Tag: Don Johnson

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Politics Politics Feature

Seeing Red

The 2024 presidential election results by precinct (Photo: Courtesy Don Johnson)

The Shelby County Republican Party is scheduled to hold its biennial convention in January, and the party has a bona fide chairmanship race on its hands.

One candidate is Bangladesh-born Naser Fazlullah, manager of a food-and-beverages firm and the local party’s vice chair, who has been highly active in Republican outreach efforts over the years. Most unusually, he professes a desire to “bring both parties together” for the benefit of Shelby County and has numerous friends both inside and outside GOP ranks.

The other candidate is insurance executive Worth Morgan, the former city council member who in 2022 ran unsuccessfully for county mayor and had been rumored as a possible candidate for Memphis mayor the next year before deciding not to make the race.

Both candidates are running as the heads of slates for a variety of other party offices.

Morgan’s campaign in particular, run under the slogan “Revive,” is in the kind of high gear normally associated with expensive major public races and has employed a barrage of elaborate online endorsements from such well-known party figures as state Representative Mark White, state Senator Brent Taylor, and conservative media commentator Todd Starnes. 

The GOP convention is scheduled for January 25th at The Venue at Bartlett Station.

• Morgan’s choice of the campaign motif “Revival” is interesting. Not too long ago, Republicans dominated county government, but demographics now heavily favor Democrats in countywide voting. As one indication of that, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris outdistanced the GOP’s Donald Trump in November by a margin of 201,759 to Trump’s 118,917. 

In a series of post-election analyses, however, veteran Republican analyst Don Johnson, formerly of Memphis and now with the Stone River Group of Nashville, has demonstrated the GOP’s supremacy virtually everywhere else in Tennessee. He has published precinct-specific maps of statewide election results showing areas won by Trump in red. Patches of Democratic blue show up only sporadically in these graphics and are largely confined to Memphis, Nashville, and the inner urban cores of Knoxville and Chattanooga. Even Haywood County in the southwest corner of the state, virtually the last Democratic stronghold in rural Tennessee, shows high purple on Johnson’s cartography.

Post-election analysis shows something else — a shift of the Republican center of gravity eastward, toward the GOP’s ancestral homeland of East Tennessee. For the first time in recent presidential elections, Republican voting in Knox County outdid the party’s totals in Shelby County.

Looking ahead to the 2026 governor’s race, it is meaningful that a recent poll of likely Republican voters by the Tennessee Conservative News shows two Knoxvillians — Congressman Tim Burchett and Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs — leading all other potential candidates.

• The Shelby County Commission ended its year with a full agenda of 89 items, several of which were matters involving schools and school funding. The commissioners navigated that agenda with admirable focus and aplomb, considering that the bombshell news of Tuesday’s scheduled Memphis Shelby-County Schools board meeting regarding the potential voiding of superintendent Marie Feagins’ contract exploded midway through their discussions.

• One of the more inclusive political crowds in recent history showed up weekend before last at Otherlands on Cooper to honor David Upton on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Upton is the proverbial man-behind-the-scenes in Shelby County politics and has had a hand — sometimes openly, sometimes not — in more local elections and civic initiatives than almost anybody else you could name. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing in Memphis: From Book Clubs to Blackberries

Book Club: The Next Chapter

Silver foxes Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen head out on a bachelorette party trip to Europe in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a sequel to the 2018 sleeper hit comedy. Craig T. Nelson rand Don Johnson also reprise their roles as frigid husband and seasoned himbo with whom our heroines must negotiate new relationships. 

Before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world in 2008, there was the Blackberry. Known to its army of corporate users as the “crackberry,” it demonstrated both the advantages and disadvantages of 24/7 connectivity long before the first Instagram post. Blackberry by indie filmmaker Matt Johnson tells the story of Research In Motion, the company who ruled the mobile world in the Bush era. Wary of another disingenuous hagiography of a tech oligarch? Don’t worry, this one’s a comedy!

