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.

Knights of Badassdom- Not as Bad as You Think

Sometimes you just need to watch a stupid movie. Like the other night when my friend and I had just finished three longs days of a comic convention. We were happy, exhausted, armed with a pizza and beer, and decided to check out this strange little movie. We were hoping for nerdy, mindless, but still entertaining and maybe not too insulting. Check. Check, check, check.

Knights of Badassdom follows a group of LARPers as they embark on what they think will be a fun weekend of whacking each other with foam sticks, but ends up being a fight to the death against true evil. Our hero is Joe, who of course gets dumped by his girlfriend Beth immediately. In order to cheer him up, his friends kidnap him and take him LARPing. Apparently he used to be a legendary Dungeons & Dragons player, so they figure he’ll dig it. He’s resistant, but up for it. But wait! His dumbass friend Eric has an actual magic book and accidentally summons a succubus (who of course looks like the ex-girlfriend) who starts violently eating her way through the entire LARP camp.

What makes the movie most fun is that the cast is chock full of people you’ll recognize from TV shows as diverse as True Blood, Game of Thrones, Firefly, The West Wing, Mad Men, and Community. Haven’t you secretly always wanted to see Peter Dinklage take shrooms and LARP?

But also, the movie knows what it is and doesn’t take itself too seriously. I hate when a movie like this tries too hard. There’s nothing worse than plodding through a heavy-handed and clumsy parody that someone thought was ART. This movie knows you’re watching it because you’re a little bit drunk and want a good laugh. And it delivers. The plot is solid but uncomplicated. Sure there are some loose ends that don’t get tied up, but you don’t have to think too hard about it.  The characters are recognizable but not totally unoriginal.

And the writers manage to pack in plenty of inside jokes without being jerks. This isn’t the Big Bang Theory, where you’re not sure if they’re laughing with you or at you. Sure, there’s jokes about the game master jerking off to his D&D Monsters Manuel, but it’s because he’s way more of a tool than the rest of them. Overall these are people I’d probably hang out with.

And just a quick note about inclusiveness. It’s easy to make a geek culture movie that’s all about straight while boys. This movie felt like it at least tried to be a tiny bit more inclusive than that. There’s a lot of women of various body types in the crowd shots. One of the leaders of a team is in an awesome pimped-out wheelchair. It’s not a lot, and the movie doesn’t really pass the Bechdel test, and Summer Glau’s character doesn’t have a lot to do. But it still felt like a world that wasn’t actively hostile to me, so progress?

I could rate this movie on a 5 star scale, but usually my movie reviews are more like how many beers you should have to fully enjoy the movie. This is a solid 2-3 beer movie. A nice relaxed buzz helps, but you don’t need to be hammered to enjoy. So grab your 12-sided dice, a bottle opener and check it out.