Mad Maxes

Last Saturday I watched two movies in one day that both made me go “what the hell just happened?” One of them in an awesome way, one of them in a terrible way. They were Mad Max and Mad Max: Fury Road.

The Mad Max series has been one of those things where I went from knowing nothing to having it be everywhere in days. One day my friend Tarra texts me saying we need to talk about this new thing she’s into, and the next minute it’s the number two movie at the box office and has taken over my Facebook and Twitter with feminist accolades/angry MRAs. So I went to see Fury Road, but decided to watch the original first. I would have watched all of the predecessors, but ran out of time. (Stay tuned for my thoughts on Road Warrior and Beyond Tunderdome. I’m sure they’re coming soon.)

Holy crap. What? That’s my reaction to both movies. I’ll start with the lovefest for Fury Road. Everything you’ve heard is true. It’s beautiful.

It’s a solid plot with adrenaline junkie action out the wazoo. It’s going to destroy all the men in America by daring to create an action movie where women get to play actual characters with actual thoughts and not just objects. Charlize Theron deserves every compliment given her and then some. I could go on and on about the movie and how much I enjoyed it.

But my overwhelming thought when the movie was over was how the hell did we get here from here?

 

Seriously. I watched the first movie and almost didn’t go see the new one. It just struck me as so mind-bendingly bad I didn’t know what to do with myself. I have so many questions. How the hell did we get here? Why do I care about this character? Is that guy’s name really Toecutter? Did they really run over that baby? And Max’s arm? What the eff is with the weird scene-transition bird?

I’ve been trying for a week to trace how George Miller got from the strange, slightly-dilapidated world of Mad Max to the beautifully bonkers desert dystopia of Fury Road. In true Tarra fashion, my lovely friend has backed up her position that Mad Max is a movie worth watching by sending me a lot of articles about its influence. I’ve done my research, and it’s starting to make sense.

The more I read about the process of making Mad Max, the more I can see the same attention to detail and design throughout. 1979 George Miller scraping together a movie on $350,000, but still being committed enough to use practical stunts, real-speed shots, and hiring an actual biker gang doesn’t seem that far off from 2015 George Miller still using mostly practical stunts and hiring Eve Ensler to consult on how different women react to trauma. His budget just got bigger and he just got older and wiser.

And I’ve got to give George this, both movies have some pretty amazing car chases. The effects are impressive, especially considering that real people actually did all of those things. In fact, when the first movies came out, rumors went around that stunt men had died making Mad Max. They were totally false, but it is hard to watch all that metal carnage and believe everyone walked away.

Speaking of the carnage, the other piece of common DNA that struck me was the violence. I enjoyed the heck out of Fury Road, but I also found myself watching the moving and wondering what it says about our culture that our entertainment is this bloodthirsty. It actually reminded me of my favorite quote from a review of the first movie; Phillip Adams saying that the movie had “all the emotional uplift of Mein Kampf” and would be “a special favourite of rapists, sadists, child murderers and incipient [Charles] Mansons.” I think the world has changed a lot, and we’re no longer surprised by movies with high body counts and lots of ‘spolsions. But both films have a couple of intimate moments where real fear and violence creep in and become truly unsettling.

I can see in the bookends of the Mad Max series a director of incredible vision trying to entertain us and make us think. I’m also immensely grateful for Mad Max, terrible Power Point style screen transitions and all, because it lead us here.

Required Reading: Blackout/All Clear

As a reader, I’ve notice that the world is full of books I just read. I experience them. I enjoy them. And then I let them go. They don’t really make a big impact on my life, on my mood, my emotional state. Connie Willis is not writing those books.

Connie Willis is writing stay up all night, I’m not leaving the house until I know what happens books. She’s writing drive me crazy, break my heart, leave me desperately needing to talk about what just happened books. Fair warning, I would not recommend her during a time where you have, you know, other things going on in your life.

I read Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book back in high school. I remember that I loved it. The time-travel-to-the-medieval-period subgenre is near and dear to me, and The Doomsday Book is waaay better than Timeline. Somehow I missed the memo that Connie Willis followed that book up with three more time travel books: To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout, and All Clear. I’m sure at some point I’ll go back and get to To Say Nothing of the Dog, but recently I jumped straight into the epic that is Blackout/All Clear.

Before I start recounting my wild emotional journey, I’ll just note that for all functional purposes Blackout and All Clear are basically one book. They’re both too long to get published as one giant tome, but it’s one continuous story. I really don’t think anyone has ever successfully read the first book and not immediately picked up the second. And if so, they’re wrong.

Blackout/All Clear takes place in Oxford in 2060 and London during the Blitz. It follows three young time travelers who get unexpectedly stuck in World War Two. Getting stuck in London during the Blitz is, you know, problematic, so the story follows their attempts to get out, not die, make a living in a foreign time, and the parallel rescue mission. I think I experienced close to every possible emotion while reading this book, but it started with frustration.

