I didn't get to see Rob Zombie's "Halloween" in advance, nor did I get to see the Kevin Bacon "Death Wish" retread "Death Sentence," the two movies opening in Memphis this week that I actually want to see. (Which is not the same as saying that I expect them to be any good...)
Instead, I review the inane yet stooopidly enjoyable "Balls of Fury," with Christopher Walken as a sort of Queens Fu Manchu who loves "Ping-Pahn-guh" (as Walken refers to table tennis, in his distinctive pronunciation). That review is here.
I also review the ambitious/pretentious "Bad Seed" update "Joshua," a psychological horror film that demonstrates that the poison apple doesn't fall far from the toxic family tree.
If you see Kate Beckinsale, Matt Dillon, Vera Farmiga or Alan Alda in Memphis a few weeks from now, thank writer-director Rod Lurie, whose latest film, "Resurrecting the Champ," with Samuel L. Jackson, is now in theaters. (But probably not for long, judging by its box-office performance, as Lurie is the first to admit.)
Lurie is bringing those actors to Memphis in mid-October to shoot a new movie, "Nothing But the Truth," inspired in part by the Valerie Plame/Judith Miller "CIA leak" case. Read more in today's edition of The Commercial Appeal. The story is here.
A trip to David Lynch's "Inland Empire" is like a vacation in Disney's Magic Kingdom compared with an excursion into the cinematic wilderness of self-taught "outsider" filmmaker Phil Chambliss, the so-called "Auteur from Arkansas."
Like Lynch, Chambliss -- a native of Locust Bayou, Arkansas -- is an intuitive filmmaker, but he operates at a less self-conscious and much more impoverished level. His short films are astonishing in their resourcefulness and utter distinctiveness, and -- perhaps most important -- they're just plain funny, in a truly weird way.
Three of Chambliss' shorts will be screened tonight in a must-see program at 7:30 tonight (Thursday, Aug. 3) at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Chambliss is scheduled to attend, to introduce the films and answer questions after the screening.
Continue reading "From Locust Bayou It Came: Phil Chambliss, the Auteur from Arkansas"
"Butoh is a corpse standing straight up in a desperate bid for life," said dancer Tatsumi Hijikata of the avant-garde Japanese dance form he helped create in 1959. "When I begin to wish I were crippled, even though I am perfectly healthy -- or rather, that I would have been better off born a cripple -- that is the first step towards butoh."
He added that the question each butoh performer should ask is: "What has become of our bodies?"
What indeed? With such ideas driving his desire to contort his body into disturbing shapes, it's no wonder Hijikata was cast as a mad doctor who surgically transforms "beautiful women" and "normal babies and old people" into distorted monsters in "Horrors of Malformed Men," an almost legendary 1969 film heralded on the cover of its debut DVD edition as "The most notorious Japanese horror movie EVER made!"
Continue reading "Malformation Junction, What's Your Function? 'Horrors of Malformed Men' and 'Snake Woman's Curse' on DVD"
TEN count 'em TEN new movies opened in Memphis today -- an almost unprecedented glut.
As far as I can tell, this has happened only once before since I began reviewing movies in 1996. That was on Oct. 7, 2005, when these ten movies opened here: "In Her Shoes," "2046," "Proof," Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," "Thumbsucker," "Two for the Money," "Waiting...," "The Gospel," "C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America" and "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit." Yeah, I can't remember anything about some of these titles, either.
In today's Memphis Playbook section of The Commercial Appeal, I review four of the ten, including:
Continue reading "Today's Reviews: 'Goya's Ghosts,' 'No End in Sight,' 'The Ten' and 'Eye of the Dolphin'"
Dino De Laurentiis' 1980 production of "Flash Gordon" is as shiny and colorful as Christmas cellophane, yet many of its bright surfaces are made from form-fitting latex and leather.
The film's "Wizard of Oz" unrealness, imaginative and intentionally unconvincing special effects and naive athlete hero and cheerleading heroine hold special appeal for children, yet its dialog introduces young fans to such vocabulary words as "concubine" and "necrophilia."
In a way, "Flash Gordon" is the kinkiest kiddie movie ever made. I imagine a "Teletubbies" episode in which Tinky Winky removes the coat hanger from his head and whips Laa-Laa and Po about their lower extremities would exude something of the same deranged aura.
Continue reading "The Ming from Another World: 'Flash Gordon' on DVD"
Some of the best short films created by Memphians during the past decade will be screened at 7:30 tonight (Thursday, Aug. 23) at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art during a program titled "The Best of Indie Memphis Shorts: Part II."
