Open up and say, "AHHHH!" for ALIEN: ROMULUS. (Photo: Courtesy 20th Century Studios)
What’s up, Memphis? Here’s what’s on the big screen for your viewing pleasure this weekend.
Alien: Romulus
Cailee Spaeny (of Priscilla fame) stars as an astronaut who discovers a derelict space station. Then, she and her crewmates discover why it is derelict: It’s overrun by alien xenomorphs. Set in the time between Ridley Scott’s original Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens, director Fede Álvarez aims to bring the sci-fi horror franchise back to its roots, and give you a big hug right in the face.
Dìdi
It’s the summer of 2008, and Chris (Izaac Wang), the first-generation son of Chinese immigrants, is trying to make new friends before he starts high school. He starts hanging out with some skaters, but since he can’t skate, he films them in the hopes of making skate videos. But the awkward teen has a lot of learning to do about life and friendship. Director Sean Wang’s ode to growing up in the early internet age swept the Audience Award and Dramatic awards at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
The Phantom of the Opera
The 1925 silent film set the standard for horror films to come. Lon Chaney, in his signature role, stars as the Phantom, a hideously scarred man condemned to live beneath an opera house in Paris who falls in love with a singer (Mary Philbin). He uses his organ playing skills to bewitch her, but sets himself and the opera up for a painful reckoning. The Orpheum Theater presents Phantom on Friday, August 16th, with live score on the Mighty Wurlitzer by organist Tony Thomas.
Time Warp Drive-In
This month’s Time Warp Drive-In theme is Comic Book Sinister, taking you to the darker side of cinema based on comics and graphic novels. Naturally, the first film on Saturday night at the Malco Summer Drive-In is Sin City, Robert Rodriguez’s pitch-black adaptation of Frank Miller’s noir graphic novel, starring Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Bruce Willis, and the late Brittany Murphy. To answer your question about this scene, no Rourke didn’t cut himself shaving.
I give Zack Snyder a lot of grief these days, but credit where credit is due, his 2009 adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen is actually a great movie. That’s probably due to the lengths he goes to to make his film match Dave Gibbons’ artwork from the original comic. It’s definitely worth watching on the big screen. Notice the very effective use of Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi score in this original trailer.
The third and final Time Warp film is The Crow. Directed by Alex Proyas, the 1994 film is from the first post-Batman wave of superhero films that included stuff like Darkman. The film is notorious for the death of star Brandon Lee, who was killed on set in circumstances similar to what recently happened on Alec Baldwin’s Western Rust. This year, it will get a reboot. Here’s the trailer for the spooky original. The Time Warp Drive-In starts at dusk on Saturday, August 17th, at the Malco Summer Drive-In.
Toby Sells is Associate Editor for the Memphis Flyer, responsible for breaking news of great civic import and, more importantly, craft beer coverage. He had somehow managed to miss the 1988 action film classic Die Hard. True to his penetrating journalistic brain, he sought answers to the most important question: Is it a Christmas movie? Here’s how it went.
Chris McCoy: Toby Sells, tell me what you know about Die Hard.
Toby Sells: Not much. I know that Bruce Willis plays a guy named John McClane. This is from years of just hearing about this movie when I would bring it up and say I’ve never seen it. People would say, “I can’t believe you’ve never seen Die Hard!” And I’ve never seen a single one of ’em. John McClane wears the white wife beater shirt, and for some reason, he doesn’t have any shoes on. He’s trying to crawl around in a building to kill Snape. And people argue about whether or not this is a Christmas movie. I have no idea what that’s about.
132 minutes later …
Chris McCoy: Toby Sells, you are now a person who has seen Die Hard. What did you think?
Toby Sells: Well, I get 10 or 12 pop culture references that I did not get before.
CM: Like what?
TS: Well, the “Yippee ki yay yay, motherfucker!” is one I’d heard people say, I didn’t know where that was from. As I was watching it, I was trying to — ’cause I really admire the way that you write about film — I was trying to come up with some ways to go deeper into the movie somehow, but it was a lot of explosions and gunfire and glass everywhere, and a guy trying to save the day. And it was just a whole lot of fun.
CM: I think it’s tons of fun! They teach this movie in film writing classes, because it’s so efficient and well structured. By the time the credits are over, you know who John McClane is, you know what his problems are, and what his life is like. You know he’s coming from New York and he’s going to L.A., and you know that he doesn’t fit in in L.A., because he’s a New York guy. And he really doesn’t change through the rest of the movie.
