Tag: Jonathan Demme

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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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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Horrortober: Silence Of The Lambs (1991)

Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in Silence Of The Lambs

FILM TITLE: Silence of the Lambs (1991)

ELAPSED TIME: 100%

WHY DID I STOP WATCHING? Hannibal has an old friend for dinner.

I usually make a policy of not reading reviews of movies before I write my own, but after finishing (that’s right — I finished it. All of it.) Silence of the Lambs last night, I went on a minor googling tear about the movie’s creation and initial reception. Because as soon as you see a movie as good as Silence of the Lambs, the next thought is necessarily, “How the fuck did they do that?”

I found a Roger Ebert review, penned in 2001 following the release of Silence of the Lambs’ underwhelming follow-up, Hannibal. Ebert writes that though Silence of the Lambs is not slasher-film disturbing, it has several genuinely frightening moments: Clarice’s first meeting with the eerily still Hannibal, the Kafka-esque removal of the moth from a victim’s throat, the elevator scene after Hannibal escapes, the back-and-forth cuts between Buffalo Bill’s real house and the false one, and the extended sequence in Bill’s basement at the end. Ebert’s point is that these moments aren’t just gross or suspenseful, but psychologically unsettling in a way that makes them timeless. Because they take place within an airtight character drama, they feel necessary, rather than excessive.

Silence Of The Lambs would be a character drama, except this happens.

As a first-time viewer and someone with little-to-no horror watching experience, I have to say that Silence of the Lambs was revelatory for me. Imagine if you thought you hated comedy but the only comedy you’d ever seen was Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser. You’d probably think comedy sucked, right? But then someone showed you Airplane! You’d realize you were wrong. I thought horror sucked because I’d never actually seen a horror movie before Horrortober, and of the handful of very good movies I’ve watched, Silence of the Lambs is the one that has felt the most worth it. The element of fear is engaging, not gratuitous, because it is presented a part of that old question: what, exactly, is evil?

Jodi Foster as Clarice Starling

I think the movie’s greatest accomplishment is that, despite the grandiosity of its subject matter, it manages to feel understated the whole way through. The scariest moment in the final sequence, when Clarice confronts Buffalo Bill, is not the scene where she sees his skin suits, but the scene where he contorts his face and asks of Clarice, faking ignorance of a previous victim, “Was she a very fat person?” It is scary because Ted Levine, as Buffalo Bill, perfectly captures the hairs-breadth difference between how that question would be posed by an innocent person, and by someone fucking crazy. It is way more unsettling than the half-decomposed body in the bathtub that we run into moments later.

Ted Lavine as Buffalo Bill, animal lover.

So, readers, I think I get it now. It is possible to make a great horror film if the point is not blood and guts, but if blood and guts are a necessary byproduct of a truly frightening inquiry of human darkness. Of course, it also helps if you have Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster leading your movie. But to make horror into art, you mostly just need to take Hannibal Lecter’s advice: “Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?” 

Horrortober: Silence Of The Lambs (1991)

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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
Film Features Film/TV

The Sweet Thereafter

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Memphis Flyer (our first quarter quell, as it were), I have chosen my personal favorite film from each year since the Flyer began publication. Then, for each of those films, I unearthed and have excerpted some quotes from the review we ran at the time. — Greg Akers

1989: #1 Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch (#2 Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee)

“While all the scenes in Mystery Train are identifiable by anyone living west of Goodlett, their geographical relationship gets altered to a point where we start to trust Jarmusch more than our own memories.” — Jim Newcomb, March 8, 1990

“Filmed primarily at the downtown corner of South Main and Calhoun, Jarmusch does not use the Peabody Hotel, the Mississippi River, Graceland, or most of the other locations that the Chamber of Commerce would thrust before any visiting filmmaker. His domain concerns exactly that territory which is not regularly tread by the masses, and his treatment of Memphis is likely to open a few eyes.”
— Robert Gordon, March 8, 1990

1990: #1 Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese (#2 Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder)

“This may not be De Niro’s best-ever performance, but he’s got that gangster thang down pat. His accent is flawless, his stature is perfect, and, boy, does he give Sansabelt slacks new meaning.”
— The Cinema Sisters, September 27, 1990

