Jumat, 22 Mei 2015
Rabu, 20 Mei 2015
Minggu, 17 Mei 2015
REVIEW: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
For the first time in a long time, I feel like I�ve been derelict in my duties as a Generation X film geek. Oh sure, me and my kind have done a fine job making sure that STAR WARS, RAIDERS, GOONIES, EVIL DEAD, RAMBO the collective John Carpenter and even fucking TRON remained at the ubiquitous forefront of pop-culture to such a degree that our Millennial ascendants couldn�t have avoided absorbing their supposed import if they wanted to� but I now realize we kinda forgot to tell you how great the MAD MAX movies were. Which means a lot of my audience probably only knows legendary Australian filmmaker George Miller as the guy behind� eh, well, a string a beloved childhood classics � but still! He did also invent the post-apocalyptic automotive warfare movie.
So� sorry about that, but in our defense the guy who played �Mad Max� went all cuckoo for Christ and then just plain cuckoo and everything he was associated with got kinda uncomfortable to talk about. But whatever! Now Tom Hardy is playing Mad Max, so it�s all good again.
If you�ve never seen a MAD MAX movie before� well, it�s the future, we�ve almost run out of oil but instead of being in any way responsible about that we�ve basically let the entire planet go to shit except for all the gas-guzzling jacked-up cars on which we now rely more than ever and� egh, look, back in the 80s this sounded like ca-raaazy Science Fiction instead of an eventuality potentially only ONE more Bush Administration away.
But whatever! We rejoin mentally-unhinged wasteland-wandering hardcase Max Rockatansky doing what he does best: Getting swept up into chaotic events he wants no part of but can�t bring himself to abandon. As the film opens, he�s captured to be used as a human bloodbank for a heavily-armed death cult led by the bizarre tyrant Immorten Joe. But no sooner does Max get there than all-out war breaks out when Joe�s general Imperator Furiosa is revealed to have helped The Immorten�s private harem of breeding wives escape to the open road; triggering an extended (and I do mean across the entire length of the film) combat car-chase � with Max finding himself reluctantly joining Furiosa�s quest and helping her fend off the three or four maniacal factions pursuing them across the desert.
Yeah. That�s pretty much the movie: The good guys are driving a truckload of hotties across the apocalyptic outback, Death Metal Darth Vader and his skinhead-tweaker suicide army want them back, and they all chase eachother around in crazy customized battle-cars wailing on eachother with insane weapons and nature occasionally intervening in the form of a death-trap marsh and a sandstorm lightning-hurricane. The result is an action film the likes of which you�ve largely never seen before, a seamless fusion of the old-fashioned gritty lunacy Miller made famous in the original films and cutting-edge 21st Century digital technology and editing techniques that looks even better in the hands of a seasoned master � action filmmaking that blows by so fast and so confidently you almost don�t realize how hard it hits until a bit later; when the real depth beneath its deceptive simplicitly of storytelling.
It�s a conceit of both prior sequels in the franchise that Max is a charismatic candide-like figure who stumbles into other people�s adventures, but in FURY ROAD it�s more apparent than ever: This is very much Furiosa�s movie � she takes all the initiative, drives all the plot, has all the skin in the game, she even gets to drive the big main battle-truck and have the cool robot arm! Max spends most of the first hour with his mouth muzzled so he can barely speak, and even once he�s free he doesn�t talk all that much. This isn�t one of those movies where the title character is the only person on Earth who can save us all because the movie says so � he�s capable and good to have around (and, for the record, Hardy is a commanding enough presence as to make you forget the role was ever recast), but you get the sense Furiosa would�ve worked this one out okay enough on her own.
Theron proved herself a fearlessly great actress a long time ago, but Furiosa is a revelation � there likely won�t be a more strikingly original hero onscreen this year. Attention also needs to be paid to a revelatory strong turn by a commanding Rosie Huntington-Whitely, and a nuanced showing from Nicholas Hoult as a luckless would-be foot-soldier whose arc forms the philosophical spine of the story � and yes, I said philosophical!
While the subsequent-superstardom of Mel Gibson and the endlessly ripped-off popularity of the wacky custom cars have been the most enduring elements of the original MAD MAX movies, Miller�s *truly* fascinating conceit was imagining what a future of newly re-barbarianized humanity trying to assemble new cultures and civilizations out of the half-remembered remains of our own might look like. This time, though, there�s actually a big, loud, radical point being made; in a manner that would probably seem overly blunt and on the nose but feels downright subtle in a movie where one of Immorten Joe�s war rigs comes with an array of speakers and a guy with a flame-throwing guitar strapped to it like a human hood-ornament because why wouldn�t he have one of those?
