Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga(5/23/2024)

I think we can all pretty much agree that Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the biggest cinematic wins of the 2010s, right?  It looked like something special from pretty much the moment the trailer dropped and the movie itself more than delivered both as a spectacle and as a stealth statement about gender roles and societal power dynamics.  The movie won six Oscars and earned a Best Picture nomination, something that’s extremely rare for a wild action movie like that, and five years later I saw a lot of places ranking it as the best movie of the entire decade.  Now nearly ten years later George Miller has finally followed that movie up with a prequel and, well, given how much people loved that last movie you’d think there would be more hype and excitement for it than there is, especially given that it’s focusing on Furiosa, a character who was considered the high point of the last movie.  Part of it may simply be that some momentum has been lost in the time it took for this to be made, part of it may be that re-casting the title character elicited some skepticism, and some of it may just be that the trailer they cut wasn’t quite what it needed to be, but really I think the disconnect was just this tacit assumption that no matter what George Miller delivered with this movie there was just no way it could ever surprise and excite people like Mad Max: Fury Road did.  Now that the movie’s out I think that last fear might have been correct, but that also shouldn’t make people ungrateful for what Miller has delivered here.

The film opens with Furiosa (Alyla Browne, later Anya Taylor-Joy) as a child who apparently grew up in a hidden “place of abundance” within the wider wasteland.  This upbringing is upended when a handful of men on motorcycles stumbled upon her oasis.  They end up kidnapping her and rushing off to tell their leader, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), about this potential raiding location but Furiosa’s mother Mary Jo Bassa (Charlee Fraser) pursues them and manages to kill them to protect their home’s location but isn’t able to save Furiosa.  Held captive by Dementus, who views her as some sort of curiosity, Furiosa plots her revenge but that needs to wait when Dementus and his large nomadic motorcycle gang stumbles upon The Citadel and its leader Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) whose greed and brutality we saw in the last movie.  Dementus quickly determines that it’s his destiny to take The Citidel and the other strongholds in Immortan Joe’s wasteland empire.  Furiosa will watch this post-apocalypic war take place over the course of several years and will see the conflict from both sides, always keeping her eventual goal of vengeance in mind.

When the world was going mad for Mad Max: Fury Road I was actually a bit more measured than most in my praise.  Don’t get me wrong, I thought the movie was awesome but I think I liked it maybe 20% less than a lot of people and “only” put it at number seven on my year end top ten list.  Looking back I probably would have put it a few slots higher on that list in retrospect, but I did have issues with it, namely the fact that I thought Mad Max himself was something of a blank cypher of a character which is kind of a problem.  Many would argue that this is because the new character, Furiosa, was the real star of that movie whose arc mattered but at the end of the day Max was the point of view character at the center of things and if he was going to be there I would have liked a bit more to him.  To some extent that’s been something keeping me at a distance from the entire Mad Max franchise: Max himself rarely talks and just shows up in the middle of situations, solves them, then moves on.  It’s a franchise structured a bit like Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name trilogy, but I’m not sure either Mel Gibson or Tom Hardy quite pull that kind of minimalism like Clint Eastwood ever did.  Fortunately that’s not a problem here both because the Mad Max character is out of the picture and also because this movie has a completely different structure than any of the previous movies in the series.

Unlike Mad Mas: Fury Road, which was essentially a chase movie set over the course of just a couple of day, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is (as the title would imply) an entire saga chronicling the life of Furiosa as a character from her childhood right up to what we saw in that previous movie.  As such we certainly see a lot more character development here than we usually see in a Mad Max movie but Furiosa, like Max, is often a person of few words.  So the thrust of the film is a revenge story in which Furiosa finds her footing within the politics of the wasteland and the various colorful villains populating it and how she came to rise in the ranks in Immortan Joe’s army to become the trusted general she was in Mad Max: Fury Road.  I’m not going to sit here and say that this is the deepest character study I’ve ever seen or that it has a particularly complex take on the subject of revenge, but compared to what we got in the other four Mad Max movies it’s practically a Russian novel.  This of course comes with its pros and cons, on one hand it gives the movie a bit more substance and weight and paints a more detailed picture of this world and its politics, on the other hand it kind of slows down the pace and maybe takes away from some of the immediacy.  Personally I’d say the tradeoff was probably worth it, even if only because we’ve already seen the other approach done about as well as it could possibly be done in the last movie and this was the right time to shake things up.