The book starts in 2060, but it’s a 2060 that Ms. Willis started writing in 1992, so somehow it’s missing things like email or cell phones. So the book starts with a tedious amount of characters dashing back and forth through Oxford trying to catch people but just missing them. And it was all I could do not to throw the book across the room and shout “just fucking text them!” Take a deep breath with me and let it go, because everything in this book takes a long time. The sooner you accept it, the less time you’ll spend asking your friends when this damn book gets better. Trust me. It does.

Blackout can feel like it starts slow. There’s a huge amount of detail as each of our characters tries to find and accomplish their original mission. Polly is observing shelter life during the beginning of the Blitz. Mike is studying the evacuation of Dunkirk. Eileen is studying the evacuation of children to the countryside. I’m pretty sure 50% of the reason Connie Willis wrote this book was as a celebration of the amazing heroism of everyday English civilians during World War Two. Each of our heroes finds an amazing variety of strong, funny, flawed but lovely humans all doing their best to make the best of one of the worst parts of modern history.

And as much as I found the slow parts of the book frustrating, they were ultimately rewarding, because they put the reader emotionally in the shoes of someone trying to make the best of living with the bombings and the rationing and the fear that any minute now England could be invaded. It’s sort of like method acting. It’s method reading. And soon enough, each of our three heroes realize they’re stuck. When they finally join forces to survive and find a way home, the book really starts cooking. But the more I think about it, the more the buildup of frustration and impatience seems like a tool. Because the book already had me feeling something. So when all of a sudden when the book goes from “if you explain this time paradox to my one more time I’m going to punch you” to “HOLY SHIT EVERYTHIG IS ON FIRE,” the emotional whiplash sets you up for gripping, page turning, pulse racing reading like I’ve rarely experienced before.

Restated: This book has so much damn setup, that when you finally get to the payoff, it’s SO SATISFYING. (Spoilers ahead. Stop here if you haven’t read it) There’s a lot of things I knew were going to happen in this book. Alf and Binnie becoming integral to the plot, the possibility of unraveling the space time continuum, Collin finally finding Polly, all of it was predictable a hundred pages away. But somehow when they finally happen, instead of being annoyed, I wanted to jump for joy. I was so happy to find Binnie as the linchpin that holds the whole thing together because I have 700 pages invested in her survival and success. There were enough twists and turns I didn’t see coming to keep me interested and enough that I did see coming to feel like I got my rewards for sticking with the books.

And that ending. After reading it, I got into a long debate about whether it was tragic or emotionally satisfying that Eileen stayed behind. I loved it because it felt like the only option for her. She had Alf and Binnie and the vicar and a whole life ahead of her in the 1940s. And after two books of being patronized and protected, she got to ultimately save everyone. But she also abandoned the world she had known and grown up in for a completely foreign time. It was complicated and bittersweet and worth debating, and those are some of the highest praises I can give.

Supergirl, Black Widow, and Girl Power

This week two hilarious and amazing videos of media starring powerful super-women hit the internet. They were both fairly similar. I loved both of them. One of them was a joke.

SNL had Scarlett Johansson on the show and created the “oh my god it’s so funny and so real it hurts” fake trailer for a Black Widow movie. It’s so spot on it’s scary. It opens with epic manly voiceover and the all-too-real question “Does Marvel not know now to make a girl superhero movie?” Cue the Sex & the City style shots of Black Widow in New York having trouble with heels and working her shitty job in a trendy media office (because that’s what women do). There’s hilarious romcom elements like her girl talking with Thor and Cap and trying to find the man who’s really worthy of her attention. It’s goofy and hilarious and perfectly encapsulates all the clichés of “women’s stories” that are shoved down our throats by media producers who have apparently never met a woman.

That was still fresh on my mind when I watched the trailer for Supergirl, and the similarities are a little spooky. Kara Zor-El works in a trendy media office where she uses her superpowers to sense when her mean boss is coming. She gets asked out on a date by a cute guy, and clearly has a crush on another cute guy. And oh yeah. She has fucking superpowers. In so many ways, this preview hits all the same clichés as SNL’s Black Widow. There’s romcom music and a trendy media job and an overemphasis on romance and an entirely unrealistic “New York” apartment. And most worrying of all, there’s Supergirl hiding her powers and maybe not believing in who she is. But then, the preview also literally addresses all of this criticism at once.

When Supergirl goes public and gets her name, our undercover heroine questions it. Why Supergirl and not at least Superwoman? And her boss gives her a magical and thorough dressing down of the issue. “What do you think is so bad about girl? I’m a girl. And your boss. And powerful, and rich, and hot, and smart. So if you perceive Supergirl as anything less than excellent, isn’t the real problem you?”

