Tag: Paul McCartney

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing Sept. 27-Oct. 3

Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum in Megalopolis (Courtesy Lionsgate)

There’s an embarrassment of riches in movie theaters this rainy weekend. Let’s get right to them.

Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola, legendary director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, worked on the idea for an epic story inspired by the history of the Roman Empire, but set in New York City, since the 1980s. Frustrated by the conservatism of the Hollywood machine which couldn’t understand his vision, at age 80, he sold his wineries in Sonoma County, California, and spent $120 million of his own money to make it himself. An all-star cast flocked to his side to be a part of the great project: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Talia Shire, Laurence Fishburne, Nathalie Emmanuel, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and Aubrey Plaza, who plays a TV host named Wow Platinum. The people who have seen the film seem to either love it or hate it. Check out the spread of reviews on Google, which is like nothing I’ve ever seen:

I’ll let you know my opinion in next week’s issue. Meanwhile, here’s the trailer.

My Old Ass

Speaking of Aburey Plaza, she also co-stars in this very different film from writer/director Megan Park. It’s Elliot’s (Missy Stella) 18th birthday, and she’s ambivalent about leaving home for college. When her friends give her some psychedelic mushrooms, she sees her future self, played by Plaza, who tells her what it’s going to be like to be her for the next couple of decades — and also to avoid a guy named Chad (Percy Hynes White).

The Wild Robot

Dreamworks Animation’s latest is by Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon animator Chris Sanders. Lupita Nyong’o voices ROZZUM, a robot who washes up on a tropical island with no memory of how it got there. Sanders’ film is based on a beloved children’s book by author Peter Brown.

Paul McCartney and Wings: One Hand Clapping

In 1974, Band on the Run was the biggest album in the world. Filmmaker David Litchfield joined Paul McCartney and his band at Abby Road Studios for four days to shoot them rehearsing for their upcoming tour. The completed film failed to sell, and sat on a shelf for decades. Its 4K remaster finally saw the light of day, and now it’s getting rave reviews.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Beatles: Get Back

Get Back captures the intimate makings of the Fab Four’s last album together.

I was 15 the first time I played with a real rock-and-roll band. The first song we learned was “Get Back” from The Beatles’ final released album Let It Be. We started with that one because it was easy — or at least it sounded easy. That’s when I learned that great rock music is deceptively simple. It wasn’t hard to hit the notes. What was hard was hitting them at exactly the right time, with exactly the right feel. We must have jammed on “Get Back” for an hour trying to get it to sound right, which of course we never did. 

I went on to play in rock bands for 30 years. In college, I played a lot of gigs and made a lot of money. After college, I played cooler shows, made good records, and didn’t make much money. I’m still doing it — my last album was released in 2020, got good reviews, and even turned a modest profit.

Maybe that’s why, in the new Beatles documentary Get Back, when we see Paul McCartney, frustrated because his bandmate John Lennon is late for rehearsal, plop down on a chair in the corner of a soundstage and pound out “Get Back” off the top of his head, it’s kind of like watching a tape of yourself being conceived: profound, moving, and also a little icky. Paul, it turns out, was just a band geek like the rest of us.

Let It Be was recorded in January 1969. Having spent 1966-1968 revolutionizing studio recording, the plan was to get back to their bar band roots by writing a new album’s worth of songs and premiering them with their first live concert in three years. Crucially, they were going to do it all in front of director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras, in a soundstage at Twickenham Studios, where A Hard Day’s Night and Help! had been filmed. That meant they had essentially three weeks to write 14 songs, whip them into shape, and record them in front of an audience. This was difficult, but not out of the question for the band who had changed pop music in one day with the 10-song session that produced Please Please Me. Legend has it that the sessions ended in acrimony, with George Harrison briefly quitting, and the band trying to salvage the project with an impromptu live show on the roof of their Apple records studio. The album was shelved, and the band returned to the studio for Abbey Road. After they broke up in early 1970, Let It Be was finally released, and Lindsay-Hogg’s feature documentary became notorious for capturing the “breakup of The Beatles.”

