La La Land – Memphis Flyer

I’ll try to be polite about this: 2015 was a banner year for film. 2016 was not. It was a year when bad decisions came back to haunt Hollywood, where cynicism reigned, and where even a total box office gross topping $10 billion won’t stop “the sky is falling” talk. Nevertheless, there were some bright spots. So here’s The Memphis Flyer‘s look back on the year a lot of people would like to forget.

Gods Of Egypt

Worst Picture: (4-way tie) 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, The Angry Birds Movie, Independence Day: Resurgence, Gods of Egypt

The most hotly contested category in our annual film awards was for the bottom spot. Bad movie overachiever Michael Bay’s 13 Hours is an incoherent, slapdash bit of agitprop that turned out to be the first shot in a frighteningly effective anti-Hillary PR campaign. Gods of Egypt looks like a cutscene taken from a particularly boring FPS video game, despite its $140 million budget. The Angry Birds Movie is the video game adaptation no one wanted, and it’s even worse than it sounds. Independence Day: Resurgence is a monument to the hubris of director Roland Emmerich. These “winners” just edged out a pair of DC comics misfires, the turgid Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the laughable Suicide Squad. It was a rich year for poor movies.

10 Cloverfield Lane

Most Claustrophobic: 10 Cloverfield Lane

There was a recurring theme among horror films in 2016: being trapped in an enclosed space with a madman. In Green Room, an unlucky punk band battled neo nazi Patrick Stewart in a secluded skinhead club, while in Don’t Breathe, three thieves get what’s coming to them when the blind homeowner they’re trying to rob turns out to have a basement of murderous secrets. But the best of the bunch was 10 Cloverfield Lane, where John Goodman holds Mary Elizabeth Winstead hostage in a bomb shelter while the world burns around them. Prophetic? Let’s hope not.

Little Men

Overlooked Gems: Maggie’s Plan, Little Men

The rule of thumb for films in 2016 was this: If a movie cost more than $100 million and it’s not made by a Disney affiliate, it’s going to suck. The good stuff was on the low end of the budgetary scale. Maggie’s Plan is a 2015 leftover directed by Rebecca Miller that combined great characterization, fine acting by Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, and Julianne Moore, and a script where a couple of smart women turned the tables on a clueless man. Little Men is Memphian Ira Sachs’ ode to boyhood friendship wrapped in a warning about late-stage capitalist rent seeking. Seek them out instead of watching Suicide Squad, please.

Arrival

Best Sci-Fi: Arrival

Imagine Independence Day, only instead of a cigar-chomping fighter pilot for a hero, you get the woman whose job it is to try to talk to the aliens. Director Denis Villeneuve took Ted Chiang’s unfilmable story about linguistics and the nature of time and created a quiet masterpiece. It proves Hollywood can be smart, it just usually chooses not to be.

Sausage Party

Best Animation: Sausage Party

While big-budget, live-action Hollywood flailed, the animators flourished. Kubo and the Two Strings, Zootopia, and Moana combined groundbreaking visuals with positive messages. But the best of the bunch was an unlikely R-rated Pixar parody by Seth Rogen that turned Disney positivity on its ear, then did terrible, terrible things to the ear. Terrible things.

The Invaders

Best Memphis Movie: The Invaders

In contrast to the horrors from Hollywood, Memphis filmmakers were on a tear in 2016. Morgan Jon Fox’s long-delayed web series Feral was a big hit for streaming service Dekkoo and will be returning with a second season in 2017. Indie Memphis’ Hometowner category was bigger than ever, with six feature films and enough shorts to fill four programming blocs. The best of the bunch was The Invaders by director Prichard Smith and writer/producer J. B. Horrell. The story of Memphis’ homegrown Black Power movement and the 1968 Sanitation Worker’s Strike that led to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. wowed the crowd on opening night of Indie Memphis. Look for it in distribution in 2017.

O.J. Simpson

MVP: O.J. Simpson

From the first moments of Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander’s mini series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, I — along with the rest of America — was completely hooked. The crack cast and incisive writing brought the tragic farce to stunning and immediate life. Then came the epic Ezra Edelman documentary O.J.: Made in America, which went even deeper into the former football player’s dizzying heights and murderous final act. The story’s indelible intersection of class, race, sports, sex, celebrity, and violence made these works feel like windows into the roiling American subconscious.

Black Phillip

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Black Phillip, The Witch

The quiet menace of Black Phillip, the devilish goat from Robert Eggers’ Puritan horror The Witch, stood hooves and horns above the pack. The hircine villain was a method actor, randomly attacking people on set with such frequency that the fear Anya Talor-Joy and Ralph Ineson showed on screen was real. Live deliciously, Black Phillip!

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead.

Best Performance: Don Cheadle, Miles Ahead

Don Cheadle’s dream project was a phantasmagorical biography of jazz legend Miles Davis. In addition to writing and directing, he also turned in the year’s best performance by playing Davis as first the brilliant young visionary battling prejudice in the late 1950s, and then the haunted, bitter superstar trying to find his way back to greatness in the 1970s. Not nearly enough people saw Miles Ahead, so be sure to give it a spin.

