Tag: science fiction

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Film Features Film/TV

They Cloned Tyrone

Foxx, Parris, and Boyega deliver near-perfect performances in this film.

They Cloned Tyrone seems like one of those movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf or Snakes on a Plane where they came up with the title and worked backwards. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, have you seen Sharknado? They made six of them!

Whatever method director Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier used to come up with the concept, they should keep doing it. To me, They Cloned Tyrone is a very pure form of science fiction. Even after towering masterpieces like Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The War of the Worlds, sci-fi struggled to gain acceptance in the literary mainstream. The genre was mostly relegated to cheap pulp magazines with pictures of little green men menacing scantily clad women on the cover. But many of the stories inside those lurid covers, from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” were serious works of art.

They Cloned Tyrone leans hard into disrepute with an appropriately sleazy Blaxploitation setup: Fontaine (John Boyega) is running a two-bit drug trafficking operation that is threatened by his better-capitalized rival Isaac (J. Alphonse Nicholson). One typical day on the job, he violently evicts one of Isaac’s guys from his territory and shakes down pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and his ho Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) for some money he’s owed. But after the shakedown winds down, Isaac’s enforcers catch up with Fontaine. Slick Charles and Yo-Yo see him gunned down in the parking lot. They’re shocked when Fontaine shows up the next day, none the worse for wear, demanding the money they already paid him.

Fontaine, it seems, is a clone. But who cloned him, and why? (We meet Tyrone much later in the story. Spoiler: He’s a clone, too.) Yo-Yo obsessively collects Nancy Drew books, and she’s itching to play girl detective in real life. The three not-quite friends start to see weirdness everywhere; little things they overlooked or took for granted start to take on a sinister aura. What is fake and what is real starts to get hazy. So does the question of who is fake and who is real. And just because you’re a clone, does that mean you’re not you? Since Fontaine is a clone — albeit one with a mixture of fake and real memories — whose side is he really on? Does he even know?

Imagine if Philip K. Dick wrote Hustle & Flow, and you’ll get a sense of what They Cloned Tyrone is like. Taylor is heavily influenced by Craig Brewer’s Memphis hip-hop opus. Parris plays Yo-Yo with the same sass-mouth accent Paula Jai Parker used as Lexus. Yo-Yo even says she’s just trying to get enough money to get back to Memphis. Very relatable.

Throwing DJay and Shug into They Live in the hood makes for some wildly entertaining scenes. But Taylor and Rettenmaier have a lot more on their minds than trash talk and jump scares. They stretch their premise into allegory like Jordan Peele, whose epochal Us is another clear influence.

Three near-perfect performances from Boyega, Foxx, and Parris keep all the plates spinning. When confronted by big weirdness, they freak out appropriately, then get down to the business of saving their hood. Boyega plays multiple scenes with himself but never looks like he’s bluescreening it in. Foxx’s “Playboy World Pimp Champion 1995” is funny but never demeaning. (Get well soon, Jamie Foxx! The world needs you!) Parris is constantly revealing new layers of Yo-Yo, who is largely responsible for keeping the plot moving forward. In the final act, when the screenplay starts to struggle to stick the landing, all the hard work the actors have done keeps the increasingly strange proceedings grounded in reality. They Cloned Tyrone smuggles gold inside a trash bag as only good sci-fi can.

They Cloned Tyrone is streaming on Netflix.

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Book Features Books

Cosmic Carnage: Dead Astronauts

I was in the grip of a wicked fever when I finished Acceptance, the final installment in Jeff VanderMeer’s science-fiction/horror epic, the Southern Reach Trilogy. As I sweated it out on the couch, VanderMeer’s work, already teeming with freaky flora and fauna, was made all the more hallucinogenic and dreamlike by my fever-addled brain. The Jungian obelisk of the Lighthouse took on grave personal significance; when the aberrant animals of Acceptance made their presence known, the walls of my apartment seemed to breathe, undulating like mutant cilia. Sure, some (most?) of that was the fever, but credit where credit is due: VanderMeer has a knack for capturing the uncanny. And having recently read the Tallahassee, Florida-based writer’s newest offering, Dead Astronauts (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux), I can safely report that it teems with the same darkly poetic prose.

