Tag: Amazing Grace

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

2019: The Year in Film

The year 2019 will go down in history as a watershed. Avengers: Endgame made $357 million on its opening weekend, which was not only the biggest take for any film in history, but also the most profitable three days in the history of the American theater industry. It was the year that the industry consolidation entered its endgame, with Disney buying 20th Century Fox and cornering more than 40 percent of the market. Beyond the extruded superhero film-type product, it turned out to be a fantastic year for smaller films with something to say. Here’s my list of the best of a year for the history books.

Worst Picture: Echo in the Canyon Confession: I decided life is too short to watch The Angry Birds Movie 2, so Echo in the Canyon is probably not the worst film released in 2019 — just the worst one I saw. Laurel Canyon was brimming over with creativity in the 1960s and 1970s, with everyone from Frank Zappa to the Eagles living in close, creative quarters. How did this happen? What does it say about the creative process? Jakob Dylan’s excruciatingly dull vanity documentary answers none of those questions. The best/worst moment is when Dylan The Lesser argues with Brian Wilson about the key of a song Wilson wrote.

‘Soul Man’

Best Memphis Film(s): Hometowner Shorts I’ve been competing in and covering the Indie Memphis Hometowner Shorts competition for the better part of two decades, and this year was the strongest field ever. Kyle Taubken’s “Soul Man” won the jury prize in a stacked field that included career-best work by directors Morgan Jon Fox, Kevin Brooks, Abby Myers, Christian Walker, Alexandra Ashley, Joshua Cannon, Daniel Farrell, Nathan Ross Murphy, and Jamey Hatley. The future of Memphis filmmaking is bright.

Apollo 11

Best Documentary: Apollo 11 There was no better use of an IMAX screen this year than Todd Douglas Miller’s direct cinema take on the first moon landing. Pieced together from NASA’s peerless archival collection and contemporary news broadcasts, Apollo 11 is a unique, visceral adventure.

Amazing Grace LLC

Amazing Grace

Best Music: Amazing Grace The year’s other direct cinema triumph is this long-awaited reconstruction of Aretha Franklin’s finest hour. The recording of her 1972 gospel album was filmed (badly) by director Sydney Pollack, but the reconstruction by producer Alan Elliott made a virtue of the technical flaws to highlight one of the greatest performances in the history of American music.

King Ghidorah, Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: King Ghidorah, Godzilla: King of the Monsters Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a tasty treat for megafauna fetishists. Godzilla, the Cary Grant of kaiju, looked dashing, but he was upstaged by his three-headed arch enemy. King Ghidorah, aka Monster Zero, whose pronoun preference is presumably “they,” is magnificently menacing, but versatile enough do a little comedy schtick while pulverizing Boston.

Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore

Slickest Picture: Dolemite Is My Name Eddie Murphy’s comeback picture is also Memphis director Craig Brewer’s best film since The Poor & Hungry. Murphy pours himself into the role of Rudy Ray Moore, the comedian who transformed himself into a blaxploitation hero. The excellent script by Ed Wood scribes Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski hums along to music by Memphian Scott Bomar. Don’t miss the cameo by Bobby Rush!

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

MVP: Brad Pitt Every performance in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is great, but Brad Pitt pulls the movie together as aging stuntman Cliff Booth. It was a performance made even more remarkable by the fact that he single-handedly saved Ad Astra from being a drudge. In 2019, Pitt proved he’s a character actor stuck in a movie star’s body.

Beanie Felstien as Molly and Kaitlyn Dever as Amy in Booksmart

Miss Congeniality: Booksmart I unabashedly loved every minute of Olivia Wilde’s teenage comedy tour de force. Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein are a comedy team of your dreams, and Billie Lourd’s Spicoli impression deserves a Best Supporting Actress nomination. Booksmart is a cult classic in the making.

Chris Evans in Knives Out.

Best Screenplay: Knives Out In a bizarre twist worthy of Rian Johnson’s sidewinder of a screenplay, Knives Out may end up being remembered for memes of Chris Evans looking snuggly in a cable knit sweater. The writer/director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi dives into Agatha Christie mysteries and takes an all-star cast with him. They don’t make ’em like Knives Out anymore, but they should.

Lupita Nyong’o in Us

Best Performance: Lupita Nyong’o, Us If Jordan Peele is our new Hitchcock, Get Out is his Rear Window, an intensely focused and controlled genre piece. Us is his Vertigo, a more complex work where the artist is discovering along with the audience. Lupita Nyong’o’s dueling performances as both the PTSD-plagued soccer mom Adelaide and her sinister doppleganger Red is one for the ages.

Parasite

Best Picture: Parasite Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or winner absolutely refuses to go the way you think it’s going to go. There was no better expression of the paranoid schizophrenic mood of 2019 than this black comedy from Korea about a family of grifters who infiltrate a wealthy family, only to find they’re not the only ones with secrets. It was a stiff competition, but Parasite emerges as the best of the year.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Week That Was …

CREDIT: Bruce VanWyngarden

I was on vacation last week — on the road, on a boat, in the woods — mostly off the grid, as it were. Did I miss anything?

I mean, besides the Supreme Court approving the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and making gay marriage the law of the land, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley deciding to take down the Confederate flag, and the Grizzlies making a few moves and drafting another “project.” That’s about it, right?

