Inside Out

Pete Docter’s creative Pixar classic helps explain the complex workings of our mind to kids and adults alike.

inside-out-posterAs adults, we use stories to explain to our kids how the world works. We have fables that teach kids etiquette, or why the planets revolve around the sun, or why we celebrate holidays. Pixar has managed an incredible feat (and it’s hardly the first time) by creating an entire ecosystem of ideas, mechanics and colors to help explain the most complicated aspects of our minds.

“Inside Out” is a movie about emotions and filled with them, but it’s really a portrait for who we are and how we function. Across their 15 films, Pixar has made a good handful of sheer classics, and “Inside Out” is among them. But Pete Docter’s film is groundbreaking because it may be the first to reach us on such an intimate, fundamental level.

What goes on inside your head? That’s the first question “Inside Out” asks and it’s a question that starts at birth. Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) is born, and with her first waking thought is Joy (Amy Poehler). Joy is a bright yellow sprite with short blue hair and eyes as big as her heart. She presses a button inside baby Riley’s mind and makes her smile. As Riley grows, more emotions emerge to work together and compete for control of Riley’s central control panel. First is Sadness (Phyllis Smith), a round blue ball of depression who literally brings down anything she touches. Fear (Bill Hader) is a skinny purple bug dressed in plaid helping Riley avoid tripping on cables or getting into trouble. Disgust (Mindy Kaling) is a stylish green drama queen averse to broccoli. And last is Anger (Lewis Black, naturally), a short red hot head in business casual attire who loves traffic, talking back to dad and complaining about San Francisco pizza.

For each memory and moment in Riley’s life, a colored ball coded to each emotion is created with a brief video clip memory, stored in “headquarters” during the day and then shuttled off to a massive array of shelves signifying long term memory. There, little sanitation workers dispose of phone numbers, U.S. presidents and more to make way for newer memories. Meanwhile, a small collection of “core memories” defines the islands of personality that make up Riley (if psychologists have said that our traits are in some way “connected”, Pixar has animated that idea literally). When Sadness accidentally turns one of Joy’s core memories blue, the two scramble to fix it and end up separated from headquarters and the ability to make Riley happy or sad. It all coincides with Riley’s disappointing move away from Minnesota to California and gradually leaves her interests, personalities and feelings crumbling away.

The factory-like mechanics of “Inside Out” are not unlike the Scream factory Docter envisioned in “Monster’s Inc.”, in which our emotions and how we process them keep the world moving. But Docter and co-director Ronaldo del Carmen have fun with every interaction and every moment of a human’s life. Not one line or image passes in front of Riley’s eyes that does not dictate a quick-witted reaction from one of our five little balls of emotions. It’s a movie that literally makes good on the expression that someone’s emotions have taken over. In a dinner table conversation between Riley and her parents, her father’s own team of workers launch into a war room, and putting his foot down has all the gravity of turning two keys to launch a nuclear sub.

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And yet thematically, “Inside Out” feels closest to “Toy Story”. The anthropomorphic emotions have given their lives to making Riley happy and creating memories that shape who she is, and as she grows into becoming a teenager, her moods and her need for memories that made her a joyful kid are no longer needed. Joy and Sadness come across Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley’s discarded imaginary friend now wandering the far reaches of her mind hoping to one day be remembered.

Often without much exposition, Docter helps convey through colors and cleverly constructed puns (the arrival of a “train of thought”) and analogies the inner workings of the mind from dreams, the subconscious and abstract thought. There’s an incredible sequence that plays with the film’s animation worthy of one of Pixar’s daring animated shorts, in which abstract ideas transform Joy and Sadness into surreal, cubist shapes and eventually two-dimensional drawings. The sequence works as a goofy action set piece, but kids and adults alike can understand the external real world implications these actions have on Riley’s mind.

Some of Docter’s most poignant ideas are perhaps a bit more common than the film’s ingenuity and perceived originality give it credit for: sadness as much as happiness shape who we are and what we remember, and as we grow, even our emotions grow more complex. But it’s not the surface level emotions and ideas that make “Inside Out” such an incredible tearjerker. It’s the complete package of vivacious animation, exuberant humor and sheer imagination that help us better understand these feelings and make this film so human both inside and out.

4 stars

Rapid Response: The Harder They Fall

Humphrey Bogart stars in his last role alongside Rod Steiger in this cynical boxing drama and film noir.

TheHarderTheyFallPosterBoxing movies looked like this back in the day. To think that someone finally decided to throw the camera into the ring with the fighters made all the difference in the world. And while “The Harder They Fall” isn’t exactly “Raging Bull” in the violence or pathos departments, Mark Robson’s film combined with Burnett Guffey’s Oscar nominated cinematography has more than a few unsettling gut punches both inside and out of the ring, especially for 1956.

“The Harder They Fall” is a strange hybrid of sport and noir, in which the nature of the boxing game is convoluted deal-making and conspiracy worthy of gangster pictures, and where the double crossing managers are not just amoral or hypocritical but so passionately cruel and adamant in their defense of their shady business and spiteful of the athletes they’re responsible for. Granted, the story on the whole doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense, and while the novel on which “The Harder They Fall” is based was something of a muckraker expose, the movie was hardly an accurate depiction of the boxing industry in 1956 and feels even more farfetched today.

