Tag: Adam Driver

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Now Playing Sept. 27-Oct. 3

Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum in Megalopolis (Courtesy Lionsgate)

There’s an embarrassment of riches in movie theaters this rainy weekend. Let’s get right to them.

Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola, legendary director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, worked on the idea for an epic story inspired by the history of the Roman Empire, but set in New York City, since the 1980s. Frustrated by the conservatism of the Hollywood machine which couldn’t understand his vision, at age 80, he sold his wineries in Sonoma County, California, and spent $120 million of his own money to make it himself. An all-star cast flocked to his side to be a part of the great project: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Talia Shire, Laurence Fishburne, Nathalie Emmanuel, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and Aubrey Plaza, who plays a TV host named Wow Platinum. The people who have seen the film seem to either love it or hate it. Check out the spread of reviews on Google, which is like nothing I’ve ever seen:

I’ll let you know my opinion in next week’s issue. Meanwhile, here’s the trailer.

My Old Ass

Speaking of Aburey Plaza, she also co-stars in this very different film from writer/director Megan Park. It’s Elliot’s (Missy Stella) 18th birthday, and she’s ambivalent about leaving home for college. When her friends give her some psychedelic mushrooms, she sees her future self, played by Plaza, who tells her what it’s going to be like to be her for the next couple of decades — and also to avoid a guy named Chad (Percy Hynes White).

The Wild Robot

Dreamworks Animation’s latest is by Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon animator Chris Sanders. Lupita Nyong’o voices ROZZUM, a robot who washes up on a tropical island with no memory of how it got there. Sanders’ film is based on a beloved children’s book by author Peter Brown.

Paul McCartney and Wings: One Hand Clapping

In 1974, Band on the Run was the biggest album in the world. Filmmaker David Litchfield joined Paul McCartney and his band at Abby Road Studios for four days to shoot them rehearsing for their upcoming tour. The completed film failed to sell, and sat on a shelf for decades. Its 4K remaster finally saw the light of day, and now it’s getting rave reviews.

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Now Playing in Memphis: Scream VI, 65, and Woody

Ghostface in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group's "Scream VI."

Good news, fans of accurate naming systems — they’re numbering Scream movies again! After the 2022 Scream, which had no number (perhaps to confuse you into believing you’re buying a ticket for Wes Craven’s 1996 masterpiece of meta-horror) but was actually the fifth Scream, the Roman numerals are back, baby! Anyway, in Scream VI, Ghostface returns, he’s got a gun, and you’re trapped on the subway with him. 

Yay, more numbers! Adam Driver stars in 65 as an astronaut who crashes on a distant planet, only to find that it’s not really a distant planet, it’s the Earth 65 million years in the past. Think the Planet of the Apes scenario, only with hordes of dinosaurs who don’t take kindly to strangers. Legend Sam Raimi produces, and A Quiet Place helm team Scott Beck and Bryan Woods wrote and directed. 

Woody Harrelson is Marcus, an NBA G-league coach who has a bit of an anger problem, in Champions. After a legal entanglement, he is ordered to perform community service by coaching a team of players with intellectual disabilities. It’s tough at first, but by golly, he’s gonna take this band of misfits all the way to the Special Olympics! 

One of the strangest high-concept films in recent memory is The Magic Flute. German director Florian Sigl takes Mozart’s opera, which debuted in 1791 and is still performed regularly today, and makes it literal, with the help of some expensive CGI and Hollywood scholockmiester Roland Emmerich. A hit in Germany last year that is just now hitting the States, it looks entertainingly weird.

Don’t hibernate on the year’s biggest sleeper hit. She’s black, she’s bad, she’s a bear, and she’s on hard drugs. Spoiler alert: She eats O’Shea Jackson Jr. But is this East Tennessee mom serving as a good role model for her cubs?

On Wednesday, Indie Memphis continues their long-running Microcinema series with A String of Pearls: The Film of Camille Billops and James Hatch. Three of the pair’s short documentaries from the 1980s and 1990, “Older Women and Love,” “Suzanne, Suzanne,” and “Take Your Bags” have been restored to spread the word about the groundbreaking documentarians. The screening at Crosstown Theatre will be pay-what-you-can.

