If you've ever wanted to know what it felt like to push Tom Holland out of an airplane, Uncharted is the film for you!
The Super Bowl is over (who won again?), and you’re looking to get out of the house and catch a flick. You’ve got a lot of variety to choose from in Memphis theaters this weekend.
The big debut is Uncharted, a $120 million adaptation of the hit video game series starring Mark Wahlberg and the spider-guy who is arguably the biggest movie star in the world right now, Tom Holland. Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer’s film is an origin story for Uncharted‘s fortune hunter Nathan Drake, and an action-adventure in the tradition of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Tomb Raider. Judging from the trailer, you’ll believe 15th-century caravels can fly!
The other new release this weekend is Dog, starring Channing Tatum as a PTSD’d vet of the War on Terror who gets a simple assignment: Drive a decorated war vet to their partner’s funeral. What seems like a milk run turns into a nightmare when the passenger turns out to be a total bitch.
But now, the real reason I’ve called you all together here on Al Gore’s interwebs: One of you is a MURDERER! Well, not really (But maybe? Who knows?), but that’s what Agatha Christie’s fastidious detective Hercule Poirot says in Death on the Nile. Kenneth Branagh plays Poirot and directs an all-star cast, including Annette Bening, Russell Brand, and a champagne-swilling Gal Gadot, in this adaptation of Christie’s quintessential detective mystery.
If that’s not enough Kenneth Branagh for you (and really, can anyone have enough Branagh in their life?), Belfast, his black-and-white, semi-memoir of growing up in Ireland during the Troubles is still at Malco Ridgeway. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Dame Judi Dench.
If you’re looking for a total disaster, Roland Emmerich has got you covered with Moonfall. Realism has never been his strong suit, nor has logic or taste or respect for basic norms of filmmaking, and this one is no exception. You’ll believe the moon can’t fly!
And finally, if you can’t believe a boat can fly, or that a dog can earn a purple heart (spoiler alert: they can), or that Kenneth Branagh is interesting, or literally anything about Moonfall, maybe you’ll believe that extremely hot person Jennifer Lopez can be hot for comedic sad-sack Owen Wilson. If that’s the case, then set sail for rom-com island with Marry Me.
Editorial meeting: Anjelica Bette Fellini, Bill Murray, and Elisabeth Moss in The French Dispatch.
Mention director Wes Anderson, and eventually someone will say he’s “twee.” What does that mean, exactly? The Merriam-Webster definition of “twee” is “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.” The word itself is thought to come from the way a small child pronounces “sweet.” Anderson’s films, which began with Bottle Rocket in 1996, were sort of retroactively lumped into a poptimist mini-movement that arguably began with a 2005 Pitchfork article titled “Twee As Fuck.”
But I’ve never thought of Anderson as particularly twee in the way, say, Shirley Temple was twee. Yes, he’s meticulous in his visuals, and childhood has been a recurring subject for him. You can tell he’s someone who has cultivated what the Buddhists call “the beginner’s mind,” staying in touch with the awe of youth most people lose as they grow older. But there has always been a darkness underneath the curated surface of his films. The Royal Tenenbaums is about a family trying to deal with the aftermath of growing up with an abusive drunk father. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is about failing to deal with failure. At the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the hero M. Gustav is summarily executed by Nazis, and the narrator Zero’s wife and child die in a flu epidemic. Moonrise Kingdom is … okay, I’ll give you Moonrise Kingdom. But it’s also a major fan favorite, and one of the director’s biggest financial successes.
Anderson’s latest film is The French Dispatch. I’m going to go ahead and cop to being biased toward this one, because it’s about magazine writers, and that’s what I am. (Read me in the pages of Memphis magazine!) Befitting the eclecticism that is the magazine form’s bread and butter, it’s an anthology movie — an exceedingly rare bird these days. It begins with the death of publisher Arthur Howitzer Jr. (a magisterial Bill Murray), whose will specified that his magazine, whose name is the film’s full title, The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (okay, that’s pretty twee) would shutter after one final issue which re-runs the best stories from its long history. First, we get Owen Wilson narrating a cycling tour of the fictional French city of Ennui, which lies on the Blasé river, because of course it does.
