Category: TV Features

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Design Star! Memphis’ Carmeon Hamilton wins Design Star: Next Gen

Star power — Memphian Carmeon Hamilton (center) stars in the first season of HGTV’s Design Star: Next Gen.

The first space Carmeon Hamilton designed was her dorm room at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. It was there she caught the design bug, and carved out a niche for herself as a blogger and, eventually, social media influencer, with her work appearing in the pages of Southern Living, Architectural Digest, and Memphis magazine.

She built up a big following on Instagram, and in February 2020, her social media prowess paid off. “I got a message from a casting producer on Instagram,” she says. “I couldn’t tell anybody about it at the time, but I auditioned, and recorded a few interviews. I didn’t even know what show I was being cast for! He told me it was a competition. I had been through the reams of interviewing and casting for a couple of years, trying to get my own show, but it never worked out. I never imagined that I would be competing for my own show!”

It wasn’t until late July that she found out what she was auditioning for. The show was Design Star: Next Gen, a reboot of a beloved HGTV series, which ran from 2006 to 2013. Hamilton was set to compete with seven contestants from all over America in a series of interior design challenges over six episodes. The show’s grand prize is $50,000 and a contract for the winner to create their own show for discovery+.

But it almost didn’t happen, Hamilton says. “My business blew up right before I was supposed to leave, so I almost didn’t do the show. I was very leery about leaving a very successful and profitable business, but my husband and my best friend convinced me to go. I’d have my business for as long as I wanted it, but it’s a rare opportunity to be cast for a show.”

Memphis designer and entrepreneur Carmeon Hamilton (above, right) takes home the big prize on Design Star: Next Gen.

At the end of October, Hamilton flew to Los Angeles for a month of taping. “The entire process was very surreal, but definitely one I will cherish for the rest of my life,” she says.

As Hamilton and her fellow contestants were being pitted against each other in competitions such as redesigning “the ugliest rooms in America” and creating inviting spaces inside train cabooses and city buses, they were becoming fast friends. “We were all very leery of going into a competition because there’s always a villain and animosity and drama, and none of us wanted that,” says Hamilton. “We all ended up being really close and supportive, and I think that aspect made the show experience that much more positive. We’re still close to this day. We talk almost every day, because we’ve all had to keep the secret to ourselves.”

The main shoot took place during the height of the pandemic, so elaborate precautions had to be taken to avoid an outbreak on set. “The production team was incredible,” Hamilton says. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt as safe.”

In the final episode, which aired on March 31st, the final three contestants were tasked with creating a bedroom that reflected their signature styles, and then raced to create a full build out of their “dream room.” When guest host Jonathan Scott of Property Brothers announced the winner, Hamilton was shocked to hear her name. She says the reaction to the show has been extremely positive. “I am still opening messages from a week ago with all the congratulations. I got thousands of messages before lunch the day the finale aired. The wave of support I’ve gotten from just Memphis in general has been incredible! I was already in love with this city, and now I love it even more.”

Hamilton has spent the beginning of 2021 preparing to launch her own show on discovery+ “We don’t have a start date yet, but we’re getting all the details together to get the final stamp of approval from the network. Hopefully, we will start shooting soon. It will be here in Memphis. I wanted to bring that element of production here, to the city, to showcase my love for Memphis and how great it is.”

Design Star: Next Gen is streaming on discovery+.

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The MCU Assumes its Final Form with WandaVision

Correct me if I’m wrong — and I’m sure someone will — but I think WandaVision holds the Marvel record for most elapsed screen time until someone gets punched. In the course of 23 films and eight TV series, the problems of superheroes and their discontents are always ultimately solved by scrapping. (I haven’t seen everything, but I’m guessing there’s a lot of punching in Iron Fist.) That’s to be expected from stories about characters who, as Vision (Paul Bettany) points out, dress like Mexican wrestlers. But for years, the “blam!” and “pow!” that are allegedly the genre’s biggest selling point have been the least interesting part of Marvel movies. How many action sequences do you remember from The Avengers? But you remember when the triumphant heroes went for shawarma.

WandaVision, the Disney+ miniseries that reaches its climax on Friday, March 5th, is the most creative thing to happen to superheroes since Into the Spider-Verse. Its real genius is leaving out the punchy parts that I’ve been tuning out since Vision was born in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Elizabeth Olsen (left) and Paul Bettany use TV Land tropes to unpack trauma in WandaVision

The love story of magically powered former Hydra operative Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision, the $3 billion vibranium synthoid of Tony Stark’s AI butler J.A.R.V.I.S. and rogue superbot Ultron, was mostly there to provide some pathos when Vision sacrificed himself to save half the universe. But despite the fact that Vision died (twice, thanks to the magic of time travel), when WandaVision kicks off, he and Wanda are living in a quaint house in a quiet New Jersey suburb. Their living room looks just like The Dick Van Dyke Show, right down to the black and white. The superpower couple tries to keep up appearances as normal, 1950s-style humans, even as their words are interrupted by a laugh track of mysterious origin.

