’s fatal flaw. (Is she some cousin to Watson’s unforgettable Bess in the problematic

Breaking the Waves, who gives of herself without question or hesitation?) But maybe Lena is

Punch-Drunk Love‘s rain of frogs. Odd things happen in P.T.

Anderson movies.

And though this is largely a two-person film, something must be said about the work of Anderson regulars Luis GuzmÝn

and Philip Seymour Hoffman: Are there two better supporting actors in film today? Hoffman is a brilliant scenery-chewer who is

great yet again as a Provo, Utah, sleazebag who owns the phone-sex operation that tries to extort Barry. And GuzmÝn’s Lance?

Does anyone do more with less than GuzmÝn? Anderson makes great, subtle use of this compulsively

watchable actor in a small role. Notice the way a scene in which Lena initially asks Barry out is played entirely through GuzmÝn’s chaste but suspicious glances.

Over the course of four films, Anderson has established himself as one of American cinema’s most dazzling and daring

young talents. Hard Eight was a debut that served notice. And

Boogie Nights, seen as a Pulp

Fiction derivative by some at the time, has

only deepened over the years. (Its greatest connection to

Pulp Fiction now is clearly the way both films are palpably giddy about the

possibilities of filmmaking.) But Anderson’s last film,

Magnolia, felt like an ending of sorts. With its Altmanesque cavalcade of characters

and intersecting plotlines, its courageous sincerity, and its Rubicon-crossing rain of frogs, it was operatic filmmaking at its most

impossibly grandiose. Where to go from there? Rather than raising the bar even higher, Anderson smartly withdraws from the precipice. Rather

than opera, Punch-Drunk Love is more of a chamber piece — brief, muted, revolving around a few characters.

Given the odd mix of expectations viewers are likely to bring to the film,

Punch-Drunk Love may take a while to sink in. I

was unsure about it upon first viewing, loved it

the second time. It’s a brave little film (under 90 minutes) with an extraordinary

performance from Sandler that is likely to be a career aberration, and it leaves so many images floating around in one’s mind:

Sandler tap-dancing in a grocery-store aisle; the surreal vision of Barry disappearing down an airport tunnel en route to his first flight;

the silhouetted embrace and kiss in front of a pastel burst of life outside a hotel window; Lena

embracing Barry as he mutters helplessly, “I don’t freak out very often, no matter what my sister says. I don’t freak out!”; and a contented final shot of Barry and Lena in harmony.

— Chris Herrington

We’re going to play a brief game that explains my disappointment in this week’s horror offering and reveals the limitations of my smug wit. Fill in the blank: GHOST SHI__. If you answered with a “P,” you have correctly named the new nautical schlockfest from junior-level production company Dark Castle (The House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts). If you answered with a “T,” you have correctly guessed the content of my review, were I allowed only two words.

Ghost Ship can boast a truly stylish opening: A romantic 1960s movie score and title font for the opening credits flash us back to ’62, aboard the Italian luxury liner Antonia Graza. We are in the ballroom, and happy, elegant couples dance dreamily to the torchy musical stylings of a gorgeous Italian songstress. A little girl looks on in boredom and loneliness. The captain approaches her and beckons her to dance. She does, and for a moment, we are deceived into thinking that all of this is very nice for the girl. Suddenly, all of the ballroom’s occupants, except the young girl, are dead, in the most gruesome and expedient mass-killing I have seen in recent film. The girl is, again, alone. That’s the first seven minutes or so, and considering that it opens a hokey movie like this, it’s terrific! Alas, the film plods on for a good 81 more minutes with (almost) nothing as good to show for it.

After the cool scene, we are introduced to a fairly typical band of likable misfits working on a salvage tugboat the kind of crew we are accustomed to seeing assembled for ensemble action or horror films like Predator, Armageddon, or The Abyss or movies closer to Ghost Ship‘s level of cheesy inadequacy, like 1980s aquatic equivalents Leviathan and Deep Star Six or the poor Deep Blue Sea. This movie is really Julianna Margulies’ big movie break, and she is the obligatory tough-as-nails female (Ö la Sigourney Weaver or Maria Conchita Alonso), while good actor Gabriel Byrne is the cap’n, doing some fine, grizzled work reminiscent of Robert Shaw and his shark story in Jaws. The team is approached by a naive young pilot named Ferriman (cue ominous music here), who has photos of a spooky, drifting vessel that, floating in international waters, could legally be a bonanza for the crew. Or it could be a … ghost ship! Is the team up for the task of hauling it in and splitting the goods? You bet!

What ensues is lots of looking through dank, rusted hallways. Lots of it. And after a while, you start to want to see someone killed to end the agony of yet more hallways. As promised in the film’s title, ghosts appear, in the forms of the little girl from the opening scene and then some not-so-nice spirits. The only interesting thing about these ghosts is figuring out which are naughty and which are nice. Why would a passenger load of 600, horribly murdered, come back to do harm to innocent scavengers? It takes a long time to figure this out, and the results lead one to question the motivations of at least one of the ghosts (really, only four ghosts have anything to do here a paltry number of apparitions, considering the budget). But who cares?