Tilda Swinton, Lois Smith, Adrien Brody, Henry Winkler, Bob Balaban, Léa Seydoux, and a whole bunch of other people.
Then, Tilda Swinton delivers an art history lecture on the origin of the French Splatter-School Action Group. The wild painters were inspired by Moses Rosenthaler (an absolutely brilliant Benicio Del Toro), an insane, violent felon who takes up painting to pass the time during his 30-year prison sentence. His first masterpiece, a nude portrait of Simone (Léa Seydoux), a prison guard who becomes his lover and muse, is discovered by Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody), an art dealer imprisoned for tax evasion.
Lyna Khoudri, Frances McDormand, and Timothée Chalamet on the barricades.
In “Revisions to a Manifesto” Frances McDormand plays journalist Lucinda Krementz, who abandons neutrality by having an affair with student revolutionary leader Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) of the 1968 “chessboard revolution.” Due to the students’ lack of demands — beyond unlimited access to the girls’ dorm — Krementz drafts the revolutionary manifesto herself.
Jeffery Wright working on deadline.
“The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” is the least coherent episode, but it features a killer James Baldwin imitation by Jeffery Wright as Roebuck, a writer whose assignment to do a profile on chef/gendarme Lt. Nescaffier (Stephen Park) spirals off into a tale of kidnapping and murder, with very little actual food content.
“Twee” implies closed off, hermetically sealed, and precious. The French Dispatch is anything but claustrophobic, even in the scenes set in an actual prison. This is Anderson’s most expansive and generous work, teeming with life in all directions. Heavy hitters like Willem Dafoe, Griffin Dunne, Christoph Waltz, Elisabeth Moss, and the unexpectedly dynamic duo of Henry Winkler and Bob Balaban appear for only seconds at a time. The dizzying array of faces flashing across the screen led me to count the acting credits on IMDB. I gave up at 300. While there are some great shots of the actual French countryside, most of the action takes place on soundstages. Nobody does set design like Anderson, and all kinds of wonders are on display, from tiny dioramas to livable multi-story cross sections.
The French Dispatch is a love letter to the golden age of magazine journalism, and it made me think I was born in the wrong era. But the underlying theme is revolution in all its forms, from the students manning the barricades to new artistic movements springing from a prison riot. Maybe the critics are right, and all this stylized attention to detail designed for aesthetic shock and awe really is “twee,” but if so, it’s twee AF.
Earlier this year, Knox Shelton became executive director of Indie Memphis after the departure of former director Ryan Watt. Preparations for the 24th edition of the film festival, which will run from October 20-25, are well underway, but Shelton took a few hours out of his busy schedule to watch a movie he’s never seen before: Inherent Vice (2014, available at Black Lodge). Our conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
Chris McCoy: What do you know about Inherent Vice?
Knox Shelton: I know that it is a film by Paul Thomas Anderson, adapted from a novel by Thomas Pynchon, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, a ton of other pretty well-known actors and actresses.
CM: Why did you pick this movie?
KS: One, it’s been on my watch list for a really long time. I’ve probably not watched it for the same reason that I’ve owned a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow for I don’t know for how many years, but I’ve never read it. And I told myself that I would read the Pynchon novel before watching the movie, and that’s probably not going to happen. So, it’s time to just watch this movie. And we’ve got the festival upcoming, so I was trying to find some great connections there. One of our films this year, C’mon C’mon, is starring Joaquin Phoenix, so I thought this would be a great film to watch.
150 minutes later…
CM: OK! Knox Shelton, you are now someone who has seen Inherent Vice. What did you think?
KS: I thought it was really good. It was really funny, which I don’t think I expected going into a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, given his most recent films. It’s definitely a movie, I think, to watch a few more times, to let it all sink in. I was immediately drawn into loving the dynamics between Bigfoot and Sportello. They were a really fun little pair.
