PULPY LOVE, PUPPY LOVE

Opening this weekend:

Love Lies Bleeding--It certainly does, along with a fair number of corpses, before this New Mexico noir has run its course. It's 1989--the Berlin Wall is coming down on TV in the background--and our heroine Lou (Kristen Stewart), a lonely employee at a low-rent desert gym, spends her days unclogging toilets and stonewalling FBI agents who would like to talk to her about her estranged arms-dealer dad.

Lou falls hard for Jackie (Katy O'Brian), a beautiful feral bodybuilder who's in training for a competition in Vegas. Jackie moves in with Lou, but as you might guess, all does not go smoothly. Jealousy, domestic violence, gang violence, PEDs and the rage to which they give rise all intrude on this sweet romance and lead to gruesome murder and desperate cover-ups.

Stewart and O'Brian are both believable, and their passion for each other is exhilarating, even as you see the collision course with disaster that they're on. Ed Harris is at his creepiest as Lou's Dad, but Dave Franco wins the award for most odious as J.J., Lou's brother-in-law who abuses her hapless sister Beth (Jena Malone). Anna Baryshnikov is wistful as Daisy, who has the bad luck to have a crush on Lou.

The director is Rose Glass, the Brit behind Saint Maud, working from a script she wrote with Weronika Tofilska. As with Saint Maud, Glass is adept at blending the horrific with the ecstatic and the erotic, and her style, abetted by Ben Fordesman's queasy fluorescent cinematography, shifts comfortably from bleak British nastiness to gritty, lurid '80s-style southwestern nastiness. While the story gets a bit chaotically close to running off the rails in the homestretch, Glass even manages a surreal, magical-realist flourish near the end that feels right.

Arthur the King--This isn't a new version of Malory or T. H. White or Camelot. The title character here is a scruffy third-world street mongrel of such dignified bearing that he's given the royal moniker by his new best friend. Said friend is Mike (Mark Wahlberg), an "adventure racer" who impulsively feeds the dog a meatball during a break in a grueling event in the Dominican Republic, after which the mutt shadows Mike's four-person team as they run, bike, free-climb, zip-line and kayak across hundreds of miles of jungle. He even steers them away from peril.

Directed by Simon Cellan Jones, this is based on the 2017 book Arthur: The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home, by Mikael Lindnord. The script, by Michael Brandt, is fictionalized; Lindnord is a Swede, not an American; he met Arthur in Ecuador, not the Dominican Republic, and Wahlberg's teammates in the movie (Simu Liu, Nathalie Emmanuel, Ali Suliman) are likewise made-up.

More strikingly, the real-life circumstances of Arthur's adoption may have been more ambiguous: an Ecuadoran man later claimed that Arthur, originally named Barbuncho, belonged to him, and that Lindnord had essentially dognapped him. Many hardcore dog lovers, of course, will be unlikely to feel much sympathy for the owner of a "pet" who's at liberty to join a dangerous cross-country race.

In any case, Arthur the King is an unembarrassed and pretty effective hybrid of the venerable band-of-misfits, last-chance-for-glory underdog sports movie with an old-school "I think he's trying to tell us something" dog picture. It's admirably attuned to the plight of strays; there's a hint of reproach, probably unintentional, in the contrast between Arthur's struggles to survive on the streets and Mike's self-imposed travails in his rather bougie, corporate-sponsored sport.

Ultimately, though, the movie is really no less corny than any Rin-Tin-Tin or Lassie flick. But it's well-paced, and if, like me, you're a sucker for dogs there's a good chance you'll enjoy it. Wahlberg is agreeable as the boyishly earnest Mike, but neither he nor any other member of the human cast is a match for Ukai, who plays Arthur, and steals the movie like it was a meatball.

PROJECT RUNWAY

Opening today:

Top Gun: Maverick--When the original Top Gun was released in 1986, I quickly came to regard it as an embodiment of everything that was wrong with American pop culture, and maybe of American culture in general. Setting aside whatever annoyance we can assign to it for turning Tom Cruise into a superstar, Top Gun's mindless, swaggering triumphalism and fetishizing of empty recklessness struck me as a symptom, maybe even a partial cause, of a generational toxicity from which we're still suffering.

Three and a half decades later, on the occasion of this very belated sequel, I'm not sure I see any rational basis for revising the opinion of my pompous 24-year-old self, or of attributing a healthier mentality to the new film. But I will say this: Top Gun: Maverick is much more enjoyable than the original.

