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Fight Night

Photo: Parrish Lewis/PEACOCK

In March 1966, Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted into the Army to fight in the Vietnam War, citing his Islamic faith as a reason and claiming conscientious objector status. At the peak of his boxing career, he was banned from the sport and spent the next four years in and out of the courtroom. In October 1970, he was finally granted a license to fight in Georgia, and on October 26th, he faced Jerry “The Bellflower Bomber” Quarry in Atlanta. In front of a sellout crowd, Ali took Quarry down in only three rounds, setting off a night of celebration in Atlanta’s Black community. At one infamous party, a group of Black gangsters celebrating the victory were set up and robbed at gunpoint by another group of Black gangsters, setting off a chain reaction of botched reprisals and mutual misunderstandings worthy of a Coen Brothers movie. 

Years later, journalist Jeff Keating, writing for the Atlanta alternative weekly Creative Loafing, discovered that the person who threw the party, an ambitious hustler known as Chicken Man, was not killed, as had long been reported, but instead had survived the ordeal and was living under an assumed name in Atlanta. Keating recounted the too-weird-to-be-true story in his true crime podcast Fight Night. Released in 2020 during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, it became a huge hit. Writer/producer Shaye Ogbonna and comedian Kevin Hart pitched the story to Universal Television, who ultimately ordered an eight-part limited series for their new streaming service Peacock. 

Craig Brewer poses at the Fight Night premiere in New York City (Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Peacock)

One of the first calls they made was to Memphis director Craig Brewer. “I got this job the old-fashioned way,” he says. “I got a call from my agents saying that [executive producer] Will Packer and Kevin Hart wanted to meet with me on a project. … Shaye, the creator, has been a fan of my films, particularly Hustle & Flow, which he saw in Atlanta.” 

Brewer was intrigued by the story and impressed with the rough drafts of the first two episodes, which were all that existed at the time. “I remember reading the script and thinking to myself, ‘This guy Shaye and I, I think are gonna really get along.’ We have the same interests in movies and TV and music. But more importantly, it’s something I always remember John Singleton talking to me about: ‘Is there regional specificity to this voice?’ And I was like, yeah, this feels like a guy from the South, in Atlanta, making movies from his heart, his culture, and his experience. It felt real to me; it felt furnished and honest and, above all, exciting.”

Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist was on its way to the screen. 

Putting the Team Together

Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat and Will Packer Media had produced the podcast, says Brewer. “Kevin was always going to be Chicken Man. That was from the jump. Then I came on and we started putting together the other cast members.” 

Kevin Hart stars as Chicken Man, the small-time hustler who gets in over his head in Fight Night.  (Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK)

Samuel L. Jackson, an acting legend who Brewer worked with in 2006’s Black Snake Moan, was quickly cast as New York gangster Frank Moten. Taraji P. Henson, who was the breakout star of Hustle & Flow, came onboard as Vivian, Chicken Man’s partner in crime. “She was always at the top of the list,” says Brewer. “Then Will Packer called me and said, ‘We gotta go get your boy Terrence.’” 


Gangsters “Cadillac” Richie (Howard) and Frank Moten (Jackson) land in Atlanta with their entourage.  (Photo: Parrish Lewis/PEACOCK)
Jackson as Moten ignores the press before the big fight. (Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK)

The producers thought Terrence Howard, star of Hustle & Flow, would be perfect for gangster Richard “Cadillac” Wheeler. “I’m speaking to you from New Jersey, so I’m speaking to you from Cadillac Richie’s territory,” says Brewer.


Terrence Howard and Marsha Stephanie Blake (Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK)

Taraji P. Henson stars as Vivian Thomas. (Photo: Parrish Lewis/PEACOCK)

After Hustle, Brewer had directed Henson and Howard in the hit TV series Empire. “I called up Terrence, and I was kinda talking him into doing the show. I said to him, ‘Listen, it’s me. I’m gonna let you get up on that tight rope like you usually do. I’ll be your net. What I want you to do is bring your creativity to this and create this character because he’s an important character as the series goes on. I’m gonna just agree to anything you wanna do and help you get it.’ Then he said, ‘Well, I wanna look like one of the Bee Gees. That’s what I wanna do.’ I just remember feeling like, ‘Oh no, what is this gonna look like?’ But then he showed up, and I thought, ‘This cat is gonna steal this show because he looks amazing. … I don’t know if he’s gonna take it off ever again.’” 


Detective J.D. Hudson (Cheadle)
protects Muhammad Ali (Dexter
Darden) before the fight.
(Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK)
(Photo: Eli Joshua Adé/PEACOCK)

The final big get for the cast was Don Cheadle. The actor/director was on Brewer’s bucket list. “I have always wanted to work with Don, and it was everything that I could have dreamed for and more. He’s a great actor, yes. But I would say that with him — and I would put Sam Jackson in the same category — you’re not just getting somebody’s acting talent, you’re getting their experience of making, watching, and living the art of storytelling. They have an eye for things that some younger actors do not have. Are we telling the right story? They make you better because they hold you to a standard of making sure that you’re doing right, not only by their character, but how their character interacts with everybody. So there were countless times that Don Cheadle would take me and Shaye off into his trailer, and we would work a scene. By the time we left the trailer, Shaye and I would look at each other and just go, ‘Man, the scene is just so much better!’” 

