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TOP PICK OF THE WEEK
The Bob’s Burgers Movie
*** In a prime-time landscape that has relegated the graying dreams of drearily washed-out American families to animation (see The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy), Bob’s Burgers has quietly thrived over 12 seasons detailing the hum-drummiest of all prole-toon heroes. Save for glimpses inside the vivid inferiority of daughters Tina (the libidinal mope voiced by Dan Mintz) and bunny ears-topped firebrand Louise (Kristen Schaal), most every Sunday with Bob Belcher (H. Jon Benjamin) revolves around desperate, doomed efforts to maintain a failing eatery amid trad-familial upheavals and the sort of show tune-laden melancholia more apt to spawn box sets than feature films. From The Bob’s Burgers Movie’s start, when our hero finds a burst water main (soon to become a police line once Louise discovers a corpse) blocking access to the restaurant’s door, there’s a familiar sense of desperation beneath the burbling farce—but left to bounce long enough, the creative team reaches unforeseen heights. Stretched out to just a shade over 100 minutes, the film’s interwoven narratives breathe and nestle, allowing the sentimental beats to flourish organically. Best of all, series founder and co-writer/co-director Loren Bouchard orchestrates the manic riffs of Bob’s wife, Linda (John Roberts), and the non sequitur fusillade of son Gene (Eugene Mirman) for the best possible version of a comfort staple rendered fresh, flavorful and well done. PG-13. JAY HORTON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport Plaza, Evergreen Parkway, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain 8, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Tigard, Vancouver Plaza.
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Top Gun: Maverick
**** Top Gun: Maverick is a jingoistic tribute to America, the Navy and the delightfully demented charisma of Tom Cruise. But above all, it is a monument to the power of big-budget cinema—to thrill, to move, and to unleash images so sweeping that they nearly shatter the screen. Directed by Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy), the film chronicles the frantic efforts of Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) to train a squadron of Navy aviators for a mission to obliterate a uranium enrichment facility. “You think up there and you’re dead!” Maverick rants. Fair enough, but there’s nothing thoughtless about Kosinski’s direction. He sends planes soaring over sand and snow, making them twist through the air with the force of heavyweight boxers and the grace of prima ballerinas. After the airless thrills of recent superhero films, Top Gun: Maverick is like a lungful of oxygen, but it has soul to go with its spectacle. Unlike Ethan Hunt, the semi-celibate spy Cruise plays in the Mission: Impossible series, Maverick lives for more than the mission. Watching his plane hang in the heavens is bliss, but so is watching him embrace the woman he loves (Jennifer Connelly) on a beach as waves gently lap against the shore. Top Gun: Maverick’s glamorized portrait of military service may be morally irresponsible, but the film reminds us what movies—and life—can be. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, Cinemagic, City Center, Eastport Plaza, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Living Room, Pioneer Place, Roseway, St. Johns, St. Johns Twin, Studio One.
Crimes of the Future
** “Surgery is the new sex,” a character claims in David Cronenberg’s sci-fi whatsit Crimes of the Future. After the erotic car wrecks of Crash (1996), it’s not shocking that Cronenberg would be drawn to the fetishistic slicing of skin. At 79, he’s cinema’s reigning king of kink-friendly provocations, despite his increasingly static storytelling. Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux star as performance artists with a ghoulish act: His body produces bizarre new organs and she cuts them free of his flesh in front of a live audience. It’s a fascinating metaphor for the shame that can cloud desire, but despite being pure Cronenberg, Crimes of the Future is a bit of a Cronen-bore. For all its gruesome bravado, the film feels more like a mechanical delivery system for ideas than a movie—watching it is like listening to a lecture by a creepy, long-winded professor. Yet there’s something oddly moving—even wholesome—about the movie’s determination to find beauty in the grotesque. Mortensen’s character says he’s no good at “the old sex” (the kind that doesn’t involve a scalpel), but who cares? In Crimes of the Future, nothing is hotter than evolution. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. AMC Vancouver Mall, Bridgeport, Cascade, Cinema 21, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center.
Neptune Frost
** Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s Afrofuturist liberation musical envisions digital shapeshifting across consciousness. Depicting a revolutionary enclave in the Burundi hills that hopes to reboot the world sans systemic oppression, Neptune Frost finds writer-composer Williams transporting the universe of his graphic novels and concept albums into a film that’s equal parts anti-capitalist diatribe and genderqueering folk saga. Yet Neptune Frost’s strengths lie in its powerful simplicity, namely the moments captured by Uzeyman’s alternately glitchy and lyrical, neon-laced cinematography: children leaping alongside their shadows or the reserved care that Elvis Ngabo (one of two performers playing the messianic Neptune) takes donning high heels on a ferry. Unfortunately, while one would hope for freer catharsis in this future where rhythm shatters gender binaries and supply chains, Williams’ verbosity stilts songs and conversations alike—and the script’s insistence that its tech and gender allegories organically align doesn’t make it so. Neptune Frost may well be the most ambitious indie film this year, but the invitation to collectively reimagine human existence is obscured in intellectual and mythic static. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Fox Tower.