TV/Movies Megathread

[Grey Fox]

The Purge has a stupid premise. After the first purge nothing would be left standing after being burnt down.

[Malthus]

Few things are perfect; heck, there's bad stuff to say about most As (e.g., the occasional but on the occasion preposterously bad editing in The Ten Commandments--we cut live to... the same shot because someone flubbed a line I guess? WTF?).

But anyway, while I wish to share my enthusiasm for things I love, the long-form reviews* are attempts at genuine commentary and persuasive writing, so I must also communicate the flaws and inadequacies along with the successes and strengths in order to be objective or to provide any service.  Now whether I do that or not is surely debatable, but that's my goal.

*As distinct from the short-form reviews, which are by and large paragraph-or-two-long jokes with minimal critique and an honest, but not as-heavily-analyzed, letter attached, based on pure gut reaction, e.g. Days of Thunder.

P.S. added a line at the end to the Purge review to close it out in a manner more coherent with the grade.  I take the point.

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to find something I like in every movie I watch, it is rare that I really dislike a movie I've seen. So my reviews, if I wrote any, would suffer from grade inflation. 

[crazy canuck]

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to find something I like in every movie I watch

Did you see Prometheus?

[Malthus]

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to find something I like in every movie I watch

Did you see Prometheus?

Okay, that was a stinker.

At least it looked cool. 

[Syt]

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to find something I like in every movie I watch

Did you see Prometheus?

It was a stinking pile of poo, but Michael Fassbender was good.

[Ideologue]

The Purge has a stupid premise. After the first purge nothing would be left standing after being burnt down.

Sure, but so does Logan's Run.  So what?

There is a bit toward the beginning that, courtesy of the emergency broadcasting system, we learn that "class 4 weapons" and above are prohibited.  I guess that means rifles, shotguns, machetes, and knives are in, but bombs, tanks, dreadnoughts (sorry Neil), and possibly firestarting equipment are out.

That would have also given a potentially more interesting shape to the plot than the generic home invasion, even moreso than a heist movie: a story in the Purge-universe about cops dealing with a >Class 4 threat on Purge night while society mutilates itself around them.  But again, that would've needed a budget greater than five mil.

[Ideologue]

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to find something I like in every movie I watch, it is rare that I really dislike a movie I've seen. So my reviews, if I wrote any, would suffer from grade inflation. 

I can't think of any movie where I literally didn't like anything.  I liked Woody Harrelson okay in the Hunger Games; the phones in Total Recall were rad; the performances and many sequences in The Master are exquisite, however disconnected they are from each other; there's even moments of Battle Royale II that recall the frenetic fun of the first, but they are rarer than unicorns.  There's almost always something to latch onto, however tenuously, but the flaws one man might overlook may be movie poison to another.  So it's important to talk about the shit.

***

Btw, Man of Steel's been getting pretty good advance reviews... then again so did Iron Mam 3 and Star Trek...

I have no fear.  This one is made by people I genuinely respect.  One (well, this one) wishes Christopher Nolan had nothing to do with so that Zack Snyder could soar free, but: it is gonna be great.

[frunk]

I have no fear.  This one is made by people I genuinely respect.  One (well, this one) wishes Christopher Nolan had nothing to do with so that Zack Snyder could soar free, but: it is gonna be great.

The fact that Snyder isn't soaring free and that he didn't write the script is the only reason I'm tempted to see this.

[11B4V]

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to find something I like in every movie I watch

Did you see Prometheus?

It was a stinking pile of poo, but Michael Fassbender was good.

It was not.

[The Brain]

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to find something I like in every movie I watch

Did you see Prometheus?

It was a stinking pile of poo, but Michael Fassbender was good.

It was not.

Well, you're wrong.

[11B4V]

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to find something I like in every movie I watch

Did you see Prometheus?

It was a stinking pile of poo, but Michael Fassbender was good.

It was not.

Well, you're wrong.

Not

[The Brain]

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to find something I like in every movie I watch

Did you see Prometheus?

It was a stinking pile of poo, but Michael Fassbender was good.

It was not.

Well, you're wrong.

Not

I take that as a yes.

[11B4V]

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to find something I like in every movie I watch

Did you see Prometheus?

It was a stinking pile of poo, but Michael Fassbender was good.

It was not.

Well, you're wrong.

Not

I take that as a yes.

Not

[The Brain]

My problem with writing reviews is that I tend to find something I like in every movie I watch

Did you see Prometheus?

It was a stinking pile of poo, but Michael Fassbender was good.

It was not.

Well, you're wrong.

Not

I take that as a yes.

Not

Too.

[Ideologue]

It's good to see I'm not interrupting anything important.  And, yes, Prometheus was very bad.

***
Mad Max (1979)



Directed by George Miller
Written by George Miller, James McCausland, and Byron Kennedy
With Mel Gibson (Max Rockatansky), Joanne Samuel (Jessie Rockatansky), Steve Bisley (Jim Goose), Hugh Keays-Byrne (Toecutter)

Standing tall amongst the classic films of our childhoods--or adulthoods, or pre-existences--in any event classic films of the late 70s and early 80s—Mad Max has the distinction of being the movie I think I'd most like to see get remade; because despite its enormous importance to its own franchise and badass 80s action cinema as a whole, it also has the distinction of being only marginally good.

Rest assured, gentle reader, I don't dislike this first outing in Max' trilogy, but to see it for the first time in perhaps two decades, after dozens of viewings of Road Warrior and Thunderdome, is almost necessarily to not be especially impressed by it.


"Can't we just get beyond Thunderdome?"

It's all the worse when those hazy memories have been replaced largely by cultural osmosis and expository narration in the two sequels, and you jumble the story's events into what would have actually made a much tighter, perhaps more interesting, movie.

