LET SLIP THE DOG OF WAR

Opening this weekend:

Max—The title character is a Belgian Malinois, which looks like a dark-faced German Shepherd, who suffers from PTSD after deployment to Afghanistan sniffing out Taliban weapons caches for the Marines. He gets adopted by the Texas family of his late handler Kyle, and bonds with Kyle’s younger brother Justin (Josh Wiggins), a snotty video-game junkie (and bootlegger).

Working with the dog gives Justin a better attitude, and a sassy but truehearted young girlfriend (Mia Xitlali) with a talent for dog training—the house where she lives is full of Chihuahuas, and if she can train them, I say she’s a true whisperer. Unfortunately, one of the handler’s fellow Marines is a low-down dirty crook with a grudge against Max, and now that he’s back stateside he pollutes the dog’s reputation with Justin’s Dad (Thomas Haden Church). Pretty soon Max, Justin and their friends are running for their lives from a bunch of arms-dealer heavies and their attack Rottweilers.

This corny, very old-fashioned boy-and-his-dog tale was co-written and directed by Boaz Yakin, who, back in his memorable 1994 directorial debut Fresh, showed us a dog being hanged. The canines here have it rough too, which may be difficult for the many people sensitive to depictions of animal suffering. The (seemingly smaller) segment of the audience sensitive to bad dialogue may have a hard time with the excruciating attempts at adolescent banter and dysfunctional family squabbles.

If you (and your kids) can get past all this, however, Max is quite enjoyable on its own terms—nicely shot by cinematographer Stefan Czapsky, with exciting action scenes, and as well acted as can be expected considering the clumsy, self-conscious dialogue. The standout performer is “Carlos,” who principally played Max—what a beautiful creature, and what soulful, convincing, heart-wrenching performance Yakin and the trainers elicited from him, and from the several other dogs who contributed to the role.

At the less glamorous end of the cast, it gave me a pang to see Lauren Graham, lovely and beguiling star of Gilmore Girls, playing the drearily conventional part of Justin’s Mom. Who would have thought that the delicious Graham would end up second fiddle to a 21^st-Century Rin-Tin-Tin?

One other note: At the screening of Max that I attended Kyrsten Sinema, Representative from Arizona’s 9^th Congressional District, spoke briefly before the film in support of The Military Working Dog Retirement Act, which she co-sponsored. This seems to me legislation to which almost anyone, regardless of political persuasion, could lend their support. Except, of course, for meanies who hate dogs.

THE ID FACTOR

In the movie version of Entourage, now in theatres, Vincent Chase’s directorial debut is Hyde, a modern techno-pop version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So… 

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree is the title creature from that fake movie, also played by Vince (Adrian Grenier), seen here in the fake poster...

STOCKING FEAT

Hope everyone’s had a great Father’s Day. The Kid and The Wife presented me this morning with this lovely bouquet of black socks:

And while we’re in picture mode—at Phoenix ComiCon a few weeks back, guys from the United Federation of Phoenix flagged me down as I was leaving, on the basis of my shirt, and took pictures of me in their impressive reproductions of Star Trek’s transporter and captain’s chair. They said they’d send them to me, and they’ve kept their promise:

UFP hosts David Gerrold, writer of the legendary original series Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles, among other guests, next weekend at LepreCon June 25th-28th.

BRAIN/BIRD

Opening this weekend:

Inside Out— This animated feature dramatizes the workings of the human mind by personifying the emotions, in this case those of a 12-year-old girl named Riley. Working in a NASA-like mission control is our heroine Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), a radiant Tinkerbell-like sprite determined to keep Riley happy; she’s supported by Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and frumpy, blue-skinned Sadness (Phyllis Smith).

The team’s job is to create memories, here seen as tiny transparent globes glowing with their emotional coloring—gold for Joy, red for Anger, and so forth. Joy tries hard to keep Sadness from touching Riley’s memories and tingeing them blue, but when Riley moves from Minnesota, where she has a best friend and plays hockey, to San Francisco, Joy finds it much harder to suppress Sadness.