Jeff VanderMeer

Dead Astronauts, like the novella The Strange Bird, takes place in the Borne universe — first outlined in VanderMeer’s 2017 novel of the same name — a fictional future populated by renegade experiments and self-replicating biotech gone rogue. It’s a world in which climate change, scarcity, and disease were almost conquered by a clever marriage of technology and nature. In every timeline, though, the unnamed Company’s greed outpaces its caution, and some experiment gone awry leads inexorably to the rapid dissolution of civilization.

Enter the dead astronauts, so-called because their quest is a suicide mission and because their containment suits resemble spacesuits — Chen, who used to work for the Company; Moss, one of the Company’s experiments and the trio’s gateway between timelines; and Grayson, the former astronaut returned to a ruined Earth. The three travel, nomadic, between timelines, hoping to find a version of their homeworld not yet beyond the point of saving. When Chen teases Moss, asking her why she can’t find a peaceful paradise of a timeline where the three travelers might live out the rest of their days, VanderMeer quashes that possibility, writing, “Those timelines did not exist. The Company had tick-engorged itself across all timelines.”

The Company is capitalism metastasized to its most extreme — blindly producing long after there exists clientele to purchase the product. In every world the astronauts visit, the Company is a constant, as are some of its creations — the messianic blue fox, the ages-old Leviathan who swims among the refuse of the Company’s failed experiments in the containment ponds, and poor Charlie X, the Company’s former head scientist, now mutated, scratching his secret equations in the dust of a dead world. The characters are variables in an equation that, the astronauts hope, can be solved to reveal a livable Earth.

With Dead Astronauts, VanderMeer succeeds in making the tried and tired tropes of a post-apocalyptic Earth feel fresh. There are no zombies, no myopically militaristic generals populating the pages. Rather, VanderMeer conjures the spectre of a world gone spectacularly and uncomprehendingly wrong.

Wisely, VanderMeer steers clear of actually outlining what wrecked the world, choosing instead to leave humankind’s final act of hubris to the reader’s imagination. The technique works, as each possibility seems simultaneously more terrible — and more probable — than the last. As in his cult classic Southern Reach Trilogy, VanderMeer’s work in Dead Astronauts leaves enough unsaid to give the danger a terrifyingly unfathomable quality. Whatever the Company has unleashed, whatever vile creations it has wrought, leaves humans as helpless and perplexed as wildlife in the face of slash-and-burn agriculture.

VanderMeer’s prose is as spare as his settings are lush, and with that harmony the writer sounds a klaxon warning of the dangers of our disharmonious existence. Dead Astronauts is mesmerizing, and with it, VanderMeer further solidifies his place on the cutting edge of America’s collective nightmares.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Passengers

Douglas Adams said it best. “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.”

Combine that really impressive bigness with Einstein’s hard speed limit, and that means f you want to get anywhere in space, it’s going to take a long time. Storytellers who want to write stories that take place on other plants have come up with all sorts of work arounds, like hyperspace and warp drive, to let people get from one star to another in a human lifetime, but there’s little evidence such things could work in real life. Therefore, the other option is to extend the human lifespan by putting passengers into extended hibernation, so you go to sleep on Earth and wake up on the exoplanet of your choosing a century from now.

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers.

That’s the departure point for Passengers. The starship Avalon’a 5,000 colonists and 200 crew are barreling towards the planet Homestead II with  at half the speed of light when the ship hits an unexpected swarm of space rocks. The impact causes a power surge that wakes one of the passengers, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), from cold sleep. The problem is, the ship is only 30 years into its 120 year journey, meaning Jim is going to die of old age long before the ship makes it to Homestead. He is destined to spend the rest of his life alone.
The good news is, he’s alone in a kilometer-long luxury hotel staffed by robots. Soon, he befriends Arthur (Michael Sheen), the bartender droid whose establishment bears a striking resemblance to the bar of the Overlook Hotel where Jack Nicholson went insane in The Shining. This is probably not a coincidence.

Passengers is a story in the tradition of “The Cold Equations”, a pulp sci fi story adapted into a Twilight Zone script that highlighted ethical problems posed by the limitations of long distance spaceflight. It’s rare for being good sci fi that doesn’t involve zapping things with ray guns. It’s a story about how technology sometimes puts people in impossible situations that no human has ever been faced with before. (Before now, no generation has had to ever learn Instagram etiquette.) Jim is on his own in deep space, and it seems to be impossible for him to get back into hibernation without the help of a whole lot of specialized equipment and a team of doctors. Should he wake someone up to get help? Or maybe just for company? Faced with a totally unique moral dilemma, he does the only logical thing and starts drinking heavily.

