APOCALYPSE; MEOW

Opening:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga--In the unlikely event that I'm ever asked to take the "Colbert Questionert" on Late Night, my answer to the question "Favorite Action Movie?" will be George Miller's 1981 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. It would probably be on the list of my twenty or thirty favorite movies, all-time. So any later chapter in George Miller's postapocalyptic Down Under car chase franchise has a lot to live up to.

This fifth entry is a prequel, offering backstory on the one-armed warrior played by Charlize Theron in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Turns out that Furiosa was abducted, as a child, from a "place of abundance" into the Wasteland, a vast desert region inhabited by gnarly motorcycle-borne pirates shuttling between three horribly symbiotic fiefdoms: The Citadel, Gas Town and The Bullet Farm.

The Citadel, a water source, is presided over by the masked warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and filled with his bald, pale, mindlessly loyal followers the War Boys, who recall the acolytes of Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian. Gas Town refines the fuel that the Wasteland's countless motor vehicles burn; The Bullet Farm provides the munitions.

Furiosa is dragged into this miserable world as a girl (Alyla Browne) and ends up in the clutches of the gabby nomadic biker chieftain Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), who more than earns her grudge against him. Over the more than two-hour run of the movie, the grown-up version of Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) is carried along through Miller's lengthy showcase chases and battle scenes, which have the feel of movements in a symphony.

I saw this film in IMAX, with a large screening audience, and what I noticed is that every time one of Miller's mad, headlong, thundering action sequences wound down, the crowd was left quiet, mesmerized. The term "gripping" gets thrown out a lot in describing movies, but Furiosa truly grips. I liked but didn't love Fury Road; this one still falls shy of Road Warrior for me, but it's a majestic piece of filmmaking nonetheless.

There's no director quite like Miller. His action scenes are staged with an epic sweep but also with a macabre slapstick intricacy. His view of humanity seems deeply jaundiced; he's forever showing us people taking cruelty and indifference to their fellow humans to horrifying extremes, yet he does it with a casual humor, as if to say, of course we're capable of this.

Yet somehow this bleak outlook doesn't come across like cheap, sophomoric cynicism, and it isn't depressing. Partly this is because he always shows us decent human values struggling to hold on in this world, but it's also because the generous-hearted Miller imbues his characters, even the deplorable ones, with so much personality and grotesque glamour.

Taylor-Joy, with the jolting anger that takes over her almost inhumanly urchin face, fits the role perfectly. As her love interest, driver Praetorian Jack, handsome Tom Burke has a valiant and sympathetic appeal. But it's Hemsworth, his eyes wounded and his tone aggrieved every time somebody has the temerity to resist him, who really engages with the audience. The final clash between Dementus and Furiosa, featuring some of the best dialogue from the script (by Miller and Nico Lathouris), gets at the impulse to avenge with a subtlety that few action movies attempt. 

There can be little doubt that Miller's films have contributed to the dangerous illusion that many people, especially young men, seem to hold: that the collapse of civilization would be cool and liberating and fun. He should probably be censured for this, but it sure makes his movies exhilarating.

The Garfield Movie--Another origin story; this computer-animated yarn starts by tracing the humble beginnings of the indolent, lasagna-loving housecat from the calculatingly marketed comic strip by Jim Davis. Turns out that as a kitten, Garfield, voiced here by Chris Pratt, was left in an alley by his feral father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) and met his devoted human Jon (Nicholas Hoult) when he saw him through the window of an Italian restaurant. His overeating is a psychological overcompensation for early want.

The rest of The Garfield Movie concerns our hero and his exuberant canine pal Odie getting abducted by the cronies of the Persian cat Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), who has a grudge against Vic. Somehow it all leads to an attempt to steal milk from a commercial dairy, and an alliance with a glowering, lovelorn bull (Ving Rhames, who's pretty funny).

Admirable as Pratt is as an easygoing onscreen star, his voice struck me as a bit generic for this character, after being performed in earlier iterations by such distinctive voices as Bill Murray and Lorenzo Music. But he's not bad, and the movie has imagination and a snappy, propulsive comic precision, not to mention a catchy theme song by Jon Batiste. It's inconsequential but slickly-made fun, and when it was over, I'll admit I went out for lasagna.

CORMAN VALUES

R.I.P. to the great Roger Corman.

Here's my utterly trivial Corman story: Back in 2000, I did an edition of my KTAR radio show Another Saturday Night by remote from a station in Palm Springs during the weekend of the Palm Springs International Film Festival. There were a few pretty big Hollywood stars there that year, and I had expressed confidence to my bosses at the station that I might be able to get a couple of them to sit down as guests on the show.

I wasn't.

One of the few guests of any stature that I was able to land was Rachel Samuels, who had directed a film in the festival called The Suicide Club with Jonathan Pryce and Paul Bettany, based on the Robert Louis Stevenson story, for the Irish division of Corman's Concorde Pictures (it was later lamely retitled The Game of Death). Samuels said the usual stuff about Corman; what a great opportunity he had given her, and how little he had paid her.

