Tag: Amy Schumer

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Opinion The Last Word

Hello, People of the Future …

CREDIT: Dwong19 | Dreamstime.com

Hello, people of the future.
By the time you read this, we will have elected a new president. I hope you’ll be reading this and that Shit Creek hasn’t escaped its embankments and flooded us with millions of tons of Clinton emails and Donald J. Trump neckties. I hope Russia hasn’t decided to invade us while we weren’t looking, because the only thing I know about survival came from watching Red Dawn, and I’m not really cut out for the having-to-pee-in-the-woods way of life. I hope we haven’t woken up to riots.

I haven’t been one of the ones saying that if Trump wins, I’m going to Canada. I’m too lazy for that kind of commitment. My passport’s expired. I’m not stockpiling ammo. I can’t ever remember what gauge the guns are, so I’d end up with a closet full of the wrong kind, and I don’t think I’d be good at selling shotgun shells on the black market because I’m not one of those people who always knows a guy. I’m not moving out into the woods. Sure, we talked about it, but I just got a YMCA membership so I want to get my money’s worth from that. Also, I just bought a bunch of produce, and I’m not sure how techy the Canadians are about bringing collards into the country. Let’s not forget they sell milk in bags. I actually haven’t decided if that’s a positive or a negative.

My brother-in-law lives in The Hague, and we talked about crashing with him. I mean, all the Dutch seem concerned about legislating is the wearing of veils and headscarves, so I guess it must be pretty quiet over there. The problem is I have no balance, and riding a bike everywhere would not be good for me. Or anyone within a three-mile radius of me. Oh, and also I believe that clothing isn’t something a government should regulate unless one is serving in an army, and I’m pretty committed to that whole freedom of religion thing, so it’s really no good.

Dwong19 | Dreamstime.com

Miley Cyrus

I just Googled “what to do if Trump wins” and got a list of celebrities who said they were leaving if Trump is elected. Barbara Streisand, Raven-Symoné, Miley Cyrus, George Lopez, Chelsea Handler, and Amy Schumer are a few. In the interest of being fair and balanced, it’s good to know there might be something positive from a Trump reign. If Clinton won, the Oath Keepers have promised Civil War. I wonder if I am waking up to an America where Miley Cyrus is tweeting about weed from Cape Breton? I’m not entirely uncomfortable with that.

I think this morning we all woke up relieved the election is over. I think we woke up tired. I think we woke up wondering if we need to push the credit card payment back to make the mortgage on time. I probably woke up this morning realizing I forgot to get coffee. I probably woke up because my dog was whining to go out. My husband probably woke up because I accidentally popped him in the head because I was dreaming that I was in a fistfight with a beaver (that has actually happened). We all woke up this morning just like we have hundreds of mornings before, and we’ll fall in bed tonight just like the hundreds of nights before. I’m not saying the election didn’t matter. I’m saying I’m trying really hard not to quote the Who about new bosses and old bosses because it seems trite.

My father told me never to vote against anything or anyone. Vote for something or someone. I was able to do that this year, just like I’ve been able to since my first Presidential Smackdown in 1992. Some years it’s harder than others, but no one ever said democracy was easy. If it were, everybody would have one. I don’t mind that other countries roll their eyes at us. It’s not like they don’t have shenanigans. Milk in bags, remember? Italy elected a porn star to parliament. North Korea’s run by the kid who sat in the back of your math class and ate his own boogers. There are people in Britain who honestly didn’t know that voting to leave the European Union really meant they would leave the European Union.

Perhaps we’ll see how close we came to ruin and make better choices next election cycle. Maybe we’ll realize all politics is local and start making better choices at home, which will eventually trickle up to better national choices. Of course, maybe every reality “star” will see how easy it is to come close to the presidency, and we can look forward to Honey Boo Boo 2032 billboards.

Here in Memphis, we’ll go on grinding. It’s what we do.