Charlie Day, star of the TV comedy staple “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia,” makes his film-directing debut by biting the hand that feeds him. For Fool’s Paradise he enlisted Ken Jeong, John Malkovich, Kate Beckinsale, Adrien Brody, Jason Sudeikis, Edie Falco, Jason Bateman, Common, and a whole bunch more, to satirize showbiz as it is practiced today. You can be excused if you get a strong Being There vibe from this one.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 represents the end of an era for Marvel and Disney. The main cast is retiring, and director James Gunn is moving to helm the rival DC movies. The Memphis Flyer‘s Sam Cicci says “Guardians Vol. 3 is the most creative Marvel film in years, a fitting end to Gunn’s time with Disney.” So far it’s pulled in $365 million worldwide, and shows no signs of stopping.

Judy Blume’s revolutionary young adult novel Are You There Go? It’s Me Margaret gets a worthy adaptation from director Kelly Fremon Craig and Simpsons producer James L. Brooks. Abby Ryder Fortson stars as Margaret, the confused middle-schooler who must navigate a move to the suburbs, puberty, and religious doubt all at once. Rachel McAdams and Memphian Kathy Bates give excellent support as Margaret’s mother and grandmother. Read my review, then watch the trailer.

Sam Raimi’s pioneering horror-comedy franchise continues its perfect record with new director Lee Cronin in Evil Dead Rise. This one’s definitely more scary than funny, but Cronin nails the franchise’s irreverent tone, and Alyssa Sullivan kills as a single mom possessed by demons who stalks a haunted apartment building. A must-see for horror fans, this one’s got legs.

South Korean director Hong Sang-soo and his frequent collaborator Kwan Hae-hyo are back together with Walk Up. Indie Memphis screens this affecting slice-of-life film, which premiered to laurels at the Toronto Film Festival, at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 17 at Studio on the Square.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

 What’s the beeping noise in the distance? It’s the sound of The Super Mario Bros. Movie collecting coins. You just saw Guardians, but you can’t get enough Chris Pratt? Good news! You can hear him phoning it in as Mario in this animated adaptation that has earned enough to build Princess Peach a very nice castle. 

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

HBO’s Watchmen Series is Chillingly Relevant

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Dr. Manhattan in HBO’s Watchmen limited series.

Alan Moore named his 1986 comic Watchmen after a quote from the Roman poet Juvenal: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? “Who watches the watchmen?”

When Moore and artist David Gibbons reworked some moribund characters from the defunct Charlton comics, the Reagan ’80s were in full swing in America, and Margaret Thatcher was imposing austerity in the artists’ native Britain. Three years earlier, when Moore was first pitching the story to DC, the NATO Able Archer 83 military exercise had almost led to a full-on nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The work, which would later be called “the moment comics grew up,” was suffused with apocalyptic fear and profound disillusionment. The institutions we had created to protect us were out of control and threatening to destroy human civilization. Moore’s thesis, that the comic book superheroes we loved were secretly fascist thugs, was echoed in the other big comic book hit of 1986, Frank Miller’s Batman reboot The Dark Knight Returns. But Miller celebrated violent vigilantism because it made for good comic images. Watchmen was Moore’s warning about a fascist future.

The Seventh Kavalry

When HBO tapped producer Damon Lindelof to create a sequel series to Watchmen, he cast around for a contemporary issue that would resonate as deeply as the reckless rush to nuclear war had in 1986. Moore was out of the picture — he has not endorsed any adaptation of his work since the disasters that were the The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen films. Besides, Watchmen was explicitly a comic about comics. Even though the 2009 Zack Snyder adaptation of Watchmen was successful when it strove to faithfully reproduce scenes from the comics (I cried when Dr. Manhattan went into exile on Mars), it was still blasphemy as far as Moore was concerned.

What Lindelof came up with was the persistence of racism as an organizing principle of American society. Now, nine months after its debut on HBO, Lindelof looks prescient. The Watchmen series is so much better than we ever could have hoped for. And now, for Juneteenth, HBO has made the series available for free outside their paywall.

Regina King as Sister Night

Like the original, this Watchmen features a sprawling cast of characters. The most vibrant and poignant of the bunch is Sister Night (Regina King), aka Angela Abar, a former officer in the Tulsa police department who now fights crime as a costumed vigilante. The Commissioner Gordon to her Batman is Judd Crawford (Don Johnson), the Tulsa chief of police whose suspicious suicide by hanging sets off an investigation that will expose both a deep-seated white supremacist movement in government and a plot to regain the power that created quantum superhero Dr. Manhattan (played in different stages of life by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Zak Rothera-Oxley, and Darrell Snedeger).

