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The Lost City

Last weekend, I was at the Time Warp Drive-In for the screening of the classic Indiana Jones trilogy. Yes, there was lots of stuff to do around town on Saturday night, and I’ve seen Raiders of the Lost Ark hundreds of times, but I just couldn’t resist the rare opportunity to watch a masterpiece of adventure cinema at the drive-in. As Harrison Ford and Alfred Molina skulked through the booby-trapped Peruvian temple, I glanced over to Malco Summer Drive-In’s screen three, where I saw Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum in an overgrown jungle temple, surrounded by snakes, lorded over by a guy in a fedora who looked a lot like Indy’s arch enemy Belloq. The movie was The Lost City, and its existence in 2022 speaks to the enduring influence of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s collaboration in the early 1980s.

The dashing archeologist/adventurer Indiana Jones has deep roots in the pulp literature of the early 20th century, where characters like Doc Savage and Allan Quatermain were both scholars and two-fisted men of action who traveled to exotic locales to find treasure and thwart the plans of other well-educated, but evil, Westerners. Lucas encountered these hyper-competent heroes in films like 1937’s King Solomon’s Mines and the adventure serials which ruled the Saturday matinee. You can still see those kinds of heroes get out of unlikely scrapes, most recently in Uncharted.

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum search for the Crown of Fire in The Lost City.

Almost as soon as Spielberg set the new template for the colonial adventure tale, people started parodying it.

The earliest light ribbing of Indiana Jones was Romancing the Stone, Robert Zemeckis’ 1984 romantic comedy starring Kathleen Turner as Joan Wilder, a romance novelist thrust into an adventure right out of one of her books, and Michael Douglas as a rakish big-game hunter who comes to her rescue. In The Lost City, Sandra Bullock’s Loretta Sage is the direct descendant of Joan Wilder. She’s the author of a highly profitable series of books about extremely sexy hero Dash and his on-again, off-again archeologist love interest Angela Lovemore. Loretta can’t come up with a good end for her latest romantic escapade, in which the couple searches for the legendary Lost City of D, and her publishing company publicist Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) is increasingly agitated about it. When she finally gives up and tacks on a stupid ending, she finds herself thrust into a book tour opposite Alan (Channing Tatum), the hunky model who lends his image to Dash for her book covers.

As with all good rom-coms, we know they’re destined to get together long before they do. Just as the book tour is falling to pieces, Loretta is kidnapped by Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), the embittered scion of a Murdoch-esque publishing fortune who spends his ample free time and disposable income treasure hunting. The mysterious artifact Loretta used as the MacGuffin for her latest novel, the Crown of Fire, is real, and it turns out that, in researching her book, she came closer to discovering its final resting place than anyone in history. Fairfax whisks her away to the island where the crown is allegedly located to help finish his search. Meanwhile, a frantic Beth convinces Alan to contact his old friend Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt), a former Navy Seal who promises to return with Loretta in 48 hours “or your next rescue is free.”

Directed by brothers Aaron and Adam Nee, The Lost City is not breaking any new ground, but it’s a pretty tight little film which does exactly what it sets out to do. It succeeds based mostly on the chemistry between Bullock and Tatum, never missing an opportunity to wedge them into a cramped sleeping bag or confront Bullock with Tatum’s bare bum. It’s a given that the intellectual Loretta will eventually fall for the big-hearted, thick-headed himbo. The supporting cast is all in on the joke. Pitt once again proves he’s a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body. Radcliffe steals scenes as the civilized villain whose luxury MRAP has a mini-bar. Randolph carries her own comic B-plot almost single-handedly. The self-referential script, like its protagonist, is often too smart for its own good. Ultimately, it’s very refreshing to see a lighthearted romantic adventure where the stakes are human-sized. Sure, it’s derivative, but as Radcliffe’s villain says when he knocks Bullock out with chloroform, “It’s a cliché for a reason.”

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Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen

The Big Lebowski

It’s hard to overstate the impact Joel and Ethan Coen have had on American film. Beginning with 1984’s Blood Simple, the two brothers from Minneapolis were a major influence on the indie revolution of the 1990s. 1987’s Raising Arizona made a star out of Nicolas Cage and proved that smart, surrealist comedy could attract an audience. Today, the TV series inspired by their Cannes- and Academy Award-winning 1996 film Fargo, keeps their legacy alive by being one of the consistently best things on the little screen.
With new film releases scarce because of the pandemic, Malco Theatres is celebrating the Coen brothers with a mini-film festival, which runs from November 20-26. The six titles represent a cross-section of the Coens’ work, from legendary comedy to existential drama. And the price is right, at $2 per ticket.

