Tag: David Byrne

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Film Features Film/TV

2020 on Screen: The Best and Worst of Film and TV

There’s no denying that 2020 was an unprecedented year, so I’m doing something unprecedented: combining film and TV into one year-end list.

Steve Carrell sucking up oxygen in Space Force.

Worst TV: Space Force

Satirizing Donald Trump’s useless new branch of the military probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But Space Force is an aggressively unfunny boondoggle that normalizes the neo-fascism that almost swallowed America in 2020.

John David Washington (center) and Robert Pattinson (right) are impeccably dressed secret time agents in Tenet.

Worst Picture: Tenet

Christopher Nolan’s latest gizmo flick was supposed to save theaters from the pandemic. Instead, it was an incoherent, boring, self-important mess. You’d think $200 million would buy a sound mix with discernible dialogue. I get angry every time I think about this movie.

We Can’t Wait

Best Memphis Film: We Can’t Wait

Lauren Ready’s Indie Memphis winner is a fly-on-the-wall view of Tami Sawyer’s 2019 mayoral campaign. Unflinching and honest, it’s an instant Bluff City classic.

Grogu, aka The Child, aka Baby Yoda

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Grogu, The Mandalorian

In this hotly contested category, Baby Yoda barely squeaks out a win over Buck from Call of the Wild. Season 2 of the Star Wars series transforms The Child by calling his presumed innocence into question, transforming the story into a battle for his soul.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton

Most Inspiring: Hamilton

The year’s emotional turning point was the Independence Day Disney+ debut of the Broadway mega-hit. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop retelling of America’s founding drama called forth the better angels of our nature.

Film About a Father Who

Best Documentary: Film About a Father Who

More than 35 years in the making, Lynne Sachs’ portrait of her mercurial father, legendary Memphis bon vivant Ira Sachs Sr., is as raw and confessional as its subject is inscrutable. Rarely has a filmmaker opened such a deep vein and let the truth bleed out.

Cristin Milioti in Palm Springs

Best Comedy: Palm Springs

Andy Samberg is stuck in a time loop he doesn’t want to break until he accidentally pulls Cristin Milioti in with him. It’s the best twist yet on the classic Groundhog Day formula, in no small part because of Milioti’s breakthrough performance. It perfectly captured the languid sameness of the COVID summer.

Soul

Best Animation: Soul

Pixar’s Pete Docter, co-directing with One Night in Miami writer Kemp Powers, creates another little slice of perfection. Shot through with a love of jazz, this lusciously animated take on A Matter of Life and Death stars Jamie Foxx as a middle school music teacher who gets his long-awaited big break, only to die on his way to the gig. Tina Fey is the disembodied soul who helps him appreciate that no life devoted to art is wasted.

Jessie Buckley

Best Performance: Jessie Buckley, I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Buckley is the acting discovery of the year. She’s perfect in Fargo as Nurse Mayflower, who hides her homicidal mania under a layer of Midwestern nice. But her performance in Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending psychological horror is a next-level achievement. She conveys Lucy’s (or maybe it’s Louisa, or possibly Lucia) fluid identity with subtle changes of postures and flashes of her crooked smile.

Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, and Jonathan Majors in Da 5 Bloods.

MVP: Spike Lee

Lee dropped not one but two masterpieces this year. Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the jungle, the kaleidoscopic Vietnam War drama Da 5 Bloods reckons with the legacy of American imperialism with an all-time great performance by Delroy Lindo as a Black veteran undone by trauma, greed, and envy. American Utopia is the polar opposite; a joyful concert film made in collaboration with David Byrne that rocks the body while pointing the way to a better future. In 2020, Lee made a convincing case that he is the greatest living American filmmaker.

Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul

Best TV: Better Call Saul

How could Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s prequel to the epochal Breaking Bad keep getting better in its fifth season? The writing is as sharp as ever, and Bob Odenkirk’s descent from the goofy screwup Jimmy McGill to amoral drug cartel lawyer Saul Goodman is every bit the equal of Bryan Cranston’s transformation from Walter White to Heisenberg. This was the season that Rhea Seehorn came into her own as Kim Wexler. Saul’s superlawyer wife revealed herself as his equal in cunning. If she can figure out what she wants in life, she will be the most dangerous character in a story filled with drug lords, assassins, and predatory bankers.

Michael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss in Shirley.

