Saturday is packed with cinematic treats this week.
First, at 10 a.m., a rare screening of a Memphis classic at Malco Studio on the Square. When What I Love About Concrete won the 2013 Best Hometowner Feature at Indie Memphis, it had been in production for several years. Filmmakers Brett Hannover, Alanna Stewart, and Katherine Dohan began the project while they were still in high school at White Station. As I said in my Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits article about the film, everyone thinks they should make a movie about the high school experience, but these folks actually did it, and their movie is much cooler than yours would have been. Somewhere between Sixteen Candles and A Wrinkle In Time, What I Love About Concrete is a must-see. And if you, or someone you know, is in grades 7-12, you can see it for free, and have a pizza lunch with the filmmakers, courtesy of the Indie Memphis young filmmakers program! Click here to sign up.
High School Magic and a Pam Grier Double Feature this Weekend at the Cinema
Then at sunset, the Time Warp Drive-In kicks off its sixth season with a tribute to actress Pam Grier. Quick, what’s the best Quentin Tarantino movie? Time’s up! It’s Jackie Brown, the Elmore Leonard adaptation QT wrote for Grier in the mid-90s. And there’s no better place to see it than the Malco Summer Drive-In.
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Then, Grier’s breakthrough performance, the 1973 blackspoitation flick Coffy, in which she is an incredible bad ass.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career in the 1980s ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. That makes the former governor of California the perfect subject for this month’s Time Warp Drive-In.
Schwarzenegger, a former professional bodybuilder whose first screen appearance was in the documentary Pumping Iron, starred in two perfect movies in the Reagan era. One of them is Conan The Barbarian, and I will accept no disagreement on that point. The second one is James Cameron’s breakthrough picture (if you don’t count Piranha II: The Spawning) The Terminator. Not much I can say about The Terminator that hasn’t already been said a thousand times. If you’ve never seen it, yes, it is every bit as good as you’ve heard, and watching it in a drive-in is pretty much the ideal setting. And if you want a master class in how to cut a trailer, take a look at this one. They don’t make ’em like this any more.
Time Warp With Ahnold this Saturday!
Next up is a film that epitomizes the rut he fell into in the late ’80s. Where The Terminator was violent, it was also one of the smartest science fiction scripts ever filmed. Predator is all about bulging biceps and firearms. And yet, Ahnold carries it effortlessly. To see what happens when he’s not the lead, check out this year’s flaccid Predator remake.
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Two years later, Paul Verhoeven was using Ahnold’s public image as a tough guy to sell his over-the-top, borderline satirical take on Philip K. Dick’s Total Recall. And yet, amidst all the weirdness, Schwarzenegger still carries the film! Just witness the horror show of the Ahnold-less remake. This is why, despite the fact that he is almost singlehandedly responsible for the introduction of the Hummer into civilian life, I can’t hate the guy. He’s got chops.
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Finally, a Stephen King adaptation that was set in the then-far-away future of 2017, The Running Man. Schwarzenegger is, predictably, great in this, but not for the usual reasons. He’s kinda clueless as the now all-too-real satire swirls around him, but playing the material completely straight is absolutely the right move here, especially since he’s playing off of a gloriously over-the-top Richard Dawson. Did I mention this movie essentially predicted the plague of reality TV, but somehow didn’t go far enough to see that the dystopia that blighted entertainment genre would create when we essentially elected Richard Dawson’s character president?
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Time Warp Drive-In starts at dusk on Saturday, November 10 at the Malco Summer Drive-In.
The Lost Boys leads off the Shocktober Time Warp Drive-In
For the last five years, the October edition of the Time Warp Drive-In has been the most popular. It’s horror movie season after all, and the Warp crew knows what you want.
This year’s ghoulish festivities kick off with a choice slice of ’80s cheese. The Lost Boys made stars of Kiefer Sutherland (who delivers the immortal line “Maggots, Michael. You’re eating maggots. How do they taste?”); Corey Haim and Corey Feldman (collectively known from that moment on as “They Coreys”); and Jason Patric. Joel Shumacher’s best film also features a cameo by Tim Copello, aka Saxophone Guy from Tina Turner videos, whose oiled physique and powerful mullet make him the most pure avatar of the Reagan Era.
Shocktober V Gets Scary At The Time Warp Drive-In
The next film continues the theme of secret suburban vampires. The directorial debut of writer/director/actor triple threat Tom Holland, Fright Night is set in the then-present-day of 1985, but it has a charming classic Hammer horror quality to it. It features Chris Sarandon as Jerry Dandridge, mild-mannered mom-dater by day, bloodsucking freak by night. Or something like that. Fright Night is one of those cult horror films that actually deserves its cult.
