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Time Warp Drive-In Pays Tribute To Elvis

In a special edition of the Time Warp Drive-In, Memphis auteur Mike McCarthy and Black Lodge Video’s Matthew Martin celebrate Elvis Presely’s film career on the 37th anniversary of his death.

The program kicks off with Jailhouse Rock, Elvis’ third and greatest film appearance. By the time it premiered in 1957, Elvis had already changed popular music forever and cemented his place as the biggest music star in the world. But to Elvis, true immortality meant film. He idolized Marlon Brando, and his performance in Jailhouse Rock owes much to Brando’s sensitive biker warlord in The Wild One. The plot is a paper thin extrapolation of Elvis’ bad boy public image, but it hardly matters. Elvis is at the height of his musical power and raw sexual charisma. The film’s centerpiece is a Busby Berkley style musical number of the title song, but even its antiquated and stylized setting doesn’t take the edge off the song or Elvis’ performance. The sequence has been copied dozens of times and remains an ideal towards which all subsequent music videos aspire to.

Time Warp Drive-In Pays Tribute To Elvis

After a “headlight vigil” is Viva Las Vegas. As Elvis’ film career went on, the quality of his films slowly declined, as he pumped out quick, but profitable, product throughout the 60s. But 1964’s Viva Las Vegas is the exception, primarily for one reason: Ann Margaret. Many of Elvis’ endless parade of love interests were one-note bimbos (Mary Tyler Moore excepted), but Ann Margaret was an exceptionally talented dancer and, if not exactly a great actress, a natural movie star with a personality as big as her halo of fiery red hair. She and Elvis had a torrid affair during and after the shooting of the film, and it shows on the screen big time. Acting or no, it’s clear that these two beautiful people can barely keep their hands off of each other. Add in a classic title song better than most of Elvis’ 60s output and it equaled the biggest grossing film of Elvis’ career.

Next is King Creole. Directed by the legendary Michael Curtiz, whose filmography includes Casablanca. Said to be Elvis’ favorite role, his turn as Danny Fisher, New Orleans street urchin turned caberet singer is certainly his best film performance, rivaling James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause.

Time Warp Drive-In Pays Tribute To Elvis (2)

The evening ends with The King’s 1972 swan song, Elvis On Tour. The concert documentary features performances filmed over four nights in 1972 interspersed with backstage footage and an interview. This is Elvis in full Las Vegas jumpsuit trim. His voice is strong, and his stage presence unmatched among mere humans, but it’s clear that he doesn’t have the same intensity as the man who was swinging from a pole in Jailhouse Rock. But after the extraordinary life he led, you’d be a little blasé about playing coliseums as well. 

The Time Warp Drive In begins at dusk on Saturday, August 16 at the Malco Summer 4 Drive-In. 

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Summer Movie Journal #5

Full Metal Jacket (1987; dir. Stanley Kubrick)—Kubrick is a cable television hypnotist; stop to watch a scene or two, and the next time you check your watch, two hours of your life have vanished. Part of this comes from Kubrick’s distinctive mixture of precision imagery and ambiguous human agents; his shifty films, which often concern the breakdown of orderly systems, always feel like you can eventually figure them out if you could just see them one…more…time. Like The Shining, Full Metal Jacket is a horror film, but it’s more matter-of-fact about the world’s terrible things than its predecessor. Its main subject is the way people like Matthew Modine’s Private Joker and Vincent D’onofrio’s Private Pyle are ground up in the human being lawnmower that is the U.S. military-industrial complex, embodied in the film by R. Lee Ermey’s mad-god drill instructor. Ermey’s florid, obscene litanies of abuse, which he delivers nonstop at maximum volume, coexists uneasily with Kubrick’s tightly composed images of military harmony, including a shot of Marines climbing ropes in the twilight as beautiful as anything in a Miyazaki film. For most viewers, Jacket’s merciless first forty-five minutes overshadow the film’s second half, which takes place in Vietnam and includes a little thing called the Tet Offensive. But it shouldn’t: one look at Animal Mother’s 1000-yard stare ought to keep you locked in. And in the age of CGI, Kubrick’s meticulous craftsmanship stands tall. Just think; they had to set those building on fire during the battle scenes every single day. Grade: A+


