In this week’s Memphis Flyer Podcast, Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse talks about AI in the newsroom, the challenges of keeping the press free, and our cover story on MPD traffic stops and marijuana.
Category: Film/TV
Categories
The Last Night at the Drive-In
By the time we got to the Malco Summer Drive-In, a crowd of cars had already gathered at Screen 4. That was not unusual for a monthly Saturday night dedicated to the Time Warp Drive-In series. What was unusual was that we were there two hours before showtime because it was the last weekend of the drive-in.
The first drive-in opened in New Jersey in 1932. The concept spread to Memphis in 1940. After World War II, their popularity exploded. Postwar prosperity meant that more people than ever owned cars, and since most drive-ins charged by the carload, piling the family into the station wagon for a double feature was an affordable night out for working-class parents. Teenagers loved the drive-in as a place where they could go on dates and have a little privacy. The drive-ins’ reputation for illicit hanky-panky even spawned a hit song in 1957, the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie.”
The drive-ins became a breeding ground for a certain kind of picture. Sure, you could find big-budget, A-list fare there, but those films existed next to cheaper movies, often made by independent companies outside the Hollywood mainstream, which were more daring with their subject matter. For every prestige title like Ben-Hur, there were a dozen flicks like Invaders from Mars.
The latter were the kinds of films the Time Warp Drive-In celebrated. Pioneering Memphis indie filmmaker Mike McCarthy (who once called himself “a man without a drive-in”) and Black Lodge Video founder Matthew Martin booked vintage classics and non-classics alike for 12 years. Sitting in the front row of Screen 4, surrounded by friends in camp chairs and kids hanging out in open hatchbacks, the pair watched the animated retrospective of Time Warp art posters created by Lauren Rae “Holtermonster” Holtermann. An emotional McCarthy said the Time Warp had brought 105 films to the biggest screen in town.
A few weeks ago, Malco announced that the sprawling drive-in was for sale after 60 years of operation. It was expected that the theater would complete the summer season, but a buyer popped up, and word got out that this weekend would be the end. No one blamed Malco. It was common knowledge that the Tashie family, who have controlled Malco for decades, loved the institution of the drive-in, even as the popularity of the format waned. This served the company well during the pandemic, when it was the theater chain’s only source of income. In the last five years, the Summer drive-in hosted the Indie Memphis Film Festival, the Southeast satellite program from the Sundance Film Festival, and Joe Bob Briggs’ drive-in festival. But while these big events and the Time Warp brought crowds to Summer Avenue, normal weekend nights were not busy, and the high overhead costs proved to be a drag on the company struggling during the post-pandemic cinema malaise which has only recently lifted. You can only lose money on something for so long.
A funny thing happened over the last six decades. Films once considered drive-in trash are now the mainstream. A young Steven Spielberg saw Invaders from Mars at a drive-in. In 1977, he paid tribute to it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, perhaps the most influential indie film of all time, was a drive-in programmer that spawned the entire zombie subgenre. Over on Screen 1, Sinners, the Ryan Coogler-directed smash which has been largely responsible for 2025’s box office outperforming 2024 by 10 percent, was playing to a full lot. It’s a direct descendant of Night of the Living Dead, and it’s leading the early conversation for Best Picture — something Romero could never have dreamed of.
The final Time Warp was a Bill & Ted marathon. Martin tells me Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter’s goofy SoCal surfer pals who travel through time to save a utopian future had been scheduled to headline the Time Warp twice before, only to face rain- and snow-outs. This night, the weather is perfect, and a stream of cars is backed up on Summer Avenue as far as the eye can see. The dirty little secret of the three Bill & Ted movies is that, while their protagonists are a little thick in the head, the screenplays are extremely well-written. Our heroes don’t solve problems with violence, but through outwitting the humorless school principals and cop dads who threaten to derail the duo’s glorious future. It’s gold, smuggled in the trash.
