Die Historic

Film: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Format: Sycamore Theater, Theater 2

There’s a huge problem with prequels, and nowhere is that more evident than in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (which I’m going to call Furiosa from this point forward). Actually, there are multiple sets of problems with prequels, and Furiosa exemplifies exactly one set of such problems nearly perfectly. One type of sequel has the problem of technology. We see Prometheus and the technology is amazing. Alien, the film it leads into, has technology from the late 1970s. It looks off, and no one seems to have figured out that if you’re going to make a prequel like this after huge real-world technology upgrades, it would be better to make the prequel a lot more retro to fit the universe.

No, Furiosa is the epitome of the other set of prequel problems—the audience knows the story. We know going in that this is going to be the backstory for Charlize Theron’s Furiosa character from Mad Max: Fury Road, and because of that, we know a lot going into the story. Because of this, and because this is something that needs to be talked about in detail, you can consider the rest of this mildly spoiler-y for both of the recent Mad Max-iverse films.

When You Wish Upon a Jar

Film: Three Thousand Years of Longing
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

George Miller has the weirdest IMDb page. If you don’t believe me, go check. This is the guy who created Mad Max and directed the entire series of movies and also wrote and directed Babe: Pig in the City and won an Oscar for Happy Feet, which he wrote, directed, and produced. That being the case, there’s not a lot that feels outside of his wheelhouse, so Three Thousand Years of Longing, a tale of magical realism involving a scholar and a djinn is certainly not outside of the realm of his oeuvre.

And, that’s exactly what Three Thousand Years of Longing is. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is an academic who studies narrative. She is entirely content with her life, living alone and without a great deal of close contact with other people. But, it’s the life that she wants. On a trip to a conference in Istanbul, she purchases a small glass bottle. Cleaning the bottle, she uncorks it and releases a djinn (Idris Elba). The djinn, who is never named anything aside from “Djinn” offers her three wishes, which he says she must take. If she does not, he is essentially trapped on this world and unable to return to the land of his people.

Off Script: The Twilight Zone: The Movie

Film: The Twilight Zone: The Movie
Format: DVD from Byron Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

If you’re older than about 30, you watched The Twilight Zone on television at some point. This was the television version of M. Night Shyamalan’s career, except that the twists almost always worked on the television show. Weird, creepy little stories that sometimes packed a moral lesson and sometimes just wanted to give people the shivering willies made for good television. Seriously, when I was younger, it was probably the only show I knew of where people my age would voluntarily watch a black-and-white television show because the stories were frequently that good. So, it’s only natural that eventually The Twilight Zone: The Movie was conceived of and released.

What I remember most about it from 1983 (it’s release date falls squarely between my sophomore and junior years in high school) is the controversy that surrounded it. Specifically, that controversy was the rather horrifying deaths of actors Vic Morrow, Renee Chen, and My-ca Dinh Le (the latter two being 6- and 7-years-old respectively), who were killed when a helicopter crashed on them while filming the first segment. This accident led to multiple court cases and almost led to the cancellation of the entire project. What I remember most was people being more than a little outraged that the film itself seemed to take no notice of this tragedy, not following the typical pattern of dedicating the film to someone close to the production who had died.

Unhappy Audience

Film: Happy Feet
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

The shit I do for this website. I grabbed Happy Feet off the shelf at the library today specifically because this was a film that I was dreading. I’ve seen it before and I didn’t like it the first time through. All I remember was a lot of breathy singing and a lot of dancing penguins. Now that I’ve watched it again, the reality is a lot of breathy singing and dancing penguins. This is exactly the worst type of film made for children or a “family” audience. There’s a lot of pandering to kids here, a slap-in-the-face level couple of messages, and nothing deeper than the barest, most obvious, surface-level story. Adults entertained by this sort of thing are the same sort of people who go to amusement parks to see the shows instead of go on the rides. It overdoses on the cute rather than actually trying to do something interesting. Like I said, the shit I do for this website.

In the world of emperor penguins, the goal is always to find something called a “heartsong.” When they are of the right age, the penguins wander around singing at each other until they find someone else singing the same song, or something, and they mate for life. This, such as it is, happens to Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) and Memphis (Hugh Jackman). They produce an egg, which results in Mumble (Elijah Wood). In what will certainly become the entire main point of the movie, it is soon discovered that Mumble is unable to sing but has a natural penchant for tap dancing.

Medicine Show

Film: Lorenzo’s Oil
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

If you are a fan of the movie Lorenzo’s Oil, I’m going to ask you politely to back away now. Go to another website for a movie review and check back here on another day. If this is a film that you find inspiring and filled with heart and spirituality, I’m probably going to piss you off in the following paragraphs. If you’re an anti-vaxxer or a proponent of “alternative” health therapies and see Lorenzo’s Oil as justification for your beliefs, I’m going to much less politely ask you to leave, because that is precisely where I have issues with this film.

Let’s hit the meat of this. The Odone family begins the film living in the Comoro Islands. Father Augusto (Nick Nolte) works for the World Bank and mother Michaela (Susan Sarandon) takes care of young son Lorenzo (Zack O’Malley Greenburg). The family eventually returns to the United States when Lorenzo suddenly begins acting out. He begins throwing massive, unexplainable tantrums and showing signs of physical deterioration. Stumped by this, the family eventually receives the diagnosis of adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a degenerative genetic illness that strips the myelin from the brain and generally leads to death within two years of diagnosis.

Turbo Charged

Film: Mad Max: Fury Road
Format: Carmike Market Square Theater.

I knew that I’d be seeing Mad Max: Fury Road in the theater. When I found out that men’s rights activists, the misogynist clods who complain that men are discriminated against in a male-dominated society hated this movie because of the prominent roles of women and pro-women plot elements, well, I knew I had to go on opening weekend. I’m a long-time Mad Max fan. I saw The Road Warrior in the theater at the tender age of 13. And when the reviews started coming in, I knew this was going to be the film I had to see if I saw no others for the rest of the summer.

So let’s get through the plot nice and quickly here. Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) lives in a blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland. He is captured by the War Boys, the military arm of a place called The Citadel, run by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Designated as a universal blood donor, Max is used as a way to get injured and sick War Boys back into battle. Meanwhile, one of Immortan Joe’s main assistants, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) has headed off to bring more gas back to the citadel. But this is not her plan; instead, she’s running away with Immortan Joe’s five wives (Zoe Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton) to get them away from him. So Joe rounds up the troops, including Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a war boy who is using Max for a transfusion. To keep going, he straps Max to the front of his vehicle, and the chase begins.

Breakdown

Film: Mad Max
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television

When I was far too young to see it, I saw The Road Warrior in the theater, and it rapidly became one of my favorite films. It may well have been the first ever VHS I ever bought. I didn’t see the first film, Mad Max for quite some time, and when I did, I saw the version with the dialogue “cleaned up” for an American audience, since, it was alleged, Americans were unable to understand the thick Australian accents of the original film. I’ve seen both films probably half a dozen times, but tonight was the first time in ages I’d seen Mad Max.

The most interesting thing to me about this film is not the cars (which are cool) or the revenge angle (which is a bit predictable and melodramatic), but the slow burn of society breaking down throughout the film. Most of the time, when we get a film that shows us the apocalypse, it’s a sudden thing—zombies crawling out of their graves, for instance, or an attack by aliens looking to destroy our world. This film is different. Here, the destruction of society comes not from outside forces or cataclysm but from slow decay and rot from the inside. Society in this film breaks down in pieces, not all at once, and this decline is what makes the film work more than anything else.