Hot Fuzz (2007: dir. Edgar Wright)— Edgar Wright is another filmmaker who stops me in my tracks whenever I’m idly channel-surfing. Hot Fuzz, about a London supercop (Simon Pegg) who thinks something fishy is going on in the small English village where he’s been reassigned, is the only action-comedy anyone needs to see, a triumph of verbal and visual wit more immediately accessible than anything Wright, Pegg and co-star Nick Frost have done so far. But for genre connoisseurs interested in a bit of fun, this pastiche offers endless treasures. Its network of cross-references and allusions are bewildering, edifying, inspirational: the Lethal Weapon theme music, the Silent Rage lookalike who can only say “Yarp”, the Straw Dogs shotgun violence played off as a joke, the casting of The Wicker Man’s Edward Woodward as the town’s security head, all the songs from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, the A-Team like way in which the bad guys aren’t killed. To say nothing of Timothy Dalton as the guiltiest-looking, most shamelessly wicked murder suspect in film history. Grade: A+

A Summer’s Tale (1996; dir. Eric Rohmer)—Although Eric Rohmer’s funny, lovely romance about the romantic adventures of a young man and three women had its long-overdue U.S. theatrical premiere earlier this year, it isn’t coming to Memphis; looks like Kansas City (where it’s currently playing) is as close as it’s going to get. This is a shame, because this is perfect mid-August fare, a chatty couple of hours that records, with grace and equanimity, all the dumb games people play when they’re too young and uncertain to deal with love, sex and commitment. I don’t tend to look to Robert Louis Stevenson for advice about today’s youth, but he’s spot-on about the central dilemma of the clueless dude at the film’s center: “He does not yet know enough of the world and men. His experience is incomplete… He is at the experimental stage; he is not sure how one would feel in certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near trying it as his means permit.” Out of such hesitations and feints are authentic feelings and many painful memories born. Grade: A


Post Tenebras Lux (2012; dir. Carlos Reygadas)—There’s too little to hold onto in Reygadas’ emotional autobiography, for which he won the Best Director award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Its internal logic remains opaque, and its few potent-looking individual vignettes fail to compensate for its many dead spots. I liked the two visits by the devil (I think) and the scene where the guy rips his own head off, but the rest of the imagery and emotions were either hidden or buried. I feel sorta dopey disliking this movie, though. It’s easy to tee off on typical Hollywood product because village-idiot brainlessness is often what it’s selling. It’s tougher to take down something “challenging” or difficult or unconventional. Because these works may require more time and effort for viewers to unpack it mysteries and challenges, you feel like a chump and a simpleton when you finally give up and say, “I don’t get it.” But I don’t get it. Grade: B-


“Friend Like Me,” from Aladdin (1992; dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker)—I didn’t discover Robin Williams’ soul while watching The Fisher King or Good Will Hunting; I discovered it in a Disney cartoon. The connection between creativity and solitude—and the way in which Williams’ manic flights of free-associative fancy frequently exhausted other people whenever he escaped from the prison of his own head—is the subtext of Williams’ Genie’s mantra: “Phenomenal cosmic power, itty-bitty living space.” Nevertheless, Williams’ magical wish-granter is his greatest role, in part because it best embodies the radical notion of the comedian as world-builder. Wonder, joy and generosity in the movies are all too rare, but these things are all present in this gloriously surreal, genially self-indulgent two and a half minute musical number, which still delights me after dozens of viewings. (Favorite moment: the way the Genie leers, “Well, lookie here!” after conjuring up a tiny harem for his new master.) Before bursting into song, the Genie declares “I don’t think you quite realize what you’ve got here”; that purely expository line will assume new shades of meaning and gravity as we continue to grapple with Williams’ huge (and often frustrating) artistic legacy. Grade (musical number only): A+

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“We Are the Best”

“Punk is dead, don’t you know that?”

