Film Clips: “Touch” and “Long Legs

20 Jul

‘Touch’ (2024)

Not entirely a “missed connection” or even “the one that got away,” but more “the one that ran away.” Based on Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson’s novel of the same name, Baltasar Kormákur’s pine-across-time-and-continents is bookended in two globally defining fates: the bombing of Hiroshima and the onset of Covid. Told in two timelines, “Touch” revolves around a 70-something Finnish gentleman by the name of Kristofer (Egill Ólafsson), a widower with a daughter who passes the time singing in a choir. He’s also recently diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s, and from his long, reflective face it’s clear he’s unsettled, memories a-flutter, unfulfilled; before the disease or virus can take hold, to London he goes, just as hotels and airlines are starting to mask up and shut down. The “why” we get in the other timeline – the 1960s – as a young Kristofer (played by the director’s son, Pálmi) drops out of school and takes up a job as a dishwasher in a Japanese restaurant. Kristofer bonds with the owner, Takahashi (Masahiro Motoki), who came to London to escape the pain and scars of the bombing, and with Takahashi’s daughter, Miko (Kôki). How events pan out in both timeframes take some painful and surprising turns. The ambient tenor orchestrated by Ólafsson is subtle and quietly moving, coming more from the soul and setting than from the flying of romantic sparks. It’s a reflective, internal story that plumbs tragedy and pain as much as it wells with hope and promise. The action takes place primarily in London with scenes in Finland and Japan; in this journey of the yearning heart, location is largely ancillary. The performers hit their marks well, though it’s hard to reconcile the lanky Pálmi with the stout Egill as the younger and older Kristofer. Given that much of “Touch” takes place in the kitchen of a Japanese restaurant, Ólafsson, the director, does a nice job of bringing the sensuality of the food to the fore, if not quite putting it in the company of “The Taste of Things” (2023) or “Babette’s Feast” (1987). 

‘Longlegs’ (2024)

All the hype about this serial killer chiller from Oz Perkins being the next “Silence of the Lambs” (1991) has been well chummed by releasing company Neon, almost to the point of the marketing becoming the reality. Nicolas Cage, also a producer on the film, makes for an unforgettable Hannibal Lecter-Buffalo Bill hybrid as the sadistic psycho of the title, and green FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) pops out of the microwave like something of a reheated Clarice Starling as she lurches into dark, forbidding places looking to bag Longlegs. It’s a moody piece propelled by deftly heightened atmospheric dread and some great performances, but it blows its credibility in the final act, and much of what’s thrown onscreen from a crime investigation standpoint makes little sense despite all its ardor and articulation – the hand waving is impressive. Set in Oregon in the 1990s (Bill Clinton is the prez), there’s been a series of families killed over a 20-year period. The crimes look usually like murder-suicide by the dad, except for a series of cryptic notes left at the scenes. Early on we learn that Harker has innate instincts that go beyond profiling and may be tied to a childhood trauma. They get her put on the Longlegs case with senior agent Carter (a dutiful and on-point Blair Underwood). To say more about the plot would be to ruin the tense ride. Monroe was good as a stalked soul who fights back in “Watcher” (2022) and “It Follows” (2014) but is less effective here, if mostly because of the arduous bait-and-switch twists the plot opts for. Cage is unquestionably the reason to see the film: His well-meted appearances as the pasty, androgynous and indelibly ghoulish Longlegs make the film, though the upping of the ante gets to be a little much near the end. Also impressive is Alicia Witt as Lee’s mother, who has a few bad habits and more than a few skeletons in the closet. Perkins’ other films, including “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” (2017), have been equally dark and moody and on point in genre, but yet never quite transcended. “Longlegs,” with the killer turns from Cage and Witt, ups the game, but cliches and a soulless finale hobble it from reaching its full stride.

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A Quiet Place: Day One

2 Jul

Killer aliens in NYC? That calls for a slice of pizza, hunted silently

Are prequels necessary? I can say I had a damn good time with “Furiosa,” the “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) prequel this year and this, showing how world annihilation by alien invasion came to be a thing in the “Quiet Place” series. What the two films have in common is a can-do – er, make that, kick-ass – lead in the form of Anya Taylor-Joy in George Miller’s post-apocalyptic road-rage flick and here, in an apocalyptic preamble, the infallible Lupita Nyong’o, so compelling – and Oscar winning –  in “12 Years a Slave” (2013) and in two roles in Jordan Peele’s sophomore feature “Us” (2019). Nyong’o is the main reason “Day One” flies as Sam, a young woman who ostensibly has terminal cancer. She’s part of a hospice excursion (the only one without white hair and white skin) bused into New York City for a marionette performance. Then things go crash-bang out on the avenue. Meteors, or the like, are raining down. Explosions and soot and ash are everywhere. 

The imagery is evocative of 9/11. A disoriented Sam walks through the debris and billows of smoke, clinging to her service cat, Frodo, while survivors around her shout out for loved ones. For their efforts they are eviscerated by the velociraptorlike xenomorphs we came to know in the John Krasinski-helmed films. The bloody assault comes on like a flash, akin to the zombies in “World War Z” (2013). People are picked off and picked apart left and right, though as we know from Krasinski’s future chapters, this species of eradicating aliens can’t see; they home in for the kill by sound.

