Mad Max: Fury Road May 2o15

Hell-hath-no-FURY-like-a-woman-scorned-ROAD!

Look, if you are expecting Mad Max: Fury Road to be just a carbon copy of the original, The Road Warrior, you are going to be both surprised . . . and not surprised. Yes, Mad Max: Fury Road is exactly like every Mad movie you have seen  . . . and also totally different. Confused? Join the club. I’ll admit that it took me a few minutes to realize that the title character, Mad Max, wasn’t the lead or the focus of this movie. He is supporting character, a utilitarian character, a character not unlike The Feral Kid in Mad Max 2.

The real Mad Max character in this movie is a female character named Imperator Furiosa who rose from her slavery to become a general in Immortan Joe’s kick-booty army of paint huffing War Boys. And what does she do? Well, as soon as she gets her War Rig,  and the opportunity, she snags Joe’s wives and hightails it to some feminist fantasy land called the Green Place.

 

And yes, this movie is full of “feminist propaganda!” How do I know? Well, the director says so, the author of the script says so, and if that’s not enough proof for you, they cast a woman in the lead role. So, ergo: it’s feminist propaganda. I mean, that’s the way we all American, eat all you want, heterosexual white dudes think, right?

 

Woman in lead role = feminist propaganda

 

Never mind the that if the lead role had been cast as a white male we’d all be thinking that it was a brilliant movie about “. . . the MANly spirit standing proudly up for “HIS” rights against the evil powers of a totalitarian regime—

 

Irate Fan Boy: Hey Woodie! I thought this was going to be a movie review?

 

Oh, yeah, the movie. The movie’s great, man. Just the cinematography alone is worth the price of admission (Which if you go to a matinée showing like I do, it ain’t that much). The shots of the Namib Desert are just devastatingly beautiful. The pic above this review is a still from the movie. Granted, not too impressive in miniature, but on the BIG screen, totally awe-inspiring.  And forget about any action sequences you’ve seen in the past. The chase scenes across the desert are brilliant! New camera techniques, incredible car crashes, great, extremely great stunt work make this “sequel” the best movie of the Mad Max franchise. Okay, I do admit I STILL don’t like the way they shoot hand-to-hand combat scenes these days. They speed up the camera to make the fight seem more “powerful(?)” and to also cover-up the fact that the lead actors can’t do stunt work. It makes it all look a bit herky-jerky  . . .  like this:

 

Anyway, no matter what, if you love great action, exceptional acting and storytelling, Mad Max: Fury Road is a must see!

 

“Oh what a day, what a lovely day!”

 

Ex Machina, April 2015

Nathan: One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil

skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and
tools, all set for extinction.

 

It’s difficult to write a review of a movie that has inspired you so much that you feel compelled to entice other people to go see it. You don’t want to say too little, but you don’t want to overstate the brilliance of the movie because folks are folks and they’ll probably be disappointed if you glorify it too much.

 

Ex Machina is at its core a Sci-Fi/Thriller. But it is even so much more than that. It’s an exploration of morality, ethics and human strengths and weaknesses. Yes, there have been many A.I. movies that use Artificial Intelligence as a plot device more than a study of human behavior. But, as I said, this movie goes beyond the basic thriller genre without being a bit preachy or making you feel as if you just stepped into a Philosophy 101class. It is an extremely personal and human exploration of the relationship between humans, a nonhuman/sentient being and, if I dare say the word . . . God.

 

Everything is working for this film. A really intriguing script that gives you just enough info to want to stay and see what’s going to happen next, lots of clever, human dialogue that always has something hidden just under the surface to make seeing this film more than once a pleasure and not a chore, and the acting? Forget about it! The three main actors (Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac) are at the top of the Thespian food chain. Man, they know how to play an action and how to make the words they’re saying sound like music to my over-educated, theatre oriented ears

 

Unfortunately, the grandeur of this little film is being dwarfed by the humongous shadows of this summer’s blockbuster hits: Avengers: Age of Ultron and Mad Max: Fury Road. But if you look for it, you should be able to find it somewhere close to you. And see it? Yes, definitely, you should see this movie!