See, Furiosa isn�t simply helping The Immorten�s wives get away from HIM, she�s helping them escape to her own homeland � a far-flung Matriarchy reigned over by grandmotherly Amazonian motorcyclists who follow a gentle path of nurture and nature-cultivation (but, y�know, with sniper-rifles and dirtbikes because this is a MAD MAX movie) where they hope to raise their offspring as anything BUT warlords, under a philosophical rallying cry of �Who killed the world?� asked in a way that leaves no doubt as to what the answer is. By contrast, the obscenely evil Immorten Joe rules over his subjects by way of a self-conjured religion comprised of equal parts car-culture, gun-worship, repurposed Viking mythology other and uber-masculine �honor culture� staples that�s yielded (among other things) an army of Skinhead suicide-soldiers called �Warboys� eager to die in battle for their surrogate daddy�s approval.
Yes, this time it�s a battle for the future course of human civilization, with the heavy implication that it�s stern father-figure patriarchs like Immorten Joe that got the world into this mess while Furiosa�s Amazon naturalists represent hope and progress. These are the kind of weighty ruminations you don�t generally expect from movies where flame-thrower guitarists are part of the set decoration.
Bottom line: This time, you can believe the hype. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is one of the most brutal, bone-crunching action films recent memory, one of the boldest most original visual experiences of the year and � improbably � one of the smartest works of dystopian scifi to emerge from the current deluge. I know the film critic collective has overhyped this sucker to kingdom come, but� seriously, just go see it anyway � it kicks ass.
So� sorry about that, but in our defense the guy who played �Mad Max� went all cuckoo for Christ and then just plain cuckoo and everything he was associated with got kinda uncomfortable to talk about. But whatever! Now Tom Hardy is playing Mad Max, so it�s all good again.
If you�ve never seen a MAD MAX movie before� well, it�s the future, we�ve almost run out of oil but instead of being in any way responsible about that we�ve basically let the entire planet go to shit except for all the gas-guzzling jacked-up cars on which we now rely more than ever and� egh, look, back in the 80s this sounded like ca-raaazy Science Fiction instead of an eventuality potentially only ONE more Bush Administration away.
But whatever! We rejoin mentally-unhinged wasteland-wandering hardcase Max Rockatansky doing what he does best: Getting swept up into chaotic events he wants no part of but can�t bring himself to abandon. As the film opens, he�s captured to be used as a human bloodbank for a heavily-armed death cult led by the bizarre tyrant Immorten Joe. But no sooner does Max get there than all-out war breaks out when Joe�s general Imperator Furiosa is revealed to have helped The Immorten�s private harem of breeding wives escape to the open road; triggering an extended (and I do mean across the entire length of the film) combat car-chase � with Max finding himself reluctantly joining Furiosa�s quest and helping her fend off the three or four maniacal factions pursuing them across the desert.
Yeah. That�s pretty much the movie: The good guys are driving a truckload of hotties across the apocalyptic outback, Death Metal Darth Vader and his skinhead-tweaker suicide army want them back, and they all chase eachother around in crazy customized battle-cars wailing on eachother with insane weapons and nature occasionally intervening in the form of a death-trap marsh and a sandstorm lightning-hurricane. The result is an action film the likes of which you�ve largely never seen before, a seamless fusion of the old-fashioned gritty lunacy Miller made famous in the original films and cutting-edge 21st Century digital technology and editing techniques that looks even better in the hands of a seasoned master � action filmmaking that blows by so fast and so confidently you almost don�t realize how hard it hits until a bit later; when the real depth beneath its deceptive simplicitly of storytelling.
It�s a conceit of both prior sequels in the franchise that Max is a charismatic candide-like figure who stumbles into other people�s adventures, but in FURY ROAD it�s more apparent than ever: This is very much Furiosa�s movie � she takes all the initiative, drives all the plot, has all the skin in the game, she even gets to drive the big main battle-truck and have the cool robot arm! Max spends most of the first hour with his mouth muzzled so he can barely speak, and even once he�s free he doesn�t talk all that much. This isn�t one of those movies where the title character is the only person on Earth who can save us all because the movie says so � he�s capable and good to have around (and, for the record, Hardy is a commanding enough presence as to make you forget the role was ever recast), but you get the sense Furiosa would�ve worked this one out okay enough on her own.