1991: #1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron (#2 The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme)

“Terminator 2 is an Alfa Romeo of a movie: pricey, sleek, fast, and loaded with horsepower. By comparison, the first Terminator was a Volkswagen. On the whole, I’d rather have a Volkswagen — they’re cheap and reliable. But, hey, Alfas can be fun too.” — Ed Weathers, July 11, 1993

1992: #1 Glengarry Glen Ross, James Foley (#2 The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann)

“Mamet’s brilliantly stylized look at the American Dream’s brutality as practiced by low-rent real estate salesmen who would put the screws to their mothers to keep their own tawdry jobs doesn’t relax its hard muscle for a moment. In the hands of this extraordinary cast, it is like a male chorus on amphetamines singing a desparate, feverish ode to capitalism and testosterone run amuck.”
— Hadley Hury, October 15, 1992

1993: #1 Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater (#2 Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg)

“Dazed and Confused is a brief trip down memory lane. The characters are not just protagonists and antagonists. They are clear representations of the folks we once knew, and their feelings are those we had years and years ago. Linklater doesn’t, however, urge us to get mushy. He is just asking us to remember.”
— Susan Ellis, November 4, 1993

1994: #1 Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino (#2 Ed Wood, Tim Burton)

“Even though Tarantino is known for his bratty insistence on being shocking by way of gratuitous violence and ethnic slurs, it’s the little things that mean so much in a Tarantino film — camera play, dialogue, performances, and music.”
— Susan Ellis, October 20, 1994

1995: #1 Heat, Michael Mann
(#2 Toy Story, John Lasseter)

“I’m sick of lowlifes and I’m sick of being told to find them fascinating by writers and directors who get a perverse testosterone rush in exalting these lives to a larger-than-life heroism with slow-motion, lovingly lingered-over mayhem and death, expertly photographed and disturbingly dehumanizing.”
— Hadley Hury, December 21, 1995

1996: #1 Lone Star, John Sayles
(#2 Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Although Lone Star takes place in a dusty Texas border town, it comes into view like a welcome oasis on the landscape of dog-day action films … Chris Cooper and Sayles’ sensitive framing of the performance produce an arresting character who inhabits a world somewhere between Dostoevsky and Larry McMurtry.”
— Hadley Hury, August 8, 1996

1997: #1 L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson (#2 The Apostle, Robert Duvall)

L.A. Confidential

“L.A. Confidential takes us with it on a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we’ll go to hell or, if we do, whether we’ll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes … to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least the possibility of trust.”

— Hadley Hury, October 2, 1997

1998: #1 Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg (#2 The Big Lebowski, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Spielberg is finishing the job he began with Schindler’s List. He’s already shown us why World War II was fought; now he shows us how. … Spielberg’s message is that war is horrifying yet sometimes necessary. And that may be true. But I still prefer the message gleaned from Peter Weir’s 1981 masterpiece, Gallipoli: War is stupid.” — Debbie Gilbert, July 30, 1998

1999: #1 Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson (#2 The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan)

“Magnolia is a film in motion; there’s a cyclical nature where paths are set that will be taken. It’s about fate, not will, where the bad will hurt and good will be redeemed.”
— Susan Ellis, January 13, 2000

2000: #1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee (#2 You Can Count On Me, Kenneth Lonergan)

“Thrilling as art and entertainment, as simple movie pleasure, and as Oscar-baiting ‘prestige’ cinema. Early hype has the film being compared to Star Wars. … An even more apt comparison might be Singin’ in the Rain, a genre celebration that Crouching Tiger at least approaches in its lightness, joy, and the sheer kinetic wonder of its fight/dance set pieces.”
— Chris Herrington, February 1, 2001

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2001: #1 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg (#2 Amélie,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

“What happens when Eyes Wide Shut meets E.T.? What does the audience do? And who is the audience?”
— Chris Herrington, June 28, 2001

2002: #1 City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
(#2 Adaptation., Spike Jonze)

“The mise-en-scène of the film is neorealist, but the cinematography, editing, and effects are hyper-stylized, as if The Bicycle Thief had been reimagined through the post-CGI lens of Fight Club or The Matrix.”

