Tom Cruise was in town. In 1992. He was filming The Firm.
WMC-TV covered the crowds that showed up to see the star.
“No, he was not shopping at the Walmart in Collierville,” said then-reporter Denise DuBois-Taylor. “No, he and Nicole Kidman were not house hunting in Germantown.”
The gem of a clip surfaced recently on YouTube thanks to a Facebook group called “Things That Aren’t in the Memphis Area Anymore.” Long name, but worth the follow if you’re looking for hometown nostalgia.
Memphis Women
On Twitter last week, Big Mek started a “#Memphis Women Thread.” It’s now an endless scroll of photos and videos of women showing their stuff.
Squeak checked in to say, “I didn’t see any other Memphis women posting.” She identified herself as a “Memphis woman.” Then, she showed her credentials.
Posted to Twitter by @mndinmybusiness
Poplar Plaza
Posted to Reddit by etherbeta
Reddit user u/etherbeta shared studies of redesigned Memphis locales last week. Above, a revamped Poplar Plaza would have a movie theater, new restaurants, residences, and an electric vehicle charging lounge that would complement the nearby Exxon.
Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s most dissected play, and arguably the greatest work of literature in the English language — despite the fact that it is set not in England, but in Denmark. The texts the Bard was drawing on were already 400 years old when he was writing at the turn of the 17th century, but the story of Amleth, the Viking prince who seeks revenge after his uncle murders his father and marries his mother, is believed to be much older. The original saga is lost to history, but it probably came from Iceland around 900 CE.
The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers and written by the Icelandic poet and musician Sjón, is on some level an attempt to reconstruct that lost story. At times, you can be forgiven if you think it seems like an attempt to adapt Hamlet as a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. But one thing is for sure: This is the most Viking work of art in the last thousand years or so.
How Viking are we talking? Burley men raise drinking horns to their liege in fire-lit mead halls. Longboats ferry warriors to raid and pillage. Priests of Odin whip berserkers into a murderous frenzy with guttural death metal chants. It’s constantly snowing, but people are half naked anyway. There are literal dogs of war, and they are literally let slip. A dead hero is set adrift on a burning boat. There’s sex in a volcanic hot spring. Nicole Kidman threatens to eat someone’s heart. Björk instructs the hero on how to acquire a magic sword by fighting an undead barrow-wight. We see Yggdrasil the World Tree framed by the Northern Lights. And, of course, valkyries appear to ride the spirits of dead warriors to Valhalla.
This is not the sanitized, horned-helmet-wearing, Marvel comics Thor vision of Viking-hood. This is blood and mud and ice and pagan gods, and, reader, I am here for it.
Björk taking the Viking thing to the next level.
We meet young Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) when his father Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) returns from plundering the English Coast. The fight was hard, and the king sports a nasty sword wound that has him thinking about his mortality. Against the objections of his mother Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), Aurvandil decides to initiate Amleth into manhood, so he can be prepared to take his place on the throne if and when the king dies in battle. The ceremony, in which the father and son ingest a psychedelic tea brewed by the shaman/fool Heimir (a gloriously crazed Willem Dafoe), is the first taste of just how bonkers this movie is going to get.
Turns out, Aurvandil was prescient. As they’re leaving the ceremony, the king is bushwhacked by his brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang), and young Amleth escapes by sea. As he rows away, he chants his new checklist: 1. Avenge father, 2. rescue mother, 3. kill uncle.
Years later, Amleth has grown into the extremely healthy form of Alexander Skarsgard, whose ab muscles ripple from pulling longboat oars. He’s pillaging with a band of berserkers operating in the land of the Kievan Rus, which is now known as Ukraine. There, he meets a seeress (Björk) who tells him Fjölnir almost immediately lost his kingdom and fled to Iceland, where he has set up a new settlement with Gudrún at his side. Ameth stows away on a ship bound for Iceland disguised as a slave, and meets the gloriously named Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Slavic sorceress who pledges to help him seek revenge in return for her freedom.
Alexander Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy plot revenge.
Eggers creates worlds that follow the mythology of their inhabitants while also offering sly comment on said mythology. Like the Puritan patriarch in The Witch, the evil Fjölnir is exposed as an incompetent braggart. When his men discover a group of warriors slain by the rampaging Amleth, they are convinced their “savage” Christian enemies must be behind it, because “their god is a corpse nailed to a tree” — never mind that we’ve just spent the last 90 minutes watching these “civilized” Norsemen rape and pillage everything in sight. Ultimately, everyone is doomed not by their predetermined fates, but by their belief that fate is predetermined.
Eggers is a director with a vision who has been given the kind of budget that lets him explore the outer limits of his talent, and he does not throw away his shot. The Northman is a living, breathing, spitting, farting, blood-spurting trip to cinematic Valhalla.
Sofia Coppola approaches The Beguiled like an scientist preparing an experiment. The source material—a novel that was already adapted into a 1971 film with Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry director Don Siegel—provided her with an isolated community of women to work with. It’s the waning days of the Civil War, and Miss Farnsworth’s School for Young Ladies holds on by a thread in rural Virginia. Miss Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) is left with only a few charges, girls and young women with dead parents and nowhere else to go. The atmosphere is made ominous by the low rumble of dueling artillery over the horizon, and teacher Edwina Morrow (Kristen Dunst) keeps a spyglass lookout for approaching soldiers.
