PITCH PERFECT 2 (Two and a Half Stars)

U.S.: Elizabeth Banks, 2015

I didn’t like it as much as the first myself, but that’s mostly because it’s a typical sequel, and typical sequels almost always suffer from too much déjà vu and too little real spark and invention — which is what the first Pitch had even when it was drowning in clichés. A second go-round for Brilliant Beca (Anna Kendrick), bad mouth Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson the mooner), driven Chloe (Brittany Snow), feisty Cynthia (Ester Dean), Audrey (Anna Camp) and all the other sprightly members of the Barden University Bellas — with more songs, more groups, more gags and more girl power — Pitch 2 obviously didn’t disappoint either its faithful fans or hordes of newcomers. And I think we can safely anticipate an eventual Pitch Perfect Trilogy, in which the Barden Bellas may even get a few politicians and world leaders to moon them.

The aforementioned tush exposure scene occurs right when the Bellas — who’ve apparently been winning ICCA a capella contests ever since Beca’s stellar Freshman year and introduction to the group back in 2012, — seem to be secure in their maximum moment of triumph, performing before the Prez at Lincoln Center, when Fat Amy lets too much of it hang out. And her fat faux pas allows the tight-ass dean of Barden (Bryant Banks) to banish them from the next competition, right when things seemed rosy and a prospective new Bella — Hailee Steinfeld as the sparkly Emily — has arrived on campus.

Disgrace is nothing new to the Bellas, of course. They began the last movie trying to survive a projectile vomit incident, during performance, again by the irrepressible Fat Amy, who can probably be counted on for something even more embarrassing in the now inevitable Pitch Perfect 3. So, the Bellas hunker down, get some new songs and some new arrangements and (some of them) some new flames, and they hurl themselves into an international a capella competition which no Yanks have ever won and which is regularly taken by an obnoxious German team called Das Sound Machine, headed by the supremely arrogant and evil-looking diva, the Kommissar (Birgitte Hjort Sorenson) — who looks like the kind of singer/dancer/actress Ingmar Bergman might have hired for a Swedish stage version of “Cabaret.”

The other competing or at least present groups include that inevitable bad-boy band, the Treblemakers — the Bellas’ nemeses from the last movie — plus such red hot harmonic aggregations as The Cantasticos, The Singboks, the Pentatonix, the Filharmonics, and more, including, so help me, a rump group from The Green Bay Packers, moonlighting as song and dance footballers in the tradition of the 1985 Chicago Bears and their immortal showstopper “The Super Bowl Shuffle.”

So the Bellas plunge into melodic combat once again and once again they appear to be underdogs. But music hath charms, and so do Beca and Fat Amy. The play list for their grand tour and showdown (or, at least, for this movie) includes such evergreens as “Doo Wop,” “We Got the World,” “Poison,” “Cups,” “Insane in the Brain,” “Bootylicious,” “Lady Marmalade” (“Voulez-vous couchez avec Moi?”), “Wrecking Crew,” “Bang Bang,” “Any Way You Want It” and that immortal song, worthy of Schubert, “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty.” (Not since “Abbey Road” has there been a lineup like that. They wish.)

In the main subplot, which has Beca seeking a recording career with a Svengali-like music boss played by Keegan-Michael Key, Snoop Dogg shows up and fuzzies a peachy nostalgia duet with Beca on a “Play a Simple Melody”-style mashup of “Walkin’ in a Winter Wonderland” (Snoop) and “Here Comes Santa Claus“ (Beca). Romance is supplied by the liked of former nemesis Bumper (Adam DeVine), The Breakfast Club fan Jesse (Skylar Austin), and, in a weird way, Birgitte’s Kommissar. Zillions gather to cheer on their faves. Lights wave. Hearts pound. Booties shake). In a stunning surprise, the competition is finally won by…..

SPOILER ALERT

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing a medley of The Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and — you guessed it — “Shake (Shake, Shake, Shake) Your Booty!” (Just kidding.)

END OF ALERT

As the competition heats up, so does the movie. Among its many celebrity guests, cheering the Bellas on, are Jimmy Kimmel, and the hosts and judges of American Idol, The View, Morning Joe and The Today Show. All of this is brought to us with another snide and sneering running commentary supplied by that snide and sneering pair, John Michael Higgins and his equally snide and sneering cohort, Elizabeth Banks. Banks also (once again) co produced the show and this time, directed it as well. And she’s pretty good, especially when she’s helming herself and Higgins, snidely sneering. And snarky.

There was such a lot of fuss over Rebel Wilson and Fat Amy in the first movie, that maybe Anna Kendrick didn’t get as much credit as she deserved. But she richly deserves it. After all, she is the star and she is a super-talented pitch perfect top-notcher. So let’s give the gal her due. Yay! You go girl! (Again.) And give our regards to Snoop.

Anyway (you want it), I must admit I liked this (now) franchise series better when it wasn’t a franchise, and they didn’t have eighty zillion guest stars and when they actually were — like the original Beca-led Bellas — an underdog. You can be more forgiving when someone or some movie is coming from behind. But writer Kay Cannon, back again to provide snappier quips than movies like this can usually muster, makes sure the Bellas, and especially Fat Amy and Beca, have amusing stuff to say as well as hot songs to sing. After all, the musicals of the old classic Hollywood days (at least the ones that weren’t translated from Broadway) often spouted a lot of clichés and silly stuff too, and we often forgave them.

Now, even though there’s a lot of the above (c. and s.s.) here, I was glad that Pitch Perfect 2, like the big-grossing or well-regarded recent musicals Chicago, Frozen, Les Miserables, and Into the Woods, and others, have signaled a seeming change — and that the movie musical, which had seemed a largely moribund genre ever since the ‘70s, could come roaring back like this. Maybe, some day, some how, somewhere, we’ll see the day when we get a lot more musicals, and more masterpieces like Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris and On the Town and Top Hat and Swing Time and The Band Wagon and Meet Me in St. Louis and The Red Shoes and High Society and Gentleman Prefer Blondes and Cabaret and The Wizard of Oz and Footlight Parade and West Side Story and A Hard Day‘s Night. For that, I’ll put up with a zillion other choruses of “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty.”

