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Coppola’s period bio-pic as teen flick

Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette had me hooked before a single image hit the screen. The Lost in Translation director’s lavish, ambitious quasi-traditional bio-pic of French teen queen and guillotined victim of the revolution, Marie Antoinette, opens with a black screen and slashing guitar chords. The song is “Natural’s Not In It,” a critique of capitalist consumption from Marxist punk band Gang of Four. Then a quick image flashes on the screen: Kirsten Dunst’s Marie, prone on a chaise lounge, shoes being fitted by a servant, dipping one dainty finger in the icing of a large cake on the table next to her and having a taste.

This neat little dialectical snap shot serves multiple purposes. It acknowledges the “unnatural” economic disparities that provoked the French Revolution as well as the extreme insularity of Marie’s privileged world. But it also gives the audience the glimpse of the Marie they expect to see almost as a wink: Okay, Coppola seems to be saying, here’s the caricature. I’m making my own movie now.

This isn’t the last time Coppola acknowledges the brutal indifference to outside suffering that was a part of Marie Antoinette’s reality and that has come to define her mythology. There’s a damning little scene toward the end of the movie when, informed of bread shortages throughout France, Marie responds not with the legendary “Let them eat cake!” (which later scholarship asserts she never actually said) but with a would-be helpful, crushingly naïve offer that her towhead toddler daughter can forgo diamonds.

But Coppola isn’t primarily interested in making a class critique or in grappling with the revolution itself. Instead she’s intent on making this a personal story told entirely from the perspective of Marie herself, who is sent from her native Austria at age 14 to wed France’s Louis XVI in a kingdom-uniting union. The result is an achingly sympathetic portrait of one of history’s more reviled figures that plays like Wong Kar-Wai and John Hughes collaborating on a costume drama, with ’80s new wave bands such as New Order, the Cure, and Bow Wow Wow providing the soundtrack.

Coppola’s Marie is an innocent plopped down in the strange, opulent but subtly vicious world of Versailles (the movie was filmed on location at the palace, a first) and forced to adapt. Dunst (engaging as always) is essentially a bored, isolated girl with nothing beyond her reach materially. What would any teenage girl do in such a situation? Shop. Marie cheers herself up with clothes and candy and pets and friends, and Coppola indulges this world’s extravagance. She celebrates it in the same cinematic-sugar-rush way you’d expect from any teen movie, but those Gang of Four guitar chords still seem to be rattling around the frame, like peasants at the gate.

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Photo Finish

Everybody knows Joe Rosenthal’s photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. When the image of the Stars and Stripes being raised atop Mount Suribachi was published across America in February 1945, the photo caused a sensation. For many war-weary home-fronters, it inspired hope of victory for the U.S.

But did you know there were two flags that day, that the famous pic was of the second one, and that the soldiers raising it weren’t under fire? Sure, it’s the set-up for a mildly interesting episode of History’s Mysteries. But for authors James Bradley and Ron Powers — and now director Clint Eastwood — it’s the basis for Flags of Our Fathers, an account of how that picture affected the country and, better yet, a meditation on the men who fought on Iwo Jima, what the battle’s survivors left behind there, and how they were haunted by their experiences forever after.

Once the photograph became famous, FDR recalled the soldiers depicted in it from the Pacific Theater to send them on a War Bond tour. Their new tour of duty didn’t involve Okinawa or the Philippines but Griffith Stadium and the Drake hotel. Stateside, the three men were celebrities, and their fund-raising effort was a monumental success.

The three flag-raisers that survived Iwo Jima are spotlighted in the film. Ryan Phillippe is excellent as Navy Corpsman John Bradley, deftly portraying the medic soldier’s dogged determination. Adam Beach and Jesse Bradford co-star as Marines Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon, respectively. Beach has a few scenes where he shines and Bradford maybe one, but most of the pair’s ineffectiveness owes to failings in the script. 

The staging of naval and air assaults in the film are staggering enough to put your heart in your throat. The beaches of Iwo Jima are composed of black volcanic sand (geologically correct Iceland was chosen for location filming), and the battle there looks like it’s taking place on the surface of the moon. The editing of the invasion is spectacular, assembled with such care that the viewing experience doesn’t degrade into confused chaos but is more like watching a tennis match with volleys, returns, and aces.

 And what a battle Eastwood’s Iwo Jima is: An armada of warships as if described by Homer; Japanese blockhouses and pillboxes; the flamethrower and the bayonet; naval barrages and self-inflicted grenade wounds. Crucially, a slide show of still photographs of the actual battle shown during the end credits reveals just how exact the film’s details are.

