The MEMernet buzzed about a guy walking around Crosstown with a mattress attached to his back. But no one really knew what was going on. Now we do!
Musician Nick Black dreamed up the mattress rig and took it for a spin to promote his new single “Future Me’s Problem.”
Top Comment
Posted to Facebook by Elvis Presley’s Graceland
The Memphis subreddit piled on contempt for that weird investment company … or whatever … that tried and failed to sue Riley Keough … for something … in a move that would have put Graceland on the auction block. (Big h/t to The Daily Memphian for breaking the story.)
Top comment, however, goes to u/erichsommer, to whom it was clear that the investment firm “ain’t never caught a rabbit.”
UFO App
Posted to X by @enigmalabs
Enigma Labs has launched an app to capture UFO/UAP sightings.
With new reports from users and some publicly available data, the company shows 4,028 UFO sightings for Tennessee since 2018. Knoxville leads the way with 251 sightings reported. Memphis is a close second with 239.
Austin Butler, who plays Elvis, and Michael Donahue at the Memphis premiere of “Elvis.” (Credit: Austin Butler)
If Priscilla Presley gives her seal of approval to your portrayal of Elvis in a movie, that’s all you need.
And that’s exactly what Priscilla, who was married to The King and is the mother of their child, Lisa Marie Presley, did during the Memphis premiere of the Baz Luhrmann movie Elvis, which stars Austin Butler as Elvis, on June 11th at The Guest House at Graceland.
“Elvis morphed into you,” Presley told Butler on stage before the movie started. “You had his guidance.”
Stars from the movie, director Luhrmann, and members of the Presley family, including Lisa Marie and her daughter, Riley Keough, and Elvis’ buddy and business associate, Jerry Schilling, were at the premiere. They all gathered on stage at one point. The movie is slated to open nationwide June 24th.
The Memphis premiere of Elvis. (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Earlier, I talked to Priscilla and people involved in the film.
I asked Priscilla what sets Elvis apart from other movies and documentaries about the performer. “It’s very sensitive to me and the family,” she says. “Baz has done an amazing job in this film. This has been two years. I know he’s been wanting to do this forever, do a movie on Elvis. But, with Baz, I get a little nervous because Baz does what he wants. He’s got an eye. He’s got such style. But now dealing with such a sensitive story was a bit worrisome [as to] where he’s going to take it.”
But, she says, “It is a true story between the ups and downs of Elvis and Col. Parker, but with his stylized way, beautiful way. Especially with Austin Butler, who plays Elvis so realistically. He had him down pat to the point of a gesture. He studied him for two years. And the story will prove it. When you see it, you think you’re seeing Elvis Presley. But, again, he is not Elvis Presley. He is an actor playing Elvis Presley. And that’s what I like about it, too. He’s not trying to be Elvis. He is his own person.
“But the story is a wonderful story and I think it’s a different take on what we normally see.”
Priscilla Presley at the Memphis premiere of Elvis. (Credit: Michael Donahue)
I asked Butler, who described Elvis as “such a complex human being,” what was the most difficult part of Elvis for him to play. “One of the most challenging things is the fact that he has been held up as either a god-like iconic figure or as this caricature that is not the real man,” Butler says. “So, for me, it was stripping all that away and getting down to his humanity.
“And the challenging part about that is you want to be incredibly technical. You want to be meticulous about all the details. But it could never be the details sacrificing the humanity.”
Luhrmann told me Elvis movies were shown at the theater in the small town where he grew up. “The matinees were the Elvis movies,” he says. “So, like as a 10-year-old, he was the coolest guy in the world. And then I grew on and all that. He was always present.”