Eventually, he makes the worst possible decision and wakes up a fellow passenger named Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), not because she can help out with the situation, but because he thinks she’s cute. Pratt’s lonely agonizing over the decision to basically commit slow murder by waking Aurora up 89 years early is the best part of Passengers.

Writer John Spaihts wrings as much drama and pathos as he can out of the impossible situation, carefully throwing new wrinkles into our heroes paths at regular intervals. The script for Passengers floated around Hollywood for years, and was at one point going to be produced with Keanu Reeves for $30 million instead of the $100 million that Sony spent on this production. Frankly, that might have been a better move. The production design on Passengers is top notch, but it doesn’t really add much to the interesting part of the story, even after the ship starts to break down and Jim and Aurora have to try to fix it with the help of a reanimated crewman named Gus (Lawrence Fishbourne). In the third act, the film’s courage suddenly fails as it tries to fit its unconventional story into a happy (or at least, happy-ish) ending. But hey, at least they were trying! If the preview audience I saw the film with was any indication, it still works, and will very likely provoke some extended conversations on the way home.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Arrival

Arrival is unlike any other film you will see this year, and to understand why that is, you need to learn about the man who is one of, if not the, best science fiction writers working today: Ted Chiang.

Chiang’s day job is as a technical writer. He has degrees in both computer science and creative writing. Although he has been active for twenty years now, he has never written a full-length novel, only fifteen short stories and novellas. But out of those fifteen works, all of them save one have been nominated for science fiction’s highest awards, the Nebula and the Hugo, and he has won eight times. (The only story that was not up for a Hugo was 2003’s “Liking What You See: A Documentary”, and that was because he refused the nomination, claiming editorial pressure had compromised the piece.) His 2010 story “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” has been a big inspiration for my own writing.

When I heard director Denis Villeneuve was adapting Chiang’s “Story Of Your Life”, I was of two minds. First, the 56-page novella is a masterpiece, combining a first contact story with an exploration into the natures of consciousness and time. The French-Canadian director’s drug war saga Sicario was one of the films that made 2015 a banner year, and he’s signed up for the Blade Runner reboot, so we’ll get a preview of how he can handle sci fi.

On the other hand, I had deep concerns that “Story of Your Life” would be unfilmable. Hitchcock said mediocre books make the best films, and Chiang is the opposite of mediocre. The story follows Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a gifted linguist who is tasked with trying to talk to the occupants of one of the twelve mysterious, giant spacecraft that appear over seemingly random places across the Earth one fall day in the near future. This is no small task. The pair of aliens, dubbed heptapods because they look like seven-legged squid, have nothing that resembles human writing, and their speech sounds like sperm whales playing with a sub woofer. Unlike, say, Star Trek aliens, these creatures are truly alien. And yet, they came all this way to visit us. Louise’s job is to ask them “What is your purpose on the Earth?”, and then translate their answer. But just to get to the asking part of the program is a seemingly impossible task, since the aliens communicate mostly using bursts of ink they expel from their bodies.

You can see the problems inherent in this adaptation. This is a story that revolves around concepts like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and concepts of time that emerge from quantum theory, and you zoned out just reading those words. Indeed, bewildered boredom is an entirely understandable reaction to Arrival. But so is awe and wonder. In my opinion, Villeneuve has accomplished what I thought impossible. Arrival stays true to the revelatory spirit of “Story of Your Life” while excising some of the story’s more difficult concepts (Chiang regularly spices up his narrative with diagrams) and adding a dash of Hollywood razzmatazz. The camera work by Bradford Young is not the equal of Roger Deakins’ masterful lensing in Sicario, but the images are frequently gorgeous. The ever versatile Adams gives a restrained performance as a lonely linguist under unimaginable stress who becomes haunted by dreams and visions as she gets closer to the truth of the aliens’ purpose.

