June 25: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981 -- George Miller)

TBD

June 24: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015 -- George Miller)

★★★★

I was caught off-guard by the beauty and grace of this film. The visual creativity here suggests Terry Gillam at his best, but Gilliam doesn't create the action and characters that George Miller does, and the intensity of the chaos and stakes in this film are especially compelling viewing.

The world of Fury Road is one of pessimistic existentialism.  It's a world of strength, oppression, violence, pestilence, dirt and exploitation, and the design of the film, as much as the action, creates this world for us.  Everything is rusty and dusty, and it’s a world created from scraps of the pre-holocaust civilization that have been repurposed for this brutal time.   It’s in this repurposing that Miller’s designers are at their most creative.  Vehicles have been cobbled together from a variety of forms of transport and outfitted with equipment unrelated to transportation like spikes, waving poles, a swaying guitar and flamethrowers.  Likewise, the many weapons here feature guns with repeating cartridges and spears, and masks are painted with skulls and locked closed with tines leading to the eyes.  Every surface in the film shows designers working to create a brutal, post-holocaust world.

And among all this, beauty.  An early shot that ties destruction and beauty in the film is the image of Immortan Joe’s wives standing in the desert.  Their armored tanker has broken down, and the shot of the group of women standing beside the wreck -- shapely, dressed in tailored rags, bronzed and posed like models for a summer fashion spread – juxtaposes their feminine beauty and the masculine devastation of the world.  And if any element binds together these values visually, it’s Charlize Theron’s Furiosa.  Furiosa is tanned, trim and beautiful, so it’s especially striking when we realize she’s missing part of her arm.  Onscreen, she embodies the world of Fury Road – one of intense destruction and intense beauty juxtaposed.

All the elements of the film develop this contrast.  Desperate flights have an ethereal beauty as Miller uses desaturation and color tint to create a look of splendor, and classical music sometimes makes scenes of desolation elegant.  The views of the Swampland, with its large, awkwardly-graceful devices wandering on a screen of deep azure tie beauty and desolation together with cinematography, an element Miller often uses effectively in sustaining this juxtaposition.  Even the choreography of the extended action scenes tends more to beauty than to the chaos of similar scenes in a film by Michael Bay.  Flexible poles with fighters at their ends wave during one assault, and a chilling allusion to blind justice lends a quality of beauty to another frenzied assault on the group.

And as beautiful as the film is, the characters manage to engage us despite their limited dialogue.  We feel for Furiosa as she realizes her dream is futile, and we root for Max to overcome the demons that haunt him.  We experience a sense of loss when Nux dies after we’ve followed his character arc from bad guy to good.  Fury Road doesn’t have the mythic element of the first Road Warrior, but it’s a beautiful pageant of starkly contrasting values.

June 23: Jurassic World (2015 -- Colin Trevorrow)

★★★

This is one of the more disappointing films of the summer.  Fourteen years after the last installment in the series and 22 since the original, Jurassic Park films have ossified into a formula: one especially significant dinosaur threat; intense, suspenseful action; a bit of wonder at the dinosaurs;  overbearing park leadership; threats to kids; and healed family/relationships.

This installment delivers all these in spades.  The CGI is compelling -- even if the parade of lunging, growling lizards becomes a little repetitious -- and there’s suspense as the Indominus stalks the boys and Owen, even if the tension has something of a familiar feel since it hews so closely to that in other installments.  The scene when the Indominus attacks the boys' gyrosphere certainly echoes the T-rex attack on the landrover in Part 1, and the vibe as Owen hides from the Indominus in the garage feels like that of the children hiding in the lab from the velocirapters of Part 3.  Some of the framing and action is even similar.  Likewise, the bad guys Jurassic World are arrogant and proud, as Jurassic Park bad guys always are -- Masrani, the owner, is arrogant overconfident; Hoskins, the military guy, sees the weapons potential of the  dinosaurs; and Dr. Wu actually returns as the craven researcher from Part 1.  Relationships among the principles follows the trajectory of those in other Jurassic Park films, too.  We watch the relationship of Gray and Zach build from Zach's indifference to brotherly love  to a general healing of all family relationships that culminates in the odd reconciliation of the parents and the restoration of their family.  Even Claire grows from indifference to love, mostly because she’s touched by the love around her.

The summer crowd will enjoy this competent film, but for all the sparkle and noise, Colin Trevorrow brings little originality or uniqueness to the Jurassic series with Jurassic World.  A sure sign of decline in the franchise, there’s some wit and winking at the conventions here, but Jurassic World feels much more like Moonraker than it does Dr. No. 

June 22: Things to Come (1936 -- William Cameron Menzies)

★★★

June 21: America America (1963 -- Elia Kazan)

★★★

June 20: Paris Blues (1961 -- Martin Ritt)

★★★★

June 19: Elmer Gantry (1960 -- Richard Brooks)

★★★