Cut-off survivors hole up in crumbling penthouse-crowned skyscrapers as military Black Hawks fly overhead. Those trapped in Manhattan are told to shelter in place silently and that boats will come to evacuate them – the military has blown the bridges around the island, having learned that water is pretty perilous to the invaders. Sam, with her wide, luminous eyes doing the communicating and Frodo in her clutch, has other ideas and heads for a visit to the old studio apartment where she penned poetry and to get a slice at the best pizza shop in Harlem. She’s going in the opposite direction of everyone else, but a British law school student (Joseph Quinn) tags along with her despite her gestured objections. 

Competently directed by Michael Sarnoski, who punched his ticket with the Nicholas Cage curio “Pig” in 2021, “Day One” builds with purpose and fervor, but ultimately drifts into the predictable.  The use of thunder and rain and a deflating car tire offer up nice flourishes, but not quite to the degree that Krasinski scored on the two chapters starring his wife, Emily Blunt. Djimon Hounsou, who had a significant role as Henri in “Part II” plays the crossover character trapped in the city with Sam. He’s in the film just enough to make the link; this is the Sam show. No Nyong’o, no movie.

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The Bikeriders

23 Jun

The gang revs up to go idling through the heartland

By Tom Meek

In the latest from Jeff Nichols, a dying way of life receives a nostalgic elegy. Beyond the big gleaming chrome growl of the Harley hog, “The Bikeriders” is something of a kindred spirit to the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola adaptations of the S.E. Hinton novels “Rumble Fish” and “The Outsiders.” Like those gritty, spare portraits of Midwestern isolationism, “The Bikeriders” embeds us with a tribe who exist on the fringe of society and abide by their own laws. In this case it’s a fictional bike gang named the Vandals that operates on the outskirts of Chicago in the late 1950s and 1960s. The film depicts the chopper brigade as more misunderstood than hood at first, but there’s a shift from freedom of expression (“Easy Rider”) to the more criminal (“Sons of Anarchy”) as new blood infuses the ranks.

Inspired by Danny Lyon’s 1968 similarly titled photo collection – making it like Larry Clark’s provocative “Tulsa,” which was a film and book of photographs – “The Bikeriders” flexes epic aspirations early on while centering on the bromance between gang leader Johnny (Tom Hardy) and his mercurial sergeant-at-arms Benny (“Elvis” himself, Austin Butler) with Benny’s (initially) reluctant love interest Kathy (Jodie Comer, “Killing Eve”) regularly at odds with Johnny in a battle for the man’s soul, if you will. 

Lyon is a character in the film, played by Mike Faist (“Westside Story,” “Challengers”), who hangs occasionally with the Vandals and shoots them while carousing at their biker bar hangouts or drunken campground jamborees. Much of the film’s narrative is meted through his tape-recorded interviews with Kathy over the years as she recounts the rise and fall of the Johnny-led Vandals. It’s a neat device that allows the film to be agile in its temporal movements; the downside is that it saps the grit and grimness of the road and the gang. Imagine if Lorraine Bracco’s Karen Hill narrated “Goodfellas” (1990).

Nichols’ films – “Mud” (2013) and “Take Shelter” (2011) to name two – have generally been about discovery in the heartland. He stretches here. There are moments that punch and pull and others that feel like they are leading somewhere new yet never quite arrive. One of the film’s minor missteps is in Benny, a lone wolf and a romantic, as the film avers through the eyes of the deeply invested Johnny and Kathy. But the character we are given never feels as compelling as we are told. We buy it because of Butler’s ingrained natural charisma and his haunting splash of Johnny Depp’s “Cry-Baby” (1990) simmer.

Hardy (“The Dark Knight Rises,” “Mad Max: Fury Road”), a thinking man’s thug if ever there was one, does much of the heavy lifting as a man who relishes the power of his post but knows there’s a target on his back from the Vandal code, which says members can challenge him to fight to settle a disagreement or move up in rank. What Hardy renders onscreen feels pulled from Brando in “The Wild One” (1953) with a bit of a Boston accent poured on.

The cast of old-school riders is an eclectic mix that features Michael Shanon and Joel Edgerton, who have worked with Nichols before individually (“Take Shelter” and “Loving,” respectively) and collectively (“Midnight Special”), as well as Norman Reedus, who’s a natural on a hog (he did have his own motorcycle travelogue show on AMC); Emory Cohen, the crew’s lovable Squiggy, who goes by the moniker Cockroach because he likes to eat bugs; and Toby Wallace, who plays Sex Pistol guitarist Steve Jones in the Danny Boyle series “Pistol” and kindles more of that menacing youthful sneer here as The Kid, an ambitious punk who wants admittance to the Vandals but runs afoul of Johnny. It’s a Shakespearean kick that needed more revving for its payoff.

Shot by longtime Nichols collaborator Adam Stone, “The Bikeriders” looks the part, capturing the grungy, neon-lit shanty bars and vast farmlands in the day’s dying light. The performers are all in character too, yet the grind of the gangland network gets occasionally sidetracked and lost is in the melodrama of minutiae.

