'Avatar: The Way of Water': Splashy

 

Avatar: the Way of Water

Dir: James Cameron

Scr: James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman, Shane Salerno

Pho: Russell Carpenter

Ed: David Brenner, James Cameron, John Refoua, Stephen E. Rivkin

Premiere: Dec. 16, 2022

192 min.

James Cameron is driven. He makes film spectaculars, and he keeps topping himself -- and everyone else in the industry -- with his new and fanciful creations. The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2, Titanic, Avatar. One record-breaking event after another. He seems compelled to create, literally, a new filmic landscape with each new project. We have waited for 12 years to see what’s on his mind now.

Technically, it’s a whole new ball game. Most impressively, he shoots much of his film underwater, and does so as fluently as he films above the surface. He then retools that reality with his amazing use of CGI and what must be the most advanced visual effects department in the world, crafting a new and complete ecosystem, rendered down to the most exacting details. In that sense, it is perfection itself.

This is a classic fantasy epic. That being said, it is one whose plot and themes a retread of previous Cameron narratives. We are once again on the beautiful, unspoiled planet of Pandora, inhabited by giant, blue, tailed, super-hippie indigenous people called the Na’vi. These noble savages (it is easy to conceive of it as Dances with Wolves in outer space) are uniquely attuned to the natural world, and interact with it in perfect symbiotic harmony.

Until the %#$*(% humans show up. Yes, they’re back, and this time they’re not after Unobtanium, they’re here to colonize Pandora to escape the dying Earth. Yes, we Homo sapiens are the villains, and Cameron’s contempt for humanity was never clearer. He is agonized about our inability to stop contributing to our own environmental destruction, and The Way of Water is very much a plea on behalf of the Earth, in cosmic trappings.

The hero of the last film, human-turned-Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is now a father and tribal leader. Conveniently, the evil Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), Jake’s nemesis, has been reborn as a Na’vi avatar as well, and he loses no time in going after Jake, the head of resistance to the human incursion. This quest for vengeance defines the rest of the film. Even the benign Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) returns, in altered form.

A flight from the dangers of being hunted leads them far away from their homeland, to another tribe that lives in sync with the ocean. What follows is about an hour of illustrating the created environment, leisuring in its wonders like a troop of travelogue-struck tourists. This guided tour of the oceanic life of Pandora does little to advance the plot, but it gives us a lot to look at and to ponder.

Did I mention the magical psychic whales? There’s plenty of them. You see, they’re being hunted, illegally, as they produce a substance that stops aging (a new Unobtanium, if you will). It is this hunt and its thwarting that take up the last third of the movie, propelling us along in a fast-paced, back-and-forth manner (how often can those kids get captured? In that way, it’s remindful of Peter Pan, with Quaritch as Captain Hook.) 

So the whales and the Na’vi and the humans get it on, and it all winds up as you might expect. 

So is it worth it? At three hours, the extreme vividness of the experience tends to overwhelm. It floods the senses, makes it hard to maintain focus. The middle third of the film is a stroll through visual effects. The cliche “kill your darlings” applies here. There is no one to tell Cameron if he’s gone overboard in the world-building department. His tenacious, exacting manifestation of the results of his imagination is an amazing sight. 

Those looking for a new narrative experience will be disappointed. Stick around for the visuals.

 

A bleeding-heart liberal's guide to 'Top Gun: Maverick'

 Top Gun: Maverick

Dir: Joseph Kosinski

Scr: Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie

Phot: Claudio Miranda

Ed: Eddie Hamilton

Premiere: May 27, 2022

130 min.

 Hoo boy. Well, it’s a good thing I waited this long to see and review this movie. That’s because it’s critic-proof. Not that many critics disliked it. In fact, pretty much everybody loved this movie. Predictably, I didn’t. Why?

First, I am immune to the charms of Tom Cruise. We are about the same age, and I grew up with his movies. But somehow, his earnest and cocky persona didn’t cause that kind of affection and admiration in me that I feel for the great white male stars from earlier years. I know intellectually that he has the stuff of which leading men are made, but I don’t feel it.

Now he mints his greatest financial win with this film, a sequel to the original Top Gun from 1986. It’s a new and improved product, engineered precisely to evoke heart-pounding, fist-pumping ecstasy in the viewer. And, if you are a male ages 13-18, I guarantee this will provoke that.

But what if you’re older and simply have given up on the glorification of the military and the assertion of the righteousness of violence? If that’s true, then there’ nothing in this film for you. If you don’t accept Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell as the World’s Greatest White Man, this film will be an empty exercise in action virtuosity.