That’s how a lot of people feel about Memphis. But it’s a tough time in the 901. Martin’s Black Lodge, a combination video store, rep theater, and performance venue, closed last summer, a victim of out-of-control rents and pandemic malaise. Earlier this year, slashed arts grant budgets and reduced corporate sponsorships put the Indie Memphis Film Festival on hiatus. Two weeks ago, the Clayborn Temple, a Civil Rights landmark, burned to the ground under unexplained circumstances. Then there was the full-hand, slap-in-the-face of the acquittal on state murder chargers of three of the police officers involved in the killing of Tyre Nichols. The loss of the drive-in might have been a long time coming, but it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
The last Time Warp is like a roving family reunion, a final gathering of the tribes. Parents brought kids for their first and probably only drive-in experience, and the kids, for the most part, were loving it. On screen, Bill and Ted defeat Death in a game of Twister, and then ask him to join their band. Several folks observe that if people showed up like this more often, the drive-in wouldn’t have to close. Keep that in mind the next time you’re wondering if you should go see a local band, or a film screening at Crosstown, or a play from Quark Theatre, or one of the dozens of other events we list in the pages of the Memphis Flyer every week. If you don’t use it, eventually, you will lose it.
This week’s music video is a cross-country collaboration between a group of Memphis expats. Adam Poor, who now resides in Denver; Melissa Goodwin Shepherd in Arizona, Chris Weary in New York City, and friend of MVM Jeff Hulett play Western-tinged country/folk together as Restless Townies.
“Strange New World” is about “having to wink at the absurdity of all the tumbleweeds and grit life throws at you,” says Shepherd, who directed this lyric video for the song. Get ready for some high lonesome imagery of Monument Valley and the sweeping horizons of the West to put you on the right track for the week.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Join Toby Sells and Chris McCoy as they talk about the Barbecue Issue. Plus, the troubling verdict in the state trial of the police officers who killed Tyre Nichols, and Central High School brings the world jazz band championship trophy home to the 901.
Categories
Shine On: The Story of Tom Lee
We’ve all been to Tom Lee Park, either before or after its $60 million reimagining transformed Memphis’ relationship to the riverfront. Maybe you’ve seen the statue of a young Black man reaching out from a rowboat to rescue a person in the water. But do you know who Tom Lee was?
On May 8, 1925, the steamship M.E. Norman was sailing upstream on the Mississippi River, returning to Memphis after a day trip to Pickney Landing. For some reason later investigations were unable to determine, as it approached Cow Island Bend, the boat suddenly capsized, throwing 75 people into the rushing waters of the Mississippi. Tom Lee was the boatman on a skiff named Zev, making his living ferrying people and cargo from one shore to the other. He witnessed the accident and raced to the scene, where he started pulling people out of the water. He made five trips to and from the accident site, ultimately saving 32 people — despite the fact that he could not swim. Lee became a nationally celebrated hero, even getting an invitation to the White House to be honored by President Calvin Coolidge. The Memphis Engineers Club bought a house for Lee and his wife, and the city gave him a job in the sanitation department. After he died in 1952, the grassy stretch by the river was named in his honor.
In November 2020, the crew of Last Bite Films was commissioned to make a documentary about the Memphis River Parks Partnership’s Tom Lee Park renovations. “As we were in the process of that, we started to get to know the family of Tom Lee’s descendants,” says producer Joseph Carr. “We just kind of slowly started to realize that there really had not been any documentary or anything, beyond a few articles here and there, that made an in-depth attempt at telling Tom Lee’s story. So we decided during that time that we were going to try to tackle the subject. Initially, we had talked about doing a more traditional documentary, and it sort of just evolved from there based on what we thought we could do, how creative we wanted to be, talking to the family, how open they were to us, doing this in a different manner, and we just got excited with that possibility and kind of ran from there.”
Having just finished a conventional documentary, director Matteo Servente says they wanted to try something different. “We kind of thought about how exciting it would be to make a piece that was not just following those traditional patterns of the talking-head documentary because of the story, because of budget limitations, and also because of our creative need to try something different. We started talking about adding elements that are non-traditional in a narrative or even in a documentary, blending in elements like dance and sound design to a degree that was going to become almost like a prominent part of the piece.”
