Mad Max: Fury Road

1979 seemed like such a peaceful time. In that universe, Australia didn't seem so hot and sandy, and Max wasn't all that mad. Things have changed so much. In the fourth installment of the "Mad Max" franchise, "Fury Road," Max is indeed very mad, and things are very chaotic. George Miller returns Mad Max to the screen after a thirty-year hiatus. Miller had quite the challenge in revitalizing his famous character: 9/11, Mel Gibson's controversies, and the death of Heath Ledger all stalled the release of a fourth "Mad Max" film. I have to tip my hat to Miller. I was completely bored by his first "Mad Max" film, released in 1979. I'm willing to acknowledge its importance and influence, especially in the action/sci-fi genre, but that doesn't erase my boredom from it. I didn't think that the sequel, "The Road Warrior," was much better. I did, though, enjoy the third film, "Beyond Thunderdome," which I feel is about tied with "Fury Road." These two are good but not great films, in my mind.

The two most recent films in the saga are vastly different. "Beyond Thunderdome" has a fairy tale-like feel, as if Max is the leader of the Lost Boys (and girls). Here in "Fury Road," Max is haunted by illusions of dead people, including children, who believe he could have saved them but failed. Max is a haunted man, and at the beginning of the film he is kidnapped by henchmen to be used as a blood donor for road warriors. The leader of the citadel where Max is taken to is a frightening figure named Immortan Joe. Joe is a complete despot, and he sends his band out to fetch some oil. The team is led by a one-armed lady named Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron), but things go awry when she takes a detour. Joe discovers that Furiosa has taken his five beautiful young wives, one of whom is pregnant with his child, in an attempt to escape to a land of (literally) greener pastures. From here, the movie is a non-stop chase scene, featuring some of the most impressive stunts and visual effects in recent memory. The only problem is that Miller and his team once and a while show little subtlety when more is needed. One scene in particular takes place in a sandstorm and is completely unnecessary; brace yourself for a massive headache. But still, Miller and his team have done a good job with their loaded budget. I firmly believe that there should be a category for stunts at the Academy Awards, and if there were one, "Fury Road" would certainly be nominated and probably would win. The stunt coordinator, Guy Norris, apparently commanded over 150 stunt performers. As for the visual effects, Miller has claimed that 90 percent of the effects were practical ones. Compare that to the dreadful "Avengers: Age of Ultron," in which the performances prance around in front of a green screen while fighting an enemy who's not really there.

In "Fury Road," however, the villain makes quite a show. Hugh Keays-Byrne appeared in the original "Mad Max" as the antagonist. He does here, too, but in a much more frightening performance. His role in the first film was pretty minimalist, and his most recognizable feature probably remains that giant blond maim. Here, he plays a different character, Immortan Joe, and the role is unlike virtually any previous villain we've ever seen. He's pasty white with darkness completely surrounding his eyes; he apparently needs some kind of breathing machine, which is decorated with the teeth of a demonic skull. He has complete control over the people, and showers them only briefly with water for them to fight over. Keays-Byrne does a fine job portraying this tyrant. Nicholas Hoult is one of Joe's warriors who is so much a believer of Joe's propaganda that he's willing to die and ascend to Valhalla. If you know your Norse mythology or at least watch "Vikings," you'll know that the warriors of Scandinavia believed that the toughest and most righteous fighters gained access to Valhalla. Hoult's character, Nux, really wants to die in a glorious battle, but he becomes disillusioned with it all. Hoult is pretty good here, intense and fiery, almost humorously so, and has again demonstrated his ability to play almost any kind of character. It's so radically different from his performances in "About a Boy," "A Single Man," "Warm Bodies," and the "X-Men" movies that he's becoming a young Lon Chaney.

