Booker T. Jones plays piano with SMA students in NYC. (Photo: Chris M. Junior)
Looking out the window onto Broadway, Booker T. Jones seemed to be seeing New York on both that day of July 12, 2023, and the many days past when he frequented the area around Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. “I would walk right through here,” he reminisced, speaking of his earliest trips to the city with the M.G.’s. “Our agent was on 57th. … We would stay at the Essex Hotel and walk past here on the way to Atlantic Records over on Broadway. And it made me question my age because I thought I remembered them building this Lincoln Center here, but I wouldn’t be that old,” he added with a wink and a grin. “I don’t think so.”
Truth be told, the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, where a packed house had gathered to hear WYXR’s own Jared “Jay B” Boyd interview Jones, had not even been built then. Jones’ memory was correct, however — the first building on the Lincoln Center campus opened in 1962, the same year that Booker T. & the M.G.’s became a household name with the hit “Green Onions.” Now, over 60 years later, Lincoln Center was hosting Booker T. Jones: A Career Retrospective to a rapt New York audience.
Yet there were more gripping things in store that day than hearing the world’s most famous organist’s stories, for the forum was a continuation of a multifaceted series of events dubbed City Soul on the Move, three days in July when Memphis held Manhattan in the palm of its hand.
SMA students in NYC. (Photo: Chris M. Junior)
It began, as so many things do, with Tom Hanks. The actor and director is passionate about his music and, it turns out, his radio. Rock ‘n’ Soul Ichiban, with DJ Debbie Daughtry on WFMU, was a longtime favorite of Hanks, and when Daughtry launched her own internet station, Boss Radio 66 on the Tune In app, he became a DJ for the station himself.
“He’s a huge fan of Booker T.,” Daughtry says of Hanks. “He said that he would love to interview him, and then it just kind of spiraled from there. But the date that we decided on was today, and Tom couldn’t be here.” Asking around for suggested interviewers during a visit to WYXR, Daughtry landed on Boyd, who’s interviewed Jones before at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. And WYXR’s program manager rose to the occasion, his rapport with Jones only amplified by the fact that Boyd’s mother and Jones shared a piano teacher, Elmertha Cole.
Once the interview was locked in, Daughtry says, “Lincoln Center is the one that said, ‘Why don’t we get the Stax Music Academy [SMA] to come up and play?’ And my mind just exploded!”
With the interview and SMA performance as a centerpiece of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City series, other Mempho-centric events materialized. The night before, renowned songwriter Greg Cartwright, host of WYXR’s Strange Mysterious Sounds, played a quiet but powerful acoustic set at Union Pool in Brooklyn, accompanied by longtime Reigning Sound keyboardist Dave Amels on harmonium. The stripped-down arrangements only made Cartwright’s songs more powerful, whether they were old recorded favorites like “Reptile Style” or the more subtle songs Cartwright has been writing recently. His encore solo performance of “She’s the Boss,” dedicated to the late Rachel Nagy of the Detroit Cobras, brought the house down. Meanwhile, that same night, Boyd was featured in a lively DJ set at BierWax NYC.
Shortly after Wednesday’s interview, Cartwright and Daughtry played DJ onstage in the Lincoln Center plaza as an audience gathered, several hundred strong, bursting with expatriate Memphians. When the show began, the SMA students handled themselves with a striking professionalism, especially when Jones sat down behind the organ and led the SMA Rhythm Section through some classic M.G.’s numbers. As the students played their parts with precision and passion, backing both Jones and charismatic SMA singers Pasley Thompson, Nicholas Dickerson, Rachael Walker, Khaylah Jones, and Joi Stubbs, Jones looked them over with an unmistakable wonder, the words he’d shared with Boyd earlier still echoing: “Right now I’m full of joy. I was moved by the music and the rehearsal. … They played so well. They didn’t play the music exactly like we did. They put their own twist to it. But it felt so good.”
Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new project Asteroid City lands this weekend. The film is a star-studded trip to Arizona desert in 1955, where the Junior Stargazers Convention is gathering for a wholesome weekend. But this cozy scene is shattered when an actual alien arrives in a for-real spaceship. Is the alien good or bad? Will the play based on the low-key alien invasion make it to opening night? Frequent Anderson collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum are joined by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.
Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen in No Hard Feelings as Maddie, an Uber driver whose luck has run out. To stave off bankruptcy, she takes a Craigslist job as a surrogate girlfriend for introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). This sex comedy for people who hate sex and also comedy co-stars Matthew Broderick and Natalie Morales.
Speaking of alien invasions, the Time Warp Drive-In for June has three of them. First up on Saturday night June 24 throws Tom Cruise into a time loop. Edge of Tomorrow was a minor hit on release in 2014, and gained cult status since then—despite a late-game name change to Live, Die, Repeat. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star as soldiers fighting alien Mimics, whose time bomb is literal.
