Tag: 2016

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Film Features Film/TV

2016: The Year In Film

I’ll try to be polite about this: 2015 was a banner year for film. 2016 was not. It was a year when bad decisions came back to haunt Hollywood, where cynicism reigned, and where even a total box office gross topping $10 billion won’t stop “the sky is falling” talk. Nevertheless, there were some bright spots. So here’s The Memphis Flyer‘s look back on the year a lot of people would like to forget.

Gods Of Egypt

Worst Picture: (4-way tie) 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, The Angry Birds Movie, Independence Day: Resurgence, Gods of Egypt

The most hotly contested category in our annual film awards was for the bottom spot. Bad movie overachiever Michael Bay’s 13 Hours is an incoherent, slapdash bit of agitprop that turned out to be the first shot in a frighteningly effective anti-Hillary PR campaign. Gods of Egypt looks like a cutscene taken from a particularly boring FPS video game, despite its $140 million budget. The Angry Birds Movie is the video game adaptation no one wanted, and it’s even worse than it sounds. Independence Day: Resurgence is a monument to the hubris of director Roland Emmerich. These “winners” just edged out a pair of DC comics misfires, the turgid Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the laughable Suicide Squad. It was a rich year for poor movies.

10 Cloverfield Lane

Most Claustrophobic: 10 Cloverfield Lane

There was a recurring theme among horror films in 2016: being trapped in an enclosed space with a madman. In Green Room, an unlucky punk band battled neo nazi Patrick Stewart in a secluded skinhead club, while in Don’t Breathe, three thieves get what’s coming to them when the blind homeowner they’re trying to rob turns out to have a basement of murderous secrets. But the best of the bunch was 10 Cloverfield Lane, where John Goodman holds Mary Elizabeth Winstead hostage in a bomb shelter while the world burns around them. Prophetic? Let’s hope not.

Little Men

Overlooked Gems: Maggie’s Plan, Little Men

The rule of thumb for films in 2016 was this: If a movie cost more than $100 million and it’s not made by a Disney affiliate, it’s going to suck. The good stuff was on the low end of the budgetary scale. Maggie’s Plan is a 2015 leftover directed by Rebecca Miller that combined great characterization, fine acting by Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, and Julianne Moore, and a script where a couple of smart women turned the tables on a clueless man. Little Men is Memphian Ira Sachs’ ode to boyhood friendship wrapped in a warning about late-stage capitalist rent seeking. Seek them out instead of watching Suicide Squad, please.

Arrival

Best Sci-Fi: Arrival

Imagine Independence Day, only instead of a cigar-chomping fighter pilot for a hero, you get the woman whose job it is to try to talk to the aliens. Director Denis Villeneuve took Ted Chiang’s unfilmable story about linguistics and the nature of time and created a quiet masterpiece. It proves Hollywood can be smart, it just usually chooses not to be.

Sausage Party

Best Animation: Sausage Party

While big-budget, live-action Hollywood flailed, the animators flourished. Kubo and the Two Strings, Zootopia, and Moana combined groundbreaking visuals with positive messages. But the best of the bunch was an unlikely R-rated Pixar parody by Seth Rogen that turned Disney positivity on its ear, then did terrible, terrible things to the ear. Terrible things.

The Invaders

Best Memphis Movie: The Invaders

In contrast to the horrors from Hollywood, Memphis filmmakers were on a tear in 2016. Morgan Jon Fox’s long-delayed web series Feral was a big hit for streaming service Dekkoo and will be returning with a second season in 2017. Indie Memphis’ Hometowner category was bigger than ever, with six feature films and enough shorts to fill four programming blocs. The best of the bunch was The Invaders by director Prichard Smith and writer/producer J. B. Horrell. The story of Memphis’ homegrown Black Power movement and the 1968 Sanitation Worker’s Strike that led to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. wowed the crowd on opening night of Indie Memphis. Look for it in distribution in 2017.