Fight Night is filled with star power, in a way very few TV shows have ever been. “The thing about movie stars is, they are decided by the people,” says Brewer. “This show is packed with five movie stars.” 

Hotlanta

Fight Night was filmed in Atlanta, Georgia. The series features extensive location shoots among the split-level ranch houses of the suburbs and in the dense city center. Crucial scenes were shot in the distinctive Hyatt Regency Atlanta, whose 22-story atrium influenced hotel design for a generation.  

“There is a crucial monologue in episode two that Sam Jackson delivers, where he’s talking about his vision for Atlanta,” says Brewer. “He wants Black people put in places of power, and for the economic future of Atlanta to be Black. It’s funny because you look at the monologue, and you can imagine if it were being said in 1970 to an all-white audience, it may seem outlandish. But last night at the premiere, there were cheers because you realize that dream is here and realized. So it’s very interesting to talk to young people about Atlanta at this crucial time in its history, in the early 1970s, where they were on a campaign that I feel is comparable to Memphis’ history, and to Memphis’ present, which is to deny that you are living, working, and thriving in a Black city. It is to your own peril if you fight against it. 

“Atlanta is a city that is open for business. We’re too busy to be dealing with any of that racist bullshit. We’re here to make some money, and I’ll be damned if that’s not the Atlanta that I go to all the time when I’m filming these movies. This is my third project in Atlanta. I’ve been there the whole time that Atlanta has said that they wanna be the next Hollywood. And so many people saying, well, that’s not gonna last, or this is gonna be transitional, or the industry is gonna change. I am telling you right now, no one wants to call it out, but production in Atlanta is there to stay. I don’t see this returning back to Hollywood as long as there’s places like Atlanta.” 

Brewer had worked on episodic network TV with Empire, but Fight Night was his first limited series, a form that has become more common in the streaming era. Brewer compares the experience to shooting an eight-hour movie. Brewer directed the first two and last two episodes, and collaborated on the writing of the entire series. He describes the process as a mixture of careful prep and on-the-fly improv. 

“I got a call from Shaye saying, ‘We got this idea to do the scene between Sam Jackson and Don Cheadle in an interrogation room,’” Brewer recalls. “We locked ourselves in a room and banged out this scene, probably had it written by like 8 o’clock, 9 o’clock at night. Then, the following morning, I went down to the sound stage and there they were, doing the scene that mere hours ago we had worked on. It’s amazing how fast it all happened. It was just so special because there’d be these moments where Shaye and I would write something, and we knew, ‘Okay, right here, Sam’s gonna probably make this part better. So let’s move on and know that he’s gonna come up with something great to say here — and sure enough, he did! It was this great moment of watching these titans just being amazing.” 

Kevin Hart, one of the driving forces behind the development of the series, took the most chances. One of the best-known comedians in the country found a new lane as a dramatic actor. “I had a moment where I saw something that I had never seen before, and it kind of knocked me on my ass,” says Brewer. “It’s in episode two where Kevin Hart’s character is in grave danger, and he has to make a plea for his life. I’m sitting there at my monitor, and I watch Kevin make this tearful plea. That was one of the most real things I’ve ever seen an actor do. I remember just sitting there in awe thinking, ‘How could someone as successful as Kevin Hart actually have a whole other store of talent inside of him that we’ve yet to see? How can it be that he could drop everything that he is as the funniest man on the planet and actually be a dramatic actor?’ You make an assumption about a person, that maybe they don’t have this particular arrow in their quiver, and then suddenly they hit a bull’s-eye. I was stunned. Everyone was stunned. Terrence came up to me and he goes, ‘That cat’s the real deal.’”

Making the Music

Fight Night is set in 1970, a high point in the history of soul, funk, and R&B music. For Scott Bomar, producer and musician behind such acts as The Bo-Keys, that’s his wheelhouse. Bomar and Brewer have worked together on five movie and TV projects, beginning with Hustle & Flow in 2005. “I feel like I got spoiled working with him early on because he’s so musical,” Bomar says. “I find that the way Craig shoots, the way he directs his actors, the way he edits, it’s got a rhythm to it. I’ve worked with him enough now to kind of know what his rhythm is.” 

Bomar says he was in “summer home repair mode” when Brewer called him out of the blue. “He said, I’m working on this TV show. Theoretically, if you had this gig, would you be able to do it? Are you available? And I’m like, sure, yeah. I can do it. I knew it was a pretty quick turnaround, but I had no idea exactly how quick of a turnaround it was. I think there were people involved who had their doubts on whether or not it was possible to do what we did in the amount of time we did it.” 

Mixing engineer Jake Ferguson and composer Scott Bomar lent their talents to the series. (Photo: Chris McCoy)

Bomar and Brewer recorded the score to Fight Night at Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis. They had one week to take each episode from concept to final mix. “I can’t say enough about my collaboration with Scott Bomar,” says Brewer. “It’s something that truly is a collaboration. I see the scene, and Scott and I start just kind of grooving to a beat, to a track that has yet to be written. We start with rhythm. It really is kind of a Memphis way of doing it.” 

Bomar enlisted several of his stable of veteran Memphis players, including drummer Willie Hall, who played on Isaac Hayes’ “Theme From Shaft.” Joe Restivo played guitar; Mark Franklin, Kirk Smothers, and Art Edmaiston contributed horn parts, along with Kameron Whalum, Gary Topper, and Yella P. Behind the board were veteran producer Kevin Houston and Jake Ferguson, who recently returned to Memphis after collaborating with superstar producer Mark Ronson. Most recently, Ferguson worked on the soundtrack to Barbie. “I feel like Craig came in and basically taught a master class on TV scoring,” Ferguson says. 