Humphrey Bogart stars in what would be his last role before his death as Eddie Willis, a former sports columnist too full of pride to return to a lower desk job at a newspaper. He’s brought in by the crooked fight promoter Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) to act as a press agent for his latest fighting sensation, the Argentinian giant Toro Moreno (Mike Lane). He’s a staggering gargantuan but can hardly take a punch, let alone throw one. He’s “Green as a cucumber”, as Eddie says. And yet Nick knows Toro can be a money making star if Eddie lies through his teeth to the press and fixes every fighter he faces up until the title match. The opening of the movie is all about myth making and hype building, and Bogie’s performance is so casually underscored and cool, like all his best work, that you would believe anything he told you.

But the film escapes some of its implausible stretches, including a Native American fighter who somehow maintains his pride by putting chicken wire in his mouth, or a priest who agrees to a donation of $25 grand of dirty money with barely no convincing at all, and becomes a story of abuse. The boxers in the sport of “The Harder They Fall’s” world aren’t athletes but bums who don’t want to do anything else, and Eddie and Nick and company feel more than fine fleecing them for all their health and money, only to leave them damn near crippled at the end of their career. There’s a startling moment when one of Eddie’s journalist buddies shows him a documentary of a former prize fighter suffering from brain damage now living on the street. It’s an unexpected real world turn from the previous noir build-up, and it’s one that over time makes us increasingly question why we’re putting up with this punishment.

During one beautifully lensed match, in which the blood flows and the lights flicker with startling speed, a fighter who suffered a brain hemorrhage in a previous fight and can hardly stand in the ring against Toro eventually collapses and is later ruled dead. Meanwhile, Toro and his promoters celebrate not just their victory but their new status as a killer in the press. Part of this is so uneasy because Toro is plain clueless at the nature of his success. So while the plot of how pointlessly cruel this system is for boxers doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, “The Harder They Fall” has a heavy weight hanging over it.

In the end, Bogie ended his career much as he did near the start of his rise to Hollywood elite: as in “Casablanca,” sending away a person he loves on a plane home. Bogart was diagnosed with esophagus cancer shortly after filming this project and died nine months after the film was released. His death came at an interesting time, as “The Harder They Fall” combined the two styles of acting during that point of time, Bogie’s old school line-reading and Steiger’s lived-in method performance. Bogart hated Steiger’s style of acting but you wouldn’t know it on screen, as Steiger was certainly the fiery showman here. Bosley Crowther back in 1956 described Steiger’s character as having “the charm of a knife-nicked grizzly bear”.

As a note, depending on how you watch the film, “The Harder They Fall” has either a cynical ending, or a really cynical ending. In the version I watched, Bogart begins writing a piece designed to expose Nick’s crooked dealings, and in another, he suggests the sport of boxing be banned altogether. It’s the rare sports movie that ends with such a gut punch.

Spy

Melissa McCarthy reteams with her Bridesmaids director Paul Feig for their latest spy spoof.

SPY_1SHEETPaul Feig’s “Spy” bills itself as a spy movie parody right in its title, but it veers closer to a traditional action-comedy vehicle for Melissa McCarthy than an out-and-out spoof. The elements are all there for a classic, but it lacks the tongue-in-cheek homages to cinema and zaniness of the OSS:117 movies or the sheer stupidity of even the Austin Powers movies. That said, Melissa McCarthy might be a shoo-in for the next James Bond once Daniel Craig steps aside.

Feig starts to reinvent the spy genre by imagining the other side of James Bond’s innate talents. Bradley Fine (Jude Law, donning a convincing American accent against expectations) is the suave CIA operative leading a sting on a Russian terrorist wielding a nuke. But he only manages to get so far because of who is speaking in his ear, Susan Cooper (McCarthy). Susan is Chloe O’Brien if she was stuck in Michael Scott’s office, where even at the CIA there are rats pooping through the ceiling and co-workers having loud birthday parties in the break room while Fine faces life and death stakes.

The Russian agent’s daughter Rayna (Rose Byrne) takes possession of the nuke, murders Fine and reveals she knows the identity of every other in-the-field CIA agent. Feeling responsible for his death, Cooper volunteers herself to track Rayna and intercept the nuke in her possession, with the hope she can remain anonymous.

It’s maybe more plot exposition than a spoof like this actually needs, but Feig quickly gets to the juicy spectacle of seeing McCarthy act. Some of her roles, even her breakout role in Feig’s “Bridesmaids”, have seen her go broad, vulgar and aggressive to a fault. But in “Spy” she plays the chipper and naïve Midwesterner that gives McCarthy her star power off screen. It’s that much more of a shock when she flips a switch and effortlessly hurls insults about people looking like a bag of dicks or dead hookers.

