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.

WIFE HACKS

Opening in theaters June 16:

Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard--Samuel L. Jackson was the chortling, foulmouthed hitman and Ryan Reynolds was the fussy bodyguard in the 2017 action comedy The Hitman's Bodyguard. About all that really stood out in my memory from that film, however, was Salma Hayek, startlingly sexy and funny as the Hitman's imprisoned badass wife. I will confess I have always had a slight weakness for the divine Ms. Hayek, so I was particularly pleased to hear that she'd been moved front-and-center for this sequel.

Well, insofar as I can be objective, she's fabulous. But the movie, in which our bickering heroes are trying to prevent some (no doubt all-too-plausible) cyberattack against Europe by Greek archvillain Antonio Banderas, is really stupid; aggressively and obnoxiously stupid. It's obnoxious even by comparison to The Hitman's Bodyguard, which is certainly saying something. That film, despite the excellence of its stars, had a disagreeable adolescent jocularity that contrasted poorly with its bloody violence. The sequel is equally bloody but even more cartoonishly broad and by-the-numbers.

This robs Jackson and Reynolds of the chance to bring any shade of subtlety or complexity to their performances. Ultimately it even sabotages the angelic Hayek. The first time we hear her spewing obscenities it's kind of amusing; the fiftieth time even she starts to wear out her welcome.

COP ROCK

Now in theaters:

Spiral: From the Book of Saw--Chris Rock is, at least arguably, the greatest currently performing American standup comedian. He also gave a fine performance in a supporting role in New Jack City back in 1991. But as a leading man in movies, he's always somehow seemed to shrink, to lose the presence he has as a standup.

He comes across differently, however, as an angry yet honest and thoughtful police detective in this shocker, linked to the Saw flicks. Chris Rock is a true, full-fledged movie star here; his presence gives this gruesome Jacobean cop thriller gravitas.

In a generic unnamed city, Rock and his young partner (Max Minghella) are on the case of a shadowy maniac who is abducting crooked cops--wearing, appropriately enough, a pig mask--by knocking them unconscious. When they awaken, they find themselves ensnared in nightmarish traps that offer them the choice between self-inflicted dismemberment or death. Or, if they wait too long, both. Electrocution, flaying and exsanguination are among the Grand Guignol spectacles that director Darren Lynn Bousman and screenwriters Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger gleefully serve up.

I only ever saw the first Saw; once I saw that first Saw, I can't say I ever saw a pressing need to see any of the subsequent Saws. So I never saw them. So I can't say how much of a connection there is between Spiral and the other movies in the franchise. To say that with confidence, I probably would not only have to see Saw again, but also see Saw II, see Saw III, and see Saws IV, V and VI. And for that matter, I'd probably have to see Saw 3-D. And also see Jigsaw.

I don't plan to do that, because Spiral, though it isn't boring, is too crass and silly for that much effort. But I enjoyed it anyway, because of Rock, who also executive-produced. As in 2014's Top Five, Rock's role here provides him, especially early on, with an on-camera audience--his new partner--so that he can riff, standup-style, as they walk along. This seems to help him maintain leading-man confidence.

Samuel L. Jackson also shows up, as Rock's gruff, distant father. This sounds promising, but the two don't get much screen time together, and most of what there is isn't particularly intense. Still, it should be said that a little Samuel L. Jackson is better than no Samuel L. Jackson.

BEATLES AND SPIDERS

Happy Friday everybody!

Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Yesterday, which opens today...

 
...and of Spider-Man: Far From Home...

...which opens next Tuesday.

Have a great weekend!

WIDOWER & WIDOWMAKERS

Opening in Arizona today:

Menashe—Yiddish movies used to be a thing; more than a hundred of them were made, mostly in Poland or the U.S., in the decades before the Second World War. After that, they became rarities—this indie drama is thought to be the first American feature made mostly in Yiddish since 1975’s drama Hester Street.

The title character is a Hasidic widower in his thirties who works in a grocery store in Brooklyn. He’s a genuinely loving father to his ten-year-old son Rieven, and doesn’t agree with the requirement that the boy go to live with his uncle and aunt until Menashe remarries, because of the belief that a child must not be raised by a single parent. He’s in no hurry to remarry, but he wants his kid back.

The simple story that ensues provides director and co-writer Joshua Z. Weinstein ample opportunity for a peek into a little-understood world. The movie was shot, not quite surreptitiously but with a very low profile, in the Hasidic enclave in Borough Park, Brooklyn, with a cast of non-actors. While this generates a neo-realist, almost verité atmosphere, Menashe transcends cultural anthropology. It’s a character study, brought to life by a gifted first-time star—Menashe Lustig, on whose life the story was loosely based.