That’s what the kids in school yell at Bobo (Mira Barkhammer) and Klara (Mira Grosin), the pair of misfit seventh grade girls in director Lukas Moodysson’s We Are The Best. Since the film is set in 1983 Stockholm, Sweden, we, the audience, know that Bobo and Klara are right and their schoolyard taunters are wrong. Punk would die and be reborn many times in the next 30 years. But from the girls’ perspective, sitting in a freshly scrubbed, urban social democracy, surrounded by cookie cutter normals and sneering metalheads, it looks true. But that doesn’t stop them from picking up the punk mantel and doing their self-imposed duty of keeping the music, and the attitude, alive.

The film opens on Bobo’s divorced mother’s 40th birthday party. In true punk fashion, everyone around her is having fun but Bobo, a pouty, plain-looking 14-year-old in frail round glasses whom, everyone notes, has just cut her hair short. She just wants to be left alone in her room to listen to her favorite bands, like Mongo and the Incest Brothers.

Bobo’s bestie Klara, on the other hand, has both parents and a set of brothers and sisters who bicker and argue constantly. Klara has gone a little further down the punk path, already sporting a mohawk and an inherited record collection courtesy of her older brother, Linus (Charlie Falk) a former punk who views his little sister’s rebellion with a combination of wry amusement and loving, not-quite condescension.

We Are the Best’s three terrific, first-time actors.

Linus’ view of the girls most closely resembles Moodysson’s take on the story, which is an adaptation of his wife’s graphic novel memoir Never Goodnight. Barkhammer and Grosin give tremendous performances, especially considering they are both first-time actors. But Moodysson maintains a safe distance, visualizing their world not as they see it, but as we see it looking back from the 21st century. When someone asks Klara what her band’s one song “Hate Sport” is about, she answers “We hate sports, and we want others to hate it as well.” It’s a laugh line, but it’s delivered with the same deadpan Scandinavian earnestness as her answer to the next question, “What is punk about?”

“Standing up for the weak.”

Klara and Bobo’s band starts almost by accident. While building a “nuclear meltdown” sculpture for an art class, they are bullied by a bunch of older boys in a metal band named Iron Fist. But when they discover that Iron Fist has neglected to sign up on the calendar for the youth center practice space, they hijack their practice by claiming to have a band of their own. It’s the first of many off-the-cuff poses that slowly turn into reality for the girls. They’re turned down for the school’s fall talent show, but when they see a talented young guitarist named Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne, another first timer) they decide to recruit her into the band, despite the fact that she is a straight-laced Christian. Hedvig accepts their invitation (“I hate sports too!” she says before teaching them to sing the song in key.), but the culture clash with her devout family is more profound than either Bobo’s or Klara’s. When they attempt to play a song called “Hang God,” Klara calmly explains to Hedvig that “It’s a Christian song. If he didn’t exist, you couldn’t hang him.”

The plot arcs through some familiar territory, as the girls learn to play together in the band, confront their philosophical differences, and fight over a boy in another punk band (whose one song is called “Reagan/Breshnev”) on their way to a climactic appearance at Santa Rock where they once again confront their nemesis Iron Fist. But it’s the details of the journey that matter in this good-natured film. Bobo, Klara, and Hedwig’s story of Sweden’s finest teenage girl punk band will feel universal to everyone who has ever set out to prove that punk won’t die on their watch.

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Film Features Film/TV

I Am Legend: Not Worth the Wait

Attention all fans of 28 Days Later, Children of Men, Twelve Monkeys, The Descent, Signs, The Road Warrior, Night of the Comet, and/or Richard Matheson fiction: Do I have a film for you to avoid: I Am Legend. (Independence Day devotees, your movie is waiting.)

I Am Legend is the long-gestating adaptation of the 1954 Matheson sci-fi/horror novel of the same name. Previously brought to film as Vincent Price’s The Last Man on Earth and Charlton Heston’s The Omega Man, I Am Legend has been linked for years to moviemakers such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ridley Scott, and Michael Bay. Finally, the movie’s out, in the combination of star Will Smith and director Francis Lawrence. It was not worth the wait.