As Genevieve Koski put in her Dissolve review, it’s more than “fat lady go boom” jokes as the trailers have made it out to be. But Feig still offers up a bad mix of lazy stereotypes of slimy, Italian misogynists as well as gags simply at the expense of McCarthy’s ludicrous disguises.

As with many of these films, it’s the supporting cast that does all the heavy lifting. Rose Byrne continues to be a standout, earning the line of the movie when she flatly declares at one of Susan’s worse puns, “What a stupid fucking retarded toast.” Jason Statham as a rival agent arguably gives his most intense performance to date, endlessly one-upping himself with increasingly ridiculous secret agent feats he can’t seem to actually perform. And British comic Miranda Hart is poised as the breakout, a goofy looking best-friend type with about a foot on Rebel Wilson but all of her awkward charm.

“Bridesmaids” opened doors for actresses like McCarthy and Byrne to do just about anything, including make a goofy spy movie previously reserved for men. But then “Spy” isn’t exactly “Bridesmaids”, and Feig might’ve just gotten more mileage out of “Bridesmaids 2”.

3 stars

Tomorrowland

Brad Bird’s clever sci-fi is a refreshingly optimistic and fun adventure movie with a great George Clooney performance.

Tomorrowland_Second_Poster“Tomorrowland” is the first movie of the summer, and perhaps many summers, that doesn’t involve a sentient robot plotting to exterminate the Earth with a giant asteroid, or a massive Earthquake ravaging the San Andreas fault line, or the apocalypse transforming the world into a desert wasteland. Director Brad Bird has a squeaky clean vision of the future but also a sense of excitement earned from modest thrills of both the sci-fi and the lo-fi variety.

Seeing a family-friendly adventure film with a strong sense of humor and healthy head of ideas is certainly a refreshing, positive change of pace from the doom and gloom. Yet “Tomorrowland” would play almost perfectly if it didn’t also try to make the idea of a squeaky clean future over a bleak one its very thesis.

“Tomorrowland” is named for the futuristic area in Disney World and Disneyland, but Bird’s film is as much about an amusement park as “Pirates of the Caribbean” is about the animatronic pirate ride also housed in Orlando and Anaheim. And while it doesn’t serve as a blatant ad for Disney the way many of their most recent properties have, Bird trots out the names of Edison, Tesla, Einstein and Jules Verne, along with a healthy dose of inspirational idioms designed to lead the innovation of Disney’s next wave of “Imagineers”.

One of those quotable motivation phrases comes when two parents ask their toddler daughter why she wants to go to space, warning her, “What if nothing’s there?” “What if everything is there?” That little girl grows up to be Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), and yes, her name is Newton. She’s a whip-smart techie and hacker who tries to prevent NASA from tearing down a launch pad and consequently put her dad (Tim McGraw). When she gets caught, she’s arrested and finds a pin with a blue and orange “T” along with her belongings. When she touches it, she’s transported to a shimmering civilization complete with jetpacks, rockets, hovering trains and more. But before she can board a rocket to the stars she’s plunged back into the real world.

Casey will spend much of “Tomorrowland” actually trying to reach the place, and Bird and screenwriter Damon Lindeloff make an interesting choice in withholding our arrival there for so long. It’s a future that seems out of reach and is notably less glamorous when we finally arrive, but all along the way Casey encounters incredible science fiction set pieces, from robots to time freeze rays to a sickly matter transporter that suggest the genius and innovation that can be found here at home.

To get to Tomorrowland, Casey enlists the help of Frank Walker (George Clooney), a former resident who we first meet as a little boy. He submits his jetpack invention to a contest at the 1964 New York World Fair, and is recruited to be a Tomorrowland citizen by a young girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy). Now Clooney plays the sourpuss to the two wide-eyed, freckly young women in his company, hilariously cynical at the idea of Tomorrowland and awaiting the arrival of the end of the world, which he believes will occur in less than 60 days. Only with Casey’s arrival does he get a glimmer of hope that the fate of the future and planet can be spared.

Bird gets a lot of mileage out of this premise, and he has fun with expectations as well. For as much fun as it is to see Clooney zap robots with makeshift laser booby traps, it’s just as refreshing to see Bird stop the sci-fi and watch Casey beat a robot to death with a baseball bat.

But Clooney says something that reflects “Tomorrowland”’s blind desire for positivity without much room for cynically challenging the idea of utopia: “Can’t you just be amazed and move on?” Tomorrowland as an actual, functioning place is never as fully developed as it would seem. Eventually it becomes clear that it’s a haven for geniuses in an alternate dimension where they can explore their ideas free of politics and intervention. Hugh Laurie, playing Tomorrowland’s head-honcho Nix, even stops the movie near its climax to deliver a monologue about humanity’s sloth and negativity, one that will bring about the end of the world.

It isn’t surprising that a Disney movie might choose to avoid some of the ramifications of a world for privileged geniuses in paradise, or that there was ever a person named Ayn Rand. Yet “Tomorrowland” doesn’t deserve that sort of hyper-analysis. It’s too much fun, and already it’s being written off as a stodgy example of Disney embedding branding into their films, despite being a massive financial failure for the Mouse House already. If Bird’s film teaches us anything, it’s that there’s hope for Hollywood blockbusters as much as there is for the human race.

