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Captain America: Brave New World

Anthony Mackie takes up the shield as Captain America in the hot garbage that is Brave New World.

While watching Captain America: Brave New World, I had a realization that Disney will be making Marvel movies for the rest of my life. 

There have been 35 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) since Iron Man debuted way back in 2008. This is not exactly a new phenomenon in the hundred-plus years of commercial filmmaking. There have been 52 movies and serials starring Tarzan, beginning with Tarzan of the Apes made by the National Film Corporation of America in 1918, and continuing until 2016’s The Legend of Tarzan. 

But MCU pictures are a different beast. Tarzan was a guy who lived in the jungle with Jane (star of 1934’s Tarzan and His Mate), who solved jungle-style problems, which differed from year to year (he fought the Leopard Woman, found the magic fountain, etc.). The MCU presents a unified story, now at more than 60 hours long — at least theoretically. But what happens when you’re telling a unified story, and you get to the part called Endgame, but you want to keep going for, say, 13 or 14 more movies? 

The answer that Captain America: Brave New World suggests is, you flail until you fail. 

Reader, I try to go into every film with an open mind. If it’s a genre I don’t generally care for, I try to evaluate it on its own terms. Is the film succeeding in what it’s trying to do, even if I don’t like what it’s trying to do? But the MCU is mightily trying my patience. What is Captain America: Brave New World even trying to do? It doesn’t know.

Actually, that’s not true. Executive Producer Kevin Feige is trying to make money for his corporate overlords, and, judging from the $190 million opening weekend, he will likely succeed. But that’s not your problem, or your win. You want to see a well-made, entertaining movie. Captain America: Brave New World is not that. 

That’s a shame because the previous Captain America stories had been some of the highlights of MCU. Chris Evans hung up the shield at the end of Avengers: Endgame, when Steve Rogers chose to use the time travel tech that won the Infinity War to go back to the 1940s and romance Peggy Carter. He tapped Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon (aka Anthony Mackie) to be his successor. When we pick up with Sam, it’s after the events of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier miniseries, which aired on Disney+. (I know nothing about that part of the story because it contained my least favorite Marvel character of all time, Bucky Barnes.) He’s down in Mexico, leading Seal Team 6 on a mission to recover a mysterious package from the clutches of the Serpent Society, led by Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito). What starts as a simple MacGuffin retrieval immediately goes south. The buyer for the package declined to show up to the rendezvous, and the frustrated Sidewinder is taking out his frustrations on a group of nuns. While Captain America (who, the film reveals, speaks both Spanish and Japanese) saves the clergy, his new sidekick Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), who has taken up the mantle of the Falcon (which is to say, Sam’s old super-suit) retrieves the package.

Afterwards, Cap and Falcon are summoned to an audience with the new president, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford). Ross was one of the bad guys in The Incredible Hulk (2008), when he was played by the late William Hurt. But now, he’s shaved his mustache, cleaned up his reputation, and won the election as a reformer. Sam is naturally suspicious of the guy who has always had his own agenda of personal ambition, but now he’s the president, so it’s Captain America’s duty to obey orders. At least that’s how this Cap interprets his role. 

President Ross reveals his plan for world peace, or something like it. The giant Celestial monster that tried to emerge from the Earth during the climax of The Eternals ended up as a stone head and hand protruding from the Indian Ocean. It turns out, the package Cap and Falcon were sent to retrieve is a sample taken by the Japanese which proves Celestial Island is extremely rich in adamantium, the fictional super-metal that Wolverine’s claws and skeleton are made of. Unlike vibranium, the other super-metal whose sole source is controlled by Wakanda, the adamantium reserves are up for grabs because the terra nova of Celestial Island belongs to no one. Rather than risk a war, President Ross is trying to negotiate a treaty that will share the new super-resource with the world. 

While Ross is making his presentation, an assassination squad led by Sam’s mentor Isaiah Bradley, himself a product of postwar super soldier research, tries to shoot him. Now, Captain America has to a) find out who’s behind the assassination attempt while b) clearing his friend Isaiah’s name and c) preventing a war. Director Julius Onah and his five credited writers have a lot of goals to fulfill, and they attempt it by shuffling Cap and his ever expanding cast of sidekicks through a series of incoherent battles and strained conversations. 