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White Noise

White Noise. (L-R) Greta Gerwig as Babette, Raffey Cassidy as Denise, May Nivola as Steffie, Sam Nivola as Heinrich and Adam Driver as Jack in White Noise. (Photo: Netflix © 2022)

In 1985, when Don DeLillo wrote his acclaimed novel White Noise, it was considered an absurdist comedy. When you’re watching Noah Baumbach’s 2022 film adaptation of White Noise, you will have moments of startling deja vu. What was considered over-the-top crazy in 1985 is now just stuff that happens in everyday life.

DeLillo’s “hero,” if you want to call him that, is Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a prominent professor of “Hitler Studies” at a Midwestern liberal arts college. Both he and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) are on their fourth marriages, so their four children live in an extremely mixed family. Luckily, the kids seem to get along well, bonded by their shared love of televised disasters. Plane crashes, floods, fires — the deadlier the better, says this household of typical viewers.

But disasters are only fun to watch at a safe remove. When they’re actually happening to you, it’s a different story. A few miles from the Gladney residence, a drunken trucker accidentally rams his tanker into a train full of chemicals. At first, Jack doesn’t believe the “airborne toxic event” is going to be a problem. Desperate evacuations to grubby refugee camps is something that happens to people in Haiti, not affluent Midwesterners. Even the frantic call from a National Guard truck to “evacuate immediately!” is an annoyance because it comes in the middle of dinner.

Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle deliver performances that hit a little too close for comfort in this absurdist comedy. 

For those of us who just lived through the pandemic, the Airborne Toxic Event feels like prophecy. The authorities can’t even agree on what to call it at first, and the name they settle on is comically ambiguous. The ever-changing signs of exposure to the toxic cloud include vague things like “unexplained deja vu” — when Steffie (May Nivola) experiences tingling in her extremities, Heinrich (Sam Nivola) accuses her of experiencing “outdated symptoms.” Even the anticlimactic end of the event seems familiar. One day, everyone is just allowed back to their homes, and not much else is said about the whole affair.

For his 11th film, Baumbach has taken on an extremely high degree of difficulty in adapting a beloved, but prickly, literary masterpiece. He leans heavily on Driver, who delivers with his usual intensity. You might not think “team teaching a college class on the parallels between Hitler and Elvis” sounds like good fodder for a cinematic experience, but Driver and Don Cheadle, who plays Jack’s frenemy professor Murray, make it riveting.

Gerwig and Baumbach are a couple, and judging from Lady Bird and Little Women, she is every bit his equal as a director. (Her $100 million Barbie movie drops next summer.) Babette gets pushed aside, in favor of Jack’s comically exaggerated narcissism. During her big scene, in which she confesses her drug addiction and affair, a stunned Jack can only repeat, “This is not Babette’s purpose.” DeLillo intended Jack to be an affectionate parody of the many “white guys who teach college” protagonists of literary novelists like Raymond Carver and John Irving. But after the Trump era, his unexamined selfishness seems uglier, and less funny.

Even though Jack and Babette’s lives continue to become more surreal and more complex, the film never really matches the energy of the A.T.E. I often quote the Hitchcock adage that mediocre books make the best movies. Works of literary genius that depend on wordsmithery usually get lost in translation. (Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is the exception that proves the rule.) Baumbach’s White Noise is dense and wordy. He creates some unlikely thrilling moments. I’m not sure what it all means, or if it holds together, but I do know that I’m still thinking about it, and I want to watch it again.

White Noise
Now playing
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House of Gucci

Ridley Scott’s HOUSE OF GUCCI A Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures film Lady Gaga stars in House of Gucci as Patrizia Reggiana, the “Black Widow” of Italy, who ordered the assassination of her husband Maurizio Gucci. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer)

Before he became Noted Auteur Ridley Scott, the English director made a big mark in advertising. In the late ’70s, Scott was hired to revamp the visual brand of Chanel No. 5 perfume. The commercial he made in 1979 would go down as an all-time classic: As a model lounges by a pool, the shadow of a private jet briefly darkens the Mediterranean sunlight. “I am made of blue sky and golden light, and I will feel this way forever,” intones the husky female voice-over. Then a hunky man magically appears and dives into her pool — no sexual overtones there.