As for making Elvis, Luhrmann says, “I didn’t do this so much out of fandom, although I have a great respect for him. I did this because I really believe he is at the center of America in the ’50s, ’60s, and the ’70s. And he is a way of exploring America. To understand that he was this rebel in the ’50s and it was dangerous to do what he was doing. And his relationship to Beale Street and people like B. B. King and then him being put in a bubble in Hollywood and then finding himself again in the [Elvis] ’68 [Comeback] Special and reconnecting with gospel, his great, great love. And then, to put it bluntly and to quote one of his songs, being caught in a trap in Vegas. That’s the sort of tragedy of that.
“And yet, what he’s left behind, as you see in that last great performance of him is still the voice and still the spirit. To me, whatever you say about Elvis, he was a spiritual person. And that comes from his love of gospel.”
I received direction from Baz Luhrmann, who showed me how to properly take a selfie, at the Memphis premiere of Elvis. (Credit: Baz Luhrmann)
Kelvin Harrison Jr., who plays B.B. King in Elvis, told me what drew him to the role. “For me, it was just how smart he was and how savvy he was with his business,” he says. “This was a very strategic man, in my opinion, but also [he had] so much heart and soul. And a simple man. He literally was working in the fields, and literally put up a wire on a post and started learning how to play and find sounds playing one string. That is so incredible to me. So I was just so inspired by the tenacity that he had, and just the rawness.”
Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Jerry Schilling at the Memphis premiere of Elvis. (Credit: Michael Donahue)
In the movie, Elvis is astonished at the stage presence, complete with the most amazing moves, of Little Richard. Alton Mason plays Richard in the film. What attracted him to the role was “how powerful, how outspoken and loud he was,” Mason told me. “How sexy he was. How fly he was. And his aura.”
Mason, who said the revered gospel singer Mahalia Jackson is his great-great-great-great aunt, also told me, “I had to develop empathy for not only who he was, but the period and the time that he was in. And him being that in that time, it takes a lot of power, a lot of fearlessness, to choose to be so different in a time like this. It was an amazing learning experience for me, too.”
Michael Donahue and Alton Mason at the Elvis premiere. (Credit: Alton Mason)
I loved what Tom Hanks, who plays Col. Tom Parker, said on stage before the movie began: “As an actor I found myself shooting in castles in which kings once lived in. I shot in palaces that have been turned into museums that were the homes of kings. I shot in museums in which kings and queens have lived in.”
But he told the audience to notice that all of those kings and queens “have an ‘s’ on the end of them. Meaning that there were more than one. At Graceland, we are visiting the home of The King.”
Tom Hanks at the Elvis Memphis movie premiere. (Credit: Michael Donahue)President and CEO of Elvis Presley Enterprises Jack Soden and his wife, Leighann, at the Memphis premiere of Elvis. (Credit: Michael Donahue)Joel Weinshanker, majority owner of Elvis Presley Enterprises and managing partner of Graceland Holdings LLC and EPE, and Kim Laughlin at the Memphis premiere of Elvis. (Credit: Michael Donahue)Hal and Geri Lansky and their daughter, Lia Lansky, at the Memphis premiere of Elvis. (Credit: Michael Donahue)We Saw You
Riley Keough and Taylour Page are strippers on a Tampa tear in Zola.
One October evening in 2015, a woman named A’Ziah King tapped out the 148-tweet long story of her weekend in Tampa. Zola, as she is known, was a waitress at a Hooters in Detroit who sometimes danced at local strip clubs for extra cash. One particularly crappy night, she had a customer named Jess, and they bonded over stripper stories. The two became friends, so Jess invited her on a road trip to Florida, where she knew a guy at a high-class club where the talent could rake it in. Intrigued by the prospect of making rent for the rest of the year in a couple of days (Florida has a reputation among strippers as being profitable territory), Zola accepts the offer. Then, things go south.
It is Florida, after all.
Along for the 20-hour ride is a hulking man who Jess calls her roommate, but who won’t give his name, and Jess’ boyfriend, who Zola quickly finds is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Once they reach The Big Guava, Zola is drawn into a vortex of motels, prostitution, dysfunction, and finally spiraling violence. But she lived to tell the tale on Twitter, and her thread went viral under the hashtag #TheStory.