Flags of Our Fathers is cut from the same cloth as Steven Spielberg’s 1998 masterpiece Saving Private Ryan. They share a look (battles are bleached a gray, muted color); a purpose (unflinching understanding of “the Greatest Generation”); a consequence (making virtually irrelevant past films portraying the same battles, such as The Longest Day and Sands of Iwo Jima); even an actor (Barry Pepper). Spielberg produced Flags of Our Fathers. Comparisons are inevitable.

Technically, Eastwood is Spielberg’s equal. But Spielberg’s film benefits from a relentless, claustrophobic structure. The narrative structure of Flags of Our Fathers progresses in measured turns — with home-front touring punctuated by intense vignettes of warfare — and sometimes the two situations coil around and comment upon one another. Eastwood makes it work. But it doesn’t stick to your guts with the same tenacity. It doesn’t exact the same toll on the audience.

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Festival Highlights

Phil Chambliss: Auteur from Arkansas

Special program

Saturday, October 14th, 5:15 p.m.

After making movies in obscurity for decades, using cheap equipment and a cast of friends and co-workers, Camden, Arkansas, native Phil Chambliss has become a minor cause celebre on the film festival circuit. Chambliss, who has written, directed, shot, edited, and scored 27 films over the past three decades, received his first public screening at the 2004 Nashville Film Festival and will be celebrated at the British Film Institute’s 50th London Film Festival later this month.

Dubbed a “folk art filmmaker,” Chambliss’ ostensibly amateurish, rural-based, borderline surreal short films are so odd, there’s a temptation to file them under “so bad they’re good,” if not just plain bad. But there’s something real happening in Chambliss’ work, at least in the three examples being screened at Indie Memphis.

The 1982 “thriller” Shadow of the Hatchet Man is the most memorable of the bunch. It’s shot in gloriously grimy 8mm black and white, which lends an effectively nasty tone to an already disreputable tale of a hatchet-wielding killer and the cheating husband who sees in the furor an opportunity to off his wife. From the pungent, intentionally loony, and well-observed dialogue (“I can see she was a cute l’il ole girl,” a newscaster — played by Chambliss — drawls during a report on the latest hatchet killer victim) to such memorably odd images as a bare-chested sheriff reporting from in front of an Arkansas flag, Shadow of the Hatchet Man is hard to forget.

The other two shorts being shown as part of this program aren’t quite as absorbing, but are still memorable. Mr. Visit Show (2002) depicts a reporter investigating rumors that the “Bird-Mart Day Care Center for Birds” is using sleeping pellets instead of seed, and ends with probably the most hilariously unstrenuous fist-fight in movie history.

Even better is 1986’s The Devil’s Helper, in which two good ole boys out in the deer woods run into one of Satan’s minions and cut a deal for expanded hunting privileges. The Devil’s Helper opens with a still shot of a giant buck, presenting the deer as a creature of awe, like a god. If you grew up around the culture of rural deer hunting (I was born in December — the lore goes that I was the only thing able to pull my older male relatives out of “camp”), you’re liable to react to the image with a laugh of recognition.

Chambliss will attend the screening. — Chris Herrington

A Reel Man

Special program

Wednesday, October 18, 8:30 p.m.

Skip Eisheimer was a film geek who chanced into 500 educational filmstrips from the 1930s to 1970s. A collector was born and, thousands of strips later, cineastes everywhere can rejoice. Eisheimer formed A/V Geeks, a group based in Raleigh, North Carolina, that takes these almost-forgotten artifacts and publicly screens them. The reaction to these strips ranges from recognition to horror to delight. A Reel Man tells Eisheimer’s story and, better yet, shows clips of some his filmstrips. Eisheimer is a kind of archaeologist, digging through the dusty discards of libraries, schools, and government agencies and resurrecting the celluloid bones he discovers there. Some of the best of these strips — More Dates for Kay, Why Vandalism? — are educational to current-day audiences, illuminating some of the ideals and mores that kids in the mid-20th century were exposed to. It raises the question: How did those generations escape deep emotional scarring? One can only hope they laughed at these films like audiences do today. And laugh you will: There’s a clearly zonked Sonny Bono lecturing on teenage pot use. In Alcohol is Dynamite, there are lines such as, “Like dope addicts, one drinker can’t stand the sight of somebody not drinking.” There’s the titular, faux-Johnny Cash country song for Shake Hands with Danger. And there are Bizarro World home truths like “It’s not sissy to be clean.” In addition to the screening of the documentary, Eisheimer will appear at the festival and will show some of his films, making this a don’t-miss event on the program. — Greg Akers

American Cannibal: The Road to Reality

Beyond the South Documentary

Sunday, October 15th, 5 p.m.