“It’s quite a bit different than film because the schedule’s so accelerated,” says Bomar. 

A 1970s vintage mini Moog synthesizer Bomar found in a closet at Sam Phillips Recording played a major role in creating the series’ soundscapes. In some cases, Bomar says they didn’t have time to assemble a full band, so he would have to play almost all of the instruments himself. “I’d say that this is the closest thing to a solo record I’ve ever made,” he laughs. 

“It was fascinating to hear Scott and Craig talk about Atlanta in the ’70s and all the inspirations they had,” says Ferguson. “Musically, it was so cool to see how we can take, quote, unquote, ‘modern instruments’ and make them feel like you’re back in the ’70s. When we finished the first two episodes, it was just incredible to see how much the scenes would come to life with the music we added.” 

“When we had the first mix, one of the producers said, ‘We asked Scott to do the impossible, and he’s done it,’” says Bomar. “That’s one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten.” 

Final Fight

The first three episodes of Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist premiered on Peacock Thursday, September 5th. New episodes will drop every Thursday for the next five weeks. The night before it hit streaming, there was a star-studded premiere at Lincoln Center in New York City. I interviewed Brewer the next morning, as he was beginning preparations for his next project, a film he wrote called Song Sung Blue starring Hugh Jackman. The director was still reeling from the reception to Fight Night. “When you’re dealing with a brand like Will Packer and Kevin Hart, that means it’s gonna be a party. You can’t just do wine and cheese and a floral arrangement. There were dancers dressed in some of the outfits from the show. There was a Cadillac in the middle of the dance floor. It’s just a party and everybody was there! My son [Graham], I had to pull his ass off the dance floor last night at like 1 a.m., saying, ‘I gotta work, son! Let’s go!’ But he was out there, doing the wobble with everybody else. … It was such a great thing to see it with a crowd. Yeah, I think we got a great show here.” 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV Sports

The Olympic Spectacle

Let’s face it: The Olympics are must-watch television. (Photo: Yalcinsonat | Dreamstime.com)

I’m not a sports fan. Baseball gives me flashbacks to the parade of humiliations that was my Little League career. The constant squeaking sound of sneakers against the floor in basketball games drives me insane. I used to think I liked to watch college football, but in fact I just liked eating fried food with my friends on fall Saturdays. I can do that without the head trauma component. Soccer? Too snoozy. Hockey? Too icy. Golf? Please no.

But I do love the Olympics. The games certainly share many traits that turn me off to professional sports. The massive civic expenditures the host cities have to endure certainly resonates badly with me, a citizen of a city and state that are currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars renovating sports stadiums while we lack a functioning mass transit system. Paris’ leaders seem to have handled that conundrum better than most cities. Many of the stadia and venues are temporary; the only permanent new construction is an aquatics center. In the opening weekend, this fact has made for some spectacular television, like beach volleyball matches played in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. The equestrian events take place on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. 

The opening ceremonies featured a memorable reference to one of Versailles’ former residents. I’m not sure what kind of opening ceremony I was expecting from the French, but a bloody Marie Antoinette holding her own head while singing a song from the French Revolution with the Gallic metal band Gojira playing on balconies over the Seine was not it. The opening ceremonies are always a mixed bag, at best. The producers have the daunting task of bringing everyone together while making everything seem monumental, and something’s got to give. Paris’ opening ceremonies may just have been the best ever. There was fire, parkour, fashion, art, and a Dionysian bacchanal in the streets of Paris. Instead of marching into the stadium en masse, the teams paraded down the Seine in a flotilla of boats. The only thing that didn’t go according to plan was the rain, which drenched hundreds of dancers along the riverbanks and chased away the crowd. But the driving rain also produced some indelible images, like a regal LeBron James holding the flag aloft at the bow of the American boat like George Washington crossing the Delaware River. 

It was a rainy weekend in Memphis, so I was locked on the couch cramming as many events into my eyeballs as possible. For me, the weirder the sport, the better. I eschewed gymnastics prelims on the opening weekend in favor of rugby sevens. The French men’s team pulled off the upset of the games so far when they won gold in front of a hometown crowd, surviving a squad of swarming Fijians, who had, until Saturday, never lost a game in Olympic history. 

For a professional appreciator of the moving image like myself, the Olympics are a quadrennial update on the state of the photographic arts. The modern games excel at producing beautiful images; the photo editor for The Atlantic reportedly sorted through 25,000 wire photos on Friday. This year, the best television has come not from Paris, but from 9,700 miles away in Tahiti. The surfing competition is being held there on a beach known as Teahupo’o, which translates to “wall of skulls.” With competitors riding 50-foot waves breaking onto a razor-sharp coral reef, it may be the most dangerous event in Olympic history, but it’s super relaxing to watch. 

