Indeed, the Green Room was excellent and perhaps due for another rewatch soon!
Did you see Hold the Dark?
Probably going to see Fury Road soon/tonight to try and spark some interest in seeing Furiosa before it’s out of the cinema. I love Fury Road but strangely feel no desire to see Furiosa at all (more so obligated because I grew up with all these movies). It’s kinda weird. I haven’t seen any trailers for Furiosa because I avoid that shit like the plague, but what little glimpses I’ve seen just looks very off.
I thought Fury Road was absolutely appalling. It starts with a car chase, which I was waiting to finish so that something could happen, but it went on for an hour. Then there was a short break, and another one hour car chase. The end. It was like the last ten minutes of Mad Max 2 but for 2 hours. Maybe it’s some kind of technical achievement or whatever but I was bored out of my mind.
Fury Road has great world building, but the first 15-20 minutes is way too hyperactive. To the point where I recommend the movie with the disclaimer that it calms down after that. It’s a real turn off. It’s cool that they let Furiosa have most of the badass moments, to the point where Max’s big hero moment happens off screen, heard from a distance through heavy fog. It’s a rug pull, but in a good way. For some reason, I’m just not that excited for the prequel.
My personal Mad Max rankings…
Mad Max
Road Warrior
Fury Road
Beyond Thunderdome
Although I will admit to dropping more quotes from FR and RW than from MM. And the sheer scale of the practical FX in Fury Road’s chase scenes is astounding to me
as hinted at before…theres a lot of weird cgi / composited elements in furiosa … with a weird framerate / speed thing going on … if they claim ‘its ALL practical’ … its bullshit…a lot of it is real… but theres a lot added later.
plus the usual green screen / expanded digital sets…most notably in the first few minutes…
but it is a unique movie and worth watching in imax…
I was worried this would be the case because of the really lame/bland looking trailers, but in fact the movie looks basically identical to Fury Road. In fact, I thought the “green place”/wives/sandstorm bits in fury road looked more disappointedly cg than anything here. Both films are photographed in such a baroque way that even the pure photography looks like cartoon and I would bet that many viewers would be surprised to find out what was actually practical here vs cg, just as they were with Fury Road. I say this as someone who is really really allergic to cgi (except when it is done purposefully badly for stylistic effect—like in David lynch stuff, ichi the killer, etc). The fact that the verdant scenery of the opening looks more artificial than anything else in the movie struck me as pretty smart.
Watch the first two MM movies (I literally just rewatched MM this past week), then watch the opening of Fury Road, and tell me the difference in tone isn’t jarring. The originals are actually pretty languidly paced films. The intro to FR comes off like a teenager hopped up on Red Bull. It’s much more enjoyable after the Furiosa absconds with the women Immortan Joe held captive, almost like a road trip movie, because it has time to breathe and let the details of the world soak in.
The whole point of these movies is their bombast and idiotic excess. The idea of fury road is “what if we made a movie that was literally in constant motion?” and “what if meth was a movie?” Expectations of tasteful pacing, and room to breathe just completely and comically miss the very obvious point.
Idiot teenager on gastation energy drink bender is the whole thing!
Totally agree. Compare a real and believable story in the first movie (only 1.5 h long) to a full on Fast and Furious-type action which is there just to make you believe there is a story in the later movies.
I thought fury road was fine but it is indeed like a “heavy metal the animated movie monster truck rally sponsored by mtv” kind of vibe, which to me drinking my mountain dew code red and freebasing refined sugar is a perfectly acceptable version of mad max in this day and age. totally serious except about the mountain dew.
If you want to get into the meta-analysis, I’d say the hyper-kinetic style of the opening is a reflection of life under Immortan Joe. The shift comes after they are separated/abandoned from the flaming tornado. Once the Max, Furiosa, and the Warboy are no longer under Joe’s sway, the entire cinematography style changes. Considering that Immortan Joe is the villain, the deliberate unpleasantness makes sense (for an extreme example of this “style as message,” see Noe’s Irreversible…or do yourself a favor and don’t).
So thanks, but I very much get it. I’m happy to agree to disagree.
All told, though, a good movie. A+ on the chase and stunts. Plenty of unforgettable scenes (Doof wagon, Shiny and Chrome, Witness, Furiosa’s sniper shot, etc).
I would quibble that these are not movies where aesthetic considerations are dictated by story (or character) concerns. Rather, story is retro-fitted to whatever the coolest most insane tableau is that they can assemble in a camera frame. Style dictates story. Similar to lynch, Kubrick, etc.
I wish modern blockbusters had anything resembling unique, refined, personalized styles, but that is not the case. Their story problems are not analogous to the kind of impressionistic filmmaking I’m talking about with regard to the later mad max movies or the work of the other stylist luminaries I mentioned.
Do you think the same about Alien? Very little story there. 2001?
Films are not literature and there is no obvious reason to privilege narrative as their driving/governing feature. Obviously there are great films that work because of great stories, but upholding this as a requirement of the medium doesn’t make sense to me.
I’d also add that there is a whole domain of film that is not only narrative-lite, but explicitly nonnarrative. Much of experimental film, my background to some extent, is non narrative. And there is a whole world of masterpieces there too.