American Cannibal: The Road To Reality is such a devastating — and devastatingly funny — film about Hollywood’s sleazy underbelly, it’s difficult to imagine that it wasn’t co-scripted by David Mamet and Christopher Guest. But, no. It’s a real documentary about Gil Riply and Dave Roberts, two idealistic kids determined to make it in the entertainment industry if it kills them. After a pilot for Comedy Central fails, the duo turns to Kevin Blatt, the pornographer who distributed the Paris Hilton sex tape, to produce a reality show called American Cannibal, where starving contestants engage in grueling challenges for food in an exotic, if not particularly scenic, locale where cannibalism is legal. Things quickly go from bad to as bad as it can get, and Riply and Roberts are in way over their heads. — Chris Davis

The Bridge

Hometowner Feature

Monday, October 16th, 8:45 p.m.

This locally produced feature directed by Brett Hanover uses materials created by the Church of Scientology and stories told by former members of L. Ron Hubbard’s controversial sci-fi religion to build a tragic narrative about misplaced faith and insidious fraud. Scientologists will hate it. People who hate Scientologists won’t like it nearly as much as the Tom Cruise episode of South Park. — CD

Cocaine Cowboys

Soul of Southern Film Documentary

Monday, October 16th, 6:30 p.m.

Audacious research and fierce editing are the standouts in Cocaine Cowboys, a documentary that chronicles the roots, heyday, and consequences — bad and good — of the cocaine trade in Miami. The city was relatively quiet in the early 1950s, but, in succession, gunrunning, rum running, marijuana trafficking, and Cuban immigration led to the cocaine-trade explosion in the ’70s. Among the significant notes is that Pittsburgh Steelers players were doing coke in the days leading to their Super Bowl game against the Dallas Cowboys in Miami in 1976. The Steelers, of course, won the game. Cocaine Cowboys doesn’t just give an overview, but focuses on individuals and their fates. Its conclusion seems inarguable: The skyline of Miami today owes more than a little to cocaine. — GA

Delusions

Hometowner Feature

Monday, October 16th, 8:30 p.m.

Delusions kicks off with drugs, rape, and prostitution, and the title credits that follow are reminiscent of the opening of The Sopranos. It doesn’t get any less bleak from there. In the movie, Memphis is a town populated by evil men, losers, and worse, and the innocent don’t remain so for long. A drug dealer (Chris Ross) and a sweet-natured virgin (Tiffany Pemberton, in a brave, gutsy performance) cross paths and have a romance that sours in devastating ways. A debt enforcer (Bevan Bell) completes the triangle, and soon enough no one remains innocent. Written and directed by Robert Saba, Delusions is a kind of would-be Bluff City Requiem for a Dream. — GA

Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island

Hometowner Feature

Monday, October 16th, 6:45 p.m.

Local filmmaker Mark Jones established himself on the local scene five years ago with his polished screwball comedy debut, Eli Parker Is Getting Married? This follow-up feature is a gay-themed horror-comedy spoof. Jones, who wrote and directed the film, reunites with his Eli Parker collaborator Ryan Parker, who serves as the editor and director of photography on Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island. The plot concerns a fraternity “hell night” staged at Hell Island (Mud Island), which had witnessed a multiple murder on the 4th of July 20 years earlier. Protagonist Jack (Tyler Farrell) is a gay pledge whose sexuality is known only to his also-closeted frat-brother boyfriend (Michael Gravois). On hell night, Jack has to worry about more than ghosts and fraternity hazing; there’s also a murderous clown on the loose, which has nothing on the perils of being in the closet while in the frat. Because of the gay theme, Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island is able to spoof both the sexualized atmosphere of slasher movies and real-life fraternities. Jones’ movie tackles these issues with a light comic touch that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen Eli Parker Is Getting Married? At the end, Jack’s frat has been turned upside down and features a “token straight brother.” — CH

Grim Sweeper

Hometowner Feature

Tuesday, October 17th, 8:30 p.m.