Continue reading "Night at the (Memphis Movie Madness) Museum"
With her line-free mask of a face and unflappable demeanor, Nicole Kidman is an odd standard-bearer for the messy imperfection of the human race. Even so, "The Invasion" -- the fourth movie incarnation of Jack Finney's classic 1955 science-fiction novel, "The Body Snatchers" -- is hardly the disaster most fans anticipated.
Continue reading "Body Snatchers Version 4.0: 'The Invasion'"
I approach a first viewing of any new David Lynch film with my brain already buzzing from the clash of contradictory impulses, as the movie lover's tingle of anticipation meets the eternal pessimist's dread of disappointment.
Lynch's latest, "Inland Empire," arrived on DVD last week freighted with enough advance praise and warning to encourage both those emotions.
Continue reading "Let's Get Lost: David Lynch's 'Inland Empire' Now on DVD"
Can you stand a little more Elvis?
Thursday (Aug. 16), I wrote about six new-to-DVD Elvis movies (and interviewed Elvis co-star Mary Ann Mobley). As a sort of belated sidebar, The Commercial Appeal on Saturday ran my followup story focusing on some other notable Elvis reissues, including the also new-to-DVD "This Is Elvis," a partly made-in-Memphis 1981 documentary narrated as if from beyond the grave by Elvis (actually, actor Ral Donner) and featuring re-enactments of Presley's life that range from the intriguing (Furry Lewis appears briefly in a Tupelo segment) to the tacky (in the expanded video version of the film, an actress playing Ginger Alden discovers "Elvis'" body on the bathroom floor).
Read it all here.
Saturday (Aug. 18), The Commercial Appeal ran the latest edition of "Elvis Allusions in the Movies," my annual survey of all the references to Elvis Presley I noticed in the new movies I watched in theaters from Elvis Week 2006 to Elvis Week 2007. (For those not in the know, "Elvis Week" more or less refers to the days that bookend the Aug. 16 anniversary of the King's 1977 death.)
This year's Elvis overachievers: "Happy Feet" (with Hugh Jackman giving voice to a penguin named Memphis) and "Hounddog" (with Dakota Fanning as a Presley-obsessed pre-"Pretty Baby.")
I really ought to archive all the past "Elvis Allusions" columns on this blog. I ought to start compiling a list of every Elvis allusion I see onscreen, no matter what the year. (For example, I just watched "Vice Squad" again recently, and psycho-pimp Wings Hauser has a classic Vegas-era Elvis poster on his apartment wall.) I ought to vacuum my house, too. All these ideas probably will be put into action some day, but for now, here's the 11th annual "Elvis Allusions in the Movies" story.
And yes, readers, please feel free to send me your own lists of Elvis Allusions in the Movies, past and present -- after all, I may have missed some. (Like, I didn't see "Delta Farce," to cite one likely Elvis-referencing source.)
I watched many of the films in advance that were chosen for the 2007 Outflix Festival, which begins today (Aug. 17) at the Muvico multiplex in Peabody Place.
Quite a few worthwhile movies will be screened during the festival, including Israel's "The Bubble," which examines the West Bank conflict through the relationship between an ex-soldier in Tel Aviv and a young Arab, and Spain's "Electroshock," about a schoolteacher in Franco-era Spain who is committed to a Bedlam-like asylum and essentially tortured in an attempt to burn away the "aberration" of her lesbianism. These films certainly are as worthy of attention as most of the so-called art films booked regularly into Malco's Studio on the Square and Ridgeway Four.
The Outflix movie that knocked me out, however, was writer-director Ned Farr's "The Gymnast."
Continue reading "Medal-Worthy: "The Gymnast," Saturday at Muvico"
The extremely ambitious and almost rogue (i.e., non-Elvis Presley Enterprises-sanctioned) "Night of a Thousand Stars" event programmed by actress Suzanna Leigh for Elvis Week continues until 6 p.m. today (Aug. 17) and from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the Memphis Botanic Garden, Cherry Rd.
Including Leigh, the British actress-turned-Memphis resident who was Elvis' co-star in "Paradise, Hawaiian Style" (1966), eight Elvis-era celebrities are in attendance to meet fans, sign (and sell) movie stills, take part in panel discussions, and so on. A highlight has been the reunion of Leigh with "Paradise" co-stars Jan Shepard and Donna Butterworth, who at the time was a cherubic little girl with a pixie haircut. Butterworth, who lives in Hawaii, is making her first trip to Memphis for a Presley event.