Because of my shamefully intense Twitter addiction, I, and thousands of others, read @_zolarmoon’s epic thread with bursts of queasy laughter while mumbling “this can’t be real.” It was real. There are pictures.
There’s a saying on the hellsite that Twitter has a new main character every day, and you’d better pray it’s not you. Achieving vitality at the level of #TheStory usually means fleeting, ephemeral fame that is extremely hard to monetize. The kind of attention you are likely to attract is negative. Zola King is the exception. After freelance scribe David Kushner sold her story to Rolling Stone, Hollywood came calling. This is the kind of thing that’s catnip to a producer. Not only is there plenty of sex and violence, but lots of people already know the story, and there’s a hook that ensures folks like me spend the first half of their reviews recounting six-year-old social media trends.
Nicholas Braun, Riley Keough, Taylour Paige, and Colman Domingo in Zola.
What newly minted executive producer Zola King has, beyond a level of street smarts that counts as a superpower, is a strong, unique voice, a fantastic ear for dialogue, and an innate sense of how to pace a narrative — vital ingredients for a good film that something like Angry Birds lacks. Zola also has director Janicza Bravo, who has an eye for Kubrickian symmetry and a grasp of film grammar, which is sadly lacking in today’s Hollywood. The most unusual thing about this movie about a digital phenomenon is that it’s shot on film. Ari Wegner’s cinematography positively revels in the grain, capturing that elusive, hyper-real yet dirty feel of beachside Florida hotels.
But none of that works unless the pair of frenemies at the center of the story can carry the picture. I once described Pulp Fiction as “a Seinfeld episode with gangsters” — a delicate balance of mortal fear and slapstick comedy that inspired a thousand flaccid neo-noir imitators in the 1990s. It’s the acting that ensures Zola succeeds where films like Two Days in the Valley failed. Taylour Paige and Riley Keough are perfection as Zola and the lawyer-renamed Stefani. Possessing considerable genetic gifts and subtly expressive eyes, Paige faces the various life-threatening absurdities thrown at her as just another day at the office. Keough (who, I am obliged as a Memphian to point out, is Elvis Presley’s granddaughter) starts out doing an uncanny imitation of Taryn Manning in Hustle & Flow, then imbues the manipulative Stefani with a little pathos. They communicate in a thick stripper patois that narrator Zola occasionally translates for the audience. Think of Zola as Jackie Brown’s Instagram account come to life.
The film builds a parallel power dynamic between Zola and Stefani’s male companions. Nicholas Braun is hilariously pathetic as Derrek, Stefani’s dim bulb boyfriend who takes the ultimate pratfall. Colman Domingo is stunning as X, Stefani’s unnamed pimp. His charming Floridian drawl can turn on a dime into a menacing Nigerian snarl. Even though this is a story told from the point of view of a marginalized Black woman, X’s overt code-switching is one of the keys to the success of this extraordinary picture. Everyone on-screen — except for poor Derrek — is constantly putting on airs. Before stepping onto the stage, Zola asks herself “which me am I going to be tonight?” Stefani sells different versions of herself to a parade of Florida men; a quick shot of Keough’s mid-coitus, thousand-yard stare stuck with me after the credits rolled. No one but us, Zola’s Twitter confidants, knows the true content of anyone’s heart — and Zola might be zooming us, too.
Who is the greatest living American director? That’s the kind of question I usually avoid because it’s unanswerable and ultimately meaningless. Ranking is for sports. What’s important is not who is better than whom. It’s “does the movie work?” Does it make you feel like it intended to make you feel, and if so, is that a good feeling? If a film not only works in the moment, but transcends it and becomes something people want to watch again and again for years to come, that’s the kind of win a director wants to chalk up.
Nevertheless, as I was leaving Logan Lucky, the question of who is the greatest living American director was on my mind. There’s Steven Spielberg, who has an unparalleled breadth and depth of work over the last 43 years. Then there’s David Lynch, who is currently unspooling an 18 hour epic about the struggle for the soul of America with Twin Peaks: The Return.
