Public transportation is a big issue in Memphis. As Flyer writer Kailyn Johnson has reported, MATA is in deep disarray. Maybe it’s time to hand things over to the real professionals. Maybe it’s time to call in GloRilla.
And why not? GloRilla has a track record of success. Her debut long player Glorious peaked at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Her tour with Megan Thee Stallion was the hottest thing in stadiums not involving Taylor Swift. This weekend, she’ll make her national television debut as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.” She’s unstoppable.
As we see in her latest music video, “Hollon,” Glo knows how to do mass transit right. Directed by Troy Roscoe, the video shows our hero in the driver’s seat where she belongs. If riders are at first turned off by her cannabis-forward commute, they come around by the time they reach their destination, which we can only assume is Party Central. Get on the bus.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com
Lily Rose Depp feels the touch of the vampire in Nosferatu. (Photo: Courtesy Focus Features)
The thing Robert Eggers does better than any other director is fully inhabiting the historic worlds of his films. His characters are not 21st-century humans wearing horned helmets plopped into a longboat. In The Northman, the pagan Vikings blame the Christians for a series of gruesome murders because “their god is a corpse nailed to a tree.” In his first film, The Witch, the devil stalking his Puritan settlers is real because it’s real to them — even as Eggers hints that the actual reason bad luck has befallen their settlement is that they suck at farming.
When he approached his long-gestating passion project, a remake of Nosferatu, he gravitated towards the source material, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Eggers works in the high melodrama of vaudeville theater and silent film, challenging you to throw yourself fully into the gloom.
The original Nosferatu is a haunted film. Director F.W. Murnau and star Max Schreck had both spent time in the trenches of World War I. The German producers didn’t get permission from the English estate of Bram Stoker, and when the author’s widow successfully sued, the court ordered all copies of the film destroyed. Luckily, they missed a few, and Nosferatu became one of the founding documents of modern horror. It’s also one of the few works of art to deal with the 1918 influenza pandemic, as the appearance of the vampire Count Orlok in Berlin is accompanied by a mysterious plague.
Nosferatu follows the broad outline of Dracula, but with a few important exceptions. It begins with Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a teenager in early 19th-century Prussia, being visited by a mysterious spirit. After it leaves, she seems to have epileptic convulsions. Years later, Ellen is a respectable young woman married to Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a real estate agent hustling for a promotion. Thomas is assigned to visit “a very old account” in the Transylvania’s Carpathian mountains. No one knows why Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) wants to buy the ruined mansion down the street from Thomas and Ellen, but they’ll take his money anyway.
Nicolas Hoult suspects something is amiss with his new client in Nosferatu. (Photo: Courtesy Focus Features)
Once Thomas arrives in Transylvania, it becomes clear nothing is normal. The local Romani are on an active vampire hunt, and when they hear where Thomas is going, they rightly freak out. The count licks Thomas’ blood and makes him sign a document in a language he doesn’t understand. But even though that sounds like something a health insurance CEO would do, the mad alchemist Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) rightly surmises that Count Orlok is a “nosferatu.” Once he has completed the real estate transaction and left Thomas for dead, the Count menaces an increasingly desperate Ellen, wanting to possess her body and her immortal soul.
Eggers plays all of this absolutely straight, as he has with all his movies. There is no winking to the camera. None of these characters have read Dracula, or seenWhat We Do in the Shadows, so every revelation of vampire lore is news to them. (The original Nosferatu, by the way, is the origin of the trope that vampires die when exposed to sunlight. Bram Stoker’s Dracula just didn’t like it.)
Willem Dafoe starts a fire in Nosferatu. (Photo: Courtesy Focus Features)
To describe Depp’s performance as “melodramatic” is a monstrous understatement. She goes full Linda Blair: shaking, foaming at the mouth, and performing a really impressive back bend while possessed with Count Orlok’s dark magic. Hoult equals her freak as the terrified husband trying to keep it together as he is faced with one mind-destroying horror after another. Dafoe pronounces every syllable like he’s driving a stake into the heart of a vampire.
The story starts out strong, but once Thomas and Orlok return to save/eat Ellen, the plot languishes in gothic ennui. Fortunately, Eggers drops one killer composition after another, so there’s always something incredible to look at onscreen. We never get the full picture of Count Orlok, who is always shaded in darkness, until the film’s extremely disturbing climax. It’s not a new observation to say that sex and death are always intertwined in horror, but few works have gone as far as Nosferatu in making the subtext so easy to read.