Standing ovation. Well said. That quote gets at the heart of what I love about this trailer. I’m a 90s girl. I grew up with Girl Power and the sort of bubbly, adorable, empowering feminism that Supergirl just might be trying to bring back.

The trailer has gotten criticism for being too girly, but really I could criticize almost every other superhero trailer ever for being too stereotypically manly. Real life men have about as much to do with the brooding, testosterone soaked world of the Batman v Superman trailer as real life women have to do with the overly emotional, impeccably groomed world of the Supergirl trailer. We don’t actually expect our superhero media to reflect real life or real gender roles, so why start now?

Supergirl might be girly, but she also came off as funny, accessible, and powerful. And frankly I’m excited for children of all genders to see that strong and brave doesn’t have to be male, but also that girliness doesn’t have to be weak.

That’s real life. People are complex. This week I both ate a pan of brownies while on my period and got an awesome promotion at work. I can be stereotypically feminine and also a powerful, smart, well rounded person who knows more about Star Wars than 90% of the population. Maybe. Just maybe. We’re about to get a superhero who can do the same. I’ve got my fingers crossed and can’t wait to find out.

Top 10 Times The Avengers: Age of Ultron Felt Like Christmas

Seems obvious, but I’ll just say it: All the Spoilers Ahead.

I saw The Avengers: Age of Ultron on Thursday night at 10:00, and I basically spent the whole day before that feeling like a kid on Christmas Eve. I fondly remember seeing the first Avengers on opening night, spending the whole movie feeling like it was Christmas. Joss Whedon pulled off the amazing magic trick of giving me everything I wanted but didn’t even know I could ask for.

So when Ultron started I had the same sensation as a kid pulling off the wrapping paper. Like most Christmases, I got a lot of things I wanted and few things I didn’t. I’m sure I’ll do a more critical watch of the movie later, because was this a perfect movie? No. Did it feel a little scattered and rushed and unfocused? Sure. But did I leave it giddy and happy? You betcha. So brace yourselves for spoilers, don’t let the haters get you down, and bask in the Whedon afterglow with me in my countdown of 10 Moments the Avengers felt like Christmas.

10. The Star Wars trailer before it.

Ok. This is cheating, but OH MY GOD IT WAS SO GOOD ON THE BIG SCREEN.

9. I love a Robot (Not that robot)

I didn’t realize how attached I’d gotten to the disembodied voice that is JARVIS until he “died.” I mean, he’s been with us since MCU day one. He’s the kind, humorous, constant in Iron Man’s universe. And frankly, I was way more upset by his death than by the actual death of Quicksilver.

8. Hulktasha

This will be controversial, but I loved most of it. I loved seeing Natasha in love, but still putting her work first. I loved seeing the Hulk being much more in control of the rage because of her. And I squeed at being one step closer to the giant-people-carrying-little-people dream that I’d been harboring since the days of Ginger Haze’s early fan doodles. So come at me bro.

7. Science Bros

As much as I like Banner and Natasha, the Banner relationship I really care about is between him and Tony. There’s an entire blog post I will write some day about how science buddies is literally my favorite type of relationship in fiction. But suffice it to say, watching Stark and Banner bicker like an old married couple is exactly what I wanted.

6. “Multiplying Like Catholic Rabbits”

Fury’s line, Whedon’s wordplay. I’m adding it to the “things I say now” list.

5. The Helicarrier’s Triumphant Return

Sure, part of my brain was screaming “Who the fuck gave Fury back the flying death machines?” But 99% of my brain was screaming REDEMPTION!!!!

4. All things Scarlet Witch

Do I have a new favorite Avenger? Quite possibly. Sure her power are indicative of the scary world of unclear narrative rules and magic-heavy powers we’re entering. But goddam is she cool. Everyone else is suiting up and prepping for the big battle and she’s just standing there all nonchalant like “I can kill you with my brain,” and her brother’s like “at least bring a jacket.” Adorbs. She’s River Tam but less bonkers, and that’s just shiny with me.

3. The Hammer’s Grading Rubric

So everyone saw the clip of the party scene that got released months ago. And it included the moment where most of the Avengers try lifting Thor’s hammer. And I enjoyed it, but I was a little worried. I mean, macho boys being macho boys feels like a one-note joke to me. But the moment was charming and had great payoff. I loved seeing Cap budge the hammer, that worthy son of a –LANGUAGE! But mostly I loved that it set us up for the magic moment where The Vision grabbed that hammer like it wasn’t even a thing. PAYOFF.