O.J. Simpson

MVP: O.J. Simpson

From the first moments of Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander’s mini series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, I — along with the rest of America — was completely hooked. The crack cast and incisive writing brought the tragic farce to stunning and immediate life. Then came the epic Ezra Edelman documentary O.J.: Made in America, which went even deeper into the former football player’s dizzying heights and murderous final act. The story’s indelible intersection of class, race, sports, sex, celebrity, and violence made these works feel like windows into the roiling American subconscious.

Black Phillip

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Black Phillip, The Witch

The quiet menace of Black Phillip, the devilish goat from Robert Eggers’ Puritan horror The Witch, stood hooves and horns above the pack. The hircine villain was a method actor, randomly attacking people on set with such frequency that the fear Anya Talor-Joy and Ralph Ineson showed on screen was real. Live deliciously, Black Phillip!

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead.

Best Performance: Don Cheadle, Miles Ahead

Don Cheadle’s dream project was a phantasmagorical biography of jazz legend Miles Davis. In addition to writing and directing, he also turned in the year’s best performance by playing Davis as first the brilliant young visionary battling prejudice in the late 1950s, and then the haunted, bitter superstar trying to find his way back to greatness in the 1970s. Not nearly enough people saw Miles Ahead, so be sure to give it a spin.

Miss Sharon Jones

Best Documentary:
Miss Sharon Jones!

There was a moment in Miss Sharon Jones! where director Barbara Kopple follows the terminally ill soul singer as she returns to church for the first time in years. Jones gets up to sing with the worship band, returning to the stage for the first time after a rough bout of chemotherapy, and the pure life force which animated her bubbles explosively to the surface. In one long, ecstatic take, Kopple and Jones created the best movie moment of the year, and one of the greatest music documentaries of all time.

La La Land

Best Picture: (tie) Moonlight,
La La Land

I was torn between these two very different films for Best Picture of 2016 until I realized I didn’t have to choose. Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is a stunningly photographed, heroically restrained story of a terrified boy growing into a hardened man, and the forbidden love that haunts, and ultimately redeems him. Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, on the other hand, bursts at the seams with life and song, resurrecting the classic Hollywood musical with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. The two films couldn’t be more different, but they represent the pinnacle of film craftsmanship and provide indelible experiences for the audience.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

You’re Getting Warmer!

Halloween was spookier than usual this year in Memphis, with the temperature topping out at a record 87 degrees. It was so hot that one of my colleagues here at the Flyer posted a picture of himself diving into his backyard pool. Now that’s spooky.

It appears that October 2016 will likely be the hottest October ever recorded for this area. It follows September 2016, which was the second-hottest September ever recorded around here. It’s not just us. It’s the entire planet. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) says September 2016 was the warmest September in 136 years of record-keeping. It gets even better: July and August of 2016 tied each other for the “warmest month ever recorded.” Ever.

In fact, according to GISS, 2016 will crush the previous record for the hottest year, set in 2015, which eclipsed the previous record for hottest year, set in 2014.  Do you sense a pattern here? Scientists do. It’s a three-year run that’s never happened before in 136 years. In addition to our streak of record heat, much of the South and Mid-South is experiencing “extreme” and “exceptional” drought. Good times!

The Flyer reported earlier this week that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has awarded Shelby County $60 million as part of its National Disaster Resilience Competition. The county plans to use the money to restore wetlands and flood plain areas to help protect area homes from the kind of massive flooding that occurred in 2011. HUD’s grant is also intended to assist the Wolf River Conservancy with mitigating future flooding and preventing soil erosion that could have negative effects on the Memphis Sand Aquifer — the source of our drinking water.

Predictably, even this bit of apparent good news was greeted by the usual, tired rhetoric of local climate-deniers in the article’s comments section. Climate change is “right up there with Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Elvis sightings, and Yeti,” said one wag. “As always,” he added, “follow the money.”

Yes, there are still people who deny climate change because they think 98 percent of the world’s climate scientists are in on some plot to make millions. Bwa-hahah!

“It’s called ‘weather,'” wrote another local anonymous genius. The comments then disintegrated into attacks on Hillary Clinton’s email server and Al Gore, and so forth.

Everything is tied to politics now. You can cite all the studies by all the reputable scientific organizations around the world, and it makes no difference. Some folks will find an outlier “study” to claim the earth is flat. And they’ll find politicians who will agree with them. If you cite a fact-checking organization, the other side will say that fact-checking organization is biased, and cite their own.