The Memphis Music Initiative (MMI) is one of the most successful arts nonprofits in Memphis. They promote music education and provide young people with opportunities to work in the music business. Last January, they released a music video that humorously addressed the frustrations of the nonprofit life. As they put it, “We’re here to serve the underserved market of fundraising jams.”
Director and producer Princeton James put together the extensive list of talent for “I Hope Like Hell We Get This Grant.” Patterned after an old cable TV ad for compilation albums by companies like K-Tel, the video brings you hits such as “Giving Tuesday” and “When I Hit The Check.” After racking up tens of thousands of views (presumably among burnt-out nonprofit staffers worldwide), the video was just nominated for a Regional Emmy Award. “We are honored to receive this nomination on behalf of the entire team, which reflects the extraordinary talent of our Memphis creatives, community partners, and staff,” says Amber Hamilton, President of the Memphis Music Initiative. “At MMI, we believe in pushing boundaries to lift the voices of grassroots organizations doing transformative work. This video is our rallying cry — cut the check and trust the experts on the ground.”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Timothée Chalamet wears a polka dot shirt as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures)
There’s one detail that everyone who was at the 1965 Newport Festival seems to agree on: Bob Dylan wore a polka dot shirt.
Dylan’s three-song set at the annual music festival was one of those moments where an artist challenged their audience so intensely that it broke brains. In 1913, the Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring caused a literal riot in the theater. Fifty years later, when Dylan takes the stage in the sleepy Rhode Island town armed with a Stratocaster and backed by Chicago electric blues disciple Mike Bloomfield, the audience which had made him a star shouts “Judas!” in this film. It is a moment that has become fraught with meaning. Depending on which side of the Great Folk Divide you fall on, it was either a rejection of the folk movement’s New Deal ideology or a declaration of artistic independence from hidebound tradition.
The Newport set is the climax of Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric, which James Mangold has adapted into A Complete Unknown. Timothée Chalamet is the latest in a surprisingly long list of actors who have played Bob Dylan onscreen — including Bob Dylan himself.
If you want a film that uses Dylanesque artistry to explore the mythic aspects of Bob Dylan, it’s Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. This is a music biopic by James Mangold. His Walk The Line, which was filmed in Memphis, set the standard for the genre. It was skewered so effectively by Walk Hard: The Dewy Cox Story that many people have become allergic to the basic beats that appear in every musician’s story.
Dylan onstage (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures)
Mangold and his star overcome self-parody by sheer force of execution. His actors sing all of the songs live on set, a Herculean task that is a bit easier for Chalamet, who must growl like Dylan, than it is for his co-star Monica Barbaro, who must sing like Joan Baez. The contrasting grit and glamor of the folk movement’s two greatest stars is what made their pairing palatable, and gave it a hint of danger. Baez recognizes Dylan’s talent as soon as she hears him sing in a cramped Greenwich Village basement. But she’s one of the few people who doesn’t immediately worship him, which makes her irresistible to him. The self-possessed Baez never gives an inch; when he betrays her onstage in front of a crowd of restless proto-hippies, she calmly sings on without him.
Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) sing in A Complete Unknown. (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures)
Joan didn’t need Bob, but Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) does. Based on the real Suze Rotolo, who appears with her then-boyfriend on the cover of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, Sylvie is the New York sophisticate who introduces the weird boy from Minnesota to the big city. Dylan takes first the bohemian folk scene, then the cocktail party circuit by storm.
And that’s where his polka dot shirt comes in. Dylan’s appearances at the 1963 and 1964 Newport Folk Festival brought him to national attention, and his album sales took off like none of the other folkies who he emulated and idolized ever did. By 1965, he had turned the Beatles on to marijuana and was dressing like a Soho hipster instead of wearing the populist work shirt uniform favored by his mentor, Pete Seeger (Ed Norton). For the folkies, it was the first sign that their standard bearer was going to betray them.
I keep using the word “betray” in this review. Mangold and Gangs of New York writer Jay Cocks’ screenplay may not please Dylan pedants. Great as he is, Bobbie didn’t write “Masters of War” in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, debut it in a Greenwich Village coffee shop, and bed Joan Baez all in one night. But Chalamet’s dead-on Dylan impression papers over the holes, and the film captures the essence of the time. A Complete Unknown is not a hagiography. Dylan might be a musical genius, but he’s a toxic boyfriend, and by the end of the film, both of his prime paramours know it. He is beloved by millions, but he is alone. As he rides off on the motorcycle that will almost kill him a few weeks later, he does not yet know the price he had paid for his freedom.