TS: No, he does change in one key way! There’s the bathroom scene, where he’s cut his foot, and he doesn’t have a shirt on anymore. John McClane is thinking things are looking pretty grim, and he’s been talking to his buddy Al outside on the radio. He’s had this revelation about his relationship with his wife who is kind of not his wife, at this point. It takes a terrorist, threats on his life over dozens of times, and many, many rounds of gunfire to realize that maybe he should have told his wife that he loved her and supported her and gone with her to Los Angeles when she took the job and moved out. It took all of that for this man to become vulnerable and decide, “Hey, you know what? It’s time I supported my wife.”
CM: As you said, it should be called Die Hard, or How Hans Gruber Saved My Marriage.
CM: When this came out, Bruce Willis was on Moonlighting. He’d never done action before. Now, he’s Mr. Action Guy. But in Moonlighting, he solved mysteries with Cybill Shepherd, and cracked wise.
TS: I thought he went the other way around. I thought he did action, but he’s also funny.
CM: There’s some kind of rights issue with Moonlighting, so it’s not on streaming or anything. But it was such a good show. I was devoted to that show. But he was a comedy actor, and now, because of Die Hard, he’s Mr. Action all the time. He became a huge star and quit Moonlighting. Then he had a blues band where he played harmonica.
TS: Yeah, he started Planet Hollywood back in the day with Schwarzenegger and all those other guys.
CM: What did you think about him in the film?
TS: He was pitch perfect. That’s John McClane, that’s not just Bruce Willis. He’s the guy in the air duct. That’s who you think of when you think about Bruce Willis.
CM: “Come out to the coast, we’ll have a few laughs!”
TS: That’s him. The other thing is, I knew going into it that he didn’t have shoes on, for some reason. Figured it out!
CM: It’s literally set up in the credit sequence, when some guy tells him to take his shoes off and make fists with your toes — which I always do! Seriously, to this day, I do that. I had forgotten why I did that until today, because I haven’t seen this movie in years and years.
TS: It is a bit of a cowboy movie, and it’s also a big heist movie. It’s kinda like Oceans 11, when they’re trying to drill into the vault, and Hans Gruber’s got this whole thing planned very well. He knows they’re gonna have to come in and cut the power, and then that’s when the vault opens. It’s got the heist vibe, which is great.
CM: They talk about the cowboy motif throughout the movie.
TS: He said he was a big Roy Rogers fan and all that, and it’s like one guy saving the day against all odds. He’s cut his foot. He’s been shot at a dozen times. And somehow, you know, this gritty New York cop sees through all of it, and figures it all out enough to win the day, get the girl, ride off into the sunset, and crack jokes along the way.
CM: He’s also the cop who won’t follow the rules, which is so Reagan Eighties. All the guys who are FBI, and the police Lieutenant that takes over at the scene, are so ineffectual. The Lieutenant [Paul Gleason] is the same actor who was the coach in The Breakfast Club in charge of detention. This guy made a career in the ’80s of being ineffectual authority figures that were meant to be ridiculed.
TS: I thought the characters were perfectly all ’80s. They fit all the molds.
CM: Everybody was an archetype.
TS: But then I’m wondering if the archetypes didn’t come from this movie?
CM: I think the hero cop who won’t follow the rules thing goes back to Dirty Harry in the ’70s, which was a reaction against the counterculture. This is a deeply conservative movie. Like, we were talking about Al the, the cop, and you’re like “What’s Al’s problem?” Oh, I killed a 13-year-old kid is the problem. And then his redemption arc is, he gets to use violence again!
TS: He gets to shoot the big zombie German at the end.
CM: That’s Alexander Gudnov, who was a ballet dancer with the Bolshoi and had a second career in America playing vaguely foreign bad guys. You know, the bad guys, Hans Gruber and his people, they set you up to think that they’re leftist revolutionaries.
TS: And apparently, Hans Gruber was one, at one point. They disavowed him, but he used to be like an actual terrorist.
CM: It was like the Baader-Meinhof Group, West German communists, but they had a fake name.
TS: But now, he’s gone rogue, so he’s just a thief.
CM: Right, just a criminal. And when he calls out these other revolutionaries, it kind of dismisses them. They’re all just thieves at heart. That’s the subtext.
TS: He can’t fight for a cause anymore, so he’s like, okay, well, if they don’t think I’m good enough for that, then screw it. I’m just gonna go for the money. And I’m gonna steal from the guy who’s got a whole lot of money. That’s gonna be my redemption. Since I can’t have the glory of saying that I helped change the world, I’m gonna get mine. I’m gonna sit on a beach and earn 20 percent interest. There are no values, you know, it’s just greed at that point. He even says so at the beginning. He talks about the Nakatomi group and says that they’re just these greedy people with all this money.