As for the other actors, I was less impressed. The performance of Hardy as Max is something that I had mixed feelings about. By now, Max is so destroyed that I imagine his suffering inspired Hardy to grunt and talk in a manner that likely was frying his vocal chords and probably left his larynx in a lot of pain by the end of the day. Hardy's choices have also revealed a wish to do just about anything, whether it's playing a villain (in "The Dark Knight Rises") or doing essentially a one-man show ("Locke") or appearing in grittier films ("Lawless" and "Warrior"). But it seems it's always his vocal decisions that turn me off of his acting. Similarly, Furiosa is an interesting character, but Theron gives a pretty uninspired performance. But again, it's Mr. Miller and his production team who deserve a lot of credit for helping to tame the love affair the movies have had with CGI. That being said, this doesn't mean that I really think there should be another "Mad Max" movie. 1979-2015 is a pretty long run. Leave Max be.

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The Best Scene in "Casablanca" Involves a Song, But It's Not "As Time Goes By"

I would bet that the scene audiences like most in "Casablanca" is the scene involving the singing of "As Time Goes By." It's a scene many adore and cherish, justifiably so; the American Film Institute even ranked it second in their list of the best songs in American films, second only to "Over the Rainbow." As much as I like that scene, I think there's a better scene in the film involving a song. The scene I'm referring to involves "Le Marseillaise." If you have forgotten about the scene, here's basically the gist of it, as well as my thoughts on why the scene is so wonderful:

Just before the scene begins, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) is revealed to be a "rank sentimentalist" when he helps a young man win loads of money (by cheating in a gambling game) so that he and the young man's lover can escape Casablanca. But Rick is not a sentimentalist; he's a bitter man who's been burned by a lover of his own (Elsa, played by Ingrid Bergman). Rick meets with Victor Lazlo (Paul Heinreid), a freedom fighter against the Nazis, and Elsa's current lover. Lazlo desperately needs help to keep up the fight, and he knows of Rick's reputation for "being on the side of the underdog," helping to fight fascists in Spain and Ethiopia. But Rick politely yet somewhat tersely claims that he's not interested in politics, and that if Lazlo really insists on knowing why he won't help, he should ask his wife. The reason for Rick not wanting to help Lazlo is more than obvious to the viewer, as all of this information has been shown earlier in the film.

The meeting ends, and then "Casablanca" gets even more interesting. Rick and Lazlo's conversation concludes when the Germans arrive in Rick's cafe and proudly sing "Die Wacht am Rein." The camera pans in to Bergman as her eyes follow Lazlo, who approaches the band and orders them to play "Le Marseillaise." They look at Rick; he nods, and then they play. The non-Germans join in, and they are so loud that the Germans cannot match them, no matter how hard they try. It gets a bit overly sentimental here, but Bergman's deep breathing is likely similar to what the audience experiences upon first watching the scene. The Germans, and especially their leader, Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt), are enraged, and Strasser orders Captain Louis Renault (Claude Raines), the Vichy leader, to close the cafe. "But I have no excuse to close it," he insists. "Find one!" is the stern reply. Renault follows his orders. Rick is angry now, too, and demands an explanation, to which Raines replies with one of the many oft-quoted lines in the movie: "I'm shocked--shocked--to find out that gambling is going on here," just before receiving his winnings of the evening.

Why is the scene so good? Much of it is because of Bogart. In the 1960s, in an article for "Esquire," Peter Bogdonavich quoted writer Nathanial Benchley who claimed to have met a Harvard student "who believed in only two things: the superiority of Harvard and the immortality of Humphrey Bogart." In those days, there was a cult of Bogart, and it's sad to realize that today most college students probably have never heard of him. But regardless, Bogart adds weight to the scene, as does the audience's appreciation of the character. As mentioned already, Rick is revealed twice in just the span of a few minutes in "Casablanca" to be a sentimentalist who likes sticking his neck out for the underdog, no matter how loudly he protests that it isn't true.