 

If you have an interest in A.I. movies (and who the heck doesn’t?), you can check out some of my favorites: Gog (1954) Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) Blade Runner (1982) The Matrix (1999)The Thirteent Floor (1999) I, Robot (2004)

Avengers: Age of Ultron, May 2o15

Like every other comic book/film geek in the universe I was pawing at the ground just waiting for Avengers: Age of Ultron to hit the movie houses. Get this! David and I were so pumped to see this flick that we got up early enough to catch an 8:30am showing at the Regal Spotlight! And we weren’t the only ones. Fast head count in the dark, there were at least three other fans who braved the early morning just to see the sequel to one of Marvel’s biggest movies, The Avengers! And after 2hrs and 21min of almost nonstop action, I can say whole heartedly that this movie was . . . okay. Yeah, you heard me, it was okay but it did suffer somewhat from a mild case of:

 

MSS (Matrix Sequel Syndrome)

 

You remember The Matrix (1999), right, that kick-ass little fantasy/action film by the Wachowskis that took Hollywood by its box office receipts and sent all us action geeks running to the closest theater showing it. And WOW! What great action! What great fight scenes! And I remember when the Wachowskis won best picture at the MTV Movie Awards, one of them smiled at us real big and said, “You liked this movie? You ain’t seen nothing yet!” And lo, they madest two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolution, and guess what? We had seen their “something yet,” and it was called, The Matrix (1999). Yeah, pretty much both sequels were about the same as the original The Matrix . . . just bigger, faster and cluttered to hell with uninspired action scenes.

 

And that’s the problem with Age of Ultron; we’ve seen pretty much all the action sequences before in the original The Avengers. Remember the cool fight scene in A1, Thor vs Hulk? Well, the second action scene in Ultron is Ironman vs. Hulk. Granted, it was a longer action sequence than in A1, but virtually the same except that the battle Between I & H was sped up so fast that it looked like blurry globs of red and green mashed potatoes whizzing across the screen!

 

And do you remember the great climactic war at the end of Avengers 1 where our heroes kick the crap out of Loki’s inept alien army? If you didn’t see it, no worries because the opening scene to Age of Ultron has the Avengers fighting an inept  army of puny humans . . . and again, if you missed that cause you were dipping into your popcorn barrel instead of paying attention to the movie. . . no worries. The final battle has the Avengers kicking the crap out of Ultron’s inept army of robots. Now, you’d think that at least one of those smart villains would have figured, “Hmmm, these Avenger guys are tough cookies! Maybe I should create a less wimpy army?”

 

To give Age of Ultron some credit, the writers did try to create a few scenes that had

something more to offer than the Avengers kicking bad guys’ bottoms and saving the world (again) from total annihilation:

 

Natasha and Bruce Love Scene (paraphrase)

Natasha: Hey, Bruce wanna hook up?

Bruce: Well, I can’t have kids.
Natasha: Neither can I.
Bruce: Well, then, maybe we shouldn’t.
Natasha: (catch in her voice) Oh, okay.

 

Or how about that heated moral debate over the creation of AI?

 

Bruce and Tony moral Debate (paraphrase)

Tony: I’m gonna create Artificial Intelligence!

Bruce: That would be immoral!

Tony: I’m gonna do it anyway.
Bruce: (catch in his voice) Oh, okay.

 

There are so many subplots going on in this movie (Hawkeye and his secret family, the love triangle between Natasha, Banner and Cap, The backstory of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, etc.) that there’s no time to explore any of them in depth, so they come off as being totally artificial and lacking a real sense of life.

 

But that’s cool, right, ‘cause the only reason we go to see this type of movie is for the “KICK-ASS” action scenes, right? Well, maybe not. I’m pretty sure that most of us want a bit more story and a lot less of the amateurish, CGI hokum that the directors and producers force on us movie after movie, after movie . . .