3 stars

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s breakout film swept this year’s Sundance, but is more than a ‘Sundance Movie’.

MeAndEarlPosterWhile independent cinema is traditionally any movie that’s independently financed, many newer film goers are first introduced to indies by what more experienced cinephiles have pejoratively labeled “The Sundance Movie”. They’re films like “Little Miss Sunshine”, “Juno”, “(500) Days of Summer”, “The Way Way Back”, and many more of varying quality. They’re not just movies that have premiered at Sundance; they’re quirky, irreverent, hipster, crowd-pleasing, charming, and to some degree, that horrible word best suited for Zooey Deschanel and Belle and Sebastian songs, “twee”.

“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” swept this year’s Sundance with not just the Grand Jury Prize but also the audience award. I expect it to be a massive mainstream hit. It would be so easy to lob one of those adjectives onto it and write it off as something less than a masterpiece because it falls into The Sundance Movie category.

And Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s film all but announces that it will be that sort of movie in its opening moments: voice-over narration from a cynical teenager making wry observations and quoting pop culture, all based on a bestselling YA novel. But in just as quickly, Rejon makes waves with those expectations. “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is dark, cringe-worthy, weird and best of all, cinematic. In its use of both film references and active cinematography, Rejon’s film is as much about cinema as it is adolescence. He’s playing with genres and expectations in a way that is so hilarious, heartwarming and utterly gratifying.

“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is one of those movies, but it is also un-ironically the best movie of the year.

The Me of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is Greg (Thomas Mann), a smart high school senior not lonely and misanthropic, and not trying to avoid human contact, but trying to avoid any serious connections. He latches onto individual cliques for just long enough to be acknowledged but not long enough to be labeled. He’s got it down to a science. While the narration is a common tool in this sort of indie, it’s the camera that really gets inside Greg’s mind. There’s a running gag involving stop-motion animation about how hot girls are like a moose stepping on a helpless squirrel, a gag that kills every time it abruptly makes an appearance. There’s even a hilarious shot in which Greg’s mom (Connie Britton) walks in on him as he’s looking at porn, and his frantic attempt to switch tabs only reveals more nudity.

His parents inform him that one of the girls in his class, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), is suffering from leukemia. Greg doesn’t really know her, and she insists she doesn’t need new friends or pity from someone being forced by their mom to come over, but then of course he was forced by his mom to spend time with her in the first place. “Eight years of carefully cultivated invisibility, gone,” he says.

Greg reveals to Rachel his affinity for making movies with his “coworker” Earl (RJ Clyer), a tough nosed kid from the other side of town. Their films are all horribly bad remakes, replacing one letter or word of a classic title to make it a potty-mouthed, so-dumb-it’s-awesome pun, and the results are a thing of beauty. Everything from “Apocalypse Now” to “Burden of Dreams” is skewered. It’s a film that goes deeper into cinephilia than most movies that claim to do the same. Soon the two find themselves making a film for Rachel, but Greg subconsciously feels doing so would allow him to get too close to someone so sick.

The story has the arc of something like last year’s “The Fault in Our Stars,” but the plot itself doesn’t even emerge until midway into the film. Rejon and Jesse Andrews’s screenplay, working from his own novel, find depth in their characters and allow them to emerge through conversation rather than situation comedy. It gets laughs because it isn’t afraid for Greg to put his foot in his mouth with an idiotic joke telling Rachel to play dead. It isn’t too cute to have Earl blurt out in his baritone voice “Titties” as soon as the thought crosses your mind. And it isn’t averse to having Nick Offerman shove a cat in the camera’s face.

There’s a healthy cynicism to everything here, and the movie literally turns on its head in a few moments to create an awareness of the camera and the cinematic devices at play. Like a Wes Anderson film, it’s extremely attentive to detail but without the artificiality that a handful find frustrating about Anderson’s style. Rejon finds beauty in static long takes, quick movement and even quicker editing, and time and again Greg steps out of his character’s shoes to explain to the audience things are not going to happen with the same melodrama or emotional catharsis you’d expect.

As a result, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” goes from a fairly outrageous and unexpected comedy to getting very real, real fast. Rejon grapples with spiritual sensations of love and life after death, and he doesn’t forget that these adult themes are still filtered through the minds of teenagers. The film’s climax and ending scene in particular capture the same screwball charm but are moments of sensational beauty.

“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is a lot like its protagonist and his desire to stay on an island unto himself. It’s a comedy and a tearjerker, and it’s smart and cute and quirky, but it just touches on those qualities without ever belonging to a single group.

4 stars

Love & Mercy

John Cusack and Paul Dano both play Brian Wilson in this biopic on the life of the Beach Boys singer.