Menashe is described as a schlimazel by his own family members, ungenerously but perhaps not inaccurately—he’s a nice fellow, but he’s chronically late, late with the rent, broke, and so forth. He insists on mild rebellion from his culture—not wearing the full Hasidic regalia on the street, for instance—in ways that nettle his family and do him no favors.

As played by Lustig, however, the character is also quietly, unsentimentally, even a little exasperatingly endearing. Lustig gives us a naturalistic portrait of the man’s humor, his guilt, his anger, his mischievousness. At one point Menashe’s disapproving brother-in-law says he’d like to see him become a mensch, but we in the audience see him this way already.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard—Samuel L. Jackson is the Hitman, Darius Kincaid, who specializes in killing rich, powerful scumbags; Ryan Reynolds is the Bodyguard, Michael Bryce, who escorts such scumbags to safety. Michael is recruited to get Darius, his longtime enemy, safely from prison in Manchester, England to The Hague, so that he can testify at the International Court of Justice against a brutal Belarusian dictator (Gary Oldman, who else?).

Apparently the imprisoned tyrant is pretty well-connected, as massive numbers of mercenaries try to kill Darius enroute. Hitman and Bodyguard bicker jocularly through mayhem, slaughter, even torture. Michael is persnickety, orderly, a planner, while Kincaid flies by the seat of his pants.

There's nothing new here, but strictly on its own terms, this cartoonishly overscaled buddy picture, directed by the Australian Patrick Hughes, is perfectly executed. Well, almost perfectly; it has the genre's annoying sentimental streak. And like most big-budget action flicks of the last few decades, it could be trimmed by at least ten minutes without losing anything it needs, but as it clocks in at just under two hours it doesn't quite wear out its welcome.

Yet despite the skill with which it's made, there is an imbalance to The Hitman's Bodyguard, in the unsavory contrast between the cutesy comedy and the shocking violence. When the dictator kills a man's family while he watches, and then minutes later we're back with Reynolds and Jackson and expected to crack up at their bantering, it's really jarring, and it doesn't feel like a deliberate black-comedy effect. It just feels like an adolescent sensibility, willing to use the sufferings of people under such regimes as a summer blockbuster plot point.

The leads keep us diverted from this ugliness, however. Reynolds has never been a favorite of mine, but he 's a good sport here, embracing the role of a prim foil to Jackson. That great actor has rarely gotten the chance to cut loose to quite the degree he does here. He seems to have a blast, singing fatalistic blues lyrics (there's a pretty good one written by Jackson himself, and reprised under the end credits) and cheerfully guffawing at the twists of fate that fling him about. Darius is out of his cell, so despite the carnage around him and the constant peril, anything else is gravy.

THERE'S AN APE FOR THAT

Opening this week: 

 
Kong: Skull Island—In 1973, just as the U.S. is bugging out of Vietnam, the Military-Industrial Complex mounts a secret but really obnoxiously intrusive expedition, via a swarm of helicopters, to the title island. Within minutes of arriving, the invaders find themselves getting the crap very justifiably beaten out of them by the title resident.

The survivors of the initial attack then squabble and try to regroup, and to survive further attacks by this skyscraper-sized primate as well as other gargantuan abominations. Notable among these are the “skull-crawlers,” a species of voracious reptiles that resemble two-legged monitor lizards with squalid, skull-like heads. The party also encounters human natives, and an American airman stranded there since WWII.

The original 1933 King Kong is my favorite movie, and giant monsters have been cinematic comfort food for me since I was a small child. So when I tell you that it’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun at a movie, I’ll understand if you take it with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun at a movie, and many people around me at the screening seemed to have the same response.

American popular moviemaking has been on a bit of a roll recently—two weeks ago we had the chiller Get Out, last week brought us Logan, and this week we get this boldly preposterous saga. It would be great if we could count on entertainment at that level every weekend.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts stages monster action with a true Brobdingnagian grandeur, and he and the special effects folks offer us a Kong who is brooding, irritable and lovable. Part of the pleasure of the movie is that he’s so much more sympathetic than the human visitors that one feels little compunction about wholeheartedly rooting for him.

There’s a tongue-in-cheek nerviness to the script, and the cast is full of character vets that can handle it. The supporting soldiers and researches are forgettable monster fodder, and the nominal hero and heroine, Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson, seem to have been cast for their ability to look great in t-shirts. But John Goodman, as the contractor leading the search, and Samuel L. Jackson as the Army Colonel who goes all Captain Ahab toward Kong, and John C. Reilly as the marooned pilot, ensure that the movie isn’t just an empty spectacle devoid of personality.