The twin crown jewels of the Coens’ filmography came out back to back in 1996 and 1998. Fargo is a crime thriller like no other. Frances McDormand, who happens to be Joel’s wife, won her first Oscar for her portrayal of Marge Gundersen, police chief of Brainard, Minnesota, who uncovers a plot by used car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) to fake the kidnapping of his wife Jean (Kristin Rudrud) that goes terribly wrong. Here’s McDormand delivering one of the greatest soliloquies in all of film history as she takes kidnapper Gaear (Peter Stormare) to face justice.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen

Two years later, the Coens took a wild left turn and made one of the most beloved comedies of all time. The Big Lebowski forever associated Jeff Bridges with The Dude, an unreconstructed hippie turned amateur detective. Intended as a parody of Southern California noir classics like The Big Sleep, The Big Lebowski’s greatest strength is as a series of indelible character sketches. Just check out this legendary bowling alley scene with Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, and John Turturro.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen (2)

2003’s Intolerable Cruelty is a rarity. It did not start out as a Coen script, but the brothers took over the production and rewrote it. It’s not one of their classics, but if anyone else had made it, it would have been the highlight of their career. It features remarkable comedic performances from George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Cedric the Entertainer, and Billy Bob Thornton.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen (3)

2007’s No Country for Old Men was the Coens’ adaptation of a late-period Cormac McCarthy novel which won Best Picture, Best Director(s), and Best Screenplay Oscars, as well as Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Javier Bardem as the killer Anton Chigurh.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen (4)

2008’s Burn After Reading saw the Coens returning to Big Lebowski-style comedy, this time set in Washington DC. It features a powerhouse cast, including McDormand, John Malkovich, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, and Brad Pitt. Here’s McDormand and Pitt trying to blackmail soon-to-be-former CIA agent Malkovich.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen (5)

The next year, the Coens returned to their Midwestern Jewish roots with A Serious Man, which they describe as a Yiddish folk tale that never was.

Coen Brothers Film Festival Brings Fargo, The Big Lebowski Back To Big Screen (6)

You can review Malco’s COVID policies here and buy tickets for the Coen Brothers Film Festival here, on their website.

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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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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.

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Ad Astra

Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness didn’t make much of a splash when it was published in 1899. But the writer’s reputation grew steadily in the first two decades of the 20th century, and by the time T. S. Eliot published his epoch-defining poem “The Hollow Men” in 1925, he began with a quote from Conrad. “Mistah Kurtz — he dead.” None other than Orson Welles wanted to produce Heart of Darkness for his first movie, but he had to settle for writing Citizen Kane instead. The story was most famously adapted in 1979 by Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now by moving the setting from Africa to Vietnam and replacing Conrad’s Charles Marlow, a naive young man who witnesses the horrors of colonial rule, with Captain Willard, a hardened assassin ordered to kill one of his own whose “methods have become … unsound.”

Director James Gray has become the latest to put Conrad’s framework to good use. The definitive adaptation of Heart of Darkness‘ subtle critique of the barbarity of colonialism will have to wait a little longer because Gray and writer Ethan Gross have moved the action to space. Ad Astra‘s hero is Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), an astronaut in the “near future” who flies for a fictional Space Command. When we meet the Major, he’s working at a prosaic post halfway up a space elevator, hundreds of kilometers above the atmosphere. But things go from boring to life threatening in a hurry — such is the astronaut life — when a mysterious energy surge from deep space hits the towering antenna and things get all explode-y. Roy, dressed, as he will be for most of the film, in a spacesuit, scrambles to contain the damage, then hurls himself off the space elevator and falls to earth, dodging flaming debris and hoping his emergency parachute won’t be too full of holes when it’s time to land.

Brad Pitt as Major Roy McBride in Ad Astra.

The opening sequence sets a high bar for the picture. The production design, led by Kevin Thompson, masterfully combines familiar elements with speculative design to create an air of realism. Space, in Major McBride’s world, is not fun. It’s trying to kill you a dozen ways all at once, and the most dangerous elements are the ones you never expect.