Best Picture: Shirley

Elisabeth Moss is brilliant as writer Shirley Jackson in Josephine Decker’s experimental biographical drama. Michael Stuhlbarg co-stars as her lit professor husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, who is at once her biggest fan and bitterest enemy. Into this toxic stew of a relationship is dropped Rose (Odessa Young), the pregnant young wife of Hyman’s colleague Fred (Logan Lerman), who becomes Shirley’s muse/punching bag. If Soul is about art’s life-giving power, Shirley is about art’s destructive dark side. Shirley is too flinty and idiosyncratic to get mainstream recognition, but it’s a stunning, unique vision straight from the American underground.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

American Utopia

From the beginning, America has been a utopian project. The Founders had come of age in an era that highlighted the problems of monarchy and what we now call authoritarianism. They saw decades in England dominated by civil war, with only the cast of unyielding megalomaniacs changing from time to time. They threw off a haughty monarchy interested only in exploitation and indifferent to the needs of its subjects in far-flung colonies. They embraced the ideals of science and the Enlightenment to create a system of democratic self-rule in the hopes that these United States could be a better place than those that came before. In 1790, George Washington wrote to a supporter that, “The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.”

From the beginning, America did not live up to the ideals espoused by our founding documents. All men were created equal — except the Black slaves. People were endowed by their creators with the inalienable right to life — except the natives who had to be slaughtered so we could take their land. Everyone had a right to vote — except for women, who made up half the population. But the ideas unleashed by the American Revolution proved infectious and hard to kill, sparking a pandemic of democratic thought all over the world. Like science, there is no end state to democracy; it’s a process. America is a 244-year-old work in progress.

This must be the place — A-list director Spike Lee documents former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne’s (above, center) vision of his adopted home in American Utopia.

Embracing the will to change is a theme that runs throughout American Utopia. It might sound strange to claim that a concert film has a theme besides “get up and dance,” but this is no ordinary concert film. David Byrne, who gained fame as the frontman for the greatest of the 1970s art punk bands, Talking Heads, crafted a Broadway show out of the unique tour he designed for his 2018 album. When Byrne played at 2018’s Memphis in May, the contrast between his act and the dozens of other pop, rock, and hip-hop acts was striking. Instead of a stage full of musicians tethered to the instruments, Byrne and company started out with a blank stage surrounded on three sides by curtains of silver links. The musicians, carrying their instruments in harnesses like a marching band, moved freely about the stage, executing choreography that took from both the freedom of the New York modern dance scene and the rigid precision of color guards and drum corps. Once the show moved to the Great White Way, it was refined into a blockbuster, which was selling out the historic Hudson Theatre.

Talking Heads were the subject of what is, for my money, the greatest concert film ever made, 1983’s Stop Making Sense, directed by the late Jonathan Demme. To document American Utopia, Byrne reached out to fellow New Yorker Spike Lee. Filming a Broadway show might seem like a waste of talent for someone on the shortlist of America’s greatest living directors, but Stop Making Sense proved the concert film is a unique and subtle challenge for a filmmaker.

Fortunately for us, Lee said yes, and he was more than equal to the task. This is not a three-camera shoot feeding a Bonnaroo live-stream. Lee and cinematographer Ellen Kuras have an uncanny knack for putting their cameras in exactly the right place to capture the drama and spectacle of the choreography. We get views from the wings, close-ups of the dancers’ bare feet, and even a rotating overhead camera.

The film’s 20 songs span Byrne’s career, from the twitchy “Don’t Worry About the Government” from the Talking Heads’ debut in ’77, to “Everybody’s Coming to My House” from 2018. The nestled polyrhythms and Dada poetry of “I, Zimbra” sound made for the percussion-heavy band, led by frequent Byrne collaborator Mauro Refosco. Songs from American Utopia, which sounded a little half-baked on the record, come into their own before the packed theater.

Byrne begins the show holding a model of a human brain. As New Wave’s poster boy, he weaponized what he now describes as mild autism into a persona that fit the confrontational CBGB punk scene where the Heads first emerged. The arc of American Utopia echoes his experiences growing up in public as a perpetual outsider trying to relate to the neurotypical. In his opening description of the brain, he pays special attention to the corpus callosum, the groove that both separates the two hemispheres and carries messages back and forth.

Byrne wants to show that we are much more alike than we are different. He points out that most members of his band, including himself, are immigrants. The American experiment has produced horrors and violence, but our openness has also led to the greatest flowering of creativity the world has ever seen. In this time of darkness, Byrne and Lee say we can once again come together to pursue that elusive dream of utopia. With this singularly joyous film, they are leading by example.

American Utopia is airing on HBO, and streams on HBO Max.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies

David Byrne and John Goodman hit the mall in True Stories.