CM: I have watched it a whole bunch of times and I see new stuff in it every time. Paul Thomas Anderson took the novel and did the whole thing in a screenplay format, and then edited it down into this movie. What really struck me this time was that this is Pynchon doing hard-boiled detective language. If you think about it, The Big Sleep and stuff like that has very flowery dialogue. But you don’t think of it as flowery, ’cause it’s being growled by Humphrey Bogart. That’s what I was really listening to this time, the musicality of the dialogue — really throughout the whole thing. Everybody kind of talks alike, but it’s just so beautiful that you don’t care.
KS: You’ve got this Big Lebowski element, where you’ve got the stoner detective. But the dialogue is so much more elevated, and of course other elements of the film, I think, are a little more elevated too. It’s really artistic and delightful throughout.
CM: I think you’re right that there is a straight line from The Big Lebowski to this movie. When this movie came out, a lot of people did not get it. I had a conversation with Craig Brewer where I was like, “Oh my God, have you seen this?” And he was just like, “Meh.” I fell in love with it immediately. But he was like, “People are whispering. I can’t understand what’s going on. They’re talking about characters who are never seen on the screen.” Well, yeah! But it really works for me. I have a real emotional attachment, I guess, to this movie.
Owen Wilson as Coy and Joaquin Phoenix as “Doc” Sportello
CM: So, you’re a head of a film festival now. How do you sell something like this to a festival crowd? It’s kind of an “eat your vegetables” thing for some people. But on the other hand, like you said, you were surprised that it was funny.
KS: That’s a good question. I think I’d want to highlight that it was a funny and entertaining movie. You also have to be upfront about it too, right? ‘Cause I think you can tell someone it’s entertaining, but they’re probably not expecting two and a half hours. Paul Thomas Anderson’s gotten really good at the slow burn, and this to me was a slow burn, but it was funny, and you still get a little bit of that reward at the end that you get with a lot of his films.
CM: You’re right, it’s got a great ending, an emotional wrap up like Boogie Nights. Are you generally a PTA fan?
KS: Yeah, generally. Ahead of this, I re-watched The Master. My wife had not seen it, so we watched that this past weekend. I hadn’t seen this or Punch-Drunk Love.
CM: A lot of people love that movie, but I am not a fan.
Joaquin Phoenix as private investigator “Doc” Sportello.
CM: What did you think about Joaquin Phoenix?
KS: I liked Joaquin Phoenix. I think he’s done some great stuff. In The Master, his performance really stuck out to me. That was, I think, a very physical performance. Not to move away from Joaquin, but to go back to this: it’s a period piece, but it’s not obsessed with being a period piece. You feel it in the dialogue, with Manson, paranoia…
CM: The Mansonoid Conspiracy!
KS: This came out around the same time as American Hustle, which is just obsessed with being a period piece. This has none of that feel at all, which I think is great and feels very natural, very contemporary.
CM: There is a lot of subtext about the end of the sixties, and the corruption of the counterculture. Sportello is a total creature of the sixties counterculture, a hippie to the bone. He’s shocked when Shasta shows up, wearing what he calls “flatland gear.” It looks like it’s about a real estate scam, when it starts. That’s basically Chinatown, you know? Then it sort of wanders off from there. Did you feel like you could follow the plot?
KS: Yeah, reasonably so.
CM: That’s good, because I think to a lot of people, it seems like gibberish.
KS: I feel like I could capture it. Maybe I’m being overconfident. That’s definitely why I said I need to rewatch it. I got the commercialization of the counterculture, and especially the real estate part of it. I was not real clear on how we got to Adrian Prussia.
CM: That’s a big plot hole that they hang a lampshade on. The narrator Sortilége says something like “he threw himself onto the karmic wheel.” He’s the guy I haven’t checked out yet. So it’s a very loose connection. But then it turns out to be the key to the whole thing. You know, the basic film noir structure is pretty simple: The detective just goes and bounces off one person after another until he solves the crime. Or not.