A few years ago, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson acquired the rights to the Let It Be sessions footage, which encompassed more than 60 hours of film and more than 180 hours of audio. He spent four years editing the chaotic mess down to a “crucial” 468 minutes.

If your first reaction is, maybe he could have gotten a little more crucial than eight hours, you’re right. This is not a film with a punchy narrative; in part three, Lindsay-Hogg complains that he has lots of footage, but no story. This is the ultimate hangout picture, because you get to hang out with The Beatles. That’s what’s so compelling — you’re watching some of the greatest artists of the last century at work.

For a seasoned show dog, it’s fascinating to watch the greatest of all time systematically violate the rock band rules. First, the rehearsal space is sacred. Don’t record the writing process, or the frank discussions that take place there. Second, no significant others in the studio. This is known as the “Yoko Rule,” which Get Back shows is unfair. Yoko Ono is omnipresent and clingy, sitting next to John in the early going, before getting bored and leaving as the sessions drag on. She’s a non-factor in the lads’ conflict, which largely stems from trying to do the delicate mental work of composing songs while under the camera’s gaze.

The Beatle who is up to the challenge of working in the spotlight is Paul. In one stunning moment, while John is meeting with Lindsay-Hogg to plan the ill-fated concert, Paul is in the background, noodling around on the piano, and “Let It Be” emerges. When he takes it to the group, and The Beatles’ eyes light up, it’s like watching Leonardo da Vinci sketching The Last Supper. Get Back shows that The Beatles, often reduced to cartoon characters, were human after all — and that makes their art even more extraordinary.

The Beatles: Get Back is now streaming on Disney+.

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Film Features Film/TV

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

On July 22, 2003, a huge derecho tore through the Mid-South. Hundred mile per hour straight line winds devastated Memphis, leaving seven people dead and more than 300,000 MLGW customers without power. The storm would come to be known as Hurricane Elvis.

The No. 1 movie in the country that July was Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. It was something new for Disney: a film based on a theme park ride. Pirates of the Caribbean was the last Disneyland ride Walt Disney personally oversaw before his death in 1967 — which led to the rumor that his body was cryogenically frozen in a secret chamber underneath the ride. The company had made rides from films before, like the Star Tours ride in Disneyland, which was the first collaboration between Lucasfilm and the House of Mouse, but this movie seemed like a case of the tail wagging the dog.

It turned out to be a huge success, thanks to a bravado performance by Johnny Depp as the pirate Jack Sparrow and fleet-footed direction from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, native Gore Verbinski. Verbinski was a music video director (he did the clip for Monster Magnet’s “Negasonic Teenage Warhead”) who had made a killing in commercials (he did the one where the frogs croak “Bud-wise-er”), and the low-stakes world of pirate fantasy was a perfect fit for him. For Depp, it marked the moment where he crossed the line from successful actor to household name.

Now, in 2017, Memphis has once again been torn to pieces by an unexpected summer storm, and a Pirates of the Caribbean movie is once again topping the box office. Coincidence?

Consider this: The two Verbinski-directed sequels, Dead Man’s Chest (2006), and At World’s End (2007) earned a collective $2 billion at the box office without inciting a major Memphis weather incident, but then came 2011’s On Stranger Tides. Verbinski stepped aside to count his money and make the excellent animated film Rango, and director Rob Marshall took the helm of the Disney pirate ship. Marshall holds the distinction of making the most expensive film ever produced. Depending on who you believe, On Stranger Tides cost either $378 or $410 million. While it was setting records at the box office, the Mississippi River was topping a 77-year-old record for the highest floodwaters ever recorded at Memphis.