LoveandMercyPosterAs a biopic, “Love & Mercy,” the story on the life of Beach Boys singer Brian Wilson, is a bit unusual. It passes over their surf pop rise to stardom in the early ‘60s in just the credits sequence. It jumps forward and backward in time to when Brian was both a young and middle-aged man on a whim. At times Bill Pohlad’s film is as deeply spiritual and scatterbrained as its subject.

But upon recording “Pet Sounds,” Brian Wilson’s unusual, yet signature, masterpiece album with The Beach Boys, he explained to one of the musicians who thought the music didn’t work, “It works in my head.”

“Love & Mercy” follows Brian as a young man played by Paul Dano during the sessions for “Pet Sounds” and the unreleased “Smile” in 1966, then again in the ‘80s, now played by John Cusack. As an older man, Wilson met Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) while under the supervision of Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). Awkward, soft-spoken and timid, Cusack walks a fine line between making Wilson creepy, damaged, flat out weird or all three. Regardless, he asks Melinda out on a date after revealing his identity and in a scary scene at a barbecue makes clear to her just how terrified he is of his caretaker.

Dr. Landy explains to Melinda that Brian is a paranoid schizophrenic, and asks that if they are to become romantically involved they need to establish ground rules such that he can retain control over how Brian is cared for and behaves. What’s daring for a biopic, but not uncommon, is that in these moments we see everything from Melinda’s perspective. Her detached position challenges our notion that Brian is really the genius we know him to be, separating us from the musical history and conflict portrayed in the earlier point in his life.

And yet Dano perhaps shines the most, performing incredibly lifelike recreations of Brian’s meticulous creative process. The faded, docu-realistic camera work inside the studio shows us the gradual methodology of his genius at work. They’re fun, lighthearted scenes as dogs bark on the sound stage and Brian picks at the inside of a piano with bobby pins, but we never get the full picture or adoration for Brian’s music. Pohlad always calls attention to the failures and the mental turmoil that masked just how significant his work was. Pohlad gets a big gasp out of news that Brian’s father sold the band’s song rights for profit, or when Brian loses his mind to the noise of silverware clinking on plates. Dano sells Brian’s madness from just the neck up in a terrific scene where he’s flailing from the deep end of a pool while the band tries to hold a serious meeting.

The melodrama however comes to an unfortunate head when “Love & Mercy’s” climax aims to take us on a busy mind trip to justify Brian’s sickness. And though the ending title card confesses Brian was never as damaged as he seemed, the movie at times makes Brian out to be a mad genius who also created one of the best albums of all time in the process.

One of Wilson’s band mates however has a good description for some of the singles on “Pet Sounds”. “Even the happy songs are sad.” “Love & Mercy” is a hopeful film, dearly respectful of his subject and ultimately a crowd-pleaser, but it has a lot of hurt and honesty behind its words and melodies.

3 ½ stars

Mad Max: Fury Road

George Miller has updated his cult classic The Road Warrior and made an all time great action film.

MadMaxPoster“Mad Max: Fury Road” is insane. It is batshit crazy. In a blockbuster age when CGI superheroes battle untold hoards of robots, monsters and aliens in a chaotic blur, there are just about no modern action movies that are purely mad.

George Miller’s movie is a disturbed fever dream, addled and excitable to the point of delirium. The images, the stunts, the stark blue and orange colorings and the constant, accelerated sensation of being pursued scream that this is an action movie for a future generation. Like the endless car chase that consumes the heroes and villains of Miller’s bleak, post-apocalyptic world, “Fury Road” is so far ahead of every contemporary action movie today just waiting for everyone to catch up.

“Fury Road” itself moves at a faster pace. At times Miller seems to be playing with the frame rate to send his characters into a frenzy and make the chase seem ever more pressing. The shaved and ash-painted War Boys spray chrome over their mouths and feel a rush of adrenaline. Our anti-hero Max (Tom Hardy) is twitchy, nervous and paranoid but always intense. And John Seale’s cinematography zooms, slows and tracks like someone is playing with the remote.

This is a movie always in motion, and that movement is the core of “Fury Road’s” story. When we’re first introduced to Max (Tom Hardy) he smashes a scurrying two-headed lizard and promptly inhales it before being captured by raiding warriors. They imprison him in a massive skull temple carved into the face of a desert cliff, where workers toil below and go mad for momentary floods of water. The man turning the faucet is Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a warlord more machine than man. His pale body and warts are covered by demonic body armor and his crossbones respirator gives him a dangerous vibe not unlike that of Darth Vader.

Joe sends his greatest general Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) out on a convoy to raid Gasoline Town, only to realize that she has smuggled out Joe’s breeding wives, a half-dozen pristine beauties in scantily clad white garments. Their presence in the film is so radically unexpected from the ruin on all the denizen’s faces. Furiosa herself is shaved bald with a prosthetic arm and a fierce demeanor. Max eventually breaks free from the hunting party looking for Furiosa, and in a survival attempt ends up working together with her to reach salvation in “the Green Place.”

Max shares the film’s namesake, mainly because Miller’s film is an extension, or a 30 year late sequel, to the ‘80s Mad Max trilogy starring Mel Gibson. But as a hero he’s deeply untrusting, impenetrable and a loner. Theron and her company of girls (including Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz and more) end up becoming “Fury Road’s” champions. The women all stand out, get the best lines, kick the most ass and feel the most pain. They’re the human entry point amid the madness.

