Author: Greg Akers

“Parks and Recreation”: The Final Goodbye

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date August 14, 2014

“Previously on” the Flyer‘s TV review page: Contemporary scripted TV is our equivalent of masterpieces of fine art. Our museums and galleries are HBO, AMC, Showtime, the basic networks, FX, and Netflix. The Sopranos is a Caravaggio; Breaking Bad is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death; Mad Men is an Edward Hopper.

NBC’s Parks and Recreation is a Keith Haring: an energetic, animate, joyous pop dance — a celebration of life with social commentary encoded in the brushwork.

Haring’s work: a celebration of life with social commentary in the brushwork

At the heart of Parks and Recreation are Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), the deputy director and director, respectively, of the parks and rec department in the fictional small town of Pawnee, Indiana. A most cheerful, well-intentioned, and indefatigable soul, Leslie serves the town she loves with a civil-service glee rarely found in nature — she wants to help everybody. A political feminist, she displays photos of the likes of Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright in her office.

To the naked eye, Leslie and Ron could not be more different. He’s a gruff, masculine outdoorsman and devout libertarian who is in charge of Pawnee’s parks department because that’s the best place he can ensure that the citizens will not begin to rely upon government services. Ron would like nothing more than to spend his time self-reliant in the woods with a whittling knife in one hand, a bottle of dark liquor in the other, and a fire at his feet.

What Leslie and Ron lack in shared perspective they make up for in mutual, sometimes begrudging respect. They genuinely like each other and put up with each other’s peculiarities because they are both good people, and they recognize that quality in one another. Their differences are diminutive compared to their commonalities. Writ large, this is the quality that sets Parks and Recreation apart from any other show: a seam-splitting generosity and humanistic altruism for all mankind.

Though considerably political in theme, Parks and Rec is not divisive in delivery. Most anybody anywhere on the left-right spectrum can find something or someone to relate to. But, the positive slant shouldn’t be mistaken for naiveté on the part of the creators, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur. Because, though the show is always looking for the good in people, Pawnee is filled with a rabble of narrow-minded, mean citizens who usually don’t act in their own best interests because they’re too dumb to identify them. This jibes with reality, and so Parks and Recreation is on some levels not just an infinitely enjoyable show but also a counterrevolutionary one in American television. It’s the good twin to the other inarguably great half-hour of the past few decades, Seinfeld. Parks and Rec never tires of trying to find the good in people, even when individuals prove unworthy again and again. Meanwhile, Seinfeld never had anything good to say about anybody.

That Parks and Recreation has maintained its spirit of goodwill toward man despite the coterminous real-world rancorous politics is all the more remarkable; 2009 saw the birth of both Parks and Recreation and the national Tea Party movement. As the axiom goes, “All politics is local.” Parks and Recreation, set in the calcified strata of small-town government and a myopic populace, somehow still manages to make one believe that maybe America is going to be all right, after all.

The terrific Parks and Rec cast prepares for its final season.

The ensemble cast is expertly designed and deployed; no two characters serve the same purpose, and no two inter-character relationships play out the same: Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones), Leslie’s BFF, a pragmatic nurse who wears her beauty uncomfortably; Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari), a metrosexual serial entrepreneur whose schemes frequently put him in over his head; April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza), an unexcitable hipster who disdains everything and everybody (with a heart of gold); Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt), a goofy underachiever who gleefully dives like a puppy into every scenario; Donna Meagle (Retta), a pop culture diva who knows what she likes and usually gets what she wants; Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe), the literally flawless city manager who uses extreme positivity to hide the fact that he’s freaking out about aging; and Jerry Gergich (Jim O’Heir), the oft-abused bureaucratic functionary who can’t get out of his own way.

Last but hardly least is Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), the love of Leslie’s life, nerdy and competent, deadpan and romantic. The relationship between Ben and Leslie is surpassed in charm only by Leslie’s platonic one with Ron. If every embellishment was stripped away from the show, what would remain are Leslie and Ron — a chaste kind of opposites attract.

Parks and Recreation is the true heir to two of the other greatest half-hours of all time: The Andy Griffith Show and Cheers. All three are regionally attentive, smartly written, finely tuned sitcoms about the family we make out of our friends and loved ones, except Parks and Rec has the added benefit of being able to be more topically adventurous and demographically diverse. Plus, the only true villain in Parks and Recreation, Pawnee’s neighboring town of Eagleton and its residents, is the geospatial mash-up of Mount Pilot and Gary’s Olde Towne Tavern.