Theron proved herself a fearlessly great actress a long time ago, but Furiosa is a revelation � there likely won�t be a more strikingly original hero onscreen this year. Attention also needs to be paid to a revelatory strong turn by a commanding Rosie Huntington-Whitely, and a nuanced showing from Nicholas Hoult as a luckless would-be foot-soldier whose arc forms the philosophical spine of the story � and yes, I said philosophical!
While the subsequent-superstardom of Mel Gibson and the endlessly ripped-off popularity of the wacky custom cars have been the most enduring elements of the original MAD MAX movies, Miller�s *truly* fascinating conceit was imagining what a future of newly re-barbarianized humanity trying to assemble new cultures and civilizations out of the half-remembered remains of our own might look like. This time, though, there�s actually a big, loud, radical point being made; in a manner that would probably seem overly blunt and on the nose but feels downright subtle in a movie where one of Immorten Joe�s war rigs comes with an array of speakers and a guy with a flame-throwing guitar strapped to it like a human hood-ornament because why wouldn�t he have one of those?
See, Furiosa isn�t simply helping The Immorten�s wives get away from HIM, she�s helping them escape to her own homeland � a far-flung Matriarchy reigned over by grandmotherly Amazonian motorcyclists who follow a gentle path of nurture and nature-cultivation (but, y�know, with sniper-rifles and dirtbikes because this is a MAD MAX movie) where they hope to raise their offspring as anything BUT warlords, under a philosophical rallying cry of �Who killed the world?� asked in a way that leaves no doubt as to what the answer is. By contrast, the obscenely evil Immorten Joe rules over his subjects by way of a self-conjured religion comprised of equal parts car-culture, gun-worship, repurposed Viking mythology other and uber-masculine �honor culture� staples that�s yielded (among other things) an army of Skinhead suicide-soldiers called �Warboys� eager to die in battle for their surrogate daddy�s approval.
Yes, this time it�s a battle for the future course of human civilization, with the heavy implication that it�s stern father-figure patriarchs like Immorten Joe that got the world into this mess while Furiosa�s Amazon naturalists represent hope and progress. These are the kind of weighty ruminations you don�t generally expect from movies where flame-thrower guitarists are part of the set decoration.
Bottom line: This time, you can believe the hype. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is one of the most brutal, bone-crunching action films recent memory, one of the boldest most original visual experiences of the year and � improbably � one of the smartest works of dystopian scifi to emerge from the current deluge. I know the film critic collective has overhyped this sucker to kingdom come, but� seriously, just go see it anyway � it kicks ass.
Jumat, 15 Mei 2015
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD: A Bruttally Brilliant Western On Wheels
Now playing at multiplexes everywhere:
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
(Dir. George Miller, 2015)
Believe the hype. The return of the iconic post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max to the big screen is a brutally brilliant blast - an exhilarating experience that majorly ups the action epic ante for this summer movie season.
After a 30-year absence, series creator George Miller re-ignites the franchise with this fourth entry that while connected to the original trilogy�s spirit, and over-the-top tone, it doesn�t feel like yet another re-boot, remake, or sequel. No, MAX MAX: FURY ROAD feels like a reclaiming of the genre it helped create.
Tom Hardy is a good fit in the role originally played by Mel Gibson of Australian badass Max Rockatansky, who we first meet as he is captured by the War Boys, the white-painted minions of the movie�s tyrannical villain, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Incidentally, Keays-Byrne is the only actor here who appeared in the original 1979 MAD MAX.
Then the movie�s real protagonist bursts on the scene: Charlie Theron with a shaved head covered in grease-smeared war paint, and a CGI-ed mechanical arm, as Imperator Furiosa, Furiosa has rescued Immortan Joe�s five wives , his young, pretty �prized breeders� (all played by supermodels), and is driving them to freedom in her big ass �War Rig,� a heavily armored tanker truck.
Immortan Joe and his War Boy army take off after them, including the sickly Nux (Nicholas Hoult of ABOUT A BOY and X-MEN fame putting in his most scarily invested acting yet) who straps Max to the front of his 5-Door Chevy Coup� outfitted as a war machine (like all the vehicles are in this savage world) so he can continue to use him as a blood bag.
A chaotically compelling chase through a massive sand storm ensues, which allows for Max to escape from Nux, and finally be able to remove the metal grill that�s been locked on his face for a third of the film. After some initial friction, Max joins Furiosa and her bevy of breeder beauties on their journey to what they refer to as �the Green Place.�
Despite some downtime in the blue darkness of nightfall, the movie is essentially an ginormously overblown chase sequence through the infinite, blindingly bright orange desert, but that so isn�t a complaint. Its pace and focus never falters, nor does the explosive impact of its violent visuals.