Well, maybe two. ________________________________________________________________________________

PITCH PERFECT (Three Stars)

U.S.: Jason Moore, 2012

In the mood for an all-out, unflinching movie musical comedy about college boys and girl a cappella groups? Want to watch (and hear) a bunch of enthusiastic unaccompanied singers slugging it out in something called the ICCA (International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella), with unaccompanied (sort of) renditions of songs like Whip It, Turn the Beat Around, Like a Virgin, and We Came to Smash in a Black Tuxedo? Want to watch (and hear) a movie where star Anna Kendrick does a Psycho shower scene parody, while playing a tattooed, ear-pierced mash-up Freshman queen named Beca who joins a failing a cappella group called the Bellas and is pursued by a persistent Freshman boy singer called Jesse (Skylar Astin) — a sweetheart of a guy who thinks the world’s most moving movie (and one of the five best-scored) is The Breakfast Club? Have you been waiting around and hoping for something like this? I didn’t think so. Serious little devil, aren’t you?

Well, as Rebel Wilson’s character Fat Amy might say, never judge a book (or a song) by its cover, even if the book is a boxed encyclopedia (sort of like Amy). Defying all reasonable expectations, Pitch Perfect (whose title is one of the most overused descriptions in movie criticism) turns out to be a cute, smart, funny show, well-directed (by Jason Moore), well-acted (by Kendrick, Wilson and a cast of dozens), well-sung (there are lots of songs and they’re usually fun) and (this is a shock) well-written. Pitch Perfect is full of clichés of course. But it also has a lot of surprisingly sharp wisecracks and snappy dialogue — courtesy of 30 Rock writer Kay Cannon, and maybe of actresses like Wilson and Kendrick, riffing.

So unfortunately, if you skip Pitch Perfect — and it sometimes deserves to be skipped — you‘ll be missing all the bouncy a cappella scenes, which even survive a projectile vomit gag or two. And you’ll miss the girl group-boy group battle to Toni Basil‘s “Mickey” and Madonna‘s “Like a Virgin,” and all of Wilson’s one-liners, including the already immortal zinger where Fat Amy says she invented her nickname herself so “twig bitches like you don’t do it behind my back.” And you’ll miss Fat Amy too, one of the raunchiest, most amusing, let-it-all-hang-out characters in any recent movie.

You‘ll miss the smart-ass contest commentary delivered (to what and to whom?) by chatty announcers John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks (who also produced the movie). And you‘ll miss the scene — a heart render really — where Anna Kendrick’s character Beca watches (on the computer) Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club pumping his fist to the Simple Minds song “Don’t You Forget About Me,” and she can’t hold back the tears. Finally, you’ll miss all the aca-jokes, where Amy and others take the prefix “aca” (from a cappella) and stick it into every other word or phrase they can — like “aca-mazing” and “aca-stonishing” and “aca-demic“ and “aca-mon, give me a break.“

In short, you’ll miss the best Movie of its kind since, I don’t know, Bring It On. Or maybe The Breakfast Club. But that didn’t have any a cappella, did it?

The movie is based not on what you’d expect — a few nights’ worth of old DVDs — but on the non-fiction book “Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a cappella Glory,” by Mickey Rapkin, which gives the actual lowdown on these kind of contests and probably should have been made into a concert documentary itself and maybe will be. So even though this show is corny and predictable, it speaks (and sings) with some authority, even when Higgins and Banks are doing the aca-commentary.

The story is simple and unoriginal and could have been really bad. Cool little Beca (played very coolly by Kendrick) wants to go away to college. But her professor dad, Dr. Mitchell (John Benjamin Hickey), wants her to go to his school, Barden, for at least a year and he wants her to participate in Barden school activities (ac-activities), which will eventually include the Bellas. Said Bellas, led by tight ac-assed boss Bella Aubrey (Anna Camp) and fervent Chloe (Brittany Snow) are trying to recover from a disgraceful aca-ICCA competition, which was climaxed by that projectile-vomiting, and they’re recruiting new talent, which includes both Beca and Fat Amy.

There’s also a nasty, over-competitive boys group called The Treblemakers, creating disharmony, led by the obnoxious Bumper (Adam Devine), but also including persistent nice guy and Breakfast Club lover Jesse. The girls sing and have spats. The boys sing and sneer. Somebody gets hired for an L. A recording session. The girls find themselves. The contest is on. In a stunning surprise, the ICCA competition is its won by…..

SPOILER ALERT

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing Pat Benatar‘s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” (No, just kidding.)

END OF ALERT

Well, we don’t go to these movies for the stories, do we? Anyway, Pitch Perfect made me laugh and I liked the music, and that, after all, has been the fundamental appeal of most teen-oriented movie musicals since Babes in Arms — except that nobody here is as good as Judy Garland or Mickey Rooney. (That‘s okay: Nobody in Babes in Arms, not even Rooney, is funnier than Rebel Wilson.)