The Captain America movies have been showcases for some of the best action sequences the MCU has produced, such as the famous airport confrontation in Civil War. Nothing attempted here even comes close to that standard. I will applaud Brave New World for not attempting the Marvel Third Act, where our heroes fight a large number of faceless adversaries. Instead, Cap faces off against the Red Hulk (who, it must be noted, is not even the primary villain) in D.C.’s cherry blossom orchard. This sounds great on paper, but it looks like absolute ass. Maybe it’s the extensive reported reshoots leading to a rushed final assembly, but this film feels like three or four films haphazardly spliced together. Mackie is game, clearly giving the role his all, but he never stands a chance because the material is hot garbage. I have trouble faulting Onah, as he is the latest in a series of semi-disposable helmers appointed as scapegoats. Brave New World bears the mark of a film made by feuding, status-obsessed middle managers. This is not filmmaking; it’s brand management disguised as entertainment. 

Captain America: Brave New World
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Music Video Monday: “Can We Live?” by NLE Choppa ft. B.O.A. Mook

Memphis rapper NLE Choppa is sick of the city’s gun violence problem. The 22-year-old is already a rap vet, having released his first single at age 16. His new single “Can We Live?” is dedicated to those we have lost, like Young Dolph and Choppa’s friend Tae Grape.

“I know some kids toting guns before they learn to tie they shoe/No more bedtime stories, they putting shit to sleep too.” Choppa raps.

The music video for “Can We Live?” was shot in Tom Lee Park, and features a cameo from Mayor Paul Young. Take a look:

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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Memphis Flyer Podcast Feb. 13, 2025: Love!

There’s so much love in the room for our annual Valentine’s Day Love Issue! Abigail Morici and Chris McCoy talk about relationships, trolls (the kind at the Memphis Botanic Gardens, not the internet kind), Becoming Led Zeppelin, and Companion, in this week’s Memphis Flyer Podcast.

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Becoming Led Zeppelin

“I knew what we had, and I wanted to knock everyone’s socks off with it.” — Jimmy Page (Photo: Courtesy Sony Pictures)

Given the oodles of gushing praise for the band written over the last half century, it’s kind of hard to believe that Rolling Stone’s music critics absolutely hated Led Zeppelin. “Dull and repetitious” is how the house organ of rock-and-roll described their 1968 debut album. It continued on like that for the better part of a decade, with reviewers going out of their way to trash records that are now unassailable castles in rock Valhalla. 

There’s a lot of critical stuff you can say about Led Zeppelin. They had some good songs, but their legions of mediocre imitators over the years have soured their reputation. The issue of cultural appropriation in the popular music of the 20th century is often very fraught and complex, but in the case of Led Zeppelin, it’s pretty cut and dried. Jimmy Page heard Chicago electric blues and said, “Do that, but louder.” As Page says in Becoming Led Zeppelin, the music he heard as a teenager in the quiet Midlands of England “sounded like it was coming from Mars, but really it was coming from Memphis.” 

But I think what really bothered those Rolling Stone writers was that Zep was never considered “authentic.” Of the four members — guitarist Jimmy Page, drummer John Bonham, singer Robert Plant, and bassist John Paul Jones — only Plant was “from the street.” Plant says he was living out of a brown suitcase, drifting from gig to gig when Jones invited him to his house for an audition. 

(Photo: Courtesy Sony Pictures)

Page and Jones had both been session musicians in London for years before the Zeppelin took flight. One of the things I learned from Becoming Led Zeppelin is that they met while on the session for the James Bond theme “Goldfinger.” Yes, that’s half of Led Zeppelin playing smooth jazz behind Shirley Bassey. Later, Page backed Donovan, the psychedelic folkie who was Bob Dylan’s nemesis. 

For me, it’s revelations like that which make the first hour of Becoming Led Zeppelin a fairly gripping watch. Director Bernard MacMahon made his name in the documentary world with the BBC miniseries American Epic. Those four films traced the lasting influence of recorded music on democracy. His assignment here is a little simpler: Tell everyone how awesome Led Zeppelin was, in their own words. 

And how awesome were they? Pretty damn awesome. MacMahon unearths some stunning footage from the band’s early years. Some of it has been widely seen before, like the Yardbirds cameo in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Page joined the Yardbirds as a side gig when Jeff Beck got sick, and then stayed with the band until they broke up in 1968. 

MacMahon does a good job keeping the famously bombastic band sticking to the facts of the story. Then Page describes the guitar that Jeff Beck gave him, which stayed with him throughout the band’s career, as “the great sword Excalibur.”   