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Road improvements are still hastened by deaths but slowed by resentments

16 Jun

A sticker posted at the scene of a June 7 traffic death in Cambridge’s Harvard Square.

Nearly 10 years ago, after cyclists Bernard Lavins and Amanda Phillips died within three months of each other, I wrote about the vulnerability of cyclists as road users and hoped to see lowered speed limits, fewer trucks in areas where cyclists and pedestrians were common and a shift from car-centric urban planning to equitable, safer-for-all streets. Much has changed. Cambridge’s Cycling Safety Ordinance went through, then-governor Charlie Baker enacted a “safe passing” law, Bluebike stations have blossomed around Greater Boston and e-bikes have made two wheels a more accessible alternative form of commuting for more people. Yet in that time, three more cyclists have been killed by trucks on Cambridge streets, including a 55-year-old woman June 7 at Mount Auburn and DeWolfe streets in Harvard Square; and lawsuits for a time sought to halt and reverse the CSO by returning the slim slivers of safe haven to trucks and other carbon-emitting vehicles – all as unchecked temperatures continue to rise globally. We are allegedly making progress, but trending backward and people are dying.

As a cyclist who’s been riding the streets of Cambridge and Boston some 4,000 miles a year for nearly 40 years, the need to bike defensively hasn’t changed much: There’s still a lack of deference to the safety of vulnerable street users by motor vehicles who don’t look for them, zipping past before making a hard right or blasting their horn because they don’t think they belong on the road.

Nearly all cyclists are multimodal – they also walk and drive – but most will tell you that when on a bike, they have to have their senses engaged more keenly. “Head on a swivel,” as many say. To put it another way, as a pedestrian you don’t regularly assume a car is going to come up on the sidewalk; in a car, if you have a green, you don’t yield for fear that another car will blast through a red and hit you, since you have the right of way. And in both scenarios you have a designated safe place in a sidewalk or a 2-ton encasement should any of that happen, unlikely as it is. On a bike, one ding and you’re out in the road and at the mercy of a six-seat SUV going twice your speed, with nothing to protect you.

This is documented easily by crash data from the state Department of Transportation and Cambridge police open portals. Over a 10-year period, six cyclists have died on our streets and 11 pedestrians; as a percent of population (approximately 105,000 and 9,000), bike riders are six times more likely to die via a motor vehicle strike than a pedestrian. More telling is that at least five of the six fatal crashes involved a truck.

Friday’s tragedy occurred shortly after the CSO took a blow in a recent City Council vote, with deadlines potentially extended in places unless the city laws are adjusted to find more car parking. But a bike-lane backlash has been going on for years – “They run red lights”; “They don’t wear helmets”; “Their bikes don’t have lights” – in addition to resentment over the loss of parking, with spaces for people with disabilities being the emotional ante often laid down. Reckless behavior is never acceptable, and cyclists can be their own best ambassadors by showing courtesy and respect to other road users; that said, motor vehicles pose the far bigger public risk and are the sole agent of road deaths. Meanwhile, in the recent makeover of Porter Square, when separated bike lanes were installed, the number of accessible parking spaces available more than doubled as part of the project.

An important aspect about that June 7 crash is that it happened where there were separated bike lanes. Whether the box truck made an illegal right (rights are allowed only on a green arrow) or the cyclist proceeded through a red light or some other factor was at play has yet to be determined. It may be some time before we know the results of an investigation, but one thing that should be considered in the interim is street design. This section of Mount Auburn is an opening-up point, which adds to its complexity. For traffic heading east on Mount Auburn, there are five traffic lights and three signs. That’s a lot to take in; if you sit at the intersection and observe for a few signal cycles, you will see confusion from users. And, of course, there are those who push through illegally. We try out traffic pattern designs to hopefully improve road safety, but must balance the needs of businesses and those who need to get around. It’s a challenge, and one with impacts.

The long and short is, traffic flows need to be simple and intuitive. Are cyclists from other states familiar with Boston bike signals, are the signals and signs at Mount Auburn and DeWolfe in the best location for each type of road user? These are nagging questions that should have been answered by post-installation use and review by those who came up with them, as well as those who enforce traffic. We’re a world-class city with revered universities that draw people from all corners of the globe; there are going to be new-to-Boston people in the streets every day. Our rotaries are infamous for their WTF factor to those newly entering Massachusetts; intersections in Harvard Square don’t need to be.

The victim, who hailed from Florida, was on a Bluebike, eliciting on social media boards sentiments that those who ride the rentals “don’t know what they’re doing.” Bluebikes are designed to be a simple walk-up-and-use transportation; it’s the violence of the streets that’s the real factor here, and we should acknowledge that. If we applied this same logic of “needing to know how to navigate the streets of Boston before getting on a bike” and extend it to cars, would anyone deplaning from Italy, the U.K. or Japan be able to rent a car at Logan?

The intersection will change. The city will act. The sad reality is that it took a life to do it. We’re one of three area cities with Boston and Somerville that have adopted Vision Zero goals – to eliminate traffic fatalities through engineering – but we’ve struggled to meet checkpoints. Potentially extending CSO deadlines only addles those efforts.