But “Fury Road” is nothing if not bananas. The film’s car chase consumes nearly the whole movie, and yet it never gets stale. It takes us through an otherworldly sandstorm that spawns a great red spiral of thunder, lightning and chaos. As one of the film’s War Boys, Nux (Nicholas Hoult), enters the storm, he shouts “Fury Road’s” scarily ironic tagline: “What a lovely day!”

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So much of the film though is accomplished largely without CGI, and the resulting explosions, the animalistic, vehicular muscle and carnage on display, and the terrifying stunts are all real examples of Miller’s crazed vision of the future. We see a clan of motorcycle warriors leaping over gorges and hurling bombs down at the convoy. We see men grasping onto giant, flexible poles that extend out, place an explosive and whiplash back into place. And this is a movie where for no particular reason a soldier rides on a truck bed suspended by bungee cords and thunders out heavy metal on a flaming guitar. It is an image so incredible and needlessly awesome that movies without it are instantly lesser as a result.

The original “Road Warrior” film (actually the second in the trilogy) instantly became a cult classic. It was weird, apocalyptic and was a new kind of action movie in a wave of gun-toting, macho war movies all concerned with Vietnam. It was from Australia and may as well have been from another world.

“Fury Road” on the other hand is everything contemporary action movies are and so much more. It is purely focused on spectacle over story but doesn’t forget the cinematics that make it unforgettable. It’s crazy and unrealistic as so many are, but it takes everything over the top and outdoes them all. “Fury Road” is the best action movie in a decade because it has the vision, the style and the courage to be truly mad.

4 stars

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down
And I do appreciate you being ’round
Help me get my feet back on the ground
Won’t you please, please help me

Montage of Heck PosterThe exuberant pop of John Lennon’s lyrics on The Beatles’ “Help!” masked just how hurt Lennon really was. If only people had actually listened to the words.

Kurt Cobain was the Lennon for Generation X, a musical genius whose rise to fame was no less meteoric than Lennon’s, and whose life was no less documented. And while the anger and intensity in Nirvana’s music was a little more obvious about his pain, Brett Morgen’s HBO documentary “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” is the first film to successfully to delve into Cobain’s psyche.

Though “Montage of Heck” traverses his life till his death and includes the appropriate notes of rock-doc history, Morgen’s work is a daring and disturbed look into the annals of Cobain’s mind. It’s a horror movie trip of a documentary. The countless audio snippets, scrapbook notes and home movies of Cobain to another director would be an un-cinematic liability, if not purely unusable. Morgen has taken those materials and turned them into a surreal, artistic virtue, one that shows Cobain’s genius and madness better than possibly any rock-doc has dared.

Watching “Montage of Heck” can feel like watching the torture Alex was forced to endure in “A Clockwork Orange”. It’s violent, aggressive, endlessly long, random, perverse and utterly painful. Morgen uses animation and wild, scatterbrained montages of footage that add an image to the sound of Cobain’s genius. If you’re wondering what a Montage of Heck is, it’s Morgen’s rapid smash cuts of campy ‘50s footage and graphic novel gore atop one of Nirvana’s wildest songs, “Territorial Pissings”.

But composing Cobain’s genius in this way does more than create an intense mood. We see incoherent flashes of nightmarish words and adjectives that scream Cobain’s hurt, but they’re actually early brainstorming for his band’s name. These scrapbook scrawls show Cobain’s ambition, organization and dedication in great detail. His margin doodles of early album art ideas are little slices of rock history, but they also demonstrate that so much of his genius was allowing his brain to experiment and put his madness into practice.

Kurt Cobain Montage of Heck

That Morgen was able to create a film around these brainstorms is part of its brilliance. There’s an engrossing animated sequence in which Cobain recounts a memory from his pre-Nirvana, teenage years. He scored weed with some guys he hated because it allowed him to escape. He then took advantage of a mentally challenged girl where his friends originally stole the weed, only to be labeled a “retard fucker” and contemplate suicide. Morgen peppers this incredible story with a string version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, and earlier a music box rendition of “All Apologies” that make his precious childhood years so delicate and frail in comparison to what’s to come.

By the film’s end, Morgen allows home movie footage of Cobain and wife Courtney Love to speak above his animated images. These recollections don’t have the style of the rest of “Montage of Heck” but have all the hurt. They live in pitiful junkie squalor, and the media prattles on about how Frances Bean Cobain was born high on crack. It looks like the most disturbing Maysles Brothers movie ever made, but still it has glimpses of Cobain’s love and affection for his music, his wife and his daughter. All the while, Morgen digs up a gem of Kurt covering The Beatles’ “And I Love Her” that speaks wonders.

Another film could’ve made Cobain out to be healthier, more jubilant and playful and less damaged. So many interviews here show Cobain to be simply exhausted and exasperated with the media. Krist Novocelic and Love (but an absent Dave Grohl) both confess that “Kurt didn’t want to be humiliated,” while Morgen eliminates any of their fonder memories for their friend.