Tim Blake Nelson as Looking Glass and Regina King as Sister Night

What’s most eerie about watching Lindelof’s Watchmen in 2020 is the police department’s use of masks. After the events of Watchmen (the graphic novel and the film adaptation), the superheroes who had been outlaws were accepted as adjuncts of the police.
Universal masking was adapted after an incident in which the racist terrorists The Seventh Kavalry, inspired by the posthumous writings of the Watchman Rorschach, had murdered police officers in their homes. Now that masks are de rigueur in the real world, it connects the fiction to our own apocalyptic atmosphere.

But the series’ critique of race relations in America is what really resonates in the long, hot summer of 2020. Allies emerge in unexpected places, and the villains are hiding in plain sight. Opening the series with a recreation of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which white supremacist gangs destroyed an affluent black neighborhood, turned out to be a stroke of genius.

Since comic book superhero narratives have become the dominant onscreen form in the last decade, it’s a relief to see something as meaty and timely as this. I’ll fully admit that I was extremely skeptical of the endeavor — let’s just say I have not been a fan of Lindelof’s previous work — but this Watchmen is a most worthy successor to Moore’s masterpiece.

HBO’s Watchmen Series is Chillingly Relevant

Watchmen is being re-broadcast on HBO this weekend in its entirety. It is also available on HBO Max streaming service.

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Film Features Film/TV

Knives Out

Be advised: Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a great movie, and I will fight you.

Notice I didn’t just say “The Last Jedi is a good installment in the Star Wars franchise,” like I would say about a Marvel movie that adequately hits the marks of costumed heroism while setting up the next episode in the infinite saga of corporate synergy. I said it was a great movie, period. Not only does it look amazing — it’s the best-lit Star Wars movie since George Lucas got his USC film professor Irvin Kirshner to helm The Empire Strikes Back — but writer/director Rian Johnson explored and expanded all of the characters he was given to work with by Lawrence Kasdan and J.J. Abrams in The Force Awakens, leaving the story neater and better than he found it. With the much-maligned Canto Bight “space casino” sequence, he did what the middle passage of a trilogy is supposed to do — complicate the morality of the story.

With the family fortune at stake and the patriarch’s corpse still warm, can the Thrombeys get a clue?

But that move is only an echo of the most challenging part of The Last Jedi, the characterization of Luke Skywalker. Instead of the gung-ho farm boy ready to take on the galaxy single-handed, he is a depressed hermit who no longer believes his youthful heroics made the world a better place. For a lot of disillusioned Gen Xers who grew up idolizing Luke, this was just a little too real. Johnson shepherded the best performance of Mark Hamill’s career as he rediscovers the heroic heart that still beats within him.

In a just world, Johnson should still be at the helm of Star Wars for the final installment of the trilogy of trilogies, which will hit theaters later this month. Instead, he and his producing partner Ram Bergman reunited most of the Last Jedi crew and knocked out Knives Out in about a year.

If you want to see what the real pros think about Johnson’s abilities, look no further than the incredible cast he assembled, starting with James Bond himself.

Daniel Craig plays private detective Benoit Blanc, who, in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie-derived whodunits sports an absolutely outrageous accent. Instead of Hercule Poirot’s bombastic Belgian, Blanc has an exaggerated Southern drawl, which prompts Hugh Ransom Drysdale (Captain America himself, Chris Evans) to call him “CSI: KFC.” Evans plays the black-sheep grandchild of Harlan Thrombey (Captain von Trapp himself, Christopher Plummer) the wildly successful writer of mystery novels whose untimely suicide on the evening of his 85th birthday party Blanc is hired to investigate.

Captain no more — Chris Evans is the black sheep of the family in Rian Johnson’s new whodunit, Knives Out.

But who hired Blanc? That’s a question that no one, not even the detective himself, knows the answer to. Was it eldest daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), the self-made real-estate mogul? Or was it Walt (Michael Shannon), business head of Harlan’s publishing empire? Or maybe it was closeted fascist son-in-law Richard (Don Johnson) or lifestyle guru daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette). The one person we know for sure it is not, is Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s immigrant nurse who finds herself caught in the middle as the children of the fabulously wealthy family jockey for a share of the inheritance.