Wonderfully the �western on wheels� that Miller promised, MAD MAD: FURY ROAD is an insanely entertaining experience that tops itself over and over. It�s an orgy of fire-breathing cars, pole-swingers, chainsaws, steampunk thugs, and gas fire explosions all given a heavy metal soundtrack by a masked musician with a flame-throwing electric guitar atop a vehicle piled with amplifiers. Try finding anything like that in another summer blockbuster this year, or any other year mind you.
I haven�t seen any of the MAD MAX movies in nearly three decades, but they were such cable staples when I was a kid in the �80s that I recall their crudely exciting ethos quite well. Here, Miller�s fourth entry does better than just to recall the series� spirit; it re-instates its power with an updated yet still vitally raw vision.
As I said before, Hardy makes a good Mad Max, but Theron's movie stealing part as Furiosa often makes it seem like she's the real road warrior, and our title character is just along for the ride. Theron's tour de force performance not only proves her Oscar win for MONSTER was no fluke, it establishes her as a serious action star who could do what fellow actresses, Scarlet Johansson and Angelina Jolie, have so far been unable to do - i.e. front a quality franchise. Here's hoping that happens with Miller's proposed MAD MAX: FURIOSA sequel set for 2017.
So as much as I enjoyed AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is, so far, the biggest, and the best would be blockbuster this season. I'm looking forward to seeing it a second time, and having my senses get assaulted all over again.
More later...
Kamis, 14 Mei 2015
SALT OF THE EARTH: A Photography Exhibit Of A Biodoc
Opening today at an indie art house near me (like The Colony Theater here in Raleigh, or The Chelsea Theater in Chapel Hill):
(Dirs. Juliano Ribeiro Salgado & Wim Wenders, 2014)
The bulk of this biodoc about Brazilian photographer Sebasti�o Salgado is a straight forward display of hundreds, maybe thousands, of the man�s exquisite black and white photographs. A cinematic slide-show largely narrated by Salgado (in French with subtitles), the film takes us through the last several decades of a globe-trotting career chronicling the lives of the world�s dispossessed.
Co-directors Juliano Ribeiro Salgado (the photographer�s son) and Wim Wenders, who also provide narration alongside their subject, begin their portrait with intensely detailed images of mud-caked masses climbing Serra Pelada, a gold mine in Brazil.
These are taken from a series of pictures Salgado shot in 1986, and are among his most well known works. �I could almost hear the gold whispering in the souls of these men,� he recounts. The 71-year old Salgado, with bushy gray eyebrows and a shiny bald head, sometimes appears in close-up super-imposed on top of his photos, in black and white, of course, to better blend in.
There are bursts of color between the dry runs of b & w photography, as we journey with Salgado and son to the West Papua Highlands of Indonesia, then to Wrangel, a remote island far north in the East Siberian Sea, and later to a beautiful Amazonian rain forest.
We also get the prerequisite back story in which we learn that Salgado grew up on a ranch in Aimor�s, Brazil, at 17 met the love of his life, L�lia, who he soon married; earned a Master�s Degree in Economics, but was sidetracked when he realized that taking pictures gave him so much more pleasure than his economic reports.
With his wife�s support, Salgado abandoned his promising, well-paid career as an economist and started from scratch as a photographer. His first photo series was done in Niger in 1973 during a severe drought, while back home in Paris, L�lia was pregnant with this film�s co-director.
Following that, Salgado and his collaborating spouse start work on their first major project, �The Other Americas� (1977-1984), which focused on Latin America. While looking through the photos from that collection, Salgado observes, �When you take a portrait, the shot is not your alone. The person offers it to you.�
Other photography projects turned acclaimed award-winning publications followed: �Sahel: The End of the Road� (1984-1986), which reported on the famine in Ethiopia, Africa: �Workers: Archaeology of the Industrial Age� (1986-1991), which Salgado says pays �homage to all the men and women who built the world around us,�; and �Exodus� (1993-1999), a project about refugee camps and people fleeing genocide that left Salgado disgusted and disturbed (�My soul was sick�).