Roy, it turns out, is a second-generation astronaut. He followed in the footsteps of his father, Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), who was the first man to lead a crew to Jupiter. The elder McBride disappeared 16 years earlier, along with the crew of the LIMA project — a mission to search the outer solar system and beyond for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Clifford took along what turned out to be an unwisely large amount of antimatter, which Space Command believes is the source of the mysterious energy surges emanating from the vicinity of Neptune that have continued to wreak havoc in the populated inner solar system. Furthermore, they have a classified reason to believe that Clifford is still alive and lurking, Kurtz-like, in Neptunian space. Instead of going up the Congo or Mekong rivers, Major Roy sets out to cross the solar system in an attempt to keep his thought-lost father from destroying human civilization.

At times, Ad Astra displays its Conrad fetish awkwardly. Brad Pitt’s flat-affect voice-over puts it squarely in Coppola territory and goes a long way toward establishing the depths of the Major’s malaise. The film’s surface commitment to realism is frequently at odds with its urge to be a rootin’ tootin’ space adventure, such as in a spectacular scene where our hero attempts a hazardous crossing of the rings of Neptune. In times past, the muddled science would have driven me nuts, but I have mellowed. I must give Gray props for being the first filmmaker to attempt to depict the eighth planet since the Mystery Science Theater 3000 anti-classic Invasion of the Neptune Men. (And yes, Neptune does have rings.)

In Ad Astra, Brad Pitt’s (above) eyes are as cold as the rings of Neptune (and, yes, it does have rings).

What holds it all together is a fantastic performance by Pitt. You can hear the echoes of both Martin Sheen’s “Saigon … shit …” and Ryan Gosling’s emotionally crippled portrayal of Neil Armstrong, but when the film threatens to spin off into excessively goofy space, Pitt’s there to reel it back in with his soulful blue eyes and clenched jaw. Major McBride is an unforgettable character for whom the Right Stuff has become a burden too heavy to bear, but too important to put down.

Ad Astra

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The Big Short

In 1947, Humphrey Bogart was the biggest movie star in the world. With a fresh contract giving him greater creative control in hand, Bogie and his drinking buddy, director John Houston, set out to make a new western called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in which he would play the hero. But when the film was released the next year, audiences were in for a shock. As expected, Bogart was the center of the movie. He had the most lines, the most close-ups, and was featured prominently in the advertising, but his character, Fred C. Dobbs, was not the hero of the story. Played by Bogie as selfish, paranoid, vain, and crude, Dobbs was actually the villain. Houston and Bogart were subverting the audiences’ expectations to make a point about unchecked greed.

Toward the end of The Big Short, Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) shows the camera a bonus check for $47,000,000 he earned for his part in destroying the world economy in 2008. Speaking into the camera, he says, “I never claimed to be the good guy.”

Brad Pitt

Michael Lewis’ 2010 book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is a detailed explanation of the events leading up to the 2008 collapse of Wall Street trading firm Bear Stearns, which precipitated the financial crisis and resulting Great Recession, the effects of which are still being felt today. Strangely enough, the film adaptation of the best seller fell to former Saturday Night Live writer and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy creator Adam McKay. When Stanley Kubrick was researching nuclear war scenarios in the early 1960s, he decided that the only honest way to make a film about Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was to make it a comedy, and so Dr. Strangelove was born. Faced with the corrupt ridiculousness of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), McKay made the same choice, and created the best movie of his career.

Steve Carell

The ensemble cast McKay assembled is top-notch: In addition to Gosling, Christian Bale plays one-eyed M.D.-turned-capital manager Michael Burry; Steve Carell plays rageaholic investment banker Mark Baum, and Brad Pitt (who also produces) plays former-banker-turned-full-time-paranoid Ben Rickert. There’s a ton of complex exposition to get through, so McKay throws Margo Robbie in a bubble bath and has her explain the basics of the mortgage market. The screenplay is downright brilliant, pulling tricks like pointing out when events have been simplified to gain the audience’s trust.

Like Dr. Strangelove, the laughs The Big Short elicits are coal black, but unlike Wall Street, it tips its hand enough to avoid making its sociopathic greedheads into heroes. No one will look at Bale’s scarily committed portrayal of a speed-metal-obsessed, autistic number cruncher and say, “I want to be that guy.” Instead, McKay’s masterful sendup of late-stage capitalism will leave you saying, “Never again!”

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Fury

They don’t make ’em like Fury any more. Writer/director David Ayer has crafted an old-fashioned war film in the tradition of The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, and The Longest Day. But instead of John Wayne leading the 101st Airborne into bloodless battle, Ayer has Brad Pitt as Don “Wardaddy” Collier leading the hardened crew of the Sherman tank Fury through mud, vomit, and viscera.