And now, here we are. Pirates once again has new direction: the Norwegian commercial team of Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg. Befitting the third-largest power outage in MLGW history, Dead Men Tell No Tales was budgeted at a relatively modest $230 million. To put that in perspective, that’s also the total gross of the yearlong Guns N’ Roses reunion tour. For $230 million, you could go to the actual Caribbean, build a new international airport in the capital of Dominica, and still have $10 million left over. The total value of tips given to Lyft drivers since the service started in 2012 is $200 million, so the producers would have enough money left over to fund the $30 million Twitter paid for the Vine video service, which it subsequently shut down.

$230 million is a lot of money. And yet, somehow, it’s not enough to produce an entertaining film. People thought it was delightful in At World’s End when Depp successfully lobbied for a cameo from Keith Richards, on whom he based his surly, slurring portrayal of pirate captain Jack Sparrow. This time around, they inexplicably got the famously chipper and articulate Paul McCartney for a pirate cameo, and I’m not sure Depp’s drunken pirate act was an act. The whole affair seems lazy, stupid, and tossed off. At least Verbinski knew how to have fun while wasting Disney’s money.

So, the bad news is, every time a new director is hired for a Pirates of the Caribbean film, Memphis gets clobbered with a natural disaster. The good news is, Dead Men Tell No Tales is currently showing in air conditioned movie theaters. While you’re waiting for the power to be restored in the wake of Hurricane Depp, you can nap in comfort for 129 minutes or even longer if you get there before the trailers start. At least then Disney’s $230 million investment will have done some good.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Eight Days A Week

Here’s my big takeaway from Eight Days A Week: The Beatles were a great band.

The Beatles play Washington D.C during their 1964 tour of America in Eight Days A Week.

I mean, yeah, big whoop, right? The Beatles were a great band. Stop the presses. But I think The Beatles have been swallowed by their own legend. In the hip hop era, extolling the virtues of The Beatles will get the kids’ eyes rolling. They are the quintessential Baby Boomer phenomenon, and this documentary is directed by another Baby Boomer phenomenon: Ron Howard, a guy whose showbiz career started in 1959. Lately, the Apollo 13 director has devoted his time to low-impact adaptations of DaVinci Code books, and this movie is another softball. Nobody ever went broke selling The Beatles to Baby Boomers.

There are some parts of this production that seem phoned-in. The sound design, which you would expect to be perfect in a project like this, is occasionally haphazard. It’s not exactly briskly paced. There are a few colorized segments that look head-scratchingly tacky. As an obsessive fan of the band and of music in general, I didn’t really learn anything significant about The Beatles from this film.

But wow, they were a great band. And they’re still great. A couple of years ago, my wife and I paid a bunch of money to see Paul McCartney at the FedEx Forum. Our expectations were tempered by the fact that Sir Paul was 70 years old, but we figured if we just got to watch Paul Freakin’ McCartney’s muscle memory fire for an hour or so, it would be worth it. The man is living history. But the show wasn’t like that at all. Paul killed it. He played for more than two hours, alternating between bass, guitar, piano, and ukulele, never leaving the stage. The only clue that he exerted himself at all was that he took his jacket off after a few tunes. If nothing else, the man is a good argument for vegetarianism.

Before the show, we were talking about how it would be preferable to see Sir Paul in a small room instead of the Forum. But during the show, he casually dropped an anecdote about his last tour where he played to a crowd of 300,000 in Ukraine, and we realized that for him, the Forum was a small room.