The difference is that Cheers and Andy Griffith never made me emotional, whereas Parks and Recreation is so moving it makes me cry on the regular. The show is coming to an end; its seventh season is its last. Perhaps it’s where I am in life or just appreciating where it’s taken me, but this ending is going to make for a tough goodbye.

Tags Amy Poehler, Andy Griffith, Aubrey Plaza, Aziz Ansari, Cheers, Chris Pratt, Jim O'Heir, Keith Haring, Nick Offerman, Parks & Rec, Rashida Jones, Retta, Rob Lowe

Film/TV TV Features

Ancient Aliens

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date August 7, 2014

A short list of the most singularly enjoyable moments on TV, circa 2014: Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder chew a scene together on Justified; the host’s epic-length one-topic rants on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver; Ron Swanson bedeviled by a Tammy on Parks and Recreation; and the sharp if-then logical leaps Ancient Aliens takes linking abstruse historical mysteries with the elegant, “According to ancient alien theorists … .” The prepositional phrase manages to both boldly explicate unusual ideas while also not overcommitting to their accuracy. The show seems to be saying, “This is a safe place for every crazy notion you’ve ever had; who knows, maybe some of them are true.”

Ancient Aliens is built around the concept first popularized by Erich von Daniken in his 1968 bestseller, Chariots of the Gods?: that extraterrestrials have been visiting earth for at least thousands of years and that their encounters with humans inspired our religions and were essential in the development of “our” technology. In other words: the Egyptian Pyramids couldn’t have been built without a little otherworldly help, and also some pharaohs, like Akhenaten, were aliens.

The genius of Ancient Aliens, and the thing that places it far, far above likeminded shows in the backwater of basic cable is the breadth and depth of its pseudoscientific and pseudohistorical geography and the earnest energy with which it cannonballs in. Because, Ancient Aliens argues rather correctly, this is a big and old world and there’s a lot of weirdness that’s hard to explain. Rather than being satisfied with hanging out in the Nile Valley for a whole episode, Ancient Aliens will glibly link a minor Sphinxian detail to some rock formation in South America, and then combine those together to get to the Bhagavad Gita, and then, before you know it, the Knights Templar have been introduced. And the episode is only half over.

Ancient Aliens is joyously assembled like a mystery in reverse being solved by an attention-deficit detective: There are clues to the enigma everywhere, and the relevant ones can be seized upon and arranged at will, because there’s only one whodunit: Aliens. The detective-in-chief on Ancient Aliens is Giorgio Tsoukalos, a Swiss-born, spray-tanned, wild-haired talking head who in real life is the director of von Daniken’s Ancient Alien Society, editor of Legendary Times Books, and — this can’t be made up — a former professional bodybuilding promoter. Tsoukalos is the perfect messenger for Ancient Aliens‘ theories: He’s a charming, intelligent, glint-eyed rogue who slyly tries to convince you to believe he’s right while also letting you know it’s okay if you don’t. Tsoukalos serves as an excellent counterbalance to the fully committed von Daniken, the serious and maybe borderline angry ancient astronaut theorist David Childress, or even the declarative narrator, Robert Clotworthy.

Ancient Aliens, now in its seventh season, spent a few seasons on the History channel before being shifted to the sister network H2. It’s a strange move, because even though the main theme of Ancient Aliens should not be confused with reality, it still features plenty of corroborated antiquity around the edges. An attentive viewer can still learn plenty about the world that was. And that’s a lot more history than you’ll glean from the shows the History channel prefers: docudramas about people in a workplace, and the monetization of old crap.

Tags Ancient Aliens, Erich von Daniken, Giorgio Tsoukalos

Film Features Film/TV

I Origins

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date August 7, 2014

Mike Cahill’s new film, I Origins, proves there’s a place in this world for earnest, borderline-hokey sci-fi philosophical meditations. The director of the 2011 indie sci-fi drama Another Earth this time explores topics from evolution and eyesight to the existence of the afterlife.

Like the novel and movie Life of Pi, I Origins places the audience in a locked room with two doors and one master key. The plot is spent elaborating the rules of the mystery of why you’re in the locked room. Each door is a solution to the mystery: one defined by a prosaic, uninspiring explanation and the other by a cosmic sense of wonder at the unexplainable. Which door you open largely depends on the decisions you make internalizing the film. Both films attempt to prove the existence of God.