The “real people trapped in a TV show” setup is nothing new — remember Raul Julia’s breakthrough performance in 1984’s Overdrawn at the Memory Bank? (No? Just me?) WandaVision‘s first three episodes see our heroic domestics trying to figure out what, exactly, is going on as they cycle through a survey of sitcom history, from I Love Lucy to The Honeymooners to the thematically appropriate I Dream of Jeannie. Then, as the world fills with color and the clothes become a lot less buttoned down, Wanda is pregnant with twins and their house looks like The Brady Bunch. As the twins grow up supernaturally quickly, we transition to the 1980s. In the show’s most delicious meta moment, episode 5 takes on Full House, the show that made Elizabeth Olsen’s sisters, Mary Kate and Ashley, into child stars.

Meanwhile, there’s a parallel story developing in a more recognizable version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) is one of billions of people who return from Thanos-induced oblivion to find a world transformed. She reports for duty at secret super-agency S.W.O.R.D. and is immediately thrust into the twin mysteries of the violent disappearances of Wanda and what was left of Vision, and a small town in New Jersey that has been cut off from the outside world by a dome of energy. By the time the narrative threads meet and the first punch is thrown in episode 6 “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!” the real world and the meta world have become hopelessly intertwined — and we haven’t even gotten to the musical number yet.

Olsen and Bettany, an “unusual couple”

WandaVision is at its best when it plays like the legendary Adult Swim short “Too Many Cooks” with an unlimited budget. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer delights in subverting basic tropes of both classic TV and Marvel superhero movies. The most important scene in the entire show, when Vision confronts Wanda with the knowledge that she created the sitcom world with her magic, plays out with credits rolling over it.

But none of the narrative fireworks would matter without emotional grounding from the leads. Olsen and Bettany have perfect chemistry. You have no trouble believing a witch could love a robot so much that she would bend the fabric of reality itself to bring him back from death (or at least deactivation). There are plenty of good performances among the sprawling supporting cast, especially Kathryn Hahn as Agnes, the nosy neighbor with a secret.

After 2020, the year without superheroes, WandaVision‘s popularity points to the staying power of the MCU, and Disney’s continued market domination, as the film world tries to get back on its feet. In some ways, the show is Marvel in its final form. The MCU has looked more like serial TV than discrete films for a long time, and the show’s cheeky writing makes a running joke out of Marvel’s tendency to hijack unrelated genres and slap a superhero in them. Marvel the infinitely pliable is the perfect vessel for Disney the insatiable devourer.

WandaVision streams on Disney+.

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Working Class Space Heroes: The Expanse Hits its Stride in Season 5

Science fiction is always about the present, even if — especially if — it’s set in the future. For The Expanse, the sci-fi TV series which just completed its fifth and best season, that dictum plays out in two ways: What the audience expects, and what kind of future the writers predict.

The Expanse has its origin in a game project by writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. They developed a world where humanity had spread throughout the solar system as a setting for a role-playing game. When they couldn’t find a buyer for the game, they used the setting for a series of sci-fi novels under the pen name James S.A. Corey, beginning with Leviathan Wakes in 2012.

Keon Alexander plays Outer Planets Alliance operative Marco Inaros in The Expanse.

This gave The Expanse stories an advantage. Science fiction was born in cheap novels and trashy magazines. When sci-fi earned “respectability” in the 1960s, Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise became the face of the genre. After Star Wars made sci-fi the dominant force at the box office in 1977, every cheap, trashy novel with little green men was written with an eventual screen adaptation in mind. But in 2021, sci-fi audiences are used to world-building in computer games like Mass Effect or tabletop RPGs such as Stars Without Number. You can’t reduce The Expanse to a traditional sci-fi premise such as “what if we had flying cars?” The show’s central question is more like “how are people shaped by the systems they’re embedded in?”

It might sound boring when you put it like that, but the wide-open world of 2350 was designed to give players many options. Do you like noir-influenced cyberpunk? You could get that with Detective Miller (Thomas Jane) on Ceres. Space opera more your speed? Climb aboard the gunboat Rocinante (pronounced “row-sin-oh”) under the command of Captain James Holden (Steven Strait).

The setting’s possibilities have allowed the showrunners to adjust from season to season. The noir storylines were going nowhere, so Miller died at the end of season two (the writers studied with Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin, so they’re not afraid to kill a main character). The focus shifted to a Trek-style, crew-on-a-spaceship drama for two seasons, as humanity wrestled with the implications of finding advanced alien technology.

The crew of the Rocinante.

After ending season four with the day successfully saved, the crew of the Rocinante went their separate ways. The series’ biggest weakness has always been the flatness of Holden’s character, so season five leans on the ensemble. Pilot Alex Kamal (Cas Anvar) returns to Mars, where he gets a chilly reception from the family he abandoned. Mercenary Amos Burton (Wes Chatham) goes home to Baltimore to face his gangster past. Engineer Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper) leaves her lover Holden in search of her long-lost son, only to find baby daddy Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) has become the Osama bin Laden of the asteroid belt. When Marco attacks Earth with a series of devastating asteroid strikes, former UN Secretary General Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) leverages the crises to return to the corridors of power — which is like an opiate addict becoming president of Purdue Pharma.

