MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (Rated R)

The original “Mad Max” film gave Mel Gibson his big start on the road to stardom.

George Miller, a medical doctor by profession, proved to be an excellent director, launching a career that has now come full circle with “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

To put everything into perspective, when “Mad Max” debuted in 1979, malaise gripped America, radical mullahs took over Iran with the Islamic revolution, and the Soviet Union was only months away from invading Afghanistan.

With its emphasis on a desolate future, this dystopian action film seemed like a good fit for the era.

Now 36 years later, “Mad Max: Fury Road” may be tapping into the zeitgeist once again.

But Mel Gibson has been replaced by Tom Hardy, who’s wearing an iron mask that is reminiscent of his appearance as Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Best of all, George Miller, the mastermind of the post-apocalyptic worldview, still has a vivid imagination.

The future is bleak in George Miller’s world, a chaotic place, where there is no rule of law, no power grids, no water, and no mercy.

Once the battle was only for oil, not it’s just a matter of survival. Life on this forbidding planet is nasty, brutish and short.

Water is the key to power wielded by the maniac tyrant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the psychotic Toecutter in the original “Mad Max”).

The Citadel, a fortress spun into a cave system where water is pumped from the only aquifer for miles around, is like a chamber of horrors for the unfortunate.

What’s left of humanity roams the Wasteland in wild tribes or clings to survival at the foot of the Citadel, where the desert warlord favors his War Boys, pasty-white creatures fueled by constant blood transfusions and a diet of mother’s milk.

As the film opens, Tom Hardy’s Max Rockatansky (the same name for Mel Gibson’s character) is a veteran of some desert war with a skill set that allows him to survive alone. He’s a wanderer in search of an idealistic place that no longer exists.

Ambushed by a wild pack of marauding War Boys, Max is dragged back to the Citadel, the most fortified stronghold in the Wasteland, where his fate is to become a source of blood transfusion for Immortan Joe’s zombie-like army.

It’s at the Citadel that we meet Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a shaved-head female warrior who is tasked with driving the War Rig to Gas Town, flanked by an armada of super-charged vintage muscle cars and trucks converted to armored vehicles.

Suddenly, Furiosa detours her rig and her convoy off their scheduled run, and it becomes clear she has a different agenda. Immortan’s kingdom erupts into bedlam.

Furiosa’s War Rig carries the precious cargo of the tyrant’s five wives, each one a sex slave prized for breeding purposes to produce a male heir.

Meanwhile, since Max is now an unwilling blood donor hooked up to warrior Nux (Hicholas Hoult), our hero is strapped to the front end of the car that Nux drives in pursuit of the wayward Furiosa.

Not long after the first run, things happen to make Max and Furiosa guarded allies as they flee for the mythical sanctuary of the Green Place.

While George Miller may be philosophical about the idea driving his “Mad Max” franchise being attributed to “Alfred Hitchcock’s notion about making films that can be watched anywhere in the world without subtitles,” the essence of “Fury Road” is action so intense that dialogue is a mere afterthought, and even when there are spoken words, it’s mostly in the service of driving the mayhem.

Dialogue is so minimal that Max never even utters his own name until late in the movie’s run. He’s like the Man with No Name in the spaghetti westerns, which seems appropriate to the desert wasteland that is the backdrop for what is essentially a non-stop road warrior chase.

Imagery is a key element. A symbolic leafless tree stands alone in the desolate sands. A monstrous, sweeping sandstorm decimates the landscape. Every detail from the gadgets attached to the pursuing vehicles to the armaments used by the warriors is a visual treat.

In pursuit of Max and Furiosa, some of the War Boys catapult on bending poles from their vehicles in attack mode, while others frantically beat war drums.

The high-octane Road War is orchestrated by a dude swinging from a bungee cord as he shreds metal and flame from a double-necked electric guitar-cum-flamethrower.

“Fury Road” unfolds in near-constant action, with only a few breaks to allow everyone to catch their collective breath.

Tom Hardy has nailed the role of the road warrior Max, but he’s eclipsed by Charlize Theron’s superior portrayal of Furiosa, a feminist icon for a dismal age.