Chanel No. 5 is just a perfume, but Scott’s visual magic is used to associate the brand with an intoxicating mix of power, lust, and wealth. You’ll never be as sexy as Catherine Deneuve, but you can go out on the town smelling like her, and that’s kind of like being made of blue sky and golden light, I guess?

It’s perversely appropriate that one of the people responsible for creating the visual language of luxury brand capitalism helms House of Gucci. “We’re not aristocrats,” says Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver). In the late ’70s, the Gucci fortune was only a couple of generations old, but patriarch Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) is instantly contemptuous when he finds out his son’s new girlfriend Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) comes from the petite bourgeois. Maurizio is in law school when he meets Patrizia at a party, and he has no intention of entering the chaotic family business. Rodolfo and his more competent brother Aldo (Al Pacino) believe Maurizio will be the future of the company, mostly because Aldo’s son Paolo (Jared Leto) is an idiot, which is why Rodolfo instantly pegs Patrizia as a gold digger. When he insists on marrying her, the groom’s side of the church is conspicuously empty, and Maurizio is forced to take a job at the Reggiani’s trucking company. (“Trucking? Mafia!” hisses Rodolfo.)

Patrizia’s not a gold digger, in that she sincerely loves Maurizio, but she’s not not a gold digger, either. Once she has the ring on her finger, the steel starts to show behind the velvet. Maurizio would be content with a fairly normal career, but Patrizia pushes him to be more ambitious. When Aldo calls to reconcile the Gucci rift, she’s adamant they return to the fold. Then she promptly starts maneuvering to put Paolo out of the picture.

Patrizia is an infamous figure in Italy, known as “the Black Widow” for ordering a hit on Maurizio in 1995. Lady Gaga plays her with what I can only describe as gusto. She and Scott know this is melodrama of the highest sort. When Patrizia and Maurizio have a tryst in his father’s office, it starts out sexy but devolves into a kind of slapstick ferocity. Driver seems to understand exactly the level of soap opera acting this story needs and delivers it nonchalantly. I suppose it’s hard not to wink into the camera when you’re doing a GQ cover shoot scene. Pacino, Leto, and Irons go full Dark Shadows. I wouldn’t call any of the Italian accents “great,” but they’re at least fun, like when an unrecognizable Leto bleats “She shake-a my hand while she knife-a me in the back!”

It’s corny as all hell, but it’s also pretty entertaining because you can tell these folks are having a good time. Scott’s lighting design is off the charts good, especially in an early Italo-disco sequence where he goes gaga with a light-up dance floor. His foreshadowing of the climactic murder is constant. When Patrizia confronts Maurizio’s mistress at a ski lodge, she barrels into the shot in a blood-red, skin-tight ski suit. Thanks to the ’70s Italian characters smoking like very fashionable chimneys, House of Gucci uses the mister as much as Blade Runner.

Ultimately, House of Gucci falls victim to the same problems Ridley Scott films have been having since Gladiator. There are a lot of good scenes that work on their own, but they never gel together into something greater than their sum. For example, Maurizio doesn’t drift away from Patrizia; he just seems to see another woman he likes and jumps ship. After luxuriating in Italian villas for two hours, the life-or-death drama at the end seems perfunctory. Like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, Lady Gaga’s portrayal of the antihero Patrizia is so charismatic and seductive that it undermines the film’s supposed deeper themes of the corrupting power of greed. The whole package comes across a little like The Godfather, if everyone involved were just a little stupider. I guess there will always be an appetite for watching awful people behaving awfully.

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Annette

The music of brothers Ron and Russell Mael, better known as the band Sparks, has always invited the descriptor “cinematic.” Maybe it’s their elaborate arrangements or Ron’s literate, self-aware lyrics. Or maybe it’s their album covers, which always hinted at little stories, like Propaganda, where they were bound and gagged in the back of a speedboat, apparently being taken by unseen kidnappers to be dumped in international waters. Why? Who knows. That’s Sparks for you.

