Bad Max as a challenging lesson

 

Mad Max as you’re supposed to want her

Having finished my Mad Max post yesterday, I realized Imhad confined my discussion of the ‘Instant Gratification’ problem to the MAGA fainthearts. Their inability to look far enough forward to envision consequences is far less than that of the whole half country full of  Democrat apologists and Trump haters. Shouldn’t I address that fact in some comparable terms to what I just wrote?

I guess so. The easy answer is referencing the two recent Mad Max sequels provided to us by Woke Hollywood. But I haven’t seen them. I had no interest in paying to see them in a theater. At one point I did put one of them, Furiosa I think, on my IMDB watch list. I received a notification that it would be briefly available on one of the streaming services and I did tune in to watch. Lost interest about 15 minutes in, by which time the old Rukes had it a good movie should have you hooked. I was not hooked. It was just the same cinematic backdrop as the Road Warrior with a female hero who was unconvincing and unattractive to me. I stopped watching.

This experience was consistent with what I have been observing about movies and pop culture generally. It’s as if Artificial Intelligence is already running the show when it comes to our entertainments. Too much of consistency of fairly obvious remakes to people old enough to remember the originals. To me, Taylor Swift is Alanis Morrisette dressed and staged like Madonna. Without Madonna’s youthful sex appeal. I did stumble across a documentary claiming its author could quantify how much popular music gad been reduced to repetitive subsets of music, lyrics, and orchestration, underneath the vocal veneer of Autotune. Told myself I’d watch the last half of the doc later but never got around to it.

On the movie front, ai’m still sitting on a half-written post about the ten best movies of the 21st Century. I have what I think is a clear winner (mentioned by nobody else) that could squeeze into the Honorable  Mentions of the 20th Century, but none of my other candidates so far can make it that far up the list. The current century is a bust movie-wise. 

Whwt we have instead of original, imaginative, resonant film productions is remakes and variations of once successful genres. Superhero’s and more superheros and, you know, lesser, more accessible maybe-meta-heroes reflecting our current warts-and-all, foul-mouthed esthetic. (AutoCorrect just tried to turn ‘meta’ into ‘mega’ because it knows what I want to say better than I do.) That parenthetical is relevant because the unifying attribute of all the unimaginative dreck were being sold by Hollywood and record companies is that their job is not to entertain us but to compel our acceptance of the product we really should want to see and hear. 

Is it coincidence that my wife just mentioned the news this morning that the first night’s theatrical showings of Melania scored the best gate receipts for a documentary in a decade? I think not. Universe chattering at me in an undertone as usual. The best part of the Melania story is how hard the media that seek to govern our tastes tried so hard to make this project fail. All the entertainment dailies panned and ridiculed it, whike the presumably objective trade press predicted a box office wipeout. Didn’t happen. My wife was chuckling that the media overseers probably still don’t realize that their bad reviews were probably the best promotion the film could have had. 

Nobody wants to see the movies they’re making now, no matter how much the ‘smart’ critics praise them. Hollywood is dying day by day. You can verify this for yourselves by watching TV ads more closely. I’ve given up counting how many A-List actors I’ve spotted in uncredited bit parts of commercials, sometimes just a famous face in a background shot. They can’t get work. And it would seem they’ve spent the millions they received a decade or two ago before the lights went out in Malibu. 

But the two Mad Max sequels (so far) did make money, more than what is currently par anyway. I suspect it’s because moviegoers missed the original Max and hoped that the new flicks would live up to them better than all the miserable Star Wars and Star Trek sequels that have stunk up theaters in the woke era. Why the biggest news you hear about the reigning movie studios these days is some acquisition in process that’s getting iffy and hostile.

Here’s what I did to assemble this post. I looked at two prominently featured clips at YouTube from the two Mad Max/Furiosa movies, one from each. Mad Max is in one of them, played by Tom Hardy behind an iron mask so he might escape recognition by the Mel Gibson fans. I’ll show you that one first.

Oh yes. The knockdown drag out fight between the new Max and the old Max. Letting us know they really are letting the new normal bury the dead past. Girl boss going blow for blow against the agèd crippled warrior we were used to seeing only in our memories.  Also some cheesecake, which the early films were short on apart from Tina Turner. But she’s gone too, and the new sexy is part cyborg, part makeup uglified version of the woman who became famous in the last century for this.

Two Days in the Valley (1996). Don’t look you sick old cis-male white boys…

Pretty sure this scene is supposed to be epochal, memorable, and monumental. All it did for me was recall the late Die Hard sequel when Bruce Willis got the sh*t kicked out of him by an 80-lb Chinese girl. Unconvinced he needed to drop a car on her to defeat her.

The next movie didn’t have Charlize, but a new, skinnier cyborg with bad hair who had this life-changing (I’m assuming) scene with an evil man who was still carrying the stuffed toy he stole from her in childhood. They are even discreet about the actual bullet-in-the-head execution, suggesting it was merciful in a way you’d never see from the badass white bays whose bodies are littering the landscape.

Was it good for you? Did you feel the earth move with all the waves of understated 

acting? Or were you secretly hoping for some fancier combat moves on both sides? 

Where we are with the woke, hate-Trump, everybody should like what they stoop to give us from their high virtue-signaling perches above the masses. 

Here’s the pitiful bottom line for me. All the ones who believe that killing Trump or locking him and his family in a dungeon forever will magically make their lives better, healthier, happier, more sexually and financially rewarding are never going to get more from their saviors than this. Derivative, condescending, imagination-free trash offered by a homeless headquarters that looks like this.

This is the price of not being able to foresee consequences for the decisions and affiliations we choose because some elitist tells we should.

All the stuff they call woke is also way older than most of you are. Why you can’t remember it even though they still play it for you sometimes on the radio…

Good night, Max.