Balancing the head and the heart in a sci fi movie is the ultimate challenge for a director. How do you capture the mind-expanding possibilities of the “literature of ideas” while injecting the all-important emotional ups and downs into the mix? Botching the mix is what kept Interstellar from truly taking off, but Villeneuve succeeds where Christopher Nolan failed, thanks to Chiang’s heart-rending subplot, which I won’t reveal too much of here except to say it’s the key to Arrival’s ultimate revelation. Keep in mind going in that this is not an M. Night Shyamalan puzzle movie, or a whodunit. It’s purpose is to use aliens to get you to think deeply about how language and time shapes the human experience.

Arrival

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Film Features Film/TV

Midnight Special

There was a time when the mission of science fiction was to produce a “sense of wonder” in the audience. You can see this in the works of masters like Ray Bradbury, who was able to effortlessly translate the terror of the unknown into the joy of discovery. Arthur C. Clarke was at his best when creating stories of exploration where there was very little conflict between the humans who set themselves against the vast strangeness of the universe.

This kind of sci-fi, which became much rarer after the ascendence of Philip K. Dick’s paranoid worldview, was reflected in some of the great films of the 20th century. In the hands of a master, like Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Steven Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, film is the perfect medium for conjuring up secular religious awe. In lesser hands, the lack of overt conflict can get boring.

There’s no shortage of conflict in Midnight Special, the new film from Jeff Nichols, the Little Rock writer/director, who is the brother of Memphis rock star Ben Nichols, lead singer of Lucero. Alton Meyer (Jaeden Lieberher) has been kidnapped by his father Roy (Michael Shannon), and they are on the run, with Lucas (Joel Edgerton) along for muscle. But it’s soon apparent that this is no ordinary domestic conflict gone bad. Alton, who wears blue swim goggles, can’t go out in the daytime, and avoids too much stimulation by obsessively reading comic books, is a willing accomplice in his kidnapping. And the people they’re running from are a dangerous cult, whom we meet when the FBI raids their church service. They look like a fundamentalist Mormon or Mennonite congregation, but their scripture is a strange techno-gibberish that lead FBI investigator Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) reveals as classified satellite communications that were apparently intercepted by Alton’s brain.

Adam Driver hunts that sci-fi “sense of wonder” in Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special.

That’s not the only weird thing Alton’s brain can do. When he gets too stimulated or emotional, blinding light shoots out of his eyes, like the kids in the immortal, 1960 British horror film Village of the Damned. And, most importantly, for the cult that sprang up around him, he can induce ecstatic visions in other people during intense, mutual trances. But each supernatural experience drains Alton a little bit more, and it’s clear from his pale, shaking frame that he can’t take much more. Roy has studied Alton’s revelations and, after reuniting him with his mother, Sarah (Kirsten Dunst), is determined to get the boy to a mysterious set of coordinates in three days, where they believe the boy’s salvation is to be had.

Lieberher is a gifted child actor who wowed in his film premiere opposite Bill Murray in St. Vincent, and his otherworldly stare is at the heart of making Midnight Special believable. Nichols, who also wrote the film, is clearly riffing on Close Encounters and E.T., and for stretches of the film, he achieves the tricky tone of sci-fi wonder, thanks mostly to his well-designed shot choices and spare but effective special effects. But Spielberg’s classics also had flashes of humor and an undercurrent of raw-edged family drama. Midnight Special has one, slack-jawed gear. Dunst, Edgerton, and the evil cultists all carry the same glazed, far-away look on their faces for most of the film. Worst of all is Shannon, who appears to be reprising his role as General Zod’s corpse in Batman v Superman. Driver is, once again, the best actor in the film, and Nichols gives him a little more room to be playful.

As demonstrated by the Syfy Channel’s recent failed attempt to adapt Clarke’s masterpiece Childhood’s End into a miniseries, the “sense-of-wonder” stories are difficult to translate for our more cynical times. Midnight Special is uneven, but just successful enough to suggest that there’s room in contemporary sci-fi for more positive, contemplative films.

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Film Features Film/TV

10 Cloverfield Lane

One time-honored method to make movies on the cheap is the “bottle show.” The idea is simple. Building sets costs money, and location shots present their own logistical problems, so when you’re short on cash, just come up with a reason to keep all of your characters trapped in one place and watch the sparks fly as characters bounce off each other. In the world of ever-expanding movie budgets, where you can’t put on a cape and fight crime for less than $150 million, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a bracing blast of old-fashioned thrifty craftsmanship.