The tons of stark, sharp photographs of emaciated, starving people, and piles of corpses in mass graves, will be difficult for some audiences to handle but with hope they�ll take to heart Salgado�s statement that �everybody should see these pictures to see how terrible our species is.�
However, Salgado�s spirits, and ours, get lifted in the last third by two developments: he and his wife�s forming the Instituto Terra so that they could replant two million trees in order to rebuild the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, and �Genesis� (2004-2013), a project with the goal of showing what �nature, animals, places, and peoples were like at the beginning of time� as Wenders puts it.
The �Genesis� segment contains some of Salgado�s most glorious, and astonishing photography, though I may be partial to his spectacular pictures that he took in Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf War of the hundreds of oil rigs that Saddam Hussein set fire to. Salgado: �It was like working in a huge theater, 500 oil wells burning - a giant stage, the size of the planet!�
Essentially a photography exhibit of a film, SALT OF THE EARTH lost the Best Documentary Oscar to Laura Poitras� CITIZENFOUR, but it�s a much more nuanced, emotionally affecting, and certainly more visually gripping experience than that highly touted Edward Snowden biopic.
Its imagery may be painful to endure at times, but there�s so much power to the portraits of strife, struggling humanity, and troubled terrain captured by Salgado�s lenses that most likely moviegoers won�t walk away from it with sick souls.
More later...
Rabu, 13 Mei 2015
TV Recap: AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D - Season 2 Episode 21-22: "S.O.S."
NOTE: This recap brought to you in part by The MovieBob Patreon.
Guys... I've got feelings. So many feelings.
AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D apparently did well enough in its second season to earn a third, but I feel like the news of just how good the show has gotten (within the realm of a medium-camp network sci-fi/action series, at least) has been a phenomenon centered mainly around TV writers and Marvel die-hards than general tube-junkies. My hope is that, now that Season 2 has concluded, the binge-watch set will discover it - and not just because the reveal of... the stuff I'm still electing to keep for after the jump has made it mandatory viewing (or, at least, mandatory wiki-ing) for Marvel Cinematic Universe completists.
No, I'd rather people "discover" that AGENTS got really good in Season 2 because it's now a damn solid bit of television; with memorable characters and a twisty "anything goes yet somehow adheres to an internal logic" ongoing story that in some ways makes better use of being in The Marvel Cinematic Universe than the more prestigious movies do - where AGE OF ULTRON occasionally seemed to be quietly resentful of its brief detours for people/places set to pay off in future movies, S.H.I.E.L.D seems to relish the prospect of pit stops involving aliens, Asgardians, HYDRA, mad scientists etc. Season 2 was full of moments where the series (as personified by Clark Gregg's Director Coulson) seemed barely able to contain shouting <b>"Look at all this STUFF we get to play with!!!"</b>
And yet, it also managed (with a few exceptions) to be a more serious, dramatic series than anything with so much built-in silliness really had any right to be; ironically excelling in many key areas where folks have (rightly) found the movie side of the Marvel experiment lacking: AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D runs on complex character dynamics, features an embarassment of riches in terms of diversity and strong female characters in particular and has the television-specific luxury of being able to chill out and let a character-arc breathe across multiple episodes. Yes, fine, DAREDEVIL (and Vincent D'onofrio's Kingpin in particular) was "the story" of Marvel on TV this year, but AGENTS turning itself into something vital deserves to be part of that discussion as well.
Anyway, onto "S.O.S." and SPOILERS...
Among Season 2's many impressive features has been the way it's handled huge changes to characters and relationships (by my count the "status quo" was upended at least 3-5 times over 22 episodes) mainly by stating "this is what's going on now" and relying on the actors to sell it. AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D is an FX-heavy production, but when it came to "shit just got real" moments it was all about delivery. Nowhere was that more apparent than the way it hid its cards on who/what would actually be the big existential threat of the finale - largely by relying on audiences to assume "No they wouldn't" in regards to Jaiying, aka "Skye's Mom."
For as long as we knew she existed, Jaiying was presented as Season 2's martyr-in-chief: Her (non)-existence as a tangible person finally made Skye's "little girl lost" persona stick, helped us understand Cal/Mr. Hyde as well as could be expected, and our main source for regarding first-half fake-out villain Daniel Whitehall as evil incarnate was the knowledge that he'd butchered her alive to attain immortality. If Skye (aka "Daisy") is AGENTS' " chosen one/redeemer figure, then Jaiying has effectively been its Virgin Mary.