The Beatles at Shea Stadium, 1966

Eight Days A Week makes it clear that Paul and the lads pretty much invented the modern arena concert—or rather, it was invented because of them. Thanks to a ten-camera film setup, the first mega-show The Beatles played, Shea Stadium in New York, provides the documentary’s most compelling footage. They perform out on the baseball diamond, with the stage about where second base would be. The isolation from the 50,000-strong throng of their rabid fans provides a prefab visual metaphor for what it was like to be one of the Fab Four in 1965. There is no huge sound system visible, like there would be at a modern arena concert, because they simply hadn’t been invented yet. A good system for getting amplified music out to a crowd that big wouldn’t be assembled for years, when The Grateful Dead’s sound crew finally cracked the problem. At Shea, The Beatles played through the stadium’s built-in PA, a primitive system only designed for at-bat announcements and the organ player. Even more unfathomable from a modern musician’s perspective, they played without monitors. They couldn’t hear themselves. And yet, they played in tune, in rhythm, and sang harmonies more complex than just about anything you hear on the radio today. The show, which is appended in full to the version of Eight Days A Week now showing at Studio on the Square, is a dazzling display of virtuosity and stage smarts under difficult conditions that had no real precedent.
Like I said, The Beatles were a great band—not just a collection of genius songwriters and visionary artists, a great band. When Howard trots out 1963 footage of John leading the band through an Earth-shaking rendition of “Twist and Shout”, I thought, the young Beatles would kill at Gonerfest, the annual garage punk festival occurring in Memphis next weekend. Eight Days A Week confirms that every young group of miscreants who have picked up guitars and drums in the last fifty years have been playing in The Beatles sandbox.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (February 12, 2015)

CREDIT: REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Sir Paul McCartney, Rihanna, and Kanye West perform at the Grammy Awards

How fortunate am I that the Grammy Awards should occur on the same night that I write this column? My original opening sentence was going to be, “For the love of everything that’s holy, vaccinate your damn kids,” but the musical-industrial complex’s annual circle-jerk is just too outrageous to go uncommented upon.

Before we enter snarkville, let me tell you what was good about the show. Catering to the aging demographic, the former headbangers AC/DC played their hit song, “Highway to Hell.” Only, it was a hit in 1979, before two-thirds of the audience was born, and it was revealed that the ancient mariners needed a teleprompter, upon which appeared the lyrics to their own song, just in case those tri-focals failed. Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett continued their May/December smoochy lounge act, singing Irving Berlin’s, “Cheek to Cheek.” But here’s a secret: The 88-year-old Bennett can’t sing anymore and she’s been carrying him for awhile. At least she didn’t wear meat this year. Beyoncé was divine. Pharrell Williams was terrific. Usher was great. And I was happy to see Beck win Album of the Year, although Twitter erupted with queries of, “Who is this guy Beck?” Which is a shame since I still consider him one of the newer artists.

Annie Lennox was all class singing the old Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ song, “I Put a Spell on You,” in direct contrast to Madonna, who refuses to age gracefully or perform an age-appropriate song. I get it: She’s a gym rat who’s in good shape for her age, and she has great legs. Still, they’re attached to a 56-year-old ass, and her sex-kitten routine, surrounded by back-up dancers wearing demon’s horns, has lasted well past its shelf life. The 60-year-old Lennox, in black slacks, sequined top, and minimal makeup, looked beautiful by comparison and didn’t need auto-tune either. I love Pharrell, who won Best Pop Solo Performance for “Happy,” only he was dressed in a bell-hop outfit reminiscent of The Grand Budapest Hotel. That funny doorman’s outfit will probably be this year’s Smokey the Bear hat. Emotional tenor Sam Smith, who won Best New Artist, Song of the Year, and Record of the Year for his smash hit, “Stay With Me,” neglected to thank Tom Petty, for whom he recently gave a songwriter’s credit and paid an undisclosed, out-of-court settlement for cribbing the chorus to Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”

The most egregious pairing of the night, and possibly of all time, was the trio of Kanye West, Rihanna, and Sir Paul McCartney singing a nondescript song called “FourFiveSeconds,” just released as Rihanna’s new single. Sir Paul has all the money and fame in the world. For the life of me, I can’t understand why he would enter into this unholy alliance. Didn’t he learn anything from that heinous duet he did with Michael Jackson? Or is he that desperate to remain relevant? Basically, McCartney was reduced to playing back-up guitar and singing inaudible low harmony while Rihanna warbled and Kanye chirped through auto-tune to cover up the fact that he can’t sing. McCartney was among the nine songwriters on this mess, but he was content standing there like a twit and never even sang a verse. I had to shout out loud, “Do you remember who his partners used to be?”