The film opens three years after a genetically engineered measles virus escapes labs and gets into the general population. Everybody on earth is either killed by the virus or by those whom the virus has turned into monsters. The last man on earth: Colonel Robert Neville, a virologist who conveniently is an expert on the sickness. Plus, he’s immune, so that helps. Neville is stranded on Manhattan Island with his dog — last man on earth’s best friend. He spends his days working on a cure to the virus, eating canned goods, and palling around with his pup. He also has to be mindful of New York’s other remaining citizens: the vampire-like, virus-ravaged fiends.

Can just screenwriter Akiva Goldsman go on strike? Goldsman has made a career of making bad movies based on books I’m fond of. Going chronologically backward: I Am Legend, The Da Vinci Code, I, Robot, the two horrible Batman movies, and A Time to Kill. (To be fair, he shares I Am Legend screenwriting co-blame with Mark Protosevich.) Good thing I never read A Beautiful Mind or Practical Magic. Up next for Goldsman: Da Vinci follow-up Angels & Demons. It’ll suck, too.

I Am Legend doesn’t get everything wrong. It opens with a fast and furious deer hunt safari through New York City’s savannah. And Smith isn’t a bad choice for this role. He can act, for one, and he’s a convincing action star.

But Smith can’t escape the film’s shallowness. It’s not a cautionary tale. It has no politics. Its spirituality is as shoddy as its science. It fails its own internal logic. Worst, I Am Legend has no meaningful human element.

Instead, the film is commercialism run roughshod. (But not in a knowing, Dawn of the Dead way.) To maintain his connection with his own humanity, Neville goes shopping. For leisure, Neville hits golf balls off the tail of an SR-71 Blackbird atop an aircraft carrier in New York harbor. It’s a pretty, sweeping, expensive-looking shot. I’d trade it for a quiet scene with Neville making art, playing music, or writing in Washington Square. In a key scene, Neville bonds with someone over a shared love for Shrek — and not a shared sense of tragedy or even hope. Tis the season.

I Am Legend

Opening Friday, December 14th

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Cruel, pretentious ending ruins King creature-feature.

The Mist opens on a dark and stormy night in Castle Rock, Maine, in the home of a book-cover artist (Thomas Jane) whose horror, fantasy, and sci-fi images cover his living room. If you’ve read much Stephen King, you sense the author’s presence even if you haven’t seen the Stephen King’s appendage on the film’s title.

For a while, The Mist, adapted from a novella at the end of his ’80s-era story collection Skeleton Crew, seems like it’s going to be a pretty good King adaptation.

The bad storm wrecks the artist’s house, so father and son head into town to stock up on supplies, getting trapped in a grocery store with an assortment of stock townsfolk while a mist enshrouds the store and rumors swirl of unseen dangers.

An entertaining, low-key cast fills out the broadly drawn collection of refugees — the hot checkout girl, the existentialist bagger, three soldiers from a nearby military base, a Bible-thumping town loon, a couple of rough-edged blue-collar guys, etc.

Into this familiar set-up, King and director Frank Darabont (of prestige King adaptations The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption) conspire on something that’s half monster movie and half nature-of-man talkfest. An octopus-like creature sucks a bloodied Norm the Bag Boy out into the mist. The ensuing in-store conflict pits fundamentalists against rationalists against existentialists.

But, despite that bid for significance, The Mist is at its best as a gee-wow horror/action movie: Pterodactyl-like creatures break through the glass and invade the store, warded off with makeshift weapons (and one revolver) created from store items. Jane’s protagonist leads an expedition through the fog to the drug store next door, which is enshrouded with webbing from a breed of spiders that would have scared away anything from Arachnophobia.

Darabont isn’t satisfied with making a minor pleasure, though, so he turns the film into a major monstrosity, with an ending that made me angrier than anything I saw at the movies this year. I never read The Mist as a kid King fan (one of the few King titles of the era I skipped), but I skimmed the end of the book recently to see if King himself was to blame. He wasn’t.