It’s been said that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” Wrong. We are now so polarized that we think we are entitled to our own facts. In fact, we can’t even agree what facts are.

But unless you don’t trust, you know, thermometers — or the scientists recording the temperature — you have to be an idiot to not at least acknowledge that the world has been getting warmer for decades. Denial is not a river in Egypt.

In fact, if we listen to the fools — and the politicians who cater to them — who urge us to ignore the findings of science, the Nile won’t even be a river in Egypt.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis Wednesday: Verge is the Memphis Music Doc For Today

Day 2 of Indie Memphis continues the distinctly Memphis vibe set by The Invaders and the IndieGrant shorts bloc on day 1. Today, the focus is on music.

Sebastian Banks of Black Rock Revival in Verge

There are a lot of documentaries about Memphis music, but Verge is different in that it’s not a historical documentary. First time director Lakethan Mason set out to make a movie about seven musicians who are adding to Memphis’ musical legacy today. “The subjects were chosen by spending time with the music community,” Mason says. “We started off with about 13 individuals that we sought out from their social media presence. There were also artists I had known over my years as an artist manager that I wanted to capture. Of course, the film would have been six hours long if we’d gone with 13, so we narrowed it down to seven exceptional artists: Nick Black, Brennan Villines, Faith Evans Ruch, Kendell MacMahon and all the bands she’s been a part of, Black Rock Revival, Marco Pave, and Kia Johnson.”

 

Verge director Lakethan Mason

Verge follows the artists through performances and their day to day struggles to make it in the industry. “It’s not just about the music, it’s about what’s behind the music. We went behind the scenes and got to know these people. I wanted the world to know they’re more than just artists, they’re people, too.”

The most fascinating thing about Verge is the insights it gives into the depths of the musicians personalities that you don’t get to see from the audience, like Brennan Villines’ work for St. Jude, or Faith Evan Ruch’s nursing career. “What I was most impressed with, was that each of these individuals are creating their own path to success,” says Mason. “We often define success as, you’re going to be performing in front of hundreds of thousands of fans in arenas. But these people are defining their own success.”

Singer Nick Black performs in Verge

The film was produced with support from executive producer J.W. Gibson. “Verge is a homegrown project, from the artist to the filmmaker to the visionary,” says Mason. “There’s a tenacity of spirit that I see in Memphians. If they want to do it, they’re going to do it. We’re a maverick city. We’ve got the indie spirit. We do it our own way, but we don’t fit into a box. We don’t play well with the industry that wants to churn out sameness.”

VERGE:MEMPHIS trailer from oddly buoyant productions on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis Wednesday: Verge is the Memphis Music Doc For Today

The Indie Memphis Film Festival continues through Monday, November 7.

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Music Music Blog

Reigning Sound Rule Gonerfest Thursday Night

If you want to get cheered up quick, try Gonerfest. 

Memphis punks Nots open Gonerfest 13 in the Cooper Young Gazebo

I had had a pretty crappy Thursday, and was in a pretty foul mood as I headed to the corner of Cooper and Young for the kickoff of Gonerfest 13. The fresh air, idyllic weather, and flurry of faces, both familiar and unfamiliar, loosened me up a bit, and then Nots rocked away the remnants of my darkness. As Goner co-owner Zac Ives said in his brief introduction to the band, it’s been a real privelage watching this band of Memphis women grow and evolve from raw, explosive talent into the finely honed outfit that confidently kicked off the world’s greatest garage punk festival. Even more heartening was the gaggle of little girls who gathered transfixed before Nots frontwoman Natalie Hoffman. The rest of Gonerfest may not be kid-friendly, but for a few minutes yesterday afternoon some Midtown kids got a glimpse of what a powerful, talented, and determined bunch of women can do. 