Ghost Ship has a lot of the flaws of other ham-fisted horror vehicles a mix of good and not-so-good actors and unanswered questions: They’re on a floating graveyard, at night. Where is that light coming from? Wouldn’t they be cold swimming in Alaskan waters? Shouldn’t the deaths of their best friends register in the following scene? And granted the sweetness of the first scene, nothing as visually interesting occurs afterward, except for a techno-scored reprise with lots of jerky Matrix-y camerawork and more deaths, a welcome reprieve from gloomy hallways and the lackluster deaths of our 2002 tugboat team. Stylish but stupid. I would steer clear of this bloated, beached nonsense and toward the genuine chills of The Ring. Bo List

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We Recommend We Recommend

friday, 8

EMERALD THEATRE COMPANY. At TheatreWorks, 2085 Monroe. Showing through Sunday. Maddona Obsessive Support Group, a comedy about those obsessed with the Material Girl.

UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS. Main Stage, through Saturday. The Shape of Things, a play that asks, “How much would you change about yourself for the one you love?”

PLAYHOUSE ON THE SQUARE. Showing through January 5th. Peter Pan.

CIRCUIT PLAYHOUSE. Through December 22nd. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Categories
Music Music Features

Sound Advice

Most of you probably don’t associate the Young Avenue Deli with the blues. That’s what Beale Street is for, right? Well, not this week.

Helena, Arkansas, native and Fat Possum alumnus Cedell Davis plays his blues the old-fashioned way — with a butter knife as a slide. Born in 1927, Davis has been around for a while, once playing backup for Robert Nighthawk, but didn’t start releasing records of his own until the ’90s. His latest, Lightning Struck the Pine, features a host of alt-rock-associated backing players, including R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, who’ll be part of Davis’ band for his Deli show Wednesday, November 13th. Earlier in the week, the Deli will host Memphis’ finest contemporary blues player, Alvin Youngblood Hart, who is riding the wave of his great batch of acoustic blues, Down in the Alley, recorded for new local label Memphis International. Hart will play the Deli Saturday, November 9th.

—Chris Herrington

For an energetic mixture of rock, rockabilly, and country, all lovingly rendered, you’ll want to visit Murphy’s Sunday, November 10th, to see Tom Clark and the High-Action Boys. They may hail from NYC (by way of Illinois), but after a drink or two, you might mistake them for real hillbillies. As inspired by classic punk groups like the Ramones as they are by Merle Haggard and George Jones, the High-Action Boys are high energy personified. They will be joined by Subteen Mark Akin in a rare solo appearance.

World Boogie is coming to Shangri-La Records Saturday, November 9th, when Jim Dickinson plays on the porch in support of his newest release, Free Beer Tomorrow. This may be Dickinson’s first release since the bluesy Dixie Fried 30 years ago, but as a producer and session musician, he’s hardly been dormant. The amazing Replacements album Pleased to Meet Me had Dickinson’s fingerprints all over it, as did Bob Dylan’s immediate classic Time Out of Mind. Aretha Franklin, the Cramps, and Alex Chilton have all benefited from the Dickinson touch, as have Mudhoney, Ry Cooder, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. As an artist, Dickinson’s sound has become as eclectic as the range of artists he has produced. Dickinson will be joined on the porch by his sons Luther and Cody, whom you may know a bit better as the North Mississippi Allstars. —Chris Davis

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Our Towns

Those of us who have traveled far from home (and it is a significant percentage these days) cannot but wonder from time to time whether those journeys have enriched or impoverished our lives. Is it better to see the world and lose your own backyard or put down roots and get to know a place with the kind of intimacy that might lead to deeper understanding?

Michael Perry has raised these kinds of questions in his compelling memoir, Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time (HarperCollins). He is the local kid who returned home to rediscover his community with fresh insight and compassion. No doubt, his experiences were dramatized by his work as a volunteer fireman and emergency medical technician, which takes him into the lives of his neighbors in powerful, often tragic ways.

The town is New Auburn, Wisconsin. The population, as the book’s title indicates, is just under 500. The cast of characters is almost as remarkable as the number of traffic accidents and fires Perry and his team of emergency workers encounter.

You will meet a big fellow, the one-eyed “Beagle,” whose ex-wives both work at the same convenience store where Beagle buys his chewing tobacco. (It is awkward, to say the least, but Beagle is philosophical: “They know my brand.”) You will meet Herbie, a hardworking farmer and rock-buster who designed the “hoverless hovercraft” that became legend in New Auburn. You will meet hunters, loggers, farmers, and working-class people of all types whose idea of a night out is heading to a local buffet of coleslaw, beans, and buttered bread. The author calls his neighbors “my people.”

Perry has a fine eye for detail, but his activities focus the mind. How do you forget pulling a teenager out of a pile of twisted metal as her father, looking on, tries to console and encourage his dying child? How do you forget a 300-pound woman who gets wedged between a toilet and a bathtub only to puke on you as you try to dislodge her? And how do you forget your own brother or sister-in-law, one killed fighting a fire, the other in a car wreck? You don’t.

Not many of us could handle the routines described here with Perry’s humor or ease. He observes, for example, that for all the vivid death and tragedy he has encountered, he has never thrown up while making a medical or fire call. He and his brothers, also firefighters, have an understated Midwestern quality about them — their anger and their love demonstrated in subtle silences that carry a world of meaning to those in tune with their private, quiet places.