The Expanse‘s vision of the 24th century is quite different from Star Trek‘s post-scarcity utopia. When Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, living during the height of the American empire, looked to the future, he saw progress and enlightenment. When The Expanse looks forward, it sees conflict as usual. Money, hand-waved away by Roddenberry, still rules the solar system. The world of Belter pirate queen Camina Drummer (Cara Gee) is defined by scarcity of air, water, and energy. Martian war hero Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams) lives in a crappy apartment because she can’t find a job, and one of the most satisfying moments in season five is when Burton steals a rich family’s spaceship to fly a group of refugees off the ruined Earth.

Good guys and bad guys blur: Marco is a terrorist, but he’s got a plan to keep the Belters from starving. Avasarala saves Earth from total destruction, but her first act as Secretary General is to declare martial law. This may not be a rosy view of the future, but looking around at the 21st century, it’s a believable one. At least they solve global warming — although season five ends with the battered Earth in the grips of post-apocalyptic nuclear winter. It’s always something in space.

Working Class Space Heroes: The Expanse Hits its Stride in Season 5

The Expanse is streaming on Amazon Prime

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Life, Death, and Laughs: Buried by the Bernards Premieres on Netflix

Local commercials are a TV genre unto themselves; often low-budget to the point of almost being homemade, and produced without the benefit of ad consultants trying to make it more palatable to suburban masses, they can be cringeworthy and inadvertently hilarious. But they can also be just as memorable as a $1 million Super Bowl ad — and after all, isn’t that the goal? How many Memphians of a certain age remember Memphis preacher Dr. James Salton telling local TV audiences “You’ll never get nowhere smoking the pipe”? It’s the rare advertisement that created such a following that fans made T-shirts devoted to it.

Memphis’ Bernard Funeral Services scored a viral hit with a 2018 ad wherein the deceased is so shocked by their low prices, he sits up in the coffin and demands to be taken there.

The Bernards’ 2018 TV ad was their first claim to fame

The Bernards were, at the time, relative newcomers to the industry, says family matriarch Debbie Bernard. “My brother and I used to talk about the mortuary business, maybe 10, 15 years ago. We would just talk about it, but we never really did anything about it. As time progressed and we started doing other things, we put it on the back burner. Then we pulled it up to the front burner.”

Now they’re about to be on the Netflix front burner in a new reality series called Buried by the Bernards. Life comes at you fast.

Kevin and Debbie of the new Netflix show Buried by the Bernards

A close-knit family with roots in Memphis that go back generations, the Bernards all pitched in on the new business endeavor, says Debbie. “Everybody had something that they had to contribute. Ryan’s was the biggest, actually. He had to go to class, go to mortuary school, take the mortuary test and everything. My assignment was ‘research and development.’ Regan was gonna work on the website. So collectively we got all together and our Bernard Funeral Services was born.”

Ryan Bernard says his mortuary science training was “an eye-opening experience. You know about death. It’s natural to life. But to actually go to school and learn the ins and outs of it, it’s almost like going to doctor school. You have to learn everything about the body and the nervous system. It’s also like being a psychiatrist, a grief counselor. You have to deal with many aspects of death, and grieving families.”

What first attracted public attention was probably the building Debbie chose for the new business: a former Union Planters bank at Lamar and Pendleton in Orange Mound. The location was perfect, and the building had a drive-through window, so they decided to make the most of it and offer drive-through funeral services. Before the pandemic, comedians thought this was hilarious. Debbie heard all the jokes. “Can I have two orders of fries and a milkshake with that?”

Ryan was booked on national talk shows. “They had me on The Steve Harvey Show trying to make a joke about it. I had to go defend the operation and let them know what the real was. Now, fast-forward two years down the road, the drive-through has been helping us out, especially with COVID. And it’s been helping out families, too.”

The TV exposure started the phones ringing. “We were just coming out the gate. We were trying to focus on building our brand and building our business,” says Debbie. “The people who called, some of them were just saying ‘Ryan needs a wife. Can I speak to him?’ We ain’t got time for that lane.”

One of the people who called was reality show producer Warren D. Robinson. At first, Debbie didn’t take his pitch seriously. “We said the ‘D’ stood for ‘Don’t call here no more!'”

But Robinson persisted. Ryan says he didn’t think his jovial family would make for good reality show fodder. “People want to watch drama and stuff, you know? I was also thinking, how could we make a good reality show but then still maintain a professional, serious business? We don’t want people to take us as a joke. They told us it would be very family-oriented, and they could make it a comedy, and there wouldn’t be any drama, and it wouldn’t be anything that would jeopardize and take away from my profession. Obviously, my uncle Kevin and my mama, they can act a fool. They gonna do that anyway.”

Kevin Miller says the humor in Buried by the Bernards comes naturally to everyone involved. “They looked at us as characters, but that’s just us every day around the funeral home.”

The show was filmed from January to March 2020, wrapping right before the COVID pandemic hit. When it debuts on Netflix on Friday, February 12th, the Bernards will suddenly reach an international audience. “I’m shocked,” says Ryan. “This thing is going to be in 191 countries! It just doesn’t feel real to me.”

Buried by the Bernards premieres on Netflix Feb. 12.