Unsatisfied with King’s open-ended conclusion, The Mist tacks on an extreme ending (which I won’t give away, though I’m tempted), more worthy of an ironic Eli Roth horror movie than the middling creature-feature The Mist actually is. There’s something smug, pretentious, and self-congratulatory about the utter pessimism and cruelty of the ending. It might have worked in a better, more severe movie, but it angered me here because I didn’t think the movie earned it. Or maybe even because the movie — or at least its actors — actually earned better.

The Mist

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Enchanting

As I write this, my almost-3-year-old daughter is having the bedding in her room changed over to a Disney Princess theme. She’s Disney Princess mad. Apparently, so is every other American girl age 2 and up, judging by the myriad products offered for purchase by the Mouse Factory this holiday season — Cinderella, Snow White, Aurora, Ariel, and a handful of others making up the Disney retail blitzkrieg. I am, quite simply, worn out by Disney Princess sensory overload.

So with that qualification, on to my review of Enchanted, the new animated/live-action Disney film about a princess who gets sent to the real world (our world) by a wicked queen, with a dashing prince following to rescue her. Though I was primed to see it as a cynical cash-in on a popular brand, I’m obliged to report the opposite: Enchanted is an excellent family film that touches upon and updates an iconic cinematic formula without diminishing it. Take that, Cinderella III: A Twist in Time!

Enchanted starts off animated, showing the beautiful Giselle (Amy Adams) pining away in song for a prince with whom she can share true love’s kiss. Jump to Prince Edward (James Marsden), the dashing heir to the Andalusian throne, who hears her song and rushes to her side to complete it with his own lyrics. Once met, they fall immediately in love and get set to marry right away.

Fearing the loss of her power, Edward’s stepmother, the evil Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon), tricks Giselle into a portal that sends her to New York City, where she becomes live-action amid the ugly cacophony of product placement in Times Square. Edward and a chipmunk follow to rescue Giselle, and the Queen’s lackey, Nathaniel (Timothy Spall), follows to foil their efforts. Things get off-formula, though, when Giselle meets and starts falling for Robert (Patrick Dempsey), a single-father divorce lawyer.

In New York, confronted with such prosaic mechanisms as showers and buses, the Disney protagonists turn out to be functional idiots. This is more a mild commentary on the studio’s history of simple-stroked characters than it is an entrée into mean-spirited humor, though. As a postmodern take on cinematic fairy tales, Enchanted recalls the Shrek films, particularly Shrek the Third‘s booty-kickin’ princesses. But where Shrek dripped with sarcasm and irony, Enchanted chooses to entertain with cheerful, positive storytelling. Its beneficence is maybe the film’s greatest strength as a family film. Instead of relying on bodily functions to make the kiddies laugh or smug literary allusions to get to the parents, Enchanted goes old-school: engaging the whole audience, together, with a solid story, character-derived humor, and palatable themes.

In the wonderful 2005 film Junebug, Adams played charming, funny, rustic, and a little naive, creating what seemed like a real person from her script directions. In Enchanted, Adams has to go the opposite direction, this time asked to embody a fictional icon based on the same set of characteristics. Once again, she hangs the moon. With giant, doe eyes and piles of red hair, Adams is perfectly cast. But it’s the spirit she brings that’s so winning.

I haven’t seen Patrick Dempsey acting since 1991’s one-two punch of Run and Mobsters. (I don’t partake in Grey’s Anatomy.) I never thought I’d say this, but Dempsey brings a degree of maturity to his role. His deft application of world-weariness (but wanting to believe) is probably as important in making Enchanted good as Adams’ charming daffiness.

Add original music by the multi-Oscar-winning Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz, traditional 2-D animation methods, and narration by Julie Andrews, and Enchanted fits quite nicely in the Disney canon.

Enchanted

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Tangled up in Dylan lore.

In 1998, Todd Haynes released Velvet Goldmine, a rapturous but prickly ode to glam-rock that referenced genre stars such as David Bowie and Iggy Pop but clung to a fan’s perspective.