It’s also possible that Rolling Stone’s hatred of Zep stems from Page coming off as the bad guy who had hijacked the beloved Yardbirds, a narrative which is not even hinted at in Becoming Led Zeppelin. And yet we know those early reviews still sting because the film devotes quite a bit of screen time to detailing the pains. Time has clearly been on Jimmy Page’s side in this argument. To hear him tell it, he didn’t care about what the critics said because he didn’t have to. When the Yardbirds split up, he paid for Led Zeppelin’s debut record out of pocket. Jones shocked his friends and family by giving up a steady paycheck as an in-demand commercial music arranger and joining Page to make loud rock. Plant passed his audition by singing a folk song popularized by Joan Baez, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” and insisted they get Bonham to play drums. Bonham agreed, if they could match the 40 quid a week he was making with his current band. After a short European tour as The New Yardbirds, that proved to be no problem. The Who’s drummer Keith Moon suggested the name Led Zeppelin about the same time Page took them into the studio. 

To anyone familiar with the horrors of the recording industry, the next part of the story is the most shocking. Page took the completed master tapes to New York City to pitch directly to Atlantic Records’ Grand Poobah Jerry Wexler and secured a contract giving him complete creative control. As I do in many of the documentaries about Boomer-era musical legends, I found myself thinking, “Wow, the biggest difference between them and the also-rans is that they had really good lawyers.” 

Page, the longtime studio rat, had plenty of time to absorb how the industry worked, and when his time came,“I knew what we had, and I wanted to knock everyone’s socks off with it,” he says. 

The recordings speak for themselves, and for a big chunk of the film’s second hour, MacMahon allows them to do just that. Seemingly every time the band was in front of a camera from 1968 to ’70 is in this film. Veteran editor Daniel Gitlin makes the most out of the wildly variable film quality. Finally, in the climactic “Whole Lotta Love” sequence, he gives the film over to the kind of psychedelia the band was so deeply associated with in the 1970s. These “laser Zeppelin at the planetarium” bits hit pretty hard, while bearing the clear influence of the incredible Bowie doc Moonage Daydream. But Becoming Led Zeppelin never climbs to that film’s artistic heights. We get only the band’s perspective, which in this case means quite a bit of whitewashing. Even though their tours were notoriously decadent, Plant only mentions drugs once, in passing. So if you’re looking for dirt, it ain’t here. But if you’re looking for thunderous riffs delivered on a giant Dolby sound system, Becoming Led Zeppelin’s got ’em. 

Becoming Led Zeppelin
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Music Video Monday: “Car” by 6PACKADELIA

“Years ago, when I first started writing songs, I joined forces with my friend and Palindrome bandmate Chad Nixon to form a raucous and inane acoustic group called 6PACKADELIA,” says Jeff Hulett. “Back then, circa 2002, and by virtue of our TASCAM 4-track, we put out a self-titled album replete with songs about love and loss and even covered a Dylan song. Flash forward to now and Chad and I are back at it, but this time we decided to cover some of our favorite ’90s songs.”

The song 6PACKADELIA covers in their first music video is not “Cars” by Gary Numan, but “Car” by Built to Spill. Their EP “Dating Ourselves” will drop on Friday, Feb. 14, which just happens to be Valentine’s Day.

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Companion

Sophie Thatcher stars as a robot, grappling with the revelation that she’s not a real person.

The word “robot” turns 125 years old in 2025. It was originally coined by Karel Čapek for his 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots. It was derived from the Czech word for “slave.”

But no one is more responsible for our modern conception of robots than Isaac Asimov. In his seminal 1950 book I, Robot, he laid out the Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. 

Asimov’s stories weren’t primarily about “gee whiz, how cool would it be to have a robot?” — although there’s plenty of that. They were about the ethical dilemmas presented by the fact that we humans have constructed autonomous beings who we expect to be our slaves. 

But wait, you say. It’s not accurate to equate our relationship with machines, which are inanimate objects built for a purpose, with slavery, which is stripping the humanity from a fellow human. When I use a Roomba to vacuum the floor, it possesses no consciousness with which to experience suffering. But in the age of AI chatbots which give the illusion of sentience, that line is increasingly blurred. 

Writer/director Drew Hancock’s Companion is a descendant of Asimov’s robot stories. It is near-future America, and Josh (Jack Quaid) and Iris (Sophie Thatcher) are excited about getting away for a weekend at their friend Sergey’s (Rupert Friend) secluded lake house. There, they hang out with Sergey’s girlfriend Kat (Megan Suri), as well as Patrick (Lukas Gage) and Eli (Harvey Guillén). Everyone’s supposed to be friends, but Kat seems pretty cold towards Iris. We also get the sense that Josh and Iris’ relationship may not be very healthy. He generally treats her as an afterthought, but she seems devoted to him. 