I like to think that a lot of people first get into independent filmmaking so that they can play with fake blood. I don’t know if this true in the case of Edward Valibus Phillips, director of the locally produced Grim Sweeper. But his movie features gobs of perfect fake blood, brains, and bone — enough to inspire a whole gaggle of new filmmakers. Grim Sweeper follows Hal (Phillips) and his pal Rod (Benjamin Rednour) as they punch the clock on a job that is both familiar (the bland humdrum of hourly wage employment with coworkers who are annoying) and alien (the duo clean human gristle from crime and death scenes). Gallows humor reigns as Rednour steals the show with his acting and Phillips reinforces the wit of the endeavor with with confident visual observations. — GA

The Importance of Being Russell

Hometowner Feature

Thursday, October 19th, 6:45 p.m.

This local feature unites two known forces on the Memphis film scene, the Paradox Productions crew responsible for the ambitious feature Strange Cargo a few years ago and actor/writer John Pickle, creator and star of the cable access skit show Pickle TV. The pair previously collaborated on the short film The Last Man on Earth, but this comedic fantasy-farce is their first feature. Pickle plays “redneck” inventor Russell Hawker (among his many great ideas is fashioning a “shotgun silencer” by duct-taping a pillow over the barrel), unhappily married, professionally frustrated, and coming up on his 10th wedding anniversary.

Pickle’s Jim Varney-esque hick character is a confident creation who holds the screen and provokes some actual laughs. The film also boasts some good ideas, such as the neat symmetry and casual critique when Russell and his wife sit down to breakfast opposite one another and separately watch the same program on adjacent televisions. The Importance of Being Russell works well early on, finding humor in its backwoods setting without being condescending, but despite a well-staged combat scene (that’s right — a combat scene!), it loses its footing a little as the plot becomes more fantastical. But it’s handsomely shot (by Paradox’s Jeff Hassen) and well made (Sean Plemmons directs, Jeff Bryant produces) throughout. — CH

Old Joy

Beyond the South Feature

Sunday, October 15th, 7 p.m.

This well-reviewed indie feature from writer-director Kelly Reichardt follows two friends (Will Oldham and Daniel London) who reunite for a weekend camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade mountain range and confront where they are in their divergent lives. Old Joy is set for an official release next month, but since a local theatrical run seems like a longshot, this might be your only chance to see it on the big screen. — CH

Playing With Rage

Soul of Southern Film Documentary

Thursday, October 19th, 6:30 p.m.

Female stereotypes are smashed to bits in Playing With Rage, a feature length documentary about a disillusioned sportswriter who rediscovers his love for competitive athletics after following the ups and downs of a professional female football team from Texas. What begins as shades of Sherman’s March quickly evolves from a self-pitying account of the filmmaker’s burnout into a seriously engaging meditation on gender roles and sports in the American heartland. — CD

Stomp! Shout! Scream!

Soul of Southern Film Feature

Saturday, October 14th, 1 p.m.

The tagline of Stomp! Shout! Scream! describes the movie as “A Beach Party Rock & Roll Monster Movie.” The beach is in 1960’s Georgia. The rock-and-roll is mainly provided by the fuzzed-out garage rock of Catfight! The monster is the Skunk Ape, an allegedly real-life Everglades Bigfoot, described by a plant-biologist character in the movie as an “antediluvian simian creature.” The tone of the film is like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, another recent homage to Atomic Age creature features, but in this case it’s more camp than overt comedy. In the movie, a guy in a suit — I mean, the mysterious Skunk Ape — menaces a small town and, like that other famous cinematic monkey, falls for a girl. — GA

What Goes Around …

Hometowner Feature

Tuesday, October 17th, 8:45 p.m.

The end of the credits for What Goes Around … states, “No animals, crackheads, or film geeks were harmed in the making of this film.” I can’t say I remember seeing any crackheads, and I’m pretty sure there weren’t any animals, but such are the quality and interests of the film that there’s no doubt it’s full of film geeks. The story is simple and universal: Talal (Patrick Henry) has been with girlfriend Marie (Chris Brown) for years, but realizes he’s philophobic — afraid of commitment. It isn’t so much Talal’s feet that are clay as his heart. When he meets Angela (Lisa Miller), he’s smitten and drops Marie for her, an action that has unforeseen and heartbreaking consequences. The film bursts with Chow Yun Fat and Rudy Ray Moore references and, in featuring the now-defunct Parallax Video as a location, provides a fitting coda to that downtown establishment. Best of all, Memphis has never looked so romantic as when Talal and Angela hit the town on a first date, their burgeoning relationship captured with black-and-white photography and Billie Holiday’s “Solitude” washing over it all. It doesn’t seem so hard to imagine the Bluff City as New York in a ’40s or ’50s film. — GA

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Cover Feature News

On the Job

Local filmmaker C. Scott McCoy and his partners in Oddly Buoyant Productions are the only previous winners of the Indie Memphis Film Festival’s Best Hometowner Feature award to have a film up for that same award this year. McCoy & Co. won two years ago for the rock-mockumentary Automusik Can Do No Wrong. Judging by their impressive follow-up, Eat, they should have a good shot again this year.