Jason Moore, who directed Broadway’s “Avenue Q,” keeps things zipping along. Writer Cannon (or should we say writer Aca-nnon) keeps the badinage popping. The choreography, by Ac-Aakomon “A.J.“ Jones, is nifty, as is the music by Christophe Beck and Mark Kilian. The only objections I have to the singing or the song selection (which includes Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.“ and Ace of Base‘s “The Sign“) are that they used Bruno Mars’ “Just the Way You Are” and not Billy Joel’s — and also that they completely ignored that semi-a cappella masterpiece “Runaround Sue by” Dion. (“Hurt! Hurt!…Well, I shoulda known it from the very start! This girl will leave me with a broken heart! So if you don’t want to cry like I do, Keep away from Runaround Sue!” )

How can you pass up a chance like that? But maybe the song is too misogynistic, even though it‘s a doo-wop masterpiece. And Sue or no Sue, this show is entertaining. The cast is delightful, a lot of the time. Anna Kendrick, well, she’s a sugarplum, tattooed or not, in or out of the shower. You go, girl! Yay! As for Rebel Wilson, she‘s Bitch Perfect: a sugar-cantaloupe, an encyclopedia of wit and wildness and avoirdupois. This woman deserves an Aca-demy Award for sass. Take that, you twig bitches.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (Four Stars)

U.S.-Australia: George Miller, 2015

1. Overdrive

Head-banging, car-crashing action movies with minimal dialogue and maximum carnage may make a lot of money, but they’ve also gotten (deservedly) a bad odor for some film-lovers, including, sometimes, me. George Miller’s sequel-and-a-half Mad Max: Fury Road though, demonstrates how to make those seeming clichés work, how to rev that engine up again. It shows us that almost any movie genre can sometimes produce a masterpiece — even if you have to create a whole world and then blast it apart to make it.

In Fury Road, the world, at least the one that most of us live in, has definitely been blown apart, or rotted away. But somehow, Miller, his astonishing crew and his highly gifted acting company make that wreckage seem marvelous, terrific, crazily beautiful. The fourth film in Miller’s “Mad Max” series — which began back in 1979, with a low-budget scruffily exciting Australian action movie starring the then-unknown Mel Gibson as Max — Fury Road is the most elaborate, the most expensive (more than 150 million dollars), the most thrill-packed and the most gloriously mad of all the Maxes: a non-stop hell-on-wheels super-thriller that virtually consists of one long, wild and violent chase through the Australian (actually Namibian) desert.

The film is not just another sequel, but a donnybrook on wheels in which a mob of grotesque, insanely vicious, post-Apocalyptic bad guys and fascist creeps pursues Max (now played by Britisher Tom Hardy of Bronson and Locke), along with five runaway brides and their kick-ass female general Furiosa (played in what will surely be one of her defining roles by Charlize Theron).

Furiosa, or the Imperator Furiosa as she‘s also known, is a lady Road Warrior who’s trying to rescue the five women, one of whom is pregnant, from their slaveringly evil buffoon Alpha captors and make it back to a matriarchal refuge run by an all-female society, the Vuvalini (Joy Smithers, Antoinette Kellerman, Melita Jurisic, Gillian Jones and others), located somewhere in the sunburnt wilderness that our water-starved and natural-resource-bereft world has become after the bomb or global warming or whatever the Hell happened.

Furiosa is the female counterpart of Mad Max, and, in those two intentionally iconic roles, Theron and Hardy generate the chemistry of a bottle of nitroglycerin, hurled and exploding. At first the two seem to hate each other, get under each other‘s skin. They’re one of the ultimate feuding motion picture couples, expressing themselves through fierce combat and slashing insult. But, like all great movie couples, or anti-couples, they grow on each other. And on us.

Both of them are refugees and outlaws, fleeing from a bloody awful tyrant warlord in a mask, and armor, riding the hood of a couple of Cadillacs lashed together. This is the hideously amused and amusing fiend, the Immortan Joe (played by Hugh Keats-Byrne, who was the memorably grotesque Toecutter in the very first Mad Max). Joe is chasing the Imperator, Max and company, with a troupe of vicious Hitlerjugend-style War Boys and his two villainous sons: the iron-muscled man-mountain Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and the eerie childlike Corpus Colossus (Quentin Kenihan). Also backing the dictatorship: the People Eater (John Howard), boss of the area’s fuel-producing center Gas Town, and the local munitions manufacturer, The Bullet Farmer (Richard Carter);

The source of Immortan Joe’s power, and that of his oddball kill-crazy despot sons is a huge mountainous water reservoir called The Citadel, located in the scorching desert (The Wasteland), whose inhabitants they have turned into chattels and serfs, and whose women have become their unwilling sex slaves and breeders. As Max (at first Immortan‘s prisoner, then his nemesis), and Furiosa and her Furiosa Five (and also a war boy turned romantic sidekick named Nux, played by Nicholas Hoult), hurtle their way through the Wasteland, the Immortan‘s army is only part of the gauntlet of weird and wonderful menaces they have to outsmart and outrun: a high-speed rogue‘s gallery that includes the soaring Polecats, acrobatic warriors who swing from one racing vehicle to another on flexible poles (played by actor-gymnasts from Canada’s renowned Cirque de Soleil); the underground Buzzard Tribe who rise terrifyingly out of the depths of the desert, and the Rock Riders, who lurk and ambush from the canyon rims above.

All these colorful and stone-murderous foes show their scurvy faces or zoom along behind our anti-hero and heroines as they plunge through the Wasteland (a kind of comic book Monument Valley, shot in the Namib desert in West Africa), the gals on their mammoth War Rig (fashioned, or so the press notes explain, from a Czech Tatra, a Chev Fleetmaster, and a six-wheel-drive 18-wheel truck.) and Max occasionally on his Interceptor, the high speed vehicle (made from a 1974 black Ford Falcon coupe) he’s had (in various incarnations), since the beginning. What transpires, stretching over most of the two hours it takes Miller’s story (co-written with Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris) to race by, is probably the single most amazing movie car-chase since the great old silent movie days when D. W. Griffith used to race the train in Intolerance.

Most of the great movies, including Intolerance, can be translated or translated back into novels, plays or other literary works — even if that wasn’t what they were to begin with. Not so Mad Max: Fury Road. In fact, if all this sounds a lot like a wildly magnified and over-elaborated comic book or video game — well, that’s obviously part of Miller’s intention, as well as part of the current Road Warrior saga’s post-movie agenda.