Oh, and President Obama singing a hymn and making one of the most powerful and beautiful speeches I’ve ever heard. That, too.

I got bits and pieces of it all on my cell phone. Traveling across Long Island with my son at the wheel, I checked CNN and saw that the ACA had survived its most serious challenge. “Wow,” I said. “The Supreme Court upheld Obamacare today.”

“That’s a big deal, right?” said my son.

“Yes, it is,” I said. “A very big deal.” Then back to vacationing we went.

It was the same sort of scenario with the SCOTUS gay-marriage decision. I learned of it on my phone in a coffee shop in Amagansett.

“That’s huge,” my son said.

“Amazing,” I said. Then back to vacationing we went: sailing, surfing, hikes in the woods, walks along secluded beaches. Our Airbnb didn’t have wi-fi and phone reception was iffy. The country was changing in monumental ways and we were barely aware of it.

Friday night, we went to hear a couple of acoustic musicians play in the local town square. It was a gorgeous evening, cool, dark, and starry, with a half-moon hanging overhead. The performers finished with a lovely version of Neil Young’s “Helpless.” Blue, blue windows behind the stars. Such peace.

As the crowd stood and shuffled, I stayed seated on the blanket and checked Facebook, as one does occasionally, even on vacation. A friend had posted a video of President Obama singing “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney. I clicked on it and listened. Within seconds there were tears in my eyes. What a powerful and perfect redemptive gesture. I sat for a while, taking it in and maybe for the first time understanding the magnitude of what had transpired in my country in a few short days.

I got back to Memphis Sunday and spent hours catching up, reading newspapers, checking websites, getting opinions and reactions to all the drama.

Justice Scalia’s get-off-my-lawn dissents, citing “hippies” and other “jiggery-pokery” were priceless. There was the inevitable blowback. Some GOP officeholders were still trying to figure out ways to keep the tides of change at bay. The old tropes of Christian persecution and states’ rights were run up the flagpole again, but even the politicians seemed to know it was over. The KKK announced a march in South Carolina, for “heritage.” Send in the clowns. Speaking of which: Donald Trump even got fired.

What a week.

Categories
News News Feature

A Week of Change

In a week of monumental events signaling — and legally upholding — transformational change in America, my imagination was drawn to a 21-year-old man-child sitting in an isolated jail cell in Charleston, South Carolina. What must admitted mass murderer Dylann Roof be thinking, I wondered. He set out to tear apart, through one heinous and violent act, the moral fabric of this democratic republic established nearly 239 years ago. He is not the first to try — and fail — to do so, and he won’t be the last.

What Roof missed — now that he’s just another misguided, murderous idiot behind bars — was hearing the resounding echoes of social and economic triumph two United States Supreme Court rulings finally addressed in declarative fashion. What Roof missed was a president of the United States rising to oratorical heights in a speech meant to speed the healing process surrounding the pain, anger, and disillusionment Roof’s act of racial intolerance created. He missed the inspiring words that celebrated the resiliency of our country in times of unspeakable tragedy. He missed “Amazing Grace.”

In his incarcerated absence, Roof may have been unaware of the high court’s solid majority vote upholding the legality of the Affordable Care Act. For millions of people in this country, including thousands in Tennessee, the fight to insure the poor, the elderly, and those on the borderline of a healthy existence will continue. They will have new paths toward being able to secure medical treatment for afflictions and diseases that otherwise would have sentenced them to lives of pain or unneccessarily premature death. Unfortunately, the SCOTUS decision on Obamacare by no means ends the political opposition to it, but it gives legal clarity to what is an earnest attempt to level the health-care playing field for the haves and have-nots.

The same antagonistic forces that have long opposed “Obamacare” have vowed to continue to seek a constitutional amendment overturning the court’s ruling. Word to the wise: Barring more conservative appointments to the high court, an unlikely prospect, that ship has sailed.

Roof, in the personal “manifesto” that surfaced after his arrest, expressed his loathing for African Americans, Latinos, and Jews. Oddly, none of his hate-filled rants targeted gays or same-sex marriage. Not that Roof will be in a position to witness such unions, but that issue was also addressed by the Supreme Court last week, and the court struck down barriers against gay marriage instituted by state governments. The majority decision used the words “human dignity” — a number of times — to bolster its judicial opinion. The same phrase was often used by abolitionists in arguing against the evils of slavery.

While young Mr. Roof rots in prison awaiting his likely execution, he will find plenty of the kind of seething anger and racial and sexual intolerance he had hoped to ignite by sparking a race war. He will have plenty of time to ponder how his cowardly and pathetic actions served as a sad precursor to what became a magnificent week in American history.

I hope he will agonize about the hour he spent inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church — a Judas in the House of the Lord. I hope the parishioners’ words of prayer and forgiveness that he heard while plotting his mayhem will be seared in his memory for whatever time he has left on this earth.

Mr. Roof, you picked the wrong place, the wrong time, and the wrong people. You failed.

And as long as the United States remains strong enough to tolerate dissent and disagreement, as long as “we the people” are willing to listen to opposing opinions about the issues that divide us, as long as we recognize injustice and fight to right the wrongs that befall the least of us, then people like Dylann Roof will be forgotten footnotes in the great American story.

As a nation, we are a work in progress, an ongoing saga of success and failure, where perfection will never be achieved. But last week demonstrated we’re still valiantly searching for it.