The '86 film has become one of the seminal movie texts of our time, but in case there are a few fortunate souls who remain benighted: It's the story of Navy fighter pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Cruise) and his time at the Fighter Weapons School at Miramar near San Diego, known as TOPGUN. Maverick--all the pilots have cute nicknames--is a brilliant flyer but is given to ignoring authority and making his own rules.

In the new film, Maverick is still a Captain after all these years because he's just too darn rebellious to advance. He's still ruffling the feathers of authority figures (huffily played by the likes of Ed Harris and Jon Hamm). He gets called back to the TOPGUN school at the insistence of its commander, his old rival Ice (Val Kilmer, who has one touching scene).

Maverick's job this time is to instruct a batch of young officers with cute nicknames--except for one simply called Bob (the endearing Lewis Pullman)--in preparation for a secret bombing run against a uranium-enrichment facility in a judiciously unidentified hostile country. Among his pupils is Rooster (Miles Teller), son of Maverick's beloved co-pilot Goose (Anthony Edwards), killed during the first film. Rooster bears Maverick a longstanding grudge. There's a bit of love interest, too; Maverick re-meets barkeep Penny (Jennifer Connelly); his previous leading lady Kelly McGillis, though briefly glimpsed in a flashback, goes unmentioned.

Now, let me be clear: Top Gun: Maverick is every bit as insipid and predictable as Top Gun the first, and Tom Cruise seems like just as much a pipsqueak. Cruise can be good, even very good, when he's playing manic and out-of-his-depth, as in Rain Man, A Few Good Men, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia, but when he's in hypercompetent man-of-action mode I've never been able to take him seriously. Even at nearly 60, he still comes across like a boy dressed up in his dad's clothes.

But that doesn't much matter here. Two factors combined to pull the stick out of my butt and allow me to enjoy this movie. One is that technical filmmaking has advanced exponentially since 1986, and the flight scenes have greater clarity and flamboyance than the original's. It's useless to try to claim that the last 30 or 40 minutes of this movie isn't exciting. It's propulsive and spellbinding, even as you see every plot point coming at you as plainly as if it was on a radar screen.

The other factor, especially for those of us who were regular moviegoers when the original came out, is simple nostalgia. The director, Joseph Kosinski, really captures the '80s-movie montage-to-montage vibe, starting right at the beginning with brooding synthesizer tones leading into the most irksome (albeit catchy) song of the estimable Kenny Loggins, "Danger Zone," all of it backing up a full opening credit sequence, not just a quick flash of the title. In this way, Top Gun: Maverick can be like that odd and common phenomenon of encountering somebody you disliked back in the day, and feeling an unaccountable surge of affection.

The Bob's Burgers Movie--Bravely facing off against Tom Cruise's fighter squadron this weekend is the story of a family struggling to keep their burger joint going when a huge sinkhole opens in the sidewalk and completely blocks access to their storefront. It's the feature version of an animated Fox TV series.

Bob is Bob Belcher (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin), the depressive dad; his wife Linda (John Roberts) is more upbeat. They live in the apartment above the restaurant with their kids, boy-crazy oldest daughter Tina (Dan Mintz); nebbishy, well-intentioned rock star wannabe middle son Gene (Eugene Mirman) and rabbit-ear-wearing, aspirational youngest Louise (Kristen Schaal). Louise is deeply offended when a girl at school calls her a "baby"; to prove this untrue she descends into the sinkhole.

This leads to a mystery involving everyone from the burger joint's rich landlords to carnies from the nearby amusement park. Other characters enter the story, some performed by name actors: Kevin Kline and Zach Galifianakis as the landlords; Gary Cole as a police detective with an inferiority complex. There are some very peculiar musical numbers, and it all culminates in a suspenseful and action-packed finale. 

This movie is funny even if you've never seen the show. I can attest to this, because I've never seen the show, and I thought this movie was funny. The comedy derives from the Belcher family's flat, affectless manner, contrasted with the convoluted gothic plot and wild action. But there's also a humane warmth to the Belchers that keeps the joke from going sour. If I lived in that town, I'd eat at that place.

CORNED BEEF & SPAGHETTI

This week’s openings suggest that it’s Bloody Revenge Weekend:

Run All Night—One of the few pretty funny lines that Neil Patrick Harris had in this year’s Oscar show was his introduction of Liam Neeson, to the effect of: “Here’s a man with a particular set of skills—he will find you, and he will kill you.”