I Origins focuses on Ian Gray, a scientist researching the evolution of the eyeball, or lack in evidence thereof. He wants to fill in the evolutionary gaps between the naturally occurring simple eye and complex eye found in the animal kingdom. He’s bent on doing this in part so that he can disprove debunkers who claim that the fact of an eye is a weak link in the theory of natural selection, and thus evidence of intelligent design. In other words, Ian believes only in the scientific method, and certainly not in God.

Karen (Brit Marling) is Ian’s more-than-capable research assistant in the endeavor. Ian’s perspective is turned upside down, though, when he encounters Sofi (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), who challenges his core beliefs with her confidence that there’s more to the universe than what can be scientifically observed.

The script is full of puns and references to vision, like: love at first sight, accidental blindness, intellectual blind spots, looking for something that’s right in front of you, a Gatsby-like billboard, and on and on — even that name, Ian Gray.

But it’s easy to forgive these minor lapses when there’s so much thematic meat to grab ahold of. Are science and religion compatible? What is love? Do facts close us off to other possibilities? What are the practical explanations for coincidences and déjà vu? And these questions aren’t (always) asked in simplistic terms but encoded in complex constructs that make you work to find the answer.

The film ends in a gorgeous interstellar burst to the tune of Radiohead’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” providing an emotional, cathartic release bathed in sunlight that made me want to bawl. I can’t wait to see it again, to free myself from the locked room once more.

Tags Brit Marling, Michael Pitt, Mike Cahill

Film Features Film/TV

Guardians of the Galaxy

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date August 7, 2014

Guardians of the Galaxy

I’ve long been of the opinion that the comic book movie hot streak would be over once all of the big superheroes the mainstream public has heard of — the likes of Batman, Spider-Man, and Captain America — were exhausted and movie companies were forced to get around to the C- and D-list titles on the comic book newsstand. Once fly-over America got a taste of the utter nerdiness of the Blue Beetle or Dazzler, the gig would be up. Because the truth is that even the great comic titles feature weird plotlines (explain Crisis on Infinite Earths to a non-nerd and see what happens) and goofy villains (Captain Boomerang? Egghead?).

So, when Marvel announced the movie version of Guardians of the Galaxy, a space adventure co-starring, among other things, a talking raccoon and a sentient tree, I thought: Here it is; the end of the run for the nerds and the regression toward the mean after the blaze in recent history for comic book cinema.

And, after having seen Guardians of the Galaxy, one of the patrons that led to a colossal, $94.3 million weekend, I must admit: I was so, so wrong — and damn glad to be so.

Guardians of the Galaxy is based on comic book characters introduced in the 1960s and ’70s. That’s how you get the strange mix of principals such as the raccoon (Rocket) and tree (Groot), plus a revenge-minded alien who doesn’t understand metaphor (Drax the Destroyer), a weaponized green-skinned babe (Gamora), and, leading them all, an earthling space cowboy who is hard to take seriously (he wants you to call him Star-Lord). But the story is based on a Marvel series from the last decade, so the misfits are banded together with a self-awareness that takes the form of extreme wit, satire, and charm.

The film starts on earth in 1988. Young Peter Quill has just watched his mom die, and then he’s abducted by a UFO. Jump ahead 26 years, and Quill (Chris Pratt) has fashioned himself as an intergalactic thief/plunderer/adventurer named Star-Lord. If he reminds you of Han Solo or Indiana Jones, that’s because Quill is knowingly modeling himself after them. Because he was taken from terra firma when he was, and since he never returned, Quill is locked into place as a child of the ’80s. His most valued possession is a Walkman and the cassette tape his mom made for him, “Awesome Mix Volume 1.” The movie fashions such contextual mashups as fighting alien varmints to the sounds of Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” and a prison escape sequence set to “The Piña Colada Song.”