So to have her turn out to not only be the season's surprise Big Bad but in many ways the reigning Big Bad of the series' "lore" so far (in as much as she ordered Cal to become Mr. Hyde, making her the leader of the "Two Monsters" whom Skye's faked-orphan backstory was designed to protect her from) and have it both make since and feel right over the course of only three episodes (this being a two-parter) is good writing and good acting, no magic trick - though the reveal that she's not "immortal" but actually has to drain life from others (it used to be done through elective self-sacrifice by Inhuman elders, now she's more-or-less a vampire) feels like it maybe could've been tipped a bit earlier.
It also serves to make her (and to a lesser extent Cal) two of the darkest villains Marvel has concocted of late: here's two decent, damn near saint-like people (the protector/nurturer of an entire culture and a Doctors Without Borders volunteer for crissakes!) who have something unimaginably evil done to them entirely unjustly. Near-miraculously, he manages to bring her back from the brink... but the damage is done, the experience has broken her mind/soul permanently and she's evil now - strongarming him into becoming evil, too. And there's no fixing her, no coming back, no switch to flip back to "good" because some scars don't heal. No justice, no cosmic balancing-out, no way out but for Cal having been . That's fucking DARK.
The rest of the show? Pretty good, too.
The Inhumans are getting introduced here, 4-5 years in advance of their self-titled movie, because Marvel needs them to replace The X-Men and that's a lot of audience-familiarity time to make up. <i>"S.O.S."</i> is, clearly, meant to serve as a test-run for how that's going to work: It's straight-up, no-bullshit an X-Men story without the X-Men; with a small community of
Does it work? Hell yeah. Everything involving the raid on The Icarus was awesome (good fight scenes, good action, good tension, nice mix of powers and characters) in the exact same way that the best X-Men versions of the same scenario are. It's a bummer that Wolverine etc won't even scrap with The Avengers, and I think it's pretty lame that Marvel is poised to send the comic-book X-Men packing just to fuck with Fox, sure. But if the question is "can Marvel Studios tell good 'superheroes-as-metaphor-for-racial/cultural-discord' stories using The Inhumans?" then the answer is yes - especially since, if this stuff works within AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D's modest means, it'll likely look gangbusters up onscreen.
For a minute there I wasn't fully sold on the turnaround with Cal, and I still sort-of wish his full "Mr. Hyde" form was a little more Hulk and a little less Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. But Season 2 MVP Kyle MacLachlan is just so goddamn fun in the part he sold it anyway and (intentional or not) the low-tech "strong monster guy" staging had pleasing echoes of the old HULK show (holy shit, why haven't they found an excuse for Lou Ferrigno to be on this show yet!?) I'm not sure that Coulson being able to talk him down into switching sides for Skye's sake makes a lot of sense, but MacLachlan's big hyperemotive constant-breakdown overracting sold it - oldschool Universal Monsters "wailing/gnashing bad guy" stuff. Shit, he's good enough that his "happy" ending even feels earned... I let out an audible "Aw, geez..." when he dropped the "magical place" line, revealing what had to be done to "free" him. Ouch.
Another "one take" fight scene for Skye? Okay, cool. Bennett is more convincing using guns or her whooshy earthquake powers than the hand-to-hand stuff, but it's fun and keeps us rooting for the character. The big final confrontation between Skye, Jaiying and Cal forced her to act against two of the most capable performers on the show (playing characters who're allowed to be much more broadly-interpreted) and she held her own admirably. In a way, "coming out" as Inhuman has made Skye more relatable - Bennett (and the writers, to be fair) never quite found the comfortable spot between "unsure neophyte" and "scary-efficient computer genius;" but having been reborn as a Marvel Speciality "superhero as metaphor for young-person in life-transition?" NOW she makes a lot more sense.
As ever, going back to a Ward subplot is where the episode suffered. There's too much going on with too high of stakes for Bobbi/Hunter vs Ward/Agent 33 to be worth pulling our focus, and it's painfully obvious that this is only happening to set up the MOCKINGBIRD spin-off that's no longer going forward. Granted, the meat of it was solid (great double turnaround on the torture stuff, clever subversion of the "girl tied to a chair" routine, LOVED May's nasty-as-hell gotcha to 33) and it's not like the Marvel movies don't frequently overcome distracting detours into setups for other things, but it felt somewhat pointless and having him elect himself leader of "HYDRA, but as a street gang" is not going to be enough to fix Ward's not-in-any-way-interesting problem.
And hey, how about finally letting Mack do some action stuff? Him, Coulson and Fitz's fight with Gordon was a great action beat in a finale that had many.
And then there's Coulson's story...