That the movie has a slower pace should not suggest that it skimps on the action scenes though, because on the contrary, once the movie does get into action mode it really delivers.  There are two or three huge action sequences in the movie that are among the best set-pieces you’re likely to see this year.  A lot of them are the car combat you’ve come to expect from the franchise but there are other types of action sprinkled throughout.  Some of these scenes are a bit slower and more elongated than what you’d get from other franchises.  I’ve heard people describe George Miller’s car chases described as being like the twenty minute prog rock songs to the three minute punk songs that other action movies give you and I think that’s even more true here.  Those more interesting in George Miller’s wild art direction and photography will also get plenty to like here with him having even more of a canvas to work with and introducing even more wild wasteland locations.  If I do think the weak link here might be some of the casting.  I’m not the biggest Chris Hemsworth fan generally and I do suspect that he was brought onto this project more for his marquee value than because he’s necessarily perfect for this villain role.  The guy is certainly trying his hardest and he’s far from terrible for even bad but I don’t think his work here entirely hits.  I also don’t think Anya Taylor-Joy is quite perfect here either, she never quite connects up perfectly with the character we saw in the previous movie and just on her own terms she never came close to impressing me like Charlize Theron did.  There’s also a character played by Tom Burke who emerges in the second half who just doesn’t really pop off the screen like I think they want him to.  Beyond that, well, as suspected there was just never going to be a way for this to match the impact of Mad Max: Fury Road and its slower pace does probably contribute to that but I also feel like this isn’t something to be taken for granted like I maybe did on the last movie at first.
****1/2 out of Five

Crash Course: Masaki Kobayashi Against the System

Back in 2013 Criterion put out a DVD boxed set as part of their Eclipse series called “Masaki Kobayashi Against the System” featuring four films which the famous director made for Shochiku Studios both before and after the release of Kobayashi’s magnum opus trilogy The Human Condition as a fan of Kobayashi I picked this set up sometime in the late 2010s and was planning to make a production of watching them all at some point after doing a “crash course” on the Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women boxed set, but other stuff kept coming out to distract me.  Finally I think it’s time to buckle down and watch these allegedly “minor” works from this major director.

The Thick Walled Room (1956)
If you look at Masaki Kobayashi’s filmography it will tell you he made at least two movies in 1956 but that is largely a function of the fact that what was actually his third film, The Thick Walled Room, was considered to be so potentially explosive that it was put on the shelf for three years before actually being released.  The film tackles the issue of what is to happen to “class B and C” war criminals imprisoned after World War II.  The movie isn’t oblivious to these men’s sins and shows them wrestling with guilt over what they did but it is ultimately at least somewhat arguing that these people should be release as they were “just following orders” and that many of their commanders were punished less harshly.  That whole argument strikes me as… rather dubious.  Similar pleas to show mercy towards German Nazis who helped to commit atrocities in that theater would be viewed as rather offensive and I don’t think it’s all that different here, but there is some nuance to be found.  I am not, however, unsympathetic to why there would be complicated feelings about this in Japan and in the mind of someone like Kobayashi.  The film focuses specifically on a guy named Yokota who seems to have been constructed to be an ideally sympathetic example of a war criminal as he only took part of his crime on the instructions of a commanding officer and was then ratted out by that commanding officer as he weaseled his way out of his own culpability.  I’m not sure about the morality of that argument: a hitman doesn’t suddenly become innocent just because the person who hired him had a better lawyer and managed to avoid punishment themselves.  Still, Yokota’s personal journey remains interesting and a late scene where he confronts that commanding officer is a really well shot and tense piece of filmmaking and Kobayashi also includes some cool dream sequence type things in the movie.  Whereever you come down on the movie’s arguments about war criminal amnesty, the mere fact that Kobayashi was willing to tackle such a hot button issue this quickly after the end of the occupation is impressively ballsy and he does find plenty of humanity to examine along the way.
***1/2 out of Five