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Then the vamp action moves from the ‘burbs to the city. Tony Scott’s illustrious directing career began in 1983 with a bang. The Hunger stars the super-sexy pairing of Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as vampire lovers on the prowl in New York City, and Susan Sarandon as their next snack. Check out this trailer, which uses “perverse” as a selling point.
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The final Shocktober film takes its vampires to a rural setting. Near Dark was the second film from director Katherine Bigelow, who would later go on to become the first woman to win a Best Director Academy Award. It was a flop upon release, but has been elevated to cult status by horror cinephiles for its sheer inventiveness. Is this the first appearance of the “vampires move around in the day time in blacked out automobiles” trope that Buffy The Vampire Slayer loved so much?
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The Time Warp Drive-In starts at sundown on Saturday, October 20 at the Malco Summer Drive-In.
Divine goes on a fabulous crime spree in Pink Flamingos
September’s Time Warp Drive-In honors the patron saint of bad taste, John Waters.
The first film of the evening is Water’s underrated 2000 romp Cecil B. Demented. Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) is a movie star who is kidnapped by the Sprocketholes, a group of “kamakazie filmmakers” including Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mike Shannon, Alicia Witt, and Stephen Dorff as the titular demented director.
Let’s Do The Time Warp Drive-In With John Waters
Next is an early Johnny Depp vehicle, Cry-Baby. It’s about as fifties rock and roll, juvenile delinquent, bobby sox-y as you can get, daddy-o!
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Then, at midnight, the infamous Pink Flamingos. This is the movie that made Waters internationally infamous for leading lady Divine’s…shockingly inappropriate dietary choices. Here’s just a taste of the drag legend’s take-no-prisoners performance, where she calls in the press to watch as she gets her kill on. Don’t watch this is if you’re at work or around decent human beings.
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I have never seen the final film of the evening, Waters and Divine’s followup to their breakthrough semi-hit, Female Trouble. But I have to say that this is one of the most kick ass trailers I have ever seen.
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The show starts Saturday night at sundown at the Malco Summer Drive-In.
It’s a big week at the movies in Memphis, so we’ll get right to it.
Tonight, Tuesday August 14 at 7 p.m., Indie Memphis presents a timely documentary at Studio on the Square. At last year’s film festival, when director Adam Bhala Lough showed two of his films, the documentary The New Radical and his lost narrative feature Weapons, he teased his latest project, Alt Right: Age of Rage. The doc delves into the Trumpian explosion of hate-fueled political movements, centering its narrative around last year’s Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Tickets are available at the Indie Memphis website.
This Week At The Cinema: The Good, The Bad, and The Anime
Then, a treat for anime fans. The first time Cowboy Bebop: The Movie played Memphis, it was for one week, and only at 9 p.m. I went three times to try to buy a ticket, only to find it was sold out. I finally got into the last screening and wondered, with the rest of the sold-out audience, why it didn’t rate a full screen to itself. Now, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Shinichro Watanabe’s groundbreaking series, Fathom Events is bringing the film (known in Japan as Knocking On Heaven’s Door) back to theaters. Cowboy Bebop‘s hyperreal fusion of American sci fi and western tropes and Japanese manga imagery has been often imitated but never equaled, and its kicking soundtrack by musical polymath Yoko Kanno remains fresh today. The series theme song “Tank!” ranks alongside “Peter Gunn” and the Mission Impossible theme. The influence from Watanabe’s masterpiece has reverberated through pop culture ever since, with entire sequences lifted almost verbatim in The Matrix, and Joss Whedon’s Firefly being practically a live-action adaptation. The big screen version lacks a little of the series’ snap, (and, inexplicably, “Tank!”) but makes up for it with one of the best space battle sequences ever created. The subtitled version featuring the original Japanese voice actors is Wednesday at the Malco Paradiso, and the dubbed version familiar to American audiences, featuring Steven Blum as Spike, Beau Billingslea as Jet, Wendee Lee as Faye, and Melissa Fahn as Edward, will be Thursday. See you at the movies, Space Cowboy.
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Friday night, director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s cult classic Love & Basketball bounces into the Orpheum Theatre Summer Film Series. Imagine Fifty Shades of Grey, only without the sociopathic capitalism and bad S&M. Actually, forget about Fifty Shades entirely and just watch a movie where actual nice people like Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan fall in love with each other for a change. Get your tix on the Orpheum website.
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Then Saturday, the Orpheum invites you to indulge in your princess fantasies with Rogers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella. This production was originally made for television in 2000 and became a prized cultural artifact thanks to a fabulous late-career performance by Whitney Houston as the fairy godmother and teen sensation Brandy as the little peasant girl with the slipper. Get your tickets here.