But beyond the weight he brings as an icon, it's his acting (and his director) that further make the scene excel. David Mamet has a good explanation. In his book "On Directing Film," he authoritatively states that "most actors are, unfortunately, not good actors." The reason? There are many, he claims, but the main reason is that the theater has fallen apart. It used to be, he writes, that actors would have spent their entire acting careers on stage by the time they reached thirty, but not anymore. Bogart started on the stage, earning his share of good and bad reviews. According to Mamet, Bogart claimed that to make the scene work, "Michael Curtiz, the director, said, 'stand on the balcony over there, and when I say action take a beat and nod,'" and that's what Bogart did. Mamet: "That's great acting. Why? What more could he possibly have done? He was required to nod, he nodded. There you have it. The audience is terribly moved by his simply restraint in an emotional situation--and that is the essence of good theater: good theater is people doing extraordinarily moving tasks as simply as possible." Contemporary theater and film, according to Mamet, tend to offer the audience the reverse, in that characters perform predictable actions in an overblown way. Mamet again: "The good actor performs his tasks as simply and as unemotionally as possible. This lets the audience 'get the idea'--just as the juxtaposition of uninflected images in service of a third idea creates the play in the mind of the audience"

It's an exceptional scene in an exceptional film. I've seen "Casablanca" several times, and the scene is by far my favorite (and there are many, many great scenes in the movie). "Casablanca" is probably also a great film to watch as our French friends celebrate Bastille Day. Our two nations have had a strong relationship (with some bumps along the way) since the beginning of our republic, and I hope it stays that way. In the meantime, enjoy "Casablanca" and the continuation of our two nations' beautiful relationship.

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Jurassic World

"I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to maintain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had, you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it...your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should!"
-Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, "Jurassic Park"


I can still remember the day I saw "Jurassic Park" somewhat vividly. It was a hot summer day in 1993, and as I jumped out of our family's car, my mother explained to me that I might find the film to be scary because in the movie "some of the dinosaurs eat other dinosaurs." From the opening moments, I was completely mesmerized, and I probably had no idea that movies were capable of presenting such images. I loved it from start to finish. We left the theater, had lunch, then came back to watch "Free Willy." It remains one of the greatest days of my life. I can't imagine that twenty years from now I will remember watching "Jurassic World," the fourth installment in this franchise, the one where the movie's makers stood on the shoulders of geniuses and were so proud of their ability to make what is now the world's fifth-highest-grossing movie of all time (with $1.4 billion in just one month) and bring back the franchise from the dead. The trouble is that they never stopped to think if they should.

Should they have? I say no, and loudly so. The 1993 film at the time seemed to have ushered in a new age of cinematic wonder, but instead in retrospect closed an era of better movie magic. If you don't believe me, just consider some of the visual effects before 1993 (like "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the original "Star Wars" trilogy) and then consider some of the modern-day ones (like "The Avengers" and the "Star Wars" prequel trilogy). True, there are some directors, like Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky, who seem to take the time to really give their audiences impressive visuals, but Colin Trevorrow is not one of them. Trevorrow directed the mediocre independent film "Safety Not Guaranteed" three years ago, and he does deserve some credit for his work here. He and his cinematographer, John Schwartzman, use a camera that's fairly active, and their decision to use film stock instead of digital cameras was the right one because it creates a better visual link to the previous installments. But unlike Steven Spielberg, the director of the first two "Jurassic" films and the executive producer of the two most recent, Trevorrow is one of the many newer directors working with visual effects who seem to have no restraint. David Christopher Bell's article for "Cracked" explains this in more detail in a brilliant article in which he calls the visual effects of "Jurassic World" and other recent films "photorealistic carnage." He makes a further very important point: except for four minutes of computer-generated imagery of only fourteen minutes of actual dinosaur screen time in "Jurassic Park," every special effect utilized was an animatronic (or puppet or other practical effect) created by Stan Winston. In other words, CGI, itself groundbreaking in 1993, was a last resort and was used to better the visual experience on a case-by-case basis. In "Jurassic World," there was only one scene that I thought was using an animatronic. The scene features two protagonists who discover a butchered dinosaur and feel sorry for it. The audience seemed to share these characters' sympathy, conveniently not carrying that practically a dozen characters were eaten moments earlier.