The cultural references do some heavy lifting to set the stage for the film’s charm, but the follow-through is with the characters. Pratt is as completely lovable as a dashing but bumbling alpha male; Zoe Saldana effortlessly sells the frosty assassin-with-a-heart-of-gold Gamora; Dave Bautista steals the show as the hulking, sober Drax the Destroyer, who wants nothing more than to kill his enemies; Bradley Cooper provides the voice for Rocket, a wise-cracking, intelligent anthropomorphic rodent who overcompensates for his size with big guns and elaborate plans; and Vin Diesel voices Groot, the ineffably sweet but powerful tree creature who expresses himself through three words only: “I am Groot.” (And, yes, the joke must be made: It’s a role that captures the limits of Diesel’s acting range.)

The ragtag bunch makes for a more compelling team-up than the recent Avengers film. It’s surprising, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Cleared of having to shoulder so many all-stars, Guardians of the Galaxy can enjoy the ride more than Avengers could. Plus, Guardians‘ writer/director James Gunn is a significantly better filmmaker than Joss Whedon.

Put it all together, and Marvel serves up a completely winning product, no matter how unlikely: a freak out in a moonage daydream that frees the film genre of its recent seriousness. I don’t care anymore that the nerds have won, so long as they keep it up with more films like this.

Tags Chris Pratt, Marvel, Peter Quill

News News Blog

D. Canale Announces New Distillery to Open on Front Street

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date July 11, 2014

CREDIT: Looney Ricks Kiss

Looney Ricks Kiss

D. Canale & Company, a Memphis name brand associated with alcohol for nearly 150 years, announced today it is building a distillery in downtown Memphis. After selling its beverage business to Hand Family Beverage Co. in 2010, Canale has been relatively quiet. But the new venture, Old Dominick Distillery, would place D. Canale back firmly in the public consciousness.

According to a press release, Old Dominick Distillery is scheduled to begin operation in Summer 2015 and open to the public in Fall 2015, and it will be located directly across from Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken, at 301 South Front Street. The building will be a production and bottling facility as well as a public tasting room.

Old Dominick was a widely tasted whiskey in the years before Prohibition. You can read lots more about the brand and “Old Dominick” himself — the D. Canale namesake — here.

Old Dominick Whiskey will be revived, along with a line of other whiskeys and vodkas, all to be made at the Front Street location.

The building is being designed by LRK and built by Archer Custom Builders, both of Memphis, and D. Canale will be consulted by Thoroughbred Spirits Group, based in Louisville, Kentucky.

Tags D. Canale & Company, Old Dominick Distillery, Old Dominick Whiskey

Film Features Film/TV

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date July 10, 2014

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas takes us back to Germany at the outset of World War II. The film’s protagonist is Bruno (Asa Butterfield), an 8-year-old boy who’s smart, brave, and adventurous but mostly confused by what’s going on in the world and at home. His father (David Thewlis), a high-ranking SS officer, has taken a promotion that relocates the family away from Berlin, to the Polish countryside. The family’s change in scenery mirrors another, much more sinister one: the moving of the Jews into a concentration camp.

Bruno’s bored in his new setting, especially because his mother (Vera Farmiga) forbids him from exploring the woods behind the home. Bruno can see a strange sort of “farm” through the trees, where the “farmers” wear striped pajamas. He befriends a boy about his age named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) on the other side of the fence. Bruno’s emotions are a swarm of conflicts, and what truths he’s told by his parents and tutor (Jim Norton) don’t align with what he’s seeing with his own eyes. That the lies come from his own father and that his mother is increasingly upset compound his predicament. His sister, Gretel (Amber Beattie), is no help: She embraces Hitler Youth to such a degree that she even has Nazi posters on her bedroom wall like they’re pin-up Tiger Beat heartthrobs.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is rated PG-13 and is based on the YA novel by John Boyne. What’s happening in the film is no surprise to adults and probably isn’t for most young teens. It’s as brilliantly effective a movie about the Holocaust as I’ve seen. A pile of discarded dolls masterfully metaphors the real atrocities, but the film eventually literalizes — it has to, really — for Bruno and the audience what genocide looks like. The horror is so massive it’s hard for any adult to comprehend it — as we have been trying to do for seven decades and counting — so I’m not sure what chance a kid would have.

The 2008 film was originally marketed as a Holocaust movie for younger audiences. Thirteen is probably about right for the youngest viewers. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas completely destroyed me. I don’t know that I would recommend it for anyone Bruno’s age.