It’s also strangely enough, part of what makes it great. That someone can take what is essentially a comic book/video game scenario and cram it so full of color and detail and back-story and raise it to such operatic heights and such loony grandeur is impressive in itself — though that’s what been intended and sort of happening (not this well) in some other comic book super-hero or action movies.

None of them are as good, or as well-made, or as  mind-blowingly exciting, as Mad Max: Fury Road.

2. Dead Stop

Mad Max, of course, isn’t a super-hero. He’s a lot more like Clint Eastwood‘s bounty-hunting wanderer in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: a pulp or movie genre hero with a human, vulnerable dimension, carried to mesmerizing extremes. In playing him, Hardy doesn’t show too much of Mel Gibson’s matinee idol qualities in the role. He’s tougher, bluffer, maybe a bit more virile, and he doesn’t quite have the bedroom eyes that made Gibson (before his meltdown and PR problems), attractive to both male and female audiences. This Mad Max, like Daniel Craig’s James Bond, is less sexy than tough — though his toughness doesn‘t make him immune to the pain and torture the villains dish out. That hardcase demeanor and non-seductiveness might be the reason Fury Road seems to tip so much toward Theron’s Furiosa, whose shaven head and burning eyes make her, paradoxically, look like more of a classic action hero. Or a non-classic action heroine. And definitely a sexy one.

That sense of human vulnerability is heightened here by the way Fury Road was shot — mostly with actual vehicles and gadgets and people doing actual stunts, and with much less CGI or special effects work than we‘ve become accustomed to. As it is, the slam bang achievements of the movie’s second unit director and stunt co-ordinator Guy Norris, whose association with Miller began with stunt work in 1981’s The Road Warrior, is also one of Fury’s great plusses, as is the gorgeous sun-splashed cinematography of veteran cinematographer John Seale and the super-orchestral score by the movie’s rock ’n roll composer Tom Holkenborg aka Junkie XL — much better, more Bernard Herrmannish and more ambitious here than he was with the action score for Run All Night.

All of this is woven together expertly by George Miller, who has been working on this project for a couple of decades, starting back during a time when he could have cast Gibson, and whose persistence suggests one of those grand, obsessive projects that often don’t get made and sometimes make emotional wrecks out of their creators. Mad Max: Fury Road not only took twenty years to prepare and complete. (Miller wasn’t exclusively devoted to it during that time.) It was mapped out with over 3,500 storyboards (by Miller and others), thousands of workers and actors and collaborators, and no less than 150 drivable vehicles — resulting in 400 hours of footage, assembled and cut down expertly by Miller’s longtime editor (and wife), Margaret Sixel.

Considering all the problems and logistics, it’s a movie that shouldn’t work this well, but does, and a movie that takes what usually seems wrong and excessive in our pictures today — the excessive violence, the endless car-chases and crashes, the near absence of dialogue and the limitations on humanity, interaction, and psychological depth — and somehow makes it right. It gives us human depth where most shows of its type just give us another comic book or video game, inflated to preposterous proportions.

And after all that, Pitch Perfect 2 outgrossed it this weekend. As Furiosa might say: Never underestimate the power of a woman, or of women. Anyway, there will be another Mad Max, they say, and one hopes it won’t take twenty years and another 150 million to make (though in the latter case, it probably will), and that it cooks and blazes and roars along like this one. If the world is going to end, it might as well look this good when it does. It might as well be George Miller and Margaret Sixel and Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron that rev it up and show us the death throes. They grow on you.

EX MACHINA (Three Stars)
U.S.: Alex Garland, 2015

We’re in something of a golden age for movie science fiction — or a gold-plated one at least — and Ex Machina is a good example how that genre can be worked and reworked by a bright filmmaker who knows the form and how to play with it. The movie marks the feature directorial debut of the brainy, taboo-shattering novelist-screenwriter Alex Garland (he wrote the scripts for Danny Boyle’s  28 Days Later, Sunshine, and the novel from which Danny Boyle made The Beach) and here, he gives us a chamber horror story, a cyber-punk robot story and a classy-looking sexual nightmare that will amuse and even mesmerize some audiences and irritate others. I was amused and irritated myself, by turns. But, all in all, I’m happy to see someone trying to make something deeper and more challenging: a science fiction plot that doesn’t depend on explosions and car wrecks and gun battles, but on a few interesting characters and ideas. It’s also nice that audiences can respond so strongly to those characters and ideas.

Indeed, the characters are what engage us first. Almost all of Garland’s movie takes place in a high tech hideaway housing four “people“: the secret estate and household of a wealthy, inventive and apparently reclusive company CEO — Oscar Isaac as Nathan Bateman, a sort of Steve Jobs-ian philosopher-tycoon-visionary. Bateman has invited one of his young employees, Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), who’s the winner of a trumped-up contest, to spend a week with him in his isolated home, allegedly to learn how the upper echelon of his company lives and works.

That’s a crock. Actually, Bateman is a manipulative inventor-bossman, and Caleb is there to take part in an experimental project Bateman has dreamed up, involving a humanoid robot that Bateman has fashioned in the shape and highly disturbing bod of a sexy, very human-looking young charmer named Ava (Alicia Vikander). In a variation of the Turing Test that Benedict Cumberbatch’s luckless Alan Turing invented in The Imitation Game, Caleb has to determine whether his robot/android/whatever can actually think, or whether she‘s just mimicking the humans around her. This is the big question that artificial life and science fiction robots and androids often pose in science fiction, from Karel Capek‘s “R.U.R.” to  Lester del Rey’s sentimental, romantic “Helen O’Loy,” to Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, to HAL 9000 in Kubrick’s 2001, to the replicants in Blade Runner, to the lost little boy in Spielberg and Kubrick‘s underrated A. I.