I Will Buy You (1956)
I Will Buy You was Masaki Kobayashi’s follow-up to The Thick Walled Room in terms of release chronology but not in terms of production chronology as a result of that latter film’s having sat on a shelf for a while.  I don’t know a whole lot about the films he made between the two of those but from what I’ve ready they appear to have been relatively safe and cozy projects for Shochiku but he decided to go a bit more “against the system” with this one.  This is part of the tradition of sports movies that don’t actually have a lot of sports footage in them like Moneyball or High Flying Bird and instead focuses on the at times cutthroat wheeling and dealing involved in getting players signed to various teams within the world of mid-1950s Japanese baseball.  The film looks at the bargains that are being made to sign a skilled player named Kurita and the various scouts and coaches involved in bartering for his services.  The idea is supposed to be that sports is a business and like any business the money corrupts people and leads them to make less than moral choices for profit and that is a message that seems… wildly naïve today.  Like, we now have twenty four hour sports networks in which talking heads argue about every known detail of every contract negotiation in detail and while you’ll occasionally see fans acting surprised or indignant when their favorite player isn’t “loyal” to their team it’s not like people don’t know how these things usually work.  In fact at this point it’s almost come out the other end with people now actively encouraging players to go for the bag instead of being exploited out of some misplaced loyalty to a team that’s likely to be owned by a rich asshole.  So that aspect maybe doesn’t hold up but still, looking at this through a modern cynical lens probably isn’t fair and the movie likely felt like something of an eye opening exposé at the time and more than likely the real point here isn’t just that sports corrupt so much as money corrupts and that point is made pretty clearly.
*** out of Five

Black River (1957)
If you go off the dates listed on the Eclipse boxed set three Masaki Kobayashi came out in 1956.  The Thick-Walled Room came out that year after sitting on the shelf for three years, and allegedly I Will Buy You and Black River also came out that year but most of the other sources online tell me Black River actually came out in 1957.  There’s a whole footnote about this on the film’s Wikipedia page and the sources it lists for 1957 strike me as being more persuasive.  Not that it matters particularly.  The film is closer in theme to The Thick-Walled Room as it’s a film that broadly looks at the theme of lasting American influence in Japan during the post-war years, this time by looking at a U.S. military base and the community of Japanese workers that has emerged around it which the film posits as a rather rootless and ramshackle asembleage living in something of a makeshift slum, specifically in a flophouse run by a questionable landlord.  The film doesn’t necessarily seem to blam the U.S. soldiers for this or even top brass or Japanese politicians so much as it views this as something of an expected environmental consequence of the stuation and it’s actually not unlike the dynamic seen in the vicinity of a domestic American base around the same time in the 1955 hollywood film The Phenix City Story.  The movie does a pretty good job of painting a picture of what these kind of chaotic communities are like but maybe a less good job finding a particularly interesting story to tell there and instead makes something of a hangout film focusing on a whole ensemble of characters some of them more interesting than others.  The movie as a whole didn’t really grab me but it’s another interesting snapshot of the times and how Kobayashi sees them and it’s worth a look for those into Japanese cinema of the era and are looking for more of a deep cut.
***1/2 out of Five