Continue reading "The Night of a Thousand Stars (Would You Believe the Day of Nine Stars?) Continues at Memphis Botanic Garden"
Today, I review the raunchy, often hilarious and sometimes intentionally nerve-wracking "Superbad"; and the "March of the Penguins"-inspired eco-doc, "Arctic Tale."
Continue reading "Today's Reviews: I Am the Walrus (Polar Bear/Narwhal/Etc.); plus, 'Superbad'"
Thursday (Aug. 16 -- the 30th anniversary of Elvis' death), my Elvis Week interview with two-time Presley onscreen objet d'amour Mary Ann Mobley ran in The Commercial Appeal. For those who missed it, here it is, very slightly expanded:
Continue reading "Elvis the Pelvis Was Elvis the Pensive: Mary Ann Mobley Remembers the King"
As of this month, Elvis the actor -- which means Elvis the boxer ("Kid Galahad"), Elvis the cliff diver ("Fun in Acapulco"), Elvis the riverboat gambler ("Frankie and Johnny"), Elvis the ghetto doctor ("Change of Habit") and even Elvis the chemical engineer ("Clambake") -- is fully represented on disc.
In other words, every film Elvis made during his career as a movie star from 1956 to 1969 has been released to DVD.
Continue reading "A Little Less Conversation, a Little More DVD-Watching: Six Presley Movies Debut on Disc in 'Elvis: The Hollywood Collection'"
"Married Life" -- the long-awaited new movie by native Memphian Ira Sachs -- will debut next month at two of the world's most prestigious and commercially advantageous film festivals.
The film -- which stars Pierce Brosnan, Rachel McAdams, Patricia Clarkson and Academy Award-winner Chris Cooper -- is the followup to Sachs' Memphis-made "Forty Shades of Blue," which won the Grand Jury Prize for best American dramatic feature at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.
The fifth and final double-feature disc in Warner Home Video's 'Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4' box set showcases one-time Howard Hughes squeeze Faith Domergue and iconic bad girl Audrey Totter as two of the most treacherous femmes fatales in the history of the genre.
Continue reading "'A Form of Compression on the Brain': The 'Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4' - Day 5 of 5"
It's hard to keep track of all the celebrities, semi-celebrities and demi-celebrities in town this week and next to participate in various Elvis Week activities, but at least five of the King's cinematic co-stars -- all female -- are coming to Memphis to meet and greet fans. (Many great musical performers will be here, too, including Wanda Jackson, James Burton and D.J. Fontana, among others, but this isn't a music blog, so we'll stick to the movie stars.)
Continue reading "Elvis Still Attracts the Girls, Girls, Girls..."
"Rush Hour 3" gleefully promotes the ugly in the phrase "ugly American." Despite a scene in which Chris Tucker engages in an extended "Who's on first?" routine with a pair of "Chinamen" named Mi and Yu, the so-called humor here isn't so much Abbott & Costello as Cheney & Rove. Racial profiling, unwanted American intervention, might-makes-right bullying -- this is one odd, sick puppy of an action-comedy. Long-delayed, it feels like a relic from the days when some people actually uttered the phrase "freedom fries" with a straight face. Read my review here.
Nicholas Ray's first movie as a director, 1948's "They Live By Night," begins with a scene that shocks, but not because of any violent, outrageous or sexual content (although the scene is somewhat sexy in its romantic tenderness).
What shocks is its modernity -- its daring acknowledgment of its "movieness" through the still rarely seen technique of descriptive onscreen captions.
As stars Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell nuzzle and kiss in woozy, firelit closeup, words appear beneath their faces, as if what we're seeing is a trailer, or a 2007 Tony Scott movie. "This boy... and this girl... were never properly introduced to the world we live in...," the words comment; this tells us that Ray intends to treat his fugitive lawbreakers with sympathy -- as outsiders rather than intruders. "They Live By Night" contains shootings, a bank robbery and a milky-orbed thug nicknamed "One-Eye," but it's more love story than thriller.
Continue reading "'Lyrical Intensity': The 'Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4' - Day 4 of 5"
In the crackerjack 1955 crime thriller "Illegal," a stool pigeon is gunned down trying to board a bus for the hinterlands, in the vain hope of eluding mob retribution. The bus' destination, according to the sign in the window? Memphis. All together now, readers of The Commercial Appeal: Woo-hoo!
Continue reading "'I Don't Blame People - I Bury 'Em!': The 'Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4' - Day 3 of 5"
Yesterday, we looked at the pairing of "Act of Violence" (1948) and "Mystery Street" (1950) on the first of five double-feature discs gathered in Warner Home Video's "Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4," a new DVD box set. (The discs also are available separately.)