CM: But he’s greedy, too. The movie says, everybody is greedy, no one has ideology — but that’s an ideology in itself. And by the way, the Nakatomi corp. is explicitly a fossil fuel company. They’re drilling for oil in Indonesia.
TS: They have got those models of the drilling rigs and stuff. As a bad guy, the only thing he’s fighting for now is just an easy life, where John McClane has got everything to fight for. His wife is in there, and they put his kids on television. It really is that story of having principles and overcoming somebody with no principles. All that stuff and all the violence does make this a deeply conservative movie. You look at the way people think about the world and how things are black and white, and it’s all right there.
CM: Here’s the bad guys: Hans Gruber’s group, who are sellout leftist terrorist or whatever, and are now like super thieves. And then there is the, the rules-following LAPD guys.
TS: There’s the FBI following the FBI playbook, which leads to disaster and everybody gets killed.
CM: And finally, the worst of all, the news media.
TS: That’s us! [laugh]. Yeah, I have thoughts on that. Of course it’s a movie and I’m not gonna hold anybody to standards or whatever. But this guy, he’s getting ready to leave, it’s Christmas Eve and he’s gonna go to some restaurant with his wife or something. Then here’s his thing on the radio. He decides he’s gonna go get glory for himself and get this crew together, go over to Nakatomi Plaza and check it out. So as it’s going along now, that can happen. Something on the scanner, head out.
CM: That happens all the time. Not to me personally, but it happens.
TS: Right. But as it’s going on — and remember, this is the evening of Christmas Eve — the station has somehow gotten the author of a book on terrorism to come in on a moment’s notice and go on the air. So then, they figured out it was Hans Gruber, and somehow his group had issued this statement, they communicate somehow that they disavowed him. And they had a file photo of Hans Gruber somehow there at the station and put it all together in no time.
CM: While we were watching, you were like, “How did they put out statements that quick before Twitter?” They called Der Spiegel and said, “Yo, that’s not our dude.”
TS: When the TV station shows up, when the press shows up, the cops have the reaction that you would think they would. “Oh great, here comes the press.” You know, that’s what we think the cops do every single time the press is involved in anything. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But the press crossed the line right?
CM: When they dug it up and found out where McClane’s kids live and they wanted to put them on air. Right.
TS: They put them in danger and all that kind of stuff. Then it became okay to punch the guy in the face at the end.
CM: I thought about that too, which is something I probably wouldn’t have thought about years ago. That actor [William Atherton] is the EPA guy from Ghostbusters. He’s another person who made a career in the ’80s out of being ineffectual authority figures. He goes to the house where we’ve established that John and Holly’s kids are, and threatens to have the housekeeper deported, because he just racistly assumes she’s an illegal alien, and then says, manipulatively, that this is the last time these kids are ever going to be able to talk to their parent. And I was like, who the hell does that? It’s never occurred to me to do anything like that. You’ve done a lot of beat reporting. Have you ever done anything like that?
TS: Absolutely not. I mean, that’s not good professional ethics.
CM: I guess people do it?
TS: You know, it’s meant to be over the top. It’s set up in a way that this guy who he was really just trying to beat channel five, as he says in the movie. But it set up this kind of emotional pivot in the movie where it then became really personal. But I’ve never, never dreamed of going to anybody’s house like that.
CM: Alan Rickman!
TS: Yeah!
CM: How amazing is he?
TS: At the beginning of this, I said, “He’s trying to get Snape.” Of course, because I’m a huge Harry Potter fan. I’ve completely rethought Alan Rickman after this performance. He was incredible, such a great bad guy.
CM: You know, he is kind of a bad guy in Harry Potter, too.
TS: Yeah, but you love him.
CM: He steals every screen that he’s in.
TS: There was that scene where he’s off looking for the detonators, and then John catches him, so he pretends to be one of the hostages. He puts on that kind of fake American accent, which was great. Still sounds like Alan Rickman with an American accent, but John kind of falls for it just enough.
CM: That scene is so great. At that point, Rickman is playing Hans Gruber, who is playing what he thinks will be a believable accent to an American. You can see the wheels turning as he fakes his way through it. That’s what makes that scene work. It’s not the accent, it’s that you can see him improvising. And that is just a stunning, stunning piece of acting. He was always, low-key, the best thing in any movie he’s in. And by the way, Bruce Willis plays that scene really well, too. That’s also really hard, ’cause he’s kind of the straight guy, and you don’t know who’s fooling who.