This new melodrama is the latest of Liam Neeson’s murmuring threat movies, the ones where he earnestly warns some gangster or kidnapper, usually over the phone, that they’re in big trouble if they don’t lay off some innocent victim. The bad guys never listen, and buckets of blood pour out of people’s heads.

Here Neeson plays Jimmy, a conscience-haunted former hitman in service of Queens crime boss Shawn (Ed Harris). Jimmy’s now a pathetic broke drunk, but when his estranged son Michael (Joel Kinnaman) witnesses Shawn’s cokehead son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) kill some Albanian gangsters, Jimmy kills Danny in Michael’s defense. Though he loves Jimmy, Shawn feels he has no choice but to have Michael killed in recompense, and Jimmy of course is determined to defend his son.

Bullets fly, and innumerable henchman fall. There are some gothic twists, including one of those unstoppable juggernaut hitmen that turn up in movies like this, creepily played by rapper Lonnie “Common” Lynn, called in by Shawn to wipe out father and son (not in that order).

This has the makings of a terrific melodrama, in that it has two great actors in an unresolvable conflict. Neeson and Harris are both as commanding as ever, and when they’re onscreen together they’re better yet—two aging slabs of Irish corned beef who’ve learned first-hand what a vile business murder is, and gaze at each other tenderly, in genuine sorrow over the horror they’re unleashing in each other’s lives.

But the movie, directed by frequent Neeson collaborator Jaume Collet-Serra (he also directed the notorious Orphan) from a script by Brad Ingelsby, ultimately wastes this great advantage. The action is too contrived and overscaled, the escapes too improbably hairbreadth, the music by Junkie XL too blaring. Eventually it gets funny, and then it gets tiresome.

There’s a moment toward the end, when Shawn knows—after one of those murmuring Neeson phone calls—that Jimmy is about to attack his stronghold. He looks at a henchman and tells him to tell everyone to get ready: “Jimmy’s comin’” This could have been a spinetingling melodramatic flourish, but we’ve seen so much ridiculously cartoonish carnage already that it barely registers.

Meanwhile, at the Valley Art:

The Salvation—For sheer ugly brutality, this Western revenge yarn makes Run All Night look like My Little Pony. The hero is Jon (Mads Mikkelsen) a Danish immigrant in the American West whose family is murdered. He quickly kills the men responsible, but in so doing gains the enmity of the twisted gang boss (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who has the craven town under his thumb. Jon and his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) are former soldiers, veterans of Denmark’s 1864 Schleswig War, and when they take up arms against the gang, blood spills copiously.

This Danish/British/South African co-production (it was shot in the deserts of the latter country) offers shootings and stabbings, rape and torture, scurvy henchmen and mealy-mouthed officials, most notably Jonathan Pryce as the corrupt mayor/undertaker. It’s like Titus Andronicus on the range, right down to a baleful woman (Eva Green) who’s had her tongue cut out.

This description should be enough to determine whether The Salvation is to your taste—or, indeed, whether you even approve of it—but in any case it’s executed with precision and confidence in a taut hour and a half. Director Kristian Levring works, from a script he co-wrote with Anders Thomas Jensen, more or less in the “Spaghetti western” style, with faux-Morricone strumming away on the soundtrack, and there wasn’t a minute that I was bored, or that I didn’t want to see Jon have his revenge. The comeuppance the bad guys ultimately receive was not painful, humiliating or protracted enough to satisfy my nasty heart, but in movies like this it almost never is.

PLANE, SPEAKING

Disney’s Planes: Fire and Rescue is the fourth animated feature, after Cars (2006), Cars 2 (2011) and Planes (2013), to be set in that strange alternate reality in which there seemingly are no people, but the vehicles are sentient and anthropomorphic.

The conceit leads back, presumably, through Knight Rider and The Love Bug and My Mother, The Car through the early Hollywood cartoons with their rampant anthropomorphism to the habit of children—boys especially—to endow their toy cars and trucks and planes with personalities.

This time the hero of Planes, cropduster-turned-racer Dusty (voiced by Dane Cook) learns that he needs a replacement part that’s no longer in production, without which he can no longer safely race. He ends up, like many other planes, finding a second career in wildland firefighting in the forests of northern California. There he gradually earns the respect of his fellow aircraft, a motley band of retardant-carriers and transport planes and helicopters voiced by the likes of Ed Harris, Julie Bowen and Wes Studi. The fearless smokejumpers which they drop into battle against huge forest fires are earth-movers, and the members of ground crew are forklifts.

