"Remember me?" Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review

Recently I was able to celebrate my birthday by watching the film Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga in the cinema. I nearly missed seeing this film on the big screen as it didn't do very well at the box office and so was shuffled off to the second-run theatres very quickly. And I certainly knew that this would be a film worth seeing in the theatre.

I'm very fond of Mad Max: Fury Road - I think it was one of the best filmgoing experiences I've ever had because the film itself is such pure cinema - visual storytelling with an unyielding pace and sense of momentum. Even though I had seen all of the previous Mad Max films and thought they were okay (Road Warrior was the best, I thought), I didn't have strong opinions on them. Heck, I didn't have strong opinions on filmmaker George Miller, even though I had seen virtually all of his movies.

The success of Mad Max: Fury Road apparently gave us Miller's 2022 film Three Thousand Years of Longing, an adaptation of an obscure piece of literature that deconstructed fairy tales. That movie came and went with barely anyone other than me paying attention to it, but I suppose it was an indulgence Miller was permitted. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga seems more like the kind of movie a studio would request - something that should definitely bring back those who enjoyed Mad Max: Fury Road. But that movie came out in 2015, so whatever 'heat' surrounded Mad Max at the time has surely cooled; I'm afraid the lukewarm response to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is to be expected.

And that's a shame, because Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a pretty good film. It's not inventive in the way that Mad Max: Fury Road was. In that film, we learned how the world worked as the film unfolded. Immortan Joe, the War Boys, the Citadel, the Green Place, the Vuvalini... Furiosa doesn't only revisit the titular Furiosa, as a prequel it has to -- by necessity -- revisit the people and places we saw in Mad Max: Fury Road. Some of the places we only glimpsed (Gastown, Bullet Farm) are embellished further. But the visuals of the world are kept faithful between the two films and it suffers from that problem with prequels - everything in the film has to end up in a place consistent with where the story begins in the chronologically subsequent picture.

Furiosa has a different feel in part because it doesn't cover a short span of time (Mad Max: Fury Road covered, what, 48 hours in the characters' lives?), instead transpiring over a decade's worth of history. The way the story is broken up with 'chapter' breaks contributes to the different feeling, but it means that although there's plenty of peril and thrills, it lacks the unrelenting momentum of Mad Max: Fury Road. We do eventually get to scenes on a War Rig with the occupants fending off invaders (several of them air-based invaders, lending a welcome variety from the previous film) but the emphasis is on Furiosa's life and struggles. Ultimately it's a story of vengeance directed by Furiosa at the man who killed her mother, but it takes a very long time for her to find the opportunity to claim her vengeance.

It's never boring; it's frequently amazing. If you enjoyed Mad Max: Fury Road you'll enjoy seeing more of that film's world and explanations for the characters' backgrounds. Heck, Furiosa's line in Fury Road - "Remember me?" - uttered to Immortan Joe, now has a context and it's not what I imagined when I saw the earlier film.

Radio Recap master list

So far I've written more than 100 Radio Recaps on this blog; to make it easier to find what I've written in the past, I've added a Radio Recap master list with an A to Z list of every Radio Recap blog post made thus far.

Radio Recap: Majestic's Master of Mystery

Majestic's Master of Mystery was a 7-episode radio serial titled "The Phantom Spoilers" that was syndicated in 1934. Although all 7 chapters still exist, I had a difficult time finding information about the program. Most of my information comes from Otrcat. The series was sponsored by Majestic Radio and starred Maurice Joachim, whom you'll recall as the titular Omar, the Wizard of Persia.

Like Omar, Majestic's Master of Mystery is set in the Middle East and trades heavily on orientalism. Unlike that series, there's a very limited cast; Joachim performs as all of the characters, mostly narrating as he goes. There's a female character in the cast but she never speaks, sparing Joachim from what would have been an embarrassing performance. Considering the show is from 1934 and has just one cast member it sounds okay - there are sound effects, which wasn't typical at the time.