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Between the World and Me

Since Kenneth Arnold saw mysterious objects in the skies over Mt. Rainier Washington in 1947, people have been scanning the horizon for UFOs. The alien spaceships were there in the skies over America, we thought, for the better part of 60 years, but actual photographs of flying saucers were rare because not everybody was carrying a camera all the time.

Since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and the election of Barack Obama in 2008, racism has diminished in America, we thought. Arbitrary police violence directed toward Black people was a thing of the past, we thought. It was something Bull Conner did in Jim Crow Alabama, not something that happened in 21st-century America. Sure, every now and then we’d hear about a Black guy getting shot by police, but they probably did something to deserve it. Besides, it’s not like we had videos of police brutality.

In Kamilah Forbes’ adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a host of actors, like Oprah Winfrey (above), bring the script to life.

The year before Barack Obama was elected, Apple introduced the iPhone. Since then, smartphone technology has exploded across the globe. More than 2.2 billion iPhones of increasing sophistication have been sold, joined by at least that many Android devices. The latest iPhone has a minimum of three cameras onboard, which means now practically everyone does have a camera in their pocket, capable of recording 4K video and streaming it to the internet in real time.

And what has this technological revolution revealed? Clear images of UFOs are still rare as hens’ teeth, but a new video of police killing and brutalizing Black people rockets across the internet every few weeks.

If the annus horribilis of 2020 has any value going forward, I hope it will be remembered as the year we shed our rose-colored glasses of American exceptionalism. The summer of Black Lives Matter was enabled by the imagination of the son of a Syrian immigrant, but it was the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates that gave the protest movement its intellectual underpinnings. Between the World and Me was written in 2015 as a letter to Coates’ son, Samori, who was named for an Algerian freedom fighter who dedicated his life to trying to throw off French colonial rule.

“I’m telling you this in your 15th year,” it begins. The book is a memoir in the form of the “talk” Black parents give their teenage sons to tell them that they must keep their noses clean and their conduct above reproach to try and avoid the worst abuses of racism — not that that is enough to guarantee their safety. “I did not tell you it would be okay, because I did not believe it would be okay,” writes Coates.

The 2015 National Book Award winner was first adapted for the stage at Harlem’s fabled Apollo Theater by Kamilah Forbes in 2018. Then, in August 2020, in the heat of BLM summer, she directed a film adaptation for HBO. Between the World and Me is in no way a conventional movie. It is a spoken-word piece with visual accompaniment; its closest antecedent is probably one of Agnès Varda’s essay films, like Faces Places. There are montages, archival footage, and animation, but the point of the thing is Coates’ prose, which carries the same KJV rhythms as the language of the Black church. Instead of just having Coates read to us, the words are brought to life by a host of actors, including Oprah Winfrey, Phylicia Rashad, Mahershala Ali, and Angela Bassett. The late Chadwick Boseman, who attended Howard University with the author and collaborated on a play with the director, is seen giving a commencement address to his alma mater in 2018.

Howard, which Coates calls “The Mecca,” plays a big part in the psychic universe of the film. Not only did Coates meet his son’s mother there when he passed her a blunt at a college party, but he attributes his spiritual and intellectual awakening to his time at the HBC. After growing up in the poor neighborhoods of West Baltimore, Coates says his experiences at the school proved to him that “the African diaspora is cosmopolitan.”

Howard also becomes the locus of Coates’ radicalization when one of his friends, Prince Carmen Jones, is shot and killed by police while driving to his fiancé’s house. Coates uses the incident to drive home the message to his son that “… there are awful men who have laid plans for you.”

The writer has James Baldwin’s gift for summing up complex social concepts with a memorable phrase. He explains the appeal of racism to white people with “A mountain is not a mountain without something below.” He implores his son to not measure himself by the standards of racist society, but to forge his own path and identity. But he also leans strongly on what he calls “the American expectation of fairness.” Far from what Coates’ critics would like you to believe, this is not a call for tribalism and cultural isolation, but instead a plea to rework the very foundations of the American identity. As you watch Oprah weep while she listens to an interview with Breonna Taylor’s mother, you’ll think, it’s about damn time.

Between the World and Me is showing on HBO.

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The Queen’s Gambit: Sex, Drugs, and … Chess?

Some artists’ talent emerges fully formed, while others’ takes time and practice to come to fruition. The Queen’s Gambit is a story about the former, created by the latter.

The project that would become the Netflix limited series is also a late-bloomer. Walter Tevis, whose novels have been adapted into films such as The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth, published The Queen’s Gambit in 1983. The film rights were quickly snapped up, but the writer’s death the next year put production in limbo. Many have tried to adapt it over the years — at one point, it was to be Heath Ledger’s directorial debut — but it was the Netflix money machine that finally greenlit it with veteran writer Scott Frank at the helm. Frank is the quintessential journeyman screenwriter who broke through with 1991’s Dead Again for Kenneth Branagh and who wrote classics like Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Minority Report. The Queen’s Gambit marks the 60-year-old’s debut as a showrunner, and the results are absolutely immaculate.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays an orphaned chess prodigy in The Queen’s Gambit

Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) is, like most great protagonists, an orphan. Her mother, Alice (Chloe Pirrie), dies in a car crash during the first episode “Openings,” but Beth (played as a child by Isla Johnston) emerges unscathed. She is delivered to an orphanage run by Helen Deardorff (Christiane Seidel), where her life only comes further unglued.