Directed by McCoy, who co-wrote and edited the film with his partner Laura Jean Hocking, Eat is an ambitious, structurally tight feature that boasts 54 speaking parts and 48 songs from 23 local or regional bands over its 83-minute run time.

The film takes place over a 24-hour period and follows the work and social lives of employees from three different restaurants — an upscale family restaurant, a corporate chain, and a cozy after-hours bar.

“We collected stories, sort of like an oral history,” says McCoy. “It’s lore,” Hocking adds.

“War stories,” McCoy says. “We stitched them together.”

The idea for the movie came from Hocking, a waitress and manager at McEwen’s who’s worked in restaurants for two decades.

“I wanted it to be a love letter to the restaurant industry,” Hocking says. “Tough love. I wanted to give back to waiters and restaurant workers.”

McCoy, a writer and editor by trade, also drew on restaurant experience. “I’m a horrible waiter,” he says. “I’ve been fired from more restaurants that you’ve eaten at in this town. Spaghetti Warehouse, Applebee’s, Alfred’s — walked out of Alfred’s. Got fired from the Belmont. Fired from Boscos. Didn’t get fired from the Pizza Café. Endless.”

McCoy and Hocking say they also drew on the restaurant experience of their cast in a movie that used plenty of improvisation.

“That was something that really helped, but it wasn’t a requirement,” Hocking says. “But it’s not hard to find an actor who’s a waiter.”

One of the standouts in the cast is local musician Amy LaVere, who plays a waitress for the corporate theme restaurant Canape’s (“a bad concept poorly executed,” McCoy says) and delivers a charmingly natural performance.

“She started working in restaurants when she was 13 or 14,” McCoy says of LaVere, “so she had a lot of restaurant anger built up. She’s a really good actress. I think next time we won’t be able to afford her.”

Eat weaves its large cast together with ease. The film’s de-centered narrative is quite a departure from Automusik Can Do No Wrong and will remind viewers of filmmakers such as Richard Linklater (Slacker, which Eat references) and Robert Altman. (McCoy cites Altman’s Short Cuts as a prime influence: “We were throwing an Altman party.”)

“It’s a movie about work,” McCoy says. “You could make it in a steel mill, but it wouldn’t be as interesting because you wouldn’t have the customer interaction. And people don’t make movies about work. But the drama you go through every day just to make a living is something everyone goes through, and those are some of the greatest dramas in people’s lives. It was important to us to do that, to make a movie about everyday experience. We wanted to make it funny, and we wanted to make it real.”

Eat(Hometowner Feature Competition)

Sunday, October 15th, 8:45 p.m.

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Out of Nowhere

It’s like a moment out of The Blair Witch Project. The day is racing to a close and the shadows are long and deep when Alan Spearman and Lance Murphy decide it might be best to split up. The Johnson grass is head-high on the forested northern tip of Mud Island. Old paths have been hidden by new growth since the last time the two filmmakers visited.

“Maybe we should try to get in and get out while there’s still light,” Spearman suggests, asking if anybody is particularly susceptible to poison ivy.

Spearman and Murphy are looking for a ruined rubber canoe that once belonged to their friend Jerry, a homeless man who kept his camp along the river on what would have been high-dollar real estate had he lived in a house rather than an improvised tent. It’s a spiritual touchstone for the professional journalists and neophyte filmmakers who’ve spent the past five years working on Nobody, a documentary following Jerry’s incredible river journey from Marion, Indiana, to Memphis.

“It’s over here,” Spearman eventually calls out, maneuvering through a thicket of vines and spider webs. Murphy, who had been exploring to the east, announces that he’s on his way and crunches through the leaves and branches. The two men fawn over the deflated yellow boat like a lost treasure.

“You know, Jerry used to write things on the canoe,” Murphy says. “It’s gone now, but there was writing all over it. There was a note from his son.”