George Miller has gone into overdrive to deliver an exciting, action-packed road thriller.

To be sure, “Mad Max: Fury Road” has plenty of action violence, some of it graphic, but all of it necessary to drive the plot.

George Miller has a great bag of tricks that make this installment a most worthy component of the venerable franchise. 

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

People speak of “hearts and flowers” when they’re talking about poems with predictable sentimentality, but here’s an antidote to all those valentines, from Sally Bliumis-Dunn, who lives in New York.

Her most recent book of poems is Second Skin, Wind Publications, 2010.

Heart

She has painted her lips
hibiscus pink.
The upper lip dips
perfectly in the center

like a Valentine heart.
It makes sense to me—
that the lips, the open

ah of the mouth
is shaped more like a heart
than the actual human heart.
I remember the first time I saw it—

veined and shiny
as the ooze of a snail—
if this were what
we had been taught to draw

how differently we might have
learned to love.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2014 by Sally Bliumus-Dunn and reprinted by permission. Introduction copyright 2015 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

HOT PURSUIT (Rated PG-13)

The notion of a female buddy comedy that pairs mismatched partners in a clash of personalities that would remind one of Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock in the wildly funny “The Heat” would seem like a successful formula for a really good comedy.

Maybe that’s what director Anne Fletcher (“The Proposal”) had in mind for “Hot Pursuit.” Or maybe she was thinking of a twist on “The Odd Couple,” with one person fussy and uptight and the other the complete opposite, but also hilarious in the same way that Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin were totally incompatible in “Midnight Run.”

“Hot Pursuit” is not that kind of movie. It’s not even close to being reasonably funny, which in itself is a great disappointment given that Reese Witherspoon and sexy bombshell Sofia Vergara offer, at least on paper, the perception of comedic polar opposites capable of delivering some laughs.

I believe that another critic referred to this film as a “hot mess,” and being stymied at the moment for a more original thought, I just have to say that there may not be a better description for what unfolds in this attempted comedy that misfires so badly.

Witherspoon’s Officer Cooper is an uptight and by-the-book cop, who after an unfortunate incident with the use of a Taser on a civilian, has been relegated to the evidence room.

No one even calls her by her first name or even seems to know what it is. Apparently, Cooper doesn’t fit in very well with the San Antonio Police Department.

Surprisingly, her superior, Captain Emmett (John Carroll Lynch), offers a field assignment that would seem more appropriate for a seasoned officer, namely escorting the wife of a mob boss to Dallas, where she and her husband will testify against a major drug lord.

Excited to get out of the property room, Cooper is an intensely enthusiastic policewoman who can cite every section of the Penal Code and does so, most annoyingly, with great frequency. She’s also very petite, even more so in comparison to Colombian beauty Sofia Vergara’s mob wife Daniella Riva.

There are few laughs (maybe just two or three, at most) in “Hot Pursuit,” but it is amusing when the stiff, tense policewoman introduces herself as “Officer Cooper” to Mrs. Riva, who in turn replies “Look at you, you’re teeny-tiny, you’re like a little dog that I can put in my purse.”

What starts off as a supposedly routine transport assignment, one that even the desk-bound officer could handle, turns into a danger-filled Texas road trip when Cooper and Daniella are forced to make a run after they become the targets of both the drug lord’s henchmen and a pair of corrupt cops.

Intent on obeying the rules and following protocol, Cooper rigidly tries to steer her charge, Mrs. Riva, on the road to Dallas, but Daniella is used to doing things her own way and in her own time. The bickering between the two women begins almost the moment they first meet.

Then things go wrong when Mr. Riva is killed in a shootout. The sassy, spoiled Daniella, who insists on carrying luggage filled with expensive, gaudy high-heeled shoes, has no choice but to make a getaway in her vintage bright red Cadillac convertible with Officer Cooper.

A series of bizarre events almost too coincidentally convenient to establishing the two women as fugitives from the law result in them being completely on their own.

It doesn’t help that Cooper and Daniella are completely at odds with one another, with Mrs. Riva ranting and raving like she just escaped from an insane asylum.