Susan Wilson also writes for yeahandanotherthing.com and likethedew.com. She and her husband Chuck have lived here long enough to know that Midtown does not start at Highland.

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Music Music Features

Chris Maxwell Returns

Chris Maxwell will make his way through Memphis this week for a show on Saturday, March 26th at Otherlands. Maxwell is currently touring in support of his new solo album, Arkansas Summer, but he might be best known around these parts as the leader of the Little Rock alternative band the Gunbunnies, which cut its 1991 debut Paw Paw Patch here in town with legendary local producer Jim Dickinson. After migrating north, Maxwell made a name for himself playing guitar for the New York band Skeleton Key, and, as a part of the music production team the Elegant Too, he has also collaborated with folks like They Might Be Giants, Yoko Ono, and Iggy Pop as well as created music for the TV shows Bob’s Burgers and Inside Amy Schumer. Maxwell spoke to the Flyer earlier this week. — JD Reager

The Memphis Flyer: The Gunbunnies were recently described to me as the “only band out of Little Rock to ever make it.” Do you think that’s a fair description?

Chris Maxwell: Ha! No, not a fair description, especially when you consider Evanescence sold around 20 million records. What is true is we were the first band to get a major label deal out of Little Rock — I’m not sure how important that is, but at least it’s more accurate.

How did you get paired with Jim Dickinson?

Our manager, Jon Hornyak, knew Jim. I had two dream producers. It was between him and T Bone Burnett. I ended up feeling better about Jim. Those records he made, especially Big Star’s Sister Lovers and the Replacements’ Pleased to Meet Me and even Toots Hibbert’s Toots in Memphis record were all big influences. To me, T Bone was more of a songwriter. Jim seemed like a mad, musical Sherpa. That’s what I wanted. Jon sent Jim my home demos, and he dug it.

What was it like to work with him?

It was one of the most bizarre, educational, stoned, and fun experiences of my life. Jim always showed up in some badass outfit. Then he’d start off every day telling some incredible story about someone like Aretha Franklin or Sam Phillips. It was inspiring to say the least. He taught us how to think like artists. He introduced me to the “happy accident.” He taught me music is something you conjure like a spell.

How much time did you spend hanging around Memphis?

We lived in Memphis for the couple of months we recorded. It was an incredible time to be there. Overton Park was having shows every weekend. Tav Falco took our band photos, Robert Gordon wrote our bio, and we played shows with Alex Chilton. It doesn’t get any better than that.

You’ve done a lot of work-for-hire for film and television over the years. How is that different from your usual songwriting?

It’s craft vs. art. Those things aren’t exclusive of each other, but the ratios are different depending on what you’re going for. If I’m writing an end credit for Bob’s Burgers, I have a very specific aesthetic that I’m working with. I can bring all of my experience as a songwriter to bear, but I’m digging around in my soul for the meaning.

Also, with songwriting, the words and stories inform the music as opposed to most of the work-for-hire composing, which is underscoring a movie. I have certainly brought a lot of my song craft to composing, and, likewise, a lot of the tools I use in composing have had an impact on how to underscore the narrative in a song.

Were you surprised at the overwhelming viral reaction to the song “Milk Milk Lemonade,” which your production team did last year with the comedian Amy Schumer?

That was a shock. I think [it got] four million hits in 24 hours? Something like that. “Milk” mostly came from my partner Phil [Hernandez]. He’s an amazing drummer and programmer. I worked with Amy on her vocals, and she was extremely sweet. She loved our track. We’ve just written and recorded another song for this upcoming season as well as produced one other track.

What inspired you to create Arkansas Summer?

It all started with the birth of my son. After Skeleton Key, I had gotten so involved in film and TV that I let my songwriting recede into the background. When Angus was born, I taught myself to fingerpick, and these songs about my life started coming out. When the song “Arkansas Summer” came to me, I realized I was making a record. That song became the heart of the record. I realized I had these stories, and I wasn’t telling them.

How did you record it?