Happy Super Tuesday. Hope you’re all out voting today. Once you’ve made that decision, it’s time to go to the movies.

Tomorrow night, Wednesday, March 3rd, Indie Memphis’ film series presents Zombi Child. Bertrand Bonello’s film takes the zombie myth back to its Caribbean roots. Before Night of the Living Dead, zombies were always associated with Hatian Vodou. Practitioners would prepare a powder containing pufferfish toxin that would paralyze the victim and make them appear dead. Then, once the funeral was over, they would revive the victim and enslave them. How often, or, even if, this ever happened is the source of much dispute, but Bonello uses the legend as a jumping-off point to tell a story of high school intrigue and body horror. This film has a look that reminds me of the hugely underrated Raw. The show starts at 7 p.m. at Malco Powerhouse.

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies

On a completely different note, Malco’s Throwback Thursday at Studio on the Square brings us a horror-comedy from the 80s with some higher-than-average star power. Michael J. Fox cashed in on his newfound Back To The Future stardom with Teen Wolf. The not-really remake of I Was A Teenage Werewolf has its moments, but it’s no I Was A Zombie For The FBI.

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies (2)

Over at Crosstown Theater on Thursday, the Arthouse series serves up a cult classic. David Byrne burned down 30 Rock last weekend with his performance on Saturday Night Live. Let’s just take a moment to watch before proceeding.

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies (4)

Wow.

Anyway, in 1986, Byrne wrote and directed his only feature film, True Stories. It’s an unconventional and difficult movie to describe — kind of a set of interlocking character sketches of people Byrne read about in supermarket tabloids, kind of a travelogue of the middle America the consummate New York art-punk discovered while on tour, and kind of a cross between a music video and traditional musical based on the underrated (there’s that word again) Talking Heads album of the same name.

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies (5)

Byrne, who appears in the film as the narrator but doesn’t sing, elevated a little-known character actor named John Goodman to what passes for a leading role in this meandering mini-masterpiece.

True Stories, Zombi Child, and Teen Wolf This Week at The Movies (3)

See you at the movies! 

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Jonathan Demme

Music Video Monday was saddened by the news last week that director Jonathan Demme passed away at age 72.

Jonathan Demme (1944-2017) with Denzel Washington on the set of Philadelphia.

Demme was a 22 year-old film publicist when he had a fateful run-in with Francois Truffaut, in which the legendary French New Wave director encouraged him to switch careers and go behind the camera. In 1971, he got a break from Roger Corman’s low-budget production unit to direct movies about bikers and women in prison (the infamous Caged Heat). Over the course of a 46-year career, he would become the first director to ever win Best Picture for a horror movie with Silence of the Lambs (which is also one of only three films to complete the Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress trifecta.) His next film, Philadelphia, won Tom Hanks his first Best Actor Oscar.

Demme’s love for film was only equaled by his love for music. The movie that first brought him mainstream recognition was 1984’s Stop Making Sense, a documentary about the Talking Heads’ tour that today is recognized as the greatest concert film ever made. Unlike Woodstock, which split the focus between the multitude of performers on the stage and the cultural revolution going on in the crowd, Stop Making Sense is an intimate portrait of a band at work. In the film’s celebrated opening, David Byrne wanders out onto an incomplete stage and declares “I’ve got a tape I want to play.”

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Jonathan Demme (4)

The Talking Heads’ most famous song “Once In A Lifetime” was named as one of the most important musical works of the Twentieth Century by NPR and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But upon its initial release in 1981, it baffled American audiences, and didn’t even crack the Billboard Hot 100. Byrne’s vocals were inspired by listening to AM radio preachers as the band toured America, and in Stop Making Sense, Demme expertly revealed the song’s origins. In a single, unbroken 4 minute 34 second shot, the camera starts out on keyboardist Bernie Worrell before panning down to Byrne, who sings in an ecstatic, Pentecostal trance. Then Demme cuts to a slightly different angle, revealing a five-shot of Byrne, Worrell, Jerry Harrison, Lynn Mabury, and Ednah Holt arranged against black like a Caravaggio portrait. In all, there are four shots in five and a half minutes. No other moment in his storied career reveal Demme’s deft touch, his loving fascination with the human form, and his unerring instinct for marrying music and image. It was this performance, one of the greatest ever captured on film, that made “Once In A Lifetime” the classic it is today.