The kind of robotic mech suits the soldiers use in Edge of Tomorrow are straight out of Starship Troopers, the Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1959 which pretty much invented the idea. In 1997, director Paul Verhoeven omitted the armored spacesuits when he adapted the novel, focusing instead on subtly lampooning the book’s rah-rah militarism. Most people didn’t get the joke, but Starship Troopers is now regarded as a classic. Would you like to know more?
The Blob is an all-time classic of 1950s sci-fi. The 1988 remake, which provides the third film of the Time Warp, is well known among horror fans as one of the best remakes ever. Check out Kevin Dillon’s magnificent mullet in this trailer.
Pixar’s latest animated feature Elemental explores love in a world of air, fire, water, and earth. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a fire elemental who strikes up an unlikely romance with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental. Can the two opposites reconcile, or will they vanish in a puff of steam? Longtime Pixar animator Peter Sohn based Elemental on his experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in New York City.
On Wednesday, June 28, Indie Memphis presents Lynch/Oz. Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s remarkable video essay explores the ways images and ideas from The Wizard of Oz shaped the radical cinema of David Lynch.
On Thursday, June 29, Paris Is Burning brings the vogue to Crosstown Theater. Director Jeanne Livingston spent seven years filming the Harlem Drag Ball culture, where competing houses competed for drag supremacy. Paris is Burning is a landmark in LBGTQ film, and one of the greatest documentaries of the last 50 years.
Jerry Schilling at the Memphis premiere of Elvis at The Guest House at Graceland (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Jerry Schilling was Elvis’ buddy for 23 years after he played football with the King one hot Memphis afternoon on July 11, 1954.
Schilling, who was 12 at the time, went on to become part of Elvis’s entourage, a business associate, and a long-time friend.
Now Schilling is watching himself being portrayed on screen in Elvis. The motion picture, which opens June 24th, was directed by Baz Luhrmann and stars Austin Butler as Elvis. “I think the movie, overall, is the best piece of work in a project done on Elvis,” Schilling says. “One, I think it answers a lot of questions by just telling the story of misconceptions of my friend.”
And, he says, Luhrmann, “put his heart and soul into it and put together an unbelievable cast.”
The project took 11 years from the idea to the finished movie, Schilling says. “There were sets burning up in Australia, Covid, you name it.”
But the delays “gave them time to really marinate this story. And everybody went back and rethought it and made it a much better film.”
Schilling now is manager of The Beach Boys, who recently released Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of The Beach Boys box set.
Author of the 2006 book, Me and a Guy Named Elvis, Schilling also has been involved in numerous Elvis-related projects. “Over the years, I have produced more shows on Elvis than I think anybody can count. I’ve cast or been part of casting various actors to play Elvis over the years. And I’ve worked with others cast by other people.”
He thought Michael St. Gerard, who played the King in the 1990 Elvis TV series, was “innately Elvis, because he was playing the younger Elvis and he didn’t have the high collars and jumpsuits and everything. But when I saw Austin Butler, he had the young Elvis down. He had the middle. He had the end. He didn’t overdo it.”
Austin Butler at the Memphis premiere of Elvis (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Butler concentrated on the part, Schilling says. “For years he did nothing but become Elvis. He was not a performer, not a singer, but a terrific actor. It was Denzel Washington who brought Butler to Baz Lurhmann. They had done something on Broadway — The Iceman Cometh. Denzel was so impressed with his work ethic.”
Butler’s role as Elvis was “multi-faceted,” Schilling says. “He did a lot of his own singing, which Michael didn’t do. I will never take anything away from Michael St. Gerard. I was in awe of him.”
But Butler was “so sincere. He fell in love with the character. He said it was like, ‘I can climb Mt. Everest.’ That was the challenge.”
But, Schilling says, “He doesn’t overdo it. He does it subtly. None of that curling the lip, ‘Thank you very much,’ all the bullshit. He’s got charisma. You want to be around him. You like him. And, you know what? When he walks in the room he’s got that little shyness Elvis had as well. It’s like a magnetic attraction goes to him.”
And, he says, Butler “fell in love with Memphis.”
Butler and Lurhmann spent time in Memphis and Tupelo, Schilling says. “They really put their heart and soul into this movie and I think it shows on the screen.”
Schilling met Lurhmann three years ago at dinner with an RCA executive during the promotional tour of the Elvis Presley: The Searcher at HBO documentary that Schilling conceived. “I think he was still looking for his Elvis at this point. He just said, ‘If this ship pulls anchor, I want you on it.’”