And then there’s Steven Soderbergh. Along with Spike Lee, he was there at the creation of the modern indie movement, winning Sundance in 1989 with the sleeper hit sex, lies, and videotape. He made George Clooney a movie star with Out of Sight and defined the 21st century’s first crop of superstars with Ocean’s Eleven. Yet he can adapt Soviet sci-fi with Solaris, get his hands dirty in the DIY underground with Bubble, and take a deep dive into political biography with the two-part, four hour Che. Soderbergh is a filmmaker’s filmmaker, the one young directors look to to learn how it’s done. He works fast and lean and gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and bullshit.
It’s that commitment to craft that led him to quit Hollywood filmmaking in disgust in 2013. On his way out, he torched the current corporate regime with his State of the Cinema speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival. What was his idea of retirement? Single-handedly writing, shooting, and editing The Knick, a Cinemax TV series.
Everybody knew Soderbergh couldn’t stay out of the game, and he managed to come back on his own terms. At a time when the mainline studios are running up $200 million tabs to pay for a sinking Pirates of the Caribbean ship, Soderbergh’s new film comes into theaters already paid for using an innovative financing and sales scheme that cut out layers of corporate bloat. Logan Lucky isn’t going to win the weekend, but it doesn’t have to. And that means Soderbergh gets to work without an MBA looking over his shoulder. The results of this financial experiment speak for themselves: Logan Lucky is the best movie I’ve seen in 2017.
Channing Tatum (left) and Adam Driver star in Steven Soderbergh’s directorial return, Logan Lucky.
There I go ranking again.
Rebecca Blunt’s script is so tight you can bounce a quarter off of it. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver are Jimmy and Clyde Logan, two West Virginia brothers who’ve been down so long they don’t know what up looks like. Along with their sister Mellie (Riley Keough), they hatch a needlessly elaborate plan to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway, just across the North Carolina border.
Every part of the sprawling cast is spot on. Katie Holmes swills chardonnay as Jimmy’s ex-wife who left him for a rich car dealer, greased to perfection by Seth McFarlane. Daniel Craig has way too much fun as a mad bomber named Joe Bang, who has to break out of, then back into prison, where Dwight Yoakam is the nicotine stained warden. Just when you think things are winding down, out pops Hilary Swank as an impossibly flinty FBI agent hot on the trail of the robbers-turned-folk-heroes.
It probably goes without saying that the photography and editing are beyond reproach, but I’m going to say it anyway. Logan Lucky is a ruthlessly designed and executed entertainment machine, but its obvious virtues may obscure its depth. Appalachia’s lack of affordable health care, the toxic at-will employment environment, the ravages of the for-profit prison industrial complex, and the impossible burdens of patriarchy on women young and old all serve to create plot points along the way to wacky larceny. With an instant classic comedy as subversive as it is hilarious, Soderbergh has served up a stunning rebuke to corporate Hollywood and cemented his status as one of the all-time greats.
American Honey harkens back to a lost era of American filmmaking. Call it the SD DIY period. The mid-1990s saw the advent of high quality digital video cameras that were both cheap enough to be affordable to the average consumer and simple enough to use so that an untrained amateur could, with a relatively modest investment of time, produce a decent image. At the same time, personal computers became powerful enough to handle complex video editing tasks. Suddenly, people all over the world who in times past would have otherwise spent their lives as sideline cinephiles were handed the tools to make their own movies. Punk rock in the 1970s came with the promise that anyone could pick up a guitar and be great, and the DIY filmmakers of 1998-2005 were animated with a similar belief.