In a chapter titled “Death,” Perry describes a group of older women talking about a teenager’s death a year earlier. The ladies discuss the matter openly in a local diner, mentioning with special emphasis a rose laid symbolically on an empty chair at what would have been the girl’s high school graduation. A truck driver who stumbles across the conversation asks if they are talking about the loss of a child. When they answer yes, the man replies simply, “You never get over it.” The driver does not speak again, but Perry watches through the window as the man leaves the diner, stops in the middle of the highway, right on the centerline, and wipes his eyes with his sleeve. Perry is not unmoved:

“I think of that guy whenever a celebrity dies and I hear some talking head in the media say we have lost a part of ourselves. You have to figure that’s a little tough for him to swallow, when he knows what it is to grieve a child, all alone in the middle of the highway. This is a grief neither assuaged nor exalted by the attention of the nation. This is a grief that refuses to arrange itself around prime time.”

Perry’s is a timely book, particularly given the attention lavished on emergency workers after 9/11. Though the world he describes is a long way from New York City or D.C., the courage and tragedy he sees in New Auburn are not so different from what we witnessed as a nation over a year ago. Perry and his fellow emergency workers go about their business without fanfare. Most of them will not even be celebrated outside of their close circle of friends and family. But they have more important reasons to act courageously: The people trapped in the burning house or the shattered vehicle are often not strangers. They are neighbors, even friends.

It took 9/11 to remind many Americans that our real heroes are ordinary people who, with all their flaws and idiosyncrasies, find it in themselves to do extraordinary, selfless things. It happens every day, even in a little town, population: 485. — George Shadroui

Dateline: Forty-Five, South Carolina, population unknown, but count on Mendal Dawes if it’s 1968. Mendal’s father is trying to romance his high school sweetheart, who happens also to be Mendal’s grade-school teacher, Lola Suber. (Mendal’s mother has skipped town and moved to Nashville to become “the next Patsy Cline.”) During one of his classroom show-and-tells, a clueless Mendal reads from his father’s “long-lost” letter purportedly written by Hélöise to Abelard, or maybe it’s Abelard to Hélöise. (“‘These were French people writing in English, I suppose,’ Ms. Suber said. … [Mendal] said, ‘They were smart, I believe.'”) Classmates giggle. Lola fumes. Later, at a parent-teacher conference between Dawes and Lola, Mendal is asked to wait in the car while parent and teacher do more than confer. But Dawes is no deadbeat dad. He’s handed the boy the keys and told him, “There’s a beer in the glove compartment, son.” Mendal is 9 years old.

This then is very not New Auburn, but it is the opening story, “Show-and-Tell,” out of a collected 14 stories (capped by the fictional thank-you speech “Richard Petty Accepts National Book Award”) in George Singleton’s The Half-Mammals of Dixie (Algonquin).

Forty-Five: former textile center currently down in the dumps and present/former home to adulterers, born-agains, neighborly scam artists, pseudo folk artists, land-grabbers, alcoholics, chain-smokers, goofballs, oddballs, one mentally defective jailbird, one “anti-PR” PR smart aleck, one baby-toting mountain mama, and a handful of semi- to bona fide success stories who may or may not be suffering inside intolerable marriages and enduring the general mess they’ve made of their lives.

Standard short-story stuff? On the one hand: yes. In Singleton’s hands: mostly no. These characters are too quick with the wisecracks, too plugged into or fed up with the mass-market junk culture of the New South to qualify for admission to the aw-shucks school of contemporary Southern letters. For a more accurate lay of the land, think Richard Ford territory but near to or decidedly the wrong side of the tracks. Selflessness, heroics? Wrong. Three case histories to prove it from Singleton’s well-reported 14:

1) Your slow death of choice is being a vendor at South Carolina’s unofficial pastime verging on statewide insanity: “collectibles,” aka flea markets. The problem/solution in “What Slide Rules Can’t Measure”: “If a radio’s nearby playing old country songs, go ahead and put a pistol to your temple.”

2) The problem (in “Answers”): Your marriage is in trouble, your book on that whiner of biblical proportions, Job, is going nowhere, and your irrational outbursts inside the Winn-Dixie have got to stop. The solution: Sit down with your wife at your At-Home Marriage Repair kit’s 100 questions and start out, the both of you, with a glass of water. Move immediately, both of you, to several twin glasses of straight bourbon. You will learn: Communication’s not the only issue. It’s that sound in your head that no one can hear that’s the real question that no one can answer. So look: You’re screwed.

3) The problem (in “Page-a-Day”): You’re an ex-pharmaceutical-company salesman pretending to be an untutored “visionary” artist, and sales to an eager gallery owner in Charleston are good. A scrawny mother with child shows up out of nowhere on your studio doorstep. She’s asking you to “breathe” on her kid to cure the baby’s thrush. You’re thinking this has got to be a put-on. This is Real McCoys, Andy Griffith material. You’re unthinkingly about to get it on with that gallery woman. You’re wife’s unthinkingly about to do the same with a police deputy. That poor mother, though, wandering the highway, is about to announce to your wife, “No man knows where he’s going, either.” It’s a declaration from an unlikely source, but it may be the sum-total understanding achieved by anybody in The Half-Mammals of Dixie.