As detailed in Edgar Wright’s excellent documentary The Sparks Brothers, the Maels, who started in the late 1960s, had their first hit in the glam rock era, and practically invented synth-pop, took to music videos like fish to water. At the end of the MTV ’80s, they tried to expand into film with hot new director Tim Burton, pitching a musical version of the manga Mai, the Psychic Girl. It sounded impossibly weird back then, especially once Burton became the biggest filmmaker in the world with Batman, and it never came to fruition. But looking back from 2021, where Japanese manga and anime artists have conquered the globe, the idea seems way ahead of its time. Again, that’s Sparks for you.

Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard) are parents to a baby played by a wooden puppet.

With Wright’s doc premiering at Sundance and getting wide release, it seems finally, 50 years into their career, Sparks’ time has come. (Of course, the film had the misfortune of premiering the same year as Oscar-shoo-in Summer of Soul, which is perfectly on-brand for the band’s snakebite career.) Now the brothers have finally gotten to fulfill their big screen musical ambitions with Annette, a long-brewing collaboration with French director Leos Carax. It’s beautiful, elaborate, obtuse, uncompromising, and either ahead of its time or outside of the concept of time. In other words, it’s very Sparks.

Annette stars Adam Driver as Henry McHenry, a comedian in the perpetually aggrieved style of Lenny Bruce, who falls deeply in love with opera singer Ann Defrasnoux, played by Marion Cotillard. After a whirlwind (and extremely horny) courtship and marriage, the couple gives birth to Annette, a beautiful baby girl played for most of the movie by a puppet. But there’s trouble in paradise. Ann’s ex is her accompanist (Simon Helberg), and his continued presence brings out Henry’s jealous side. Meanwhile, Henry’s new show “The Ape of God” — which is little more than Henry lashing out at the audience — is bombing, while Ann’s career is taking off. Things come to a head when a drunken Henry sails the couple’s yacht into a storm. Then the really weird stuff starts.

About halfway through Annette, I turned to my wife and said, “Adam Driver is our Brando.” The guy is good at everything from stealing the show as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy to embodying the gawky, quiet poet in Paterson. Annette proves he’s game for anything. It’s like Brando singing in Guys and Dolls, only instead of appearing in a popular Broadway musical, it’s a deeply weird, experimental glam rock opera. Who else would risk their career for this? Who else could pull it off so well?

Speaking of pulling it off, a few minutes later I said to my wife, “Wow, he sure is shirtless a lot.” Carax knows he’s got two of the most beautiful people on the planet, and he’s not afraid to shoot them in all their glory, with sex scenes that look like Caravaggio paintings. Did I mention they’re singing during the sex scenes?

Carax isn’t afraid of anything. The visuals are just as striking and experimental as the music. He puts his stars on the back of a real motorcycle, singing into the wind with no helmets. The emotions are big and brash, flirting with the outlandish, until it comes to a boil in an absolute barn burner of a final scene.

Annette is going to be called “too weird” by a lot of people whose favorite films involve space wizards and flying men in tights, but for me, it was the perfect amount of weird. In an industry that promises magic but delivers conformity, it’s a fresh breath of originality. That’s Sparks for you.

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Who Will Win at the Academy Awards? The Flyer’s Critic Has No Idea.

I have a confession to make: I’m not very good at the Academy Awards.

Oscar night is a big deal in the Hocking-McCoy household. We clear off the coffee table and put out a big spread of sushi. We parse each acceptance speech down to the syllable level. We print out ballots and compete to see who gets the most categories right. The prize for the winner is bragging rights for the year.

I can’t remember the last time I held bragging rights. Have I ever bested Commercial Appeal writer John Beifuss in his annual “Beat Beifuss” competition? I got close once.

You’d think that someone who reads about, watches, and occasionally makes movies for a living would be better at predicting Oscar winners. But, it turns out, my tastes rarely match the outcome of the Oscar voters’ poll. I’ve tried voting strategically, making my choices based on the conventional wisdom in the trades and among critics with bigger circulation than me. I’ve also tried voting my conscience, picking the ones I thought should win and letting the chips fall where they may. Neither method seems to work.

This is, of course, very similar to the choice voters face in the Democratic primaries. Do you vote your conscience or do you vote for the candidate you think has the best chance to beat Trump? Let my experience be a lesson to you. You simply don’t have enough information to vote strategically, so use the system the way it was designed to be used and just vote for the candidate you think will do the best job.