After the show, I went back to the hotel room to change into something more appropriate for dinner. While I was changing, The Wife, who was already in the bar downstairs, called me.

"You'll want to hurry. Roger Corman and his wife just came in."

I hurried. I took the promotional card for The Suicide Club with me. When I walked into the bar, there the great man was at a high top table, handsome and natty as ever, enjoying a drink with his lovely wife. I walked over and asked if he'd sign my card, telling him that I had just plugged the film on my radio show. He thanked me very graciously and signed my card.

I wish I could say I pushed the conversation, that we bonded and that he offered me a job--apparently he was known to do such things--but I was too shy and didn't want to intrude on his evening out. So I didn't. But the card still hangs, framed, next to my desk.

Last night my friend Richard and I had a Corman movie night; we watched the director's 1957 opus Not of This Earth.

The star is the late, incomparable Beverly Garland, at whose hotel in Burbank I stayed a couple of times; I once saw her, large and in charge, taking care of business with some underlings in the parking lot.

Here the ever-fabulous Bev is a nurse (she seriously rocks the uniform) menaced by Paul Birch as a creepy telepathic vampiric alien in cool shades that mask his hypnotic blank eyes. The monotonic fellow is from the planet Davanna, which has been devastated by radiation and needs Earthlings--who he refers to as "sub-humans"--for our blood.

This truly nutty picture is quintessential Corman, scripted by Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna, with an eerie animated title sequence and a cast that includes Corman's repertory company members Jonathan Haze (of The Little Shop of Horrors), and Dick Miller (of A Bucket of Blood) as a vacuum cleaner salesman. There's also a small alien monster, created by the marvelous low-tech creature craftsman Paul Blaisdell; sort of a tentacled flying flapjack that settles on to a victim's head like an oversized hat, then sucks the blood out of his noggin.

Thank you for this and all the other wacky and wonderful times, sir. Peace and joy eternal to you.

A BRIDGE TOO NOIR

This past weekend Your Humble Narrator made his way west to attend the 25th annual Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival at the Camelot Theatre in Palm Springs, California.

As in past years, the fest offered a slate of black-and-white crime films from the '40s and '50s. Also as in past years, some of them inevitably strained the definition of noir; this year's schedule included a Sherlock Holmes movie, 1944's The Scarlet Claw, and a Western, Day of the Outlaw (1959). But so what? The definition of noir as a genre is nebulous anyway. The point is that the chance to see cool old flicks like these on a movie screen doesn't come along every day. For sheer entertainment, this may be the most reliably enjoyable film festival in the country.

Also on the schedule were such familiar entries as the John Garfield boxing drama Body and Soul (1947), Anthony Mann's outstanding and still relevant 1949 immigration thriller Border Incident, with George Murphy and Ricardo Montalban, and the hard-boiled thrillers Dead Reckoning (1947) and The Enforcer (1951), both starring noir king Humphrey Bogart. But some of us are most likely to be drawn to the relative obscurities.

This year, for instance, brought the opportunity to see No Man of Her Own (1950). In his onstage introduction to the film at the Camelot, TCM Noir Alley host Eddie Muller repeatedly referred to star Barbara Stanwyck as "the greatest actress in movie history." I'd certainly put her in the top five, anyway, and she's in fine, intense form in this adaptation of the classic Cornell Woolrich novel I Married a Dead Man (originally published under his pseudonym, William Irish).

She plays the heck out of a down-on-her-luck pregnant woman who, through circumstances generously described as coincidental, is able to pass herself off as the new daughter-in-law of a wealthy couple whose son has just died. Despite the obvious absurdities of the plot, the film is engrossing and even moving because of Stanwyck's impassioned star performance, and a fine supporting cast including John Lund, Jane Cowl, Phyllis Thaxter, Richard Denning, Milburn Stone, Carole Matthews as no-nonsense femme fatale and Lyle Bettger in a despicable turn as Stanwyck's sneering blackmailer.

The movie also had, for me, a madeleine of Proustian remembrance: Though I hadn't thought about it in years, the scene in which Stanwyck and Thaxter are upended in a train crash came back to me from childhood with the vividness of an acid flashback. I don't think I saw any of the rest of it back then, but that tidbit had been waiting in the memory banks to be revived for at least half a century.

Other gems this year included Escape in the Fog (1945), with the adorable young Nina Foch dodging Axis spies in San Francisco, and the compelling Southern thriller Woman in Hiding, from 1950.

The woman in question is Ida Lupino, who realizes she's made a major mistake marrying creepy Stephen McNally before the honeymoon even starts. Lupino's delicate beauty contrasts with her gutsy, heartfelt spirit, and director Michael Gordon manages a Hitchcock-worthy sequence set in the stairwell of a hotel. The cast includes, along with Lupino's real-life husband Howard Duff, a bit role by Joe Besser, a later-vintage replacement member of the Three Stooges.