There is a sprig of hope, however, as on Monday the council gets a policy order asking the city to undertake a review of intersections where crashes have resulted in a serious injury. It’s a decade late, but something that could have real results. And getting measurable results is the only way to evaluate downstream efforts: ink is cheap, blood is not. Furthermore, as we become a denser city, we need to rethink how we use our streetscapes and who uses them. It’s not just about safety. It’s also about equity.

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‘Hold,’ an installation suggesting enslavers’ ship, offers place for reflection in idyllic Radcliffe Yard

7 Jun

“Hold,” by Curry J. Hackett and Gabriel Jean-Paul Soomar, is installed in Radcliffe Yard near Harvard Square.

Idyllic Radcliffe Yard on Brattle Street in Harvard Square hosts rotating art exhibits in the cozy, verdant nook known as the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Garden. You know, those perfectly formed mounds of sand and gravel, the stately, tiered wooden walkway or perhaps the picturesque, grassy green knolls with wispy reeds reaching skyward. The Harvard Radcliffe Institute has held a biennial competition within the Harvard community since 2012 to produce and deliver these public installations.

This year’s winner, “Hold,” by Graduate School of Design students Curry J. Hackett and Gabriel Jean-Paul Soomar debuted before commencement ceremonies: an abstract rendering of a slave ship’s cargo hold. It may just be the institute’s most provocative installation to date, as it stirs the painful legacy of slavery in America and, more pointedly, at Harvard.

The 30-foot, U-shaped structure of wood and translucent plexiglass represents the nave or “hold” of a ship where those forcefully abducted from their native land, put in chains and separated from their families existed for long stretches under inhumane conditions – relative darkness and little food or water – as they were harried across the ocean and into the shackles of plantation enslavement. The rising wall on the Garden Street side of the installation is an evocation of the ship’s sail that caught the wind and drove the vessel.

The open, interactive design invites visitors to step inside the “Hold” and interact with history and the ripples of injustice across decades and centuries. “Sometimes when I go there I see a ruin. Other times I go there and I see a common,” Hackett said over coffee, reflecting on his own interactions with the piece.

Curry J. Hackett, left, and Gabriel Jean-Paul Soomar at the May 15 opening event for “Hold.”  

Hackett and Soomar didn’t come together so much because of a Harvard connection, but because Soomar’s mentor at the University of Miami knew of Hackett, who had taught design at Howard University and the University of Tennessee. The inspiration for “Hold,” Soomar said, came as the two sought to create “an inviting safe place for Black and brown people and others marginalized who might not otherwise have such a space at Harvard.”

“We wanted to bring forth narratives and histories and create a conversation,” Soomar said.

A key conceptual bonding point for the two and the design were the writings of professor Katherine McKittrick, a prominent feminist and activist at Canada’s Queen’s University. Most specifically, her essay on “Plantation Futures” and the notion of enclosure and the walling off of Black peoples. The walls that enclose here go beyond the hull of the ship, as there are other barriers that sequester and separate, be they redlining, disproportionate incarceration or inequity in educational opportunity – the list is long. Additionally, the Radcliffe Institute, an interdisciplinary academic research center with a focus on issues of race and gender, invited applicants to propose topics and themes that might be related to “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery” report released in 2022 during the tenure of president Lawrence Bacow.

“Hold” is a multimedia experience. An audio component that enriches the sense of immersion is slated to change over the exhibit’s two-year tenure but now plays “A Baptism Story” – a bit of “personal oral history” as Hackett describes it. If you plug in your earbuds and scan the barcode on the plaque, you hear a soundscape Hackett recorded around Boston and the banks of the Charles River – the repetitive clanging of a pile driver at a construction site, the rustle of reeds and pronounced splashing of water – mixed with a looped phone conversation between Hackett and his mother recalling her baptism in rural Virginia and singing a few bars of a hymn.

The recording is meant to evoke spirituality and sensation, Hackett said, though much of the conversation is obfuscated by other sounds to protect the privacy between mother and son while conveying the essence of their relationship and bond. If you go at sunset, there are weatherproof speakers embedded in the ground around “Hold” that play the nearly 15-minute track. “It’s like you’re in the middle of a conversation,” Hackett said. The site-projected audio is far more affecting and immersive than the streamable alternative. Like a good Dolby system, you hear sounds in the aural fore and some that are faraway; from the splashes, you can practically feel your feet in the water. There’s also a track of chimes that play at 11 a.m. Sunday, the time many Black churches schedule services.

The soundscape for “Hold” will play on holidays such as Juneteenth, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Independence Day.

A new soundscape is expected every three months. Next up, Soomar, who was born in Miami and raised in Trinidad and Florida, will bring a collage of celebratory sounds from diasporic carnivals in Trinidad, London, Boston and Nigeria. “It’ll be like going from one room to another with different music,” Soomar said. From there, Hackett and Soomar, graduates from the School of Design as of May, will curate additional soundscapes, working with Radcliffe staff to draw from the Harvard community.

The ongoing process also provides an opportunity for Hackett and Soomar to reconnect with their creation. The hope is to have other events – community gatherings and perhaps panel talks, Hackett said.