The Inheritance (1962)
The Inheritance is the odd man out in this “Masaki Kobayashi Against the System” eclipse set as it would seem to be the most obscure of the four films as evidence by the fact that it’s the only one without a Wikipedia page which is paradoxical because it’s in may ways the biggest, moset recent, and arguably the most mature of the films here.  The other three films reflect the movies released before Kobayashi’s magnum opus The Human Condition while this is the first one made after it.  In a lot of ways it kind of feels like his equivalent to Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well in that both are looking at the cutthroat world of high finance and the general greediness that’s starting to pervade Japanese society.  The film looks at a scenario in which a rich executive learns he is dying and decides at the last minute announces that he’s had three secret illegitimate children over the course of his life who he’s lost track of and is thinking about putting them in his will if they can be found.  Rather than taking this task in earnest, his wife along with most of his staff instantly start exploiting the situation to find various angles for this to benefit themselves instead of these kids who’ve been discarded by a millionaire deadbeat dad.  Kobayashi’s visual style evolved a bit over the course of The Human Condition and he’s now filming in widescreen and has a slightly higher budget he’s working with.  If a complaint can be registered against the movie it’s that it’s arguably a bit one-note; we get pretty early that these people are amoral backstabbers and the film plays out accordingly, but otherwise it’s pretty solid work if not quite up to the level of the movies it’s sandwitched between as he’d go from this to even more impressive works like Harakiri, Kwaidan, and Samurai Rebellion.
**** out of Five

In Conclusion
Overall I was happy to have watched all of these movies but I would say that overall the boxed set might have been a little bit of a disappointment for me, but perhaps only because my expectations were a bit out of line.  Before this I’d only seen the most major of Kobayashi’s works and they set a standard that was likely unrealistic given that movies that are placed in an Eclipse set are almost certainly going to be relatively minor works in the grand scheme of things.  Don’t get me wrong, these are still pretty high quality Japanese classics but none of them really felt like masterpieces and it kind of makes me suspect that there will be further dips in quality if I look too much deeper into Kobayashi’s filmography.

I Saw the TV Glow(5/8/2024)

Last October there were reports that someone at A24 had announced that they wanted to expand into “action and big IP projects,” a truly ominous development if true.  I don’t know that I’ve heard anything more about that from them and I do hope it’s been misreported because god knows we really need the A24 we’ve already had as they’ve been a real godsend for cinema.  What was that even going to mean?  Would it mean they’d develop a separate shingle that would sort of be a Dimension to their Miramax?  Or would it be something akin to Lionsgate going from being the distributor of movies too edgy for the major studios to being the people who do that but less boldly while also peddling The Hunger Games?  We may have gotten a preview of this new A24 earlier this year with the movie Civil War, which seemed like something of a best case scenario for what this transition could look like if it happens, but they were of course already in the Alex Garland business so maybe that’s just an extension of that existing relationship.  What is clear is that the old A24 is not gone yet as their latest buzzed about release, I Saw the TV Glow, is very much a product meant to appeal to their base of millennial and Gen Z hipster cineastes in that’s it’s a cool youth skewing indie from a buzzy filmmaker with some horror elements and some place in the various discourses of the day.

The film begins in 1996 and focuses in on a character named Owen (Ian Foreman, later  Justice Smith), a seventh grader living in a relatively comfortable suburb but who’s extremely reserved and isolated and has rather smothering parents who overly shelter him.  One day he meets a ninth grade girl named Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who is herself disaffected but in different ways and the two bond over a shared interest in a TV show called “The Pink Opaque,” which seems to be a sort of supernatural thriller made for tween to teen audiences.  The two don’t really talk a whole lot at first but Maddy does provide him with VHS tapes of the show since he usually can’t stay up late enough to watch it as it airs.  Their mutual attachment to the show does seem to go beyond normal fandom however and as their friendship progresses over the years it starts to feel like they’re seeing much different things in this show than most people do and the show starts to seem like more than a show.

I’ve seen some people describe I Saw the TV Glow as a horror movie, which I don’t think is really correct or useful in setting expectations for audiences.  There are a couple scenes, mainly ones involving the fictional show within the movie that do engage with the language of horror but that’s not the film’s primary mode and I wouldn’t send people to it with any expectation that they’ll get their pants scared off.  The most obvious comparison I could probably make would be to something like Donnie Darko, which is another movie about teenagers in the near past facing some sort of vague supernatural situation which might be a psychological delusions and isn’t existing in a specific genre, but that movie uses less of an indie vocabulary to tell its story and for all that movie’s cryptic qualities it probably is more of a puzzle to be put together while this one is a bit more expressive and metaphoric.  At the heart of it is this strange friendship between Owen and Maddy and whether there’s actually some sort of supernatural connection they’re experiencing with this TV show or if these are just two people with difficult upbringings forming a sort of codependent bond that is leading them in some delusional directions.