But maybe the real oddity of the schedule was Across the Bridge (1957), a British feature based on a Graham Greene short story and starring a mannered and sweaty Rod Steiger--with a German accent, no less!--as a short-fused white-collar criminal dodging extradition in a Mexican border town. On his way south he's thrown another man, who he resembles, off the train and stolen his passport, but he ends up with this guy's soulful-faced spaniel, Delores, dogging his footsteps (sorry) and gazing reproachfully up at him.

Directed by Ken Annakin, Across the Bridge was shown in Palm Springs in a fairly crappy digital copy, but the presenter assured us that they're working to get it properly restored. I hope they succeed. It's just about the most Graham Greene-ish thing ever, full of moral limbo south of the border and Mexican women wearing prominent crucifixes. And of course it's via "Delores" (suffering) that Steiger's rotten fugitive finds a fateful sort of redemption. In terms of performance, by the way, even full-tilt Stieger is no match for the beautiful Delores, who steals the movie like a dropped potato chip.

BANANA REPUBLIC

Opening this weekend:

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes--Generations after the death of Caesar, the chimpanzee who founded ape civilization, apes live in clans along the California coast, around the grown-over ruins of human civilization. Our young hero Noa (Owen Teague) is part of the Eagle Clan, a sort of peaceable low-tech utopia that practices fishing by falconry.

Trouble arrives in the form of a raiding party which abducts the Eagle Clan while Noa is away. He follows, along the way picking up a scholarly orangutan, Raka (Peter Macon), and a waiflike human, Mae (Freya Allan). Noa eventually finds his clan enslaved on a beach, under the rule of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), a swaggering monarch complete with crown and throne, demanding in blustery rhetoric that his throng of subjects pay him obeisance outside his palace, a rusted shipwreck.

Proximus claims authority in the name of Caesar the Lawgiver, but Raka has already taught Noa that his tyranny is an outrage to the true Caesar's egalitarian traditions. What Proximus really wants, it turns out, is to open the massive door to an underground seaside vault full of old human technology and all the potential power that any potentate could want.

This fourth of the latter-day Apes movies is, one might say, the ape-iest of them, the one most immersed in an established ape culture and with the most meager human presence. Directed by Maze Runner veteran Wes Ball from a script by Josh Friedman, it's also the most modest, in blockbuster terms; the cast is made up largely of journeyman TV actors mostly unfamiliar to me. The only name player I recognized was the always reliable William H. Macy, as a human bookworm who's teaching Proximus the follies of human history, often to the King's uproarious laughter.

It's a moody, evenly paced adventure that borrows not only from the original Apes series, especially 1970's satirically seething Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but from other mythic sources including Star Wars and The Lion King. And it's admirably unsentimental, with characters seemingly ripe for redemption that aren't redeemed and alliances that don't warm into friendships. The atmosphere is bitter but bracing, and the film has a heart of hard but noble honor.

It's difficult, these days, for many of us to see any movie about autocratic rule, or the undermining of democratic values, or the allure of "strongman" leadership, as anything but a political allegory for our times. The mangy, orange-furred ape tyrant "Skar King" in the recent Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, for instance, seemed like little more than a heavy-handed, though entertaining, political cartoon. But if Proximus was intended as a stand-in for our current would-be sovereign, I have to say, his high-flown language and historical curiosity make for an overgenerous caricature.

STUNTED DEVELOPEMENT

Now in theaters:

The Fall Guy--Beyond the title, this action comedy only borrows a little from Glen Larson's TV series, which ran on ABC from 1981 to 1986: the basic premise, the names of the main characters and the cornpone theme song over the closing credits. But it seems intended as a semi-throwback, a modern take on the easygoing car stunt movies and TV shows popular from the mid-'70s to the mid-'80s, not only The Fall Guy but Hooper and the Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run pictures.

Directed by stunt veteran David Leitch from a script by Drew Pearce, The Fall Guy concerns a Hollywood stuntman with the perfect '80s TV name of Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) who drops out of the industry after an on-set accident. A noxious producer (Hannah Waddingham) persuades him to get back in the saddle, doubling for a putridly narcissistic star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on a sci-fi actioner being shot in Sydney. Mostly Colt goes because he's in love with the director, Jody (Emily Blunt). Before long, however, he realizes that he's been pulled into the project for more sinister reasons.

None of this is meant to be taken very seriously; the tone is near-farcical, though sometimes with a macabre edge. The plot is just an excuse for a string of spectacular car, boat, aerial and combat stunts, both in the movie-within-the-movie and in the external story.

The stars are strong. Gosling gets across some of the same addled, highly sympathetic goofiness that he showed as Ken in Barbie, and he seems to bring out the best in Blunt. Always capable, she has a delightful openhearted sweetness here. The villains--Taylor-Johnson, Waddingham and their brutish henchmen--are also on point, and overall, the movie goes down easy; it's not bad. It's a lot of movie to just be not bad, I suppose, but I certainly found it preferable to the modern iteration of the stunt movie, the humorless and possibly pernicious Fast and the Furious flicks.