The camaraderie of the surfers having the rides of their lives while incidentally also competing for gold is the best example of the Olympic spirit. Gathering all of humanity together to see who can run the fastest and jump the highest may seem quaint in our troubled world. But three wars raging across the globe makes the traditional Olympic truce seem like a pretty good idea. The most moving example of peak human performance came from Celine Dion. After being sidelined from the stage for four years due to a rare neurological condition, she closed out the opening ceremony by slaying at a planetary level with Edith Piaf’s “Hymne a l’Amour.” As her fellow NBC broadcasters sat dumfounded, Kelly Clarkson, herself an accomplished singer, struggled through tears to find words for what we had witnessed. It was the most authentic emotion I’ve seen on TV in a long, long time. 

Watch the 2024 Paris Olympics on NBC or Peacock. 

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

Scavengers Reign

The world of Vesta is endlessly complex. (Photo: Courtesy Netflix)

In writing class, they teach about the different kinds of conflicts a story can center around. Person vs. person is the most common, but there’s also person vs. self, person vs. fate, and person vs. society. Person vs. nature (formerly known as “man vs. nature”) is not nearly as common as it was a hundred years ago, back in the days of frontier and jungle adventure magazines. That’s one of the reasons the sci-fi animated series Scavengers Reign is so refreshing. Its take on the classic story of a shipwrecked crew struggling to survive in a hostile wilderness is simple at first, but becomes more fascinating as complexities emerge. In fact, “emerging complexity” is one of the overarching themes of the 12-episode story. Creators Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner are fascinated with the interplay of life-forms, both cooperation and conflict, which create a functioning ecosystem. The world they have created is unlike anything you’ve seen.

Scavengers Reign begins with its castaways, survivors from the crew of the cargo ship Demeter 227, already stranded on the planet Vesta. Azi (voiced by Wunmi Mosaku), the capable quartermaster, is paired with her robot Levi (Alia Shawkat). Their escape pod landed safely on open ground, and Azi uses an omniwheel motorcycle to scout the surrounding terrain. When Levi starts acting odd, Azi discovers that a fungus-like alien life-form has been growing on the robot’s circuitry — and the robot likes it.

Photo: Courtesy Netflix

Ursula (Sunita Mani), a biologist, was in the escape pod with Sam (Bob Stephenson), the captain of the Demeter. Their landing was a little rougher, but they have managed to salvage enough gear to communicate with the fatally damaged ship still in orbit. In the pilot episode, “The Signal,” the pair travel to retrieve a battery from another crashed escape pod. Once they get there, they see that the crew have all been killed by some unknown environmental hazard, which they then have to face. But that’s business as usual on this planet.

The occupant of the third escape pod has it the worst. It landed in a tree-like plant hundreds of feet tall, and Kamen (Ted Travelstead) has been trapped inside for weeks. He is finally rescued (if you want to call it that) by a creature he names Hollow. Imagine a cross between a platypus and a koala bear with psychic powers which it uses to dominate other life-forms. Instead of making little green tripod-thingies bring them yummy berry-like spheres, Hollow latches onto the human and demands Kamen hunt for him. In Kamen’s mind, it speaks to him in the form of Fiona (also voiced by Alia Shawkat), Demeter’s robotics engineer. Hollow uses Kamen’s guilt over their dysfunctional relationship against him, and his already fragile psyche slowly crumbles.

Sam and Ursula succeed in contacting the ship, and they manage to activate the automatic landing sequence. At first, they’re worried it might land on top of them. Then they discover they didn’t get that lucky. The Demeter lands many kilometers away from all three parties. The first half of the story is taken up with their increasingly frantic and costly attempts to make it to the ship. Once there, they will find that this world has even more surprises in store. As the show progresses, flashbacks start to fill in the details of how they got here, and who they were before they were lost in space and written off by their employers.

Anime’s dominant visual style has become so pervasive that I hear stories from art teachers about begging their young students to try to draw something else. Scavengers Reign owes a debt to Miyazaki’s sense of grandeur and deliberate pacing, and Akira’s pervasive body horror. But Bennett and Huettner’s aesthetic is more like the French illustrator Moebius. The world of Vesta is endlessly complex, with many animals and plants living in such close symbiosis that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Our heroes are constantly dodging predators, both animals and plants. But many of their interactions with the native flora and fauna aren’t so cut and dried. When Ursula is trapped inside a living wall of thorns, Sam freaks out. But Ursula insists she was never in danger, and in fact might have even been communicating with the giant plant-like organism. What were they saying? She doesn’t know. But as the story progresses, the survivors slowly learn to stop trying to conquer nature, and start trying to live in harmony with it. That’s what makes this beautiful and thought-provoking show such a treasure.

Scavengers Reign is streaming on Netflix.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

History of the World, Part II

Jack Black plays a singing Stalin in History of the World, Part II</i.

Mel Brooks is the king of the dad joke. The 96-year-old writer/director/producer comes by it honest. He cut his comic teeth in the Catskill mountains of New York, where former vaudevillians could make a good living doing stand-up comedy for the mostly Jewish New Yorkers who would flee the city in the summer for a weekend at a lake resort. He was there at the beginning of TV comedy — his first gig was in 1949, writing jokes for Sid Caesar on the now-defunct DuMont Network.

The Catskills style of comedy was quick, broad, and punchy. Designed to keep the attention of vacationers on their third martini, it translated well to television. One of the running bits Brooks did with his friend and co-writer Carl Reiner was “The 2000 Year Old Man.” Reiner would ask questions about historical events, and Brooks would crack wise about meeting Jesus or the Dark Ages.