It’s the mid-1950s, so Helen’s child-rearing philosophies are, shall we say, much less enlightened than she thinks they are. In the spirit of “better living through chemistry,” the orphans are all given tranquilizers to help head off any behavioral problems. The drugs don’t seem to work for Jolene (Moses Ingram), one of the few Black girls at the orphanage. Jolene befriends Beth by advising her to save the green pills for a bedtime binge, and then seals their friendship by teaching her how to cuss and explaining what a penis is.

It’s the stuff millions of middle-school friendships are made of, but perhaps Beth and Jolene’s “friendship” should be in quotation marks. Young Beth is one of the most withdrawn and solitary characters ever put to screen. Even before she was orphaned, it’s doubtful she ever spent a happy day in the care of her clearly mentally ill mother. At age 8, she is tight-lipped and fiercely controlled. The only joys in her young life at the orphanage are benzo-induced out-of-body experiences and sneaking into the basement to play chess with the janitor, Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp).

Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Taylor-Joy

Shaibel is a fellow loner, and an amateur scholar of the game. He is startled as Beth’s talents become instantly apparent. In a matter of weeks, she goes from not knowing the rules to regularly beating him. But her strategic mind remains a secret until the state bans the orphanage from feeding the kids tranquilizers.

Desperate for some more of those little green pills, Beth hatches a plan to secure a supply. The sequence where she attempts her drug heist is flawless, and it sets up her character for the rest of the series. She plans each move in advance and executes with cold-blooded precision — until she gets her hands on the giant jar of feel-good candy. Even with her endgame in sight, she’s still shoveling pills into her mouth when she’s caught by essentially the entire orphanage. She’s banned from playing chess until she’s adopted by Alma Wheatly (Marielle Heller), a neglected housewife whose crushed dream was to be a piano player.

For the rest of the seven episodes, Beth struggles to find a balance between her prodigious genius and the emotional pain that stalks her every move. After an incredible start by Isla Johnston, who plays Beth as a child, Taylor-Joy plays her as an alien observing the puny humans around her. Like Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, she is not so much emotionless as she is sacrificing all feeling to keep a deep, horrible rage in check.

Scott’s direction is clearly Kubrickian, and Taylor-Joy knows how to deliver a dead-eyed stare. She’s gorgeous and elegant as she conquers the world of competitive chess, but you never doubt for a second that there is a huge, throbbing brain behind those eyes — dissecting your every move. The production design is off-the-charts good as Beth travels to Cold War-era Las Vegas, Paris, and Moscow to play for bigger and bigger purses, and fight for respect from the sexist chess bros who can’t fathom getting beaten by a girl.

In an age of padded narratives designed to maximize streaming engagement, The Queen’s Gambit remains taut up until the last two episodes, when Beth’s addictions hit bottom as she preps for a championship match against Russian champion Vasily Borgov (Marcin Dorocinski).

The Queen’s Gambit probably could have wrapped in six episodes, but when a show’s world is rendered so beautifully, you won’t mind a little extra time to look around.

The Queen’s Gambit is streaming on Netflix.

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The Mandalorian’s Second Season is Riding High in the Saddle

There was a lot that went wrong with The Rise of Skywalker, the final film in the Star Wars trilogy of trilogies. To begin with, the 2016 death of Carrie Fisher threw the original outline, in which she played a greater part in the endgame, out the window. Original director Colin Trevorrow was ousted after his film, The Book of Henry, flopped, and J.J. Abrams returned to helm the final installment. Abrams and writer Chris Terrio set about undoing much of the story Rian Johnson had set up for them in The Last Jedi, apparently because of some vocal fans on Reddit whose major beef seemed to be that women got too much screen time. The resulting film was a total mess that left a lot of the fanbase dissatisfied and disappointed. If their goal after the disappointing box office of Solo was to boost the returns on the final film, it didn’t work. The Last Jedi made over $300 million more than The Rise of Skywalker.

The Mando with No Name — Pedro Pascal stars in Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni’s space Western, The Mandalorian.

But if you really want to understand what went wrong, I can sum it up for you pretty neatly: It didn’t feel like a Star Wars movie because Abrams and Terrio botched the recipe. Star Wars has its origins in the pulp science-fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. The whole reason why George Lucas came up with an original story set in a “galaxy far, far away” is because Dino De Laurentiis wouldn’t sell him the rights to Flash Gordon. But a quick look at De Laurentiis’ 1980 Flash Gordon reveals that Star Wars isn’t purely pulp sci-fi. Lucas’ greatest talent turned out to be mashing different film genres together. A New Hope took inspiration from World War II movies, Akira Kurosawa samurai sagas, and Westerns. Later, in the prequels, he would add sword-and-sandal gladiator epics and film noir to the mix, with varying degrees of success.

The Rise of Skywalker, on the other hand, tries to be a comic book movie. Terrio also wrote Batman v Superman and Justice League, both of which are as awful as they were profitable. It’s understandable that the Disney brass would think this would be the right way to go, given the historic success of their Marvel franchise, but instead it soured the mix.