Hackett, who has a design consultancy, is looking to return to the classroom, though where is still to be decided. Soomar will teach this summer at the Arts for Learning program in Miami and will likely launch his own consultancy.

The Radcliffe selection process was something of a sojourn of endurance. Hackett and Soomar submitted their initial design sketches and concept overview early in 2023 and were told that March they were one of five shortlisted entries. They submitted a prototype of their design and in June 2023 found they’d won. It was “fulfilling and humbling,” Soomar said.

As a result of the “Legacy of Slavery” report, the Bacow administration pledged $100 million to redress the stain of slavery in the university’s past, including a public memorial acknowledging the use of enslaved people to build and operate the school. Last week the memorial committee heads, English professor Tracy K. Smith and Carpenter Center director Dan I. Byers, resigned, citing pressures to rush the project. The timeline for the memorial is still unknown, though 2027 was an early goal. In the interim there is “Hold.”

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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

25 May

Series put in reverse to fill in the gaps on a map of dangerous ground

Hard to believe it’s been nearly 10 years since George Miller punched us all in the face with “Fury Road,” his amped-up reenvisioning of the post-apocalyptic “Mad Max” universe. A phenomenal cast and action scenes that arguably topped the original trilogy’s signature episode, “The Road Warrior” (1981), made that spectacle of a lawless world taken over by marauding tribal factions a reboot like no other. “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the new nitro-injected prequel to that 2015 desert storm, is a high-energy affair, to be certain. It doesn’t move the needle, but it is game to try to keep pace.

One of the perverse pleasures of those late 1970 and 1980s films (“Mad Max” and “Beyond Thunderdome” bookending “Road Warrior”) was Miller’s minimal backstory or world building. In voiceover we’re told only that fuel become scarce, nations went to war over it and nukes happened – leaning in on catastrophic climate change before COP 21 was even a glimmer in the U.N.’s eye. Then again, global nuclear warfare pretty much leapfrogs an environmental crisis. 

As always, scarce resources are the crux of conflict in “Furiosa” and the reason for the rise of ’roid-rage tyrants such as the Morlock-ish Immortan Joe or our new dispenser of wasteland sadism, Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), whose MO is drawing and quartering by motorcycle after a bit of “Squid Game” fun. (This younger Immortan Joe is played by Lachy Hulme, replacing Hugh Keays-Byrne from the 2015 film. Keays-Byrne, also indelible as Toecutter in the original “Mad Max” in 1979, died in 2020.) As we know from “Fury Road,” young, fertile women are worth warring over as well, or more so to be hoarded away in chastity belts with the intent to propagate legacies Genghis Kahn style. 

Miller and his longtime co-scribe Nick Lathouris, had a small part in the 1979 film, do a yeoman’s job of fleshing out the chaotic, dust-choked universe conjured up in “Fury Road.” In this chapter we actually get to go to the Bullet Farm and Gas Town, fortified encampments that loomed across the desert but were never visited or sieged by Immortan Joe’s pasty white phalanx of War Boys. “Furiosa” also becomes the first “Max” flick to play significantly off plot developments from another chapter (though to belie the title, while there is a Max stand-in, there is no one named Max). The film’s five segments begin in the Green Place of Many Mothers where “Fury” essentially ends, as a young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is kidnapped by the minions of Dementus. Her mother (Charlee Fraser), a hell of a shot with a rifle, follows along in a pursuit. It’s long-simmering scene with the potent poetry of the grueling desert march from “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962). Jumping forward in time, an older Furiosa played by Anya Taylor-Joy (“The Queen’s Gambit,” “The Witch”) has been traded from Dementus to Joe to stave off a war and later, through near-death happenstance, goes incognito in Joe’s mountain cliff complex known as the Citadel. 

Given that what much of what goes down in wasteland has to do with dick waving (I mean, we have characters called Rictus Erectus, Scrotus and Pissboy) and prison-yard, alpha-male domination, the uneasy peace and trade accords with Gas Town and the Bullet Farm begin to fray, with Furiosa and her own agenda in play as war looms. This is also the first “Mad Max” to have hordes of equally matched factions go at it, not the haplessly underarmed and helplessly outnumbered stranded and beset in their own personal “Rio Bravo” (1959). And despite the outwardly mean, masculine veneer, like “Fury Road,” “Furiosa” is decidedly female in its humanist gaze and nurturing of hope for a better tomorrow. 

Taylor-Joy is seamless as the can-do, younger version of what Charlize Theron brought to the screen nine years ago. Equally superb is Browne as the adolescent Furiosa, and not enough can be said about Fraser’s mad mom, who may be the most formidable wasteland warrior of all. Hemsworth tries, but he’s no Lord Humungous, and his bawdy bad-ass retorts have a bit too much “Thor” jokiness to them. The other near miss is Tom Burke (Orson Welles in “Mank”) as Praetorian Jack, a weak-tea distillation of Mel Gibson’s morally ambiguous roamer from the initial films who lacks the harrowed, frying-pan-into-the-fire immediacy of Tom Hardy in the last go-round; a relationship dynamic between Jack and Furiosa that Miller aims for as they ride out into the wasteland in the requisite fortified tanker never really takes hold, because Taylor-Joy’s grease-smeared avenger is so much more fully baked and fire-breathing. 