The bit, which always killed, would eventually evolve into the 1981 film, History of the World, Part I. In the episodic skit film, narrated by Orson Welles, Brooks plays four different characters — Moses, a greek philosopher named Comicus, the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, and King Louis XVI. Brooks was coming off of a decade when he made some of history’s greatest comedies, like Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. History of the World, Part I never quite reaches those heights, but it has some glorious moments, like Moses dropping one of the stone tablets God gave him and quickly revising the number of commandments from 15 to 10. History of the World, Part I was kept alive through endless reruns on cable TV, but Brooks always denied he intended to do a Part II — the number was part of the joke.

Then, almost 40 years later, Hulu picked up History of the World, Part II. The concept works much better as a 30-minute sketch show than it did as a film. At 96, Brooks is more about attracting good collaborators than one-man-banding it. Wanda Sykes, Nick Kroll, and Ike Barinholtz produce and replace Brooks in the multi-role role. The Mindy Project’s David Stassen is the showrunner, and the writing staff is enormous. In the first episode, William Shakespeare pays a visit to his writers room, where a new recruit tries to hide that she’s actually a woman — a self-aware commentary on how this kind of traditional comedy has long been made.

Teasing away Borscht Belt comedy’s sexism and homophobia while keeping its vital technical aspects and still allowing some raunch is difficult, but for the most part, Brooks and co. are up to it. Brooks’ comedy was always deeply anti-racist, and episode 1 closes with the show’s brain trust posing as TV announcers at the Olympics commenting on “Hitler on Ice,” the infamous one-off gag that closed History of the World, Part I.

Any comedy nerd worth their tight five would give their schwartz to work with Brooks, so the show is studded with cameos. Jack Black slays as Stalin, who gets a musical number in the multi-episode story arc about the Russian Revolution that somehow combines Fiddler on the Roof with Reds. In a stroke of casting genius, comedian and national treasure George Wallace plays racist governor George Wallace opposite Wanda Sykes as Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. Seth Rogen is fun as Noah, who thinks God’s “two of every kind” plan is a lot of hassle, so he just collects an ark full of cute dogs instead.

Brooks has always been a “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” kind of guy, and History of the World, Part II is wildly uneven. The extended story of Ulysses S. Grant (Ike Barinholtz) trying to find a drink is tedious, until it ends with a big musical number. If you’re a Brooks fan, or if you’re really missing Drunk History, History of the World, Part II is for you.

History of the World, Part II is streaming on Hulu.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Poker Face

Poker Face, starring Natasha Lyonne, brings back old-school episodic television, much to this critic’s delight.

The X-Files paved the way for a big shift in how TV series work. Serial storytelling, where each episode advances a larger story line, was very common in the early days of film, radio, and television. It has the inherent advantage of keeping an audience coming back for more each week — especially if you end each episode with a cliffhanger, as the Saturday morning serials like Flash Gordon perfected.

The problem lies with onboarding new audiences. If I missed the first episode of a slow-burn mystery show like True Detective or Fargo and instead tuned in mid-season, I would probably be lost. If the drama depends on complex world-building like Game of Thrones, fuggetaboutit. But if I tune into just about any episode of 1970s detective show Columbo, I’m not lost at all. Here’s this weird little guy who solves murders. No need to learn any dragon names.

In 1990, Twin Peaks rescued serial storytelling from the soap opera ghetto. The X-Files, which premiered in 1993, split the difference between “Monster of the Week” episodes and serial “mythology” story lines, setting an example for a generation of showrunners. Now that prestige television is almost exclusively serial, Poker Face intends to reclaim episodic TV from the doldrums of endless CSI reincarnations. Created by Knives Out director Rian Johnson and Russian Doll star Natasha Lyonne, it is a self-conscious reinvention of the Columbo formula.

In the pilot episode, written and directed by Johnson, we meet Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a cocktail waitress at Frost Casino in Las Vegas who has an innate ability to determine when people are lying. If you’re thinking, “Charlie could make a killing playing poker,” she is way ahead of you. Charlie was using her disarming manner and human lie detector skills in backrooms and casinos when Sterling Frost Sr. (Ron Perlman) figured out her deal and gave her a job at the casino to keep her under control. Now that Sr. is retired, Jr. (a deliciously sleazy Adrien Brody) gets a notion to use Charlie to shake down a high roller. When her friend Natalie (Dascha Polanco), a hotel maid, is found dead next to her abusive boyfriend, everyone at first believes that it’s a case of domestic violence — sad, but all too common. Everyone, that is, except Charlie. Something about the way Jr. talks about the death of her co-worker sets off her Charlie-sense. In the ensuing tangle of flashbacks and reveals, Charlie ends up on the lam with Cliff (Benjamin Bratt), the Frosts’ head of security, in pursuit.

Every week, Charlie tries to settle down in a new place, but inevitably, someone commits murder, and her inquisitive nature and overdeveloped sense of justice get the better of her. It’s a little bit Murder, She Wrote, a little bit The Incredible Hulk (the ’78-’82 TV series, not the misbegotten Ang Lee movie), and a whole lotta Columbo.