2. Hawkeye Lays It Out

Hawkeye got a lot more to do in this movie, but by far one of my favorite moments of the whole thing was during the chaotic final battle where Hawkeye gives Wanda Maximoff the most realistic pep talk ever. The gist is basically “We’re on a flying city fighting killer robots and I have a bow and arrow. None of this makes sense. But do it anyway.” It’s exactly why these movies are completely ridiculous and completely endearing, all in a deadpan nutshell.

1. Whedon Theatre Jokes

Joss Whedon can have my heart forever if he just keeps making jokes that make my theatre nerd heart sing. Last time his “Shakespeare in the Park” crack had me giggling for days. This time it was “This day has been long. Like, Eugene O’Neil long.” So here’s my heart Joss. I look forward to the next time you break it.

The Great Marvel Re-Watch

Over the last month and a half, I have been a part of a dedicated and delightful group of individuals who watched every Marvel Cinematic Universe film leading up to this weekend’s Age of Ultron premier. It’s been quite the journey. In some ways, we’ve come a long way. And in some ways it’s delightful to look back and see all the ways this series won my love. So here’s some thoughts.

We’ve Come a Long Way

Iron Man came out in 2008. 2008. That’s 7 years ago. 7 years is a long time to grow, and we all have, Marvel included. The first Iron Man movie is fun, but it also had moments that made me marvel (pun intended) at how much things have grown. The plot is simple and archetypal, and my gods is Pepper Potts ditsy. These days Pepper is the mighty CEO of Stark Industries who keeps Tony in line as a hobby, but in 2008 she was embarrassed because she was dancing with her boss and forgot her deodorant. I’m sorry, but a world where Pepper Potts can’t remember her deodorant is a world I don’t want to live in.  It’s fascinating to see how the writers and minds at Marvel have had more faith in Pepper and their female characters more generally. We have a long way to go, but they’ve certainly become more dynamic and been given a lot more to do. And then there’s the misstep of The Incredible Hulk. Marvel clearly learned some things from that. Most notably that it helps to give your characters, ya’ know, character. But I don’t believe we could have a more complicated movie like Winter Soldier if Marvel hadn’t first learned that audiences want something and someone to care about.

Perfection Isn’t Where You Think

It’s easy to look back on Iron Man and believe that because it was first, it probably wasn’t that great. But, I have to say: Iron Man is a strong film. Like a really strong film. It’s fun, it’s well structured, and it’s so damn likable. The plot is easy to follow and doesn’t rely heavily on techno-babble. The setup and payoff is all there. And the last couple of minutes of the movie are still some of the most rewarding in the franchise.

When I think back on the Marvel movies, there are those I dismiss and those I think I love. It was interesting to go back and test all those memories. I found that a lot of the ones I dismissed were stronger than I remembered. And many of the ones I considered my favorites had big flaws. Let’s take the Captain America movies. They’re my favorite. I love them. But the more times I watch them, the more I realize they have plot holes you should drive a helicarrier through. After re-watching The First Avenger, we spent almost an hour coming up with literally any other way Cap could have saved New York other than putting that plane in the water. And seriously, why couldn’t they just tell one helicarrier to shoot down the other two at the end of Winter Soldier? Why did they need to dramatically triangulate all three? And whatever you do, do not try to explain the final fight scene in Guardians of the Galaxy to anyone.

But The Connections!

Probably the #1 reason the Marvel Cinematic Universe is beloved is their commitment to fan service. This is a franchise that wants to reward the dedicated. It’s fun to look for Stan Lee every time and know that every time your waiting will pay off. It’s fun to watch the characters interact across each other’s movies. There’s magic to watching Steve Rogers show up for a quick second in Thor 2. There’s great fun to be had with the fact that across the TV and movie empire, Natasha is the gold standard for spy. And it’s just perfect that they use a post credit scene to give me fodder for my head cannon belief that Tony and Banner are BFFs even between movies.

And more seriously, it’s a huge strength of the series that characters who could be throw-aways become important. Be it Agent Coulson moving from minor cameo to star of his own TV show, or Jasper Sitwell and the asshole Senator from Iron Man actually having been Hydra all along, this is a franchise that rewards loyalty. And it’s nice to feel appreciated.

Final Notes

We learned a collection of other things on the Marvel re-watch journey, from deep thoughts on types of origin stories to the fact that apparently in movie physics all you need to do to survive an explosion is hide behind a wall. Ultimately, what really sets Marvel apart from the other superhero stories is that in this world there are consequences. Experiences matter. The characters grow and change because of what they experience. Batman in The Dark Knight trilogy is pretty much always the same Batman. But the Iron Man series sees Tony go from spoiled playboy, to revered super hero, to full PTSD wreak because of the things he’s seen and done. Other examples abound, from New York’s rebuilding in Daredevil, to Erik Selvig in the mental institution in Thor 2. Hell, sometimes people who die even stay dead. Sometimes. It’s still superheroes, after all.