My Oscar ineptitude is one of the reasons I usually don’t do a preview pick-’em column. But the voices of my writing teachers are in my head saying, “People love it when you make yourself vulnerable.” So here goes: my picks for the 2020 Academy Awards.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker is the only truly great part of that film, but Adam Driver’s clueless art-dad Charlie in Marriage Story is the year’s best naturalistic performance. I’m going with Driver.

Supporting Actor: Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers better than anyone else could have in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but Brad Pitt elevates Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood to greatness. Plus, his T-shirt clearly says “CHAMPION.” Pitt is it.

Little Women could clean up in multiple categories.

Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role: This is the hardest category for me. Cynthia Erivo’s Harriet Tubman is close to perfect. Scarlett Johansson is Adam Driver’s equal in Marriage Story. I’m going with Saoirse Ronan as Jo in Little Women.

Best Supporting Actress is a little easier. It’s down to Laura Dern as a divorce lawyer in Marriage Story and Florence Pugh as Amy in Little Women. I think Pugh nudges Dern.

Missing Link

Best Animated Feature: I desperately want Missing Link to win. The stop-motion wizards at Laika have been killing it for a decade, and this is their year for recognition!

For Cinematography, it’s Roger Deakins in a walk. 1917 is a next-level achievement. This is the only Oscar that film deserves.

For Costume Design, Jacqueline Durran for Little Women barely beats Arianne Phillips for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Excellent work by both women.

Best Documentary Feature is Honeyland, an environmental fable masquerading as a character study. Highly recommended.

Any other year, Achievement in Film Editing would be Thelma Schoonmaker’s for the taking, but The Irishman is more than three hours long. Jinmo Yang’s work on Parasite should carry the day.

Honeyland makes a strong case for Best International Feature, but I’ve got to go with Parasite.

I’m going to take a pass on makeup because I haven’t seen two of the nominees. Best Original Song is “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin from the underrated Rocketman. Original Score should and probably will go to John Williams for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, so he can retire a legend. Go ahead and give Skywalker Best Visual Effects, too. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood‘s 1969 mixtape should take home the two sound awards, as well as Production Design.

Greta Gerwig’s tear-up-the-floorboards reimagining of Little Women deserves the Adapted Screenplay statue. I’m giving the Original Screenplay to Knives Out … probably because I’m giving everything else to Parasite.

Best Director goes to Bong Joon Ho. I was willing to give it to Quentin Tarantino, but then I found out that the Parasite house was a set with CGI background, and I was shook. Masterful execution is what this category is all about.

Best Picture has to be Parasite. This was a very good year for movies. Little Women, Marriage Story, and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood are all worthy films. But Parasite captures the spirit of 2019, and it deserves the biggest prize of all.

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

John Boyega, Joonas Suotamo, Daisy Ridley, Anthony Daniels, and Oscar Isaac in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

So many thoughts. Where to begin? 

How about a sports metaphor: There’s playing to win, then there’s playing not to lose. There’s a subtle, but significant, difference between the two approaches. Playing to win means being fit, smart, and prepared, adopting an aggressive attitude, and taking chances. You can be fit, smart, and prepared when playing not to lose, but you don’t take chances. You play not to lose when you feel like you have something to lose. You’ve been successful, you think you’re in a good position, and you want to cruise to the end of the season. But playing not to lose is a good way to guarantee a loss. You abandon successful strategies because they suddenly feel too risky. You start to doubt yourself. You lose the plot.

In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, director J. J. Abrams is playing not to lose.

Adam Driver as Kylo Ren

I’m an old-school Star Wars fan who had his life changed in a movie theater in 1977. I’ve been a fan of the franchise through good movies and bad. I had fun watching The Rise of Skywalker on opening night. But afterwards, during the traditional fan debates in the lobby, there were questions. As my wife said, “I have notes.”

First of all, I have held my tongue on this issue for fear of sounding too nerdy, but here it is: J.J. Abrams, hyperspace does not work that way.

Now you, being a rational human being who lives on planet Earth, might say “Wow, that’s what’s wrong with nitpicking Internet fandom these days!” But I would disagree. It’s a kind of like broken window theory: It’s a small sign of neglect that points to bigger problems.