Brad Pitt in Fury

The film opens in April 1945. The war is almost over, and even though Wardaddy has fought through North Africa to Normandy to Belgium and finally into Germany, he has only now lost his first crewman. Greenhorn Norman Ellison’s (Logan Lerman) first job is to clean his predecessor’s guts off of his seat, which tells you everything you need to know about the film’s tone. Norman is not initially popular with his new crew, earning the particular ire of Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis (Jon Bernthal), a tanker who has embraced the war’s horrors. Trini “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Peña) is the hard drinking Mexican driver, and Boyd “Bible” Swan (an unrecognizable Shia LaBeouf) is the tank’s fundamentalist first officer. There’s a war on, so their get to know you time is short, and they are thrust back into battle immediately.

Norman, who acts as the audience’s eyes and ears throughout the film, grows up in a hurry through a series of increasingly brutal battle scenes. There’s no quick cutting, handheld camera designed to disorient. Ayer builds and releases tension the hard way, with careful sequences that efficiently lay out who is doing what to whom.

Someone smarter than me said that Brad Pitt is a character actor trapped in the body of a leading man, but Fury may be a breakthrough for him — if one of the world’s most successful actors can be said to have a breakthrough. Wardaddy is clearly based on his character from Inglourious Basterds, but he’s not playing a Quentin Tarantino cartoon. As he calmly leads his tank through the carnage, he looks more comfortable in his skin than he ever has.

The ostensible theme of Fury is that war makes monsters of men, but it’s a prime example of Françios Truffaut’s observation that it is impossible to make an anti-war film, because movies make fighting seem like so much fun. You won’t see many shots as beautifully composed as Wardaddy, silhouetted by flames, fighting off legions of SS. But the film bogs down in an interminable second act set in a captured German village where the boys have to actually interact with (gasp) women. It’s fascinating to see how the archetype of the American soldier has evolved in the post-Full Metal Jacket era. Would you ever see John Wayne shoot a prisoner in cold blood? Would American soldiers gang rape a German woman in The Longest Day? But this is the 21st century, and maybe directors aren’t interested in, or audiences won’t buy, us as the unvarnished good guy, even when we’re fighting the Nazis. Maybe that’s why they don’t make ’em like they used to.

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The Conversion

In January 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape won the Audience Award for best feature at the Sundance Film Festival, kicking off the modern Indie film movement.

To audiences, “Indie” usually means quirky, low-budget, character-driven fare that is more like the auteurist films of the 1970s than contemporary Hollywood’s designed-by-committee product. But “Indie” originally referred to films financed outside the major studios by outfits like New Line Cinema, which produced Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). By 1990, The Coen Brothers had crossed over into the mainstream with Miller’s Crossing, a film that brought together the meticulous plotting, brainy dialog, and stunning visual compositions that would garner them acclaim for the next 25 years.

As the 1990s dawned, a whole crop of directors stood up with a mission to make good movies on their own terms — and that meant raising money by any means necessary. Robert Rodriguez financed his $7,000 debut feature El Mariachi by selling his body for medical testing. It went on to win the 1993 Audience Award at Sundance, and his book Rebel Without A Crew inspired a generation of filmmakers.

Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker threw out the screenwriting rulebook that had dominated American film since George Lucas name-checked Joseph Campbell, focusing instead on dozens of strange characters floating around Austin. The structure has echoed through Indie film ever since, not only in Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (1993) but also the “hyperlink” movies of the early 2000s such as Soderbergh’s Traffic and even more conventionally scripted films such as Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut, Clerks.

Quentin Tarantino is arguably the most influential director of the last 25 years. His breakthrough hit, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, was the first film completely financed by producer Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. But even then, the definitions of what was an “Indie” movie were fluid, as the formerly independent Miramax had become a subsidiary of Disney.

Indie fervor was spreading as local film scenes sprang up around the country. In Memphis, Mike McCarthy’s pioneering run of drive-in exploitation-inspired weirdness started in 1994 with Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis, followed the next year by the semi-autobiographical Teenage Tupelo. With 1997’s The Sore Losers, McCarthy integrated Memphis’ burgeoning underground music scene with his even-more-underground film aesthetic.

In 1995, the European Dogme 95 Collective, led by Lars von Trier, issued its “Vows of Chastity” and defined a new naturalist cinema: no props, no post-production sound, and no lighting. Scripts were minimal, demanding improvisation by the actors. Dogme #1 was Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998.