He tries something similar with I’m Not There, a pop meditation “inspired by the music & many lives of Bob Dylan” that is less concerned with presenting Dylan’s life in a realistic sense than on ruminating on the character of Dylan as experienced by his most ardent fans.

To do this, Haynes employs six actors — Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, and African-American adolescent Marcus Carl Franklin — to play otherwise unconnected roles (none of them named “Bob Dylan”) that each embody a different facet of Dylan’s protean public persona.

Bale is the early, serious folkie Dylan in his first signs of dissatisfaction with the earnestness of the scene. Ledger is an actor who played lead in a “Dylan” biopic whose real life — in his courtship, marriage, and break-up with a sad-eyed lady of the lowlands played beautifully by Charlotte Gainsbourg — represents the most widely known segment of Dylan’s own domestic life. Whishaw plays a man in an interrogation-style interview who claims to be (Dylan influence) Arthur Rimbaud. Franklin is a boxcar-hopping musician who dubs himself “Woody” after Woody Guthrie and eventually visits the great folksinger (as Dylan did) on his deathbed. Blanchett is a scream as the most iconic of Dylan figures, the messy-haired mid-Sixties rock prophet. And Gere — in a dull recurring segment that threatens to stop the movie dead — actually plays an aging Billy the Kid in a reference to the film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, which Dylan acted in and provided music for.

Through the weaving of these six sections, Haynes touches on reams of Dylan lore, iconography, and soundbites — his electric folk-festival debut, being called “Judas” in London, his relationship with Joan Baez, his motorcycle accident, his chauvinism, his embrace of Christianity, etc. The Blanchett scenes are the strongest, filmed in black-and-white to make them not just a reference to that period of Dylan’s career but to the way it’s been perceived through the lens of D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back.

The result is probably the most personal and most ambitious musical “biopic” ever attempted. For remotely obsessive Dylan fans, it’s endlessly compelling, if not always successful. For more casual fans, it’s likely to be entirely inexplicable.

I’m Not There

Opens Wednesday, November 21st

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On the Hunt

Early in No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen’s acclaimed adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) puts his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) on a bus to send her away from potential violence. Moss has recently made off with a satchel of cash left over from a drug deal gone bad, and he warns his wife that she isn’t used to the kind of trouble they may be facing. Carla Jean’s response: “I’m used to lots of things — I worked at Wal-Mart.”

In print, this exchange is typical Coens — a telegraphed laugh-line delivered for the audience at the expense of the character. But, on film, it doesn’t play that way. Macdonald withholds the effect. She says the line but in a flat murmur, like she’s hoping no one will notice. She seems to be protecting her character from a mistake in the script. She also saves the Coens from perhaps the only potentially bad moment in what is otherwise their best film.

The Coens are working with an entirely new group of actors here after utilizing an extended company of familiar faces for most of their career. The result is that no one acts like they’re in a Coen Brothers movie. Each actor stays true to character rather than pandering to the perceived superiority of the audience, and the Coens themselves follow suit (or perhaps lead the way), overcoming the smug, cold snarkiness that animates most of their work (or ruins it, depending on your perspective). The result is the duo’s most measured film ever, a tense, virtuoso thriller where violence is undercut by legitimate sadness.

Intricately designed and richly photographed by Roger Deakins, the film is basically a three-way chase film. It’s set in 1980, in a West in which the wide-open landscapes are more likely to be a home to drug trafficking than cattle drives. The plot is set in motion when Moss, while hunting in the West Texas prairies, comes upon the aftermath of a massacre, a botched exchange with heroin and cash left behind amid unspeakable carnage — even a dog has been shot.

Moss leaves the dope but takes the cash and is soon being hunted by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a psychopathic hitman trailing the money. Following behind them both is Sheriff Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a third-generation lawman troubled by the shifting nature of the crime he’s forced to confront.

All three leads are terrific in roles that are relatively solitary and less talky than the Coen norm. Brolin is vivid as a man on the run, about to find out if he’s as capable as he thinks he is. Bardem makes for one of the most compelling and frightening screen villains ever, a calm, implacable killer whose glazed hint of a grin and Prince Valiant hairdo make him an unsettling presence even before he acts. And Jones plays effectively to type as a tart, unsentimental observer of a world gone mad.

