Furiosa Might Not Save Movies, But... Um...
Guzzoline?
I finally saw Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which isn’t a great title for a movie where Mad Max appears for maybe 20 seconds and he’s clearly a stunt double. But more people recognize “Mad Max” than “Furiosa,” so he stays on the marquee.
It’s a good movie. Not as good as Fury Road, but no action movie in the past decade has reached that bar. I would’ve cut 20 minutes and 20 characters, fixed some of the dodgy CGI, and made Anya Taylor-Joy eat something, but those huge, expressive eyes steal the show. And while George Miller might be almost as old as the president of the United States, he still knows how to shoot amazing scenes of propulsive violence.
It’s also the best performance Chris Hemsworth has ever given. His Dementus is the craziest villain in the whole series, a murderous, sociopathic warlord who has devoted his life to being as cartoonishly evil as possible to get revenge on a world that failed him. He treats cruelty and torment like performance art, forever preening for his audience.
But Hemsworth actually made me kinda like the guy. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near such a lunatic in real life, but he sure is fun to watch. He really chews on the scenery, and what scenery it is.1
It’s one of the strangest big-budget Hollywood blockbusters I’ve ever seen, and that ain’t bad.
Unfortunately, it’s busting no blocks whatsoever. It came out at the worst time for theatrical movies in decades. Everybody’s got an opinion about why theaters are empty these days, but it seems as simple as one word: streaming.
Why pay 15 bucks for a movie ticket? Why fight traffic, and possibly your fellow patrons, just to sit in a darkened auditorium for a few hours watching a movie with no pause button? You can just wait a month and spend about as much to watch the same film at home, as many times as you want.
The Fall Guy premiered a month ago, and you can already watch it on your phone while you’re taking a dump. Which I might try, actually.
Movies are just like everything else now. Books, music, news, sports: It’s all just content. They’re all competing for eyeballs. Everything is clickbait.
That’s why the movie business is just IP management now. Everything’s a sequel or a remake or a reboot. Mad Max. Garfield. Star Wars. Marvel. Barbie. Stuff that’s been around for 50 years or more. Nobody wants to take a chance on anything new.
So when one of the products happens to be good, like this one, the audience is just like: “¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
Anyway, Furiosa is what we used to call a “popcorn movie,” back when anybody could still afford popcorn at the movies. It’s worth watching on a big screen, but I can hardly blame anybody for staying home instead.
Oh, one last thing: A lot of MRA film nerds are blaming feminism for Furiosa’s failure at the box office. But Fury Road was every bit as feminist, if not more so, with the added humiliation of making Max the sidekick in his own movie. If you hate women, you have a lot more reason to hate that one. No, Furiosa is just a good movie coming out at a bad time.
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In other Election 2024 news:
The Invasion of Normandy happened when Joe Biden was a toddler, and he may or may not have commemorated the 80th anniversary the same way he did when it first happened: by making a doodie in his pants.
It looked to me like he just thought it was time to sit down, then realized it wasn’t time to sit down yet, and did not know what to do because he is very, very old. But it’s funnier to imagine him dropping a big log right there in front of everybody. So believe whatever you want. You all will anyway.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Next Friday is the third anniversary of this newsletter, so I’m marking the occasion by taking a week off afterwards. I’m not very good at planning things. But that’s why you like me, right?
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I won’t spoil it, but Dementus’ comeuppance is bizarre and biologically impossible and perfectly in keeping with the rest of the series. These movies aren’t documentaries. They’re myths. Apocrypha of the apocalypse.
I think the biggest problem with theaters is just the expense. During the before times, in the long long ago, there were no luxury loungers or XD, no IMAX or restaurant style food brought to you - you had $2 theaters with broken seats and cruddy popcorn. If some old theaters were like, "let's do $5 tickets and cut back on the extras" there'd probably be a market for it, but not when it's like a $100 for a family of four for tickets and popcorn.
Yes, that is why we like you (at least one of many reasons)!!