Eventually the emotional crises that come with a move during childhood cause Joy and Sadness to get separated from the headquarters, leaving Fear, Anger and Disgust in charge. The rest of the movie concerns their Bunyan-esque journey through Riley’s personality to take over again in headquarters.

The conceit of this movie isn’t new. It wasn’t new as the premise of the early-‘90s Fox sitcom Herman’s Head, and wasn’t even new as one of the funnier segments of Woody Allen’s 1972 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) or the 1970 movie of Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. It goes back through the Good and Evil Angels that appear on the shoulders of cartoon characters, and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, through medieval morality plays to the Psychomachia of the Roman poet Prudentius.

But it’s possible that no one’s ever done this idea quite as well as Inside Out. One’s expectations for Pixar’s features tend to be pretty high, but even so I wasn’t prepared for how deeply imagined this movie is, or how emotionally potent. Or, for that matter, how wise: the theme is emotional gestalt, and the role of sadness in a healthy personality.

I walked out of the theatre feeling like I’d seen a masterpiece, and a few days later this doesn’t feel like an overreaction. It may be the best movie I’ve seen all year. My only concern is that Inside Out is so fast and complex that some of its subtleties may get past smaller children—the gags about abstract thought could leave a college kid studying for a psych final feeling confused. But even so, the movie is so full of color and comedy that kids will likely enjoy it even if they don’t entirely get it.

Opening today at FilmBar Phoenix:

I Am Big Bird—Well, maybe it isn’t quite as soul-stirring a line as “I Am Spartacus.” But only maybe. Certainly the title avian has had a longer and happier career than the hapless gladiator.

Subtitled The Caroll Spinney Story, this documentary chronicles the life of the puppeteer who has given soul to the towering, yellow-plumed fowl, the long-beaked, guileless face of Sesame Street. A soft-spoken Bostonian with a narrow, goateed hippie’s face, Spinney has performed both the childlike Big Bird and, for a bit of Hyde to go with that Jekyll, the curmudgeonly Oscar the Grouch for more than forty years.

Directed by Dave LaMattina and Chad N. Walker and partly funded via Kickstarter, the film is smoothly made if fairly conventional as cinema. It's helped along because Spinney’s life, even before his Sesame Street days, seems to have been unusually well-documented, first by home movies and later, after his marriage to Debra Gilroy in 1979, by home video. It’s the content, however, that makes this the most fascinating show business documentary I’ve seen since, at least, Andrew Leavold’s The Search for Weng Weng.

I’ve been a Sesame Street fan since the show started—I clearly remember watching the first episode, and I watched it religiously for years even though I was too old for it, educationally speaking (I already knew how to read and count). I loved the show simply because it was genuinely funny, and had richer characters than almost any live-action show aimed at kids (or, for the most part, adults) at the time. Oscar was a special favorite of mine from the first.

Even so, I Am Big Bird was full of stuff I didn’t know. It covers everything from Spinney’s difficult relationship with his father to Big Bird’s visits to China to Mitt Romney’s backfired shot at PBS in the 2012 election—probably an attempt, tactically idiotic, to throw red meat to that part of the reactionary Right that hates Sesame Street for being multicultural propaganda (which it certainly is)—to Spinney’s startling near-miss with another historical moment.

But probably nothing in I Am Big Bird is as astounding as the technical explanation of how Big Bird works, and what that has meant, for Spinney and his apprentices, over the years. As a physical acting challenge it makes, say, a DeNiro weight gain or a Christian Bale weight loss look like a walk in the park.

FOND-LEE REMEMBERED

Christopher Lee was the last of them.

Fans of classic horror movies will know who I mean by “them.” First there was Lugosi, then Karloff, then Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine, and around midcentury came the rise of Vincent Price, and then, more or less starting with the same 1957 movie, came Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Some might exclude Carradine from the list, and some might include, say, Peter Lorre or Lionel Atwill. But essentially I think that these seven guys—Lugosi, Karloff, Chaney Jr., Carradine, Cushing and Lee—represent the true superstars of old-school, classic horror in English-language talkies.