The film’s best running gag just happens to come from frequent television news reports seen in the background, which manage to keep decreasing the height description of the diminutive Cooper and increasing the age of the statuesque Daniella, much to the frustration of the latter.

While on the lam, Cooper and Daniella stumble upon a bewildered farmer (comedian Jim Gaffigan) they disarm by pretending to be lesbians who can’t keep their hands off of each other. Meanwhile, he shoots off his finger during the excitement. This is just of many lame efforts at humor.

A more pleasant encounter comes when the two desperate women commandeer a pickup truck, not knowing that its owner, the hunky Randy (Robert Kazinsky), is passed out in the back with a monitor attached to his ankle.

Being a felon himself, Randy is sympathetic and helpful, and oddly enough attracted to the pushy, forceful policewoman.

The misfiring gags run the gamut from Cooper in a disguise as a teenage boy sneaking into a drug lord’s birthday party to the two women taking over a bus full of senior citizens on a sightseeing trip in order to stage a highway demolition derby with pursuing bad guys.

As mentioned earlier, “Hot Pursuit” is a hot mess. The jokes are so redundant about everything from fashion faux pas to police procedures that the comedy is a complete miscarriage.

The collateral damage also taints the comedic talents of Sofia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon, but hopefully they’ll recover from this mess.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

A couple I know adopted three very small children from a distant country, and the children had never been constrained in any way.

The airliner’s seatbelts were so fearful for them that they screamed all the way back to the States. But since then their lives have been wonderfully happy.

And here’s a similar story, this too with a good ending, by Patrick Hicks of South Dakota.

The Strangers

After we picked you up at the Omaha airport,
we clamped you into a new car seat
and listened to you yowl
beneath the streetlights of Nebraska.

Our hotel suite was plump with toys,
ready, we hoped, to soothe you into America.
But for a solid hour you watched the door,
shrieking, Umma, the Korean word for mother.

Once or twice you glanced back at us
and, in this netherworld where a door home
had slammed shut forever, your terrified eyes
paced between the past and the future.

Umma, you screamed, Umma!
But your foster mother back in Seoul never appeared.

Your new mother and I lay on the bed,
cooing your birth name,
until, at last, you collapsed into our arms.

In time, even terror must yield to sleep.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2014 by Patrick Hicks, “The Strangers,” from Adoptable, (Salmon Poetry, 2014). Poem reprinted by permission of Patrick Hicks and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2015 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON (Rated PG-13)

The summer season has arrived in early May and if there is a guaranteed box office hit, both for domestic and global audiences, it’s director Joss Whedon’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” a spectacular action film impervious to the opinions of film critics.

Just three years, Marvel Studios delivered the ultimate comic-book film in “The Avengers,” tying together for a single purpose mission such awesome superhero characters as Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Thor, Black Widow and Hawkeye.

An organization named S.H.I.E.L.D., headed by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), assembled these various Marvel superheroes into a shaky team to take down Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Thor’s megalomaniac adoptive brother, and to defend Earth from an alien attack.
 
This time around in the “Age of Ultron” S.H.I.E.L.D. has been dismantled and is out of the picture, though its fearless leader Nick Fury is still lurking in the shadows. He’ll show up at an opportune time, but regrettably the raving lunatic Loki is nowhere to be seen.

It may not count for much where things left off the last time, or that “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” came along after 2012’s “The Avengers.”

But there is the matter of the Avengers having to dispense with the wicked Hydra organization holed up in Eastern Europe.

With an assault on Hydra’s mountainous retreat, the Avengers encounter two new adversaries, the twins Pietro and Wanda Maximoff (Aaron-Taylor Johnson and Elizabeth Olson), known as Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch respectively, possessing the psychic powers to induce mind-altering visions for their enemies.

After an arduous battle, the Avengers take refuge in a bunker, celebrating their victory with one of the very few moments of merriment and down-time. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) amuses himself with a challenge to his heroic colleagues to lift his mighty hammer.

Romantic interludes are rare for our busy heroes, but there’s a tentative relationship developing between Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk, and Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha, aka Black Widow. The tricky part is to keep Bruce Banner’s emotions in check.

Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, proves his worth financing operations and delivering the humorous quips and barbed observations.