Ironically, it took Jon Favreau, the director of Iron Man, to right the ship with the first live-action Star Wars TV series. The Mandalorian feels like Star Wars because Favreau and company, including Clone Wars showrunner Dave Filoni, understand the formula. And it’s paying off. In these tense times, the audiences are eating it up like comfort food.

The Mandalorian skews heavily toward the Westerns end of the spectrum. Put a hat and six-shooter on the masked star Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and the renegade space warrior becomes the Leonardo DiCaprio cowboy character from Bounty Law in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Pairing him with a super-cute sidekick — The Child, aka Baby Yoda — who he is sworn to protect, turned out to be a stroke of genius.

Even in the title of the first episode of the second season, “The Marshall,” the Western elements couldn’t be clearer. Searching for Mandalorian allies, Din returns to the familiar deserts of Tatooine and reconnects with Peli Motto (Amy Sedaris). He borrows her speeder bike to travel to the frontier mining town of Mos Pelgo, which, rumor has it, is under the protection of a man in Mandalorian armor. There, he meets Cobb Vanth (Timothy Olyphant), who is wearing some familiar armor — the heavily damaged suit of one Boba Fett, last seen rocketing into a Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi. Din agrees to help Cobb and the villagers kill a krayt dragon — a monster the size of a freight train — that has been terrorizing the town. In the process, Din brokers an alliance with the indigenous Sand People — just like many heroes in revisionist Westerns such as The Lone Ranger make allies of the Native Americans.

The second episode, “The Passenger,” sees Din agreeing to ferry a frog-like alien to the moon Trask, where her mate will fertilize the eggs she carries in a special container. Filoni guest stars as an X-Wing pilot who sees through Din’s attempts to bluff his way through a New Republic checkpoint. The mood is a little sillier — turns out Baby Yodas like to eat frog eggs — and the pace looser, but the execution remains top-notch, particularly during the harrowing climax in an ice cave full of angry spider monsters.

In the light of the growing recognition of the injustices heaped on Native Americans during the expansion of our country’s frontier, Westerns don’t have the same cachet with younger audiences that they did in the past. The Mandalorian repurposes what the genre did best — the lone hero, the freedom of the frontier, the challenge of creating a new moral code in a lawless land. It’s exactly what we need right now.

The Mandalorian is streaming on Disney+.

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Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb: The Local Angle

In early 2019, Memphis cinematographer Ryan Earl Parker got a call from director James Tovell. “He said, ‘Hey, you wanna go dig up some mummies?'”

Parker, who got his start in the Indie Memphis scene, formerly worked with Tovell on a documentary for National Geographic. This project had the potential to be much bigger. Archeologists searching the Egyptian desert near the sacred city of Memphis had found a tomb that had apparently been untouched for four millennia. It was the biggest find in Egyptology in 50 years. “They basically sold the film rights, and through that process, they were able to pay for the diggers and the scientists to do their work,” says Parker.

In Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb, the diggers and scientists are locals. They’re captured on film by Memphis-based cinematographer Ryan Earl Parker.

In April 2019, with the deep-pocketed backing of Netflix, Tovell and Parker went to Egypt with a small crew to document the excavation in the Saqqara necropolis. The site was less than a mile from the step pyramid of Djoser, the oldest pyramid in the world.

Egyptian archeology has been an obsession in the West since Napoleon’s armies dug up the Rosetta Stone. It also makes good TV, as you can tell from a quick perusal of the History Channel lineup. “The director said, ‘I don’t want this to feel like another BBC documentary,'” recalls Parker. “‘It needs to feel like a movie. I want it to be cinematic.'”

What makes the film Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb special is the access the crew had to the archeologists at work. Instead of a group of talking heads expounding on the burial traditions of the Old Kingdom, Parker’s cameras captured the painstaking process of archeological research, the dusty frustration of an empty shaft, and the joys of discovery as they happened. The diggers and scientists become fleshed out characters. There’s Ghareeb, the serene excavator whose family has been digging in the desert for generations; the ruggedly good-looking Hamda, an archeologist whose smile tells you he’s doing what he was meant to do; and Amira, the anthropologist tasked with reconstructing the bones of the ancients. This is not a standard colonialist narrative of sophisticated Europeans coming to loot forgotten treasures. “These people are all Egyptians. They live very modestly. From a social standpoint, they all understand that these are the remnants of their people. To us, it’s ancient Egypt, but these are their ancestors. They seemed to all have a reverence for that.”

One of the first events Parker’s camera captured was linguists reading the tomb’s hieroglyphs for the first time. The 4,500-year-old text revealed that the owner of the tomb was named Wahtye, and his whole family was buried there. At the same time, the area surrounding the main tomb was yielding rich treasures, such as the first mummified lion ever discovered. “At first, we were like, ‘Let’s set up great frames and let the action just unfold in them,'” says Parker. “But our approach had to change because they were just constantly finding so many things outside the tomb. We just had to go on the shoulder and run to get these shots.”