Ex Machina is a familiar movie nightmare, but it‘s also a kind of sex comedy, in a kind of  Carnal Knowledge mode. Two bright young men — Caleb, the sensitive nerdy techno-guy employee and Bateman the entertainingly arrogant and self-confident  stud — form part of a triangle (in this case an inter-species triangle) with Ava — or possibly part of a quartet with Nathan’s eye-catching, quiet  housekeeper, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno).  Like Art Garfunkel’s Sandy and Jack Nicholson’s Jonathan in Carnal Knowledge, Caleb and Bateman are the mismatched buddies, one of whom is good with women — or at least good at seducing them or inventing them (Bateman), while the other is a naïve romantic who falls in love too easily (Caleb). We can guess very early, I think, that Caleb will fall for Ava, and become disaffected in some way from Nathan. What’s going on in the head of Ava, and also of Kyoko, are part of Ex Machina’s mysterious subtext.

Ex Machina takes the sort of plot premise that might be used to trigger a flood of sex scenes in a soft-core porno movie, and tries to use them instead to trigger shivers and speculation in this science fiction horror film, in which humans are seduced by sexy robots and thinly repressed violence is always poking through the sheets.  Like Spike Jonze‘s Her, it‘s partly a sex fantasy where Ava seems (at least at first), a kind of ultimate love toy, and the men are high tech playboys.  There’s even a pseudo-feminist twist, in which the erstwhile dolls may strike back.

The story is not bad, though it could have been better. It could, for example have been something closer to the shattering Blade Runner (which was adapted from Philip Dick’s marvelous “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) or to Alfred Bester’s great android shocker “Fondly Fahrenheit.” It’s a long step down from either, though one of the best things in the movie is the way it looks. Bateman’s playhouse, thanks to production designer Mark Digby and cinematographer Rob Hardy, has the compelling layout and austere veneer of something by  Kubrick (the space ship in 2001 maybe); fit dwelling place for two brainiacs and their robot girlfriend.

The other highlight of the film — which at least is  smart entertainment — is the memorable performance of Oscar Isaac. As Bateman, Isaac charges up the movie the way the younger Nicholson and Al Pacino used to zing up their shows and electrify their audiences. Isaac, who was brilliant as the Dylanesque folk singer in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Lewyn Davies, is brilliant here too, in a different kind of role. His Davis, unlike tycoon Bateman, was an outsider and misfit and a Dave Van Ronkian exemplar of left wing urban folk balladry in the early ‘60s. (The movie, by the way, would have been better if the Coens hadn’t somewhat mysteriously downplayed the whole political angle.)

Isaac as Bateman, while just as self-centered as Davis was, is a rich success where Davis was a poor failure. He’s a cockily arrogant business guy where Davis was a somewhat nasty, egotist artist who liked to push around people, not just robots. It’s a magnetic performance in the way those early movie-stealing turns by Nicholson or Pacino or De Niro or Brando were. Bateman is both attractive and somewhat repellent and dangerous, and he dominates the movie even when he’s not around.

Domhnall Gleeson is his opposite. He’s the son of that great Irish actor Brendan Gleeson, but where his father is a consummate movie roughneck, Domhnall is sensitive and a little dreamy. Nevertheless, his part isn’t written as well as Isaac’s, so he can’t make the same kind of vivid, vigorous  impression. Even so, the younger Gleeson provides contrast, as Garfunkel did to Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge, or as Jean-Louis Trintignant’s shy passenger  did to Vittorio Gassmann’s brash driver  in Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life). A contrast not only to Bateman, but to the lithe and subtly menacing Vikander as Ava the robot.

Ava and Kyoko are played very well by Vikander and Mizuno, and it’s probably not their fault that Garland never really solves the problem of making femme fatale Ava at the same time believably mechanical and believably human — and that he keeps us guessing about which side is in the ascendant.  Is the movie sexist, as a few critics have suggested?  That’s certainly not what Garland intended. He’s as fascinated by robots/androids here as he was by the zombies in 28 Days Later, and in a way, he’s on Ava’s side, or thinks he is. But, while the movie didn’t really move me, and Ava didn’t really win me over, they certainly got to lots of other watchers, probably both male and female. Ex Machina has generated mostly wonderful reviews, and it’s drawn a larger-than-average art house/indie audience. If it didn’t exactly please me — that’s probably because it wasn’t either A. I., Blade Runner or Fondly Fahrenheit. And because Ava wasn’t a femme fatale Hal.

FURIOUS SEVEN (Three Stars)

U.S.: James Wan, 2015

Furious Seven and movies like it are, in some ways, the face of cinema today. I don’t say that with a smile on my face.

One day, in the not-too-distant future, when we’ve finally used up all our planet’s available fossil fuels, and when muscle cars, or sports cars, or cars of any kind and class, and the combustion engines themselves, are things of the past — and when the movies about those autos and their fast and furious drivers (or at least the few muscle car flicks left) survive only in museums or whatever is around then to preserve old popular media and vintage entertainment in that far off, peculiar future — then we’ll maybe look on movies like Furious Seven, with the right blend of shock and awe and nostalgia. And maybe we won’t.

Now, it’s not museums but multiplexes that are the proper arenas for the insanely over-the-top bill of car chases and collisions and mano-a-mano fights that are the modus operandi of movies like Furious Seven and all its furiously preposterous predecessors — the  latest of the fast and fiery car-crashing mega-hits filling up zillions of theaters in our own auto-erotic age: with their barmy visions of gas-powered vehicular monoliths soaring heavenward and earthward and diving off cliffs — visions that may, in the future,  seem relics and mementoes of an odd, incredible, almost unimaginable past —  in films that may seem relics of a vanished age too.