The fictional show at the center of all this, “The Pink Opaque,” is an interesting element of the movie in and of itself.  We only get a handful of glimpses at this show, which appears to be about two teenage girls who met at summer camp and share a psychic bond and use this to fight back against monsters sent by a lunar themed villain called Mr. Melancholy.  It seems like a very weird show that doesn’t seem to be inspired by any one actual 90s show.  It airs on something called the “Young Adult Network” which I’m pretty sure is supposed to be an analogue to Nickelodeon given that it’s said to be the last show that airs before the switch to black and white reruns.  The show also has the low budget look and feel of stuff like “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” but it’s said to have a serialized format with both “mythos” and “monster of the week” episodes like “The X-Files” and also seems to be geared more towards the teen audience of something like “Roswell.”  It clearly has a the analog touches of television from that era but the basic filmmaking in the clips feels a lot more impressive and Avant-garde than anything that aired on actual 90s television outside of “Twin Peaks” in its absolute strangest moments.  In keeping with the film’s central mystery around what experience these people are having with the show there is some indication that what we see of the show is filtered through the characters’ experience and that the “actual” show was shittier than what we see in the movie.

I Saw the TV Glow was directed by Jane Schoenbrun, the filmmaker who gave us We’re All Going to the World’s Fair a couple of years ago.  That was a movie that was particularly interested in the internet and the effects it’s having or not having on Gen Z kids, ultimately coming to slightly ambivalent conclusions.  This follow-up suggests that us millennials did not necessarily have the best relationship with the traditional analog media we were given either.  That first movie intrigued me to be sure and seemed like a pretty thoughtful and forward thinking piece of work but it never quite engaged me as a piece of cinema like I wanted it to.  I Saw the TV Glow is in many ways an ideal sophomore effort from Schoenbrun as it brings a lot of the ideas from that movie forward but paints on a bigger canvas provided by increased resources and takes things in a much more watchable and engaging direction.  Where that previous movie felt kind of blunt and quiet bordering on invoking found footage, this movie is ethereal and nostalgic without feeling pandering and has a well-chosen soundtrack featuring mostly newly recorded songs trying to invoke a certain kind of suburban malaise and internal confusion.

Jane Schoenbrun is a trans/non-binary filmmaker and when We’re All Going to the World’s Fair came out I did see some people interpreting it as some sort of extended allegory for that experience, which I must say went right over my head if it’s there but I can probably see a bit more of those elements in this one; Owen seems to view a kindship between himself and a female character on the show in a way that’s probably pointed and deeply closeted transness would explain a lot of why the character is as uncomfortable in his own skin as he is.  I would not, however, recommend limiting one’s interpretations of this movie to queer readings as there are other things going on here as well and it’s quite intentionally meant to be exist with some room for interpretation.  It’s not a perfect movie necessarily and has a bit of a muddled ending that doesn’t quite bring things full circle successfully, which is maybe the point but which is a bit unsatisfying none the less.  Outside of that though this is a pretty big win; exactly the kind of thing we want an emerging director to do and exactly the kind of thing we want A24 to get behind.
**** out of Five

May Round-Up 2024

The Beast(5/12/2024)

