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.

THRUSH HOURS, RUSH HOURS

Opening today:

Pitch Perfect 2—The 2012 comedy to which this is the sequel was set in the world of collegiate competitive a cappella groups. It had adorable young actresses, beautiful singing, and catty wit offset by a bit of heart, so on the whole, it was a fun couple of hours. It also had—and was, for me, marred by—some self-conscious, heavy-handed gross-out gags.

Pitch Perfect 2’s excuse for a plot has our heroines the Barden Bellas accidentally disgracing themselves at a Kennedy Center performance in front of the President. They’re pariahs in the a cappella community, but aim to redeem themselves at an international competition in Copenhagen. As they prepare for this, all sorts of wacky stuff happens, along with a bit of undemanding romance.

At the center of the ensemble, once again, is the charmingly commonsensical Anne Kendrick as Beca, supported by Brittany Snow, Rebel Wilson, Ester Dean, Hana Mae Lee and the rest of the gang from part one, along with additions Hailee Steinfeld and Chrissie Fit. Reprising their roles from part one are John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks as two cheerfully inappropriate play-by-play commentators.

Banks also took over directing duties this time, replacing the original’s Jason Moore, and I think the results are looser, sillier and funnier. Banks sustains the comic energy through some nutty extended sequences, like a competition between four vocal groups, and the big numbers have some spectacle and punch. The script, again by Kay Cannon, is dense with quizzical, non-sequitur verbal jokes that play surprisingly well, and when Kendrick and her pals sing a wistful version of her improbable hit “Cup Song” around the campfire, it manages even to be a little touching.

About the music: A friend of mine expressed doubt that the songs here were truly a cappella—it sounded to him like bass and percussion enhancement had been added. He could be right, and if he is I suppose I would find that a disappointing cheat. But even so, it sounds good.

Mad Max: Fury Road—1982’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is, I believe, arguably the best action movie ever made, at least of the chase variety. It would probably be somewhere in my top twenty or thirty favorite movies. So this follow up had a lot to live up to.

Set in the Down Under outback, The Road Warrior, a sequel to the 1979 low-budget actioner Mad Max, depicts a not-too-distant future in which the world economy has collapsed in the wake of a global fuel shortage. Society in the desert has returned to tribalism and savagery, and gasoline is the only currency left for the marauding brutes that rocket along the desolate highways in motorcycles and hopped-up cars. A small, fortified colony of reasonably civilized people have developed a refinery, and are trying to move the cache of gas they’ve generated to a safe location near the sea, but they can’t get past the besieging army of the masked, hot-rod-riding warlord Humungus.

To the reluctant rescue comes the title character, the mysterious “road warrior” known as Max, played by Mel Gibson. This soul-wounded loner agrees to drive the armored tanker-truck for the colonists and fend off the onslaught of the freaky gas-pirates. The resulting climactic sequence, full of thrilling and often horrifying stunt work and the sustained kinetic direction of George Miller, is, for my money, the most headlong, jaw-dropping, Wagnerian motor-vehicle chase ever put on film.

The 1985 sequel Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome wasn’t as good, and with the new film clearly employing heavy doses of CGI effects, I had my doubts that Miller could recapture the earlier classic’s remarkable quality. And he doesn’t, quite—The Road Warrior remains without peer. But happily, Mad Max: Fury Road is still a very potent action movie, and the second best of the series.

Miller has lost none of his directorial panache—Fury Road casually offers up everything from two-headed lizards to human dairy farming to combat inside a raging haboob. Along with this grotesque yet epic visual imagination, there’s a certain grandiosity, tinged with irony but still visceral, to Miller’s staging of violent action that is one-of-a-kind. His cutting has the speed and dazzle of modern action masters like, say, Paul Greengrass, but it also has a clarity and precision that give it a Rube Goldberg comic dimension, and a relentless momentum. There’s simply no filmmaker quite like him.

Fury Road benefits from having, like Road Warrior, a relatively straightforward storyline. Max finds himself helping similarly haunted, one-armed driver Charlize Theron transport a handful of the “breeders”—who look like refugees from a Victoria’s Secret ad—of a masked, rumbly-voiced warlord very similar to Humungus, to safety, wherever that might be. The path leads through a seemingly endless supply of bizarre vehicular killers.

As for Tom Hardy, he cuts a serviceably lively figure as Max, but—much as it galls me to admit it—he doesn’t have the electric presence of Mel Gibson. Unlike the somehow sullen Hardy, Gibson’s Max seemed…well, mad. Maybe he wasn’t acting.

HEROIC FEET

2006’s Happy Feet was a truly crazy movie, a blend of Pixar-style animation, Bollywood musical & a streak of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Set in a world in which penguins sing to connect with their soul-mates, the film focused on the unfortunate young Mumble, unable to carry a tune but endowed with a natural talent for tap-dancing.

It starts off, in short, as a fable about nonconformity & finding your own individual path—a good joke right off the bat, in the black-&-white uniformity of the penguin rookery (in The Far Side, Gary Larson once depicted a single penguin amongst the multitudes belting out “I’ve Gotta Be Me”). But by the end, director George Miller had spun the film from a sweet, if deeply eccentric, underdog tale into a grandiose environmentalist vision for which the word epic is hardly sufficient—“cosmic” would be more like it.

I’d be tempted to say it’s a one-of-a-kind movie, but as of this weekend, it’s not. A major box-office hit & an Oscar-winner besides, Happy Feet could hardly fail to spawn a sequel, & here it is, some five years later. In Happy Feet Two, Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) has the penguins mixing some fancy footwork in with their stirring oratorios—the tiny feet often splashing in ominous melt-water—but alas his own son Erik, ironically enough, isn’t much of a dancer. Poor Erik runs away from the shame of this, accompanied by two loyal pals, & Mumble heads off to find them.

While they’re gone, a huge chunk of Antarctic ice collides with the rookery, sealing thousands of penguins, including Erik’s Mom Gloria (voiced by Alecia Moore, aka Pink, replacing the late Brittany Murphy), off from the ocean. So it’s up to Mumble, Erik & his friends to try to find a way to save them—from hunger, from marauding skuas, & from general despair. Their allies this time include the Latin-accented Adelie penguin Ramon (Robin Williams) & his colony, elephant seals, electric-guitar-playing human researchers &, albeit unwittingly, two nearly-microscopic krill (Brad Pitt & Matt Damon) who have broken away from their enormous swarm to strike out on their own existential search for identity.

There’s also, of all birds, a puffin—named Sven, & voiced complete with Nordic accent by Hank Azaria—who has somehow found his way to the other end of the world. He’s been mistaken for a penguin who can fly, which gives him the status of a sort of self-improvement spiritual leader.

In other words, like the first film, Happy Feet Two is another big helping of off-the-wall weirdness. But also like the first film, it’s funny & good-hearted, & the musical numbers—which, a la Bollywood, freely mix snatches of the Rawhide theme, grand opera & Queen & Bowie’s “Under Pressure”—are thrilling, both in their relentless rhythms & in Miller’s dazzling, undulating visual perspectives.

Miller’s apparent purpose, this time, is to stave off the sense of despair that many of us feel over the seeming futility of individual action in the environmental struggle. The moral which the movie asserts—it’s also on the poster—is “Every Step Counts.” To this I can only say: I hope so.