What will our descendants — who by then may be riding around in ox-carts, thanks to our own prodigal gas-guzzling centuries of waste — think of these spectacles? How will they mentally process these muscle car crash-a-thons? Will the movies seem not just ubiquitous multi-zillion-budgeted epics of speed and destruction  – drawing vast world-wide audiences in the age of Pedal-to-the-Metal, but the crazy nightmares of some long-vanished culture — some weird shit that somebody dreamed up and made out of CGI, after too many intoxicants, while centuries hence their descendants are condemned in real life to a fried planet, or to the beast and buggy stables, or the super-skateboards, or the Human Internet, or the Telekinetic Express, or whatever they then use to get around in the future, when all the oil is finally gone.

In any case, when they get a load of “Furious Seven” — and its super-powered sports cars and racing cars  driving off cliffs and bailing out of planes and crashing and taking flight through one Abu Dhabi skyscraper after another — and when they take a gander at all the other bizarre airborne car fantasies that their moviemaking ancestors dreamed up for those vehicular marvels (fantasy flying Aston Martins and Dodge Chargers and Chrysler minivans) to do in their stunt sessions, they may not believe their eyes or brains. And that’s the whole point, of course.

Maybe, in a barmy way, the future audience will secretly buy it. Maybe they’ll think that’s what cars and life were really like. Maybe that’s what they’ll think drivers really did. Maybe they’ll dream of bringing back the golden age of car-chase movies and mayhem. Nah. I’m kidding of course. But…

“Furious Seven” is the seventh of the series that began in 2001 with the Vin Diesel-Paul Walker rebel-racers crash-a-thon, “The Fast and the Furious” — and that has been getting faster and more furious, and more expensive, and more lucrative, and more ludicrous (or Ludacris) ever since. I don’t like the series all that much, and I had my problems with this one too — though it’s my favorite of all of these shows, partly because of the presence of  the new villain (Jason Statham), and of Kurt Russell as an ultra-smart-ass  government official called “Mr. Nobody,” and a bit more because of the sheer loco preposterousness of all the car-chase, car-race scenes — which are, of course, always preposterous, but not always, it seemed,  so much as they are here — and even more because of this movie’s surprisingly and genuinely moving ending: a fond farewell and tribute to Walker, who died in a car-crash in November, 2013, and becomes the subject of a heartfelt mood-shift that succeeds, smashingly..

Walker, a smiling good-looking surfer-blonde  type, has been playing the ex-undercover-cop Brian O’Conner — opposite Diesel as the dour, bald, and hard-driving outlaw racer Dominic Toretto — since the beginning, back in 2001. He died with only about half of his part here on film. And it was the unenviable assignment of new director James Wan, helmer of the hip gory horror movies Saw and The Conjuring (who took over direction from Justin Lin, who did the last four of them) to somehow disguise the fact that Walker was not physically present for many of his scenes. (He was CGIed, dubbed and replaced for some of them by other actors, including his two brothers, Caleb and Cody CGI). In any case, the fictional Brian was not intended at first to say the goodbyes that most of us will think must be coming.

How can you take a movie that was intended at the start to be an entertainingly ridiculous, an action-bromance with a few laughs and a sermon or two, and swerve it into seriousness and sadness at the end?

You take it seriously. And sadly. Furious Seven (a title Wan took from what I assume must be one of his favorite films, Akira Kurosawa’s The Magnificent Seven) has been retooled of course. It has that new heavy: Jason Statham as the scowling  sadist Deckard Shaw, a mean ex-Special Ops guy out for revenge against Dom’s team, the boys (and girls) who put his brother Owen (Luke Evans) into the hospital, before Deckard puts Owen and all his fellow patients and doctors into  the Fiery Beyond.

Not content with one massacre, Deckard starts killing off members of Dom‘s “family,” until Dom and his guys (and gals) take umbrage and are recruited by Russell’s Mr. Nobody (I’d forgotten how great Russell was as Nick Frescia, the wise acre L. A. cop with the Pat Reilly haircut in Bob Towne‘s Tequila Sunrise; here, I remembered). Their assignment: to go after Deckard and his  psycho cohort, fiendish war lord Mose Jakanda (Dimon Hounsou), in order to rescue  gorgeous ace hacker Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), who has invented a program called God‘s Eye, which can find anyone, anywhere.

Back for the ride, making up the family, in addition to Brian and Dom, are some more vets: Dom’s fierce amnesiac lady Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), and Brian’s staunch wife (and Dom’s sister) Mia (Jordana Brewster), and the comedy team of blowhard Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and tech whiz straight man Tej  (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges). And, despite being confined to a hospital and an arm-cast for most of the movie, Fast Five latecomer Luke Hobbs (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson).

The automotive antics this time include a wacko scene where the crew bail out of a plane flying over Azerbaijani and the Caucasus Mountains, soaring down without parachutes (except for the jump-shy Roman) and landing, amazingly, on a twisting road in the middle of a thick forest, after which they try to rescue Ramsey on an insanely perilous mountain way, surviving one cliff-hanger after another (including a teeter-totter tribute to The Italian Job).

There‘s another of those ridiculous chases though city streets (L. A. this time), in which in heroes (and heroines) and villains pursue and shoot at each other in a town that seems unprotected by police and every traffic law was made to be broken. Here, Dom and Deckard even stage a head-on collision, walk away unhurt and intact,  and nobody, especially the police, tries  to interfere. And, as if somebody somehow remembered the absurdity of it all, screen-writer Chris Morgan (who’s been around since The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the third in the series) has the cops finally show up, late, and the “vehicular war” exploding all over is at least mentioned on the TV news.