I’m nothing if not brand loyal and as such there’s a pretty good chance that I never would have seen or even heard of Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast had it not been distributed by Janus Films and as such received a whole bunch of promotion and shoutouts on that company’s Twitter feed.  Honestly I wasn’t sure what to expect from it; I’m not that familiar with Bonello’s other work and the plot summaries I saw of it were pretty vague.  As it turns out the film is kind of a work of science fiction which is set in the year 2044 but the main bit of futuristic technology in it is a machine that allows people to examine their past lives to expunge that baggage from their psyches… which is a concept that has something of a whiff of scientology to it, but hopefully that’s accidental.  The main character’s main hangup is that she has a deep seeded feeling that one day, possibly at random she’ll be hit with some fatal disaster, which is stopping her from embracing life.  That’s a concept that will be familiar to anyone who’s read Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” which is almost certainly something the film’s title is alluding to.  In addition to the 2044 material we see two of the protagonists’ past lives and in all three stories we meet a woman played by Léa Seydoux and a man played by George MacKay: first we see them in the early 1900s (around the time of Henry James) in a sort of period melodrama involving a love triangle and then we see a story set around 2014 in which a version of MacKay a violent “incel” who’s stalking the Seydoux character.  That later story is almost certainly inspired by the case of real life mass shooter Elliot Rodger which adds layers of dread to the proceedings but will likely cause some debate about the ethics of exploiting such tragedies.

Again, I’m not particularly familiar with Bonello, I think the only of his other films I’ve seen is his 2016 effort Nocturama.  My memories of that film are a bit hazy but I don’t remember it having a whole lot in common with this.  Watching this movie alone I’d say he seems like a guy who’s prone to wearing his influences on his sleeve to some extent.  Parts of this movie, particularly the framing story, have clear shades of David Lynch and the 2014 segment is heavily indebted to Michael Haneke.  The film feels a touch unbalanced in some ways as we don’t get quite enough of the framing story to really have it stand toe-to-toe with the past lives but only having two of those past lives feels a bit unwieldy.  Three is kind of the magic number with these things and I feel like they could have maybe shortened those to make room for a third to really lock in the pattern.  That second story in particular seems to go on way too long given that you basically know where it’s going from the jump, at least in broad terms if not specifics.  There are clear motifs between all three stories and similar thematic throughlines but I’m not quite sure I understood the entire logic behind it all or how the past lives fully interact with the framing story.  I also can’t say I was entirely impressed by the film’s overall look and feel, which seemed pretty straightforwardly digital and lacked the heft to really bring the film’s ambitions home.  It’s kind of one of those movies that I can imagine seeing a video essay about at some point and maybe being won over a bit, but at present I’m not sure I really “get” this one and can’t say I was really won over by it.
**1/2 out of Five

Babes(5/27/2024)

I keep wanting to see mainstream comedy come back and it keeps kind of just not happening.  Babes, a Neon release, wasn’t quite an attempt at the mainstream but it didn’t exactly feel like plucky indie either and that straddling of the two worlds may be part of why it hasn’t really caught on much.  The film is largely a vehicle for Ilana Glazer, star of the Comedy Central sitcom “Broad City” and she’s more or less playing the same chaotic New York hipster role she established on that show.  In the film she plays someone who becomes pregnant after a one night stand and learns that the father had actually died in a freak accident shortly after the consummation, leaving her to decide to have the baby despite not exactly being your typical maternal type.  The whole set up feels a bit contrived to come up with a scenario in which the father doesn’t really enter into the equation for her decision making here but the movie is also a bit oddly disinterested in exploring why she wants this baby and also why she might not want to.  Particularly conspicuous in its absence is any discussion of where this single woman living in New York on a Yoga instructor’s salary might not be able to afford another mouth to feed.   Honestly I think the movie is perhaps looking at the wrong thing generally as it’s a movie about pregnancy when in reality I think I would have been a lot more interested in seeing how this immature character adjusts to motherhood than I am in seeing her go to ultrasounds and the other various Knocked Up motions.  I’ll also say that I was a little disappointed in the direction here by Pamela Adlon, who was a lot more adventurous on her TV series “Better Things” than she is here, this feels a bit more conventional and straightforward.  Having said all that, I don’t think this is a disaster by any means and I also need to concede that I’m absolutely not who this is targeted at.  The movie is clearly meant to appeal to people who’ve had babies recently or know someone who has and are going to see all these various rituals of pregnancy being depicted and say “oh my god it’s so true” and I’m not really in that boat and the movie just wasn’t funny enough unto itself to bridge that gap.
**1/2 out of Five