This is a very serious movie.
mad max fury road
The thing that people were chasing was to be not an object, but the five wives. I needed a warrior. But it couldn’t be a man taking five wives from another man. That’s an entirely different story. So everything grew out of that.
“Initially, there wasn’t a feminist agenda,” director George Miller insisted.
This quote about Mad Max: Fury Road made me want to gnaw on my own knuckle in cartoonish excitement because DO YOU SEE WHAT HIS LOGIC DOES THERE? Too many directors and writers would stop at “I needed a warrior.” They never take that next step to understand that it couldn’t be a man taking five wives from another man.
For most action movies, the first half of this quote is enough. It’s enough to be Liam Neeson or Jason Statham or Clive Owen as a good man rescuing the poor women from the bad man. Easy money, right? But Miller had the instinct to realize that a woman helping other women is not only a more interesting story to tell–it’s the story we should be telling all along.
(via rashaka)
snow storm: hannibal and his army crossing the alps, j. m. w. turner // mad max: fury road
THE PASSION caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect. (x)
disaster/apocalypse/post-apocalypse movies: a truly modern Romantic genre? DISCUSS
Why MM:FR Was the Most Tasteful Action Movie I’ve Seen
Things that the film handled with restraint:
Rape: As countless people have said – Half of the movie’s main cast consists of sex slaves. And there’s not a single rape scene.
Gore: The film looks exactly the type to be ultra-violent a la Quentin Tarantino. But it’s not. The one gory moment is one that you can see coming from miles away and lasts only for a second. And even then, it’s not terrible. Considering this, the movie probably could have had a PG-13 rating with minor alteration.
Sexualization: Five women wearing nothing but gauze sounds like a recipe for anything but what we got; no lingering, awkward, bodily shots. There was even a scene with a completely naked young woman with the camera focused directly on her. Guess what. The camera treated her exactly as if she were wearing flannel pajamas.
Degradation of women: Bad people get upset. We get that. Sometimes they like to swear at our heroines. And yet no one felt the need to say “bitch,” “cunt,” or “whore.” How a film managed to present about the least female-friendly society you can imagine but treated its female characters with more respect than 99% of action movies is beyond me.
Things that the film did not handle with restraint:
FLAMETHROWER GUITAR.
Gender equality: No one once says “Women are ___,” or “Men are ___.” It almost seems like outside of Immortan Joe’s freakishly utilitarian society, men and women get along just fine. Huh. Weird.
Death: Good and bad people die alike on the Fury Road; very quickly. It’s your typical action movie body count. But in a move that’s both odd and brilliant, the film spends a good amount of it’s scarce dialogue detailing what death means to the characters. For some, it’s a suicidal call to honor. For others, it’s a necessary risk to bring about more life. People die in droves. And it’s sad. Death matters.
Criticism: This is about the most critical movie of gender inequality, capitalism, and fascism I’ve ever seen without anyone ever mentioning gender inequality, capitalism or fascism.
COMPASSION: I can’t state this enough. This is a post-apocalyptic genre movie where people kill each other over sex slaves, border disputes, and cars and its message is hope and compassion. The biggest, most heroic moment of the movie is an act of healing, not an act of violence. WHOA.
On the set of Mad Max: Fury Road, the stunt actor for Furiosa and one of the stunt actors for Max fell in love.
“We’ve said it before and it’s quite cheesy, but it really was love at
first sight. While we were punching each other we were falling for each
other – quite rapidly.”
Charlize Theron on rumors that her and Tom Hardy clashed on set: “We f–kin’ went at it, yeah. And on other days, he and George [Miller, the director] went at it,“ she reveals. “It was the isolation, and the fact that we were stuck in a rig for the entire shoot. We shot a war movie on a moving truck — there’s very little green screen. It was like a family road trip that just never went anywhere. We never got anywhere. We just drove. We drove into nothingness, and that was maddening sometimes.”
Theron and Hardy filmed on location in Swakopmund in Namibia, on the edge of the Namib Desert, for six-and-a-half months. But it wasn’t just the environment that was driving them mad.
“It’s material that’s really frightening — we didn’t have a script. Tom and I are actors who take our jobs seriously. Both of us want to please the directors we work with, and when you don’t know if you can deliver on that, it’s a frightening place to be — and for Tom more than me, because he was stepping into big shoes,” Theron explains.
Despite going at it a few times, Charlize went on to say that she ultimately appreciated Tom’s approach more than some of her peers.
“I’d rather have that honesty working with someone than someone who fake-smiles through something — especially for actors, when your job is to go for the emotional truth. When you’re with somebody and you don’t feel like you’re in their emotional truth, then you don’t trust them,” she says. “I think good actors go all the way. If you want to be a safe actor, and you emotionally protect yourself from things getting out of hand, the performance will show all of that. Anyone who really, really, really goes into the deep dark corners of what emotional truth is, as somebody who works opposite of that, you have to be grateful for that. I beg for that. I beg for that on a job, that potency to the stew that makes it that magic that it is.”
Despite their rocky relationship, Charlize showed the interviewer a gift that Tom left for her in her trailer. It was a self-portrait Hardy painted with a red handprint on the back and an inscription: You are an absolute nightmare, BUT you are also f–king awesome. I’ll kind of miss you. Love, Tommy.
“We drove each other crazy, but I think we have respect for each other, and that’s the difference,” Charlize concludes. “This is the kind of stuff that nobody wants to understand — there’s a real beauty to that kind of relationship.”
I’LL KIND OF MISS YOU, LOVE TOMMY. JFC, THIS IS PERFECT.