So this seven part saga, which began on L. A.’s mean streets, back in 2001, in director Rob Cohen‘s and writer Gary Scott Thompson’s inflation of the chickie run in James Dean’s immortal Rebel Without a Cause (a much better movie, with a tenth of the action), and has since been around the world (including the show’s itinerary of  L. A. and Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi), gives us the flying car business as usual: unbelievable car stunts, unbelievably done, interrupted by some folderol from Roman and Tej and some bromance schmaltz from Dom and Brian and some road pulchritude  from Letty and Ashley.

But this movie tries to maintain enough gravitas to be believable when the cast and crew, and especially Diesel’s Dom salute their fallen friend. They do, believably, which says something about how you make good movies that we remember for their people as much as, or more than for the crashes and the cliffhangers.

NIGHTCRAWLER (Three Stars)

U.S.: Dan Gilroy, 2014

I. Moonrise on Sunset (and Elsewhere)

Nightcrawler is a movie mostly about Los Angeles at night, mostly about the times when a lot of the city closes down and the streets go black, and freelance newshounds and videographers come crawling out of the dark corners and racing through the dark streets to take pictures of  disaster and bloodshed and mayhem — which they peddle to the noisier TV channels and news programs: all those second or third tier (or less) stations  whose (not always) unspoken motto is “If it bleeds, it leads.” It’s a good movie: tough, eloquent, very well-shot (by Robert Elswit)—a rousing little show that tries to tap the same sort of sleaze-scraping, unsparing vein as Ace in the Hole (about newspapers and sensationalistic journalism),  Sweet Smell of Success (about newspaper gossip columnists) and A Face in the Crowd (about populist right-wing TV). A lot of the time, it succeeds. Sometimes sweetly, and sometimes with a spray of acid.

I wouldn’t say that Nightcrawler — which sounds like a horror movie title and, in a way, is one — is better that any of its models or even in their class. (It isn’t.) But it’s certainly  better — better shot, better acted and definitely better-written — than most of the movies that purport to show us crime, action and modern life in a half way real, pseudo-contemporary urban milieu, The director/writer, Dan Gilroy, comes from a  family of writers.  He’s the son of Frank (“The Subject was Roses“) and the brother of Tony (Michael Clayton and the Bourne movies and one of this show’s producers). And he’s right in their family tradition. His movie is well-plotted and tightly structured and tensely done (thanks probably to another Gilroy, Dan’s twin brother and editor John). The dialogue is way better than average: smooth and confident and upfront and sometimes really nasty. It sounds like the racy, snappy, viper-tongued  lingo of pros who know they’re stepping over the boundaries, and transgressing humanistic values  and guess what, don’t care. This is what the public wants, they seem to be shrugging and saying, and damn it all, what you want you get — and what you get, you pay for.

II. Creepy-crawly

The movie focuses on one character who‘s probably the nastiest of them all, a  glib, tireless, super-nosy  amateur video guy (though not amateur for long), who stumbles on this hard-boiled little world and metier of free-lance video-peddling, and starts parleying his chutzpah and recklessness and almost shocking lack of scruples to crawl, maul and claw his way to the top. His name is Louis Bloom, and he‘s played, with sass and bite and a sick little half-grin, by Jake Gyllenhaal. Is it just an accident that Lou’s character name is so reminiscent of Leopold Bloom, James Joyce‘s Dublin witness character in his great-day-in-the life novel “Ulysses“? (Modern movie kids will probably instead recall Gene Wilder’s Leo Bloom in The Producers.)

Gyllenhaal — whose best credits include Donnie Darko, Brokeback Mountain and Prisoners — plays his Bloom  with so little seductive actor’s vanity and such shamelessness and venom, that you almost want to applaud the actor for taking us on such an anti-ego trip. His Leo is a night creeper with a pallid unhealthy persona, wide boyish glittering eyes, and a dead, creepy smile that makes him look a bit like a snake who came in from the cold. He speaks in what is almost pop-media code: lacing his come-ons and put-downs and hard-sells with a fast ooze of rapid deadpan patter and a twisted lexicon of snappy pop aphorisms that he’s scraped off of TV and the internet.

Lou  has an almost religious lack of morals. When we first meet him, he‘s stealing scrap metal,  assaulting a guard and then peddling his loot to a contemptuous scrap-dealer who brushes off  Lou’s  pitch for a steady  job by asking why in Hell he should employ a thief.  The movie asks — or has Lou ask for it — “Why the hell not?” In this world of sometimes heartless voyeurism and all-embracing greed, who the hell cares?

When Lou stumbles later on that little company of camera bugs scuttling around a bloody car-wreck, and talks to cynical, lore-dispensing old pro Joe Loder (Bill Paxton, spot on)  he immediately decides to go out and grab a camera, and troll for some salable mayhem himself. Soon, he finds a buyer:  a hard-bitten, sexily dressed TV news producer with a stripper’s name, Nina Romina,  who has the hard-shell, glamorous veneer of a top-rate Madame just opening up a new bordello. Nina  (played tangily by Rene Russo, Dan‘s wife) right away spots Bloom‘s energy and determination and perhaps his lack of scruples. They become a team. Not necessarily a sexual team — though Lou pitches for that piece of pie as well. But definitely the balls-out team that can push Nina‘s floundering station out of Ratings Hell  and into minor league Fox News territory.

Lou has his own team too — consisting of himself at the wheel and his underpaid assistant and heavily exploited ex-homeless wingman, Rick (Riz Ahmed, very good) barking out the directions to the disaster. Soon enough they stumble on what every movie like this lusts for: The Big Story. Here, it’s a mass murder in a posh Beverly Hills-style house — which Lou gets about as up close and personal as you can possibly get without actually committing the murders yourself, copping footage that’s a tabloid-level news whore’s wet, wet dream.