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But what’s that? You’re tired of actual good movies? You’re ready for first class trash? Saturday night, the Time Warp Drive-In has got you covered. Saturday night, the Worst Movies Ever program kicks off with, what else, 1959’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. Recently I was in Los Angeles, and got to visit the space where director Ed Wood had his production offices during his reign of cinematic error. Predictably, it was a dump.
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Next up is the exact point where the horror boom of the 1980s went bust: Troll 2. Feel the terror if you dare:
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Then brace for the Citizen Kane of kung fu rock n’ roll films, Miami Connection. They sing. They dance. They kick ass. They do none of it well.
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Think they only made bad movies in the twentieth century? The modern anti-classic Birdemic will make you think again, and then not think about anything. Just stop thinking, OK?
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Then, drive off into the sunrise with the infamous international production Manos: The Hands Of Fate. Then keep driving. And driving. And driving…
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The May edition of the Time Warp Drive-In series is a smorgasbord of tasty fantasy treats from the 1980s.
The Last Unicorn
Saturday night at 7 PM at the Malco Summer Avenue Drive-In, the More Dreams Of Gods And Magic program opens with a stone cold classic. Rob Riener’s 1987 adaptation of William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride was added the National Film Registry in 2016. It has become, as is said of Casablanca, a film consisting entirely of quotable lines. Here’s one of the film’s iconic scenes, the battle of wits between Wesley, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, and evil mastermind Vizzini, for the life of the hostage Princess Buttercup. Also like Casablanca, virtually everyone in this film went on to have a great career. Carey Elwes, who played Wesley, will be the mayor in season three of Stranger Things. Wallace Shawn, who played Vizzini, is an acclaimed playwright who broke into film with the 1981 adaptation of his play My Dinner With André and, at age 74, is still working as a voice over artist on Bojack Horseman. And Princess Buttercup is Robin Wright, who has received four straight Emmy nominations for her role as the first lady in House Of Cards, and just last year appeared in both Wonder Woman and Blade Runner 2049.Even if you think you have it memorized, check out this tour de force scene:
‘INCONCEIVABLE!’ Fantasy Lineup For Saturday Night’s Time Warp Drive-In
The second film is another literary adaptation, this time of the 1972 Newberry Award winner Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. The children’s book is something like a cross between Watership Down and Flowers For Algernon, although maybe not as depressing as that might sound. The 1982 film version The Secret Of NIMH was spearheaded by Don Bluth, the former Disney animator who became the House Of Mouse’s nemesis during the 1980s, when he had a run of films with MGM that included The Land Before Time. Bluth is also famous among gamers for his work on the beautiful but unplayable Dragon’s Lair, which pioneered what would later be called DVD ROM games. The film is more than a little cheesy, but makes up for it with some amazing classical animation.
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The Secret of NIMH was released in 1982 at the height of the post-Star Wars sci fi fantasy boom. Sharing screen time that year were the last two films on the Time Warp slate. The Last Unicorn was a Rankin/Bass production with a killer voice actor lineup that included Mia Farrow, Angela Landsbury, Jeff Bridges, and Christopher Lee. It’s perhaps most significant for the young Japanese animation crew who got their start on the film and would go on to form the core of Studio Ghibli.
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And finally, there’s Krull. By 1982’s lofty standards, Krull is not a good movie. If it were released today, it would be probably make $500 million. Nowadays, the film’s biggest attraction is the elaborate pre-digital special effects, which include the high point of that light-leak video laser thing. The screenplay is a bloody mess of Lucas-damaged Hero’s Journey cliches, but veteran British character actors Freddy Jones and Franchesca Annis occasionally step in to elevate the proceedings with committed performances that the material probably didn’t deserve. But hey, that’s why you spend your money on the Brits—they always bring it.
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If you’ve ever wondered what was so great about Alfred Hitchcock, this is the weekend to find out. Was the master of suspense the greatest filmmaker of all time? The four films playing in Memphis this weekend make the strongest case possible for Hitch’s GOAT status.
Alfred Hitchcock
Saturday night, the Time Warp Drive-In will devote its season’s first full show to Hitchcock. Cinephiles will go round and round on which of his films is the best, but the Time Warp is leading with my pick: Rear Window. This amazingly compact work takes place in one giant set. It has Jimmy Stewart at his most laconic, literal queen Grace Kelly at her absolute sexiest, and a classic supporting performance by the great Thelma Ritter. Just look at the way Hitch introduces the setting and almost every character in the film in the opening three minutes.