The rather strict formula (a “howcatchem” in screenwriter parlance) means the pleasures of Poker Face are all in the execution. The stories have been uniformly good. Johnson and sister showrunners Nora and Lilla Zuckerman keep the settings proletariat: So far, Charlie has cleared a lesbian trucker (Hong Chau) of the murder of a Subway sandwich artist (Brandon Micheal Hall) and avenged the death of a barbecue pitmaster (Shane Paul McGhie). The talent on display has been impressive — in “Rest in Metal,” for example, indie film legend Chloë Sevigny is the singer of a one-hit-wonder metal band, her guitarist is the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, and her roadie Chuck Cooper has a Tony Award.

Poker Face is great, escapist fun, but not bingeable. It’s old-fashioned weekly appointment television, and when it’s done this well, there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

Poker Face is now streaming on Peacock.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Last of Us

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey make for uneasy post-apocalyptic companions as Joel and Ellie.

Post-apocalyptic stories hit different these days. It’s not that the Covid-19 pandemic was a civilization ender — the real-life virus’ current worldwide death toll is 6.7 million people, while, to pick one example from post-apocalyptic lit, the Captain Trips virus from Stephen King’s The Stand is 99 percent fatal. It’s that now, we have a much better appreciation of what kind of disruptions that even a “normal” pandemic can create. And, of course, the fear of infection inherent in the zombie genre is much more relatable.

The Last Of Us was released for Playstation 3 in June 2013, right at the height of the last zombie craze and three years into the run of The Walking Dead. It was an immediate hit and is now considered a classic for its cinematic, character-based storytelling, and a Psycho-like protagonist switcheroo, as the character you play initially, Sarah, dies on the first day of the zombie outbreak.

In the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us, Sarah is played by Nico Parker, who charms instantly. It’s her father Joel’s (Pedro Pascal) birthday, and she wants to do something nice for her hardworking single parent. But Sarah’s little jaunt into the city to get Joel’s watch repaired is cut short by a jittery shopkeeper who, it turns out, pays a lot more attention to the news than she does. Her bus ride home becomes a less comic version of Shaun of the Dead, where the background action belies the encroaching chaos, but not everyone understands what it means yet. By the time showrunner Craig Mazin stages his own version of the famous one-shot car escape from Children of Men, the problem is obvious: A mutated fungus that takes over the brains of humans and hijacks their bodies to spread via bite is spreading rapidly.

Then, the story jumps ahead 20 years. Joel is grimly holding on in a radically changed world. What’s left of Boston is a Quarantine Zone run by the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA), which also seems to be all that’s left of the American government. The deeply traumatized population bristles after two decades of military rule, and a group calling itself the Fireflies wages a furtive rebellion to restore some semblance of democracy. Joel and his partner Tess (Anna Torv) are planning on busting out of the QZ to find his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) who might be in a Firefly settlement in Wyoming. But their plans are complicated by the arrival of Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenager who wanders in from the contaminated wasteland with a big secret: She was bitten by an Infected, but resisted the fungus. The Fireflies want to get her to a group of surviving scientists, who they think can use her to create an antifungal vaccine.

Mazin, who won two Emmys for his excellent Chernobyl series, and Neil Druckmann, who wrote the source material, have an unerring eye, and often more importantly, an ear for the creepy. Pascal, freed from the helmet of The Mandalorian, is perfect as the taciturn Joel, while Ramsey, last seen as the fierce Lady Mormont on Game of Thrones, deftly hints at the depths behind Ellie’s eyes. The Last of Us is the rare video game adaptation that actually works on its own terms. Even if you’re as burned out on zombies as I am, it’s worth a look.

The Last of Us is streaming on HBO Max and Hulu.

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Film Features Film/TV

Andor Season 1

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in Lucasfilm's ANDOR, exclusively on Disney+. ©2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

In 2016, Star Wars violated its own formula with Rogue One. Directed by Gareth Edwards and written by Tony Gilroy and Chris Weitz, it jettisoned the space wizards and coming-of-age stories in favor of more straightforward space thriller action, all spun off of two sentences in A New Hope’s famous opening crawl text from 1977.

Rogue One was to be the first of many anthology films, telling stories in the Star Wars universe outside of the increasingly played-out Skywalker family saga. But after Solo’s mediocre box office performance and the pandemic set Disney down a course toward streaming, those energies were directed toward creating live-action series. Coming three years after the debut of The Mandalorian, Andor is the best of the bunch.

Diego Luna stars as the rebel super spy Cassian Andor. When we first meet him, he’s far from the ideologically motivated utilitarian who sacrifices himself to give the Rebellion a fighting chance in Rogue One. His first brush with the Empire is with one of Palpatine’s subcontractors. He’s in a brothel searching for his missing sister. He hasn’t seen her since he was rescued from the dying planet Kenari by Maarva (Fiona Shaw), a kindly scavenger making a living from collecting discarded Imperial technology. Andor attracts unwelcome attention from a couple of security contractors looking for a quick shakedown, and when things get out of hand, he kills them and flees back to Maarva’s home on Ferrix. On the run, he decides to sell the most valuable piece of contraband he owns to buy passage offworld. His buyer turns out to be Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), one of the founders of the Rebellion against the Empire, who recruits him for an impossibly dangerous mission: stealing the Imperial payroll for an entire planet.

Genevieve O’Reilly as Mon Mothma

Meanwhile, a corporate security officer named Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) is trying to track down and arrest Andor for the murder of his two employees. His bungling attracts the attention of Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), an Imperial Security Bureau officer who believes Andor is the key to unraveling the galaxy-wide conspiracy that will become the Alliance to Restore the Republic.