Baz Luhrmann at the Memphis premier of Elvis (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Schilling and Priscilla Presley got together with Tom Hanks — who plays Elvis’ manager, Col. Tom Parker — before filming began. “Priscilla ran into Tom Hanks’ wife, Rita Wilson, at the grocery store and Rita said, ‘Why don’t you and Jerry Schilling come over for dinner?’ This is two weeks before Tom went to Australia to start filming. So, we go there and Tom opens the door and the first thing he says is, ‘Jerry, are we going to talk about the Beach Boys or Elvis?’”
Hanks is a huge Beach Boys fan, Schilling says. But they spent the next three or four hours talking about Elvis and Parker. “Priscilla and I really wanted to give a full picture of Colonel Parker to Tom.”
The movie was “pretty much finished” when Schilling met Butler. “Priscilla and I went to New York for the Metropolitan Gala that Baz Luhrmann invited us to.”
They met Butler in a revolving door at The Carlyle hotel on their way out to dinner a few days before the gala. “He comes in and says, ‘Hi,’ to both of us. Seems like a nice guy. Good looking guy. It’s Austin. So, he goes, ‘Oh, my God.’ He’s really nervous. He says, ‘I want you two guys to be happy with this.’”
Schilling and Priscilla wouldn’t commit to going to the Cannes Film Festival for a showing of Elvis until they saw the movie. So, Lurhmann arranged a special screening of the film for the two of them. “I purposely didn’t sit next to her. I sat down, wanting to have my own thoughts. I wanted her to have her own thoughts. Half way through, I’m beside her. By the end, Priscilla looked at me and said, ‘Well, I guess we’re going to Cannes.’”
Priscilla Presley at the Memphis premier of Elvis (Credit: Michael Donahue)
They knew Luhrmann was going to make his type of movie. “Baz is a very private filmmaker. He’s going to do what he wants to do. So, you never know” — like the Russwood Park concert scene, where Elvis/Butler pulls out all the stops with his seductive gyrations, shakes, and wiggles. Schilling was 14 when he went to that show. “In real life, it was much more subtle than they make it in the movie ‘cause you’re making a movie. But he did make the statement and he did his own show. And it was a ‘wow’ show.”
Elvis had recently appeared in a tuxedo singing “Hound Dog” to a dog on TV’s The Steve Allen Show after being introduced by Allen as “the new Elvis Presley.” Elvis, Schilling says, told the Russwood audience, “I’m not going to let those people in New York change me. That was his way of saying, ‘You’re going to get the real Elvis.’”
Was Parker a villain in real life? “The film is really difficult for me because I know the controlling side of the Colonel. I know the bullying side. But I also know the human side of the Colonel. I don’t think he was dishonest at all. The only concern I have was when Elvis wanted to do A Star is Born and travel overseas and have his own production company.”
Tom Hanks at the Memphis premier of Elvis (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Elvis eventually started his own production company with himself and Schilling as heads of the company. But he never got to travel overseas. “The Colonel didn’t want it known he wasn’t an American citizen. But, creatively, the Colonel was really holding Elvis back.”
Elvis did “some good movies,” but most of them were the same type of musical. “I think I lost my friend at an early age because of creative disappointments. He was embarrassed and he tried to fight. And the machinery was too big.”
As for Elvis’s ambitions, including doing more serious roles, Shilling says Parker and other business associates “killed all that.”
With every Elvis musical, there was a soundtrack, “no matter how good or bad the music might be. At one point, Elvis said, ‘I’m not doing any more of this stuff.’ And the Colonel said, ‘You’ll fulfill your contract or you’re not doing anything.’”
As for Schilling talking back to Parker in the early days, he says, “Listen, I wasn’t in a position most of the time to be telling Colonel Parker what to do, or any of that.”
Schilling stopped working for Elvis for a time and went into film editing. “Because I quit working for him, I didn’t have to be under the Colonel’s supervision. For me, idolizing, looking up to Elvis as a 12 year old, and him not having a hit record when I met him, to be able, years later, to discuss a movie of his or a tour of his, that’s full circle.”
But, Schilling says, “There was a human side of Colonel Parker. Did he love Elvis Presley? Yes. Did Elvis love the Colonel? Yes.”
And, he says, “It was the best team. Elvis never forgot what the Colonel did for him in the beginning. It’s hard to get all that in the film.”
Schilling is portrayed in the movie by Luke Bracey. But Schilling hadn’t met Bracey when he, Priscilla, Hanks, and Butler flew to Cannes. “I asked Tom Hanks, ‘So, how was Luke Bracey playing me? I haven’t met him.’ He said, ‘He was the voice of reason through the whole thing.’ And Austin said, ‘Yep. He really was.’”
“I think what it means to me — and I think what the message they were trying to give me — is so many times the guys around Elvis were these hangers-on who laughed when Elvis laughed. And were just ‘yes’ men.”