On the other side of the spectrum, Chris Evans’ affable Captain America gently chastises his colleagues for any off-color remarks.

The most fallible member of the team is Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton, known as Hawkeye for his sharpshooting skills with a lethal crossbow.

In the heat of battle, Hawkeye is obviously more vulnerable than his comrades, which is clear after the first skirmish in the remote forest.

The clash in the Eastern European mountains looks like a breeze in hindsight when the creation of artificial intelligence known as Ultron (voiced with eerie menace by James Spader) lets known his evil plan to bring global peace by eliminating every trace of mankind.

It was supposed to be this way. Tony Stark invested heavily to jumpstart a peacekeeping program, but recovering Loki’s powerful scepter from the clutches of Hydra yielded the surprise of an artificial intelligence in Ultron that developed an army of robot warriors.

Entering the fray against the villainous Ultron puts the Avengers crew at a significant disadvantage in the early goings, so much so that they repair to Hawkeye’s farmhouse in the Midwest to lick their wounds and regroup for the inevitable showdown with Ultron.

Along the way, a new character to help the Avengers arrives with the appearance of Vision (Paul Bettany), an artificial life form that, as far as I can tell, is an android designed by Ultron for nefarious purposes, but turned out to have a sweet soul with a soft spot for humans.

Globe-trotting adventure is the name of the game as the Avengers bounce around several continents before settling back to the climactic fight in the fictional Eastern European country of Sokovia, where the war-torn streets provide an exciting backdrop to the epic final battle scene.

The climactic action puts the Avengers in a difficult bind as the robot army seems nearly indestructible. With Tony Stark in over his head, his old pal Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) is once again ready to bring some military hardware to the fight.

Though “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” filled with great battle scenes, could benefit from more judicious editing to cut down the running time a tad, director Joss Whedon delivers the action goods that fans of this emerging franchise (two more films are in the works) are gleefully expecting.

What does it matter if, by chance, this second “Avengers,” in the mind of doubters, shines no brighter than a distant meteorite?

All of the elements of success for a superhero franchise are in plain view, and “Age of Ultron” is an action-packed juggernaut that won’t be derailed.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – The Middletown Art Center invites the public to attend its second opening reception, “Innovative Landscapes,” on Saturday, May 9, from 6 to 8 pm.

The group show features work by 14 local and regional artists that stretch the tradition of landscape to include innovations in format, medium, technology, process, concept or vision. Functional ceramic, glass, and metal pieces by local artists are also on view.

Art works on view include John Hanses’ large format landscape photographs, shot on film and printed using pigment inks, Ricia Araiza and Michal Leventhal’s collaboratively painted abstract landscapes, Mary Mattlage's monotypes in concertina-bound handmade books, Lisa Kaplan’s relief paintings using colorful earth-clay from various elevations in Lake County, and Renata Jaworska’s metal works, bent into soft organic forms.

Alana Clearlake, William Martin, Laura Kennedy, Peter Shandera, Anthony George, Graham Lloyd, Geoffrey Huckabay, Rojax, and Uriah Mills present other intriguing visions, dreamscapes, observations, formats and media that explore “Landscape.”

Recently established by local art professionals for residents and visitors to enjoy, MAC is a vibrant hub for art, art activities and cultural enrichment.

“We look forward to bringing the arts into more people’s lives with each exhibition, event or class” said Renata Jaworska, one of MAC’s founding artists. “It was amazing to meet so many great people at our gala opening in March. Art lovers and visual and performing artists from all over the county came to welcome more art culture into our communities. I am excited to meet more of them on May 9.”

Compelling artwork, friends old and new, musical ambiance courtesy of David Neft, and organic and biodynamic wine poured by Beaver Creek Vineyards, promise a delightful evening of culture and community not to be missed.

MAC is centrally located at 21456 Highway 175, at the junction of Highway 29 and Highway 175 in Middletown, the gateway to Lake County.

MAC is open Thursday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m., and Sunday from 12:30 to 5 p.m.

To learn more about classes and events, to become a member or support Mac with a donation, visit www.middletownartcenter.org or call 707-809-8118.