You see, Mitchell is still a rebel, 36 years after the first film. He’s also still only a captain, when his friend “Iceman” (Val Kilmer) has by now become an admiral. Why? Because he’s a rebel, dang it! He gets in trouble all the time, and Iceman saves his bacon. This time, he’s the pilot of a experimental craft, and by golly he flies even though he’s told not to, and then flies it faster than it’s supposed to go, so it breaks and apart and he bails out. What a man.

So, do we see this character as an emotionally retarded man-child, struck in Oppositional defiant disorder? No, we see him as the apogee of male aspiration – free, irresponsible, disturbingly ageless. He indeed possesses the biggest penis in the universe.

He is reassigned to his old combat school, the Top Gun of the title. Now he has to pull together a ragtag assemblage of earnest and cocky youngsters who yearn to be schooled in the Tom Cruise academy of rule-breaking charm.

It turns out they have to attack a foreign uranium-enriching plant, run by a country that shall remain nameless (rhymes with Schmiran). This righteous task is a deadly trip through a winding canyon, bordered by missiles, protected by enemy fighters, with a minimal chance of success and no margin for error! It’s basically the final sequence of Star Wars, with Cruise as Luke Skywalker.

That’s right! Little old Tom Cruise goes from coaching the jet jockeys to getting back into the game, leading the mission himself. WHOOSH! BAM! BOOM! What do you think happens? What we would all like to have happen. Then there’s another climax! And another!

Wow. Smoke a cigarette and calm down. What else? The homoerotic sublimation is there in spades, so there’s that. There’s Val Kilmer, the same age as Cruise, looking old enough to be his grandfather. There’s the typical hard-bodies-on-the-beach scene, the meditative motorcycle ride, the second chance with an old flame. All the biggest hits are there, strung like beads on a wire.

It’s a triumph of the industrial cinema. It is wired to stimulate your pleasure zones. Unless you are like me, in which case you’ll go back to watching your weird old foreign art films.

 

'The Menu': horror comedy skewers haute cuisine

 The Menu

Dir: Mark Mylod

Scr: Seth Reiss and Will Tracy

Phot: Peter Deming

Ed: Christopher Tellifsen

Premiere: Nov. 18, 2022

106 min.

If you have ever been in a food service job, you will get it. If you’ve ever been to a fancy dinner where you didn’t understand what was going on, you will get it. The Menu is a dark satire that takes on the ridiculousness of high-profile fine-dining experiences, but its tale of madness and obsession is familiar both to those who dish it out and those who take it.

Taking it is, in fact, what the diners of The Menu must do, in ways they’ve never taken it before. Several super-wealthy patrons take a boat to a private island, where they will enjoy a multicourse meal prepared by the quietly remote master chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes at his icy best). Slowick is king of his world, a master chef whose every command is obeyed by his homogenous staff.

The guests consist of a wealthy couple, a washed-up movie star and his personal assistant, some crypto bros, a critic and her editor, and an obnoxious foodie (Nicholas Hoult) and his paid escort, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy, who is in everything so why not in this as well?). Slowick’s mother quietly drinks herself to sleep in the corner.

As the meal progresses, the courses get stranger. Chef talks about his impoverished and abused childhood. The maître d, Elsa (Hong Chau), starts abusing the guests. All the while, a sprightly sommelier continues to ply everyone with the appropriate accompanying wine. A sous chef performs a staged suicide.

Then it gets weird.

The filmmakers exercised due diligence in making the film look as convincing as possible – hiring food designer Dominique Crenn and using second unit director David Gelb, who created the Chef’s Table TV docuseries, to make the tone of the film conform to that of the high-end food show. The Menu’s restaurant is all too familiar, an intimidating high-tech, uneaseful space that emphasizes the dominance of the adjoining kitchen.

 The players all maintain straight faces as the carnage begins, and the filmmakers play it straight, too, never tipping their hand or getting ahead of the audience. The airy ridiculousness of fine dining’s conceits and conceptions are skewered thoroughly here.

As the evening unfolds, a laundry list of woes peculiar to the restaurant business are recited – the ingratitude for the effort and energy put into creating nourishing entertainments, the stubborn whims of the customer, who must always be accommodated, the dependence on other peoples' money, the lack of a real life in the business. The NO SUBSTITUTIONS policy. Any cook or server who ever dealt with a recalcitrant patron will savor the various punishments meted out to the assembled customers.

In the end, it’s the pumpers versus the dumpers, and everyone collaborates in their own destruction, save for the cynical and resourceful Margot, who serves as the Ishmael of this fishy tale. An ominous joke of a film, The Menu masterfully deconstructs the curious carapace of conceptions we have constructed around the simple act of eating food.