But for “Montage of Heck”, Morgen’s depressing and absolutely necessary approach to his life echoes some of Cobain’s own words. “Unless it is about me, it is now my duty to completely drain you.”

4 stars

Kurt Cobain Montage of Heck 2

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Marvel’s latest blockbuster is a mess too beholden to plot threads of the MCU, and James Spader’s great Ultron can’t save it.

AvengersPosterMarvel has been branding their Cinematic Universe in such a way that each subsequent film teases the next, and all seem to be building to something. “Avengers: Age of Ultron” should be that moment, but it doesn’t feel like the culmination of all that’s come before. Worse, it doesn’t even feel like an “Avengers” movie.

With 2011’s “The Avengers”, director Joss Whedon did successfully juggle the many characters who showed up in Marvel’s “Phase One”, and he seemed to wink at the camera while doing so, allowing these big personalities to clash and poke fun in a way that returned the color, fun and originality to what had become an increasingly dense, plot driven series.

“Age of Ultron” doesn’t allow its characters to grapple with a major story as a team. It’s a super mess full of forced backstories and plot threads to past and future movies. Black Widow and Bruce Banner are given an unlikely and unexpected tortured romance while trying to battle their demons. Iron Man hints at fracturing from the team as he will in “Captain America: Civil War”, but feels half-baked and underdeveloped here. Thor disappears from the team to fulfill a nonsensical side plot in a Nordic cave. Hawkeye suddenly has family melodrama on a reclusive farm that slows the film to a halt. And new additions are given neither the screen time nor the emotional heft to truly make an impact.

If Marvel isn’t building to this and still hasn’t arrived at their best, what are we waiting for?

In the film’s opening shot, Whedon weaves through the forest of a fictional Russian-esque country as the Avengers stage an attack on a compound. It’s an unbroken take (achieved through digital trickery) that unnaturally circles the area in an effort to showcase each hero one by one as they deal with some baddies, all before catching them all lunging forward at once in a poster-ready screen grab. It’s emblematic of how “Age of Ultron” both looks and feels, in which Whedon is really just showing off. Some of these elaborate, but not stylish shots only remind how much is going on.

Like the camera, the plot also fails to stay fixated in one place. Upon reaching the compound, they retrieve Loki’s scepter. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) plan to research it in an attempt to create a brilliant form of artificial intelligence that can provide peace on Earth somehow. They inadvertently succeed but manage to create Ultron (voiced by James Spader), a highly intelligent program that in no time flat deduces that the only way to achieve peace is to eliminate The Avengers and evolve mankind through extinction.

Ultron brings to the film possibly Marvel’s first actual theme and message, and he proves to be arguably the best super villain Marvel has dreamed up. He repeatedly sings “I’ve Got No Strings” from “Pinocchio” to show he’s not one of Iron Man’s puppets, and his principled ideas about the evolution of intelligent life resound with the weight of countless sci-fi films before it. “Age of Ultron’s” ideas about AI and the folly of man may not be profound, but delivered with Spader’s quick, dry, ironic tone, it’s convincing.

But as for making a convincing narrative and objective for Ultron, Whedon is far less successful. As a villain, Ultron is convenient. He exists in the Internet! He’s unstoppable, and always one step ahead. So when his plan is revealed to make a tangible version of himself, it seems like a step in the wrong evolutionary direction. But even that plan fizzles out to make way for yet another new character, and the resulting final battle is The Avengers taking on thousands of disposable metal baddies. The action sequences feel like a rehash of not just the chaotic spectacle at the end of “The Avengers”, but of “Iron Man 3” for how many Stark-powered enemies they’re forced to bring down.

Whedon has more luck with a battle between Iron Man and a hypnotized Hulk in a crowded city. It isolates the action on two figures and smashes things up real good. Yet it too blends in with the chaos at the Russian compound, then in the African warehouse, then in the Russian city. Marvel seems unable to stage a compelling set piece that doesn’t involve a million moving parts in a busy area.

These scenes are so unmemorable because they lack suspense. They’re hugely bloodless and without any of the dark edges of Christopher Nolan’s or Zack Snyder’s superhero attempts. Marvel also doesn’t see the need to make us care for these characters again, as they’ve already done so in previous films. But it’s easy to forget what makes Tony Stark heroic and likeable in the first place, not least of which because he’s been separated from the brilliant, charming chemistry he has with Pepper Potts (the movie makes a quick, cheap concession to explain why Gwyneth Paltrow and Natalie Portman are missing).

When the action does settle down, Whedon brings his trademark smarm to the party, particularly in a scene where all the Avengers try to lift Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) hammer and find themselves unworthy. These characters have shades and nuance, but under Whedon’s dialogue they all seem like the same cocky adventurers with a quick act of wordplay here and a too-clever high-brow pop culture reference the next.