Schilling wasn’t one of those. He remembered when he “challenged” one of Elvis’s decisions. “And he goes, ‘Okay, you can go back to Memphis if you don’t like it.’ Over the 23 years I knew him, we had three or four arguments. It wouldn’t have been a real friendship if we hadn’t.”
Schilling was “totally pleased” with Bracey’s portrayal of him, which he says was respectful and based on facts. “They read my book, I’m sure, more than once. Austin told me they read everything.”
Schilling says Bracey “doesn’t overdo anything. And yet when it was time to maybe have a difference of opinion whether it was Elvis or it was the Colonel, he played it right. He didn’t come back and do a big argument, which I wouldn’t have done either. He got me down.”
In trying to put Elvis’s life in perspective, Schilling says, “We’re all familiar with the ‘68 Comeback Special’ and what that did to Elvis’s career when it was really, as the movie says, in the toilet.”
Elvis, the movie, is “the ‘’68 Legacy Comeback,’” Schilling says. “I think this is going go do for his legacy what the ‘’68 Comeback Special’ did for his career while he was alive. It gives viewers an understanding of how special this man was.”
Schilling adds, “Ironically, 68 years ago in July was when Elvis’ first record was played, and when I met him.”
When I interviewed him, Schilling was headed to see the Elvis movie with Priscilla for his fourth time, and Priscilla’s fifth. “I’m glad this movie will be a record years from now for the history of Elvis, the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and of Tupelo, of Memphis. It really needed to be documented. If this was written and not filmed, I would put it in the National Archives.”
Austin Butler’s performance as Elvis is electrifying.
The most insightful film I’ve ever seen about Elvis Presley is “The Singing Canary,” a five-minute experimental short by Memphis director Adam Remsen. It contains neither images of Elvis nor his music, only footage of astronauts and rocket launches. Remsen’s voice-over casts Elvis not as a singer or entertainer or idol, but as an explorer of new psychic spaces.
Yes, Elvis was supremely talented, superhumanly good looking, and unbelievably charismatic. But it was sheer luck that he came along at exactly the moment in history when a combination of rhythm and blues, amphetamines, and television could transform a penniless truck driver into the most famous person who had ever lived. “No one had ever been in his position before. He did the best he could,” said Remsen. “He was just living his life, making the best choices he could. As it happened, he was unprepared to make those choices, in one way or another.”
Who could have been prepared? The only people who had been as famous as Elvis circa 1957 were pharaohs. A decade later, The Beatles would express relief that, when they were thrown into the maelstrom of modern fame, at least they had one another. Elvis was alone, going through stuff no one in the entire 300,000-year history of Homo sapiens had ever gone through before. “He was the singing canary we sent into the gold mine. And when the singing stopped, we learned it was dangerous in there.”
The latest big screen attempt to tell The King’s story shares this view of Elvis as a martyr for the information age. Baz Luhrmann is one of a handful of directors with an instantly recognizable style. As technically exacting as he is bombastic, Luhrmann’s films are the closest thing we have to the lavish MGM musicals of Old Hollywood. Emotions are heightened, the cutting is frenetic, and realism is an afterthought. Music and montage are Luhrmann’s love language, and everything else is in service of maintaining the momentum. When he’s on his game, Luhrmann can sweep you up and transport you to another place like the tornado in The Wizard of Oz.
This film rises above the simple jukebox musical I feared we would get when I heard Luhrmann was taking on the story of The King. Credit for much of its success must go to Austin Butler, who has the unenviable task of trying to bring to life the most impersonated man in history. On the Louisiana Hayride and at the triumphant July 4, 1956, Russwood Park homecoming show, Butler is electrifying. He’s got the cheekbones, and he knows how to use them.
Austin Butler as Elvis Presley.
The racial politics of the era are never far from the surface. In Luhrmann’s vision, Elvis’ smoking-hot sexuality was what made him dangerous. But what scared The Establishment about this poor white kid singing Black music was not how he danced — it was that Elvis represented a crack in the South’s Jim Crow apartheid. He didn’t just laugh at the minstrel show; he identified with B.B. King, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Little Richard. Some of the white kids who followed him would go on to discover The Bar-Kays, Sam Cooke, and Aretha Franklin, and begin to think, “Hey, maybe these Black people are humans, just like me.”
But the protean summer of ’56, which has for so long formed the fetish of rock-and-roll, doesn’t interest Luhrmann as much as the Vegas era. It begins with an elaborate staging of the ’68 Comeback Special. Instead of focusing on the in-the-round jam session, which remains one of the greatest live musical performances ever put before a camera, Luhrmann finds meaning in Elvis’ selection of “If I Can Dream” as his closing number. Butler delivers the moment with maximum gravitas.
Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) advises Elvis (Austin Butler).