The show moved to the considerably less kid-friendly environs of the Hi-Tone for the evening’s festivities, led off by Memphis newcomers Hash Redactors. Half the fun of Gonerfest (well, maybe not literally half) is discovering new acts, and between the psychedelic Redactors and Chook Race from Melbourne Australia, I had joined two new fandoms before 10 PM. As the night’s MC, the legendary Black Oak Arkansas frontman Jim Dandy, explained “Chook Race” is Aussie slang for chicken racing, which is apparently a thing in the Outback. But aside from their accents, the three piece didn’t sound like they were from down under. I got a distinct vibe of Athens, Georgia circa 1981 from the jangly sound and twisty songwriting. Some songs sounded like Pylon, while others could have been outtakes from REM’s first EP “Chronic Town”. 

Chook Race from Melbourne, Australia

The crowd shoehorned into the Hi Tone mingled all kinds of accents and looks. I noticed as I entered the show that passports were being offered as IDs as often as American driver’s licenses. Yes, people really come from outside the states to Gonerfest. Lots of them. 

Reigning Sound

The rest of the evening offered various shades of garage rock, from Ohioans Counter Intuits to the Gonerfest veterans now based in San Francisco Useless Eaters. Guitar heroes Fred and Toody—Oregonian legends who fronted Dead Moon and Pierced Arrows—played a noisy set to a reverent room. Then it was time for a return of some Memphis favorite sons, Reigning Sound. Greg Oblivian Cartwright formed the band in the early 2000s with Alex Greene on keys, Greg Roberson on drums, and Memphis import Jeremy Scott on bass and backup vocals. The original lineup stayed stable for two of the best records created in Memphis since the heyday of Stax, and their live shows are legendary. When the original lineup reunited, with the occasional addition of John Whittemore on pedal steel and guitar, they proved the legends true for those who didn’t get the opportunity to see it go down the first time. There wasn’t a bad band on the first night of Gonerfest 13, but the Reigning Sound were head and shoulders above the rest. No one else had the width and depth of Cartwright’s songwriting, or the telepathic group cohesion that can sound both haphazard and incredibly tight at the same time. These guys are, and have alway been, the real deal. 

Now to get rehydrated for today’s shows. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Outflix Film Festival 2016

The 19th year of the Outflix Film Festival finds it at a crossroads. Outgoing director Jeffrey Harwood thinks it’s a good place to be. “I’ve been working with Outflix since 2008,” and serving as director for two years, he says. “It really has been a learning experience for me, seeing the crowds get bigger and the movies change. The quality of the films we have has changed. They’ve gotten better.”

Harwood says queer cinema worldwide has expanded both in scope and subject matter. This year’s Outflix features works from Sweden, Germany, Chile, Argentina, the U.K., Ireland, France, and India. Subject matter has expanded from coming out stories and campy comedies to stories that encompass every aspect of life. “We’re seeing universal issues approached in LGBT terms — family issues, adoptions. These films aren’t all just about being gay, but because these characters are gay, it influences how they approach life. I think that’s one of the good ways that LGBT cinema is growing. We still have the campy comedies and the coming out stories, and we need them, because there are still people coming out — especially in the ‘flyover zone.’ People still need these stories, but for the rest of the community, we’re seeing ourselves reflected in far more and different ways than we were even five years ago,” Harwood says.

The opening night film is Girls Lost, directed by Alexandra-Therese Keining. It’s the story of a trio of teenage outcasts who find a magic flower that turns them into boys. Once gender switched, they find attitudes toward them have changed dramatically. “The movie speaks to transgender issues and misogyny. They find that as boys, they are completely accepted. One of the girls discovers that the reason that she never felt at home [as a girl] is because this is who she is. She is trans.”

Friday evening’s programming features films aimed at young people. In Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, “A 17-year-old preacher’s kid is having a swim party for his birthday. One of his friends named Logan is attracted to him, and Henry is attracted to another guy who is not out yet. It examines the role of not just homosexuality, but sexuality and gender in role types. There are people at the party who are at various points on the spectrum of acceptance,” Harwood says.