You can’t get any more bottle show than the “group of survivors trapped in a bomb shelter” scenario, and first-time director Dan Trachtenberg makes the most of it. His sense of economy is obvious in the opening shot, a languid track across a New Orleans apartment that establishes who Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is: an aspiring fashion designer packing up to leave her boyfriend Ben (Bradley Cooper, who appears only as a voice on the phone). Her angry drive up I-55 is an homage to Janet Leigh’s escape with the stolen money in Psycho, complete with pounding, Bernard Herrmann-like score from Bear McCreary. But instead of stumbling into the Bates Motel, Michelle’s car runs—or is run—off the road, knocking her unconscious. When she wakes up, she’s chained to a bed in an anonymous basement, and the only door she can see looks suspiciously jail-like. She’s understandably alarmed, and meeting her new “host” doesn’t help. Howard (John Goodman) is a hulking Navy veteran who decided to build a survival bunker underneath his house sometime after his wife left him with their teenage daughter in tow. He tells Michelle that he rescued her from the car crash, but while she was unconscious, civilization collapsed, and they’re the only survivors.

John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead

This, naturally, raises a lot of questions, but there’s all the time in the world for answers. Howard’s not sure of the exact cause of the calamity—it could be nuclear or chemical, but whatever it is, the air outside is not fit to breathe, and nothing’s coming through on the radio. Howard’s story is more or less confirmed by the only other person in the bunker, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), a none-too-bright country boy who helped Howard build the bunker and thus knew where to go when the world went to hell. Holes in the story start to become apparent, and Howard’s giving off a real rapey vibe, even if he did save their lives, so Michelle has to decide if she’s in more danger in the bunker or facing the unknown on the surface.

Michelle and Howard’s characters are perfectly matched for confrontation: She runs at the first sign of trouble, while his instinct is to hide in situations he can control. Goodman puts on a powerhouse of a performance, vacillating back and forth between sympathetic and scary, often within the space of a sentence or two. Winstead, a horror movie veteran who has always risen to the challenges presented her, tops her former career best performance as Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

The efficient screenplay, credited to Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle, started life as an unrelated script J.J. Abrams bought for his Bad Robot production company and was rebranded as a spiritual sequel to the 2008 found-footage monster movie Cloverfield. That may have been a stroke of genius on the part of Abrams. Even though 10 Cloverfield Lane is not a found-footage movie, and even at the end it is still unclear if its alleged apocalypse is related to New York’s giant monster issues from the first film, the two works share a philosophy of assuming the point of view of ordinary people caught up in giant, inconceivable disasters to posit that the monsters in our minds are more dangerous than the ones outside the bunker.

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Film Features Film/TV

Film Review: The Martian

2001: A Space Odyssey regularly jockeys for position with Citizen Kane and Vertigo atop lists of the greatest movies ever made. When Stanley Kubrick set out to create what he called “the proverbial good science-fiction movie”, he tapped Arthur C. Clarke, the super-genius author who came up with the idea for the communications satellite, and the resulting masterpiece explores the space between scientific rigor and religious awe.

But sometimes it seems 2001‘s influence on the genre it sought to perfect has not been universally positive. Consider 1968’s other great sci-fi hit, Planet of the Apes. It, too, concerned itself with humanity’s ultimate fate, but its big ideas are wrapped in a fun package. There should be enough room in sci-fi for both Charlton Heston snarling “You damn dirty apes!” and Keir Dullea staring into psychedelic infinity. But too often, when directors are given free reign, they feel obligated to try to top Kubrick. Consider two recent examples of hundred-million- dollar misfires: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Nolan’s spectacular, 2001-inspired 70-mm photography couldn’t save Interstellar from collapsing into self-important gobbledygook. For Prometheus, Scott disappointed everyone by ditching the pulpy, “haunted-house-in-space” premise that made Alien a classic in favor of wallowing in secondhand Kubrickian mysticism.

Scott learned his lesson with The Martian. The origin and fate of all humanity are not at stake, just the life of one man: NASA astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon). Adapted from a best-selling novel by Andrew Weir, The Martian‘s inspiration comes not from universe-spanning epics, but from the 1954 short story “The Cold Equations,” in which a space pilot and a stowaway must grapple with the fact that they don’t have enough fuel to land safely. Newtonian physics creates the fodder for high drama.