The climax of the six-week dig was the discovery of Wahtye’s mummy in the bottom of the burial shaft. Parker was looking over Hamada’s shoulder as he carefully brushed away the accumulated dirt of the centuries. “It was a two-and-a-half-foot square,” he says. “I’m crammed in the corner, the camera extended over his body, trying to get shots without disturbing him. I was praying that I was not gonna drop the camera on these old bones. I don’t speak Arabic, so I barely knew anything they were saying. After he had gotten all the bones collected and sent them up, we sort of took a break while we were waiting for the ladder to be dropped down. He turns to me and says, ‘You know, Ryan, you and me were the first to see Wahtye in 4,500 years.’ In that moment, I just sort of stepped outside of myself. You compartmentalize things, you know? I’m a cameraman. I’m looking through the viewfinder. I’m capturing images with all this calculus going on in the back of my head — my focus, my framing, thinking about the edit. But this is beyond me capturing a moment for this project. This is Ryan Parker, country boy from Tipton County, in this moment. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Since Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb hit Netflix last Wednesday, it has captured the imagination of viewers. By the weekend, it was the second-most-watched film on Netflix in the entire world. “It’s on in 190 countries,” says Parker. “What we did is reaching millions of people. I’ve been getting random Instagram messages from complete strangers all over the globe saying they really loved it.”

The key to the film’s success is in how the process of archeology reveals our common humanity. As the anthropologist Amira says while arranging the bones of a teenager who died tragically more than 2,000 years before the founding of Rome, “These people were like us — exactly like us. That is the real story.”

Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb is streaming on Netflix.

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Film/TV TV Features

Save Yourselves! Millennials Take On Alien Invasion. Laughs Ensue.

How many times this year have you opened your computer or glanced at your smartphone and exclaimed “Oh my god, this is bad!”? When Su (Sunita Mani) does it in the opening scene of Save Yourselves!, it’s pretty relatable, right? Has the president given COVID to Betty White? Has Kanye tapped a swarm of murder hornets as his running mate? Are we out of toilet paper again?

In Su’s case, the “Oh my god, this is bad!” is because her boyfriend Jack (John Reynolds) has accidentally closed all of her tabs on her internet browser. So, definitely not good, but it could have been worse.

Invasion of the attention snatchers — Sunita Mani (left) and John Reynolds star as internet-savvy millennial lovebirds trying to unplug and recalibrate in Save Yourselves!

Su and Jack have a cozy little millennial life in Brooklyn. He is a software developer (of course), and she is a personal assistant. They are, like practically everyone else, living in a computer-created bubble of their own making. After the inevitable lovers’ quarrel that follows Jack’s thoughtless tab erasure (“I use those tabs for work!” Su cries.), they settle on the couch for a little make-up nookie — until Jack gets a text from his friend who is getting married. Distracted again, they retreat back into their smartphone bubbles.

The opening scene is a masterful piece of screenwriting and staging by writing/directing team Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. Save Yourselves! is their feature debut. It caused a stir at Sundance back in the Before Times of January, and was snatched up by Bleecker Street Films, the New York indie studio behind Logan Lucky and the Memphis-based Brian Banks.

At the wedding, they catch up with their friends IRL. Everyone, it seems, is doing something more meaningful with their lives than Su and Jack. Ralph (Ben Sinclair) quit his job as an investment banker to found a start-up that is 3D printing eco-friendly surfboards inspired by whale tails. As the wine flows and the conversations deepen, Ralph offers to let Su and Jack use his grandfather’s cabin near a lake upstate.

Su jumps at the opportunity to get out of town. They both need time away from their phones, their laptops, the internet, and life in general, to put things in perspective. “I want us to be better people,” she says.

The plan is to spend a disconnected week at the cabin. No internet, no Alexa, just nature. All this information overload has a tendency to make trivial things seem important. We think we have to keep checking Twitter and Facebook or risk being out of touch, but self-care is more important. What are they going to miss during their week away that’s so paramount?

How about an alien invasion? While Jack and Su are holed up in the cabin, drifting around a lily-pad-filled pond in a borrowed canoe, smoking weed, and watching a weird meteor shower, all hell breaks loose back home. The aliens might look like harmless puff balls, but they make quick work of human civilization. Jack must come to terms with the fact that his web design skills are suddenly irrelevant, and he can’t even start a fire.

Save Yourselves! is a sci-fi horror comedy in the tradition of Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. Like Cloverfield, it’s a ground-level view of an apocalyptic alien invasion, only funny. Fischer and Wilson’s biggest asset is Sunita Mani. You probably recognize her from a Progressive insurance commercial, but she’s been demonstrating her razor-sharp timing in the ladies wrestling comedy GLOW and indie films like the criminally overlooked The Death of Dick Long. She also appeared in the fantastic short film “Dick Pics! (A Documentary),” which appeared at last year’s Indie Memphis.

The hipster mustachioed John Reynolds is Mani’s ideal foil. His Jack is fabulously insecure, but genuinely loves Su. He’s no better at the “new masculinity” than he is at the old one. You can’t help but root for them, even as they find themselves deep in a hole and just keep on digging.