Harwood is leaving Memphis to go to graduate school in Ohio, so this will be his last year as director. “We are going to be having a town hall on Sunday. We’ll fill the cinema at Ridgeway. This is an opportunity for a talkback, for the public to say what they like about Outflix, and what they would like to see changed … We want to talk about where we want to take Outflix, because next year is our 20th anniversary. So where does it need to go? How does it need to grow? … LGBT film festivals are still needed, because it’s an opportunity for us to come together in one place and an opportunity to educate the community. Here we are, we’re a part of Memphis, but you don’t know who we are. Come watch our films, and learn a little bit about us.”

Check It

Friday, September 9, 9:25 p.m.

It’s an old TV trope — Kid gets bullied. Dad tells kid to fight back. Next time kid gets bullied, kid fights back. Bullies back off.

But for many of the LGBTQ youth in a Washington, D.C.-based street gang called Check It, there was no dad to offer encouragement. And for many, there was no mom either because mom was off getting high on crack or too busy calling her son or daughter a “faggy-ass bitch” to care what was happening at school.

That’s what happened to Alton, a young, slim, African-American transgender woman with long, dark hair and a penchant for Jackie O-style sunglasses. Alton’s mom called her a “faggy-ass bitch” too many times, so Alton pushed her mother down a flight of stairs and was then sent to what she describes as a “mental home.” Then Alton found a new family in Check It.

The gang, whose members carry brass knuckles and knives and are known around D.C. for not taking any shit, is the subject of Check It, a documentary that follows the lives of a few of the gang’s members and their efforts to make positive changes in their lives.

Check It was formed in 2005 by three gay ninth-graders who were tired of being bullied. They started fighting back, and their bullies backed off. Eventually, the gang of mostly black teens and young adults grew to more than 200 members.

While the idea of a homophobia-fighting street gang sounds largely positive, the documentary makes clear that Check It often resorts to illegal activity for both defense and survival. Many of its transgender members, like Alton, are also sex workers on D.C.’s infamous K Street because it’s the only way they can find work.

Others are just really into fighting. A gay man named Skittles, who has a cross tattoo under his eye and multiple piercings on his face, tells the camera that once he starts fighting, he doesn’t stop until the cops pull him off someone.

A D.C.-area gang counselor named Ron “Mo” Moten comes along and tries to help a few Check It members get out of the gang life. He enrolls Alton and several others in a summer fashion camp, and he gets Skittles hooked up with a boxing coach.

Mo’s results are mixed, and, as the members either embrace or reject the new positive outlets, the film showcases how these youth have been set up for failure. To succeed, they have to fight not only their bullies but also their own demons developed through years of parental neglect and societal oppression. — Bianca Phillips

Upstairs Inferno

Girls Lost

Upstairs Inferno

Sunday, Sept. 7, 5 p.m.

To hear its former patrons tell it, the Up Stairs Lounge was pretty tame for a New Orleans gay bar in the early 1970s. Piano Dave would regularly entertain the patrons, and beer busts would end with folks in a circle holding hands and singing. “It was more like a social club than a bar,” says Stewart Butler in Upstairs Inferno, Outflix 2016’s closing night documentary.

The bar’s back room featured a small stage that was usually used for drag shows the regulars called “Nellydramas.” On Sunday nights, as the beer busts raged in the front room, it was transformed into the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). It was on one of those Sunday nights, June 24, 1973, that the Up Stairs Lounge passed into infamy. Someone emptied a can of lighter fluid in the stairwell and started a fire that claimed the lives of 32 gay men. It was a tragedy, a crime, and a wake-up call for the Southern city’s gay community.

Upstairs Inferno is director Robert L. Camina’s second documentary after 2012’s Raid of the Rainbow Lounge. The story of the Up Stairs arson has so many facets: A homosexual community on the cusp of liberation in the Stonewall era, the perilous position of LGBT-friendly Christianity, and a mystery that leads to uncomfortable answers. Camina chooses not to focus on the whodunit aspects of the story but spends his time immersed in the survivors’ emotional aftermath. He tracks down the survivors of the atrocity and their allies and people who candidly recall their own discomfort at the fact that the crime made the homosexual community impossible to ignore. The interviews are powerful and harrowing, especially with Rev. Elder Troy Perry, an MCC pastor who fought for recognition of the victim’s basic humanity while the police dithered and the city’s mayor, chief of police, and archbishop ignored the carnage. “God does not hate us,” he told his grieving flock. “This is mass murder. Some human did this, not God.” — Chris McCoy

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Olympic Fever Dream 2016

Pro Tip: If you have to be sick, try to be sick during the Olympics.