And now they’ve all passed on.

Of course when Lee and Cushing became horror stars, with Hammer’s ’57 Curse of Frankenstein and the following year with Dracula (called Horror of Dracula in the U.S.), they didn’t seem old-school, but rather new-wave, with Hammer’s amped-up gore and cleavage, usually in lurid color. But within a decade or so, Hammer and its stars and style and imitators had been fully admitted to the canon of horror as Boomer-era, Famous Monsters of Filmland-reading fans would recognize it.

Lee, who started as a movie actor shortly after his WWII service (he was an uncredited spear-carrier in Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet) and who even made a couple of movies with Karloff—he played the grave-robber Resurrection Joe in the Karloff chiller Corridors of Blood—never really faded away. Though still probably most remembered for playing Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Mummy and many other scary parts in the Hammer and other British films of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Lee remained relevant as a character actor until his death, at 93, earlier this month, appearing in The Wicker Man and The Man With the Golden Gun and Airport ‘77 and in the title role of the Pakistani biopic Jinnah, and in the Star Wars movies and Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations and Tim Burton’s flicks and TV miniseries and video game voices and so on.

For my birthday this year I got The Christopher Lee Collection, a pretentiously-titled DVD box set featuring four fairly low-rent films Lee made for producer Harry Allen Towers, three of them directed by Spanish sleazemaster Jesus “Jess” Franco. So I recently caught up with Lee in two ‘70s quickies I’d never seen before—The Castle of Fu Manchu and a tawdry historical melodrama called The Bloody Judge. They’re terrible movies, but the star is effortlessly authoritative in both of them.

In 1970’s The Bloody Judge (hilariously retitled Night of the Blood Monster for the U.S. market) Lee plays an actual historical figure, the original “Hanging Judge” George Jeffreys, who notoriously presided over the treason trials after England’s Monmouth Rebellion in 1685. Franco’s version of this story is full of quite unsavory violence and sexual exploitation, but there in the middle of it is Lee, trying his best to give a textured performance as the haughty but conscience-haunted Jeffreys. This was his fate throughout much of his long career, and he seemed good-humoredly resigned to it.

Anyway…

Monster-of-the-Week: Obviously Lee should get the nod this week, but which of his roles to choose? For a lot of fans, there would be no contest; many regard him as the greatest screen Dracula of all time. I’m a Lugosi loyalist myself, but there’s no doubt of the sexual charisma and imposing physical threat Lee brought the role, even when, as was most of the time in the Hammer Dracula films, he was ridiculously underused—in 1966’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness he doesn’t even say a word in his beautiful deep rumble, and in several of the others he speaks only a handful of lines.

So let’s acknowledge him, this time, for the title role in Count Dracula…

…a low-budget 1970 non-Hammer production, again produced and written by Towers and directed by Franco. It’s not an entirely successful film by a long shot, but it allowed Lee to play the Count as he had long wanted to, in a manner highly faithful to Stoker’s novel.

RIP, sir. You’ll be missed.

THE WORLD IS MORE THAN ENOUGH

RIP to an all time great, Christopher Lee, departed at 93. More on him later, of course.

Opening wide today:

Jurassic World—Near the beginning of this summer blockbuster, one of the bigwigs at the title theme park complains that the public is no longer impressed by live dinosaurs, that kids don’t see them that differently than they’d see an elephant. It is, after all, twenty-some years since the disastrous events of Jurassic Park the first, so in the timeline of the franchise we’ve all had time to get blasé about giant extinct reptiles.

It’s hard not to sense that behind this is the dilemma of the filmmakers—back in 1993, Jurassic Park gave us CGI/animatronic dinosaur scenes so convincing that, at the time, they seemed almost like documentary footage. Between that and the dazzling showmanship of director Steven Spielberg, the original swept us briskly past logical and logistical gaps and stodgy, banal dramatics.

But two decades and two (enjoyable) sequels later, how to revive the franchise? Both the movie and its characters use the same approach—build a better dinosaur. And by better, of course, they mean more badass.