It started in an Airstream I bought from Ethan Hawke after his divorce from Uma Thurman. Then, as it evolved, I moved into a couple of real studios that are minutes from my house: Dreamland and Applehead. Eventually I sold the Airstream and built a studio at my house where I finished recording and mixing everything.

It was a difficult process mainly due to the fact I write and record all day for my real job. That made it difficult to find the energy to write and record my own music. More often than not there was no gas left in the tank. But once I saw the thing that it was going to become, I kept pushing and finding the cracks to wedge in time.


Chris Maxwell live at Otherlands, Saturday, March 26th. 8 p.m. $7

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Amy Schumer Live At The Apollo

Amy Schumer Live at the Apollo (2015; dir. Chris Rock)—The title of Amy Schumer’s second stand-up special hints at a kind of unpredictable, potentially hostile collision between performer and audience not unlike the 2012 Late Show with David Letterman episode where Dave performed to an empty Ed Sullivan theater while Hurricane Sandy raged, or the 1997 Late Night with Conan O’ Brien episode where Conan did his show in front of a studio audience comprised entirely of grade-school kids. Schumer didn’t do her act on Amateur Night; in fact, I’m not sure there’s a single paying customer of color in any of the numerous crowd shots.

So instead of edgy, unpredictable performance art we get a pretty good show from a pretty good comedian still on a serious roll. Schumer is much more relaxed and conversational this time around; the disarming, shock-value-heavy “good girl who says ghastly things” part of her act has largely disappeared. And thanks to her work on Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer, she’s more comfortable dropping into different characters for a snarky line or gesture than she once was. Her continuing growth as a physical comedian is also one of the show’s many highlights.

Mostly Sex Stuff, Schumer’s first special, improved after multiple viewings; Live at the Apollo improves after the first 30 minutes and keeps getting better all the way to the end. Her okay bits are about massage parlors and her awkward adolescence. Her good bits are about low-hanging fruit like beauty pageants and dumb Family Feud contestants. Her great bits are about food and sex, two topics where guilt and shame and pleasure are layered on top of each other like hoagie ingredients or fatigued swingers. The food stuff includes her admission that she’s never forgotten to eat lunch; the sex stuff includes her own discomfort with being labeled a sex comic (“I feel like a guy could get up here and literally pull his dick out and everybody would be like, ‘He’s a thinker!’”). She closes with a riotous and humane disquisition about the humiliating sex positions dreamt up by lonesome horndogs and performed by no one that’s funnier than most of Trainwreck.

Grade: A

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Film Features Film/TV

Trainwreck vs. Ant-Man

Last weekend’s box office race involved two seeming opposites: Marvel’s Ant-Man and Trainwreck, the collaboration between comedy titans Amy Schumer and Judd Apatow. But after a Sunday double feature of the two films, I was struck by their similarities and what they say about the current risk-averse environment in Hollywood.

Ant-Man stars Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, a former electrical engineer whom we first meet as he is being released from San Quentin, where he was doing time for a Robin-Hood robbery of his corrupt former employer. His wife Maggie (Judy Greer) has divorced him and is living with their daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) and her new boyfriend, Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). Scott tries to go straight, but after he’s fired from his job at Baskin-Robbins, in one of the more creative product placement sequences in recent memory, he takes his friend Luis (Michael Peña) up on his idea to break into a Victorian mansion and clean out a mysterious basement vault.

But, as the comic book fates would have it, the mansion is the home of one Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), an old-school superscientist who discovered a way to reduce the space between atoms and thus shrink himself down to the size of an insect. For years, he and his wife operated in secret as a superteam of Ant-Man and the Wasp. After a desperate mission for S.H.I.E.L.D. to stop World War III, she disappeared into subatomic space, and he took off his supersuit and vowed to keep the world-changing and potentially dangerous technology under wraps.

Under Pym’s tutelage, Scott sets out to stop the scientist’s former protegee Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from selling his own version of the shrinking technology to the evil forces of Hydra by stealing a high-tech Iron Man-type suit called the Yellowjacket.