Kong: Skull Island is not, I suppose, a movie of particularly mature or wholesome sensibility. But it can’t fairly be called dumb, either—it’s made with skill, wit and imagination, and it has moments that could be called magical. 

 
The Ottoman Lieutenant—Call the title character Ismail, a dashing young Turk in the Ottoman army. He's played by a Dutch actor named Michiel Huisman, previously unfamiliar to me but very appealing. Our heroine, played by the Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar, is Lillie, a high-minded nurse from Philadelphia who goes to work in a clinic in Anatolia in the early days of World War I. She and Ismail fall in love, even though he's a Muslim and she's a Christian, even though the dull doctor at the clinic (Josh Hartnett) also loves her, and even though the Armenian Christians she cares for are in big trouble from the Turks.

This star-crossed interfaith romance tries to be sexy and swoony in the manner of a check-out line romance novel of the old school. The direction is by that excellent journeyman Joseph Ruben, who back in the '80s made three classic thrillers in a row: Dreamscape, The Stepfather and True Believer. The poor fellow hasn't been able to get a script worthy of his abilities since, but that doesn't stop him from bringing the best out of what he has to work with, like efficiently staging some exciting action scenes here, or from capitalizing on the expansive scenery.

Ben Kingsley easily nails his few scenes as another American doctor with whom Lillie bonds, a sick and bereaved man who labors on in spite of despairing doubt that life has any meaning. But crisp direction and a strong supporting turn can only take the movie so far, especially when there may be an unspoken agenda beyond the mild love story.

With its insipid dialogue and nagging, generically epic music, The Ottoman Lieutenant comes off as trite but watchable and harmless enough, on the surface. It would be remiss, however, not to note that the film, a Turkish-backed production, is grotesquely evasive about the Armenian Genocide that started in 1915, in which about a million and a half people perished.

The movie doesn't exactly deny the event, but it treats it obliquely, in bland passages from Lillie's narration like "the Ottomans took measures to stamp out the Armenian rebels, and the Armenians fought back," or "...some Armenian men were taken from their homes and conscripted to serve in the Ottoman army, while the round-up of Armenian women, children and the elderly had begun..." She never quite spits out what those "measures" were, or what the people were being rounded up for.

It's true that we're shown a small number of Ottoman soldiers massacring some Armenians on a country road. But there's no sense of the scope and sanction of the horror from this scene, the real point of which is that our valiant hero Ismail intercedes on the Armenians' behalf.

To be fair, this probably isn't much more outrageously disingenuous than, say, the classic John Ford epics are toward the real-life genocides of the American West. Still, behind all of The Ottoman Lieutenant's pieties and platitudes and tender longings and noble sacrifices, it's hard to miss a distinct whiff of whitewash.

THE HUMAN ABSTAIN

Opening this week:

Chi-Raq—The title refers to Chicago, the streets of which are more lethal these days for young black men than Iraq. It also refers to the rapper and gang leader (Nick Cannon) whose girlfriend Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) is at the center of Spike Lee’s modern-dress retelling of Aristophanes, much of it played out in rhyming dialogue. Lysistrata leads the girlfriends of rival gangs on Chicago’s south side in a sex strike until the shooting stops.

The middle-aged women in the neighborhood eventually join in, demanding activism from the miserable middle-aged men. Eventually the strikers seize a National Guard armory, and the forces of the Mayor (D. B. Sweeney) and the Police Commissioner (Harry Lennix) lay siege to them there, planning “Operation Hot and Bothered,” in which the ladies are bombarded, Noriega-style, with romantic slow jams.

Farcical as this strand is, Lee and his co-writer Kevin Willmott (of C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America) point to the anti-war sex strike started by Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee in 2003 to show that there are real-life precedents for this sort of action. They also make clear that the object of the protest is no joke: The film includes horrifying violence, including the death of a child from a stray bullet.

I had missed Spike Lee’s last few movies, and Chi-Raq reminded me of how funny he can be. While its free-form structure recalls Lee’s early School Daze (1988), what surprised me is how genuinely Greek it is. It’s a fairly insane movie, but all its messy craziness—the broad characterizations, dirty jokes and slapstick thrown up alongside angry, deadly-serious didactic rants and debates, the meandering plot, the digressions—is at least equally true of Aristophanes.

As always with Lee’s films, much of the energy comes from the acting. Standouts here include veterans like Angela Bassett as the wise lady across the street, Wesley Snipes, giggling like Muttley, as the rival gang leader Cyclops, a raspy-voiced John Cusack as an enraged priest and Samuel L. Jackson, unleashing his peerless verbal exuberance on rhymed couplets of choral commentary.