But what makes Majestic's Master of Mystery stand out is the unusual offer that Joachim (as "Master of Mystery") makes in each program, inviting listeners to request a free sandalwood swastika ("the oldest good-luck emblem known to man") that was supposedly personally brought from India by the Master of Mystery. This was, after all, a year after the Nazi party had taken over Germany and made the swastika a national symbol. The makers of Majestic's Master of Mystery seem to have been trying to release swastikas under the "well, actually" guise of its traditional symbology either because they wanted to subvert the Nazis or subvert anti-Nazis. Either way, it's the most interesting thing about the series.

You can hear Majestic's Master of Mystery at the Old Time Radio Researchers Library.

I Watched Movies; I Have Opinions.

Airline travelling is the great opportunity for each of us to discover... what's been in the cinemas recently?

It seems just about every major film takes it turn as an offering presented on the tiny viewscreen located on the back of your neighbour's headrest. On my recent travels I watched four films; three were pretty good, one was rather forgettable.

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023) is an adaptation of a play I hadn't heard of, which was itself adapted from a novel by Herman Wouk. I haven't read the novel either, but I knew the story from the 1954 film (The Caine Mutiny) that starred Humphrey Bogart as the commanding officer of the USS Caine, who is persecuted by his subordinates and finally driven into a breakdown during a military court martial. The 2023 version stars Kiefer Sutherland as the officer; it was directed by William Friedkin, his last before his death; sadly it was also the final film appearance of actor Lance Reddick.

As I wrote above, I wasn't aware the book had also been designed to serve as a stage play. I assumed this movie would be a full dramatization of the events leading to the mutiny; instead, it's a courtroom drama with characters discussing their versions of the events in question but with no flashbacks to them. I wonder if Friedkin took an interest in adapting the play because during the pandemic it wouldn't have been too risky to film. I should also note that the story is set in contemporary times, rather than the World War II setting of the original book, play and film.

The film has all of three sets and zero action scenes - it's carried entirely by performances and the performances are very good. This was easily the best of the films I watched; how nice that Friedkin's final picture was such a good one!

American Fiction (2023) was not quite what I was expecting; it's an adaptation of Erasure by Percival Everett and stars Jeffrey Wright as a frustrated literary professor who writes a novel he intends to use as a satire of the works he sees written about black lives and is then shocked when his satire is accepted as a worthy novel by the people whose respect he'd been unable to earn.

I thought American Fiction would be a pretty biting film, but while it is concerned with satire it's not particularly funny. There is a funny sequence where Wright imagines a scene from his book (Keith David turns up as one of the characters), but this is not Spike Lee's Bamboozled, it seldom tries to be funny. It's ultimately about Wright's character and his family and all their personal baggage, with the sensationalized novel creating a plot for the character scenes to hang from. I liked it but it's difficult to recommend.

The Beekeeper (2024) is a Jason Staham action film directed by David Ayer. Surely I've been disappointed by enough Statham movies in the past that I would avoid this, right? And given how vulgar I've found Ayer's films this surely wouldn's be for me, right? Yet I heard a bit of talk about this film on the internet indicating that it was a very satisfying revenge film because Statham's character is being pit against online scammers who cheat people out of their money. And yes, all of that does feel very cathartic to watch.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) is a horror film derived from the sequence in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula where the vessel Demeter ferries Dracula to England while he picks off the crew one by one. I thought isolating that sequence from the novel was a pretty choice for a horror film, but this film doesn't so much adapt the novel as obtain inspiration from it; they don't follow the events as recorded in the ship's log from the novel. Also, the film's rules about vampires are fairly typical Hollywood rules, such as sunlight causing them to burst into flames (which isn't in the Stoker novel). Surprisingly, the movie depicts Dracula as an inhuman creature inspired by Nosferatu even though it's a Universal movie - meaning they could draw from Universal's own history of visuals. It gets pretty ridiculous at times but I suppose I wanted a more restrained movie, faithful to the original text; this film, which features a CGI Dracula with immense bat wings who comes swooping down upon people is many things, but not restrained.

Lubango Vlog: Reflections

As we leave Angola, my wife and I reflect on our activities and accomplishments of the previous month.

How Not to Hunt Lions

While in Angola I recorded my Uncle Steve delivering his famous "How Not to Hunt a Lion" story. Now you can see it for yourself!

Lubango Vlog: More Junk Food Testing!

My wife and I made another junk food testing video for your enjoyment!