Rogue One screenwriter Tony Gilroy has developed Andor into one of the most compelling characters on television. The 12-episode series starts slow, but the first episode is also the worst. It gains momentum as Andor’s perspective changes. At first, his only goal is survival. But when he tries to flee the politics of the fragmenting Empire, he finds that wherever you go, politics always finds you. Before he even understands what he’s fighting for, Andor is already making sacrifices and hard choices for the sake of the Rebellion.

Just as interesting as Andor’s commando missions and prison breakouts is the intrigue on Coruscant, where wealthy Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) plays cat and mouse with Imperial investigators as she tries to coordinate and arm the rebellion’s restless factions.

While there is the requisite cute robot (B2EMO, voiced by Dave Chapman), Andor’s tone is different than the space opera we’re used to from Star Wars. The action on the Imperial capital planet Coruscant resembles the Cold War tension of The Americans; I would watch an entire series that’s just scenes from Mon Mothma’s marriage to the clueless playboy Perrin (Alastair Mackenzie). I still don’t side with the people who say all of Star Wars should be gritty and “realistic” (whatever that means in a universe with space wizards), but it certainly works for Andor.

On Wednesday, November 23rd, the first two episodes of Andor will air on ABC, while the series finale will join the other 11 episodes streaming on Disney+.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Vietnam War

If you make documentaries in the 21st century, Ken Burns is inescapable. You either have to accept his influence and learn his lessons, or reject it and try to do something different. The advantage of the latter is, fail or succeed, you at least won’t be boring. The advantage of the former is, making a piece that works.
Burns greatest filmmaking skill is achieving a steady flow of information that’s not too fast, and not too slow. His documentary series are timed for maximum absorption. He wants to give your brain time to wallow around in the details, while still learning the important lessons. That might sound easy, but in practice, it is insanely difficult. Sustaining interest over 18 hours of television is an Olympian feat.

Burns has not always succeeded. For his 2009 PBS series National Parks: America’s Best Idea, he slowed it way down, presumably to give those stunning HD vistas a little time to breathe. For one episode, my wife fell asleep during the opening credits. At least it was soothing.

The Vietnam War, Burns’ newest venture, more resembles his 2011 series Prohibition, which clocked in at a brisk 5 and a half hours. The presence of co-director Lynn Novick seems to be good for the finished product.
Watching our country’s best and brightest stumble into protracted disaster seems quite relevant in 2017. It wasn’t like there wasn’t a historical precedent. From Afghanistan to, well, Afghanistan again, low key meddling at the edges of empire has a tendency to spiral out of control. The entire story of America’s Southeast Asian misadventure was told already in the French colonial involvement in Vietnam. The American experience just lasted longer, because we had more money and bodies to spend.

There were multiple people who saw it coming and tried to warn against it, beginning with the very first OSS detachment in the country after the end of the Japanese invasion. But it was always the pursuit of short term political gain that keeps the war going. Just kick the can a little further down the road, and maybe things will get better.

The most interesting thing Burns has achieved so far is fleshing out Ho Chi Minh as a character rather than the yellow peril figure he had been portrayed as in the United States for so long. Ho was a nationalist at heart, and one of those rare revolutionaries who was such a skilled retail politician that he made the successful transition into governing. His first choice to achieve independence for his country was to go to the Americans. When we sided with his country’s colonial masters, he did the logical thing and went to the Chinese and the Russians. One of the most stunning moments of the first two episodes is when an American Green Beret commander casually says, yeah, we should have been on Ho’s side, because we started out as a colony and achieved greatness as an independent nation, and that’s what the Vietnamese wanted to do.

But stuff is always more complicated than that, and that’s the theme of The Vietnam War. Burns and Novick are great researchers, but they’ve outdone themselves. Like Burns’ masterpiece, The Civil War, it shies away from the notion that history is the story of Great Men doing Bold Deeds, and points instead to the forces and incentives pushing and pulling the actors. There’s no Lincoln or Grant in this story, but that makes it all the richer.

The Vietnam War

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Sun Records Episode 3: In The Third Person

The big news from the third episode of Sun Records is that Johnny Cash finally got something cool to do.
The episode opened with him hanging with his buddies in a beer hall in Landsberg, Germany where he was stationed in the early 1950s. (Idlewild Presbyterian Church’s Fellowship Hall gets a featured cameo as the watering hole.) At the prodding of his buddies, Cash busts out into an impromptu oom-pah song, wowing the crowd. This is the first time Kevin Fonteyne has shown believable talent as a singer—although I have no idea if he actually sang himself—and I started to possibly buy into his Cash portrayal. Later, Cash shows his introspective side as he passes up the opportunity to see a movie in the base lounge to sit by himself with his guitar, working out some songs. He gets a big idea when his buddy casually mentions Folsom prison. We all know where that’s going.

Col. Tom continues to be the most compelling character in the series. When he first see him this week, he’s getting some heat from his bookie—turns out the Colonel likes to gamble, and his eye for the ponies is not as well developed as his eye for singing talent. Nevertheless, his grandiosity is in full effect. He’s already starting to refer to himself in the third person. “Are you proposing impropriety on the Colonel’s part?” he says to Eddy Arnold.