But J.J’s gonna J.J., and in The Rise of Skywalker, his strengths and weaknesses get the kind of full expression that only $250 million can buy. His strengths are that he always leans into character. There are good performances here, led by Anthony Daniels as C-3PO. Daniels (who, incidentally, is one of the top-grossing actors in all of film history because he is the only actor to have appeared in all 9 films of the Skywalker family saga) has always been ace comic relief, especially given the fact that he’s played nine films in the most uncomfortable and inexpressive costume imaginable. His final film gives him moments of pathos, and Daniels delivers so beautifully it looks effortless, and is thus easily overlooked. Such is the lot of the robotic character actor.

Oscar Isaac, who is a fantastic actor, plays the best single scene of the film with Keri Russell Poe Dameron’s newly introduced ex-girlfriend, the spice smuggler Zorri Bliss. Daisy Ridley is comfortable in Rey’s skin, and her scenes largely play to her physicality. The young girl dressed as Rey at the Malco Powerhouse screening on opening night testifies to how deeply she has connected with the audience. Her frenemy relationship with Kylo Ren/Ben Solo (Adam Driver, excellent as always) provides the film’s emotional spine. When Isaac and Ridley go on a mission with John Boyega’s Finn in the Millennium Falcon, the film hums along for a while, powered by their chemistry. But just when the sequence should be reaching its climax, Abrams fails to stick the landing, and it fizzles.

Abrams’ weakness is that he’s only as good as the writer he’s paired with. The Force Awakens was the best film of his career, and he co-wrote it with the legendary Lawrence Kasdan. The Rise of Skywalker must tie up 42 years worth of loose plot ends. The final installment of the sequel trilogy was also handicapped by the untimely death of Carrie Fisher, whose General Leia was to have had a much wider role in the film. So maybe sticking the landing was always impossible. It would be tall order for anyone, but Chris Terrio, the guy who wrote Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, is not up to the task. It’s not like the prequels, which often had the air of immaculately crafted renderings of scripts that should have gone through a couple of more drafts. The Rise of Skywalker feels like a checklist movie, with superfluous scenes shoehorned in to fulfill perceived audience wishes. Unrelenting fan service is playing not to lose.

So I’m a true fan, with love forged on the elementary school playgrounds of 1978. Do I feel properly serviced? Like I said, I had a great time in the theater with my fellow geeks, I teared up at the appropriate times, and the mood was generally positive afterwards. Ultimately, The Rise of Skywalker is most comparable to Return of the Jedi. There are some great high points, but it lacks unity. There’s a parallel here to what happened with the last season of Game of Thrones. There was a decision to go with spectacle rather than doing the hard and risky work in the writers’ room. There’s no shortage of spectacle, but compared to what the franchise is capable of, it feels like a squandered opportunity.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

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Harriet, Mystery Train, and Frankie Lead Indie Memphis 2019 Lineup

Cynthia Ervino as Harriet Tubman in Harriet, the opening night film at Indie Memphis 2019

The Indie Memphis Film Festival has announced the lineup for the 22nd iteration of the home-grown cinephile celebration, which will run October 30-November 4, 2019. The opening night film will be Harriet, a biopic of abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman by director Kasi Lemmons.

(l to r) Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny, and Adam Driver star in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die.

Director Jim Jarmusch, who put Memphis on the arthouse map in 1989 with Mystery Train, will return for a 30th anniversary screening of the seminal independent film. Since the festival runs through Halloween this year, Jarmusch will also screen his latest film, zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die.

Producer/director Sara Driver, Jarmusch’s longtime partner and sometimes co-creator, will be the subject of a retrospective, and present the “spooky inspirations” for her work, which critic Johnathan Rosenbaum called “a conflation of fantasy with surrealism, science fiction, comics, horror, sword-and-sorcery, and the supernatural that stretches all the way from art cinema to exploitation by way of Hollywood.”

William Marshall wants to have a drink on you in Blacula.

On Halloween itself, there will be a special screening of the cult classic Blacula starring William Marshall as a vampire loose in ’70s Los Angeles.