“Furiosa,” as gorgeous as it is to take in, is long, and Miller and Lathouris unwisely rehash moments from past films (Gyro Captain ultra-lights, a botched Molotov catching fire on the legs of a hapless combatant and the whole “You want to get out of here, you talk to me” swagger line, among the many) as homage, which just weakens them. You can’t fault the film’s furious pacing, jaw-dropping action sequences and dutiful connecting of dots, but is it needed? “Fury Road” was a mic drop; “Furiosa” is a victory lap, the “Silmarillion” of the series. 

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The bike bus rolls on each Friday in Cambridge, but a recent kids’ ride was more like a parade

23 May

By Tom Meek

Saturday, May 18, 2024

Darren Buck leads a bike bus in Cambridge on Friday.

The Peabody/Rindge Avenue Upper School bike bus is about to notch its second anniversary. It launched at the end of June 2022, just as Cambridge was emerging from pandemic lockdowns and shut-ins, and has operated nearly every Friday of the academic calendar since.

A bike bus is a parent-chaperoned group of children who ride to school together. There’s safety in numbers that provide visibility and street presence, and participants get a low-stress, fresh-air outing. The Peabody/RAUS group led by parents Katherine Beaty and Darren Buck is one of nine bike bus initiatives in Greater Boston and the only one in Cambridge. There are three in Somerville.

Beaty started the bike bus because being a bike advocate in the more traditional, political sense had become taxing, she said, noting its meetings, campaigns, emails and follow-ups yielding little immediate result or much joy. “I wanted to do something that would bring me joy and get my kids to school,” she said, speaking before a bike bus presentation she and Buck gave Wednesday as part of the Streetwise lecture series at the Aeronaut Brewery. Buck, who works in transportation policy, was in the midst of scouting cities to relocate his family to and happened to encounter Beaty leading a group of kids on bike. He knew immediately Cambridge was the place to land, he said.

One of the leading proponents for the bike bus movement is “Coach” Sam Balto, a Portland, Oregon, physical education educator who taught at the David A. Ellis School in Roxbury. He’s also a self-described tactical urbanist – activists such as those in Critical Mass or the Boston Bike Party who take a physical approach and might spray paint bike lanes on a street in the middle of the night. When in Boston, Balto used to place cardboard cutouts of Tom Brady around the Ellis school to get cars to slow down. Beaty referred to him as her “guru.”

A May 8 ride in recognition of National Walk, Bike and Roll to School Day included performers from the School of Honk.

In their Streetwise presentation, Beaty and Buck outlined the three steps necessary for a successful bike bus. First is finding a calm, safe route to the destination, probably less-trafficked side streets; there’s an engagement component of reaching out to the community, other parents and the school administration; the most critical part is to have fun. For a May 8 recognition of the National Walk, Bike and Roll to School Day, the Peabody/RAUC bike bus was accompanied by members of School of Honk, who performed while rolling along. Vice mayor Marc McGovern spoke and rode with the group. Beaty said the caravan had more than 130 riders.

For this past Friday’s regular ride, which I attended, revered Boston institution Keytar Bear was supposed to join but was unable to make it because off traffic issues, promising to accompany a future date instead. This time there was approximately 40 riders, which Beaty said was typical; drop-off in the winter is not significant, she said, though some rides have to be canceled when there’s ice or heavy snow or rain.

The route that Beaty and Buck lead begins at Russell Field near the Alewife T station, with organizers first gathering riders from the Fresh Pond Apartments on Rindge Avenue. Beside parents who serve as ride marshals, there are volunteers from the Cambridge Bike Safety Group who help make sure intersections are safe to proceed through and block traffic as necessary. The right, safer route in this case includes Dudley and Reed streets, some of it parallel to the busier avenue where the school is. Students of all ages participate, with some riding with parents in e-assisted cargo bikes, some kicking along on balance bikes and others doing their own two-wheel propulsion. The communal joy of the activity is palpable, and an apt flourish to the end the week. Most people the bike bus passes cheer and wave, Beaty and another Bike Safety volunteer said. You can often see on the faces of onlookers the effect of a parade of second-graders gliding by.

The Peabody bike bus works only for the commute to school, not from, because of varying after-school schedules and one-way streets that prevent a calm and safe path back to Russell Field. Many parents bike their kids home on the sidewalk, or load their bicycles into their car or the hold of a cargo bike. Organizers are asking the city to designate certain streets as a Neighborway, as they are doing in Somerville.

Beaty said she would love to see more bike buses, but cannot be in two places at once – and she and Buck live close to Russell Field. Their children won’t be at Peabody forever, either, and Beaty, a Harvard library employee, will be on a research sabbatical in Rome next year. The hope is that others will step up. Given the group’s energy and levels of participation, that might not be a problem.