But while his gambling instincts may be faulty, his hucksterism is on point. He sells fans to the fans at the un-air conditioned Peabody Dog Patch Jamboree. The show is a Memphis musician cameo-fest: The Subteens’ Mark Aiken gets a line as the stage manager, and guitar slinger John Paul Keith gets a double cameo as two different guitar players! He’s like Clark Kent, just take off the glasses and you’re somebody else. Had I not been familiar with JPK, I might not have noticed his duplicity, which is a tribute to the skill of the makeup and costume folks. If there’s one thing Sun Records has been consistently good at, it’s deploying all of the budget- and time-saving tricks in the book.

Meanwhile, Eddy Arnold’s career is blowing up, but he’s getting wise to Col. Tom’s chicanery. The Colonel’s already got another mark—Hank Snow, played by St. Louis musician Pokey LaFarge—so he fires the client before Snow releases him.

Back at our titular studio, Sam, Dewey, and B.B. King are pretty pleased with their recordings, but label head Joe Bihari (Mike Horton) is not so turned on to “all the hep stuff blasting out of Beale Street.” The future arrives out front of Sun in the form of Ike Turner (Kerry D. Holliday in his screen debut) and his band, causing a commotion with the racist proprietors of the car dealership across the street. On the one hand, I applaud the show for taking the controversial “racism is bad, OK?” stance, but the whole sequence where Sam and Dewey stand up to the bigots—as well as the characterization of Ike is pretty cringeworthy.

Not that Ike Turner was a good guy in real life. Far from it. When they can’t come up with the $3.98 it takes to record at Sun, they naturally head down to Beale Street, where Ike tries to pimp a waitress named Wanda into singing for his band at Sun and paying the bill all herself. When that’s unsuccessful, he just grabs the tip jar and runs out the door, leading the establishment’s proprietor to fire off a blast from a shotgun that damages a guitar amp.

The story of how the damaged guitar amp accidentally created fuzz guitar is the stuff of rock legend, and its treatment here is an example of how Sun Record’s flawed approach to history is counterproductive. As Ike Turner told it, the amp fell off the back of the car. There was no dramatic shotgun chase. Wouldn’t the simple fact that Ike and boys were flat broke, scrounged up just enough to cut the record, and then had to play with a damaged guitar amp that turned out to actually sound good be more relatable? Injecting unnecessary crime hijinx adds nothing. Furthermore, when they actually cut “Rocket 88”, Sam makes noise about being impressed with the novel guitar tone, but we never actually hear the guitar tone isolated so the lay audience can understand what he’s talking about. The good news is, the take of “Rocket 88” recorded for the show is pretty rocking, and Ike’s resentment at being told what to do by Sam, and his subsequent outmaneuvering of Sam is believable and in character.

Sam and Marion takes “Rocket 88” to a pool party where Leonard Chess of Chess Records fame is cavorting with teenage hotties. Marion record scratches the anemic swing on the turntable and busts out “Rocket 88”, sending the greasers and bobby soxers into a spasm of uncontrollable dancing. Mr. Chess is impressed, and soon Sam is hanging his first hit record on the wall—only to find out that Ike Turner has jumped ship, so he’s back to square one. Sam responds to the setback with a one-man, Marshall Avenue DUI party. Marion, meanwhile, gets a radio gig with Dewey to help support the company, setting her up for either an illicit love triangle with her boss or some Mad Men-style sexual harassment. Time will tell.

Down in Louisiana, Jerry Lee and Jimmy Swaggart are getting into more teenage hijinx, stealing porno mags and breaking into the church so Jerry Lee can chase skirts and play the upright piano. Jimmy makes some noise about how Jerry Lee’s sinful ways are going to send him to the pit of fire (“Spill not your seed on the ground! Stay away from loose women!”), but we all know how effective that’s going to turn out to be. Besides, Jimmy’s heart doesn’t seem to be in it. He’s clearly having too much fun tagging along with his cousin. In this comedic sub plot, playing fast and loose with history is yielding some fun comic dividends.

Unfortunately, it’s Elvis’ turn to spin his wheels. He sneaks into Trixie’s room at night and, trying to explain his ahistorical black church attendance, tunes her radio to Dewey’s R&B show. This attracts negative attention from her father, and as Elvis flees through the window, he yells at Trixie “This is the kind of music that makes good girls go bad!”

Dad’s got a point, Trixie. Dad’s got a point.

[Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the site of the beer hall shoot as Rhodes College’s cafeteria.]

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Million Dollar Quartet Gets New Name, Premiere Date

The CMT series filmed in Memphis under the name Million Dollar Quartet will premiere on Feb. 23, 2017—but it won’t be called Million Dollar Quartet.

The eight-episode series is based on the 2010, Tony Award-winning jukebox musical by Floyd Mutrux and Colin Escott. Today’s announcement of the premiere date was accompanied by the news that the show will now be called Sun Records. No reason was given for the name change.

The series, which was filmed in Memphis in the spring and summer of 2016, stars Chad Michael Murray as Sam Phillips, comedian Billy Gardell as Colonel Tom Parker, Drake Milligan as Elvis Presley, Kevin Fonteyne as Johnny Cash, Christian Lees as Jerry Lee Lewis, Jonah Lees as Jimmy Swaggart, Trevor Donovan as Eddy Arnold, Keir O’Donnell as Dewey Phillips, Jennifer Holland as Becky Phillips, Margaret Anne Florence as Marion Keisker, Kerry Holliday as Ike Turner, and Dustin Ingram as Carl Perkins.