No Country for Old Men is a strikingly violent film: Chigurh is introduced in the process of being apprehended, soon strangling the arresting officer with his handcuffs, turning a small-town police-station floor into a Jackson Pollock of blood and scuff marks. Soon after, the Coens film a gripping scene where a pit bull charges across a shallow river after Moss, only to meet her doom. The novel yet realistic staging of these moments of violence is enhanced by terrific thriller mechanics involving the hunt for Moss and his hiding of the purloined loot. But most impressive is the discipline that the Coens show in eliding Chigurh’s killings as the film develops.

Like any other Coen movie, No Country for Old Men is more about their cultural source material (McCarthy’s novel, film thrillers from ’40s noir to Sam Peckinpah) than about real life. But here, unlike most of their work, they treat their influences right. It’s Blood Simple sans bullshit. As a lean, self-contained thriller about a human monster, it lies somewhere between the pure poetry of The Night of the Hunter and the grim waking nightmare of (the original) Cape Fear. And it’s more worthy of those comparisons than any modern movie I can think of.

No Country for Old Men

Opens Wednesday, November 21st

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All the Town’s a Stage

An average day on the job for Martin Lane seems like anything but Hollywood glamour. He finds Porto-Johns, picks up trash, and figures out where an entire cast and crew of a movie are going to eat.

“It really sucks sometimes,” Lane says. “I’m the first person there and the last to leave. If they shoot for 12 hours, I’m there for 16.”

Lane is the location manager for Nothing But the Truth, the feature-length movie starring Kate Beckinsale, Alan Alda, and Matt Dillon that has been shooting in Memphis since early October.

As a location manager, Lane works with the Memphis and Shelby County Film and Television Commission, but Lane might not even have the job if it weren’t for the 2006 Tennessee Visual Content Act.

The legislation offers tax incentives to both in- and out-of-state groups to produce films in Tennessee, and Nothing But the Truth is the first film to take advantage of these incentives.

For other movies recently shot in Memphis, the film commission had to create local incentive packages. With 2004’s Walk the Line, “we had to pull together every incentive we could find on a local level,” says deputy film commissioner Sharon Fox O’Guin. “We got that movie by the skin of our teeth.”

Locally, the number of potential productions is up, and Nothing But the Truth executive producer James Spies opened an office in Nashville.

“All this shows that it makes economic sense [to film companies], not only creative sense,” O’Guin says.

On location, Lane sees what kind of difference a film can make to local businesses.

A film set requires dozens of trained and experienced artisans, and, according to Lane, 50 percent of the crew for Nothing But the Truth came from outside the city. Fortunately, one of the provisions in Tennessee’s new incentives is an on-the-job training program to expand the local crew base.

“Part of the incentives are based on how much local business the project uses: laborers, vendors, and rental services,” Lane explains.

With Memphis businesses adapting to the new industry, film shoots may become more than an occasional occurrence. And no doubt, Lane will still be cleaning up afterward.

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Christmas in Thailand? Win a Part in Oliver Stone’s New Movie.

Winsome Sinclair & Associates will hold a casting call Saturday, November 17th in Memphis for “featured extra” roles for the new Oliver Stone movie, Pinkville.

Stone will be shooting on -location in Thailand starting December 26, for six weeks. Saturday’s open casting call will be held from 1-6 p.m. at the FedExForum.

Sinclair is seeking Caucasian, African-American and Latino males between the ages of 20-50 to play soldiers. Production will cover travel, room and board, per diem, and pay.

Those interested should bring a recent headshot/snapshot and a passport that doesn’t expire for at least the next six months. The office of Congressman Steve Cohen will expedite passport processing to meet travel deadlines for all those cast who are not already in possession of a passport with the proper expiration date.

Attendees should be prepared to be taped in order to “show personality” and even “sing a song such as Happy Birthday.” Those cast will be playing soldiers in the Viet Nam War and would leave for Thailand December 7th, for six weeks of filming.

Christmas in Thailand anyone?