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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

11 May

Reboot hails Caesar

And so we enter into our next “Planet of the Apes” trilogy. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, theaters were packed for people in ape suits chasing after hunky Hollywood sorts such as Charlton Heston (the 1968 original with a script by “Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling) and James Franciscus (“Beneath the Planet of the Apes”) playing men caught out of time and in the wrong place – a world ruled by talking apes where humans were largely mute also-rans. They were the kindlings of the blockbuster before there was “Jaws” (1975) or “Star Wars” (1977) Those films, all starring Roddy McDowall, were a five-pack with the actor playing the demure, science-minded chimp Cornelius in the first three and then his son, Caesar in the last two, “Conquest for the Planet of the Apes” (1972) and “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” (1973).

Skipping over Tim Burton’s 2001 stinker, the 2011-2017 trilogy (“Rise,” “Dawn,” “War for …”) wasn’t so much a reboot as a retooling that leveraged CGI and the talents of motion-capture actor extraordinaire Andy Serkis playing the series centerpiece, Caesar, who leads the apes out of human tyranny and along the path to a peaceful sovereign existence. In that series, apes achieved higher intelligence and the ability to speak because of humankind’s meddling and experimentation, while humans turned aphasic and dimwitted due to a virus that pretty much shut down the planet – this being pre-Covid, mind you. 

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is a new grab at a franchise (“From the beginning we thought about this as a trilogy,” director Wes Ball told Empire) that serves up a warm embrace of Caesar and his legacy. Since “War for the Planet of the Apes” the solidarity of ape-dom has fragmented and gone feudal. We’re a few generations out as the eagle clan of apes, a peaceful treehouse encampment-aviary, raise eagles to help them fish, scout and defend themselves. Humans are rare and believed to be near extinction. 

Our protagonist is Noa (Owen Teague), a coming-of-age chimp whose father (Neil Sandilands) is leader of the clan and harsh to his own. On an excursion to find coveted eagle eggs and rise in rank and stature, Noa and his posse see signs of a lone human in the woods and other forces moving through the valley as well. The latter turns out to be a column of soldier apes sent forth by a bonobo known as Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), who, like any good Roman leader seeking to expand the empire, does so by sacking and enslaving – which is exactly what happens to the eagle clan. In the aftermath Noa links up with Raka (a beautifully baritoned Peter Macon), a hermit orangutan well versed in the teachings of Caesar (“Ape not kill ape,” which Proximus Caesar, who trades on the name for effect and de facto authority, violates regularly) and keeper of books, which Noa has never seen. Noa’s also never seen a human, but sure enough, the waif in the woods, (Freya Allen, “The Witcher”), now trailing them for food scraps, comes out of the dark and joins them on their quest to infiltrate Proximus Caesar’s seaside fortress – an enormous, rusted-out aircraft carrier or cargo ship beached up against the rocky cliffside – and free the eagle clan survivors, Noa’s mother and a budding love interest among those imprisoned. It’s no spoiler to say that Allen’s Mae (the apes call all human women “Nova” by default) can speak, which blows even Raka’s mind.

The film’s gorgeously shot and boasts some imaginative world building, but there’s a lot going on, perhaps too much: Proximus Caesar’s larger agenda is to gain access to an old military silo for the ostensible humanmade war machine relics inside; to date, their big tactical weapon is an electric cattle prod; other than that, it’s knives, spears and fists. Several plot threads never get tied up, and Noa and Mae are thinly drawn – twice as much so if you hold them up against Serkis’ Caesar. Part of that is the uneven pacing by Ball, who cut his teeth on the “Maze Runner” series, another dystopian sci-fi concept. That said, there are some nice homages to the 1968 original, including a dark horse ambling regally down a deserted beach, those eerie scarecrow totems from the forbidden zone and the ominous trumpeting of a ram’s horn before a siege.

The film is less steeped in the metaphorical references to slavery and racism layered into the 1963 “Apes” novel by Pierre Boulle (who also wrote the novel that “The Bridge of the River Kwai” was based on) and more front and center in the earlier franchise. What we do get is some megalomaniacal clinging to power that feels Trumpian and plenty of fair digs about human hubris and the past due to repeat itself, as well as the perils of game-changing war technology falling into the wrong hands. Not much of it’s fresh, but it is dutiful and likely do well enough to ensure the next two chapters before another pause and a reboot. It’s how it goes, damn them all to hell.

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Film Clips

27 Apr

Of Beavers and Boys, reviewed: ‘Hundreds of Beavers’ and ‘Boy Kills World’

Cult camp is an odd genre bucket that collects a vast variety of films dumped there for varying reasons. Some (“El Topo,” “Barbarella” and even the recently released “Sasquatch Sunset”) end up there by design; others (“Showgirls,” “Mommy Dearest”) wind up there because they’re unintended, rubbernecking-worthy spectacles. Two films from this week’s roundup land there with mixed results: “Hundreds of Beavers,” which had a held-over-by-popular-demand extended run at the Somerville Theatre this year and is now available on streaming platforms, and “Boy Kills World,” which played as part of the Boston Underground Film Festival at The Brattle Theatre and opens at Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond on Friday. Two different films with distinctly different outcomes.