So meet the neighbors, even friends, maybe yourself. Singleton makes learning fun. No sirens. None needed. But conditions: critical.

— Leonard Gill

Michael Perry signing and reading from Population: 485

Davis-Kidd Booksellers:

Tuesday, November 12th, 6:30 p.m.

Square Books in Oxford:

Wednesday, November 13th, 5 p.m.

George Singleton signing and reading from The Half-Mammals of Dixie

Burke’s Book Store:

Wednesday, November 13th, 5 p.m.

Square Books in Oxford:

Friday, November 15th, 5 p.m.

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

City Sports

Split Personality

As J-Will goes, so go the Griz: a tale of two second quarters.

By Chris Herrington

As was pointed out in these pages two weeks ago, the play of Grizzlies point guard Jason Williams is the clearest barometer of team success — and the team’s first four games of the season only bolster that argument. In the Grizzlies’ first three games — all against elite teams, all blowout losses –Williams averaged 8.7 points, six assists, and four turnovers and shot 37 percent from the floor and 29 percent from the three-point arc. Monday night, the Grizzlies played another elite team, the San Antonio Spurs. But rather than get blown out of the building again, they forced a bigger, more experienced, and more talented Spurs team into overtime. It took a long, fadeaway jumpshot at the buzzer from reigning MVP Tim Duncan — over the outstretched arms of Pau Gasol — to put the Grizzlies away. In that game, Williams put up 19 points, nine assists, and only two turnovers and shot 47 percent from the floor and 38 percent from three-point line.

But it isn’t as simple as the numbers. It’s Williams’ notoriously erratic decision-making — nuances that don’t show up in the boxscore –that really drives the team’s fortunes. You could see both sides of Williams’ Jekyll and Hyde point skills in the team’s past two games and see how his decision-making during the second quarter in particular often determines whether the team will have a chance to win.

Coach Sidney Lowe’s point guard rotation is pretty consistent, at least in the first half of games: Williams starts, giving way to backup Brevin Knight sometime in the final few minutes of the first quarter. Knight continues into the second quarter, replaced by Williams midway through. Williams finishes the half.

In the team’s 17-point loss to Sacramento last week, the Grizzlies led 13-8 when Williams left the game in the first quarter. Knight held the lead, and the Grizzlies were up 35-29 when Williams returned with 8:31 to go in the half. Then the bad J-Will emerged. Over the next four minutes and 10 offensive possessions, Williams ignored his duty to run the offense, pulling up for four quick, contested jumpers –all misses — before another teammate had touched the ball. Only once in those 10 possessions did the team’s trigger-man make a pass that was actually catalytic –a pass intended to actively initiate or create offense. (Swingman Gordon Giricek got an open three off Williams’ penetration but missed.) In the four minutes after Williams returned to the game, the team didn’t score a single field goal, and the Kings went on a 14-2 run.

At that point, Lowe called a timeout and Williams played the rest of the half much more in control, but the damage had been done: The Kings went into the half with the lead, the Grizzlies lost their momentum, and Sacramento blew the game open in the third quarter.

Monday against the Spurs, Williams wasn’t inspired in the second quarter, but he was efficient. The Grizzlies held a one-point lead when Williams left the game in the first quarter, but when J-Will reentered the game mid-way through the second quarter, the Spurs were up by six (36-42). Through 15 offensive possessions to close out the half, Williams jacked up only one of his trademark off-balance, early-in-the-shot-clock three-pointers. He pushed the ball when the opportunity was there –hitting Lorenzen Wright, who got fouled, and Giricek, who finished. He walked it up and got the ball to Gasol and got the offense going. Williams wasn’t flashy during these six minutes. He didn’t score a single point. But he had three assists and no turnovers. More importantly, the team went on a 14-7 run, reclaiming a one-point lead heading into the half and giving them the momentum to battle the Spurs on through to overtime.

There’s a coda to all this, of course. In the overtime period against the Spurs, Williams gave Grizzlies fans a mini-version of the good J-Will/bad J-Will dichotomy. For the first two and a half minutes of the five-minute period, the offense ran through Gasol exclusively. Twice, Williams got open shots off Gasol passes and twice he knocked them down. Through two and a half minutes, Williams had five points (all in the flow of the offense), two assists, no turnovers, and the team pulled ahead 99-94. Then, inexplicably, the Grizzlies went away from running the ball through Gasol. Williams pulled up for two quick threes, both misses. He committed a turnover. He went to rookie Drew Gooden down low, who fumbled the pass, instead of an open Gasol. The Spurs closed the game for the win.

After the game, Lowe was obviously disappointed in the execution at the end. Does Williams always have the option to pull up for a quick jumper, one reporter asked. “Option?” Lowe responded, incredulously. “No, that’s not his option, not in that situation. That’s a decision [he made], but not an option. He’s the type of player who wants to put a dagger in you. He wants to go for the big bomb. He took a couple of bad shots, but [other than that] he played a good game for us.”

