Nothing to Declare: Gringo, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
David Oyelowo and Sharlto Copley
Here's my NPR review of Gringo, a bloody farce that musters four good comic performances from primarily non-comedic actors in the service of nothing much.
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Pop Culture Happy Hour: Atomic Blonde
Chris Klimek
The Mondo two-LP blue-and-yellow-vinyl edition of the soundtrack to David Leitch's stylish Charlize Theron-headlined, set-in-1989 espionage thriller Atomic Blonde that I ordered won't arrive for several weeks, I'm told. Until then you and I will just have to make do with our extant libraries of New Order, The Clash, A Flock of Seagulls, etc. And with this thrilling recorded-in-one take episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein host Linda Holmes and regular panelists Stephen Thompson and Glen Weldon brought me in to talk about how much we all like watching Ms. Theron kick ass. It's a lot more satisfying that watching her play second-fiddle to some grunting no-talent clown in a tank top.
Presenting My Fourth Annual Village Voice Summer Movie Preview
Chris Klimek
It's a tradition! Here once again I choose a dozen movies due in the next three months for which I've got medium-high hopes.
Diesel Fumes: The Fate of the Furious, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
Xander Cage as Dominic Toretto. (Universal)
We all know the inexplicably prolonged Fast & Furious series can't touch Mad Max: Fury Road or even its closer competitor the Mission: Impossible franchise, right? We all know that?
Even by the series' own standards of allegedly intentional badness, the new The Fate of the Furious is a sour lemon. (136 minutes, four good scenes.) Here's my NPR review.
What Fresh Hell! Mad Max: Fury Road, reviewed.
Chris Klimek
Tom Hardy & Charlize Theron play the dual protagonists of the fourth, and best, Max Max.
Melting clocks would not look out of place in the surreal and vibrant post-apocalyptic world George Miller has created in Mad Max: Fury Road, the long-delayed fourth installment in the series that launched his eclectic career 36 years ago. (Four Max Maxes now, but also two Babes and two Happy Feet.) Among its other substantial achievements, the film elevates Charlize Theron into the Sigourney Weaver-Linda Hamilton-Carrie Anne Moss Action Heroine Hall of Fame. Last year was an unusually strong one for blockbusters, but Fury Road is still the baddest to burn rubber and spit fire in many nuclear winters. My NPR review is here.
Making-of documentary The Furious Gods reveals the people who actually made Prometheus had no idea WTF, either.
Chris Klimek
Because I routinely make awful decisions about how to spend my time, I paid $24.99 (50% of MSRP) for the four-disc, 3D Blu-Ray edition of Prometheus, a film I'd harbored huge hopes for but ultimately found disappointing. A Ridley Scott film, in other words.
I don't have the gear or the inclination to watch a 3D movie at home, but the deluxe set that includes the 3D version of Prometheus (along with the plain-Jane 2D in three different formats, because what price piece of mind?) is the only way to get The Furious Gods, a three-hour, 40 minute (!) making-of documentary by Charles de Lauzirika, a nonfiction filmmaker whose substantive, well-edited making-ofs for similarly lavish reissues of Scott's only two great films -- say their names with me now, everybody, Alien and Blade Runner -- have already claimed many irreplaceable hours of my life.
The Furious Gods is long, sure, but actually it's longer, because I've been watching in "enhanced mode," meaning that when an icon appears at the top of the screen I can press a button on my remote and watch an "enhancement pod" -- a video footnote, basically -- containing even more nerdily trivial information about whatever specific aspect of the film's conception and production is being discussed at that moment.
When Scott talks about casting original Dragon Tattoo Girl Noomi Rapace in the movie, you can watch her screen test. When production designer Arthur Max talks about creating the movie's titular spacecraft (which was still called the Magellan for a long time, did you know, even after the Untitled Alien Prequel acquired the name Prometheus), you can click through dozens of drawings and schematics of the ship -- which I think that all of us, regardless of our political affiliation, can agree is fucking rad. You can even watch an enhancement pod about the film's many rejected titles. Alien: Tomb of the Gods, anyone?
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