In the first year after dual writer and actor strikes rattled the Hollywood establishment, there was much fretting about lackluster box office returns in the first half, followed by much celebration in the second half. But there were gems everywhere for those who searched. We celebrate the best with Flyer Film Awards for 2024. But first, the worst.
Worst Picture
Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, and Jamie Lee Curtis search for alien treasure in Borderlands.
Borderlands
2024’s good video game adaptation was Amazon Prime’s Fallout series. The best thing you can say about Eli Roth’s epic flop is that everyone got paid in advance.
MVP
Timothée Chalamet
Timothée Chalamet, Dune: Part 2, A Complete Unknown
Muad’dib came alive as the cursed savior of Arrakis, torn between his love for Zendaya’s Chani and the imperial destiny he was bred for. Then, Chalamet sang 40 Bob Dylan songs, live on set, in A Complete Unknown and slayed every one of them. Give this boy some flowers.
Best Performance by a Nonhuman
Joy and Anxiety in Inside Out 2
Anxiety, Inside Out 2
Our Age of Anxiety found a mascot in the orange emotion, voiced by Maya Hawke, that invades our tween heroine Riley’s brain when she’s thrown into a competitive situation at hockey camp. I wish I had Inside Out 2 when I was growing up.
Best Interior Spaces
I Saw The TV Glow (Courtesy A24)
I Saw the TV Glow
Jane Schoenbrun’s ode to fandom is as inexplicable a film as you’ll see this year. Owen is a shy outsider who finds his people when he discovers a cult TV show called The Pink Opaque. He and his friend Maddy slowly lose their own identities as they tune out the rest of the world. But was it all a dream? Where does the dream end and reality begin?
Grossest Picture
Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley star in The Substance.
The Substance
If Sunset Boulevard were directed by David Cronenberg, it would look something like The Substance. Coralie Fargeat directs Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkles, an aging star who will try anything to stay young, including a dangerous drug pushed by a secret organization. When Margaret Qualley bursts from her body as her younger self, she’s reluctant to get back in. Then the real body horror begins.
Boys Go to Jupiter
Best Animated Film
Boys Go to Jupiter
It was a banner year for animation, with the triumphal Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot, the plucky Latvian animal eco-fantasy Flow, and the epic Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim. But this tiny team from Pittsburgh, led by Julian Glander, made a joyously subversive story of a delivery boy trying to beat the system, and the alien egg he finds along the way.
RaMell Ross’ story of two Black boys sent to a brutal reform school in 1960s Florida works its empathetic magic through first-person camera work, courtesy of cinematographer Jomo Fray. Equal parts gorgeous and brutal, but never banal.
Biggest Performance
Chris Hemsworth as Dementus (Courtesy Warner Bros.)
Chris Hemsworth, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Director George Miller’s origin story of his Fury Road protagonist is as epic as it gets, and Hemsworth has the juice as the biker warlord Dementus. Hemsworth’s words and deeds are as big as the Wasteland’s horizon, but he leads us through decades, subtly changing Dementus’ bluster to show his loosening grip on sanity. When he gets his comeuppance from Furiosa, you almost feel sorry for him. Almost.
Best Documentary
Union
Union
Against all odds, the warehouse workers at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island successfully got their union recognized by the NLRB, after years of grinding organizing and union busting goons. You won’t find Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Sundance-winning documentary on Amazon Prime, and if Jeff Bezos gets his way, you won’t see it anywhere. The filmmakers are self-distributing, so seek it out.
Best Picture
Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora. (Courtesy Neon)
Anora
Sean Baker’s masterpiece follows stripper and sometime prostitute Ani as she falls in love with one of her clients, the wastrel son of a Russian oligarch. But when they marry in Las Vegas, and his parents (and the Russian mafia of New York) get wind of it, the whole fantasy falls apart. Baker and Mikey Madison get my personal Best Director and Best Actor awards. Everything about Anora is perfect.
Héra (Gaia Wise) rides into battle. (Courtesy New Line Cinema)
Before Peter Jackson convinced New Line Cinema to back his Lord of the Rings movie trilogy in 1999, lots of people had tried to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic. Stanley Kubrick though about it, and decided it was unfilmable. John Boorman tried in the 1970s, but when he got bogged down, he sold his screenplay to an unlikely entity. Animator Ralph Bakshi is, today, a legend. In the mid-’70s, he was the guy who made Fritz the Cat, a gleefully obscene animated film based on the work of counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb, notorious for being the first animated film to ever receive an X rating.
Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings was sorely undercapitalized, so he was forced to innovate. He drew over test footage of people in costumes, a time-saving technique known as “rotoscoping,” and slyly mixed live-action with animation. As with all of Bakshi’s nine feature films, the results are a mixed bag. There are moments of brilliance, and moments of “WTF was he thinking?” Bakshi’s film was a financial success, but even though it ended with the siege of Helm’s Deep, his studio never greenlit the promised sequel, which would have taken the Hobbits to Mordor.
After the Best Picture triumph of Return of the King, Jackson produced three Hobbit movies that were of, let’s say, declining quality. Noted Tolkienista Jeff Bezos paid $750 million for the The Rings of Power TV series on Amazon Prime, which has been dodgy, at best, and a crushing bore at worst.
Now New Line, in a bid to retain the rights to Tolkien’s works, has gone back to LOTR’s cinematic roots and produced an animated film. Produced and co-written by Philippa Boyens, who was one of Jackson’s main creative collaborators, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is directed by Kenji Kamiyama, an acclaimed anime artist whose credits include the groundbreaking cyberpunk series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
The Rohirrim royal family: Héra (Gaia Wise), King Helm Hammerhands (Brian Cox), Hama (Yazdan Qafouri) and Haleth (Benjamin Wainwright) — (Courtesy New Line)
The War of the Rohirrim is based on a tidbit of Middle Earth history mentioned in one of Tolkien’s exhaustive appendices. It’s a couple of centuries before Bilbo Baggins discovers the One Ring, and the no-nonsense King Helm Hammerhands (voiced by Brian Cox) rules the kingdom of Rohan. His daughter Héra (Gaia Wise) is not content to be a beautiful princess tucked away in a castle. Raised by her martial father and two brothers, while her mother died in childbirth, she learned to ride a horse before she could walk and is as handy with a short sword as any Rider of Rohan.
But, as you would expect, it’s an uphill battle for a woman to get respect in a feudalistic, patriarchal society. Overshadowed by her brothers Hama (Yazdan Qafouri) and Haleth (Benjamin Wainwright), she’s so out of the loop that when rival horse lord Freca (Shaun Dooley) shows up, demanding an answer to his son Wulf’s (Luke Pasqualino) proposition for a dynastic marriage, it’s all news to her. Her father wants her to marry a Gondorian, thus cementing the loyalty of a powerful ally. But Héra’s ambition is to resurrect the tradition of the Shield Maidens, a group of female warriors who took up arms to save Rohan when the riders were decimated in battle.
When Freca won’t take “no” for an answer, and gets uppity with the King, Helm says he won’t abide fighting in the mead hall, and suggests they take it outside. Freca proves no match for the guy they call “Hammerhands” and dies after only one punch. The king immediately regrets his rage, but feels he has to exile Wulf as a precaution.
Years later, Wulf returns at the head of an army of Dunlending wild men to claim the throne of Rohan, and the king must fight through betrayal in his own ranks and a long, cold winter of pitched battles to save his throne. When Hama and Haleth fall on the field of battle, it’s up to Héra to save her country and secure her family’s legacy.
Kamiyama is a product of the Japanese anime machine, but like Bakshi’s LOTR, this transcontinental production is hodgepodge of techniques and styles from the entire world of animation. Héra, with big eyes, flowing gowns, and flashing swords, is as much Sailor Moon as she is Tolkien. Modern digital tools open up possibilities Bakshi never had, and the line between animation and heavily processed video blurs. In places, Kamiyama appears to be deliberately aping Bakshi’s rotoscoping style. While this is clearly Peter Jackson’s version of Middle Earth, with familiar sets like Helm’s Deep and Isengard, Kamiyama avoids Jackson’ addiction to slo mo, while delivering the big set piece battles the series is famous for.
The writing, however, is bit of mixed bag. I appreciated the lack of heavy sorcery, and the choice to focus on a human story of jealousy and ambition gone wrong. But The War of the Rohirrim never feels more important than a footnote to the Lord of the Rings story, which is exactly what it is. But hey, at least it’s more entertaining than those Hobbit movies.
Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora. (Courtesy Neon)
Eighty members of the Southeastern Film Critic’s Association have voted Anora as the best film of 2024. The organization polls its members, including this columnist, annually to determine the 10 best films of the year, and award outstanding acting performances, as well as awards for writing and directing.
It was a contentious year for the critics.The closest category in this year’s balloting was for Best Documentary. With only two ballots left to be tabulated, the category was a three-way tie between Will & Harper, Sugarcane, and Super/Man the Christopher Reeve Story. When the final two votes were added, Sugarcane, an investigation into the Canadian Indian residential school system by directors Julian Brave, NoiseCat, and Emily Cassie, took the crown.