Williams can’t catch a break on press row. It seems like every decision he makes is deemed a bad one, while “good guys” like Shane Battier and Knight are given a pass when they come up short. One popular theory floating around last year, which seems to still have some currency, is that the team functions better with Knight at the helm. This may be true on nights when Williams is having a particularly bad game but is otherwise absurd. Last season, in games in which Knight played 24 or more minutes (in other words, in games in which he was the primary point guard), the Grizzlies’ winning percentage was a calamitous .111. In games in which Williams had control of the team, the winning percentage was a still paltry, but dramatically better, .339.

Lowe was right: Williams did have a good game on Monday. He put the team in a position to win, but he didn’t finish. Jason Williams gives this team its best opportunity to win — but this year is the make-or-break year. If he puts it together, this team will improve by double digits in the win column. If he doesn’t, the malaise will return. Pay attention to those second quarters.

Gullywasher!

Raindrops keep falling on their heads as yet again the Tigers snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

By Kenneth Neill

How mad can a proverbial wet hen get? Trust me: no madder than the thousand or so drowned rats disguised as U of M football fans still prowling around the bowels of the soggy Liberty Bowl late Saturday afternoon, having watched their beloved Tigers figure out yet another creative way to lose a football game. This time, the Blue Boys snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, losing 26-21 to a mediocre Houston squad that, in the end, could only smile and quote Elvis (“Thankyaverramuch!”), knowing just how lucky they were to head home with a win.

Victory was there for the taking: The Tigers had the ball first-and-goal on the Houston five, with but 1:15 to play. A casual observer would have thought it impossible for the Tigers to blow this one, but we, the Loyal Order of Drowned Rats, knew better: If there was a way to lose, the Tigers would surely find it.

And, sure enough, they did. A remarkable (for the sheer stupidity of the decision) quarterback draw call on first down netted minus-three yards and kept the clock running, allowing for the usual time-wasting offensive confusion on the field as the Tigers tried to regroup for their next play. On second down, Danny Wimprine threw an incompletion, and then, on third down, his passing arm was hit as he threw and the ball dropped into the eager arms of a Houston defender. Game, set, match, Cougars. We of the LODR trudged home like war refugees to soak our frozen feet in buckets of warm water and ponder what might have been this season.

Where did it all go wrong? Well, one could start with the spate of special-teams goofs that killed momentum week in and week out and brought us heartbreaking defeat after heartbreaking defeat. Then consider the intense bout of Turnover Fever that infected the team in midseason, giving opponents a couple more easy victories. And, yes, behind it all was the Dirty Little Secret about the Tiger defense: namely, that we barely had one. Preseason backfield defections, inexperience, and a spate of injuries combined to make this Tiger defensive squad perhaps the weakest in recent memory.

The good news is that much of this was fixed by last Saturday, when the Tigers — remarkably under the demoralizing circumstances — played one of their better games of the season. The intriguing quarterbacks-as-floating-punters strategy actually worked well most of the time, and the Tigers made but one turnover (albeit a costly one; Derron White’s punt-return drop set up Houston’s first TD) until the game’s final seconds. And the defense — outweighed, overmatched, undermanned — played just about as well as it could.

So what went wrong Saturday? The same thing that’s gone wrong all year. The Tigers failed, yet again, to maximize their strength. A Tiger offense that should have been among C-USA’s best this season sputtered like an old car with water in its gas tank.

Look at the facts. We have a veteran offensive line, a quarterback in Danny Wimprine who (despite his uncanny knack of making exactly the wrong decision at exactly the wrong time) is on everybody’s list of the top three in the conference, receivers who can fly, and a running-back tandem (Dante Brown and D’Angelo Williams) clearly as good as anyone else’s in the C-USA.

And what have we done with all this talent? We’ve squandered it with offensive strategies that defy logic, with a no-huddle system apparently designed to encourage communication snafus, and boneheaded play-calling at critical times. It hasn’t helped that there have been days when Tiger receivers have dropped every ball thrown at them, but that’s football. That kind of bad luck makes you 4-5, not 2-7.

When you’re not the most talented football team on the planet, you have to maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. The 2002 Tigers have done just the opposite, and it shows. That last painful series against Houston said it all. Whatever you say about the play-calling and execution, the offense looked completely confused. And you can’t win football games when you’re confused — whether you’re the coaches on the sidelines or the players on the field.

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We Recommend We Recommend

thursday, 7

UNIVERSITY OF MEMHIS, Main stage, Showing through Saturday, November 9th: The Shape of Things, a play that asks the question, “How much would you change about yourself for the one you love?”

ALBERS FINE ART GALLERY, through December 6th, oil-on-canvas urban landscapes by Brent Hooper.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Giants of East Africa

Orchestra Super Mazembe

(Earthworks)

In 1991, Earthworks released the compilation Guitar Paradise of East Africa, a title that was less hyperbole than a plain statement of fact. One of the disc’s highlights was “Shauri Yako,” an early-’80s number from the Kenyan-out-of-the-Congo 13-piece Orchestra Super Mazembe that lasted nine and a half minutes yet ended way too soon. Length aside, there’s nothing particularly grandiose about “Shauri Yako” at first. The vocals are nasal and a little homely, the interweaving guitars aren’t nearly as showy as those of OSM’s neighbors in Kinshasa would be a little later in the decade (compare the slick fretwork of Diblo Dibala on Kanda Bongo Man’s and Loketo’s albums), and the dynamics are subtle enough to pass you by the first couple times. It’s pretty hypnotic, though. Soon, you find both the vocal melody and the guitar breaks stuck in your head. After a while, it’s hard not to want to hear it again. And then again. And again after that.