Then, one morning by the pool, Sergey tries to rape Iris when no one else is around. She seems confused at first, then enraged. She pulls out a knife and plunges it into Sergey’s neck. Iris runs back to Josh, covered in blood and tears. But instead of comforting her, Josh tells her to “sleep.” Iris immediately goes limp because she’s his robot companion.

Obviously Iris violated the First Law of Robotics when she stabbed Sergey. But she was in danger of being raped, which is self defense, as defined by the Third Law, except that there’s the pesky First Law exception. So clearly, something has gone wrong here. And by the way, where did she get the knife? Most people don’t bring weapons with them when they’re lounging by the pool. 

If it seems like I’m giving away too much of the plot, trust me that I’m not. Hancock’s screenplay has more than enough twists and turns in store. Even better, each plot reveal is grounded in the premise, surprising in the moment, and seems inevitable in retrospect. 

Thatcher is perfect as Iris, who is forced to grapple with the very Philip K. Dick-ian revelation that she’s not a real person, but a stunningly accurate fake. At first, she leans into the robo-bimbo persona, but gets more subtle and human-like as the story progresses. The other big standout in the cast is Harvey Guillén as a conniving houseguest with secrets of his own. It’s a testament to how beloved the What We Do in the Shadows star is that when he made his entrance, half of the people in my screening pointed at him like the Leonardo DiCaprio meme. 

Usually, January and February are the months when studios dump films that they don’t know what to do with into theaters. So maybe I’m just happy to see a good screenplay executed well during the dry season, but I haven’t stopped thinking about Companion since I saw it. On the surface, it’s a tight techno-thriller with a sly sense of humor. But it’s also hinting at deeper issues, not just about feminism and the nature of consent, but also about our rapidly changing relationship with technology. At what point does the Roomba deserve rights? 

Companion
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Music Video Monday: “December” by Rob Jungklas

Memphis singer/songwriter Rob Jungklas has a new album on tap. December will be released later this month, and the first single is the title track.

“I am always loathe to say what a song means to me.  Sometimes I don’t even know until years later,” says Jungklas. “Justin Thompson is aware of this, and he suggested a lyric video. That way, the song is both specific and open to interpretation. He did a wonderful job of setting the mood, and creating a visual accompaniment to the words. Hopefully, the listener/viewer will be moved to their own conclusions.”

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Memphis Flyer Podcast Jan. 30: Podcasting in Memphis

This week on the Memphis Flyer Podcast, we’re all about podcasting! Sonosphere creator and host Amy Schaftlein joins Chris McCoy to talk about her pioneering music podcast, her day job at United Housing, and The Brutalist. Read this week’s cover story here.

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The Brutalist

Adrien Brody is László Tóth, a refugee architect, in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.

Even if you don’t know what brutalism is, you’ve seen it in action. “Brutalism” is a term given to an architectural style which arose after World War II. Prewar movements such as Art Nouveau and Art Deco had lots of showy bits. Look at the ornate staircase railings in turn-of-the-20th century houses or the intricate glasswork of Tiffany. Art Deco’s architectural masterpiece was the Chrysler Building in New York City, a soaring spire of glass and steel whose crown mimics the rays of the rising sun. 

Brutalism shed all of that. For architects like Mies van der Rohe, the beauty of a building lies not in the sculptural ornaments you can make from steel, but from the inherent qualities of the steel itself. The name is derived from a French term for raw concrete. Brutalist buildings often have long expanses of featureless concrete walls. It was somewhat of a utopian project; good architecture could help people live better, cleaner lives. By the late ’60s and ’70s, brutalism came into favor with large institutions like government buildings and college campuses. In Memphis, the Southern College of Optometry’s central tower on Madison Avenue is a prime example of brutalism done well. 

But the style has not always aged so gracefully. Many brutalist concrete exteriors got grungy as the years passed. Street artists love to use the blank walls of government buildings as a canvas for graffiti. When the BBC conducted a survey in 2008 to determine the 12 most hated buildings in the UK, eight of them were brutalist. But the style still has many champions, especially in the former Soviet bloc, where brutalism produced many unique works. 