The other thing <i>"S.O.S"</i> crystallizes about why Season 2 worked is the way the series finally settled in to having it's cake and eating it regarding how it "works" in its own universe. The season had a lot of mysteries, but really only one question: Is Coulson, now Director of S.H.I.E.L.D 2.0 by Nick Fury's hand, actually a good leader? Even before Gonzales and "real S.H.I.E.L.D" turned up, this was the question because of the Alien Writing situation.
The logical/rational answer, of course, is NO he absolutely isn't. He's overly emotional, he plays favorites and follows personal biases/hangups, he's inquisitive about "cool" or nostalgiac things to the point of recklessness and he wants to run a paramilitary/spy organization like a family camping trip. He's the last person who should be the guiding hand of a TV procedural drama, wherein problems are invariably solved through logic and rationality. But other procedural dramas aren't set in the Marvel Universe, and Coulson's eccentricities generally make perfect sense if you're living in a comic-book. Which everyone on this show basically is. Coulson's repeating-arc throughout Season 2 has been about his Fanboy Logic ("Super-powers are awesome!" "We need to chase down this alien stuff!" "Let's upgrade Deathlok!" "Maybe we can flip this villain to work for us!"), framed as pure and noble, coming up against "real" logic... and coming out on top. Pandering? Little bit, but it works.
As such, it makes "Marvel sense" for him to come out of all this minus an arm (no, I don't think they'll have him commission one from Iron Man) but otherwise still in charge of both S.H.I.E.L.D and a new initiative to draft a "covert" version of The Avengers from the world's population of powered-people (one imagines that this is where a lot of Season 3's story is going to come from, in tandem with Jaiying's counterfeit Terrigen material being dispersed into the ocean.) Curious to see who/what they pull from the canon to fill those slots - I imagine "newly-activated Inhuman" will be the shortform origin for some, but I don't think we'll hear from The Inhumans-plural again until things get closer to the movie. Big question, of course, becomes is THIS part of where CIVIL WAR will come from?
As for that final stinger? Eh... what can be said other than, "we'll see?" This makes two seasons in a row where they've seemingly taken unique pleasure in building up Fitz/Simmons shippers only to kick them in the gut at the last second. I doubt getting absorbed by the big stone whatsit has "killed" Simmons, and while I'm sure it's going to be the popular fan-theory... NO, I'd say there's a zero-percent chance that it's going to spit her back out as Captain Marvel. More likely? If The Inhumans were afraid of that thing, I could see her emerging with the ability (directly or indirectly) to hurt Inhumans specifically (maybe by neutralizing their powers?), maybe dredging back up her anti-superhuman leanings from earlier in the season? That would be an interesting wrinkle.
Overall, a great end to a good Season. Here's to hoping they can maintain this momentum heading into Season 3.
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Selasa, 12 Mei 2015
Who's The Real Speed-Bump on FURY ROAD?
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The reviews are starting to hit for MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (I'm seeing it myself later today) and they're pretty-much over the moon among the big online-presence critics: Faraci likes it, Tapley like it, the links to Drew McWeeny's piece keep coming back broken but he's apparently onboard, McCarthy likes it, Kohn likes it, Duralde is into it and Chang digs it. But much of the ecstasy comes (at least on social media) tempered by a certain amount of bittnerness: Film Twitter has been convinced that this is The New Hotness all year, and now it's convinced that the film is going to "underperform" - in as much as action films generally need to open in first place now to be considered a "hit" by entertainment reporters, and FURY ROAD is tracking to open behind PITCH PERFECT 2 and maybe also (depending on who you ask) AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON in its third week.
The prospect of this makes me want to quit The Internet, my chosen vocation and the planet Earth for a month. Not because I'm going to be super-bummed about the film's success - my "investment" in MAD MAX is that I want George Miller to keep getting big director gigs and it's got cars and explosions, so it's going to tear shit up at the China/Pan-Asia boxoffice regardless what it does here - but I'm already pre-tired of hearing about what the "failure" (cultural, not necessarily financial) "means." An actioner equally beloved by "I remember REAL movies!" againg-boomer critics and Gen-X film-geek tastemakers eating it against a Girl Movie ("Eeeeeeew!") about pop-music ("EEEEEEEWWWW!!!!!") and the most-recent superhero entry? Welcome to Thinkpiece Hell. Yeech!