The film opens with the Keystone Kops that are the Main Force Patrol, engaged in a hilariously negligent hot pursuit of the vicious Night Rider, across the surprisingly well-maintained roads that exist following, we are told via title card, the end of civilization (try not to notice the busy restaurant, well-stocked auto mechanic, or most bafflingly the operational British Petroleum refinery that can be seen over the course of the film).

In contrast to his rambunctiously unprofessional fellow MFP officers, Max Rockatansky appears to be the only competent and mature policeman in Australia.  Made aware of the situation, he bides his time by not endangering numerous civilians, waiting until his moment arrives.  So the comically inept phase of the chase continues; suddenly a child wanders into the street.

Hey, I remember what this movie is about!  It's about Max getting Mad when his kid and wife are turned into road chowder.  Well, I say, I can't imagine why I thought they wasted a lot of time!

Of course, this key event actually happens about sixty minutes later, and Max's enemy is not the threatening power of the decaying post-civilizational state, but the gang of hoodlums to which the Night Rider belonged.  Once he's forced into a high-speed crash and dies, his fiendish friends are bummed because he apparently owned the only car between the twenty of them.

Swearing vengeance is the gang's leader, a blood libelous alternatively-sexual villain stereotype of the kind apparently rather en vogue during the 1970s; see also, the gay attempted carjackers in Vanishing Point (1970); and Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint of Diamonds Are Forever (1971), though George Miller and perhaps Australia in general were a bit late to this particular prejudice party in 1979, long after David Bowie had had his way with Mick Jagger, putting an end to any discrimination against all modes of sexuality in the Western world for all time.  Our evil gay du jour goes by the unlikely name of Toecutter--so we know now what Martinus will be up to after peak oil and the inevitable blossoming of his antisocial tendencies into full-blown psychosis.

Now, I have a huge problem with these fabulous marauders' presentation--and it's not Miller's depiction of a highly-fictionalized 70s counterculture as inherently debauched and sinister, which is actually interesting as a relic of a bygone age--but for the moment I want to say I do rather like Toecutter's gang.  They're rather menacing as characters--their thievery, thuggery, and equal-opportunity sexual battery get more savage as the film goes on, and while there's perhaps some pacing issues, it's not boring to see their pursuit of revenge escalate from pettiness to wanton cruelty, ultimately leading to the burning alive of Max' colleague and pal Jim Goose.  Theoretically, they are effective villains.

And just as importantly, are they prone to entertainingly bizarre non sequiturs.  In fact, almost everyone in Mad Max is prone to weird non sequiturs, in behavior as well as dialogue.  The first act is full of these odd moments: Toecutter carrying around his friend's boxed remains at the train station and his emphatic and intimate command to the attendant to "Remember the Night Rider!"; Max' chief wandering around with no shirt but a kicky scarf watering his plants and Jesse Venturaing all over everything; and, prior to his grisly murder, Goose's assessment of a denuded man who has clearly just been violently anally raped as a "turkey"--the latter, way funnier than it has any right to be.  Max, however, is one of the exceptions: quiet, stoic, and basically normal (for now).


"You must bring the Night Rider to Mount Seleya."

And, since the second act involves him retiring from the Patrol and going on vacation with his also rather quiet and stoic and basically normal wife Jessie, this alleged adrenaline-soaked ride grinds to shrieking halt.  It's not until Toecutter and company track the Rockatanskys down and, following a confrontation between the gang and Jessie Rockatansky's mom that plays more as a comedy-of-errors than an action scene, put the woman and child between the wheels of a motorcycle and one of those well-maintained Ozzie highways that things finally get moving again.

And they do move.  I'll give them that.  But:

This gets us back to the key problem with Toecutter's crew, alluded to earlier, a problem that threatens the undoing of the movie entire: they are all on motorcycles.  Max, once returned to the city subsequent to his family's Frank Castling, has a car.  An enormous, muscly, fast, heavily reinforced and very heavy generally fucking supercar.  An iconically badass car.  A car introduced in the brief but furiously-telegraphing garage scene in act one: Chekhov's Ford XB Falcon GT.

As a result, Max' revenge largely takes the form of not looking twice.


You just take your half out of the middle.

Thusly, the film regrettably relies on Max doing something very stupid during the beginning of the climactic showdown in order to preserve the tension.

The very end is pretty damned solid though, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover Alan Moore owes George Miller a royalty check or two for the virtually identical, down to the dialogue, scene in Watchmen.  Oh, it's only a problem when people use your work, right, Alan?  But, hey, maybe it's meta and Rorschach just watched Mad Max.  I'm sure he was fun to sit next to in the theater.

A classic and a must-see for the fan interested in the origin story, but Mad Max is not very highly recommended on its own merits: the film suffers from a middling threat, not to mention a tragically saggy midsection, and the poor, take-our-word-for-it presentation of the wind-down of civilization.  A colossal hit in Australia, it didn't do well in places where civilization hadn't crumbled, and it's no mistake that Mad Max 2 was Road Warrior on this side of the Pacific.  Still, it's not bad and there are far worse ways to spend an hour and a half.

But it's unfortunate indeed that the forthcoming Fury Road is not the prequel/rebootquel as once rumored.  I suppose you take the canon you have, not the canon you wish you had, and, luckily, next time we'll be getting the real deal, with ten times the budget--and a hundred times the maturity of vision.

B

P.S.: what is George Miller's obsession with 1)wipes and 2)that bug-eye/luxated globe makeup/special effect?  Seriously.  Director's signature?  They're all over Road Warrior too.  Hell, I like it, I'm just asking.


You're welcome!