Luhrmann’s most polarizing decision is to tell the story from Col. Tom Parker’s perspective — and not just because of Tom Hanks’ accent. Having the villain as the narrator is a very Shakespearean choice, intended to make Parker into Iago, a malignant influence confiding to us about the lies he’s whispering in the hero’s ear. Parker was the consummate confidence man and a natural-born carny barker. In the early days, he and Elvis were an unstoppable team. When Elvis was languishing in Vegas, it would have been better if he were alone. Parker gets the blame for Elvis sitting out the Civil Rights fights of the late ’60s and for missing opportunities to tour the world. He gets credit for the groundbreaking Aloha from Hawaii concert, the definitive document of Elvis’ late period. But Luhrmann declines to use the first satellite broadcast to a global audience of one billion as a climax, like Queen at Live Aid in Bohemian Rhapsody. As for Hanks’ performance as the shady Dutch immigrant, let’s just say that the veteran actor knows when to put the ham on the sandwich.
Elvis (Austin Bulter) and Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge).
The standouts in the sprawling supporting cast include Helen Thomson’s sad turn as the alcoholic Gladys and Olivia DeJonge’s uncanny Priscilla. The Power of the Dog’s Kodi Smit-McPhee gets a standout cameo as Jimmie Rodgers Snow, one of the first people to understand the depth of Elvis’ power. During the early film’s frequent digressions into the Beale Street music scene, Yola Quartey and Shonka Dukureh each get show-stopping moments as Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Big Mama Thornton.
Ultimately, your reaction to Elvis is going to depend on whether or not you can vibrate on Luhrmann’s frequency. I was a fan of the director’s early work, like Romeo + Juliet, but found The Great Gatsby off-putting and snoozed through Australia. Elvis is a return to the explosive Luhrmann of Moulin Rouge. He freely twists the songs, sometimes in ways that are insightful, and sometimes in ways that betray a lack of trust in the material, like using anachronistic hip-hop beats whenever we return to Beale. The film is massively overstuffed with striking images, but that kind of sounds like complaining because you have too many scoops of delicious ice cream. It’s understandable if you find the constant barrage of visual information disorienting or the constant dance on the edge of camp cloying. But when Elvis is on stage, and Luhrmann is on fire, you understand why The King will live forever.
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
As a literary genre, the Western emerged around the same time film technology came of age. In the mid 1890s, as the Lumière brothers were working out the kinks in their cinématographe, American readers were thrilling to tales of Buffalo Bill Cody’s adventures as a cavalry scout. In 1902, Owen Wister wrote The Virginian, probably still the greatest Western novel, codifying the cowboy as a laconic man of few words and decisive action who lives by his own code of ethics in a lawless land. The next year, The Great Train Robbery became the first real action film blockbuster.
Once upon a time in the West — Tom Hanks stars as Captain Jefferson Kidd in News of the World
If there’s one thing film producers have always been good at, it’s copying money-making properties. American audiences had proved they were mad for horseback chases, broad-brimmed hats, and six-shooters, and that’s what they got. By the end of the silent era, the “horse opera” dominated the box office. The Western splintered into dozens of sub-genres. Gene Autry sang songs as he battled rustlers, Apaches, and, in 1935’s The Phantom Empire, atomic robots from beneath the hollow earth. By the time John Ford increased the scope to epic and introduced John Wayne in 1939’s Stagecoach, he had been directing Westerns for 15 years.
The Western’s influence spread globally. In Japan, Akira Kurosawa translated Ford’s basic techniques of filming action and building suspense to tell stories from his country’s history. When Seven Samurai was remade as The Magnificent Seven, it translated seamlessly to the frontier. Italian director Sergio Leone perfected the art of feeding American culture back to us by transforming Kurosawa’s Yojimbo into A Fistful of Dollars, making Clint Eastwood a movie star. The Western waned in the 1970s as science-fiction took over as the dominant genre — but not before directors like George Lucas had strip-mined it for gags.
Nowadays, Westerns are a hard sell, mostly because the game of cowboys and Indians now looks like cosplaying genocide. But the imprint of the Western is everywhere. What are Paul Walker and Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious but a lawman and rustler in street racer drag? The Mandalorian freely recycles plots from Have Gun – Will Travel, only in space. So it’s rare to see a pure Western like News of the World succeed on its own terms.
Tom Hanks stars as Captain Jefferson Kidd who ekes out a living roaming the wilds of 1870 Texas by reading newspapers and Eastern magazines to marginally literate cowpokes for a dime a pop. While leaving Wichita Falls, he encounters an overturned wagon on the road. He follows a blood trail to find a hanged Black man with a white supremacist message tacked to his body. Hiding in the woods nearby is a young white girl dressed in Native American clothing. Johanna (Helena Zengel) speaks no English. She was taken as an infant by the Kiowa and raised as one of their own until her tribe was wiped out by a U.S. Cavalry raid. According to papers he finds in the wreckage, she was being taken to her surviving family, an aunt and uncle who live 400 miles to the south. The rootless captain is instructed by occupying Union soldiers to help her complete the journey — despite the fact that, as he says, “I do not have a clue as to the keeping of a child.”