‘Hundreds of Beavers’ (2022)

“Beavers,” co-written by director Mike Cheslik and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, shoots for something new and markedly left of center. What the pair has concocted is slapstick, silent-era comedy mixed with loopy Looney Tunes animation and modern-day special effects. Made for a mere $150,000, the film has a premise that feels affectionately borrowed from Chaplin or Keaton: A 19th-century applejack seller named Jean Kayak (Tews), perpetually hopped up on his own hooch, gets into a skirmish with an army of beavers in the frozen wilds of the northern Midwest – think “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972) by way of “The Gold Rush” (1925). The beavers aren’t cute CGI creations, but dudes in suits with ginormous buckteeth. There’s something to do with a fur trader (Doug Mancheski) and his winsome daughter (Olivia Graves) whom Jean fancies, but it’s mostly Jean versus the bevy of beavers with cartoonish boinks and bams and some fairly taxing physical comedy performed by Tews as he hops from one log to another in a sawmill and slip-slides his way across the ice as a legion of angry beavers chases after him. No dialogue is spoken, and it’s shot in black and white. The experience (did I mention the daughter is pretty good at disemboweling beavers with a knife?) gets a bit repetitious, but Cheslik and Tews, all in on the hijinks, save some zaniness for the last go-round.

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‘Boy Kills World’ (2023)

“Boy Kills World” jumps out of the gate with promise; in the near dystopian future the aristocracy keep the masses in check with an annual lottery/purge called the “Culling.” What the film is, however, is a fairly pat, years-in-waiting revenge drama centered on a warrior known just as Boy (Bill Skarsgård, “Barbarian”) under the tutelage of a sensei (Yayan Ruhian, from the “Raid” films and “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum”) to beef up and exact revenge on Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), the elitist who sanctioned the execution of his parents when he was an adolescent. The gimmick is that Boy can’t talk, yet the whole movie is narrated by him in voiceover. That’s done by H. Jon Benjamin (the voice of “Archer”), who makes Boy sound something like a cross between the gruff growl of Christian Bale’s caped crusader in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” trilogy with the wily witticisms of Bruce Campbell in any of the Sam Raimi “Evil Dead” flicks. That is somewhat fitting, as Raimi serves as executive producer here, and though directed by Moritz Mohr, “Boy Kills World” has plenty of Raimi influences. The plot of rebel forces fighting an aristocratic tyranny means comparisons to films such as “V for Vendetta” (2005) are sure to drop, but the lesser, forgotten 1992 Mick Jagger vehicle “Freejack” is the more apt comparison, as the fun of watching Skarsgård the avenger’s parkour-propelled takedown of legions of baddies ultimately palls. Skarsgård, almost as jacked as older bro Alexander was in “The Northman” (2022), makes for an impressive onscreen presence, as does Jessica Rothe as the skilled assassin known as June27 equipped with a neat combat helmet that’s a cerebral message board of sorts. It’s too bad the narrative arc they ride isn’t as sleek and mean

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Businesses can bring in the bicycling crowd, one $5 lifetime helmet sticker at a time

27 Apr

Bicycle Benefits founder Ian Klepetar takes advantage of a discount at Cambridge’s Area Four eatery unlocked with the sticker on his helmet.

Remember those $5 Bicycle Benefits stickers? They gave you deals such as 5 percent off at Petsi Pies if you showed a bike helmet at the cash register with the right sticker affixed to it.

They’re still around (so is Petsi Pies, now under new ownership and crushing it on Beacon Street in Somerville) but undergoing a relaunch of sorts in preparation for Bike Month in May.

Bicycle Benefits launched in 2007 in Saratoga Springs, New York – the hometown of sometime Somervillian Ian Klepetar – but a Greater Boston campaign arrived in 2008 to give people an exclusive financial incentive to get on bikes and out of cars. “We live in a culture which prioritizes an auto-focused existence despite the destructive nature of automobile travel,” Klepetar said. “Most people have access to a bicycle, yet often need a little extra nudge to ride it.”

There are approximately 40 cities in the United States with a Bicycle Benefits program. Part of the reason the program is being rebooted by Klepetar and his all-volunteer crew is the damage done by the Covid pandemic to the restaurant industry, which is a large sector of the businesses participating in Bicycle Benefits.

Before Covid, the program had about 40 partners in the Cambridge-Somerville area, Klepetar said. It is currently at 60, and he hopes to have that number at 100 by the end of the summer. Many of the businesses that participate in the program sell the stickers.

The program has a online map that makes it easy to look up partners in a city or by postal code and filter choices by business type – hardware store, bike shop, cafe, bar, restaurant, and so on. Some current deals Klepetar highlighted are a free coffee with the purchase of a pastry at the Area Four eatery (a discount he took advantage of while we met) and 10 percent off purchases at American Flatbreads in Somerville’s Davis Square.

Most participating businesses are local and independent, but there are nationwide chains – Ace Hardware and Whole Foods, for instance, which offers a $5 gift card for every $50 purchase at its grocery store on Beacon Street in Somerville.

Klepetar, who makes his living through maintenance and gardener gigs – and during the winters works at a ski resort in Utah – remains committed to the cause. When he went from Boston to Madison, Wisconsin, to launch a program there, he rode his bike the whole way.

“A lot of how we get around is within our control,” he said.

The website and other operating expenses for the program are paid out of income from people buying the $5 stickers – pretty much a one-time, lifetime purchase. When I told Klepetar I had three helmets and laid down my fiver, he gave me three stickers.

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