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Jonathan Demme (3)

in 1985, Demme directed two music videos. The first was for postpunk standard bearers New Order. Like Stop Making Sense, it concentrated on the process of musical creation, but instead of a thousand-seat theater in Los Angeles, the band is gathered in an anonymous studio recording “The Perfect Kiss” while only the director and the engineer looks on.

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Jonathan Demme (2)

Demme’s other 1985 video was “Sun City”. The fight against apartheid in South Africa was on top of the mind for many young people in the mid-80s, and E-Street Band guitarist Stephen Van Zandt helped organize an artist’s boycott of the South African resort Sun City. To call attention to the protest, he produced a star-studded song along the lines of “We Are The World”. Rarely heard these days, the hip hop inflected “Sun City” is clearly the best of the big benefit singles of the era, featuring verses from Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash, Afrikka Bambaataa, as well as Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffan from the Temptations, Hall and Oates, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and, of course, the ubiquitous Bono. Demme’s video is a great little slice of 80s analog video cheese.

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Jonathan Demme

Demme would continue to work with his favorite musicians throughout his career, including making three documentaries about Neil Young. His final film has a Memphis connection. Justin Timberlake + Tennessee Kids, a chronicle of the last night of the singer’s latest tour, earned a rare 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s been a huge hit for Netflix, who produced it, and is currently for offer in its entirety on the streaming service. It’s a fitting epitaph for Demme, who, more than any other director of his or any other era, understood musicians and loved the music.

Music Video Monday Special Edition: Jonathan Demme (5)

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Talking Heads

“As we get older and stop making sense … ” — David Byrne

I’ve long been a fan of musician David Byrne. The Talking Heads were my soundtrack for a long time. Byrne, a brilliant artist and thinker, recently wrote an essay for The Guardian called, “The Internet Will Suck All the Creative Content Out of the World.” In it, he bemoaned the rise of music file-sharing services like Spotify, which pay musicians a pittance for access to their work.

Byrne made some great points, but he only got it half right. The internet does suck up all the creative content in the world, but then it spews it back out for consumption. The real problem for artists trying to sell their recorded music is not that it’s been sucked away; it’s that consumers are now inundated with creative content. They’ve been given a free bag of rice, and musicians are asking them to pick out a particular grain to eat — and pay for it.

Go to YouTube and type in the name of any popular song and you’ll get the original, but you’ll also get dozens of videos of teens in their room playing the song, as well as lots of wannabe local bands playing their version. It’s like music selfies.

The market for what was once a saleable physical product, whether vinyl, CD, or tape, has shrunk radically. Music — the creative content — can now be heard on demand for free or nearly so, streamed via various internet sites, including YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, etc., and stored on our phones or other devices.

Many of us used to proudly display our record collections, then, later, our stack towers of CDs; we gave friends “mix tapes,” a CD burned with our favorite tunes. No longer. We share playlists. We forward links. Why bother to “own” music when you can listen to it — and give to others — for free? The internet hasn’t sucked all the creative content from the world, but it has destroyed the traditional recorded-music business model.

Of course, it’s not just the music business that has been transformed by the internet. Everyone is a photographer now. We are inundated with pictures via Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook. Nobody has photo albums anymore. Kodak is bankrupt. No one’s getting a dime from that gorgeous shot of a desert sunset that’s being viewed by thousands of people.

Travel agencies? No thanks, I’ll just use Travelocity or Expedia. Fight the crowds at the mall? Nah, I’ll just order online. Newspaper subscription? No thanks, I’ll just scan Huffington Post or local news sites. Free is the new black.

But even in the face of these technological challenges, writers still write, painters still paint, musicians still play their hearts out. They enrich our lives immeasurably, and they need to make a living. So close your laptop, put your phone down for a while. Buy a book, buy a painting, go out and hear a live band — maybe even, gasp, buy a CD. We shouldn’t take our artists for granted. They are vital to our quality of life and they need our support.

And we need them to help us make sense.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Stop Making Sense

What makes a great concert film? Is it a big event with dozens of stars, like Woodstock or Wattstax? Is it chancing into horror, like Gimme Shelter? Is it a gathering for a noble cause like The Concert For Bangladesh? Or is it a heartstring tugger like The Last Waltz?

Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense makes the argument that the key to greatness is catching a group at just the right time. In December 1983, Talking Heads were riding a wave of creativity that had started at CBGB’s in 1977. Rhode Island School Of Design dropouts David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz, along with former Modern Lover Jerry Harrison, were the art rock center of the punk movement. Their tour in support of Speaking In Tongues incorporated all of the band’s advances into a loose narrative stage show inspired equally by Japanese Noh theater and Twyla Tharp modern dance. Demme shot three shows over one weekend in Los Angles with eight 35mm cameras and edited together the mountain of footage into something that is not quite narrative, not quite documentary, and not quite rock show. Byrne is scarily committed to his onstage persona, the wide-eyed, borderline autistic geek, an alien reporting on the human race through twisted, polyrhythmic songs that stretched the definition of punk and Western pop music. Demme treats him like a leading man in a musical, making brave choices like holding on a single shot of Byrne for four minutes of “Once In A Lifetime” and not showing the audience until the very end of the film.

In Byrne’s book How Music Works, he downplays the myth of musical genius in favor of the genius of scenes — groups of artists who push each other to greater heights. Stop Making Sense is the perfect meeting of musicians at the peak of their power and a director finding his voice. Catch it on the IMAX screen Thursday, October 23rd at 7pm to see what it looks like when all of the pieces come together perfectly for an artist.

Categories
Music Music Features

Meeting David Byrne at B.B.’s

I’ll start by saying that David Byrne’s performance at the Orpheum last night was amazing — though I didn’t expect anything less.

Byrne’s group — 11 people total, including the dancers — came out dressed in white from head to toe. Byrne told the crowd to expect to hear songs that he had collaborated on with Brian Eno over the years, including Talking Heads songs, songs from the Byrne/Eno My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and some from their newest collaboration, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

The group opened with “Strange Overtones,” a single from the latter, and the audience stood, immediately attentive. To the delight of the crowd, they played a number of Talking Heads hits, including “I Zimbra,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and “Houses in Motion.” The energy from the crowd — especially during the Talking Heads songs — exceeded that of any other show I’ve attended at the Orpheum, but that may have also had something to do with the fact that alcoholic beverages were allowed in the seating areas.

The newer songs, though not quite as well known to many, were really great, too. There was a comforting familiarity to the music, and in my opinion, just about anything the now wonderfully white-haired, always eccentric Byrne produces is pure genius. The group’s three dancers flitted and contorted around the stage in unison with the percussion-filled, sometimes African-sounding, music. And Byrne’s vocals remained as smooth and soothing as they’ve always been. The performance was completely magical.

But the most exciting part for me came after the show — after the crowd of hippies and die-hard fans slowly made their way out and away. At around 11:15 p.m., I was at B.B. King’s Blues Club on Beale, saying hi to some friends and grabbing one last celebratory beer. Then in walks none other than David Byrne himself — followed by his dancers, back-up singers, his percussionist, and his drummer.

Byrne stood unrecognized at the bar, so I walked up to him, introduced myself and gave him a huge bear hug. I told him I’d buy him a drink. He graciously accepted the offer and ordered a Ghost River, a locally brewed beer. Byrne took a few sips and quickly made his way to the dance floor.

Z-DA, “The Princess of Beale,” was performing, and Byrne obviously couldn’t resist the urge to dance to the Stax classic, “Hold On, I’m Coming.” Byrne danced in his classic only-David-Byrne-would-dance-this-way-in-public style, squatting and bobbing his head to and fro. His group hit the dance floor shortly after, and it appeared that they were all having a blast.

I joined them and found myself dancing within feet of Byrne. He bounced and bobbed across the dance floor for another few songs — pausing only to sip his beer — before making a quick stop in the restroom and then a dash to the exit.

I didn’t want to seem like a crazy fan, so I let him go without bothering him. I watched through the window as he unchained his bicycle from the rack outside of B.B.’s. A moment later, I walked outside to see him riding off in the distance, his white shirt fading into darkness around the corner of Main and Beale. — by Shara Clark

Categories
Music Record Reviews

The Knee Plays

The mid-’80s was the pinnacle of David Byrne’s weirdness. Recording an album based on the indigenous music of a made-up tribe (In the Bush of Ghosts) was weird. Breaking up a successful group like the Talking Heads wasn’t normal. And The Knee Plays, his 1985 collaboration with playwright Robert Wilson, was an exercise in sustained weirdness. Reissued now on a 1 CD/2 DVD set with eight bonus tracks, The Knee Plays features compositions for reeds and horns, primarily holding and shaping chords to form a backdrop for Byrne’s meditations on working and traveling. “I thought that if I ate the food of the area I was visiting,” Byrne explains on “Social Studies,” “that I might assimilate the point of view of the people of that region.” He’s neither ironic nor satirical but simply fascinated by human behavior. (“Tree [Today Is an Important Occasion],” “In the Future”) — SD

Grade: B+