Hanks and Helena Zengel
Director Paul Greengrass takes the opportunity of this episodic road movie to quote from some classics. Their entry into the dusty streets of Dallas amid a crushing herd of cattle echoes Montgomery Clift’s arrival at Abilene in Red River. Most significantly, the kidnapped white girl embracing her Native American captors’ identity comes straight from Natalie Wood in The Searchers. Captain Kidd is, like John Wayne’s Ethan, a defeated Confederate veteran. But where Ethan is a racist maniac determined to kill his niece to preserve the family honor, Captain Kidd is a broken man who finds solace in sharing the written word. He wants more than anything to connect with Johanna, to pull the “orphan twice over” out of her shell and help her reconnect with the world.
News of the World does not flinch at the horrors of the American frontier. Ulysses S. Grant’s name draws boos from a crowd when Kidd reads about the 13th Amendment. The first danger Kidd defends Johanna from is a group of men who want to buy her for sex slavery. In the film’s most memorable set piece, Kidd foments a rebellion against a white supremacist warlord named Mr. Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy).
Hanks is, predictably, magnificent as Kidd, but the big discovery here is 12-year-old Zengel, a German TV actress who doesn’t have to fake not speaking English. Between her mostly wordless performance and Hanks’ brooding mug, News of the World proves there’s a little life left in the horse opera yet.
News of the World is now playing at multiple locations and streaming on demand online.
I have a confession to make: I’m not very good at the Academy Awards.
Oscar night is a big deal in the Hocking-McCoy household. We clear off the coffee table and put out a big spread of sushi. We parse each acceptance speech down to the syllable level. We print out ballots and compete to see who gets the most categories right. The prize for the winner is bragging rights for the year.
I can’t remember the last time I held bragging rights. Have I ever bested Commercial Appeal writer John Beifuss in his annual “Beat Beifuss” competition? I got close once.
You’d think that someone who reads about, watches, and occasionally makes movies for a living would be better at predicting Oscar winners. But, it turns out, my tastes rarely match the outcome of the Oscar voters’ poll. I’ve tried voting strategically, making my choices based on the conventional wisdom in the trades and among critics with bigger circulation than me. I’ve also tried voting my conscience, picking the ones I thought should win and letting the chips fall where they may. Neither method seems to work.
This is, of course, very similar to the choice voters face in the Democratic primaries. Do you vote your conscience or do you vote for the candidate you think has the best chance to beat Trump? Let my experience be a lesson to you. You simply don’t have enough information to vote strategically, so use the system the way it was designed to be used and just vote for the candidate you think will do the best job.
My Oscar ineptitude is one of the reasons I usually don’t do a preview pick-’em column. But the voices of my writing teachers are in my head saying, “People love it when you make yourself vulnerable.” So here goes: my picks for the 2020 Academy Awards.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker is the only truly great part of that film, but Adam Driver’s clueless art-dad Charlie in Marriage Story is the year’s best naturalistic performance. I’m going with Driver.
Supporting Actor: Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers better than anyone else could have in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but Brad Pitt elevates Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood to greatness. Plus, his T-shirt clearly says “CHAMPION.” Pitt is it.
Little Women could clean up in multiple categories.
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role: This is the hardest category for me. Cynthia Erivo’s Harriet Tubman is close to perfect. Scarlett Johansson is Adam Driver’s equal in Marriage Story. I’m going with Saoirse Ronan as Jo in Little Women.
Best Supporting Actress is a little easier. It’s down to Laura Dern as a divorce lawyer in Marriage Story and Florence Pugh as Amy in Little Women. I think Pugh nudges Dern.
Missing Link
Best Animated Feature: I desperately want Missing Link to win. The stop-motion wizards at Laika have been killing it for a decade, and this is their year for recognition!
For Cinematography, it’s Roger Deakins in a walk. 1917 is a next-level achievement. This is the only Oscar that film deserves.
For Costume Design, Jacqueline Durran for Little Women barely beats Arianne Phillips for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Excellent work by both women.
Best Documentary Feature is Honeyland, an environmental fable masquerading as a character study. Highly recommended.
Any other year, Achievement in Film Editing would be Thelma Schoonmaker’s for the taking, but The Irishman is more than three hours long. Jinmo Yang’s work on Parasite should carry the day.
Honeyland makes a strong case for Best International Feature, but I’ve got to go with Parasite.
I’m going to take a pass on makeup because I haven’t seen two of the nominees. Best Original Song is “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin from the underrated Rocketman. Original Score should and probably will go to John Williams for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, so he can retire a legend. Go ahead and give SkywalkerBest Visual Effects, too. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood‘s 1969 mixtape should take home the two sound awards, as well as Production Design.