It’s A Hitchcock Weekend! Time Warp Drive In and Turner Classic Movies Present Four Classics From The Master of Suspense
Next up is North by Northwest, the template for thousands of action movies. Check out this trailer, in which Hitch prefigured Deadpool‘s marketing campaign by six decades.
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Next on the super-genius parade is The Birds, a deeply weird horror film that today can be read as a kind of proto-zombie movie. The events of the film are never really explained, but as you can see from this classic clip, these are some really pissed off birds!
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On Sunday at the Paradiso, Turner Classic Movies presents a 60th anniversary screening of Vertigo, Hitchcock’s masterpiece which, in 2012, bumped Citizen Kane from the top spot of the decennial Sight + Sound Best Films Of All Times poll. You can judge for yourself at the Paradiso on Sunday, March 18 at 2:00 PM.
It’s A Hitchcock Weekend! Time Warp Drive In and Turner Classic Movies Present Four Classics From The Master of Suspense (4)
The Time Warp Drive-In is back tonight with a salute to The Paranoid Visions of John Carpenter.
They Live
During the heyday of his career in the 1970s and 80s, Carpenter was known mostly as a schlock horror director. He broke into the mainstream in 1978 with Halloween, a $300,000 quickie that made $70 million, launched Jamie Lee Curtis’ career and set the template for the slasher movie genre that would dominate 80s horror. Without Halloween, the entire horror genre would be unrecognizable today: There would be no Friday the 13th, A Nightmare On Elm Street, or Scream.
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The all-night marathon of Carpenter’s work includes the film that many consider his masterpiece, The Thing. The 1982 film starring Kurt Russell that had the misfortune of being released the same weekend as E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and was buried at the box office. But it has inspired generations of horror filmmakers, who have tirelessly imitated its beats, but always failed to achieve the same intensity of tension. Also on offer is Carptenter’s rarely seen homage to H.P. Lovecraft, In The Mouth of Madness, and the criminally underrated 1987 work Prince of Darkness. Viewed today, Prince of Darkness is a wildly uneven film, but the most scared I have ever been in a movie theater was when I first saw it at age 16. Also, it has Alice Cooper in it.
Prince of Darkness
Carpenter was the poster child for what Martin Scoresese called “the director as smuggler”. His work was always much more complex than it appeared on the surface. There was a strong come-on—Jeff Bridges as a romantic E.T. In 1984’s Starman, for example—but the real meat was in the details. Starman was a huge commercial hit, but it was also a textbook Man From Mars story, where the visitor from elsewhere, unfamiliar with our ways, becomes a conduit for us to question the unexamined assumptions of our culture.
The Time Warp leads with They Live. Released in 1988, the film was the last gasp of Carptener’s golden decade. Even though it made $13 million on a $3 million budget, it was long considered an embarrassing oddity. But today, it is clear that They Live is one of the most insightful pieces of social science fiction ever produced. It is at once a promulgator of conspiratorial thinking and a critique of it. It’s Richard Hofstadter’s essay “The Paranoid Style In American Politics” rendered as a trashy vehicle for wrester Rowdy Roddy Piper. It’s a primer on propaganda, and how our postwar belief that we don’t do propaganda in America makes us particularly vulnerable to a skillful propagandist such as Fox News’ Roger Ailes. You want to see through Donald Trump’s smokescreen of lies? Put on the sunglasses (a literal framing device) and see the alien masquerading as humans. But be aware: Trump’s followers also believe they are wearing the sunglasses, and only they know the real truth. Is Nada, Piper’s everyman character, actually a dangerous paranoid schizophrenic? He sees things that others can’t, and commits a mass shooting in a bank in response to images only he can see. The film keeps us guessing right up until the end, but the urge to question reality, and dark places those questions can lead, linger long after the final sex joke.
Time Warp Drive-In: The Paranoid Visions of John Carpenter
This mild spring day is perfect weather for the drive-in. Fortunately, the Time Warp’s got you covered!
The theme is Comic Book Hardcore, but the first item on tonight’s program is the official premiere of episode 1 of Waif, the sci-fi serial directed by Time Warp Drive In co-host Mike McCarthy. Waif is the story of an alien stowaway, played by Meghan Prewitt, who finds herself stranded on future Earth. The sci fi serial form is perfectly suited to McCarthy’s pulpy sensibilities, and the the space-based special effects by Raffe Murray in the opening episode have a pleasing hint of the 70s BBC shops that produced classic Doctor Who and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
Waif
2005’s Sin City saw OG indie auteur Robert Rodriguez’s most significant contribution to the comic book movie genre. Rodriguez, in collaboration with famed Batman artist Frank Miller, abandoned photorealism entirely and created a dark, stylized world where Miller’s hardboiled characters and over-the-top femme fatales fit right in. It’s too bad the sequel, 2014’s A Dame To Kill For, was so godawful, because this is one of the greatest visual masterpieces of 21st century filmmaking, and a perfect drive-in feature.