Tags Amber Beattie, Asa Butterfield, concentration camp, David Thewlis, Holocaust, Jack Scanlon, Jim Norton, John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Vera Farmiga, World War II

Film Features Film/TV

Film Retrospective: Batman (1989)

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date June 26, 2014

This week, 25 years ago, I was a knot of anticipation. The thing I wanted to see more than any other thing, the Batman film, was at last coming out. I’m not saying I wanted to see Batman more than I wanted to see any other movie at the time; I mean I had never been so eager to partake in anything, ever. In retrospect, I haven’t been so excited for the release of any other piece of pop culture. I think the only things to surpass it are real-life greatnesses: kissing a girl, getting married, the birth of my children. Seriously. (Where are you going? Come back!)

I was so excited in part because I loved and devoured the Batman comics. The character appealed to my maturing sense of identity and growing individualism. He was no less human than I was — he wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider, exposed to cosmic or gamma rays, or orphaned from an alien planet — infinitely relatable to this here shy little nerd. What made Bruce Wayne into Batman was nothing but a common traumatic childhood; granted, my sheltered, suburban upbringing was far from harrowing. But, if you stabbed Batman with a sword-umbrella, he’d bleed like anyone else, and he became successful by dint of willpower alone. Plus, what kid doesn’t want to hear that it’s the monsters who should be afraid of the dark?

Michael Keaton in Batman

The movie Batman hit me square in the face, at age 13, the summer before 8th grade, a seminal moment at a seminal age. It marked my transition from an artless, prepubescent consumer of whatever happened to be in front of me to a relatively thoughtful observer of craft and commercialism. The coming of age was my (forgive me) Bat Mitzvah.

Batman felt like the first movie that was made for me. I pined for news in the build-up to its release — this was, of course, long before the internet, a lonely place of dying that left one starved for information. I watched Entertainment Tonight routinely, hoping for clips or updates; I scoured for showbiz tidbits in the Appeal section of The Commercial Appeal — this was pre-Captain Comics. Entertainment Weekly didn’t exist yet. MTV ran a “Steal the Batmobile” contest; I obsessed over the glimpses of the movie the promos and commercials showed. When the video to Prince’s “Batdance” premiered in advance of the film’s release, I was devastated: It didn’t show any scenes from the movie.

Finally, Batman came out. I saw it at Highland Quartet, the first showing on the first day. It napalmed me. I could not have loved it more. It buried itself in my DNA instantly. I bought the Danny Elfman score on tape and wore it out. To this day, it’s my all-time favorite soundtrack. I waited on tenterhooks for the box office results, finally delivered (at least, in my recollection) in the voice of Chris Connelly on an MTV News segment: Batman had a huge opening weekend. I felt personally vindicated. (As I said, I was a nerd.)

Batman was my first movie review. I wrote it for myself, in a journal kept in a spiral school notebook that has been, sadly, lost to time. After some attic digging, I did unearth the second volume of my journal, running from August 1989 to December 1990. Included within is my first ever movies list, presented here unadulterated:

Top 15 Movies, 6-29-90, 1:41-1:46 a.m.

1. Batman

2. The Hunt for Red October

3. RoboCop 2

4. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

5. Gremlins 2

6. The Jerk

7. RoboCop

8. Die Hard

9. The Terminator

10. Top Gun

11. The Blues Brothers

12. The Running Man

13. Young Guns

14. Blind Date

15. Parenthood

Looking back, there are plenty of things to commend in Tim Burton’s film. His German Expressionistic sensibilities (and Anton Furst production design) perfectly reflect the shadows of the mind cast within by Bruce Wayne’s psychological scars; Michael Keaton is surprisingly good as Batman; Jack Nicholson is terrific as the Joker. Its reputation was only burnished by the disappointments that followed, with the 1990s sequels Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin.

However, in 2005, with Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan rendered the 1989 Batman irrelevant — astonishingly, but no less substantively. Nolan and Christian Bale made a grown-up adaptation — textually moodier, with characters more realistically beat down by life’s injustices — that thoroughly neutered the Burton/Keaton “original.”

The one thing missing from Nolan’s update was the childhood sense of awe and joy that I see bursting from the 1989 film. It’s not really Batman Begins‘ fault. How could it have possibly contained and inspired all that life-changing ecstasy? After all, I wasn’t there to provide it.

We Recommend We Recommend

Bad Movie Double Feature

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date June 19, 2014

There is a point in retrograde at which a bad movie becomes so bad it is alchemically transformed into a good movie. If the actors are terrible enough, the direction inept enough, and the script godawful enough, then the fine line between enjoying something for being excellent is indistinguishable from enjoying something that is terrible.