Greta Gerwig’s tear-up-the-floorboards reimagining of Little Women deserves the Adapted Screenplay statue. I’m giving the Original Screenplay to Knives Out … probably because I’m giving everything else to Parasite.
Best Director goes to Bong Joon Ho. I was willing to give it to Quentin Tarantino, but then I found out that the Parasite house was a set with CGI background, and I was shook. Masterful execution is what this category is all about.
Best Picture has to be Parasite. This was a very good year for movies. Little Women, Marriage Story, and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood are all worthy films. But Parasite captures the spirit of 2019, and it deserves the biggest prize of all.
Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) and Forky (Tony Hale) hit the road in Toy Story 4
This month, a spate of articles in publications like Forbes and Cinemablend asked, why are sequels and reboots tanking at the box office this year? Films such as The Secret Life of Pets 2 and Men In Black: International have significantly underperformed industry expectations. Dark Phoenix looks poised to lose about $100 million. After years of reliably turning out audiences, the writers ask, is the endless sequel model faltering?
I usually try to keep talk about the business end of things to a minimum in my columns, because I believe my primary job is to help you, my beloved readers, to decide what films to watch, and the behind-the-scenes stuff is largely irrelevant to your decision. But in this case, as a critic in the trenches, I believe I can answer the question currently obsessing industry observers. Why did these sequels fall short at the box office? Because they’re stupid and they suck.
Not all sequels have done badly at the box office. Avengers: Endgame may well end up being the highest grossing film of all time. Godzilla: King of the Monsters will easily top $100 million domestically and is raking in the money overseas. The franchises that are tanking are the ones that have no visible reason to exist beyond seeming like a safe choice for fearful studio executives.
The gang’s all here!
Which brings us to Toy Story 4, a film that, by my own definition, has no reason to exist. 1995’s Toy Story was the film that launched Pixar and popularized 3D computer animation. 2010’s Best Animated Feature winner Toy Story 3 ended with Andy, the kid who owned Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), going to college, and the toys being passed down to a new kid named Bonnie (Madeleine McGraw). It was a bittersweet tearjerker that, rare for a children’s film, addressed aging and mortality.
In 2010, Pixar said the Toy Story was over, but Disney, in their wisdom, decided we needed another one. The story begins with a flashback. Bo Peep (Annie Potts), who was absent from the third film, is being given away while Woody and the gang mount a rescue operation. Before leaving, she assures Woody that being passed from kid to kid is just part of a toy’s life.
Back in the present, Woody is still Bonnie’s toy, but no longer the favorite like he was with Andy. Languishing in the closet, he makes a spontaneous decision to stow away in her backpack as she goes to orientation on the first day of kindergarten. Bonnie has a hard time fitting in at school, so she makes a new friend. This doesn’t mean she meets another kid, but rather, she makes a toy out of a spork, a popsicle stick, and some pipe cleaners and names him Forky.
The existence of Forky (Tony Hale) foregrounds all sorts of existential questions that hover around the Toy Story premise. He asks the first one himself: “Why am I alive?” Best not to think about it too much, Forky.
Bo Peep (right) leads the toys in an antique store rescue operation.
Forky tries to escape, but Bonnie loves him, so Woody has to bring him back to the fold. This mission becomes more complicated when the family takes a road trip in a rented RV. Woody and the gang are thrown into a series of adventures, escapes, and rescues revolving around a carnival and a small-town antique store. Woody reunites with old flame Bo Peep, who is now living a Furiosa-like existence as a rogue toy.
Directed by longtime Pixar hand Josh Cooley and written by Wall-E director Andrew Stanton and Stephany Folsom, Toy Story 4 has the magic mix of humor and pathos. A pair of stuffed animals voiced by Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key get huge laughs. The animation is frequently eye-popping. The facial expressions, especially in the early kindergarten sequences, convey more emotion than anyone in Dark Phoenix. The glowing carnival at night and the jumbled interior of the antique store are wonders to behold.
I’ll admit I was skeptical going in, but Pixar proved me wrong. Toy Story4 may not rise to the level of the greatest Pixar films like Ratatouille or Inside Out, but it is not a waste of time and resources like the other $150 million fiascos polluting the multiplex. I am first in line to lament Hollywood’s dependence on franchises, but when a sequel can deliver on this level, I’ll take it.
With the World Cup and the Thai soccer team rescue in the headlines, it’s a good time for a soccer doc.
The Workers Cup
Migrant African workers in Qatar are currently building facilities for the 2022 World Cup. It’s a hellish existence that borders on slavery. The worker’s only outlet is a soccer tournament, held on the very fields they’re constructing. The Workers Cup is by director Adam Sobel and producers Ramsey Haddad and Rosie Garthwaithe, and it’s screening at Malco Ridgeway tonight at 7 PM. You can get tickets on the Indie Memphis website.