Amazi Arnett composed the music and wrote the screenplay for what would become “Shine On” “Coming from Tom Lee’s point of view was sort of the product of all of our conversation and what Matteo wanted, and that made sense to me. We don’t hear from him. There’s all this lore about who he is, but no idea about who he was as a person. It was important to me to capture that. Once we talked with the descendants, I started noticing all these little bits of information that the public couldn’t possibly know … I wanted to really ground him in his humanity, and what he would’ve thought about the situation.”
In the film, Tom Lee is played by Kenon Walker. “I think he just was somebody who was in the right place at the right time and decided to do something right,” says Walker, familiar to Memphians as the current Duckmaster at the Peabody Hotel. “I don’t think he set out to be a hero. I think he was in a position where he saw something that needed to be done, and he was in a position to do it … A lot of people today would’ve just sat on the sideline and watched that ship sink. They might not have stepped up and done anything but recorded it, or put it on Facebook Live.”
The film combines voiceover, reflecting on the rescue from Tom Lee’s perspective, with some stunning images of the Zev on the river at sunset, and dance sequences by choreographer Steven Prince Tate filmed in the park. “We shot on the river, and so we had a lot of moving pieces that were not easy to pull off,” says Servente. “We did our homework, but the crew really just brought it home … [Editor] Edward Valibus helped us find the place and the amount of dance that was needed for everything.”
Producers Molly Wexler and Anton Mack raised funds for the film and did the necessary archival research. “It was a fascinating project,” says Mack. “We had such deep and rich conversations as we tried to work through this creative process with Arnett’s writing and Matteo’s leadership.”
“The nice thing is that we’re such a good team,” says Wexler. “Anton and I did a lot of the archival stuff, going through all the records at the library and so on, just trying to make sure we had the story correct. We also brought on Ryan Jones from the National Civil Rights Museum, who helped contextualize the story to make sure we got it right for that era, which was incredibly helpful.”
“Shine On: The Tome Lee Story” aired on WKNO-TV on the 100th anniversary of Tom Lee’s heroics. You can catch it on the PBS streaming app for the next week or so. “This story is really evergreen because as kids go and visit the park, they’ll watch this film ahead of time to give them some context of who Tom Lee was,” says Wexler. “It’s going to be incorporated in some Jim Crow curricula. It doesn’t have to just be isolated to Tom Lee. There’s so much more to it that connects it to the history of the country.”
“Shine On! The Tom Lee Story” is streaming on the PBS app.
Fresh off setting the world record for the longest standup set of all time, Benny Elbows joins Chris McCoy to talk comedy, endurance, beer, movies, and Dungeons & Dragons.
Categories
Thunderbolts*
Before we begin, I want to get one thing straight: I hate Bucky Barnes.
I’ve been tired of Marvel superhero movies for the better part of a decade now. So, so tired. I’m burned-out on superheroes in general, and the Marvel pantheon in particular. And yet, we’re still doing it. Punching, quipping, popping in and out of existence at the snap of a finger. It’s exhausting.
The old crew, the ones who starred in The Avengers, are long gone. They’re off counting their money, making guest appearances on Saturday Night Live, and getting run over by snowplows. ScarJo; Evans, the best of the Chrises; token liberal Mark Ruffalo; luckiest dude alive Jeremy Renner; and, of course, RDJ. We had some times.
But Bucky Barnes, played by Sebastian Stan, is the most useless superhero. His function as Steve Rogers’ Army buddy was always to get into trouble so Captain America can have something to feel guilty about. He “died,” then came back as a Hydra experiment designed to recreate Cap’s lost super soldier serum. Also, he has a bionic arm, which is a big cyborg cop-out of a superpower. Captain America would save his old buddy Bucky, then Bucky’s brainwashing would kick in, and he would betray Cap. After it happens a couple of times, don’t you just go, “Okay, we tried, but he can’t be saved?” Put him out of his misery. Let Vision do it.