Jerry came into Spearman’s and Murphy’s life unexpectedly when The Commercial Appeal photographers received a phone call from the Coast Guard, who thought somebody might be interested in talking to the good-natured homeless man who’d given up on society after the death of his mother and fell in love with America’s big river.

Jerry on the streets in Nobody

“He’s really like a modern-day Huck Finn,” Murphy says. “We wanted to show that these people that Mark Twain wrote about are still around. And still pretty much the same.”

He and Spearman work their way to the riverbank and look out over the dark waters swirling with the last pink and purple rays of the sun. They marvel at how the river can become an addiction and speak enviously of the vistas known only to those who live on the river.

Jerry is an alcoholic and a drifter but he’s not a panhandler. At one point in the film he declares, “I’m too proud to ever ask anybody for a dime.”

Nobody opens with a shot of Jerry shaving, watching his reflection in a small, jagged shard of mirror. It then moves from one breathtaking and provocative image to the next, calling into question all of our culture’s preconceived notions about homelessness and community.

From one homeless man’s recipe for cooking up pigeon and possum to Jerry’s own revealing commentaries on birth, death, and what lies between, Nobody alternately repulses and intrigues.

Spearman and Murphy have taken a formal approach to their film, and the contrived images may get under the skin of documentary purists.

“We’re prepared for that,” Spearman says confidently, brandishing a flashlight. “Now maybe we should try to get out of the woods while we can still see where we’re going.”

Nobody

(Hometowner Documentary Competition)

Thursday, October 19th

8:45 p.m.

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South from Sundance

In 1993, Ashley Judd starred in a disarmingly modest Southern indie movie called Ruby in Paradise. She played a young woman from the rural South (Kentucky, or maybe Tennessee) who packs her car in the opening credits, fleeing a bad relationship, and heads south to Florida to start a new life. She gets a job at a beachfront gift shop. She makes a few friends. She has a couple of relationships — one bad, one good but complicated. In typical movie narrative terms, nothing happens. But that nothing encompasses everything. Years ago a good friend and fellow Ruby in Paradise admirer labeled the film a koan, a mysterious touchstone for being young and single and discovering your life.

Earlier this year, after a long time in the Hollywood wilderness, Judd appeared at the Sundance Film Festival in Come Early Morning, another naturalistic Southern indie about a woman in search of her life. This character was a decade older, of course, and more damaged; her wounds more self-inflicted. But the character’s journey — and the movie’s uncommon patience and naturalism — mark Come Early Morning as a Ruby in Paradise companion piece, right down to its refusal to tidily wrap up its romantic plot thread and the way its character locates contentment through work.

This connection appears to be purely accidental, according to Come Early Morning‘s creator, Arkansas-bred, indie-identified actress Joey Lauren Adams (Chasing Amy, Dazed and Confused), who makes her writing and directing debut with the film, which is the opening-night screening at this year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival.

Adams, who currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi, says that Come Early Morning wasn’t written with Ruby — or even Judd — in mind. But it was born out of a frustration with Hollywood that Judd could probably identify with.

“I guess I was sort of frustrated with the roles that were available, not just for me but for women in general,” Adams says. “And I realized I wasn’t going to change anything by acting. As an actress, there are times when you’re doing a film and you’re really busy. And then other times I’d wake up and want to work, but there were no scripts to read, no auditions, nothing to do. And that drove me nuts. So I started writing. And rule number one is write what you know, or so I’m told.”

Adams set and filmed Come Early Morning around her hometown of North Little Rock and the smaller communities of Scott and Lonoke.

Adams had originally written the film as something to act in herself, but that changed when she decided to direct as well. “I wasn’t going to get a Michael Apted to direct it, or a Bruce Beresford,” Adams says, citing two of her favorite filmmakers. “The director we were talking with [didn’t have much experience] and then the music started to become really important to me, and the place, and I became so terrified about what someone else might turn it into.”

The more Adams learned about what goes into directing, the more she realized she didn’t know enough to direct and star.

Joey Lauren Adams (left)

“One of my producers gave [the script] to [Judd’s] agent at Sundance the year before,” Adams says, “and she loved it. Ashley read it right away. And decided she wanted to do it.”

Adams says she saw Ruby in Paradise when it came out but never really had it in mind. Her template, she says, was Tender Mercies, a Beresford drama from the ’80s staring Robert Duvall.

“I do see Lucy [Judd’s character] as more of a masculine character,” Adams says. “She’s doing what the guy usually does in the movies — sleeping with the guy and trying to sneak away in the morning.”