This Week At The Cinema: Soccer and Sundance
Tonight is also the 50th Anniversary screening of The Beatles’ only excursion into animation, Yellow Submarine at the Paradiso.
This Week At The Cinema: Soccer and Sundance (5)
On Wednesday, Indie Memphis Microcinema presents an encore of the 2018 Sundance short films at Crosstown Arts.
This Week At The Cinema: Soccer and Sundance (2)
Friday night will be busy, with two very different possibilities to fulfill your entertainment needs. At the Orpheum Theatre, the summer goes into small gear with Joe Johnston’s debut special-effects romp, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.
This Week At The Cinema: Soccer and Sundance (4)
Then Mike McCarthy’s Midnight at the Studio continues with Alejandro Jodorowski’s groundbreaking psychedelic western El Topo.
This Week At The Cinema: Soccer and Sundance (3)
On Sunday at the Paradiso, Turner Classic Movies hosts the 30th anniversary of the film that made Tom Hanks a superstar, Big. Directed by Penny Marshall, it was the first film directed by a woman to gross more than $100 million.
Lesson number five in Yale history professor Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century is “Remember Professional Ethics.” Snyder writes, “When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitment to just practice becomes more important.”
Few people have ever accused Hollywood of having “professional ethics.” Long gone are the days when Dalton Trumbo would write a patriotic paean like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and then get hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee for his troubles, or where John Sturges could condemn Japanese internment with Bad Day at Black Rock, or where Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford could star in All the President’s Men and make it one of the biggest movies of the year. Nope, these days it’s all $100 million toy commercials and fascist dreck like 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Do successful filmmakers have a duty to the Republic? Don’t make Michael Bay laugh into his Porsche collection.
This is why, even if The Post wasn’t a rip roaring great movie, it would still be a remarkable presence in the theaters of 2018. At age 71, with an estimated net worth of $3 billion, Steven Spielberg didn’t have to make this movie. Producer Amy Pascal, former head of Sony, didn’t have to pony up for a script by struggling screenwriter Liz Hannah about Katharine Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post in the Watergate era. Who in their right mind would do such a thing when My Little Pony is just hanging there, ripe for transformation into a cinematic universe?
Maybe they did it because The Post is the movie that needs to be made right now. Maybe that’s the same reason Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks signed on, as Graham and Post editor Ben Bradlee, respectively.
Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep lead a star-studded cast in The Post, Steven Spielberg’s remarkable new film about the release of the Pentagon Papers
Hanks has another potential reason: He’s an obsessive typewriter collector, and the newsrooms of 1971 would be like Candyland for him. Dial-up phone fans will also be in heaven for the 116-minute running time. So will political junkies and actual patriots who value the First Amendment, the separation of powers, and representative democracy.
If you’re a fan of good film craft — as all right-thinking people should be — you will flip for The Post. Spielberg may be the best steward of old-school film grammar we have left, and all of the classic virtues are on display. The Post tells the story of the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, which explained in great detail that former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) and the U.S. Government knew that the Vietnam War was unwinnable as early as 1965, a full decade and tens of thousands of casualties before it ignominiously ended. It is that most dreaded of script genres: People talking in rooms without brandishing guns. The practice of journalism is mostly people on telephones, or as film producers call it, slow box office death. There probably aren’t five people on the planet who could have pulled off this story with the same excitement and urgency as Spielberg. What most contemporary directors would take five cuts to accomplish, he can do with a focus pull, such as when Bradlee crashes Graham’s birthday party with urgent clandestine news, and Spielberg meticulously reveals McNamara, the one person who can’t know what’s going on, in the crowd. The director is in complete control of where your eyes are focused on the screen at all times, and it feels great, not intrusive or forced. Information is revealed at exactly the right pace, and dense exposition flows like drawn butter.
Hanks leads a murderer’s row of contemporary acting talent that includes Sarah Paulson as Bradlee’s wife Tony, Bob Odenkirk as reporter Ben Bagdikian, Matthew Rhys as leaker Daniel Ellsberg, Jesse Plemons as Post lawyer Roger Clark, and David Cross as reporter Howard Simons. But it’s Streep who shines brightest. Graham starts the film as a socialite and dilettante as interested in rubbing elbows with the rich and powerful as she is in running a paper. By the end, she walks determinedly out of the Supreme Court to be greeted by a silent phalanx of young women looking to her example of powerful, patriotic womanhood. Streep’s arc is one of the most finely shaded and complex of her storied career. The Post pursues the personal, the political, and professional spheres of life all at once, and its story of putting duty to country and humanity over personal loyalty and professional advancement couldn’t be more timely. I hope this group of artists’ example is seen far and wide in our troubled country.