Giants of East Africa, OSM’s new greatest-hits collection, achieves the same effect, only a lot faster and more frequently. “Shauri Yako” is still the highlight, but, surrounded by such strong material, such distinctions seem trivial. The hypnotic grace notes that kick off “Kassongo,” the group’s first single, announce the record’s m.o.: paradise found again. Like much of the set, “Kassongo” starts off as a mesmerizing shuffle before the guitars (led by Bukasa wa Bukasa “Bukalos” and supported by riffers Loboko Bua Mangala and Komba Kassongo Songoley) shed their shackles and segue into a kicky little groove, over which lead vocalist Lovy Longomba (aka “Ya Mama”) shouts his pleasure. Throughout Giants of East Africa, it’s hard not to identify with him. — Michaelangelo Matos

Grade: A

Going Driftless: An Artist’s Tribute to Greg Brown

Various Artists

(Red House Records)

Just who is Greg Brown? you might ask. If you aren’t a folk-hound, a native Midwesterner, or a fan of Prairie Home Companion, you probably don’t know. Brown is a veteran singer-songwriter from Iowa who’s put out 19 or so solo albums and whose songs — quintessentially American, poignant, and cutting at the same time — have been covered by everyone from Carlos Santana to Willie Nelson to Shawn Colvin. Brown’s mama played electric guitar, his father was a Pentecostal preacher, and his discovery of Mississippi bluesman Big Bill Broonzy at the tender age of 10 sealed his fate as a future roots-music man. His music is intensely personal, whether dealing with big issues like the struggle to keep small towns alive or the hassles involved in the minutiae of everyday life and relationships. Brown’s tunes are firmly rooted to a place: the heart of the American Midwest. He worked for years doing music for Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion on NPR and is the founder of Red House Records, an indie label known for its roster of cutting-edge folk artists.

What a feast of artists come to this table. Many stellar female singer-songwriters make appearances here, including Lucinda Williams, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Victoria Williams. Royalties from this tribute album go the Breast Cancer Fund of San Francisco (hence the all-female cast), and what a change it is from the usual charity platter, which is often cobbled together and features MOR artists like Celine Dion to appeal to mass tastes. Finally, here’s a charity/tribute album for thinking people that’s actually very good. Highlights include Gillian Welch doing the lazy “Summer Evening,” Ani DiFranco’s chilling interpretation of “The Poet Game,” and Iris Dement’s high-lonesome yodeling on “The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home.” The lesser-known artists here give excellent performances too, especially Karen Savoca’s sassy rendering of “Two Little Feet” and the lovely, translucent voice of Leandra Peak, who closes the album. In fact, there are no snoozers here at all — a minor miracle given that 14 artists are involved. —Lisa Lumb

Grade: A-

Black Letter Days/Devil’s Workshop

Frank Black and the Catholics

(spinART)

Being the next writer to blow smoke up Frank Black’s arse for his work with the Pixies is not a prospect I’m too jazzed about, nor is it a particularly engaging place to start a review of his two new albums, especially on the cusp of his solo career’s 10th year. But what shape would Black’s solo career have taken if his 1993 solo debut hadn’t come on the heels of his ground-breaking run with the Pixies?

Chances are we wouldn’t be hearing anything from Black. He would have given up without that extra push and label attention that come standard with the Previously Fronted Extremely Influential Band package.

But Black shines supreme when placed within the context of the Cue Ball Triumvirate: Black, David Thomas, and Bob Mould. Besides the unifying baldness, all three led phenomenal bands — Thomas’ Pere Ubu and Mould’s Hüsker Dü (and, perhaps, Sugar) — and have tackled lengthy solo careers. Thomas’ has been “difficult,” which, for our purposes, is another word for “bad,” and Mould’s has had its ups, downs, and unflattering oddities (see this year’s Modulate). Black, if not just plain good, has at least made interesting music worth the attention of an open ear.

And now Black’s unexpectedly prolific stretch of post-Pixies albums reaches numbers eight and nine with the simultaneously released Black Letter Days and Devil’s Workshop. That spokesperson for AA rock, former Replacement Paul Westerberg, pulled this same stunt earlier in the year. What’s with these guys? Is it a secret society? The We Fronted Post-punk Bands of Holy Grail Status So Let’s Go Drive Some Golf Balls Club? But perhaps that’s a little unfair to Black, because, however improbably, both of these new albums are keepers.

The logic behind the split is clear: This music wouldn’t work as a sprawling double CD; listeners need a choice, and they get one. You want no filler in short order? Go with Devil’s Workshop, crooked pop finished in 30-something minutes. Black’s shameless but workable Stones rips are omnipresent throughout both records, and the numerous phases within the Stones’ oeuvre that are worthy of pilfering certainly hold a lot more staying power than the Pere Ubu and Velvets reference points prominent on Black’s earlier work, Pixies included. (You go through Pere Ubu and Velvet Underground phases; there should be no Rolling Stones “phase” — the love should last.) Devil’s Workshop is like Some Girls with a Pixies twist. It’s a big shot of aging Jagger Swagger administered right into Black’s mildly slanted pop musings and yammering acoustic rave-ups.