But Whedon has interesting things to work with, and you wish Marvel would withhold flashbacks of Black Widow’s (Scarlett Johansson) assassin up-bringing for her own movie and condense the two hour, 20 minute run time of this one. Johansson is arguably the standout of this franchise, and her interactions with Ruffalo are the closest Marvel has gotten to making Hulk’s werewolf curse understandable and believable.

“Age of Ultron” isn’t a movie though; it’s seven movies, and none of them stick. Marvel has to quit making teases for their next Big Thing and make that movie today.

2 ½ stars

Ex Machina

Alex Garland’s directorial debut sci-fi about artificial intelligence starring Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson.

ExMachinaPosterIn Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina”, Ava (Alicia Vikander) is a highly receptive robot who can speak, interact, have an intelligent conversation, tell jokes, flirt, and possibly display the true signs of human intelligence. In a conversation with the protagonist Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), she can pick up on the “micro expressions” in his face and tell that he’s lying, that he’s uncomfortable or that he may even be in love. She’s gifted with tiny details that make her personality so memorable.

“Ex Machina” succeeds not on the broad strokes of its clever sci-fi premise, but in the little “micro expressions” that define its character, style, ideas, thrilling pulse, and entrancing tone. It’s a finely tuned machine of a movie, with beauty and excitement that make it human.

When we meet Caleb, his computer is sizing him up from his web cam. His expressions and his excitement are recorded as he learns he has won a prestigious contest. Deep in reclusive Alaskan forests, Caleb arrives by helicopter to the subterranean home of Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a computer genius who we learn is the mastermind behind the world’s most widely used search engine, Blue Book. Caleb is one of his star coders, and as part of this contest, he has been chosen to observe and test Nathan’s latest creation, a super sophisticated version of Artificial Intelligence known as Ava. Caleb’s goal will be to take The Turing Test, and see if by the end of his week stay he still knows he’s talking to a robot.

Garland treats this concept with an elegant, fine touch. Caleb’s arrival at Nathan’s secret facility isn’t announced or explained as a procedural, but is gradually understood. Already we feel like a rat in a maze, with the sterile colors, no windows and low ceilings and corridors that make us feel both trapped and observed. Isaac’s performance as Nathan too is highly adept. We’ve been given only background details that he’s a computer genius and a titan of industry, but even before we know that, Isaac makes him to be an uncomfortable figure nothing like we expected. He’s a casual, cavalier bro, the kind of alpha, powerful figure so comfortable in his own skin that he makes others feel nervous around him.

But Vikander is the real star of the show. Garland has given Ava a slender, silvery sleek figure. She has a human face molded over a metal frame, and we can peer through her shimmering, metallic body to see her inner workings. Garland has done this such that we can literally see inside her, spiritually and physically.

Caleb is placed in a small room with see through glass separating him from Ava while Nathan observes. He asks questions about her past and her hobbies, and she proves to be charming and candid. Vikander’s quiet, yet open performance allows her to delicately toe the line between AI and Caleb’s immediate dream girl. Vikander is a former ballerina, and Ava has the grace of one. But Nathan and Caleb wonder if she’s for real, or if she’s an incredible simulation of a person having a conversation.

In later sessions, Ava makes jokes and asks about Caleb’s own past and hobbies. “Ex Machina” at this point starts to resemble a hybrid of Spike Jonze’s “Her” and Shane Carruth’s “Primer”, with a beautiful affectation for a computerized presence emerging out of thin air, all while the suspicion of Nathan’s test and of the discussion of science and AI theory create a simmering tension.

But Garland has more up his sleeve, and his ideas offer both a powerful insight into human nature while rewriting some of the rules of artificial intelligence in science fiction. We’ve been told that robots cannot feel love or emotion, but “Ex Machina” is the first film that would beg to differ. Why does the robot need sexuality, Caleb questions? Humans weren’t programmed to love or feel attractions, but then of course we were. These animal urges aren’t learned but are instinctual and automatic, coded into our DNA. The idea is Garland’s additional jab at men, with Nathan’s brutish, often drunken behavior and disregard for his servant Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) suggest man’s base desire to control women and dream of creating an ideal woman. It’s no coincidence then that Ava is a “female”.

Garland goes deeper and suggests through a chilling look at the transparency of the digital age that search engines have come to understand how humans think, not just what we’re thinking. It is another detail in Garland’s modest scale that helps add up to important spiritual questions. “Is it strange to have made something that hates you,” Ava asks of her creator. Nathan’s character is constantly a curious one because he could be playing God, or he could be just tinkering with a computer program with emotions that are an illusion. He could be a dangerous loose cannon, or he could be more innocent and clueless than he lets on.

Some critics have argued that Garland’s film ends predictably, and that it lacks a compelling and surprising Deus Ex Machina from which the film draws its name. But what remains unexpected is just what note Garland chooses to end this story on. Throughout “Ex Machina” he has been juggling tones of surreal suspense and touching romance, and while any number of endings could have put it closer in line with “Blade Runner,” “Moon” or “A.I.”, Garland chooses one that’s all his own, one that spins what it means to be human in a darker and unexpected light.

4 stars