— Chris Herrington, April 3, 2003

Lost in Translation

2003: #1 Lost in Translation, Sofia
Coppola (#2 Mystic River, Clint Eastwood)

“Lost in Translation is a film short on plot but rich with incident; nothing much happens, yet every frame is crammed with life and nuance and emotion. … What Coppola seems to be going for here is an ode to human connection that is bigger than (or perhaps just apart from) sex and romance.”
— Chris Herrington, October 2, 2003

2004: #1 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry
(#2 Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino)

“This is the best film I’ve seen this year and one of the best in recent memory. Funny, witty, charming, and wise, it runs the gamut from comedy to tragedy without falling into either farce or melodrama. Its insights into human loss and redemption are complicated and difficult, well thought out but with the illusion and feel of absolute spontaneity and authentic in its construction — and then deconstruction — of human feelings and memory.”
— Bo List, March 25, 2004

2005: #1 Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee (#2 Hustle & Flow, Craig Brewer)

“The film is a triumph because it creates characters of humanity and anguish, in a setup that could easily become a target for homophobic ridicule. Jack and Ennis are a brave challenge to the stereotyped image of homosexuals in mainstream films, their relations to their families and to each other are truthful and beautifully captured.” — Ben Popper, January 12, 2006

2006: #1 Children of Men,
Alfonso Cuarón (#2 The Proposition, John Hillcoat)

“As aggressively bleak as Children of Men is, it’s ultimately a movie about hope. It’s a nativity story of sort, complete with a manger. And from city to forest to war zone to a lone boat in the sea, it’s a journey you won’t want to miss.”
— Chris Herrington, January 11, 2007

2007 #1 Zodiac, David Fincher
(#2 There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson)

“[Zodiac is] termite art, too busy burrowing into its story and characters to bother with what you think.”
— Chris Herrington, March 8, 2007

2008: #1 Frozen River, Courtney Hunt (#2 The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan)

“Frozen River is full of observations of those who are living less than paycheck to paycheck: digging through the couch for lunch money for the kids; buying exactly as much gas as you have change in your pocket; popcorn and Tang for dinner. The American Dream is sought after by the dispossessed, the repossessed, and the pissed off.”
— Greg Akers, August 28, 2008

2009: #1 Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze (#2 Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron)

“I know how ridiculous it is to say something like, ‘Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best kids’ movies in the 70 years since The Wizard of Oz.’ So I won’t. But I’m thinking it.”
— Greg Akers, October 15, 2009

2010: #1 Inception, Christopher Nolan (#2 The Social Network,
David Fincher)

“Nolan has created a complex, challenging cinematic world but one that is thought through and whose rules are well-communicated. But the ingenuity of the film’s concept never supersedes an emotional underpinning that pays off mightily.”
— Chris Herrington, July 15, 2010

2011: #1 The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick (#2 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson)

“The Tree of Life encompasses a level of artistic ambition increasingly rare in modern American movies — Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood might be the closest recent comparison, and I’m not sure it’s all that close. This is a massive achievement. An imperfect film, perhaps, but an utterly essential one.”
— Chris Herrington, June 23, 2011

2012: #1 Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow (#2 Lincoln, Steven Spielberg)

“Zero Dark Thirty is essentially an investigative procedural about an obsessive search for knowledge, not unlike such touchstones as Zodiac or All the President’s Men. And it has an impressive, immersive experiential heft, making much better use of its nearly three-hour running time than any competing award-season behemoth.”
— Chris Herrington, January 10, 2013 

2013: #1 12 Years a Slave, Steve
McQueen (#2 Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón)

“Slavery bent human beings into grotesque shapes, on both sides of the whip. But 12 Years a Slave is more concerned with the end of it. McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley are black. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t be notable but is. If you consider 12 Years a Slave with The Butler and Fruitvale Station, you can see a by-God trend of black filmmakers making mainstream movies about the black experience, something else that shouldn’t be worth mentioning but is.”
— Greg Akers, October 31, 2013