Sin City
Next up is an early entry into the comic book movie sweepstakes, the 1994 adaptation of The Crow, based on the underground comic by James O’Barr. The film is infamous not so much for what happens onscreen as what happened offscreen: Its star, Brandon Lee, son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee, was killed in a still-mysterious on-set accident eight days prior to filming wrap. Viewed from a distance of 22 years, Lee’s performance has a brooding charisma that inspires all sorts of might-have-beens, and the film looks like the blueprint for the DC grimdark philosophy of superhero films.
The Crow
1995’s Tank Girl is an infamous flop that destroyed careers and poisoned the reputation one of the few girl power comics on the scene in the 1990s. Lori Petty stars as the titular Tank Girl, who roams the post-apocalyptic world not so much like Furiosa as like Mad Max if he were played by Gewn Stephanie. It’s also notable for being one of the stranger roles rapper turned TV cop drama regular Ice-T has had, as he appears as a sentient marsupial mutant named T-Saint. The years have been kind to this film, imbuing it with a sense of trashy fun. Like Repo Man, it finds its salvation in a good soundtrack and some now-classic fashion.
Tank Girl
The final film on the docket is Blade, another 1990s comic book film that looks better in retrospect than it did a the time. It stars Wesley Snipes in a career-making turn as a sword-slinging vampire hunter. In this origin story, Blade, a half-human whose mother was bitten by a vampire while he was in the womb, faces off against the great character actor Stephen Dorff as a vamp set on world domination. It’s got enough stylish vampire decapitations to keep you awake into the wee hours of the drive-in.
“Staying at home and watching a movie is great, but there’s another way to do it,” Matt Martin says. The Black Lodge Video owner, together with Memphis underground movie guru Mike McCarthy, is gearing up for the third season of the Time Warp Drive-in. Once a month, the Malco Summer Drive-in will play host to an all-night extravaganza of classic (if you define “classic” loosely) movies.
“There’s been a resurgence in interest in retro-cinema, especially among millennials,” Martin says. “The drive-in allows people to go back in time and see some great movies they might never have heard of. At the same time there’s this cinema-drenched environment. Mike likes to call it ‘free-range cinema.’ We invite the audience to be part of a night that’s not just about the movies. You can get out under the stars, interact with people, have a picnic with cinema all around you.”
Robert De Niro and Ray Liota in Goodfellas
This year’s series begins Saturday with Dark Urban Worlds: The Films of Martin Scorsese. For one ticket, audiences will get four films: Scorsese’s 1990 organized-crime epic Goodfellas; then The Departed, which tackled the story of gangster Whitey Bulger a decade before Johnny Depp’s Black Mass; Taxi Driver, the 1976 masterpiece that made Scorsese and Robert De Niro legends; and After Hours, the 1985 comedy where straight-laced Griffin Dunne tries to escape from bohemian New York.
“The drive-in always was a home for the bizarre,” Martin says. “It’s been synonymous with weirdo genre movies, exploitation, and strange horrors. I wanted to get a couple that represent that theme — for example Goodfellas takes inspiration from exploitation — but then throw some more obscure stuff in there, like After Hours, because so few people have ever seen it. The drive-in audience is tricky. It’s not like a regular movie theater, because attention doesn’t work the same way. The environment is more conducive to hanging out and interactivity and fun. We tried to pick things that have a certain pace, a certain energy to them. The drive-in is more about the entire experience than about the individual storylines.”
Other programs in the 2015 Time Warp series includes Sing Along Cinema!, the April set of musicals including the contrasting 1980 films The Blues Brothers and Xanadu; Comic Book Hardcore! in May, with Sin City and The Crow; Return of the Burn with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Half Baked; Martial Arts Mayhem in July, with Enter the Dragon and Kung Fu Hustle; Paranoid Visions, a tribute to John Carpenter with They Live and The Thing; and Bride of Shocktober!, horror comedies including Young Frankenstein and Shaun of the Dead.
On another front, Martin says Black Lodge Video has been without a physical building for more than a year, but that is about to change. “We’ve finally found what we think is the new and best home for Black Lodge, and our enormous collection, and we can hopefully make some announcements at the end of the month about where that will be. We’re going to take it up a notch, and hopefully we’ll be able to branch out into other directions, like theme nights and workshops. My hope is that the Lodge will be, by summer, ready to reclaim its position as Memphis’ leading film archive.”