This film is definitely in the low-budget indie category, but the team makes every penny count. Matt Clegg’s cinematography looks like a million bucks (which is probably how much the movie cost in total). It’s a refreshing change from indifferently shot, improv-based comedies that populate streaming services. The modest special effects sequences fit perfectly amid the shaggy dog storytelling. Fischer and Wilson delight in pulling the rug out from under their characters, and just when you think they’ve written themselves into a corner, they pull out an unexpected ending that feels thematically connected to the opening scene.

Shot before the pandemic, Save Yourselves! captures the feeling of isolation, and having your worst fears realized on the regular. If that’s not relatable in 2020, I don’t know what is.

Save Yourselves! is now playing in theaters and streaming online.

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Film/TV TV Features

Racism is the Existential Horror in Lovecraft Country

One of the subtle jokes in HBO’s 2019 Watchmen series comes in the pilot episode. In an alternate version of 2019, Tulsa police chief Judd Crawford is called out of an all-Black production of Oklahoma! when one of his men is shot by a white supremacist terrorist.

Recasting the lily-white musical about love among the Sooners with African-American actors was a subtle dig at Hamilton — an alternate history commenting on the real world’s preferred revisionist history. The 2019 where Robert Redford is president for life was, on the surface, much more racially tolerant and liberal than the real 2019, but their biggest problems are still megalomaniacal rich people and racism.

Jonathan Majors (left) and Jurnee Smollett face racism and white supremacist institutions in Lovecraft Country.

With its masked police and white supremacist conspiracies — and a whopping 26 Emmy nominations — the sequel series to Alan Moore and David Gibbons’ landmark graphic novel is enjoying a second life during the pandemic. With no second season in sight (and frankly, none needed), HBO’s would-be Watchmen successor is Lovecraft Country. Loosely adapted from a short story collection by science-fiction writer Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country takes the revisionist scalpel to one of horror’s sacred cows.

H.P. Lovecraft’s stories from the 1920s are founding documents of modern horror. The villains of Lovecraft’s stories are epic monsters like Cthulhu, an “elder god” alien hibernating on the bottom of the ocean, waiting for the moment when the stars align to devour humanity. But the real horror in Lovecraft is our own cosmic insignificance. The return of Cthulhu or the mysterious meteorite that brings a contagious, reality-distorting prismatic phenomenon in “The Colour Out of Space” are simply “natural” forces bigger than us. In the age of climate change and pandemics, Lovecraft’s appeal is clear: Everything we have worked for and worried about in our pathetic little lives is subject to being swept away by unfeeling forces beyond our comprehension.

But while Lovecraft may have been a genius and his work remains relevant, he was also, in his personal life and letters, racist as hell. While it’s true most privileged white men of his time held racial attitudes that would not pass muster today, Lovecraft wrote a friend that Hitler was “a clown, but God, I like the boy!” Once again, we are faced with the question of the content of the art vs. the character of the artist.

Black sci-fi fan Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) will take the art. The bookish Chicagoan has just returned from serving in the Korean War to search for his disappeared father. But his uncle, George (Courtney B. Vance), won’t let him forget the glaring flaws in Lovecraft’s character. George is the publisher of a guide for safe Negro travel through pre-civil rights era America. Even though Atticus celebrates leaving “Jim Crow Land” when he rides in the back of the bus from his Army base in Florida across the Illinois border, George knows there are still “sundown towns” all through the Midwest, where Black people are unwelcome, to say the least.

George agrees to take Atticus along on his latest travel writing trip to investigate a mysterious message his father left behind. He was obsessed with finding the secret of Atticus’ mother’s mysterious parentage. Before he disappeared, he traced the family tree to Ardham, Massachusetts, one letter away from Arkham, the base of Lovecraft’s mysterious Cthulhu cult. The third person along on their journey is Leti Lewis (Jurnee Smollett), a childhood friend who has fallen on hard times.

Lovecraft Country‘s pilot “Sundown” begins strongly enough. Atticus’ dreams about his battle experiences in Korea are interrupted by invaders from Mars. As H.G. Wells’ tripods spray heat rays across the battlefield, the red Martian princess Dejah Thoris descends from a flying saucer to save him.

The fantastic scene neatly sums up how Atticus finds solace in pulp fantasy. But even as he and his friends find Lovecraft’s fantastic creatures in the Massa woods, the real scary monsters are the white supremacist sheriffs who terrorize the Black travelers. The episode’s climax traps Atticus and company with their racist oppressors in a Night of the Living Dead-style siege in a cabin in the woods, but not even mutual supernatural threats can overcome their divisions.

“Sundown” is gorgeously shot, and showrunner Misha Green and director Yann Demange conjure some genuinely tense moments, such as a car chase with our heroes trying to beat both the law and the sunset. The series promises a Black, vintage version of The X-Files, with monsters of the week and an overarching Cthulhu cult conspiracy.

While it’s hard to judge a series by its pilot (with Watchmen‘s “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice” being the exception that proves the rule), Green and Demange muddy the waters by trying to bite off too many characters and plot threads at once. A pretty but meandering sequence involving Leti’s R&B singer sister feels glaringly out of place, for example. Lovecraft Country‘s revisionist horror has potential, if it can just learn to focus.

Lovecraft Country airs on HBO.