III. Couldn’t Possibly Happen

That’s where Nightcrawler’s story speeds up and heads for pay-dirt, but also where it begins to get a little ridiculous — and, like Lou, goes too far. At the crime scene, Lou takes shots he shouldn’t be taking and  withholds evidence and lies to the cops and slants the story in ways that would get him fired if he wasn’t working with people who have as much (or less) scruples than he does — and should get him fired or investigated anyway, but doesn’t. I’m not saying TV news is a kosher operation, But the movie doesn’t do a good job of explaining why Lou gets away with this, or why he thinks he can. After going along on the show’s program for quite a while, I have to say I didn’t much believe much of what happens in Nightcrawler from the debut of the Big Story on. But I forgave it, at least part of the way, because the show was so entertaining and the actors were so good. God knows most of the movies we see, especially the contemporary action/crime shows, don’t make much sense either. As for Lou: him you can forgive for  being a pungently realized movie character taking us on a wild ride.

Modern TV news — and I’ve watched more of it than I should — certainly has its sleazy side, and Nightcrawler gets points for trying to uncover some of it. But Gilroy Dan seems to want to be Reginald Rose or Paddy Chayefsky or maybe (as many critics have opined), the Scorsese of Taxi Driver, and he’s not quite there. (For one thing, his script could use more characters and background.) Nightcrawler has stuff to commend. It looks good (Elswit deserves another kudo), sounds good (ditto Gilroy), plays good (ditto the actors, especially Gyllenhaal and Ahmed) and takes us somewhere interesting, even if some of us have been there before, or think we have.

It also demonstrates something that you wouldn’t think needed much proving, but apparently does, again: In creating a milieu like this — sharp and brutal and poisonous and, at least part of the way,  true to life — you’re better off using good dialogue read by good actors than staging two or three pretty good, very expensive  car-chases or gun battles, and hoping that enough critics, or enough of the audience, have crushes on the leads. (By the way, the big car-chase here, staged by stunt coordinator/second unit director Mike Smith, isn’t bad.)

Overall, Nightcrawler is good in the same way The Drop was good or that The Wolf of Wall Street was a good deal better than good. It makes us feel, at least part of the time, that we’re in a real place, with at least half-way real people doing at least half-way real things. And the fact that those half-way real things are so destructive and hard-hearted and  brutal and insanely off the charts — and that they’re somewhat plausibly connected to at least some of the TV news trash some of us see every night — is what gives you the neo-noir shivers. Much more, at least, than the usual contemporary action movie whose ploy is having some high priced movie star (Liam or Keanu or Denzel or what have you ) walk down a street or into a room or onto a train or a warehouse with ten to twenty gunmen blazing away or flexing their muscles and attitude, and killing them all.

The conventional crime/action movie of today, like, say, John Wick, shows us something that couldn’t possibly  happen, written by someone who has probably been nowhere near anything remotely similar, and whose imagination has probably been debauched by too many other movies that couldn’t possibly happen either. (I’m not saying, mind you, that there aren’t a lot of good or better than good movies that couldn’t happen or don‘t make sense.) Nightcrawler shows us something that probably couldn’t possibly happen either, but that maybe almost could. That “maybe almost could” is the big catch. What earned Nightcrawler all those good reviews, mine now included, is the unsettling fact that there’s a lot of people who may recognize themselves, or at least part of themselves, in Lou Bloom and his dirty odyssey and his brutality and his lack of scruple: as a modern guy just trying to get along in this rotten modern world — a viper with a camera who wants to come in from the cold, and who would sell his rattle and his poisonous front teeth for a key. It’s a world for snakes and whores and all kind of things that couldn‘t possibly happen (we think) .  And I don’t exempt myself.

HONEYMOON (Two  Stars)

U.S.: Leigh Janiak, 2013

Suppose you drove off for a romantic rendezvous in your parent’s isolated cabin in the woods, and the honeymoon quickly degenerated  from an idyll into something…else. Suppose you went off together to be alone and wild and erotically indulgent and your lover began behaving like someone or something….else.

Suppose romance just started…dribbling away.  Suppose the girl, Bea (Rose Leslie) began forgetting details of your lives and of the English vocabulary. Suppose mysterious bite marks turned up on her thighs, mysterious lights began flashing in the woods at night, mysterious notations popped up in her notebook and she developed a mysterious  aversion to the lovemaking with Paul (Harry Treadaway) of which she earlier couldn’t get enough. Suppose bad-tempered acquaintances showed up in the woods, behaving like menacing mysterious weirdoes, while mysterious secretions and eruptions and objects began appearing on Bea’s thighs and orifices.

SPOILER ALERT

…And suppose you had the distinct impression  that somehow you had stumbled into a cheapo, micro-budget version of the 1958 I Married a Monster from Outer Space., or of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with cut-rate pods and zombies. caught by a nervous camera, occasionally operated by the troubled lovers themselves…

END OF ALERT

Honeymoon, the first feature by promising director-writer Leigh Janiak milks more chills out of that nutty situation than you might have imagined.  A devotee of highly atmospheric horror masters Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick, Ms. Janiak (and her co-writer, Phil Graziadei) try to combine the usual genre shocks and  shivers, with a psychologically astute examination of the problems and perils of a young couple — two intelligent but perhaps too complacent people who may not know each other quite as well as they think.

The movie begins well, with fairly good dialogue and decent acting from its minuscule cast (four people, not counting lurkers in the woods). Costars Leslie (“Game of Thrones“) and Treadaway (“Penny Dreadful“) both have the usual sharp British acting technique, and they play their parts with more style than you expect and give us more depth than genre characters like this usually plumb. Janiak and her cinematographer (Kyle Klutz) don’t display anything like the visual panache of a Kubrick or a Polanski, but at least she’s chosen the right models. It’s not really a good movie, but it’s…promising. Hard-core horror aficionados will probably appreciate it more then I did.

Still, the movie has its moments: times when it almost feels as if the show is about to break the chains of horror movie cheapiedom and become…something else. Mysteriously, these moments usually…dribble away.