Joaqin Phoenix as “Doc” Sportello and Josh Brolin as “Bigfoot” Bjornsen.
KS: There’s something with Paul Thomas Anderson and male friendships, and it’s in this movie, too. There’s something kind of fun and sweet about it. Sportello and Bigfoot have these dynamics that are established in our society all around us. You’ve got Doc, the hippie, and Bigfoot this sort-of Republican, super buttoned-up man. Yet they’re able to understand each other on a deeper level than just sort of, “Hey, we’re both detectives.” There’s something very sweet about that connection.
CM: Turns out when Sportello finds out that Adrian Prussia killed Bigfoot’s partner for the Golden Fang, he’s like, “Oh my God! I understand this guy now!” He has empathy for him, you know? Then there’s Benicio del Toro, the lawyer, which is another conflicted male friendship. “Clients pay me, Doc. Clients pay me.”
Benicio del Toro and Joaquin Phoenix.
Lemme ask you: Sortilége, the narrator. Do you think she’s a real person?
KS: I mean, no. It’s interesting. He’s using Joanna Newsome, who’s got probably the most otherworldly voice I could imagine, and using her for this character that kind of just floats in and out, and sometimes she doesn’t even have a body. Until you asked the question, I didn’t think about it, though.
CM: Seriously, I had watched it a couple of times until I realized, she’s not actually a person, she’s just in his mind.
KS: Wait, there’s a scene when they’re in the car together, towards the beginning, where she just kind of fades away.
CM: You see them in the car, then the angle reverses, and she’s gone. She’s his internal monologue. And she also fills that film noir voiceover role. You know, “That’s me, floating dead in the pool …”
Joanna Newsome as Sortilége, Phoenix, and Katherine Waterson as Shasta
KS: It’s a very film-y movie without being overly film-y. I think of Boogie Nights, where the opening scene has a very Spielberg feel, like he’s like paying direct homage. He doesn’t do that here. It feels natural.
CM: The cinematography is incredible.
KS: Yeah, all the blues and yellows. I keep thinking of that opening and closing. It’s not quite the closing shot, but the ocean in between those two buildings, it’s a beautiful, beautiful start to a movie. It’s a really gorgeous, gorgeous film. And I heard y’all kind of react to it, at the end when he’s driving with Shasta, and the lights are coming in, right in his eyes. It’s got this sort of dream-like light. It’s almost like they’re floating in the air.
CM: It’s full of these weird dualities, and fascists lurking in the background, like the Jewish builder who hangs around with Nazis. And the bit, “Is that a swastika?” “No, that’s a Hindu symbol of luck.” Nah, it’s a swastika tattooed on that guy’s face!
KS: It goes back to what I was saying about Sportello and Bigfoot — the more liberal hippie Sportello and the very conservative, super buttoned-up cop who were able to get along.
CM: And the Black Panther who comes in and tries to hire Sportello to find out who killed his Aryan Brotherhood friend.
Joaquin Phoenix and Michael K. Williams
KS: And rest and peace to Michael K. Williams. I did not know he was in this movie. He just passed away.
CM: I didn’t realize that was him! I mean, seriously, the cast is amazing.
KS: Oh yeah. Maya Rudolph is in like, what, two scenes maybe? She’s just the receptionist!
Maya Rudolph’s (center) cameo in Inherent Vice.
CM: One of the things I like about film noir, and you see it in this movie, too, is that everybody’s playing a game against everybody else, and everybody’s a rational player. Everybody’s looking two or three moves ahead, which allows the dialogue to be very subtle because everybody’s anticipating each other’s moves. That’s one of the things that appeals to me about noir. Everybody’s smart and savvy. But real life is not like that at all. People are stupid. If you expect rational actors, it’ll mess you up. I’m very distrustful of people.
KS: And that’s on steroids in this with all the paranoia that he’s already feeling from the pot.