I almost want to play "movie journalism predictability bingo" with the results. Who's going to be first out of the gate with "REAL MEN are OVER at the boxoffice!"? How soon do we get the counter-clickbait "Real Men are OVER at the boxoffice - good riddance!"? Who'll be the champ of sniffing about arbitrary action-genre "cred" ("Pffff! Maybe they should've called it MARVEL'S Mad Max, eh?")? Screw Bingo, maybe it's time to invent Movie Critic Clue - I'll take Jeff Wells in The Starbucks with "Hispanic party-elephants."
Here's what I'd like to know: If and when FURY ROAD "fails" to leap whatever stupidly high bar has been set for an R-rated reboot of a franchise that sputtered out back in '85 and largely vanished under a sea of inferior knock-offs and endless present-era homages like DOOMSDAY (meanwhile, KINGSMEN, another "disappointment" has spun it's modest-but-steady boxoffice placing into becoming one of the year's biggest hits with a sequel on the way) and we're all looking for someone to blame, is anyone going to point the finger at the guy who's probably more responsible for this franchise not maintaining its once-thought garaunteed cultural capital...
...MEL GIBSON?
Let's not mince words: FURY ROAD's "glorious" marketing campaign isn't selling this movie to anyone who hasn't been onboard since the pitch. It has TRON LEGACY's trailers - zero plot (until Trailer #3), tons of mood and visuals, all hinged on "That you loved? It's back!!!!" Fine, fair enough, it IS a nostalgia-reboot property, after all, and that's big business right now. Want a likely big return? Sell Generation X it's pre-High School viewing years back to it - and invite everyone younger who's had to grow up with Gen-X tastemakers beating it into their skulls that This Stuff was The Best Stuff.
Except unlike STAR WARS, GHOSTBUSTERS, INDIANA JONES, ROCKY, RAMBO, STAR TREK, the Marvel canon, perennial "Give us a sequel!!!!" mainstays like GOONIES, MONSTER SQUAD, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, etc even BATMAN and SUPERMAN to a certain extent... the MAD MAX movies have not spent the last decade being re-enshrined, revisited and kept vital in the pop-consciousness. The dubious identifiers of what has and hasn't "lasted" (in no particular order: routines by pop-reference comedians, FAMILY GUY cutaway parodies, YouTube/meme fixations, Lego revivals) have largely ignored it. Right now, Mad Max as a franchise/character probably has less nostalgia/recieved-nostalgia cache going for it than EVIL DEAD/ARMY OF DARKNESS, which doesn't feel... right, if you remember how large it used to loom - and I sincerely think it's all-but entirely due to the fact that the character/franchise is inextricably tied to Mel Gibson - an actor who has effectively poisoned everything associated with him to a genuinely stunning degree.
Ever since Gibson effectively came out as "mean-spirited, self-torturing, kinda-sad crazy" instead of "fun crazy" as was his earlier reputation during the making and release of PASSION OF THE CHRIST, he's been on a cultural downward spiral that took most of his clout with it. PASSION's percieved (by many, including me) eye-popping anti-semitism made him an industry pariah, which in turn meant he had no "cover" when a whole mess of other scary/unpleasant stuff hit the headlines about him between '04 and recently. He's basically been a joke that quickly became to depressing to keep telling for a solid decade; and I doubt it's a coincidence that while damn near every other fragment of 80s pop-ephemera has gotten a reboot, a revival or at least endless positive reappraisal (do I need to remind you that Howard the Duck now counts as an applause-drawing cameo?) both MAD MAX and LETHAL WEAPON have been allowed to lie fallow?
Again, let's talk turkey: ROCKY and RAMBO both got to come back (Rocky is even coming back again for the new spin-off, CREED) not necessarily because they or their respective subgenres were particularly relevant at the time, but because the names Rocky Balboa and John J. Rambo had been burned into the pop-consciousness even of people who never saw the originals as Important Institutions in the intervening years. "Mad" Max Rockatansky hasn't had that luxury, his lot in the same amount of time has been: "Yeah, those were awesome. Too bad about Mel, huh?"
I hope the movie is good. It looks good. Hell, I'm cutting this a bit short so I can get on the train to go watch it. But if the now-expected "underperformance" (which really won't be, since it's rated R in May and this is 2015) happens, I wonder who else will look past slinging mud at PITCH PERFECT ("Fuckin' feminized American Idol-watching Tumblrina millennial brats!!!!") and/or geek-bloggers "in the tank" for the Marvel Machine ("Haw haw! Yeah, maybe we should tell the Nerd Herd there was a stinger about Max having the next one of those stupid rocks!") to ask if Mad Mel should take the lion's share of the lashings for kneecapping this franchise before it even ever got up to walk?
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