But no, The Good Chris is gone, we’re on our third or fourth super team Disney desperately needs us to like because the quarterly earnings call is coming up, and that boat ain’t gonna pay for itself. (Didthe Eternals count? I don’t freakin’ know.) Yet Bucky still endures. There’s a whole sequence in Thunderbolts* devoted to making Bucky Barnes look like the biggest badass of the bunch. He’s blowing up Hummers with explosives that make them flip end over end, which is not a thing that happens in places where the laws of physics apply. It falls flat because Bucky’s a chump, and not even Stan (who is not a bad actor, in the big picture of bad actors) can sell it.
In the current timeline, Bucky was just elected to his first term in Congress. Congressman Bucky is very J.D. Vance coded because of course he is. Soulless weirdos getting elected is one of those nods to realism that makes the MCU so relevant. Really got the finger on the pulse there, guys.
Unsurprisingly, Bucky sucks at legislating. Understandable, since physical assaults on the House floor have been relatively rare since January 6, 2021. He’s still got that old c-rimefighting urge, though, and the new director of the CIA, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), is setting off his Spidey sense. Director de Fontaine is a walking, talking, call-taking nightmare of oligarchic institutional capture, who has used her wealth to conduct terrible secret experiments at the edge of science. Wow, more realism.
Bucky and a colleague credited as “Gary: A Congressman” (Wendell Pierce: an actor) are trying to impeach her. To avoid impeachment, imprisonment, and confiscation of her ill-gotten fortune, de Fontaine must destroy the evidence of her extracurricular activities. She turns to a trusted asset, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), to blow up a secret O.X.E. Group laboratory. Yelena, the adoptive sister of Black Widow and a product of Soviet super-assassin conditioning, is suffering from burnout. She wakes up; she stares at her phone; she goes to work and kills a bunch of guys. What’s the point? There will just be more guys to kill tomorrow.
After a reunion with her deadbeat dad, Soviet super-soldier Red Guardian (David Harbour), she decides to ask for a promotion. Maybe something in the heroic register? De Fontaine assures her, if she completes one more secret assignment, she can commit redemptive violence for a change.
The mission to investigate a secret vault where the secrets are stored turns out to be a trap. Yelena, you see, is also evidence which needs to be destroyed. So is John Walker, aka U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), an American super-soldier (there sure are a lot of those) who was briefly Captain America before … well, some bad stuff happened, and now he’s a professional violence worker. Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko), aka Taskmaster, and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) are also there, and they soon discover they’re all assigned to kill each other.
Trapped in the exploding fight-vault with them is a dude named Bob, who has no idea why or how he got there. Did you guess that they will all have to work together and rethink their roles as villains in order to survive deadly treachery by someone who was on Seinfeld? Because that’s what happens.
Bob, it turns out, is yet another victim of super-science gone awry. He will become The Void, whose evil plot is to give all of Manhattan depression. Again, totally relatable.
Maybe it’s these new antidepressants talking, but I didn’t hate Thunderbolts* as much as I feared. After a little introspection while Yelena and crew were incepting through The Void’s depression world, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors-style, I realized why.
It’s because of Pugh and Harbour’s outrageous Russian accents.
What can I say? I, a professional film critic, am a sucker for a stupid accent. The key is, the actor has to know the accent is stupid and lean into it. Think Clooney in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Pugh’s fluctuating pronunciations say to me, “Yes, this movie is stupid. But we’re in it together, so we might as well make the most of this fun accent.” So when the Thunderbolts* finally defeat The Void with hugs**, I was like, “Thank you, Francis Pugh, I needed that.”
*Yes, the asterisk in the title is there for a reason, and yes, the reason is stupid.
**This is not a joke.
Thunderbolts*
Now playing
Multiple locations
Memphis singer/songwriter Jeff Hulett has a new EP called “The Testing Floor” out on Small Batch Records. On the first single, “Nobody Knows,” Hulett gets existential.
“The song itself is about mortality and the great beyond. The before and the contemplation of the after. In the end, nobody knows,” says Hulett.
The lyric video is directed by Jake Vest, who Hulett calls “my go-to guy for my videos.”