Ant-Man is not as good as this year’s other Marvel offering, Avengers: Age Of Ultron, but it scores points for originality. Written by Attack the Block‘s Joe Cornish and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World‘s Edgar Wright, who was originally slated to direct, the film tries — and mostly succeeds — to combine an Ocean‘s Eleven-style heist flick with a superhero story in the same tonal range as Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. It’s burdened with the traditional origin-story baggage, but the sequence where Scott discovers the powers of the Ant-Man supersuit by shrinking himself in the bathtub and fleeing running water, hostile insects, and a vacuum cleaner is another triumph for special effects wizards Industrial Light & Magic. Rudd, a veteran of many Apatow comedies, including Knocked Up, is exactly the right guy to sell the mix of comedy and superheroics, and some sparks fly with furtive love interest Evangeline Lilly as Pym’s double agent daughter Hope van Dyne. For the sections of its 117-minute running time when it’s focusing on its core plot, Ant-Man is a good time at the movies.

For Trainwreck, Amy Schumer’s vehicle for transforming basic cable stardom into a feature film career, she surrounded herself with some very heavy hitters. First and foremost is Apatow, the producer, director, and writer with his fingers in everything from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Girls. The pair execute Schumer’s first feature-length screenplay with verve. Schumer stars as Amy, a New York magazine journalist who is basically a fleshed-out version of her public persona. In a sharp inversion of the usual romantic comedy formula, she is a quick-witted, commitment-phobic hookup artist dating a hunky man-bimbo named Steven (John Cena), who just wants to get married, settle down, and raise a basketball team’s worth of sons in a house in the country. Soon after her chronic infidelity torpedoes her relationship, she is assigned to write about a prominent sports doctor named Aaron (Bill Hader), who counts LeBron James among his patients. The two hit it off, and she soon violates her “never sleep over” rule with him.

If this were a traditional Rom-Com, and Amy’s character were male and played by, say, Tim Meadows (who is one of the dozens of comedic talents who have cameos), I would be calling him a ladies man. Schumer is practically daring people to expose the double standard by calling her a slut. Her effortless performance proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that she has chops to carry a feature film. Apatow is savvy enough to give her a long leash, giving her scenes time to breathe, selecting some choice improvs, and letting barrages of comic exchanges live in two-shots. Hadler finds himself in the unfamiliar role of the straight man to Schumer’s cutup, but he acquits himself well in what is essentially the Meg Ryan role from When Harry Met Sally. Practically everyone in the film’s supporting hoard of comics and sports figures also gives a good turn. Tilda Swinton is stiletto sharp as Dianna, Amy’s conscience-free magazine editor boss. Dave Attell is consistently funny as a homeless man who acts as Amy’s Greek chorus. Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei slay as the leads in a black-and-white art film called The Dogwalker that the film’s characters keep trying to watch. Matthew Broderick, Marv Albert, and tennis superstar Chris Evert share a funny scene. But the biggest surprise is LeBron James, who shines with confidence and humor every time he’s on the screen. For the sections of its 124-minute running time that it focuses on Amy’s romantic foibles, Trainwreck is a good time at the movies.

But that’s the rub for both Ant-Man and Trainwreck. They both spend way too much time straying from what an M.B.A. would call their “core competencies.” In the case of Ant-Man, the distractions are twofold. First is the now-predictable, awkward shoehorning of scenes intended to connect the film to the larger cinematic universe. As his first test, Pym assigns Scott to steal a technological bauble from a S.H.I.E.L.D warehouse, prompting a superclash between Ant-Man and fellow Marvel C-lister Falcon (Anthony Mackie). The allegedly vital piece of equipment is never mentioned again.