Part of this wreck is not Trevorrow's fault. There was a profound sense of awe with that first movie, but then with each and every subsequent installment in the franchise, there was less and less. But had Trevorrow and his visual effects team used the same restraint and lack of color grading that was used in 1993, I think "Jurassic World" would have been much better. Its story and actors try to fill the gap. The world of "Jurassic World" is one in which the idea of living, breathing dinosaurs is no longer a novelty but a bore. Jurassic World is an amusement park much like Sea World, featuring roughly 20,000 visitors a day. Irrfan Khan plays the new owner, a billionaire so irresponsible he not only demands his scientists make bigger and meaner dinosaurs but also personally takes a helicopter out to do battle with the dinosaurs wrecking his park. The park's operations director is played by Bryce Dallas Howard, and she, too, is not very responsible, sharing the concerns that closing the park would be the end of the company. Finally, there's Vincent D'Onofrio, who's just as good a villain here as he is on Netflix's "Daredevil." D'Onofrio plays the hawkish security chief who believes that InGen, the corporation featured in most of the films, could use these animals for war purposes.

None of them seem to heed any of the advice of Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), an animal trainer for the park who seems to be one of the few adults in the room. Pratt has continued to show that he can carry a film as an action lead and do so with humor as well. At one point, Grady gets into an argument with Howard's character, Claire Dearing, who needs Grady's help finding her nephews after a dinosaur breaks out. She insists that he track the boys' footprints or scent. "I was with the navy," he barks, "not the Navajo!" But while I could appreciate the humor of Pratt, I found his character's situations so unfathomably stupid. Grady works for the park training the Velociraptors and actually leads them into battle against the Indominus, a genetically-mutated dinosaur that is terrorizing the island (and looks unbelievably stupid). At one point, Grady and Dearing take a moment to break from shooting at the Pterodactyls flying around chewing on their fellow human beings so that they can smooch. I think if the talking raptor from "Jurassic Park III" had made an appearance, it would have been more believable than any of this junk.  

There are still other fine performances here. Omar Sy appears here as a fellow trainer of Grady's; you may have seen Sy in the international French hit, "The Intouchables." It's also interesting to see Wong return, and his role this time is much more interesting that his small appearance in "Jurassic Park." And really, at the heart of this movie are the two boys who are sent to visit their aunt Claire, who is too busy to spend time with them and sends them to explore the park with her assistant. They are played by Ty Simpkins (whom you might recognize from the "Insidious" movies) and Nick Robinson as the older brother, more interested in girls than dinosaurs, and who is particularly annoyed by babysitting his brother. Simpkins in particular is very good here. The two boys become aware that their parents are getting a divorce, and this understandably troubles the younger one. It made me think that Spielberg, whose films often feature a child's relationship to his father, insisted that the moment be included here. But that's another flaw of "Jurassic World": there are some real moments that work well with the human characters, but there are zero interesting moments featuring dinosaurs.

I think back again to that day as a six-year-old in 1993. Children are arguably the best audience members; they possess no prejudice towards movies. It doesn't matter if it's a black-and-white film, or whether or not it's in sound, or whether or not the language is a language they understand and use. To most children, particularly younger ones, "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" can be just as exciting and thrilling as "The Lost World," the 1925 silent adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work. Certainly the young boy two rows behind me who wouldn't shut up the entire time found "Jurassic World" to be quite good fun. But it's the parents of these children who have a duty to find their young ones better movies to watch. My advice: if you have children, show them "Jurassic Park," and then lie to them and say that there were no sequels.

Dedicated to Carrie and Eileen.

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