The premise is that Jurassic World is now up and running, funded by a gushy billionaire (Irrfan Khan), as a major international tourist attraction, with dinosaur petting zoos and boat excursions and a Sea World-style show with a mosasaurus leaping for a hanging shark like a porpoise leaping for a sardine. It also has, for that matter, a Starbucks and a Pandora jeweler and a gallery sponsored by Samsung—this movie has more product placement than Clueless, and to a similarly disingenuous satirical point.

Anyway, in response to the public’s yawn about dinosaurs, the park’s geneticists (led by B. D. Wong from the original film) have created a 50-foot tall genetically-engineered dino-hybrid monster dubbed Indominus Rex. This toothy titan breaks free, kills people and other dinosaurs, sets other creatures free in the wake of his destruction, and generally unleashes pandemonium.

So, how is it? Look, I’m a dinosaur geek, so it’s hopeless asking me for a balanced view of a dinosaur movie. But I remember being intrigued by the choice of the director, Colin Trevorrow, whose only previous feature was the sweet but low-key romantic comedy Safety Not Guaranteed. He seemed like an offbeat choice for a special-effects-bloated spectacle.

He was just the right choice, as it turned out. He has a peculiar sense of humor and, better yet, no significant sense of decorum, and after setting us up with a relatively straight-faced opening quarter, he starts putting funky little spins on notions from King Kong to the Japanese monster flicks to the earlier films in this series, and he gradually lets the movie go crazy. In a good way.

He even gives us a villainous corporate creep (Vincent D'Onofrio) who thinks the velociraptors would make excellent American soldiers. I seem to recall something like that in the Weekly World News years ago.

The showpiece dinosaur scenes have a buoyant exuberance that's really fun. The one in which the two boys, riding in a transparent observation sphere, are bounced around like a pinball between a herd of panicking ankylosaurs is ready made to be a ride in Universal's own theme park.

But Trevorrow's nutty sensibility may be best displayed in the way he handles his leads. Bryce Dallas Howard starts out as a stereotypical lacquered career woman who doesn't show enough interest in her visiting nephews (the boys in the ball). As she spends more time in the company of hunky dinosaur trainer (yes, dinosaur trainer; you read that right) Chris Pratt she accrues glamour until, by the time she's leading a T-Rex with a traffic flare, she's like a de-victimized Fay Wray. It would be retrograde if it weren't for the sense that it's a put-on.

As for Pratt's brawny raptor whisperer, he gets to ride a motorcycle and lead a pack of four voracious female predators. It's been a while since a leading man has had it this good.

Opening today at Harkins Camelview:

The Farewell Party—Yehezkel, an inventor and good-heartedly meddlesome neighbor, lives in a Jerusalem retirement home. With the help of a couple of friends from the building—and to his wife’s horror—he develops a Kervorkian-style euthanasia machine and uses it to put a man out of the misery of a protracted terminal illness (with the man’s wholehearted consent). Word gets around among the geriatric community, and pretty soon people are approaching Yehezkel and pals asking for the same service.

This Israeli film, co-directed and written by Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon, may sound grim, and it certainly has its heartbreakingly poignant moments. But it’s not a downer at all—it has at least as many sly, ironic laughs as it has tears. Although it seems firmly in the right-to-die camp, the film is fully awake to the thorny complexities that come along with this right, and employs them for both comic and dramatic power.

And good grief, is it well acted. Every member of the cast, led by bourekas star Ze’ev Ravach as Yehezkel, is effortlessly vital and convincing, and they have an ensemble chemistry that’s tense and crisp and more sexy than you might expect. There’s no patronization of the aged here. These people aren’t cute oldsters, nor are they tragically venerable—the word for them is cool. I wanted to hang out with them.

SO REXY IT HURTS

With Jurassic World opening this weekend, check out my list, on Topless Robot, of the best Dinosaur “Cameos.”

Also…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s acknowledge “Indominus Rex...”

...the genetically-modified hybrid superdinosaur who stars in Jurassic World…