Miss Sharon Jones

Best Documentary:
Miss Sharon Jones!

There was a moment in Miss Sharon Jones! where director Barbara Kopple follows the terminally ill soul singer as she returns to church for the first time in years. Jones gets up to sing with the worship band, returning to the stage for the first time after a rough bout of chemotherapy, and the pure life force which animated her bubbles explosively to the surface. In one long, ecstatic take, Kopple and Jones created the best movie moment of the year, and one of the greatest music documentaries of all time.

La La Land

Best Picture: (tie) Moonlight,
La La Land

I was torn between these two very different films for Best Picture of 2016 until I realized I didn’t have to choose. Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is a stunningly photographed, heroically restrained story of a terrified boy growing into a hardened man, and the forbidden love that haunts, and ultimately redeems him. Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, on the other hand, bursts at the seams with life and song, resurrecting the classic Hollywood musical with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. The two films couldn’t be more different, but they represent the pinnacle of film craftsmanship and provide indelible experiences for the audience.

Jem Cohen, the ascot-sporting bassist for the Ettes, has got it made. He gets to play energetic ’60s beat rock, and, as the only male in the band, he gets to spend a lot of time with two beautiful ladies and travel around in a psychedelic van solving mysteries. Okay, I made up the last part. Nonetheless, the L.A.-based trio with a vintage look and sound seems to be having a blast and getting along as they head into the final weeks of a two-month tour through Canada and the U.S. Drummer Poni Silver quips, “Ask us how well we’re getting along in another three weeks.”

All three members, including guitarist and frontwoman Coco Hames, are from the East Coast but didn’t meet until they were in Los Angeles. They are finding that La-la Land isn’t the easiest place for a retro-rocking, non-trendy group to survive.

“It’s hard because you’re competing against the sons and daughters of famous people who have all of these connections in the music business,” Cohen says. “Though the place is big enough for different styles, the scene is so fragmented.” Hames half-jokingly adds, “We tour all the time because everyone in Los Angeles is so industry.”

In 2004, Hames and Silver decided to form a band. Where the girl group in Dreamgirls drops the “-ettes” from their name, Hames wanted to embrace the feminine aspect of the name and “be the suffix.” After trying out a couple of girlfriends on bass, the two decided on Cohen, sacrificing the gender purity of the group for band chemistry. Cohen says, “One of the reasons we do get along so well is that we love the same music — Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, the Beatles.”

After months of rehearsal and songwriting, the Ettes decided to cut their first proper record. They aimed high and far away. They contacted Liam Watson, who had produced Billy Childish, Holly Golightly, and the White Stripes, and arranged to record at his Toe Rag Studios in London. The Ettes financed the trip themselves.

“We wanted to do it and didn’t think about what would happen next,” Hames remembers. In London, the group got to meet their musical idols, Childish and Golightly.

Soon after, the Ettes were able to convince the Sympathy for the Record Industry label to release their debut, Shake the Dust. Though the label is based in SoCal, many of its acts hail from Detroit or, in the case of Jack Yarber’s multiple projects, Memphis. In fact, Falling James Moreland, Courtney Love’s first husband and noted transvestite punk rocker/critic, recently wrote, “Let’s hope we don’t lose this ever-touring group to Detroit or Memphis. The Ettes fit in better with rootsy revisionists like the Detroit Cobras and the Oblivians than they do with most L.A. bands.” He might have good reason to be fearful. The Ettes are indeed looking for a nice place to relocate. According to Hames, the phrase “shake the dust” is about moving on from the past.

One place the Ettes are considering is Asheville, North Carolina. Hames’ folks live there, and it’s also the home of former Memphian Greg Cartwright and his band the Reigning Sound. The Ettes aren’t ashamed to admit their admiration for Cartwright’s music, both the Oblivians (which Cartwright was a member of along with Yarber and Goner Records’ Eric Friedl) and the Reigning Sound. The Ettes have even recorded a cover of the Reigning Sound’s “We Repel Each Other.” Their streamlined, poppier version lacks the raw power and emotional urgency of the original, but it does have a charm of its own.

Hames’ voice, equal parts Ye-Ye girl sweetness and party-gal rasp, is much better suited to Shake the Dust‘s low-key, melancholy closer, “I Wanna Go Home.” It would also seem to be a perfect match for “My Baby Cried All Night Long,” a Nancy Sinatra cover that the Ettes have been working into their live repertoire. Hames, in a stylish baby-doll dress, could easily be Nancy Sinatra’s understudy. The band’s impeccably mod fashion sense is evident not only in their publicity shots but offstage as well. Hames says, “I dress the part every day. People need to understand that it comes from my history as a debutante.”

To give you an idea of how many shows they have played on the recent tour, the Ettes’ upcoming show will be their second in Memphis this year. Even with the relentless touring schedule, Cohen seems more than content in his role as the Jack Tripper of the garage-rock set.

“We are excited about coming back to play,” Cohen says. “Everyone was very energetic in the audience, and we even attended a late-night dance party after the show.”