Meanwhile, in America, weirdness was reaching its peak with Soderbergh’s surrealist romp Schizopolis. Today, the film enjoys a cult audience, but in 1997, it almost ended Soderbergh’s career and led to a turning point in Indie film. The same year, Tarantino directed Jackie Brown and then withdrew from filmmaking for six years. Soderbergh’s next feature veered away from experiment: 1998’s Out Of Sight was, like Jackie Brown, a tightly plotted adaptation of an Elmore Leonard crime novel. Before Tarantino returned to the director’s chair, Soderbergh would hit with Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and make George Clooney and Brad Pitt the biggest stars in the world with a very un-Indie remake of the Rat Pack vehicle Ocean’s 11.

Technology rescued Indie film. In the late ’90s, personal computers were on their way to being ubiquitous, and digital video cameras had improved in picture quality as they simplified operation. The 1999 experimental horror The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, showed what was possible with digital, simultaneously inventing the found footage genre and becoming the most profitable Indie movie in history, grossing $248 million worldwide on a shooting budget of $25,000.

The festival circuit continued to grow. The Indie Memphis Film Festival was founded in 1998, showcasing works such as the gonzo comedies of Memphis cable access TV legend John Pickle. In 2000, it found its biggest hit: Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, a gritty, digital story of the Memphis streets, won awards both here and at the Hollywood Film Festival.

In 2005, Memphis directors dominated the Sundance Film Festival, with Ira Sach’s impressionistic character piece Forty Shades Of Blue winning the Grand Jury Prize, and Brewer’s Hustle & Flow winning the Audience Award, which would ultimately lead to the unforgettable spectacle of Three Six Mafia beating out Dolly Parton for the Best Original Song Oscar.

Brewer rode the crest of a digital wave that breathed new life into Indie film. In Memphis, Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson co-founded the MeDiA Co-Op, gathering dozens of actors and would-be filmmakers together under the newly democratized Indie film banner. Originally a devotee of Dogme 95, Fox quickly grew beyond its limitations, and by the time of 2008’s OMG/HaHaHa, his stories of down-and-out kids in Memphis owed more to Italian neorealism like Rome, Open City than to von Trier.

Elsewhere, the digital revolution was producing American auteurs like Andrew Bujalski, whose 2002 Funny Ha Ha would be retroactively dubbed the first “mumblecore” movie. The awkward label was coined to describe the wave of realist, DIY digital films such as Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth that hit SXSW in 2005. Memphis MeDiA Co-Op alum Kentucker Audley produced three features, beginning with 2007’s mumblecore Team Picture.

Not everyone was on board the digital train. Two of the best Indie films of the 21st century were shot on film: Shane Carruth’s $7,000 Sundance winner Primer (2004) and Rian Johnson’s high school noir Brick (2005). But as digital video evolved into HD, Indie films shot on actual film have become increasingly rare.

DVDs — the way most Indies made money — started to give way to digital distribution via the Internet. Web series, such as Memphis indie collective Corduroy Wednesday’s sci fi comedy The Conversion, began to spring up on YouTube.

With actress and director Greta Gerwig’s star-making turn in 2013’s Francis Ha, it seemed that the only aspect of the American DIY movement that would survive the transition from mumblecore to mainstream was a naturalistic acting style. Founding father Soderbergh announced his retirement in 2013 with a blistering condemnation of the Hollywood machine. Lena Dunham’s 2010 festival hit Tiny Furniture caught the eye of producer Judd Apatow, and the pair hatched HBO’s Girls, which wears its indie roots on its sleeve and has become a national phenomenon.

The Indie spirit is alive and well, even if it may bypass theaters in the future.

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Film Features Film/TV

Killing Them Softly

New Zealand-born writer-director Andrew Dominik’s epic second film, 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is one of the best and most ambitious American films of the new century. Dominik’s new follow-up, Killing Them Softly, though an hour shorter and not historical in nature, is, in its own way, no less ambitious and no less suffused with Americana.

Based on Cogan’s Trade, a crime novel by George V. Higgins, Killing Them Softly is, on one level, a tightly wound, grimy little Boston crime story. Mid-level underworld operator Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola) hatches a plan to knock over a mob-protected card game and frame the game’s operator, Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who is already viewed with suspicion. He hires a couple of young hoods: needy, nervous Frankie (Scooter McNairy), whom he trusts, and Frankie’s ex-con pal, sweaty Aussie junkie Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), whom he doesn’t. The job comes off, and unseen mob bosses have their lawyer (Richard Jenkins) bring in Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt, Dominik’s Jesse James), a fixer/enforcer/hit man to clean things up and get the games back and running.