Johnson’s script for Knives Out is the kind of thing Hollywood craftspeople like Leigh Brackett and Dalton Trumbo used to churn out on the regular: a tight, fun genre piece suffused with contemporary politics. Johnson delights in pulling the rug out from under you, then leaving you to wonder how long the floor is going to last.

Blanc, the eccentric detective, is a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes, only he has a pair of Watsons in local cops Lieutenant Elliott (LaKeith Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan). As necessary in byzantine mysteries, the dialogue is heavy in exposition. But it goes down easy because all the actors are having so much fun. Craig chews the scenery like it’s a plug of tobacco, while Curtis projects raw, feminine power and Shannon plays against type as a subservient failson. Only de Armas is truly playing for sympathy, as the sole poor person in the cast, who, coincidentally, vomits every time she tries to tell a lie.

What makes Knives Out a meaty murder mystery is its subversive portrait of the American ruling class. They’re all feeding on the corpse of a fortune made by someone smarter and kinder than they are, and their thin veneer of niceness is stripped away the instant an iota of their privilege is threatened. That’s why it’s immensely satisfying when Johnson delivers their collective comeuppance.

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Film Features Film/TV

Cold in July is a joyful throwback to 1980s thrillers.

Quentin Tarantino killed the non-ironic action movie the way Nirvana killed hair metal. It probably needed to be done, but let’s not pretend something of value wasn’t lost.

Remember when cinematic violence could be menacing, gratuitous, and funny, but also earnestly delivered all at once? When a thriller could be grippingly serious but with character transformation rather than character depth, and themes rather than social commentary? When everything didn’t have to be hyper-clever, it could just be nicely pulled off?

Cold in July remembers; it takes place in 1989 — not just as a setting but as a state of mind. It’s the middle of the night, and the Dane family, husband Richard (Michael C. Hall, who doesn’t get enough credit as a thoroughly outstanding actor), wife Ann (Vinessa Shaw), and their son, Jordan (Brogan Hall), are sound asleep. That is, until the parents hear an intruder in their home. Richard gets his pistol from a shoebox in his closet, loads it with shaky hands, and ventures down the hallway to confront the burglar. The confrontation goes south, and Richard shoots the unknown man dead.

The police, in the person of Detective Ray Price (Nick Damici) have no qualms about calling it self-defense. Price says the perp was Freddie Russell, a known criminal. Richard is nevertheless devastated; he’s not a violent man. He wants to know if Freddie had any family. Just the one, he’s told: a dad who just got out on parole from prison.

You see where this is going, right? Ben Russell (Sam Shepard) rolls into town, all scary and mysterious, and starts threatening the Dane family. He wants an eye for an eye, which means young Jordan is in danger since Richard killed the Russell scion. Ben is an almost supernatural force of evil: In his first appearance, he just shows up in the frame, looming over an unsuspecting Richard, and he manages to get past a squad of police to get to the Dane family. It’s all very Cape Fear — though Cold in July‘s homage is to Scorsese’s 1991 over-the-top remake rather than the hardboiled original.

But, Cold in July (based on a novel by Joe R. Lansdale) is tricking you. I won’t spoil the finer points of the narrative, but when you think you’ve got where it’s going figured out, its plot takes left turns. The film’s references go from period, ’80s and ’90s domestic horrors like Unlawful Entry, Pacific Heights, and Flesh and Bone to period action thrillers like Blind Fury, The Hitcher, The Osterman Weekend (I might have Rutger Hauer on the brain), Road House, the Dolph Lundgren version of The Punisher, Blood Simple played straight, or even a human-scale Commando.

All that, plus Hall sports a sweet ‘stache and mullet, and Don Johnson shows up as a private detective named Jim Bob Luke, who wears loud country-and-western shirts and a cowboy hat and drives a red convertible with fuzzy dice and a hula girl on the dash. And it works!

The score, by Jeff Grace, is straight up synthesizers and rock guitars. The whole endeavor is appreciatively cheesy, including the direction from Jim Mickle — but there are no hints of mockery. It’s a #throwbackthursday kind of film: outdated hair and fashions and concepts not better off forgotten.