Conversely, Black Letter Days will require a little more homework. For starters, it’s epic, as much music as one CD will hold. The cover art: black-and-white photos of industrial chain-link fences and concrete drainage ditches. Some songs are long; most are nasty and dark, with a touch of faux blues, making Black Letter Days‘ probable sonic antecedent the drugs-coming-out-of-our-ears ’69-’73 Stones. But it’s not just plagiarism. Gifted songwriters like Black make their pickings sound new. The moving or catchy air of the songs will strike you long before their blueprints do. — Andrew Earles

Grades: Black Letter Days: B; Devil’s Workshop: B+

Categories
Music Music Features

Sound Advice

Cincinnati’s Over The Rhine has built up a considerable cult following over their decade-or-so existence, and on the evidence of their most recent album, 2001’s Films for Radio (released on Virgin, the band’s second flirtation with the major-label game), it’s not hard to see why. Lead singer Karin Bergquist’s charismatic, sometimes florid vocals are ear-catching, and husband/musical partner Linford Detweiler’s songwriting is literary and delicately religious. These forces combine to form a gently arty, folkish rock sound likely to appeal to fans of the Cowboy Junkies, Sarah McLachlan, or 10,000 Maniacs. Earlier records are reportedly heavy on acoustic instrumentation, but Films for Radio is richly fleshed out, its more complex atmospherics never taking away from the band’s sure tune-craft. Over The Rhine will be at the Hi-Tone Café Friday, November 1st.

Those looking for a bit more rambunctious time this week are advised to camp out at Young Avenue Deli. Local faves Lucero, back in town amid touring to support their just-released sophomore album Tennessee, will have a Halloween-night throw-down at that Midtown watering hole. It promises to be a raucous affair. And you could stick around the next night for Mr. “Because I Got High” himself, Afroman. The Mississippi-based one-hit wonder is either a good-time novelty act or an unbearable frat-party aberration, depending on your perspective. Vote with your wallet. — Chris Herrington

If you collected all of Bob X’s fantastically ghoulish Hell on Earth posters, the band listings would read like a who’s who of Memphis rock-and-roll for the past dozen years. You’d see an amazing collection of punk bands, blues revivalists, metal bands, living legends, art rockers, indie rockers, novelty acts, and garage groups. And that’s just for starters. Hell on Earth, an event that has become the Halloween party for the Memphis rock set, is equally famous for decadence and debauchery. This year’s stellar lineup leans in the punk/garage direction with The Limes, The Grown-Up Wrongs, and the always-amazing Tyler Keith and the Preacher’s Kids. The dirty South’s latest rap diva, Chopper Girl (aka Holland Taylor), will swap couplets with retro rapper Hunchoe the Phenom and a few special guests. Though he’s not listed on the poster, word on the street has it that super-rapper Al Kapone will drop by to lend a rhyme as well. Since Memphis’ virtually all-vanilla rock scene and double-chocolate rap scene almost never swirl (except at the occasional Porch Ghouls show or the odd Three 6/Saliva tag team), this year’s Hell on Earth could be a historic occasion. It all goes down on Friday, November 1st, at the Premiere Palace. —Chris Davis

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Death Becomes Her

A remake of a massively popular Japanese film of the same name, current box-office champ The Ring opens with a set piece similar to that of the Scream series. It’s a dark and stormy night in a big, mostly empty house. Two comely teenage girls sit in one girl’s bedroom and gossip. By the end of the night, one will be dead and one will be headed to the psychiatric ward. The actual setup is also in the vein of recent American teen-horror films: One girl tells an urban legend about a videotape — anyone who watches it gets a call saying they’ll die in seven days, which they do. The other girl gulps:”I saw it. Seven days ago.”

But this opening also cues the audience that this isn’t another one of those horror movies. The scene isn’t played for laughs –ironic or queasy — or for gore. It’s played for maximum creep effect. And it’s effective.

The dead girl’s aunt, Rachel (Naomi Watts), is an investigative reporter, and the girl’s mother asks her to try to determine why her daughter died (“Sixteen-year-old girls’ hearts don’t just stop. I’ve talked to three different doctors, and no one can tell me exactly why my daughter died”). Rachel soon hears talk of the videotape and discovers that the other kids who watched it with her niece also died, all at 10 p.m. the same night. Rachel tracks the tape down fairly easily (it is waiting to be found) and, without hesitation, watches it. Then she gets the call.

Creepy details pile up: Rachel’s grade school son Aidan has been drawing pictures of a dead girl at school, which Rachel takes to be a coping mechanism after the death of her beloved niece — except that he started making the drawings before her death. Photographic images of people who have seen the tape — including Rachel and her estranged boyfriend (and Aidan’s father) Noah (played by Martin Henderson), a video technician, to whom she shows the tape — are blurred.