TS: So good. And then the fall there at the end, from the top of the tower, that was iconic too. I think I’d seen that before somewhere also.
CM: That’s been copied a lot.
TS: We talked about this being a Christmas movie.
CM: That was my next question. People argue about that.
TS: Right. I think absolutely it is a Christmas movie. They set it at Christmas time. They’re having a Christmas party. And I love the way the music just kind of peppers in little references to Christmas carols here and there. There’s kind of an ominous “Jingle Bells.”
CM: At one point, they used jingle bells in the same rhythm as the Psycho theme. Jing Jing Jing Jing …
[Laughter]
CM: You know, I think this is a perfect movie, because everything works together. Everybody’s good in it. The screenplay is well structured. We were talking about the motivations of minor characters a minute ago. Well, it’s a credit to the screenwriting that you think that these people have motivations and you can identify them. Nowadays, a lot of times, I don’t even know what the motivation of the protagonist is.
TS: They are just out there wielding weapons for some reason, and you hope they turn out okay. And that guy they’re shooting is probably bad.
CM: All the action scenes in this, I was just noticing how good they are. And that is really difficult to do, to make action scenes that work. You have a sense of what the space is like. How does this guy relate to that guy? How far away are they? For example, when they shoot the glass.
TS: You know he’s barefoot.
CM: Exactly. You know he’s been barefoot from the beginning. They show you the glass, and then show you Hans Gruber having the idea to shoot the glass.
TS: Yeah. So you’ve already had the idea and it’s like, “Oh look at this guy. He knows what’s up.”
CM: Obviously, this movie inspired so many action movies. But today, it seems like nobody can do this kind of craftsmanship.
CM: So, bottom line.
TS: Bottom line is, I’m glad I’ve seen Die Hard.
CM: Would you recommend it to others?
TS: I would recommend it to others, just for a great action movie. Unplug your brain, go check it out.
“How much of human life is lost in waiting?” is a line by Emerson quoted in one of the worst movies of all time, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I could not help but think of it while watching M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass, the capper to a trilogy that took 20 years to make. It started with 2000’s Unbreakable, a drama whose ending twist explained that it was really the prologue to the adventures of a superhero, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), and a mad genius, Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson). 2017’s Split was about James McAvoy’s dissociative identity disorder-suffering villain, The Beast, with an ending twist that this took place in the same universe as the previous film, with the director resurrecting earlier characters. Glass is here to let these superbeings finally be unbound, which it tries to accomplish by stranding them in an insane asylum and locking them in cells for most of the film.
Shyamalan was hailed as a wunderkind after The Sixth Sense. He quickly fell into self-parody: His twists strayed to left field, his quirky dialogue turned odd. I prefer his films when they got weird. The Village has so much craft and prestige wrapping its silly, trashy plot. The Happening had none, and I love it the most: the cast speaking entirely in non sequiturs about a world taken over by angry plants, who in the end are defeated by love. Pure, glorious schlock.
Like Spielberg, Shyamalan is good at dramatizing neurotic childhood fears of loneliness and abandonment, but when the emotion becomes positive, it gets manipulative. Orchestral music tells you to feel happy, but you might feel alienated instead. Shyamalan is great at showy long takes. He loves to hold on a medium or close-up reaction shot well past the point most movies cut. It’s both economical and unnerving.
I watched all of his unclassifiable trilogy in one day, like a child forced to smoke a pack of cigarettes in order to hate them. Unbreakable is a dour retread of The Sixth Sense, enlivened by Jackson in a purple jacket and shock hair dramatizing the nightmare of brittle bone disease. Split is buoyed by McAvoy.
Unfortunately, Glass is horrible, but it’s as odd and idiosyncratic as his other films. Psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) captures Dunn and The Beast and moves them into an asylum with Glass. She tries to convince them that their superheroic abilities are just delusions. When Dunn believes her, he does so because the story needs to sideline him, and the seams of threadbare writing start to show. Most of the budget may have gone to the salaries of the three headliners, and their schedules might not have connected, as they rarely share the same screen.
For half the runtime, Jackson is in a comatose state, staring emptily from a wheelchair, and when he wakes he says meta lines that might have been fresh 20 years ago, when Unbreakable opened with text explaining what comic books are.