Coy’s (Owen Wilson) surf band’s pizza party becomes The Last Supper.
CM: Sportello doesn’t actually solve anything! He gives the dope back to the Fang and Shasta just comes back on her own.
KS: He helps out Coy, which seems like the most insignificant of all the connections that are made. And you’re like, “Wait, so the end prize is that he gets to go home to his wife and kids? Like, okay, great.”
CM: Maybe that’s what’s challenging about it: This movie’s not holding your hand. It presents all the information, but you gotta put the work in. And to bring us back around to Indie Memphis, maybe that’s what you want out of festival movies. It’s not just passive viewing. Right?
KS: No, absolutely not. I think one of the things that we find really important is that the festival is finding films that do a good job at that in such an entertaining way — this is a really good example — and then making sure that there is a conversation, because films like this deserve a conversation like we’re having here. Whether that be from our local filmmakers, whether that be from national films, they all deserve a really thoughtful conversation. That’s what the festival is really all about — being able to celebrate creative and artistic endeavor and give it the honor that the work deserves through thoughtful conversation and celebrating the artist.
Every culture needs a god of mischief. For many Native Americans, it was Coyote. In West Africa, it was Anansi. For the Norse, it was Loki.
Most trickster gods have no motivation beyond spreading chaos. They are, as they say on the internet, in it for the lulz. Loki was a little different. He had an agenda. To prevent him from seizing power, the gods of Valhalla imprisoned him — order symbolically controlling chaos. But one day, he will escape his bounds, and bring about ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, and the destruction of creation. Chaos, in other words, will ultimately win.
When Stan Lee introduced a superhero based on the Norse god Thor, making a version of Loki to be his arch-enemy was a no-brainer. Played by Tom Hiddleston in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is the version most people know. And now, to feed the gaping maw of streaming content of Disney+, Loki the villain has his own series.
Loki begins, as all things must, with Avengers: Endgame. During the hopelessly convoluted time travel plot/MCU clip show the Avengers concocted to reverse Thanos’ snap heard ‘round the universe, they traveled back to the events of the first Avengers film, where a chaotic mix-up briefly left Loki in possession of the MacGuffin de jour, the cosmically powerful Tesseract. But when he tries to teleport away from the fracas to use his new magical artifact to take over Asgard, he finds himself instead in the clutches of a mysteriously powerful organization called the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Instead of producing plentiful, cheap, low-carbon power from nuclear, hydroelectric, and solar, like the TVA we all know and tolerate should be doing, this TVA is tasked with keeping the multiverse simple and understandable by stamping out variations from the One Sacred Timeline. Putting a powerful magic item in the hands of a trickster god certainly qualifies as a disruptive event.
Loki is used to throwing his magical weight around, but the TVA’s privileged place in the multiverse means it makes its own rules. Magic doesn’t work, but time travel sure does, and they weaponize it to neutralize Loki. Existing outside of time, they’ve seen it all before, and will see it all again.
In the pilot, much is made of the TVA’s ’70s retro aesthetic. Instead of charismatic gods and heroes, they’re a bunch of bureaucrats doing a job. When Loki appears before Judge Ravona Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), she is on the road to sentencing him to whatever the multiverse equivalent of the death penalty is until Special Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) intervenes. He’s hunting a powerful variant force threatening to tear the multiverse a new charged vacuum emboitment, and it takes a trickster to catch a trickster.
Hiddleston’s Loki has always been one of the best actors in the MCU, providing a little lightness to Thor’s ponderous proceedings, until Taika Waititi let Chris Hemsworth’s comic hair down in Raganarok. Under the direction of Kate Heron, he is predictably charismatic. Wilson unexpectedly turns out to be a great deadpan foil to Hiddleston, and the pair’s chemistry promises to propel Loki to series length.
Written by Rick and Morty alum Michael Waldron, Loki looks to take the MCU squarely into Doctor Who territory of multidimensional madness. If the team can sustain the energy of the pilot, it might be a time trip worth taking.