Vivid as these performers are, however, the glue that holds Chi-Raq together—just barely—is the likable and luscious Lysistrata of Teyonah Parris. She and her fellow strikers certainly make setting down the guns seem worthwhile.

TYPE A PERSONALITIES

Opening this week:

Avengers: Age of Ultron—The big-budget superhero blockbusters of the last decade or so are not, I confess, my favorite genre. I loved Sam Raimi’s first two Spiderman movies and the first two Iron Man flicks as well, and the first Captain America movie, the period piece, had some flavor. But as these and other series have extended and expanded and intermingled with each other, bloat and rote have begun to set in.

Don’t get me wrong; I always find something in all of them to enjoy—there are always exciting scenes and entertaining performances, or, if nothing else, Scarlett Johansson to look at. But for me, there’s a certain hyper-seriousness to the writing of the recent Marvel and DC spectacles, and also a sterile visual atmosphere—a result, I think, of the wall-to-wall CGI—that’s a bit dreary, almost oppressive. Most of them also feel overplotted, and at least a half-hour too long.

So it’s possible that you could find less cranky and whiny commentators than I to hold forth on the matter of Avengers: Age of Ultron. Because, though it gives me no pleasure to take a “you kids get out of my yard” tone, everything I said above applies to this latest Marvel all-star game.

The main hero line-up this time includes Tony Stark aka Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Bruce Banner aka The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), the aforementioned Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Chris Evans as Captain America, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, among others. The plot this time is yet another variation on the Frankenstein theme: Ultron is an android endowed with massive artificial intelligence, recklessly created by Tony Stark to keep the world peaceful and safe.

Regrettably, Ultron decides the most efficient way to accomplish this is to wipe out the human race with the help of his army of killer robots, and Tony and his Avenger pals have their hands full stopping this. Interminable wild chase and fight scenes ensue, many featuring buildings collapsing into graying clouds of rubble—an unsavory, reflexive modern motif that can’t cease to be obligatory in movies like this soon enough to suit me.

But, as usual, Avengers: Age of Ultron has its compensations. For instance, there’s Elizabeth Olsen, soulful as ever, as Scarlet Witch, some sort of freaky Eastern European super-psychic, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as her super-fast twin brother Quicksilver. And, as aforementioned, there’s Scarlett Johansson to look at.

But the most fun that this movie offered me was its title character, voiced, and performed by “motion capture,” by James Spader. I’ve long been a fan of Spader, from his beginnings in the‘80s as a sort of off-the-bench honorary Brat Packer, through to his hilarious courtroom harangues and pervy lewdnesses on Boston Legal. Avengers: Age of Ultron should have devoted far more of its length to verbal sparring between Spader’s ironic purring and Downey’s nervous, nattering insolence—a clash between two of the greatest smart-alecks in contemporary pop culture.

OVER THE CAP

There are many exciting, ingeniously-directed scenes in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the extravagant sequel to 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger.

On the deck of a ship, for instance, the Marvel hero (Chris Evans) engages in an extended scrap with a French pirate that looks like some sort of folk dance. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) holds off an attack by gunmen dressed as cops from inside his heavily fortified SUV. A little later, Cap finds himself surrounded by turncoat enemies in an elevator, and all hell breaks loose in the enclosed space.

These sequences and others are cleverly executed by directors Anthony and Joe Russo. The movie also has Scarlett Johansson going for it—she’s drolly alluring as Cap’s butt-kicking ally Black Widow. I enjoyed Johansson’s gentle prodding of the less-than-electric Evans, but overall, when the end credits of Captain America: The Winter Soldier arrive, it’s more a relief than anything.

The 2011 film, which squared Cap off against his nemesis Red Skull, was a period piece, circa WWII, which maybe gave it a bit more snap and flavor than some of the other Marvel flicks of recent years. Cap was frozen in that film and thawed-out in contemporary times, and the new movie pits him, along with Black Widow and Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and a few other good guys, against cyborg menace Winter Soldier. It’s watchable, but it gets bogged down in too many interminable shoot-outs and chases, and a lengthy finale involving giant airships.

Indeed, it suffers from the same problem—though I may be in the minority in regarding it as a problem—as most recent superhero flicks: None of them seem to know When To Quit. They dawdle on, climax after climax and then coda after coda, even interrupting the end credits for a now-obligatory parting shot. My best guess is that, having charged us so much for our tickets, they’re terrified that we’re going to feel we haven’t gotten enough for our money.