Today, we review the most intriguing disc in the set, which pairs two nasty and tough low-budget oddities, "Crime Wave" (1954) and "Decoy" (1946). The former was shot almost entirely on location; the latter is set primarily in a studio-bound world as bleak (existentially if not visually) as the one found in Edgar G. Ulmer's dead-end classic, "Detour." Both are must-sees for crime film aficionados.
Continue reading "'Murder Is My Business and Midnight Is My Beat': The 'Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4' - Day 2 of 5"
Whenever a dramatic headline appears in an old movie on DVD, I hit the freeze-frame button, in order to scan the rest of the contents of the phony newspaper page. (Does anybody else out there do this?)
Of course, the moviemakers of the past never could have predicted that anybody ever would scrutinize these props, so most of the art department-created headlines that appear on these makeshift pages are irrelevant and generic, promoting "stories" about fires, building projects, "meetings" and so on.
In the nightmarish no-budget film noir, "Decoy," however, this mysterious headline appears, inconspicuously tucked into a corner of the page of the fake newspaper that fills the screen: "Earth Forces Laid to Cosmic Impulse."
Finding this phrase was almost a David Lynch moment, as if it had been planted by some time-traveling joker well aware that the influence of a "cosmic impulse" may be as good an explanation as any for the cold twists of fate, self-destructive decisions, cruel behavior and outbursts of violence that occur throughout those dark crime films of the 1940s and 50s that many years later would come to be classified as "film noir."
Released last week, Warner Home Video's "Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4" collects ten prime cuts of noir on five double-feature discs, available individually or in a box set.
I don't like to pre-judge movies, in part because the snobbish and close-minded pre-judgments of critics from decades past helps explain why so many movies with exploitative titles or absurd premises -- masterpieces like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Curse of the Cat People" -- weren't taken seriously on their initial release.
However, my open-mindedness was seriously challenged this week at a screening of "The Simpsons Movie," when I was exposed to a brief teaser trailer for the new "Alvin and the Chipmunks," a movie that -- in the tradition of the "Garfield" films -- combines live-action actors and sets with CGI critters.
Continue reading "Awfulness Alert: The 'Alvin and the Chipmunks' Movie"
Yes, seven movies opened in Memphis today, and I've only seen one of them. Sorry.
But it's a good one, an unheralded surprise from Australia: "Jindabyne," starring Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney.
Audiences who remember Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" may experience deja vu midway through this film when a group of friends on a fishing trip discovers the floating, naked corpse of a murdered woman. That's no coincidence: Both movies were inspired in part by Raymond Carver's short story "So Much Water So Close to Home."
Read my full review here.
Okay, we all know that DVD companies routinely release bare-bones editions of hit movies to the marketplace even though they're planning to release "special editions" of these same titles several months later, a business strategy that encourages thousands -- even millions -- of fans to "double dip" by buying the same movie twice within the same year or two.
In other words, the DVD companies exploit the enthusiasm and empty the pockets of the true fan while earning bonus bucks for their own megacorporate masters.
But do they have to be so insultingly BLATANT about it? The new DVD of "Zodiac" might as well be labeled the "Sucker Edition."
Continue reading "Sign of the Times: A 'Zodiac' Bummer"
Bob Levy of Oak Hall wants you to see "Black Book."
He's seen it four times so far, and he told me in an E-mail that he believes my readers will be "thankful" if they don't "let such a powerful film as 'Black Book' pass from the big screen in Memphis without their seeing it."
But you better move fast: Today (Thursday, Aug. 2) is the film's last day in a Mid-South movie theater.
After its showings at 12:45, 4:05 and 7:20 p.m. today, "Black Book" ends its seven-week run in Memphis, first at Malco's Ridgeway Four, then (for the past two weeks) at the Forest Hill Cinema 8.
Continue reading "Strong Legs: 'Black Book'"
Yes, I know your time is tight, but do yourself a favor and make time tonight (Wednesday, Aug. 1) for "Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story," a PBS "Great Performances" documentary that debuts at 8 p.m. on WKNO-TV Channel 10. It's a must-see for anyone interested in soul music, Memphis history, the creative process and racial harmony as not just a Utopian ideal but a practical (if sadly short-lived) reality. "It was about the groove," says guitar great Steve Cropper, speaking about making music specifically but also about something deeper.
Continue reading "You Don't Miss Your Water (Until Your Well Runs Dry): 'The Stax Records Story'"
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Published a new blog post: 
Serj Tankian-
Against Me!- 
The Making of Jack's New Album 
Radiohead 
Eddie Vedder's 
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