Despite a respectful tone toward firefighting, a lot of wit goes speeding buy in the rapid-fire dialogue (“She left me for a hybrid. I didn’t hear it coming”) and the aerial action scenes have a sense of soaring grandeur. It’s all likely to make perfect sense to you if you’re under ten, but adults may find themselves wondering about literal matters—like exactly who, for instance, the corn is being grown for, unless perhaps it’s for ethanol subsidies.

STRANGENESS ON A TRAIN

Summertime tends to be sci-fi time at the American movies, and so far this summer is no exception. Opening this week:

Snowpiercer—This one begins with the release of a cooling agent, something like “Ice Nine” in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, to combat global warming. The world immediately freezes and, according to the opening exposition, “all life became extinct.” This would be rather anticlimactic, so the movie contradicts itself at once: A remnant of society remains, riding a futuristic supertrain in a constant, annual loop around the snowbound earth.

The train’s “Tail Section” houses the ragged underclass, kept in check by armed guards and fed on nasty-looking cubes of protein gel. A band of revolutionaries led by Curtis (Chris Evans) and a wizened old sage, Gilliam (John Hurt) makes a charge toward the front of the train, where the first-class passengers live in decadent luxury. Once past the more brutal and unsavory security forces, each car along the way is increasingly swanky and bizarre—the revolutionaries storm aquariums, sushi bars, schoolhouses, beauty salons and discos. Central to the plot are such initially baffling elements as hard-boiled eggs, tape measures and apparently the last two cigarettes in the world.

Based on a French comic book (Le Transperceniege), this is the work of Bong Joon-ho, the brilliant Korean who made The Host. For a while I couldn’t decide if Snowpiercer was the silliest piece of camp in years or the most blisteringly profound allegory for modern society since Hobbes’ Leviathan, but after a while I realized I didn’t have to choose—either way, the movie is never boring.

The cast is superb—it includes Jamie Bell, Ed Harris, Song Kang-ho and Ah-sung Ko (both from The Host), Octavia Spencer, Alison Pill and, best of all, Tilda Swinton, hilarious as a toadying minor official. The design of the train is a series of nutty surprises, and the music, by Marco Beltrami, is stirring. Snowpiercer is savagely violent at times, and has episodes that fall flat, but overall it’s one of the weirdest and most fascinating sci-fi movies to come down the track in a long time.

Earth to Echo—Three preteen friends are about to be separated by the eminent domain destruction of their Nevada subdivision. They decide to have one more big adventure together, so they ride their bikes out to the middle of the desert, tracking a digital signal, and there find a cute little cybernetic alien, apparently marooned. They dub him Echo and quickly figure out how to communicate with him. Soon, joined by a pretty girl they like, they’re helping Echo gather parts to repair himself and return to his spaceship.

The movie is a collection of motifs from ‘80s kids’ fantasy/adventure movies—most obviously E.T., both in its storyline and in certain visual nods, like the creepy, amorphous mob of human researchers chasing the boys, flashlights in hand. But there are also hints of The Goonies, Explorers, maybe even Stand By Me, and Echo looks a bit like Bubo the clockwork owl in the original Clash of the Titans. This gives the film a pleasing throwback quality, and the young leads create a likable sense of loyalty to each other.

Still in theatres:

Transformers: Age of Extinction—Because the Transformers toys came along after my own childhood, I don’t have the sentimental attachment to them that boys who were kids in the ‘80s do. And the first two big-budget Transformers blockbusters starred Shia LeBeouf, whose appeal, I’m afraid, was lost on me. So those films left me cold.

But this new sequel features robotic dinosaurs, and I’ve always been partial to dinosaurs. And instead of LeBeouf in the male lead, it features Mark Wahlberg, who I also like (though not as much as I like dinosaurs). So I was prepared to like this movie.

Well, it has some splendid otherworldy spectacle. The director, Michael Bay, doesn’t seem to have an ounce of restraint in his personality, but he is able to stage scenes in which robotic giants amble nonchalantly through settings of burnished Americana, as if Isaac Asimov’s imagination had somehow invaded the vision of Norman Rockwell, and this stuff is executed seamlessly by the special effects team.

All that said, this move is dumb, and so outrageously overlong that it feels, somehow, like an act of aggression. It’s nearly three hours long. It’s almost an hour longer than Citizen Kane. It’s more than an hour longer than Casablanca. And you don’t even get to see the robot dinosaurs until near the end. If you really want to see it, wait for the DVD.