I first discovered this pro tip during the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino while recovering from hernia surgery. There is no better sport to nod off in a demerol haze to than curling. The experience was so positive (or at least as positive as recovering from major thoracic surgery can be), that when the doctor told me I had a massive hernia on the other side of my body, I scheduled the surgery around the 2014 Sochi games.

Pro Tip #2: opt for the robotic hernia surgery.

In 2012, when web streaming was becoming more practical, I endeavored to watch every event of the London games for a Flyer article. Between then and the Sochi games, I started to understand what experienced sports journalists are talking about when they say every Olympics has a different atmosphere. London had been a little stuffy, but uplifting; Sochi was ominous and vaguely dystopian.

OPENING CEREMONIES
The lead up to Rio had been a string of bad news: The rowers would be churning through sewage, Zika virus was going to be rampant, and the Brazilian government was literally collapsing just as the opening ceremony was looming. I was planning on catching as much of the games as I could, but my schedule was pretty busy, so I was going to keep it casual. Then my wife and I both woke up on Friday morning with a horrifying stomach flu, so my busy weekend turned into Olympic Fever Dream 2016.

We can’t run any pics from the Olympics, so here’s the rings.

The opening ceremonies had three directors, including Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian filmmaker who created the harrowing 2002 Rio crime epic City Of God. Working with a tiny fraction of the budgets Beijing and London had, they chose to lean heavily on projection mapping. You can see a much smaller scale example of projection mapping at the Crosstown Arts gallery this weekend with Fish, which, like much of the opening ceremony, uses a system of overlapping projectors throwing digitally manipulated images to create its illusions.

Maybe it was a result of my 100-degree fever, but I thought the program, which traced the entire history of human habitation in the Amazon basin and ended with a call for action against climate change, was superior to both better-funded recent examples. Rio’s secret weapon is Brazil’s incredible musical culture, and the beats didn’t stop with the end of the opening ceremony. Every event came with a live soundtrack of local musicians, and as far as I’m concerned Brazil has earned the gold medal in dancing. Despite the encroaching chaos of the outside world, the samba-infected mood of these games is loose and jubilant.

CYCLING THROUGH THE FUTURE

The story of Olympics coverage in the 21st century has been one of rapidly advancing digital video technology. 2008 was year HD came to Olympics, and the unwritten story this year has been the advent of 4K video. For the vast majority of viewers, its still being served in 1080 HD streams, but TV has never looked better than this. The colors are deep and varied, the blacks crunchy. Details in the foreground and background are constantly popping out you. What was an uncanny trick shot four years ago—such as the uncanny double images of underwater swimmers caused by reflections from the surface—now occurs in almost every swim heat.

The technical advances were immediately evident on Saturday at the Men’s 150 KM Bicycle Road Race. Cycling has always been a difficult sport to cover because of the speeds and distances involved, and only in recent years has it become practical to transmit digital HD video from a moving motorcycle. The combination of point-of-view images with drone and helicopter footage made for incredibly exciting viewing experience, and NBC used it very effectively to tell the story of a truly epic athletic contest. The race took six hours, and it was closely contested all the entire time. The course wound through the mountains surrounding Rio, and commentators were calling it the most difficult in Olympic history. The race was a brutal war of attrition, with riders bouncing on century-old cobblestones and dodging the shrapnel of their crashed competitors. Australian Richie Porto pulled himself off the pavement and tried to continue racing with a broken collarbone. The final few kilometers was a plunge from Fort Copacabana so steep and twisty the three leaders pulled away from the chase motorcycles, tightening the suspense for a breathless moment until the camera rounded a corner to reveal a pair of racers sprawled across the road. The survivor of the pile up was Rafael Majka, a two-time Tour de France King Of The Mountain winner who held a big lead when the course straightened out for the final sprint, only to settle for bronze after a pack of riders ran him down like wolves taking down a buffalo.