When an unexpected sandstorm forces the crew of the Ares 3 mission to leave the red planet in a hurry, Watney is hit by flying debris and left for dead. But Watney wakes up and drags himself back to the expedition’s abandoned, but still mostly functional, base, where he performs some gruesome self-surgery and tries to come to grips with the fact that he is more alone than anyone has ever been. The opening sequence, where the crew struggles through the storm and mission commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) must make the gut-wrenching decision to leave, are some of Scott’s best work since Black Hawk Down. The story then splits into three: the castaway’s uphill battle to survive in Mars’ harsh environment; the NASA ground team discovering they’ve still got a live astronaut on the Martian surface; and the expedition crew flying through the solar system with only enough fuel to return to Earth. Everyone must work together to rescue Watney as the world watches.

The Martian often plays out like a fictionalized, future version of Apollo 13. Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard get all the little details right, like how calling a NASA scientist a “steely-eyed missile man” is the highest compliment, and how “lock the doors” is the worst thing you can hear in mission control. But they never get bogged down in minutiae, thanks largely to Damon’s engaging and vulnerable performance. The cast is huge, and features workmanlike performances from Jeff Daniels as the NASA director, Kristen Wiig as the beleaguered PR specialist, Chiwetel Ejiofor as the mission director, and Sean Bean as the head of the astronaut corps. But even though Scott is excellent at ratcheting up the tension back on Earth, I found myself eager to return to Mars to watch Damon living by his wits while pausing occasionally to take in the otherworldly vistas Scott creates from heavily CGI’d footage of the Jordanian desert.

The Martian is a major return to form for Scott, who seems inspired by NASA’s can-do spirit. The film’s optimism is a far cry from the darkness of Blade Runner, but it has proven to be a big hit with audiences, massively outperforming box-office projections by grossing $55 million in its opening weekend. As this film and Gravity prove, science fiction is sometimes better when it concentrates on the small questions, like how to find your way home.

The Martian
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Film Features Film/TV

Time Warp Drive-In: It Came From The Drive-In

The Summer Drive-In was built by Malco Theaters in 1950, on the cusp of the country’s big drive-in theater boom. At the height of their popularity, there were more than 4,000 drive-ins all over the country, comprising more than one quarter of all movies screens. Now, that figure is at 1.5 percent.

But the lost pleasures of the drive-in are not lost on Memphis filmmaker Mike McCarthy and Black Lodge Video proprietor Matt Martin, who, last year, started the monthly Time Warp Drive-In series, which brings classic films, both well-known and obscure, back to the biggest screens.

“We were accepted by a large part of the Memphis community,” says McCarthy. “[Malco Theatres Executive VP] Jimmy Tashie took a chance at, not only saving the drive-in, but plugging a program in that would use the drive-in for what its American function used to be.”

The eight-month series will once again run four-movie programs, once a month, each united by a theme, ranging from the deliciously schlocky to the seriously artsy. Last year’s most popular program was the Stanley Kubrick marathon, which ended as the sun came up. “Who says the drive-in is anti-intellectual?” McCarthy says.

The appeal of the drive-in is both backward- and forward-looking. The atmosphere at the Time Warp Drive-In events is relaxed and social. People are free to sit in their cars and watch the movie or roam around and say hi to their friends. It’s the classic film version of tailgating. “Matt from Black Lodge brought this up: It’s a kind of social experiment, like America is in general. It’s getting back to turntables and vinyl. Maybe it’s not celluloid, but it’s celluloid-like. You didn’t get to see that, because you weren’t born. But you can go back to that. It takes a handful of people who believe to make it happen. And that’s why Malco has been around for 100 years. They’ll take that chance.”

Malco’s Film VP Jeff Kaufman worked hard to find and book the sometimes-obscure films that Martin and McCarthy want to program. “I think we’ve got the material, and we’re trying to get things that people want to see, while kind of playing it a little dangerous around the edges,” McCarthy says. “This Saturday’s totally kid-friendly. We make a conscious attempt to show the kid-friendly stuff first, so people can come out with their kids.”