Memphis director Ira Sachs returns from France with his latest picture Frankie, starring Isabella Huppert as an ailing movie star who summons her family and friends for one last gathering.
 

Harriet, Mystery Train, and Frankie Lead Indie Memphis 2019 Lineup

The Hometowner category, which spotlights films made by Memphis artists, boasts a healthy six features this year, including Cold Feet, a bachelor party horror comedy by Indie Memphis stalwarts Brad Ellis and Allen C. Gardner, which just won the writing award at the New Orleans Horror Film Festival. Musician and artist Lawerence Matthews makes his feature film debut at the festival with vérité documentary The Hub. Cinematographer and producer Jordan Danelz presents his first feature documentary In the Absence, which deals with blight and gentrification in Memphis. Jookin’ is the subject of Louis Wallecan’s Lil Buck: Real Swan. Jim Hanon profiles Memphis saxophonist Kirk Whalum in Humanite: The Beloved Community. Director Jessica Chaney makes her premiere with the girl power drama This Can’t Be Life.

Penny Hardaway (right) stars with Shaquille O’Neil (center), Matt Nover (left), and Nick Nolte (bottom) in William Friedkin’s Blue Chips.

The celebrated director of The Exorcist, William Friedkin will have a mini-retrospective with two films. The first is Blue Chips, a 1995 film set in the world of college basketball starring Shaquille O’Neil, Nick Nolte, and University of Memphis basketball coach Penny Hardaway. The second is Sorcerer, a film Friedkin called his masterpiece, but which had the misfortune to be released in 1977 on the week Star Wars went wide.

Another sure-to-be-anticipated screening will be Varda by Agnes, an autobiographical film by the late, revered filmmaker Agnes Varda, made when she was 90 years old.

The great director says goodbye in Varda by Agnes.

The Narrative Feature competition will feature five films from as far abroad as the Dominican Republic, four of which are by women directors. The documentary competition will be between four features, including Best Before Death, director Paul Duane’s portrait of artist Bill Drummond, which was filmed partially in Memphis.

The Memphis Flyer will have full coverage of the festival in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, you can find more information, festival passes, and tickets to individual screenings on the Indie Memphis website. 

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The Dead Don’t Die

The town of Centerville’s welcome sign says it all: “A Real Nice Place.” Police chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) don’t have to work too hard to keep the peace. When The Dead Don’t Die opens, they’re checking out a report by Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi) that old Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) has been stealing his chickens. The investigation goes pretty much nowhere, because Chief Robertson thinks Farmer Miller’s an asshole, and all Hermit Bob will say is “fuck you.”

As they head back to the station, Cliff and Ronnie notice that there’s something weird going on. This is, of course, the set up to nearly every zombie film ever made: Two people, their heads buried in the daily minutiae, slowly come to realize that their world is being overrun by the unquiet dead.

You probably don’t associate director Jim Jarmusch with the genre, but he has obviously seen a few zombie movies in his time. Jarmusch’s primary directing mode has always been that of the observer. He favors letting things play out in long takes, the better to get to know his characters, warts and all. His 1989 masterpiece Mystery Train, which immortalized the down-and-out Memphis of the era, lingered on the bewildered faces of Jun and Mitsuko, the Japanese tourists who were discovering the real America. In Night on Earth, he got a career best performance from Winona Ryder by simply riding around in a cab with her.

(l to r) Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny, and Adam Driver star in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die.

But he’s also always had a taste for genre pictures, such as his 1995 Western Dead Man, where he shot Johnny Depp in creamy duotone while demolishing the genre’s black and white morality plays. His last foray into supernatural horror was 2014’s transcendent Only Lovers Left Alive, where Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston played centuries-old vampires feeling the weight of immortality.

As one of the godfathers of independent film, Jarmusch knows how to get a project done by rounding up all of your friends and showing them a good time while they work. The difference with Jarmusch is the quality of the friends’ talents. Sara Driver, who became his partner while he was making his first film Stranger Than Paradise, appears as a zombie. Steve Buscemi, who here sports a “Keep America White Again” hat, rode with Joe Strummer in Mystery Train. Tom Waits spouted gruff wisdom in Coffee and Cigarettes. Bill Murray was the lead of Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers. The director worked with Iggy Pop for years to make a documentary on The Stooges. Tilda Swinton, so chillingly elegant in Only Lovers Left Alive, appears in The Dead Don’t Die as an eccentric coroner who is aces with a samurai sword. Adam Driver was magnificent in Paterson, Jarmusch’s last film. The list goes on.