Another close result resulted in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow just missing the top 10. The acclaimed A24 film about a TV show’s increasingly creepy fandom was narrowly edged out by James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, which hits theaters on Christmas Day.
“Between theatrical distribution and streaming, releases can be a bit scattered and hard to find, but if you take the time to find the better films of 2024, they form a potent lineup. We hope that film fans out there can use our Top 10 list to catch up on some of the best that 2024 had to offer.”
Look for my Best of 2024 in next week’s issue of the Memphis Flyer. Meanwhile, here are the complete results of the SEFCA’s poll.
One of my favorite film noirs is Dark Passage, a 1947 Warner Brothers film by director Delmer Daves. Humphrey Bogart stars as an escaped convict trying to clear his name. With the help of Lauren Bacall, he gets facial reconstructive surgery in an attempt to evade police. What’s great about Dark Passage is that the entire first hour of the film is shot from a first-person point of view. We hear Bogart’s voice, but we never see his face — at least not until he gets a new one. POV had been used before, but never so successfully. Only a handful of other films have attempted such a trick, most recently the 2015 shoot-em-up Hardcore Henry, which played on modern audiences’ familiarity with first-person shooter video games.
Done well, POV camera helps a viewer identify more deeply with a character because we see what they see, which is why director RaMell Ross chose to shoot Nickel Boys in the first-person perspective. Based on a 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys tells the story of Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp as a child, and later Ethan Herisse), a Black teenager in 1962 Tallahassee who is generally quiet, studious, and likes to read stuff like Pride and Prejudice. The Civil Rights era is in full swing, but life is still tough for Black kids in Jim Crow-era Florida. Luckily, Elwood’s grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is very supportive, and he has a great teacher (Jimmie Fails) who sees his potential. When he gets an opportunity to take college classes at the Marvin Griggs Technical School, he jumps at the chance. Lacking transportation, he decides to hitchhike to his first class. But it turns out that the man who picks him up is driving a stolen car, and the police don’t believe Elwood had nothing to do with it. So Elwood finds himself at Nickel Academy, a reform school that is notorious for its cruelty towards its charges. When Elwood arrives in the back of a police car, the two white punks he rides with are dropped off in front of a nice-looking Antebellum building. The Black kids live in dilapidated dorms out back.
The nerdy Elwood doesn’t get along with the other kids at the school, but Turner (Brandon Wilson) stands up for him, and the two become friends. When he gets mixed up in a restroom altercation with bully Griff (Luke Tennie), Elwood finds out exactly how brutal the Nickel Academy is. Administrator Mr. Spencer (Hamish Linklater) personally whips Elwood so badly that when his grandmother arrives for a visit, they won’t let her see him. Instead, she runs into Turner, who can’t assure her that everything is all right.
Elwood and Turner try to survive Nickel Academy, as we switch back and forth between their viewpoints. Later, in flash-forward sequences set 20 and 30 years in the future, the POV changes, so we see the back of Elwood’s head (now played by the dreadlocked Daveed Diggs) as he encounters people from his past he might rather forget.
Herisse, Wilson, and Tennie offer solid performances, and Ellis-Taylor’s turn as a loving grandmother who is losing the fight to bring her kin home brings the tears. But they all get overshadowed by the film’s technical achievements. The POV shooting works, for the most part, but Ross has trouble committing to the bit. His intention is to make us feel Elwood and Turner’s visceral fear and despair, but when he intercuts the action with archival footage to represent the passage of time, as well as the occasional dream sequence, it undercuts the effect he’s going for.
Whitehead based Nickel Academy on the Dozier School for Boys, a Florida reform school that was shut down in 2011 after 111 years of burying, sometimes literally, “undesirable” young men. But the problem of minority juveniles caught in an uncaring and cruel system hasn’t gone away. As Turner observes late in the film, “There’s Nickels all over this country.”
Nickel Boys opens in theaters Friday, December 13th.
Singer/songwriter Richard Wilson’s soulful, jazzy guitar is the center of his sound. On “Let’s Be Free,” it’s the sound of liberation.
To accompany the song, which was recorded with Scott Bomar at Sam Phillips Recording Services, he opted for a simple performance video, bathed in red light. “Sail away/Let’s be free …”
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, Chris McCoy and Abigail Morici talk about the Winter Arts Guide, Tsunami, Wicked, and Andrea Morales’ photography exhibit at the Brooks Museum. Check it out on the Flyer’s YouTube channel.