Sasha Lane as Star in American Honey
Alongside the new technology was a new philosophy. The Soderbergh/Tarantino/Rodriegez brand of indie film was all about formal experimentation and carrying on a conversation with film history. The Dogme 95 movement of Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg stressed absolute realism as a way to strip away the damaging meta messaging of capitalist, patriarchal Hollywood filmmaking and empower the voices of the oppressed. Vinterberg’s The Celebration, the first Dogme 95 film, is a real-time account of a family coming to grips with its sexually abusive patriarch. Dogme 95-inspired digital indies gave voices to thousands of filmmakers from marginalized communities, such as LBGT, immigrants, and African Americans. Here in Memphis, Morgan Jon Fox founded the Digital Media Co-Op and created social realist films like Blue Citrus Hearts and OMG/HAHAHA by utilizing confessional Meisner techniques of improvisational acting. Fox’s films of the era looked rough to an audience busy devouring lavish Lord Of The Rings movies, but that was part of the point. The realities people lived in day to day weren’t expertly color corrected, bad guys often weren’t punished, and happy endings could seem few and far between. Look closer at Blue Citrus Hearts, for example, and you’ll find a stunningly sophisticated take on the intimate anxieties of the Bush era.
The American DIY films of this era were created entirely in standard DVD resolution: 720 x 480 pixels, an aspect ratio of 4:3. Roughly, square. Toward the end of the 2000s, cameras and computers graduated to high definition:1920 x 1080 pixels, a rectangular aspect ratio of 16:9. This is the format that your average HD TV uses these days, and it means a much sharper picture with better color resolution that allows for creativity in the image creation that rivals or exceeds traditional 35 MM film. Dogme zeal mutated into mumblecore, becoming less revelatory in the process. Since the films of the SD era don’t match formats with the contemporary video equipment, they are rarely seen today, but you can see one of the best examples of the period online in the form of the remastered version of Craig Brewer’s The Poor And Hungry. Today, the legacy of American DIY’s social realism rests mostly in a style of acting practiced by people like Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, and Joe Swanberg.
Shia LaBouf and Sasha Lane
American Honey is infused with nostalgia for the SD DIY era. Even though director Andrea Arnold creates her images with contemporary video equipment, the film is presented in a 4:3 aspect ratio. The actors, including the lead Sasha Lane are all new, raw, and untrained. Well, almost all of them—the two ringers here are bad boy actor Shia LaBeouf and Elvis’ granddaughter Riley Keough.
Lane plays Star, an 18-year-old in an abusive relationship taking care of a pair of kids from her boyfriend’s last marriage. A chance meeting in a Wal-Mart with Jake (LaBouf) gives her a chance to escape her dead end life. Jake runs a “mag crew”, a van load of teenage, semi-homeless misfits who go door to door selling magazine subscriptions. “Who buys magazine subscriptions any more?” Star asks, after she’s already in the van.
“Nobody”, one of her new cohort answers.
The kids on the mag crew are being ruthlessly exploited by Jake and Krystal (Keough), who enforce a cult like order with songs, cheers, and copious drugs. Arnold uses the group dynamics as a critique of late stage capitalism, which reaches its most biting with “losers night”, in which the two lowest earning members of the ragtag team are forced to fight for their bosses’ amusement.
Star is swept along with the mag crew as they prowl the middle of the country, committing petty crimes and having bad sex from Oklahoma to the Bakken shale fracking fields of South Dakota. American Honey is simultaneously a character study of a troubled, poor young woman in the process of slipping through the cracks of American society and a portrait of the decaying heartland seen through her eyes. As a travelogue of cheap motels, it has no parallel.
Arnold creates some indelible scenes along the way, such as when Star gets into a sexually charged situation with three rich men in cowboy hats, and then later when she crosses a final moral line while bathed in the golden light of a natural gas flare. These moments account for the lavish praise the film has received, including the Jury Prize at Cannes. But they are also few and far between. American Honey is a great 90 minute movie crammed into 163 minutes.