The series takes its name from the most famous song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, so the opening program is, appropriately, movies that were mentioned in the show’s opening number, “Science Fiction Double Feature,” that also appeared on Memphis’ legendary horror host Sivad’s long-running Fantastic Features program. “We’re showing what many people believe to be the greatest film of all time, the 1933 version of King Kong,” McCarthy says. “It’s not the worst film of all time, which is the 1976 version of King Kong.

The granddaddy of the horror/sci-fi special effects spectacle films, King Kong has lost none of its power. It’s concise, imaginative, and best experienced with a crowd. The evening’s second film comes from 20 years later. It Came from Outer Space is based on a story by sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury and was prime drive-in fare. It features shape-shifting aliens years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 3D imagery from the original golden age of 3D, and a twisted take on the alien invasion formula.

It Came From Outer Space

The third film, When Worlds Collide, was made in 1951, but it doesn’t fit the mold of the sci-fi monster movie. Produced by George Pal, whose credits include the original film takes on War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, the film asks what would happen if scientists discover that Earth was doomed to destruction by a rogue planet, presaging Lars Von Trier’s 2011 Melancholia.

The evening closes with The Invisible Man, starring Claude Rains as the title scientist who throws off social constraints after rendering himself transparent. Directed by Frankenstein auteur James Whale, the film has been recognized as an all-time classic by the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry and will richly reward intrepid viewers who stay at the drive-in all night long.

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Film Features Film/TV

Memphis Comic And Fantasy Convention 2014

Since a few dozen proto-geeks gathered for the first WorldCon in 1939, sci fi, fantasy, and anime fan conventions have grown into a huge phenomenon. Dozens of regional and speciality cons have sprung up all over the world, with 150,000 people gathering for Comic Con in San Diego and Dragon Con in Atlanta every year. Now in its 5th year, the Memphis Comic and Fantasy Convention has not yet achieved that level of success, but founder Joe Thordarson likes to think big: “I still have big plans for this. We want to grow every year.”

This weekend, the Hilton Memphis will play host to a few thousand people of all ages browsing through the wares of dozens of comics and collectables vendors, meeting some of their heroes, playing games, and generally letting their geek flags fly. “Even though the convention is basically a three-day geek celebration, when you walk through it, you can’t help but be struck by all of the talented artists, writers, and filmmakers,” Thordarson says.

“My goal from the beginning was to make it more than just a once-a-year event,” he says. “I wanted to make it a year-round thing and use the talented artists and filmmakers we deal with as a way to promote art in schools. Throughout the year, we host workshops and filmmaking camps and animation camps and things like that.”

One of the ongoing student projects is Live Cartoon.”We take a character created by one of the students, and then we write a script around it.” Students collaborate to create storyboards for the script, which are then projected behind voice actors who read the script live to a con audience. This year, Live Cartoon will be hosted by voice actor and host of That Anime Show J Michael Tatum. “It’s a neat thing for the kids,” Thordarson says. “It teaches them about what a real production is, it teaches them about deadlines. It hopefully gets them excited enough to go out and do it themselves.” The same program will include a sneak peek of Department of ReQuests, a pilot produced for the Cartoon Network by animators Travis Fowler and Krickett King, alums of both Memphis College of Art and previous Live Cartoon projects.

A series of Memphis-rooted films will screen at the con this year. Timid Monster will premiere their new short film After Light, a Kickstarter-funded science-fiction film that began life as a book trailer for Cameo Renae’s zombie apocalypse novel ARV-3 before growing into a fully realized short. “After Light takes a chapter out of the ARV-3 book,” says director Dan Baker. “A group of survivors who have weathered the apocalypse underground are trying to navigate their way through the city. They get lost and confused. Their map says they’re in the right place, but there have been barricades thrown up, which confuses them. So the young girl, the hero of the story, volunteers to climb to the top of a nearby building so she can get a bird’s eye view and scout ahead. So she and the male lead embark on a trip to the top of the building where they get ambushed by these zombie creatures called ARVs.”

The project had its genesis at Nashville’s Utopia Con, but Baker says he is looking forward to his hometown premiere. “Memphis Comic and Fantasy Contention is the con that we kind of cut our teeth on. We’ve been going there since 2011,” he says.