Indie Memphis, Black Lodge Video, and local filmmaker Mark Jones (who makes movies that are not horrible) present two such terrifically dreadful films on Wednesday, June 25th, at Malco’s Studio on the Square. The Room and Miami Connection screen in double-feature fashion beginning at 7 p.m.

The films are so very bad-good. The Room (2003) is considered by many to be the worst film ever made; Entertainment Weekly calls it “the Citizen Kane of bad movies.” (Perhaps one day we’ll see a loving treatment of The Room‘s filmmaker, Tommy Wiseau, and the making of his film, à la Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, about the charmingly bad director of Plan 9 from Outer Space.) The Room will screen on 35mm film, which is like presenting a turd on a Tiffany platter (in other words: great idea!).

Miami Connection (1987) is a retelling of the classical plot that dates back to Homer or Virgil or something: a rock-synth band called Dragon Sound, comprised of black belts in Taekwondo, battles an army of ninjas in Florida.

Shakespeare, it ain’t, which is a good thing.

Tags Black Lodge Video, Indie Memphis, Mark Jones, Miami Connection, The Room

Film Features Film/TV

Film Review: The Rover

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date June 19, 2014

For films and literature about dystopian societies, there’s no better setting than England (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Children of Men, Never Let Me Go, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, V for Vendetta…). But when it comes to post-apocalyptic locations, the place to (not) be is Australia (on the strength of Mad Max and The Road Warrior and even Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome alone, not to mention the classic On the Beach and Tank Girl). Perhaps it’s the way Australia already seems like a post-apocalyptic place, with its natural wasteland scenery of the Outback, its racially and ethnically troubled society, and its mondo-poisonous animal kingdom. Plus, the events of the pre-apocalyptic film The Last Wave could take place tomorrow, and it wouldn’t be a bit surprising.

Add The Rover to the antipodean eschatological list. The film, starring Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson, takes place Down Under “ten years after the collapse.” Eric (Pearce) goes into a way station in the middle of nowhere to get something to drink. A group of outlaws (Scoot McNairy, David Field, and Tawanda Manyimo), on the run from a violent robbery, wreck their truck and steal Eric’s car. Eric, desperate to recover his car for unknown reasons, goes in hot pursuit. A man the criminals left behind for dead, Rey (Pattinson), is grievously injured but goes on the chase as well. Eric and Rey find common purpose but have disparate agendas.

The script (David Michôd and Joel Edgerton) is assembled in deliberate, stripped-down fashion. Each plot thread comes together slowly but surely. The film drives right into the story, then explains its world slowly and only partly. Brief bouts of dialog punctuate long stretches of silence. As director, Michôd’s long takes consider the land and the survivors’ place in it. Antony Partos’ spare, foreboding, primal score takes up instruments seemingly one at a time: percussion, piano, euphonium, bass, tin whistle.

Post-apocalyptic Australia, with car chases over endless, uninhabited highways, concern over the price of petrol, a plot fueled by vengeance, a violent, once-civilized loner you root for in spite of yourself: No, it’s not one of George Miller’s Mad Max films, though there’s no reason you couldn’t pretend it’s an unacknowledged prequel. That said, The Rover is more Mad Max than The Road Warrior. The harsh action is closer to the brutality of the original than the gonzo sequences from its sequel. (And, it must be noted, Eric drives a sedan, not a DIY armored supercharger.) Emotionally, too, The Rover mimics the existential angst of Mad Max.

In fact, The Rover may be the most depressing, black-mooded film seen in some time. I think I recall one moment of levity, in the first five minutes, before the shape of the movie came into focus. Michôd and company challenge you to keep pulling for Eric amid his relentless, Ahabian quest for his car. He takes no prisoners who don’t serve his purpose. You’ll pull for him because we are inculcated to cheer for the protagonist. But The Rover, when all is said and done, retroactively positions Eric less antihero and more … well, someone both more and less sympathetic than he appeared.

The script paints the mourning at the core of The Rover, and cinematographer Natasha Braier proves the point: Eric and Rey, after the fall, face to face in a dry and waterless place. “If you don’t learn to fight, your death is going to come real soon,” Eric warns Rey. Hilarious!