Come Early Morning confounds expectations in many ways — from its refusal to fashion a conventional happy ending to Lucy’s potentially redemptive romance to a novel but believable depiction of Southern church culture to the respect it gives to work, with Lucy finding a measure of job satisfaction as a contractor.

Come Early Morning was purchased by indie distributor Roadside Attractions after screening at Sundance and is set for a U.S. theatrical run starting next month.

As for the director’s future? “I definitely want to write and direct,” says Adams, most recently seen in a supporting role in the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston comedy The Break-Up. “I’m sort of over L.A., and as an actress I’d have to spend more time there. I love writing and I love that I can do it anywhere.”

Adams will be driving from Oxford to attend the screening.

Come Early Morning

Opening-night screening

Friday, October 13th, 8 p.m.

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Cover Feature News

Indie Memphis

The Indie Memphis Film Festival celebrates its ninth year this week, screening approximately 80 films — features, documentaries, shorts, music videos, and experimental movies — over the course of seven days at Muvico’s Peabody Place Theater.

A festival that’s long prided itself as being the definitive annual showcase of locally produced movies will boast its largest selection of local — dubbed “Hometowner” — features ever this year. Among the eight feature films by Memphis filmmakers are three notable second features, including Eat from C. Scott McCoy (of 2004 Indie Memphis winner Automusik Can Do No Wrong), Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island from Mark Jones (of Eli Parker Is Getting Married?), and The Importance of Being Russell from director Sean Plemmons and his partners with Paradox Productions (of Strange Cargo).

The festival lives up to its “Soul of Southern Film” moniker with a couple of high-profile screenings: Arkansas-bred, Mississippi-based actress Joey Lauren Adams will be in town to show off her writing and directing debut, the regional drama Come Early Morning, which screened at Sundance earlier this year. And Arkansas “outsider cinema” auteur Phil Chambliss will be at the festival to screen a few of his homemade short films before they get the royal treatment at the London Film Festival later this month.

Indie Memphis also expands its mission to incorporate more selections from “Beyond the South.” Boston’s acclaimed Alloy Orchestra will be in town to give live accompaniment to a screening of the 1920s silent classic The Phantom of the Opera. And one of the year’s most critically acclaimed indies, Old Joy, will make its first and perhaps only Memphis appearance at the festival. — Chris Herrington

Indie Memphis Film Festival

Muvico Peabody Place Theater

Friday, October 13th-Thursday, October 19th

Individual screenings $6.50; full festival pass $60

See IndieMemphis.com for a full schedule

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Film Features Film/TV

House of Sand

Brazil, 1910. A madman takes his young pregnant wife, Áurea, and her mother into the desert to build a house and start a new life. He picks his spot, erects a flimsy building on a dune, and promptly dies. Thus, his wife begins a life of trying to get out of the wasteland. Real-life daughter and mother Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro play the abandoned pair. But such is life in the desert — where time is measured not in months or years but generations — that these actresses will play their own descendants. House of Sand director Andrucha Waddington has an eye for the beautiful, but he never stays with one image so long that he exchanges style for substance. There are big philosophies in the sand — liberation, civilization, even astrophysics — and though presented subtly, the movie doesn’t scrimp on how these ideas play out in the lives of these women. The performances by Torres and Montenegro are as diverse as the script calls for and as excellent as can be imagined. Even the relative brevity (114 minutes) of the film works. A decade can pass in the blink of a frame, and as the desert grows less imposing and more comfortable to its characters, so does the movie ingrain itself into our own viewing experience. It’s one of the best films of the year.

Opening Friday, October 13th, at Ridgeway Four

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Film Features Film/TV

John Lennon doc overvalues hippie rabble-rouser, undervalues the artist

David Leaf and John Scheinfeld’s inept, tiresome new film The U.S. vs. John Lennon depicts John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1971 move to New York City and their subsequent involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement. The couple’s status and media importance also led them into relationships with activists such as Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party. These uneasy alliances between rock stars and rabble-rousers alarmed then-President Richard Nixon and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who placed Lennon under FBI surveillance. The government also tried to deport Lennon and Ono in 1972, the year Nixon defeated George McGovern for the presidency.

Lennon’s anti-war demonstrations may merit a historical footnote in yet another book about the significance of the ’60s, but they are wrongly recast as mythic countercultural stands by a parade of talking heads, including McGovern, Gore Vidal, Yoko Ono, and Geraldo Rivera. None of these pundits offers any insights. The only useful head is journalist Robin Blackburn, who correctly points out that Lennon’s vague utopian stance was powerful principally because he was an artist and a good interview subject whose “protests” were funny and strange but not terribly cogent — more conceptual art than political program.

