Tag: Little Men

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2016: The Year In Film

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.

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Film Features Film/TV

Little Men

Little Men proves Ira Sachs directs actors better than almost anyone else working in film today. Sachs doesn’t rehearse his actors before they come onto the set, but that doesn’t imply a lack of preparation on his part. The first step in getting career-best performances from people like John Lithgow and Alfred Molina is a spot-on instinct for casting. For example, when preparing for 2014’s Love Is Strange, he discovered that Lithgow and Molina were old friends, and he knew that even though both actors are straight, they would be perfect to play the long-committed gay couple whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they are finally able to marry. Little Men, which finishes a trilogy of Sachs films about male relationships that began with 2012’s Keep the Lights On, starts off with a strong foundation of perfect casting from top to bottom. The lead duo are Theo Taplitz as Jake Jardine, the shy, 13-year-old whose parents’ move from Manhattan begins the story; and Michael Barbieri as Tony Calvelli, the outgoing, first-generation Brooklynite who immediately recognizes a kindred spirit.

Jake’s dad Brian is played by Greg Kinnear, from whom Sachs wrings an unexpected depth of emotion. Brian is an actor whose father Max dies, leaving him and his sister Audrey (Talia Balsam) the building in Brooklyn where he lived. The building comes with a spacious apartment and a single tenant, a dress store owned by Leonor Calvelli (Paulina García). When Max bought the house, his Brooklyn neighborhood was quiet, working class, and not very desirable. By the time the Jardine family moves in, it’s in the midst of a real estate boom, pushing the average rents on the street five times higher than what Max was charging Leonor.

Sachs has been recognized as perhaps the greatest queer filmmaker of his generation, but there has always been an underlying class consciousness in his work. Little Men brings those concerns to the forefront. Jake and Michael quickly become best friends, but there’s no suggestion of romantic attraction between the two teens. Tony clearly likes girls, and one of his best scenes involves his getting his first taste of rejection when the girl he’s crushing on informs him she’s into older guys. After giving a look like he’s been hit in the stomach with a sledgehammer, Tony gathers himself up and says, “Thank you for your honesty”—which, not coincidentally, was the title of the retrospective series New York’s Museum of Modern Art ran in Sachs’ honor this summer.

Greg Kinnear (left) and Talia Balsam deliver acting gold in Ira Sachs’ Little Men.

Jake and Tony bring out the best in each other. Jake begins the film avoiding eye contact with his public school classmates and ends with a developed set of social skills. Tony takes Jake’s commitment to his drawings and discipline in schoolwork, and the aspiring actor flourishes, as seen in a blistering scene in an acting class run by Mauricio Bustamante. But as the two only children grow closer, raw economics conspire to pull them apart. Brian’s acting career is going nowhere fast, and his sister Audrey insists on raising Leonor’s rent to levels the store can’t sustain. Jake and Tony’s doomed friendship becomes a metaphor for the vanishing multiethnic, economically varied community in Brooklyn that inspired Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Sachs’ and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias’ ability to imbue a simple story about a couple of tween boys bonding over video games with such depth of subtext is breathtaking. Even the way they get into and out of scenes brings unexpected joy. Sachs and cinematographer Óscar Durán’s camera is always in exactly the right place, never sacrificing clarity even as the framing and staging veers wildly unconventional.

Sachs says Little Men was inspired in part by his experiences as a longtime member of the Memphis Children’s Theatre, and it’s clear that his actors are at the center of everything he does. García is absolutely brilliant as Leonor, a tough but kind woman fighting for her livelihood while trying to do what’s best for her son. Molina makes a cameo as Leonor’s lawyer, and even his minor turn is brilliant. Kinnear delivers the sneakiest performance of the film, surrounded by loving family, but also alone, uncertain about his action, and ultimately denied any sort of lasting satisfaction. It may not rise to the emotional highs of Love Is Strange, but Little Men is a beautiful, complex work that will stay with you long after the credits roll.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis Announces First Crop of Movies for 2016 Festival

A documentary about a controversial chapter of Memphis history, a coming-of-age drama by one of Memphis’ favorite sons and a look back at a seminal Bluff City work by Hollywood’s hottest writer will be the centerpieces of the 2016 Indie Memphis Film Festival. 

Indie Memphis released this video today to reveal the first crop of the160 films that will screen at the weeklong festival in November. 

Indie Memphis Announces First Crop of Movies for 2016 Festival

The Invaders

The opening night film will be The Invaders, a documentary by director Prichard Smith, writer J. B. Horrell (who is better known as the Memphis musician behind Ex-Cult and Aquarian Blood), and executive producer Craig Brewer. The film traces the history of Memphis’ indigenous black power group of the 1960s, The Invaders. Contemporaries of the Black Panthers, The Invaders became infamous during the aftermath of the 1968 Sanitation Workers Strike. The film tells the story from their perspective, shedding new light on the events leading up to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Full disclosure: This columnist consulted on the film) 

Little Men

Director Ira Sachs, a Memphis native who lives in New York City, has been garnering acclaim for his new film Little Men, which will premiere at Indie Memphis before beginning its run at the Malco Ridgeway. Sachs, who recently had a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, will be on hand to introduce the film and answer questions from the audience. 

Free In Deed

Director Jake Mahaffy’s Free In Deed, shot in Memphis in 2014, is based on a true life story of faith healing gone wrong. It premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival and has garnered international acclaim from Europe to Australia. 

The People vs. Larry Flynt

20 years ago this summer, The People vs. Larry Flynt shot here in Memphis. Directed by Milos Foreman, the film was the brainchild of screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who scored this year’s biggest television hit with The People vs. OJ Simpson. Karaszewski will return to Memphis for the twentieth anniversary screening of his epic tale of the Hustler publisher’s visit to the Supreme Court. 

Kallen Esperian: Vissi d’arté

The closing night of the festival will be director Steve Ross’ locally produced documentary profile of the Memphis opera singer Kallen Esperian: Vissi d’arte’. The film premiered with a pair of sold-out shows earlier this year, and the closing night gala will give more Memphians an opportunity to see this remarkable work. 

This year’s festival, sponsored by Duncan Williams runs from November 1-7. Tickets are now on sale at the Indie Memphis web site.