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Then who killed the world?
Tonight we made a dish for dinner that was not paprikás, but the sauce had a lot of sour cream and a lot of paprika and some charnushka and a base of mushroom soup because we didn't have any mushrooms in the house and I had to thicken it with flour because it turned out our sour cream was lowfat, but it tasted great over black pepper noodles with caraway-dill sausage. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel is in a food coma as we speak. Autolycus is asleep on my lap, but I don't know what his excuse is.
I am sleeping very badly; I feel like I'm losing time everywhere.
Last night I saw Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) withrushthatspeaks and derspatchel. I would like to write about it at some point; I did not expect a bone-crunching, gear-grinding, guitar-shredding action movie would ever remind me of Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985). I think it was a combination of the backstory of Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa and the tribe of lesbian separatist biker nomads, most of them over sixty and all completely awesome. This is the only action movie I've ever seen whose heroes are a dozen really interesting women and one and a half men. (The other guy is an antagonist about a quarter of the time and the other quarter confused, which is fair; he grew up in an automotive death cult, which tends to muddle a person's priorities.) It is also probably the most metal movie I have ever seen. I am really enjoying the way it encourages reviewers to outdo one another in hyperbole—I think my favorite attempt so far is the Telegraph's "Imagine if Cirque du Soleil reenacted a Hieronymus Bosch painting and someone set the theatre on fire." The Guardian takes a similar tack with "an array of variously hairy stilt-walking, motorbiking, chainsawing crazies, suggesting that a militarised wing of the French circus troupe Archaos has escaped into the desert and gone feral." The worldbuilding is actually more coherent and more thoughtful than either of those quotes makes it sound, but I understand the difficulty of discussing the action sequences. There really is a battle guitarist whose double-necked, electrified instrument shoots flames. He is attacked to his amp stack by bungee cords. A fight on the front of his truck (which comes with its own taiko drummers) is reflected in the soundtrack, because he is playing the film's music. Either you say that with a straight face or you start alluding to the Surrealists.
One really unexpected side effect of watching Fury Road when I did caught me after the fact: as a movie concerned both with questions of feminism and the world after the end of the world, it made a weird sort of continuity with The Reckless Moment (1949) and Things to Come (1936). I don't expect this to happen to most people. I'm not surprised that I'm re-reading Le Guin, though.
derspatchel is in a food coma as we speak. Autolycus is asleep on my lap, but I don't know what his excuse is.I am sleeping very badly; I feel like I'm losing time everywhere.
Last night I saw Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) with
rushthatspeaks and derspatchel. I would like to write about it at some point; I did not expect a bone-crunching, gear-grinding, guitar-shredding action movie would ever remind me of Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985). I think it was a combination of the backstory of Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa and the tribe of lesbian separatist biker nomads, most of them over sixty and all completely awesome. This is the only action movie I've ever seen whose heroes are a dozen really interesting women and one and a half men. (The other guy is an antagonist about a quarter of the time and the other quarter confused, which is fair; he grew up in an automotive death cult, which tends to muddle a person's priorities.) It is also probably the most metal movie I have ever seen. I am really enjoying the way it encourages reviewers to outdo one another in hyperbole—I think my favorite attempt so far is the Telegraph's "Imagine if Cirque du Soleil reenacted a Hieronymus Bosch painting and someone set the theatre on fire." The Guardian takes a similar tack with "an array of variously hairy stilt-walking, motorbiking, chainsawing crazies, suggesting that a militarised wing of the French circus troupe Archaos has escaped into the desert and gone feral." The worldbuilding is actually more coherent and more thoughtful than either of those quotes makes it sound, but I understand the difficulty of discussing the action sequences. There really is a battle guitarist whose double-necked, electrified instrument shoots flames. He is attacked to his amp stack by bungee cords. A fight on the front of his truck (which comes with its own taiko drummers) is reflected in the soundtrack, because he is playing the film's music. Either you say that with a straight face or you start alluding to the Surrealists.One really unexpected side effect of watching Fury Road when I did caught me after the fact: as a movie concerned both with questions of feminism and the world after the end of the world, it made a weird sort of continuity with The Reckless Moment (1949) and Things to Come (1936). I don't expect this to happen to most people. I'm not surprised that I'm re-reading Le Guin, though.
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Thank you. There are a lot of factors. I'm doing what I can.
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It does have a lot of BOOM and a lot of physical violence, which is about par for the course with action films, especially post-apocalyptic dystopian ones. What it doesn't have is a lot of objectified and/or undercharacterized and/or absent women. It has pretty much exactly the opposite. It gets away with having the male protagonist haunted by the ghost of his dead daughter because she is not the only daughter onscreen; it gets away with telling us that he couldn't save her life because all around him are women saving themselves. The screen is packed with cars and stunts and dust and fire and power chords, but the emotional crosshairs of the film are on five women making a jailbreak for their lives and one aiding them for the sake of her soul. One of the most powerful scenes in the film—the one that hit me out of nowhere—is the moment there are suddenly even more women in the frame.
Skip this next part if you care about spoilers, I suppose.