Dominik works through the beats of this story with immense, at times overwhelming style: a staccato opening that introduces Frankie shuffling through a blasted urban landscape. A tense, patient heist sequence. A rain-splattered drive-by murder shot in nearly abstract super slow-motion. A heroin fix depicted as a point-of-view scene. A big introduction for Pitt, brought on to the tune of Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around.” And Dominik has at his disposal a tremendously cast rogue’s gallery of heavies and creeps that also includes James Gandolfini as a nihilistic lush of a would-be hitman and Gone Baby Gone‘s Slaine and veteran Sam Shepard as another tandem of enforcers.

But Dominik isn’t content to tell a simple underworld story. He changes the time period of Higgins’ 1974 novel to the fall of 2008 and plays it against the backdrop of the financial collapse and presidential election, which rings out via billboards, car-radio broadcasts, and bar television sets. And Dominik draws parallels throughout. The card game hit leads to an “economic collapse” in this little corner of the criminal underworld. Then-president Bush’s public address assertion to “step in with dramatic action” rhymes with the deployment of Pitt’s Cogan. Jenkins’ mob lawyer laments the shaky “decision makers” who employ him. Murder comes cheap with “recession prices.”

It becomes clear that Dominik is going for more than a genre movie but instead a nasty, cynical black comedy on American decline. It’s awkwardly done at times, but Dominik — and, particularly, Pitt — bring text and subtext together at the end with a satisfying final snap.

Killing Them Softly

Opening Friday, November 30th

Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Man Who Shot Brad Pitt

When Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) first appears onscreen in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, he looks the part of the cold-blooded killer. With his stovepipe hat, silent-film villain’s whey-faced complexion, and seamlessly mortared, predatory row of top teeth, Ford evokes the angel of death so strongly that you half-expect the film to end before anyone has finished a plate of beans or saddled a horse. But soon it’s apparent that Ford would have trouble killing a fly; he’s actually the meek, overenthusiastic specter of celebrity worship — just a drooling, dream-addled fan of the outlaw Jesse James (Brad Pitt) who has come not to bury the gunslinger but to join him in one last midnight ride.

Eventually, Ford joins the James gang, and after following James around much of Missouri, he ultimately fulfills the duty implicit in the film’s title. To his credit, though, writer/director Andrew Dominik takes his slow, sweet time getting there, and that’s one of his film’s many triumphs. The Assassination of Jesse James is both a meditative, haunting Western and a smashing example of inspired genre work.

Dominik’s wordy screenplay, which achieves a kind of mock-Cormac McCarthy eloquence, enhances the humdrum story’s pulpy, mythical qualities. Dick Liddle (a superb Paul Schneider), one of James’ hoodlums, avers that “You can hide things in vocabulary,” and unusual words such as “vouchsafe,” “palaver,” “auguries,” and “personage” tumble from Hugh Ross’ narration. This imaginative diction spills over into the characters too. When Liddle is shot in the leg, he describes his wound to Ford as “full of torment, Bob. Thanks for askin’.”

This ornate vocabulary does indeed hide the basic emotion that unifies all these characters: fear. Worn to the stumps by bad weather and paranoia, these men feel exposed everywhere. As Pitt plays him, Jesse James is little different from his bumbling cohorts. He’s scared and hunted. However, he’s a much more experienced and merciless killer and that is a significant asset.

Jesse James‘ photography is also a significant asset for the film. Camera man Roger Deakins, who shot several of the Coen Brothers’ films, achieves some magnificent pictorial effects by shooting many scenes with the most meager light sources — lanterns, candles, sunlight, stars, reflected snow. In one ironic lighting decision, a single outhouse candle dwindles to blackness as Liddle prepares to dip his wick in a willing adulteress (Kailin See).

The last 20 minutes of the film explore the much larger irony of Ford’s own fate after he shoots James in the back (an act played out in the film like a staged ritual even when it happens the first time.) As the years go by, Jesse James, bandit and murderer, is fondly recalled as an American hero, while Ford grows more reclusive and insecure as his hate mail piles up. Ford’s cruel destiny is thus to live out a genre axiom. The success of the film is the failure of Ford’s own life: the how is much more important than the what.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Opening Friday, October 26th

Multiple locations