When we first meet László Tóth (Adrien Brody) in The Brutalist, he is on a boat to America. When a cry arises from above, he and the other passengers race up the deck to catch their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. Director Brady Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley make the visuals match both the ecstasy and disorientation of the moment by following László up the ladder with a handheld camera. When he finally sees Lady Liberty, the camera swoops and rolls, eventually ending upside down, with the torch seemingly hanging from the top of the screen.

Corbet and Crawley shot The Brutalist in VistaVision, a format devised by Paramount Pictures in the 1950s which uses a 35mm negative to produce an image wider than old-fashioned TVs, but not as wide as 70mm widescreen or the 16:9 ratio of most flatscreen TVs. The director said he wanted to shoot this story in a format which matched the time period, and he makes a stirring case for the now-obsolete format. The Brutalist offers striking compositions, which, true to form, highlight the beauty of everyday objects. When László, the impoverished immigrant, takes a job building a loading dock crane, we see it as he sees it — a steel colossus standing against the bright blue firmament.  

László makes his way from New York City to Philadelphia, where he is taken in by his cousin Attilla (Alessandro Nivola), who gives him great news. László was separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) when he was snatched from Budapest by the Nazis and thrown into the Dachau concentration camp. He had given them up for dead, but they are still alive. László longs to bring Erzsébet to America, but she is trapped in Hungary by the Soviet occupation. Plus, László is living in the store room of Attilla’s furniture showroom, so he must improve his station before he can expand his family. 

Then, opportunity comes from an unexpected quarter. Attila and László are contacted by Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), who wants them to renovate the library in his father’s mansion as a birthday surprise. During the job interview, László reveals the depth of his vision. He studied at the Bauhaus, an early modernist art and design school in Germany which was declared not Germanic enough when the Nazis took power in 1933. In Europe, he had his own architecture firm and built many buildings, to great renown, before the fascists destroyed the tolerant, liberal society which allowed him to flourish. 

The old library is a dusty mess with a cracked Tiffany glass skylight. When László gets done with it, it’s a clean, modernist space with built-in shelving of light wood with massive doors to protect the rare books from sunlight. In the center is a reading chair with a built-in book holder. When the homeowner Harrison (Guy Pearce) returns unexpectedly, he’s furious, partly because he says they have destroyed his room without permission, and partly because he saw a Black man, Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), on his property. At first, Henry refuses to pay for the work, and Attila blames László’s radical designs. But when a Look magazine journalist profiling Harrison sees the library and gushes about it in print, the wealthy magnate seeks out László to apologize and commissions a great building, which will be László’s American masterpiece. The long road to completing the building, which involves navigating both the conservatism of conventional architecture and the anti-Semitism of the Pennsylvania WASP elite, will consume László’s being. 

The Brutalist is a stubbornly old-fashioned film. At 215 minutes, it comes with an intermission, which would have made bloated recent fare like Avengers: Endgame more tolerable. (Lawrence of Arabia, by comparison, is 216 minutes and also had an intermission.) Brody is brilliant as the enigmatic Hungarian, so passionate about his art but chilly even towards his own wife. And why doesn’t Guy Pearce get more work? He’s every bit Brody’s equal as the rich industrialist who uses his talented friend for clout. If The Brutalist stopped after the intermission, it would be a near-perfect film, an immigrant story in the vein of The Godfather Part II. Unfortunately, Corbet can’t quite stick the landing, and it falls apart at the end. But that’s okay. Endings are hard. Architecture is forever. 

The Brutalist
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Music Video Monday: “Don’t They Know Who We Think We Are?” by T. Jarrod Bonta

When T. Jarrod Bonta heard Casper Rawls do “Don’t You Know Who We Think We Are?,” it made a big impression.

“I first heard the song at the Continental Club,” he says “I was underage, and had to sneak in to hear him play. Later on, I had the pleasure of working with him many times throughout the years I lived in Austin, and I still do when I make it down that way.”

Bonta loved the song, written by Rawls and Suzy Elkins, so much he made it his own.

“I had the honor of recording this song at the historic Sam Phillips recording studio, with some of my favorite Memphis musicians: Danny Banks on drums, Matthew Wilson on bass, John Paul Keith on guitar, and engineered by Scott Bomar. Everything was recorded live, just like the big boys do it, no overdubs, this was the first take. It sounded like rock and roll to me!”

Bonta’s animated visuals have a charming, handmade quality that fits the song’s vibes.

“The video is inspired by the lyrics of the song, A lot of these images are merely the way I sometimes see the world. I’ve never played a grand piano underneath a highway overpass before, but I think it would be cool!”

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.