Ironically, Lennon’s best music from this time tells a different story. The hoary old hippie anthems “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance” are dusted off once more to establish Lennon as a legitimate revolutionary, but the other Lennon music in the film highlights his sarcasm and distrust of all authority. This is most clear when anti-war and draft-protest footage is scored to “Well, Well, Well” and “I Found Out,” two numbers from Lennon’s 1970 album Plastic Ono Band. These brutal songs condemn mass action in favor of a clear-eyed independence from all things communal and especially political. Yet here they are used, sincerely and mistakenly, as battle cries.

As history, the film is even worse, leaping from 1971 to 1966 to 1970 to 1969 to 1973 in a vain attempt to construct a chain of tangentially related historical events. Rather than illuminating events, such fumbling reinvents history as nostalgia; to claim that Lennon would have made an enormous difference in an election McGovern had already bungled beyond repair is useless ahistorical speculation.

In our current frightening political climate, where government surveillance may soon be a fact of life for everyone, self-congratulatory documentaries like The U.S. vs. John Lennon serve no clear or worthwhile purpose.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon

Opening Friday, October 13th

Studio on the Square

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Film Features Film/TV

Capote, Take Two

Filmed at the same time but held back a year to avoid competition with its unavoidable cinematic rival, Infamous tells very much the same story as last year’s Oscar-winning Capote: Manhattan writer Truman Capote reading about a brutal Kansas murder, heading to the heartland to research the case for a New Yorker article, insinuating himself into the lives of both the Kansas town and the accused killers, and spending years turning the story into his landmark “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood.

This story and the Capote character are certainly captivating enough to carry two movies, but Infamous, written and directed by Douglas McGrath, suffers against the standard set by Capote.

Despite covering the exact same terrain, the films are quite different. Infamous is lighter and campier, more interested in Capote as a flamboyant gossip. To this end, the film spends considerably more time exploring Capote’s standing among his network of Manhattan socialite buddies — a gaudy cast that includes an awkward Sigourney Weaver, a solid Hope Davis, and a juicy Juliet Stevenson.

British actor Toby Jones plays Capote, and he’s more of a physical match for the author with his truncated child-man build and high-pitched voice than Philip Seymour Hoffman was. But Jones never invests his performance with the complexity that won Hoffman a well-deserved Oscar.

Instead, this skit-level impersonation fits the limited goals of a movie that wants to make more of Capote’s oddness. Infamous is more overt about Capote’s sexuality, but rather than seeming bold, this gambit panders to an assumed audience that McGrath seems to think will have more in common with the people of Holcomb, Kansas, than with Capote’s cosmopolitan sewing circle.

In conjunction with this assumption about the film’s audience is the general dumbing-down of the movie’s literary milieu. Where Capote casually eavesdropped on the author dishing about James Baldwin at a cocktail party, Infamous takes pains to help the viewer understand how and why this effeminate little man is important, with a succession of side characters speaking patiently into the camera, docudrama style — prepping the viewer for Capote’s personality (“his voice is weird”) or explaining the literary and personal significance of In Cold Blood.

“It made him,” one talking head says. “It ruined him.” This is the message of both films, but where Hoffman showed the effect in Capote, Infamous is content to merely say it.

Oddly, the one area where Infamous trumps Capote is in its depiction of the writer’s childhood friend and In Cold Blood research assistant, To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee. In Capote, the classy Catherine Keener always seems like Catherine Keener. Here, a decidedly less respected Sandra Bullock loses herself in the role of a sturdy, modest, no-nonsense woman surrounded by glittery characters.

Jones may not get under his character’s skin the way Hoffman did, but his physical verisimilitude serves to underscore the poignancy of Bullock’s performance, especially when she tells an anecdote about Capote as a child.

Given the strength of her performance, it’s fitting that Bullock’s Lee gets the last word. In one of those otherwise ill-advised talking-head segments, she describes how, in America, the joy of celebrating an accomplishment is always followed immediately by the question, “What’s next?” Lee, speaking of Capote’s struggles in the aftermath of In Cold Blood but also of her own failure to follow up To Kill a Mockingbird, says very simply: “And what’s next can be so hard.” It’s a deeply affecting moment, and it makes you wish the movie had been hers.