Geekland, director Lara Johnson’s documentary, was funded by the Rhodes College Institute for Regional Studies. “I grew up in Nashville, so I saw there was a conflict between traditional Southern culture and conservatism and geek culture,” Johnson says. “I had a friend in high school who is interviewed in the film whose father was a Southern Baptist pastor. She wasn’t allowed to read Harry Potter until she rebelled when she was 16. So I was going to see what that looked like in Memphis. But once I started getting into it, I found that it didn’t really exist in Memphis. People here are really cool about that kind of stuff, and there’s not really any conflict that you find in a lot of other places in the South. Memphis is unique in that way. So the film kind of turned into a showcase of all of the different, cool, geek things that are happening here.”

Johnson says making Geekland has introduced her to a new community: “The Memphis Comic and Fantasy Convention, along with a lot of other geeky people in Memphis, have totally embraced me.”

The evening will close with a screening of Mike McCarthy’s 2009 sci-fi film Cigarette Girl. Set in a dystopian future Memphis where tobacco is contraband, the Cigarette Girl, played by Cori Dials, must live by her wits and a handy .45.

“You combine Sexual Persona with Elvis Presley, and you get a great deal of my work,” McCarthy says of his art-house-meets-grind-house aesthetic. He calls Dials his “Gothic Brigitte Bardot.” “If you don’t quite have a million bucks, but you have somebody who looks like a million bucks, then you have a million bucks,”

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Film/TV TV Features

TV Watch: Doctor Who

CREDIT: BBC.co.uk/doctorwho

Doctor Who is now entering its 51st year. The BBC sci-fi TV show is older than Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Star Trek. Its first episode, which was delayed because of BBC’s coverage of the Kennedy asassination, debuted in England the same year that Astro Boy, the first ever anime, debuted in Japan. Can a show that is as old as an entire genre still have something to say?

The first actor to play the Doctor was William Hartnell, who was 55 years old at the time of the 1963 debut. After three years galavanting through time and space in the TARDIS, Hartnell’s deteriorating health forced him to retire. So the writers came up with a way to keep the popular show going without its star. When Time Lords like the Doctor are near death, their bodies regenerate, changing appearance and giving them new life. The number of total regenerations a single Time Lord could get was set at 12, which, in 1966 probably seemed like a large enough number that the writers would never have to deal with what happened when the Doctor ran out.

BBC.co.uk/doctorwho

Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who

After being cancelled in 1989, Doctor Who regenerated in 2005. For the first 26 years of the show’s run, it was a series of half-hour cliffhangers that bound five or six episodes together under one long story arc. When it returned, it was as series of one-hour, stand-alone episodes with only the loosest of a season-long arc. The new Who was instantly popular, thanks in large part to the onscreen chemistry between the ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose (Billie Piper), the Doctor’s human traveling companion. When Eccleston decided that one year as the most recognized man in nerddom was enough, he was replaced by the 10th Doctor (David Tennant), and Piper stuck around long enough to get the new guy established and set the new Who up for its best years. Long-form television was back in fashion, and Doctor Who‘s plot machinations became increasingly byzantine, as the Doctor’s troubled past in the Time War caught up with him. When Tennant left the TARDIS in 2010, he was replaced by the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith), who was initially well received but never achieved the same depth of fan love as Tennant. Smith stayed for three years until being killed off during the show’s emotional 50th anniversary special. And so, here we are, with Peter Capaldi premiering as the once-thought-impossible 12th Doctor.

Doctor Who fandom is the oldest and most fanatical of the nerd subtribes, and during the run up to the 50th anniversary, showrunner Steven Moffat seemed determined to serve up as much red meat to the fans as possible. The series immersed itself in its own mythology, becoming a show mostly about itself, a recursion that the character of the Doctor, who once famously described the universe as a “big ball of wibby wobbly timey-wimey stuff,” would appreciate.

Moffat surrounds the new Doctor with fan-favorite characters Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint, and Strax, their Sontaran comic relief. But Moffat doesn’t give the new guy much to do. When Capaldi is finally unleashed late in the show to confront the cyborg villain, he hints at a new iron hand under the Doctor’s jolly velvet glove. But overall, Capaldi’s first episode seems flat and uninspired. If he is to be the actor to regenerate a franchise crushed under the weight of its own history, Moffat is going to have to find new places for the TARDIS to go.