“I really feel that Jake captures this feeling with the visuals and overall flow. Onward we go!”
This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, it’s RiverBeat time! Alex Greene talks about his cover story interviews with Chuck D, Bobby Rush, Cage the Elephant, and DJ Zirk. Plus, Memphis rock legend Greg “Oblivian” Cartwright visits to give us the skinny on his latest project The Hypos.
Categories
Andor Season 2
I recently attended a lecture by Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University. Snyder’s specialty is the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. His 2017 book, On Tyranny, was essential reading during the first Trump administration, and earlier this year, it topped the New York Times Bestseller list. If you’ve recently heard the phrase “don’t obey in advance,” that’s Snyder’s work.
His new book, On Freedom, asks hard questions about the way we use the word “freedom” in America. Too often, we think of freedom only as the absence of anyone telling us what to do. But it’s much more than that. Freedom is not merely individualistic in nature. There are times when banding together with other people will make both us and them more free. The American Revolution is one example. People with diverse interests from diverse places banded together to throw off the chains of monarchy and prevent any one person from ever having that much power over them again.
George Lucas called the good guys in 1977’s Star Wars the Rebel Alliance. The bad guys were the Galactic Empire. The names weren’t important. He just needed an excuse for lasers to go pew pew. Sure, Obi-Wan Kenobi was fighting to restore the Old Republic, but his number-one ally was Princess Leia, who was royalty. And where did this plucky group of rebels get a fleet of expensive-looking spaceships? Who cares? It’s a story about space wizards trying to get their mojo back.
Lucas himself was the first to realize he had half-accidentally created a political story, and the prequel trilogy is really about how democracies die. In the Disney era, Rogue One stood apart for its glimpse into what everyday life was like under the rule of Emperor Palpatine. When Tony Gilroy, who was on Rogue One’s creative team, continued the story with Alliance operative Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) on Disney+, it was as much about how revolutions begin in authoritarian regimes as it was about a street hustler who finds a purpose in life.
Season 2, which premiered last week on Disney+, leans into the ensemble cast Gilroy created and adapted. This season is unique, in that its twelve 30-minute episodes are being released three at a time, with each batch telling a complete story and then skipping ahead one year. From the very first scene, Gilroy and his crew show they’re taking Star Wars to an emotional place it has never been before. Cassian has infiltrated Sienar Fleet Systems to steal an advanced TIE fighter prototype. As she is handing him the keys to the ship, the young tech who has helped him (Rachelle Diedericks) asks, “If I die today, will it be worth it?”
Yes, Cassian assures her; no matter what happens, she’s made a decision to be free in the face of oppression. Then he leaves her to her fate. It’s a brilliant bit of writing, revealing Cassian’s moral calculus. Many more people will be faced with the same bad set of choices. On the prosperous world Chandrila, Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) is facing the consequences of the deals she made to finance the Alliance to restore the Republic. She’s giving her daughter Leida (Bronte Carmichael) away in a loveless arranged marriage to the son of a shady oligarch. It’s the social event of the season, which means Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård), the deep-cover Rebel leader, can use it as an excuse for a visit. Meanwhile, Mothma’s own marriage is falling apart, her daughter hates her, and her banker Tay (Ben Miles) is considering ratting her out to the Empire.
The most chilling sequence in these first three episodes is a boardroom meeting. Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) has assembled a secret team of Imperial brass, including ISB investigator Dedra Meero (Denise Gough). Under the guise of “energy independence,” Krennic plans to mine the peaceful planet Ghorman, famous for its fine silk exports, for the enormous quantities of minerals it will take to build the Death Star. The problem is, how to remove the population without causing too much of a stir. The bureaucrats calmly pitching genocidal ideas is a reference to the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis planned the Final Solution. By taking the question “Where did the Rebellion come from?” seriously, Gilroy has elevated this space fantasy into a work that’s sadly relevant to our moment. What is freedom? When push comes to shove, how hard will you fight, how far will you go, for freedom?
New episodes of Andor premiere Tuesday nights on Disney+.