That faint music you hear is John Lennon, somewhere from the great beyond, singing another chorus of his “How Do You Sleep at Night.” And speaking of songwriters, the winner of the Best R&B Song, Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love,” credited eight writers. Since when did songs begin getting written by committee? It only took one person to write “A Case of You.”

It was keenly disappointing to see that the “In Memoriam” segment, while mentioning music lawyers and agents, omitted the names of artists and legends beloved to Memphians whom we lost this year: Jimi Jamison, John Fry, Mabon “Teenie” Hodges, Jack Holder, John Hampton, and “Cowboy” Jack Clement, the legendary producer who began his career with Sam Phillips at Sun Records. I understand the names were printed in a longer read-out on the Grammy site, but each of these artists deserved an on-air remembrance.

The program’s closing segment, a tribute to the movie, Selma, featuring Beyoncé, John Legend, and Common, was transcendent. I’ve heard Legend sing many times, but I believe this was his finest performance. There’s a lot of great music out there; it’s just not what the near-extinct, corporate labels want you to hear. Personally, I enjoy watching the old, thieving, grimy music “industry” implode. It deserves to. All told, the 2015 Grammys were merely tepid, but it might have been worse. They could have let Dave Grohl play.

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Film Features Film/TV

Indie Memphis screens A Hard Day’s Night

Richard Lester’s noisy, jumpy, compulsively ironic A Hard Day’s Night has played an important part in the Fab Four’s creation myth since its London premiere on July 6, 1964. Like the Beatles themselves, the film is strangely resistant to negative criticism. It has never really gone out of fashion, which is partly why Indie Memphis is screening a great-looking 50th anniversary restoration on Wednesday, July 9th, at Studio on the Square.

This meticulously scripted yet seemingly improvised piece of fanboy and fangirl propaganda seduced critics immediately. The Village Voice‘s Andrew Sarris proclaimed that “A Hard Day’s Night has turned out to be the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals, the brilliant crystallization of such diverse cultural particles as the pop movie, rock n’ roll, cinéma vérité, the nouvelle vague, free cinema, the affectedly hand-held camera, frenzied cutting, the cult of the sexless subadolescent, the semidocumentary, and studied spontaneity.”

In enthusiastic prose that suggests Sarris was momentarily infected by the same hysteria propelling Night‘s hordes of screaming teenage girls, Sarris also wrote, “My critical theories and preconceptions are all shook up, and I am profoundly grateful to the Beatles for such a pleasurable softening of hardening aesthetic arteries.”

Nearly 40 years later, Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” essay echoed Sarris’ sentiments while highlighting the film’s continuing influence on pop-culture consumption. “Today,” he wrote, “when we watch TV and see quick cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews conducted on the run with moving targets, quickly intercut snatches of dialogue, music under documentary action and all the other trademarks of the modern style, we are looking at the children of A Hard Day’s Night.” Although countless reality shows and endless infotainment programming have rendered the expressive possibilities of Lester’s sound-image syntheses commonplace clichés, it’s hard to argue with Ebert’s assessment.

Along with Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap, A Hard Day’s Night is the definitive movie about being in a rock-and-roll band — which doesn’t necessarily make it truthful or authentic. In a new essay for the Criterion Collection’s DVD release, Howard Hampton praises the film as a truthful-looking act of calculated image manipulation: “Collective and individual identities — the John-Paul-George-Ringo lunch box and merchandise concession — are worked out and woven through a treadmill environment where the hamsters play satiric havoc with the business of light entertainment and teen merchandising.” However, no amount of cynicism or satire can deflate the first “Can’t Buy Me Love” interlude, where the Beatles jump, scuffle, dance, and collide with each other in an open field like overheated molecules.