Memphis filmmaker Chad Allen Barton has pointed out that Shyamalan is a religious storyteller. He often shows characters needing to believe in themselves, their family, and the afterlife. This is usually expressed in a spiritual way and affirmed with an inspirational twist. This faith serves an additional role of keeping expensive special effects to a minimum.
In what other superhero movie would the final fight between good and evil (in a parking lot) cut away at first punch to the viewpoint of nameless extras looking at a van? Or be preceded by Jackson pointing at a skyscraper where the fight would have occurred had the film had more money? Shyamalan is interested in not just twists, but delayed gratification.
In the theater on opening weekend, you could feel the excitement slowly go out of the audience. The final twist here is a conscious wrongheaded choice that is bugfuck in its disconnection from viewers’ enthusiasm, yet lovely for its wrongness. Marvel is sleek and sometimes great, but when it doesn’t fire on all cylinders, it smothers you like a committee-made sitcom. Glass is terrible but at least feels personal.
The finale doesn’t work as storytelling, but it might make sense as an accidental middle finger to the idea that superheroes are inherently inspirational, when the reason for their omnipresence is monetary, as with westerns and Roman movies before them. Remove the money, and you lose the faith.
The modern era of digital cinema that began 21 years ago with Steven Spielberg’s photorealistic dinosaurs in Jurassic Park came of age in 1999 with Star Wars:The Phantom Menace. At the time, George Lucas said he believed digital cinema would allow filmmakers to work in a more “painterly” fashion. No longer constrained by what they could make happen in front of a camera in a real space, directors could let their images run wild. Many subsequent big budget science fiction and fantasy films, such as Alphonso Cuarón’s Gravity, have had more in common with animation than with traditional narrative cinema. But animators have from the beginning been willing to push their form to its limits, while films that starred humans have almost always focused on looking believable, especially if the stories they told were fantastic.
Among the very few who are willing to test the visual extremes that digital cinema could achieve is Robert Rodriguez. The man who once sold his body to medical experiments to finance El Mariachi now commands a legion of digital artists, and he has no compunctions about deploying them aggressively. In Sin City, his 2005 collaboration with comics old master Frank Miller, he made one of the few comic book movies that actually looked like a comic book. He put Miller’s visually striking, hard-boiled world in motion, and catapulted Jessica Alba to the A-list in the process. Sin City had no interest in photorealism, and its striking black-and-white compositions are like nothing else before or since. The sequel, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, often equals the original’s visual bravado, but ultimately falls short of its potential.
Reprising their roles from the original are Alba as Nancy, the stripper with a heart of gold; Mickey Rourke as Marv, the musclebound psycho with a heart of gold; Rosario Dawson as Gail, the warrior prostitute with a heart of gold, and Powers Boothe as Senator Roark, Sin City’s crime patriarch with a heart of lead. Newcomers this time include Eva Green as Ava, the titular dame to kill for; Jeremy Piven as a wisecracking detective; and Joseph Gordon Levitt as Johnny the supernaturally lucky gambler. A series of cameos include Bruce Willis as the ghost of Hartigan, the last good cop in Sin City who was killed off in the last installment; and Christopher Lloyd as an underworld doctor.
Like the original, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is episodic. But the 2005 installment’s brutal short stories added up to a satisfying whole, while the sequel is an incoherent mess. Comics are the ultimate auteur’s medium, and having total control over every aspect of a world seems to drive creators insane in a special way. They retreat into the fantasy worlds they create and lose sight of what it means to be an ordinary human. That’s why the deep empathy of comics artists such as Scott Pilgrim’s Brian Lee O’Malley are so treasured. Even in today’s comics-obsessed cinema, Edgar Wright’s 2010 O’Malley adaptation, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, is one of the few films outside of the Sin City franchise to go outside the realm of the real, pointing a way forward for comic book moves.
But A Dame To Kill For‘s Miller-penned script points only backwards. The exaggerated noir tropes that were fun in 2005 are just grindingly grim now. All of the men are hard-drinking, scrappy fighters motivated by revenge. All of the women are burlesque dancers, whores, or femme fatales, which is to say, in Miller’s mind, all the same. Everyone swigs vodka straight from the bottle and rockets around in awesome vintage carts before getting thrown from windows by invincible foes until it becomes hard to care about who’s doing what to whom. Miller’s comic works, which include Batman: The Dark Night Returns and The 300, have been hugely influential on both comics and film, but A Dame To Kill For cements Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises as the last good grimdark comic movie, and no amount of hoochie dancing or beheadings can save it from a descent into tedium.