Nicole Kidman in The Beguiled
One day, while foraging for mushrooms, Amy (Oona Laurence) finds instead a wounded Union soldier. Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) caught a leg full of shrapnel before fleeing the battle and finding a tree to die against. Emily helps the Corporal back to the school, where he collapses. Miss Farnsworth decides the Christian thing to do is to show mercy, so they take the soldier into the mansion’s music room to treat his wounds. Jane (Angourie Rice) says he’s a obviously a rapist in waiting and wants to hand him over to the Confederate army, but Alicia (Elle Fanning) thinks he should be allowed to stay. Miss Farnsworth leads the group in a prayer for the Corporal’s “return to health, and early departure.”
But it’s too late. The Corporal lands in the midst of the women like a sex grenade, and the first to catch the shrapnel is Miss Farnsworth herself. The prim and proper woman who makes a living instilling values in young ladies finds herself overcome with lust while washing the naked, unconscious soldier. She recognizes the danger and makes the music room off limits to the girls, which quickly becomes the most-violated rule in the crumbling school.
Colin Farrell puts the moves on Elle Fanning.
Like in The Virgin Suicides and The Bling Ring, Coppola’s subject is a group of women gone feral. As each of her characters sneak into the Corporals’ room for a little conversation and illicit hand-holding, their relationship to the group changes. Each of these scenes also explores how women of different ages relate to men. Miss Farnsworth offers brandy and conversation, while 18-year-old Alicia wordlessly kisses his sleeping lips. Even the youngest girls understand they’re supposed to dress up for the man, but they don’t really know why. Eventually, bodices are (literally) ripped, and jealousy and anger spiral out of control.
In some ways, the escalating tension and subtly shifting allegiances in The Beguiled resembles the paranoid neo-horror of It Comes At Night. Coppola’s strongest points as a director serve her well. She has an incredible eye for composition, and her work here with French cinematographer Phillippe Le Sourd is beautiful and meticulous. Most impressive is the Kubrickian candlelight photography around the school’s tense dinner table.
Coppola is also top notch with actors, and she has a potent pairing with Kidman, nailing the pragmatism and repressed passion of the Southern spinster. Dunst deftly plays against type as the plain, desperate schoolteacher, and Oona Lawrence is outstanding as the budding tween naturalist whose compassion backfires.
Like a scientist, Coppola is controlling the variables of her experiment. A black slave character present in the original film is absent in this version. Taking race out of the equation keeps the focus on the female group dynamics and sexual selection pressures Coppola wants to pick apart, but setting the story in the Civil War makes the absence of racial tension obvious. Would we be less sympathetic to these ladies’ plight if we saw how they treated their slaves? Maybe. Or maybe, as with Marie Antoinette, Coppola wants to make beautiful images from the grand trappings of fading aristocracy without confronting the exploitation that created them. As it is, The Beguiled is a movie with no good guys or bad guys, just people responding to pressures in strange, but understandable, ways.
It’s no secret that there’s a dearth of juicy roles for women over 30 in Hollywood. Given the experienced, talented actresses available and the fact that female led films have done extremely in the box office the last few years, the only reason this inequality persists is down to the biases of the old men in charge.
Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor try to figure out what the hell is going on in Secret In Their Eyes
Unfortunately, the roles Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts get in Secret In Their Eyes may sound juicy on paper, but in practice, they’re not doing anybody any favors. Kidman plays Clare, a Los Angeles district attorney who accessorizes her business suits with clenched jaw and no-nonsense gaze. Roberts plays Jess, a high ranking police detective haunted by the death of her daughter. Their male counterpart is Ray (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is on a leave of absence from his job as the head of security for the New York Mets.
The story takes place in two time frames. We enter in roughly the present, when Ray returns to L.A. After a 13 year absence to tell Clare and Jess he’s had a breakthrough in the cold case of the murder of Jess’ daughter Carolyn (Zoe Graham). Then we flash back to 2002, when Ray, Clare, and Jess were co-workers on the police counterterrorism squad, survieling a mosque populated by dangerous radicals. Carolyn’s body is found in the dumpster behind the mosque, which complicates the circumstances of the investigation, especially when the prime suspect turns out to be an FBI informant.
The film’s bifurcated structure is the most interesting thing about Secret In Their Eyes, but it can’t save the incredibly ham handed script. This is an adaptation of a 2009 Argentine film that won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and the adjustments to the story necessary to transport it from the days of the 1970s military junta to contemporary America render the story largely nonsensical. It’s supposed to be about three good cops whose worldviews are shaken and ethics tested when a horrible crime hits too close to home, but instead it comes off as the story of three cops who are very bad at their jobs, but keep getting promoted anyway. In an inexplicable middle passage where Ray and his old pal Bumpy (Dean Norris, playing off his Breaking Bad character) descend into a buddy cop comedy, the alleged hero of the piece completely blows the investigation by breaking into the suspect’s house without a warrant and stealing his possessions, which are then rendered inadmissible as evidence.
The strangely baseball-obsessed script takes pains to remind us that Kidman’s character is from Philadelphia, but yet she slips in an out of an Aussie accent. Ejiofor seems to be channeling Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. Roberts has one note: bottomless depression, punctuated by fits of lashing out and crying. By the time we got to the first of two—count ‘em, two!—big twist endings, the audience I saw the film with was openly laughing, which I don’t think was the emotional response director Billy Ray was trying to evoke. It’s never a good sign when my notes for a movie include the word “shitshow” with two underlines, but it certainly applies here.