The same narrative played out the next day with the women’s road race, which was even more intense. Dutch cyclist Annemie van Vleuten was cruising down the mountain toward the gold when her tire slipped on drizzle slicked pavement and she crashed headfirst into a concrete curb on live television. Despite a severe concussion and three cracked vertebrae, she tweeted from the intensive care unit that she was bummed she crashed just when she was having the race of her life.

STREAMING MESS

So here we are in 2016. Everyone’s got an Apple TV or Roku or Chromecast hooked up to their flatscreen. We’ve got the whole streaming thing cracked, right? This year we’ll be able to see any Olympic even we want live over the web, right?

Nope.

The NBC streaming experience, both on the web site and through the Apple TV app, has been a total mess. The streams have been coming through clear, but you’re not always sure what you’re going to get when you click on an icon, because the labeling and times have been obscure and inaccurate. Early in the week, the automatic ad serving on the stream was so bad it ruined the Women’s Epee competition by covering most of the action with Samsung commercials.

As the games progressed, the ad serving situation seemed to get better. Many of the streamed events don’t have any commentary. This can be a problem for something like judo, where the line between winning and losing is unclear to the casual viewer. But with something like archery, where the objective is clear, the lack of narration really brought into focus how much the drama mongering, narrative based coverage is totally false.

Archery matches are great single-serving sports experiences. Sets go quickly, so there’s lots of scoring, lead changes, and tension. The arcs of the arrows ending with a satisfying “thunk” at the target makes for great television. Archers have a much wider variety of body types than, say, gymnasts. For every willowy Eastern European demigoddess looking like they’ve just come from the Wild Hunt, there’s a sturdy, kind-eyed math teacher type. The sport is also a great example of how quickly the Olympics can transform you into an armchair expert. I found myself getting blasé about 8s and 9s, even though any of these kind-eyed math teacher types could easily kill me with a single arrow from a quarter mile away.

FALSE AND TRUE NARRATIVES

Modern sports coverage and its obsession with psychological narratives goes back to Roone Arledge’s tenure at ABC sports in the 70s. It can be useful and truthful, as was the case with American Judo gold medalist Kayla Harrison. There are a lot of different ways to lose a judo match that fall short of losing consciousness, and it helps to have an expert explain the action. And Harrison’s story is genuinely compelling: She was sexually abused by her first coach, but recovered to become and activist and two-time gold medalist. She’s the former sparring partner of UFC superstar Rhonda Rousey, and she’s facing pressure to follow her friend into the more violent, lucrative sport, but that would mean giving up her calling to be a firefighter. It’s a genuine moral dilemma! 

Elsewhere, though, NBC’s attempts to drum up drama have been intrusive and unnecessary, and they seem unable to adapt when their preferred narrative is proven false. The US Women’s Gymnastic Team may be the greatest assemblage of athletes in their sport’s history, and they show every outward sign of having a healthy, supportive team relationship. Commentators repeatedly attempted to tease out jealousies and interpersonal drama, but the team’s performance was so dominant and Olympic in spirit that the women’s sheer virtue became the dominant story.

The pool was the arena for the games’ greatest heroics so far. Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszu won three gold medals in the grueling individual medley and backstroke events, breaking both Olympic and world records in the process. American Katie Ledecky left everyone in her wake winning three golds and a silver in dominant fashion. Simone Manuel created one of the games’ most transcendent images when she became the first African American woman to win a gold medal in a swimming event.

Then there’s Michael Phelps. At age 31—ancient by Olympic swimmer standards—his performance in the pool made a strong case that Phelps is the greatest Olympian of all time. Not only has he won a completely unprecedented 22 gold medals in the course of his storied career, but his win in the 200 Meter Individual Medly race put his lifetime individual medal count at 13. The former record for total lifetime individual gold medals was 12, and it was held by a man known only as Leonidas of Rhodes, a runner who won his ultimate medal at Olympia in 152 B.C.E. 2,168 years ago. There is much that needs changing in the modern Olympics, but Rio has so far lived up to the Olympian ideal. It’s a celebration of humanity’s greatness, spanning the long millennia, and now served to your Roku in brilliant 4K video.