Film Shorts: Valley Cinemas and Beyond

Get ready, home viewers, because as the colder nights are looming, Netflix is about to lose thousands of its most popular movies. Two of the top causalities are The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Transformers: Age of Extinction. This radical change is due to the lapse of a licensing agreement Netflix enjoys with a distributor, and Netflix has decided against renewal. The firm is called Epix, and it handles films for companies such as Paramount, Lionsgate, and MGM (the Bond films). You'll still be able to see these movies elsewhere, say, on Amazon or Hulu, but according to Variety, the show biz "bible," Netflix wants to carry content that the consumer can only view on its service. That's one of the reasons the website has been manufacturing its own TV shows lately. The close-off date is the last day of September so view while you can.

The Valley Cinema 2 is offering sugar and spice this week, a violent action thriller, and a romantic comedy.

The Transporter Refueled doesn't have the original star, or much in the way of the same filmmakers, but it tells a similar story, especially if you like balletic fight scenes and car chases. Frank Martin (this time played by Ed Skrein, from Game of Thrones) is trying to escape a hitwoman hired by a Russian mobster. The director did Taken and Transporter 3, and brings the same intensity-on-a-budget evinced by other films in the series, all produced by Luc Besson, France's Spielberg. It might be enough to say that The Transporter Refueled is better than the TV series derived from the films.

Trainwreck is the product of careful construction by the Media Industrial Complex. The plot is created to support two sides of an argument, in the fence sitting, in Hollywood's tradition of fence-sitting when it comes to controversy. In this apparently autobiographical tale, Schumer is a magazine writer who falls for the subject of a profile, a sports doctor (TV's Bill Hader). This takes her by surprise, because she has lived her life as a foe of monogamy, an anti-Bridget Jones. She is a hedonist who drinks, smokes pot, and interacts with men only to the degree that she can use them for immediate pleasure before dropping them. The argument of the film seems to be, "Amy should have the same freedom men have to follow their impulses." Except in the second half of the movie, Amy's hedonism is likened to a pathology passed down to her by her dad, and that what she and presumably all women really need is to admit to their flaws and succumb to the commitment of an adult relationship. This commences when she entertains Hader with a cheerleader dance. Trainwreck has something for everyone, as long as feminists watch only the first half, and traditionalists watch only the second.

The Worx, at 700 1/2 1st Ave N (406-228-4474), has finally got Mad Max: Fury Road. It isn't exactly a sequel, and not exactly a reboot, more like a loving reimagining of the bleak, dusty world of Mad Max with variations on old themes and a new star. And why should the film be anything else, given that the kids it's aimed at know the earlier films only by TV and DVDs, if at all?

Though the dialogue conveyed by the modern sound production is, as usual, hard to understand, the plot is clear. Furiosa exits the outpost west ostensibly to deliver oil somewhere, and is pursued by Joe when the theft is discovered. He and his guys give chase until Furiosa reaches her destination, only to discover that the "green land" she was seeking was the very place she just fled, the outpost. So, she, Max, and the brides turn around and go back east, once again with Joe and Co. in surprised pursuit. This back-and-forth is more than just a gesture of existential futility, however, as the women all rise to the challenge of asserting their identities. Thus Fury Road turns out to be a feminist epic in a superb action film.