Second is the turgid subplot involving Scott’s efforts to reconnect with his daughter Cassie, and her would-be stepfather Paxton’s attempts to put him back in jail. When Scott is having trouble using Pym’s ant-control technology, Hope tells him to concentrate on how much he wants to reunite with his daughter. The moment rings completely false in context: If you’re trying to talk to ants, shouldn’t you be concentrating on ants? The intention seems to be to make Scott a more sympathetic character, but Rudd’s quick-quipping charisma makes that unnecessary. Why spend the time on flimsy sentiment when we can be playing to Ant-Man’s strengths?

Similarly, Trainwreck gets bogged down in a superfluous subplot involving Amy’s sister Kim (Brie Larson) and their father Gordon (Colin Quinn). It starts promisingly enough in the very first scene of the movie when Gordon explains to young Kim and Amy why he and their mother are getting a divorce (“Do you love your doll? How would you like it if you could only play with that one doll for the rest of your life?”). But then, we flash forward to the present day, and Gordon has been admitted to an assisted living facility, which becomes a source of friction between the sisters. Quinn is woefully miscast as a disabled old man, especially when he’s sitting next to veteran actor and actual old man Norman Lloyd. The subplot is seemingly there only for cheap sentiment, and it drags on and on, adding an unacceptable amount of running time to what should be a fleetly paced comedy. As we left the theater, my wife overheard a woman asking her friend how the film was. “I like it okay,” she said. “I thought it was never going to end, though.”

When Ant-Man is kicking pint-sized ass and Amy Schumer is schticking it up, their respective movies crackle with life. Hollywood is filled with smart people, and I can’t believe that an editor didn’t point out that the films could be improved by excising their phony sentimental scenes. So why didn’t these films achieve greatness? I submit it is another symptom of the studio’s increasingly crippling risk aversion. All films must be all things to all audiences to hit the so-called “four quadrants” of old and young, male and female, so raunchy comedies get extraneous schmaltz and lightweight comic book movies get weighed down with irrelevant family drama. Both Ant-Man and Trainwreck end up like rock albums with lackluster songwriting filled with killer guitar solos. They’re entertaining enough but haunted by the greatness that could have been.

Ant-Man
Now showing
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Trainwreck
Now showing
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Amy Schumer at Horseshoe Tunica Friday

Amy Schumer will raunch up Bluesville at Horseshoe Casino this Friday, September 26th. Schumer got her big break on the 2007 season of Last Comic Standing. Since then, she’s had a slew of guest roles on series like Girls, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, Louie, and Delocated. Cultivating a large cult following with her own brand of gross-out and sex-based humor, her comedy falls into the same territory mined by Chelsea Handler — only not pretentious.

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Schumer’s breakout performance on the Roast of Charlie Sheen helped launch her into the pop-culture stratosphere. Her five minute, profanity lace diatribe skewered everyone from William Shatner to Mike Tyson to Sheen himself. The highlight of her insults was the comparison of Tyson’s facial tattoo to a tramp stamp. From 2010-2012, Schumer co-hosted Hoppus on Music, with musician Mark Hoppus. The talk show aired on Fuse.

Amy Schumer at Horseshoe Tunica Friday

Since 2013, she has starred on Inside Amy Schumer on Comedy Central. The show blends sketches with Schumer’s stand up and off beat interviews. Her 2011 comedy album, Cutting, broke Billboard’’s top five and was on multiple best of lists that year. A sample of the tracks on the album let you know where you’re headed: “Masturbating,” “Cockblock,” and “Asshole” are just a few of the gems.

The comedian’s next project should launch her into super stardom. Trainwreck is due out in July 2015 and stars Schumer along with an ensemble cast that includes Bill Hader and Tilda Swinton. The film was co-written by Schumer and comedy juggernaut Judd Apatow, who also produced and directed.

This will probably be your last chance to catch Schumer at a local appearance. If Apatow’s previous films are any indication, she’s set to join the ranks of Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel and others whose careers skyrocketed after their starring turn in an Apatow summer blockbuster. Not to mention the fact that Schumer can tell a dick joke that would make the Diceman blush.