Disharmonious voices about the film were seldom heard. They did exist, though; in his 1966 essay “Day of The Lesteroids,” Manny Farber wrote “Lester’s trademark is a kind of thickness of texture which he gets purely with technique, like the blurred, flattened, anonymous, engineering sounds which replace actors’ voices, plus the piling up of finicky details, as in the scene of the Beatle shaving his friend’s image in the mirror.” And remember the guy who once sang “I don’t believe in Beatles,” too. But I don’t want them to spoil the party.

A Hard Day’s Night screens at Malco’s Studio on the Square Wednesday, July 9th, at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Tickets are $8.

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Congressman Fincher

Eighth District congressman Stephen Fincher, like so many in the GOP, wants to cut assistance to the poor, including the food stamps program that feeds millions of poor children (Politics, May 23rd issue). Government waste, he calls it. But, of course, Fincher has no problem whatsoever in accepting $3.2 million(!) from the federal government in the form of crop subsidies for his own family farm. That’s not waste. That’s just large checks going to Fincher for not growing certain crops. And he even has the nerve to justify his position by citing the teachings of Jesus. This guy has absolutely no shame. And no clue. And we in the Eighth District are much the poorer for it.

J.C. Jackson

Covington

Tom Tomorrow

I imagine you already know this, but Dan Perkins has won the 2013 Herblock Prize for excellence in political cartooning. I’ve been reading the Flyer for as long as I’ve lived in Memphis (about 20 years) and never miss “This Modern World.” I know it’s available online, but as a codger (get off my lawn!), I really appreciate being able to pick up your paper and see my favorite cartoon in print week after week. So, thanks so much for making that happen. I really appreciate it and bet a lot of your other readers do too.

Geoff Hopkins

Memphis

It’s the Liberals’ Fault!

Jackson Baker’s interview with Mitch Landrieu was fantastic (May 23rd isue). Giving Landrieu a platform to once again tell the liberal lies about Katrina and New Orleans was the best. We all know that the one and only reason the levees in New Orleans broke down was liberal Democrat corruption. But you can’t say that, can you? The liberal Democrats were stealing money hand over fist from the levee commission, which caused shoddy levees to be built. Landrieu blaming it on some mysterious government entity is brilliant.

Liberal Democrats have run NOLA for 80 years, but you can always blame someone else. Just keep repeating this crap, and the numbskulls out there will go for it. See you on Bourbon Street.

Mike Crone

Piperton, Tennessee

Justin Fox Burks

Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney

Just read Jackson Baker’s review of the Paul McCartney concert (May 30th issue). The subhead, “Paul McCartney enthralls at FedExForum,” nailed it. The word “enthrall” means to hold spellbound, to enchant, or to captivate. It was all that and more. Not sure about anyone else, but I never took a drink or bathroom break from the opening song to the last encore. I didn’t want to miss a minute of it.

Baker wrote that “there was no oldies-show aura to any of it.” Prior to this concert, I had never seen McCartney, so I was really curious about that part. After all, most of the songs in his catalog are 30, 40, or even 50 years old. But McCartney played for three hours with no intermission, looked nothing like a 70-year-old rock-and-roller. And I was close enough to feel the heat from the flame jets on “Live and Let Die.”

I like Baker’s description of “honorably withered old soldiers” when referring to Robert Plant and the Jagger/Richards duo, in comparison to the Dorian Gray-like “cute Beatle” and his refusal to age. He wasn’t jumping around onstage like a 20-year-old, and I wouldn’t expect him to, but he sure made me happy. His guitar, piano, and voice were all he needed to enthrall, indeed.

Mike Williams

Germantown

Club 152

John Branston nailed it with his column (City Beat, May 23rd issue) about the over-hyped Club 152 affair. The DA wanted some publicity for cracking down on crime. The club owners wanted to get their bar back open in time for Grizzlies playoff home games. Wrist slap. Deal made. Win, win. Now it’s back to business as usual. I, for one, am just shocked that a three-story dance club on Beale Street would have any illegal drugs on the premises. Shocked, I tell you.

Robert Winston

Memphis