In searching for the essence of the SD DIY magic, Arnold has also resurrected, and even amplified, its flaws. Just as punk rock’s promise that everyone has an inner rock star was proven false, so too did hundreds of hours of poorly edited, boring dross spell the end of mumblecore. American Honey seems like the work of a first time filmmaker too in love with her raw material to do the hard emotional work of culling the story down to its essence. I’m not saying that every movie has to be a speedy, plot driven affair. Arnold could have cut fully half of her shots and still retained the episodic structure and ensemble acting dynamics that are clearly her goals here. By the time the film enters its second hour, the goodwill generated by the fresh faced enthusiasm of the actors and flashes of fleeting, accidental beauty is ground down by the editing’s oppressive tedium.
If you want to see this kind of thing done well, check out Morgan Jon Fox’s streaming series Feral, about which I have spilled many pixels. Fox was one of the first to go down the road American Honey follows, and he is an expert on how to carefully pace the delicate dramas and comedies of everyday life. Like its heroine, American Honey is left adrift, aimless, and confused.
I was going to start this review with an extended riff on how the thread of apocalyptic science fiction in novels like Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World found its ultimate cinematic expression in George Miller’s Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), but you know what? Forget that. Just go see Mad Max: Fury Road.
I was going to title this review “Punk’s Sistine Chapel,” which is what Ballard called The Road Warrior, but never mind that. I figure going on about the web of symbolism and allegory woven into George Miller’s first visit back to the blasted Australian outback in 30 years would obscure the central question in many readers minds: Does stuff blow up good?
Stuff blows up. Real. Good.
And it’s real stuff, really blowing up. It’s not that there’s no CGI in Fury Road. It’s just that Miller sees it as just another tool in a toolbox that also includes armies of stunt drivers piloting a fleet of custom vehicles, many of which are on fire at any given time.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Miller, cinematographer John Seale, production designer Colin Gibson, and editor Margaret Sixel have composed a symphony of revving engines, crashing metal, and thundering reports. Unlike most action movies made since The Bourne Ultimatum, Fury Road doesn’t try to disorient you. Quite the opposite: Miller is a master of creating a space inside your head that feels real, then hurtling you through the space in the most exciting way possible. He has exposed most Hollywood action directors as highly paid frauds. Miller’s not here to slap a bunch of disjointed images on the screen, throw millions of marketing dollars to persuade an audience that dreck is acceptable, and chalk it up as a success. Miller delivers an object of pure cinema that wouldn’t work as a novel, a comic book, or a video game. He uses exquisitely detailed images and minimal dialog to carefully parcel out just enough information at just the right time to keep you emotionally engaged in the mayhem on the screen. Actions have consequences, effect follows cause. When people get hit, they get hurt. The world feels real. There’s a guy suspended from cords on the front of a giant war truck playing metal riffs on a guitar that shoots fire, and he fits right in.
Seriously, you should see this movie.
And then there’s Charlize Theron. Her Imperator Furiosa is a woman of few words but limitless steely gazes. She’s somewhere between Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from Alien and Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. There’s no shortage of good performances, including Nicholas Hoult as paint-huffing bezerker Nux, Mad Max veteran Hugh Keays-Byrne as warlord Immortan Joe, and Riley Keough (who is Elvis’ granddaughter in real life) as Capable, one of the five sex slaves whose rescue provides the story’s catalyst. But Theron just flat out steals the show.
I know it probably feels like I’m laying it on a little thick for what is essentially a big car chase movie, but when I left the theater I felt like a starving man who had just been fed a steak. It’s a rare film that engages the mind while rocking the body. Miller’s vision of a world consumed by its own greed, where water, gasoline, and bullets are the most precious commodities, seems even more relevant today than it did 30 years ago. In 2015, armies of men in makeshift war machines crafted by hand from Toyota trucks really do fight over basic resources in places like Syria, Chechnya, and Mali. ISIS, a reactionary, apocalyptic religious cult led by a divinely inspired warlord, looks a lot like Immortan Joe and his War Boys. It’s Mad Max’s world, we just live in it.