A woman who was stolen from her tribe as a child, returning now as an adult, stands unarmed and identifies herself by name and mother-lineage. The sentry calls out a high wordless cry. Faceless figures on dirt bikes emerge from the dunes around her. (The world of Fury Road is blasted, depopulated desert; combustion engines and dwindling natural resources are the order of the day. Just by not being crazily tricked-out conspicuous consumers, the bikers are easily the most sustainable culture we’ve met so far in the film.) They unwrap their hoods and push back their scarves and they are women, none of them young, their faces lined, their hair grey and silver, their hands bony and strong. Plus the sentry, they are all that remain of the woman's tribe. And they welcome her, they admire the women who made the journey with her, they ask for assurances about the two men who came with them, and it is honest to God like watching a page of Le Guin come to life, the elder mothers, weathered, tough, and beautiful as wind-gnarled trees. They are the pulp trope of the lesbian separatist biker gang played absolutely seriously, as a real culture, with great affection and detail for each of the women, even when we never learn some of their names. All of them will turn out to be staunch warriors; one carries a box of seeds, which she plants in the wasteland even knowing that none of them might grow. There's no assumption of comedy in the idea of seventy-year-old biker nomads with flyaway white hair and dry breasts beneath their cross-bound shirts. You just never see that on the screen.
The film is less groundbreaking about race—it's not full of racist stereotypes, it's just mostly very white—but I do think its representation of women is unusually good, especially for its genre, especially for its subgenre. When there are multiple women onscreen and they all have voices and differences of character and attitude and reaction and choice, it makes a difference.
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Aww, that whole bit was such beautiful writing. I MUST see this, really.
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I recommend heavy-duty earplugs. The soundtrack is like ninety percent bass.
Enjoy!
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I'm sorry you're sleeping so poorly. :/
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I recommend it. The action is clearly and tightly choreographed, the stunts are inventive, impressive, and often just beautiful to look at, and the worldbuilding and the characters are so much deeper and more deeply knit into the themes of the plot than a two-hour chase movie traditionally demands and it pays off in every conceivable direction. Every now and then Miller did something to the frame rate that I found visually difficult to follow, but fortunately it was not the dominant mode. It was just a shockingly smarter film than I was expecting, and I'd already heard some good reviews.
I'm sorry you're sleeping so poorly.
Thank you.
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Oddly, I took tonight to actually try mushrooms again. Results are as yet inconclusive, but I am thus far hopeful that they are a thing I might be able to casually eat again some time in the future.
* I started the day on scant sleep, and then I spent quite a lot of time taking longish walks, despite having been at work all day, so construction of said soup was largely done with
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Fingers crossed! As a person who loves mushrooms, I do not like the idea of other people being deprived of them.
Improvised duck soup sounds wonderful.
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Alas, it was not me! I have not actually seen The General. I have, however, read an interview with George Miller where he references Keaton's work and affirms that he asked his editor (Margaret Sixel, who is also his wife) to cut Fury Road like a silent movie, so you can tell your father he's on to something.
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Which line?
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Pull quote: "Charlize Theron's objective in this film is to not die" --George Miller
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Ah. I missed seeing the pull quote. I'm going to hope that was a copyediting glitch.
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I hadn't even heard about a biker gang shootout. I can see that being strange!
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That's both upsetting and really weird.
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Your dinner sounds inspired.
Nine
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It is also the first movie I have seen in ages to use the title "Imperator" in its original sense: meaning a military commander, a general. Things like that make me happy. But that single recognition scene in the desert was amazing.
Your dinner sounds inspired.
We had these caraway-dill sausages . . .
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I hope you can do it! I haven't even heard of Spring.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcoRtZkDwKA
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oh THAT's what I was trying to place the link to while watching.
I am both impressed and astounded that it managed to pull off being such a feminist work. TWO HOURS of near-continuous chase sequence; and yet!
And so many other little details. Furiosa's utter competence, both when and when not wearing her mechanical arm. The engagement with a most Australian nightmare, what happens when the water goes away. The way the battle musicians are presented so early in the narrative: these people don't have a piper lead them to battle, they have a metal band.
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Okay, if someone who isn't me felt it, I have to wonder if George Miller did read Le Guin.
I am both impressed and astounded that it managed to pull off being such a feminist work. TWO HOURS of near-continuous chase sequence; and yet!
Yes! It packs an incredible amount of explicit and implied worldbuilding into its visuals, not so much in between the action as seamlessly within it. Watching Nux and Max tells us what life is like for a man in Immortan Joe's Citadel; watching Furiosa and the "wives" and the women imprisoned for their milk (ask me how much I love that they are the ones to open the waterfalls at the end of the film; the answer is lots) tells us what life is like for a woman. And nearly every thing that happens in the film is in direct service of demonstrating how these patterns can be broken, blurred, and reclaimed as lives instead of gears of the war-machine. While also blasting the audience with adrenaline and symphonic metal. As far as narrative economy goes, it's ridiculous.
Furiosa's utter competence, both when and when not wearing her mechanical arm.
I love that her story is not about her arm. It's not a symbol of anything about her. It's just a fact of her life.
The engagement with a most Australian nightmare, what happens when the water goes away.
Yes. Even the green place, now a poisoned salt marsh. That was correctly shocking.
It really was like watching a movie made in the 1970's and the 2010's simultaneously. And it got the best of each. Usually that sort of fusion goes the other way and just depresses everybody.