Murray and Driver, joined by Chloë Sevigny as Officer Mindy, first try to make sense out of the dead rising from the grave with a hunger for human flesh, then try to contain the zombie contagion. They also serve as their own Greek chorus, commenting on the action as it happens around and to them, delivering sly in-jokes, and making the occasional meta foray. There are references to earlier Jarmusch films, such as the road-tripping tourists, played by Selena Gomez, Luka Sabbat, and Austin Butler (slicked up like Strummer), who pick the wrong time to hole up in a seedy room at the Moonlight Motel. Jarmusch, the consummate indie film hipster, gets a laugh at their — and his own — expense with the line “Infernal hipsters and their irony!”

In the tradition of George Romero, who invented and perfected the modern zombie picture, Jarmusch uses the walking dead as satirical mirrors of society. Like the ghouls in Dawn of the Dead, they are drawn to the things they coveted in life, only in this case it’s wifi and chardonnay.

As a zombie comedy, The Dead Don’t Die never reaches the manic heights of Shaun of the Dead; but then again, it never tries that approach. Jarmuch’s sense of humor is dry as a bone, and his pacing deliberate. Hermit Bob, who watches the zombie apocalypse gather strength through cracked binoculars, serves as the director’s alter ego. He can’t fully participate in the rapidly decaying human society, but he can’t look away, either. One line in particular from The Dead Don’t Die seems designed to resonate through Jarmusch’s entire filmmaking career: “The world is perfect. Appreciate the details.”

The Dead Don’t Die

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Crosstown Arts Talks, Don Quixote, and Babylon This Week At The Movies

Adam Driver and José Luis Ferrar in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

Tonight at 5 PM, Crosstown Arts presents a viewing party for three artists currently in residence. Jia Wang, Chen Wang, and Matteo Servante will deliver artist’s talks on the projects they’ve been working on at the Midtown arts institution.

Then, on Wednesday, April 10, Servante and fellow filmmaker and Crosstown resident Pierre Primetens will screen their work at Crosstown Theater.
courtesy Crosstown Arts

Jia Wang and Chen Wang

It’s the busiest film Wednesday in recent memory, which means some hard choices for Memphis cinephiles. Indie Memphis is presenting Babylon, a legendary “lost” film from 1980. Reggae musician Brinsley Ford stars as a struggling DJ on the mean streets of London at the dawn of the Thatcher era. This was the musical melting pot where reggae and punk met for the first time, where dub made inroads with the mainstream and left an indelible mark on electronic music, and where the inclusiveness of the anti-racist skins and Twin-Tone, second wave ska met the racist National Front. Often, those meetings were in the street, with violence. Rated X in England, and never before released in the United States, despite being hailed at Cannes as one of the greatest English films ever made, Babylon is more relevant than ever. Babylon bows at 7 PM at Studio on the Square, and you can get tickets here, on the Indie Memphis website.

Crosstown Arts Talks, Don Quixote, and Babylon This Week At The Movies (2)

Meanwhile at the Paradiso, another “lost” film. When people tell me they want to be a filmmaker, I often tell them to watch two movies: Raiders Of The Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a fan remake of the Spielberg classic made over the course of a decade in Mississippi by a group of teenagers. That film proves what determination and grit can accomplish. Then, watch Lost In La Mancha, the documentary about director Terry Gilliam’s failed attempt to push through with his film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, while being beset on all sides by failure, bad luck, and bad faith.

Well, twenty years after Lost In La Mancha, Gilliam, now in his 70s, finally finished The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with Adam Driver in the lead role. The bits of the completed film in Lost in La Mancha are tantalizing, and now we can see if it’s actually any good. I personally have faith in Gilliam, the former Monty Python animator turn visionary auteur. But we’ll see. Hey, the trailer looks good!

Crosstown Arts Talks, Don Quixote, and Babylon This Week At The Movies