The tape itself, which Noah derides as “very student-film,” is a catalog of perhaps subconsciously connected black-and-white images, sort of a cross between Un Chien Andalou and a Nine Inch Nails video but sufficiently skin-crawling. Technology wizard Noah somehow determines that it couldn’t have been made by any camera he’s aware of. (Something about an ID number encoded on videotapes.)

Having watched the tape and gotten the call, Rachel has seven days to unravel the mystery before her own demise, which gives the film its structure, and the details of the tape’s origin begin to emerge. What at first seems to be the result of some electronic transmission coming from the tape itself turns into something a little different, and Rachel’s sleuthing leads to an isolated island, an insane asylum, an old, dark house, a sordid family history, and other evocative ghost-story material. Along the way, the film fetishizes a few creepy images: a long ladder leading to a barn loft, an old well buried underneath a cabin, a lighthouse over a rocky beach.

The Ring is no great film. As recent horror films go, it’s neither as accomplished as The Sixth Sense nor as sui generis as The Blair Witch Project. It does have some of the skin-crawling atmospherics of the finest arty ’60s horror films — Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls, Repulsion. And it stays a step ahead of its many plot holes and implausibilities. It also comes with the now de rigueur twist ending, except this time, the device isn’t gratuitous. It’s necessary: a not-quite-happy ending that withholds reassurance and throws the fear back at the audience.

And if nothing else, The Ring is notable as the first film for Watts since her historic performance in Mulholland Drive. Watts (who’ll be filming 21 Grams in Memphis later this year) acquits herself wonderfully in what is a far less compelling role (will there ever be another role like Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn?), proving that her electric performance for David Lynch was no fluke and that she can carry more mainstream material on her own. — Chris Herrington

Igby Slocumb, title character of Igby Goes Down, is a rascal, as my grandmother would say. Equal parts charmer, thief, sycophant, whiz kid, and brat, Igby (Kieran Culkin) gets what he wants and he’s not afraid to starve on the street to prove that he’s cleverer than everyone around him. No proper school on the East Coast will have him (he’s been through most of them), and mother Mimi (Susan Sarandon) is at the end of her rope in her attempts to sophisticate and legitimize him, juggling Igby-wrangling with her feisty battle with breast cancer. Brother Oliver (Ryan Phillippe), an opportunistic Columbia frosh, is the model of vacant parental approval: successful, articulate, bland. Oliver could be Thurston Howell III’s long-lost grandson, with Igby as an unwelcome hindrance to his social calendar and Young Republican ladder-climbing.

There is something spooky about the Culkin family. I envision the following scenario: Walt Disney, in his twilight years, works feverishly on a mysterious fertility drug that will produce the perfect child actor. Disney leaves the drug safely hidden in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World but dies before he can create his race of tap-dancing, tinny-voiced, smiling miniature superkids. Enter Kit and Patricia Culkin, years later, happy newlyweds on their honeymoon, who stumble on the secret formula in between Epcot and Neverneverland. She drinks the formula and you know the rest.

The Culkins are a little hard to keep track of, but Kieran is the one who was in Father of the Bride, The Cider House Rules, and this past summer’s The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. Like Altar Boys, this is a skewed coming-of-age drama — not in the vein of Stand by Me or Empire of the Sun, by any means, but quite like Rushmore. We know that Igby is smarter than anyone else in the movie from the get-go. It’s not about smarts. The point of the journey lies in catching the heart up with the head. Igby grows up a little, hates his mother, encounters sex (and lots of it, with the sexy Amanda Peet and the smartly acrid Claire Danes) and drugs and adultery and corruption before his eventual return home. The first scene, a flash-forward, shows Igby and Oliver at Mimi’s bedside, putting a plastic bag over her head. Are they trying to kill her? The scene, quirky and amusingly troubled, cuts away to the beginnings of Igby’s adventures. One of the last scenes brings us back to this moment — now not so quirky, not so funny. Igby spends so much time avoiding and cursing his mother that we expect some intellectually giddy triumph from his chance to end her altogether. The film’s success lies in connecting these two dots, and Kieran plays the full circle with grown-up mischief and real-kid hurt.

This is a movie for literate audiences who enjoy smallish films with subtly quirky characters and no easy answers. The dramatic element of Igby is always coated with humor and dark wit. The comedy is laced with pain. The film’s violence, sexuality, and glimpses of mortality are usually accompanied by big laughs. The performances are finely tuned to this humor, with a cast of underrated comics that includes Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum (in a delightfully low-key turn as Igby’s patronizing godfather), and Bill Pullman as the schizophrenic Slocumb patriarch. In fact, the film’s tone is arguably set by Pullman. Each time we see him, in the present or in flashback, we are drawn further and further into the darkness of the film’s bitter wit, concluding with a bizarre and haunting bathroom scene between a teeth-brushing young Igby (played by younger brother Rory Culkin — see? there’s dozens of ’em) and his bloodied, showering father. Having only seen Pullman in the lowbrow Spaceballs, Independence Day, and Mr. Wrong, it’s nice to see some interesting, real acting from him. The film shares in his schizophrenia, and when the film comes full circle with Igby’s closure with numb brother Oliver, meanie Mom, and crazy Dad, we feel just as finished, just as strong as Igby. Not for the faint of heart or those who wonder about where their kids are. They’ll just worry more. — Bo List