#mad max fury road analysis

[uths-ethnol-spam]

mad max: fury road and journey

hi. as a french student, i attend to english class as a foreign language and i submitted an oral presentation on a piece of media in relation to our theme: Journey, Travel, Exile. despite the compelling topic, the class had been incredibly dull this semester. i figured i might as well post the text somewhere, if it interests some people in the fandom.

anyway! there are mistakes here and there, sorry about that. :))

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. GEORGE MILLER. 2015

Journeys depicted in cinema are about going from one place to another; they often mirror the protagonist’s own inner and emotional journey — hence the satisfaction of finally witnessing the protagonist’s arrival: it symbolises the completion of the character’s story after three or five acts.

So what about a movie revealing about two thirds into the story that actually, the journey doesn't end here, because the characters are meant to go back from where they came? How does this depiction of journey match the inner journey of the protagonist?

This question is quite central in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, and some even expressed criticism about the fact that what was announced as a journey is, basically, a round-trip. 

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, directed by George Miller and released in 2015, is the fourth opus of the MAD MAX series started back in the eighties. The multi awards-winning action movie features Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa and Tom Hardy as Max, in the post-punk dystopian “Wasteland” : after a nuclear war, a handful of men have taken possession of means of production and of vital resources, keeping survivors as slaves and fanatic soldiers. But the specificity of this post-apocalyptic feudal society lies in the key importance of motorised vehicles: in the deadly desert, a car is a symbol of freedom and independence. 

Max has been captured by the main antagonist and war lord Immortan Joe, and his iconic car now belongs to the lord’s mechanical cavalry; as for Imperator Furiosa, she drives the War Rig and intends to recklessly flee to the Green Place, bringing with her Immortan Joe’s “Wives”. Starts consequently the epic high-speed car chase, which is the beating heart of this action movie.

Of course, the chase is both a setting for the characters to evolve, and a metaphor of this journey. It is exemplified by the quote at the end: "Where must we go... we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?" But the whole movie also focuses on two other noteworthy elements: what is it like to have no home to return to, hence being perpetually exiled? And what are the mechanics of travel in this collapsed society? Indeed, Miller and the creative team focused on the materialistic dimension of journey — the cars, how they function, and to what extent they inform the public about their driver.

Keeping all of that in mind, we’ll study how the audience’s expectations about this tumultuous journey — relying on a materialistic and spectacular depiction — are subverted into the very heart of the narrative structure, in order to unfold Furiosa’s and Max’s inner journey.

We’ll proceed that way: 

First, we’ll focus on the global approach of journey, exile and migration in the movie, from a thematic and a structural point of view, and how it impacts the narrative.

But the means of the journey are as important as the ends: that’s why we’ll see how filming and showing the journey enable Miller to draw parallels with our own relationship to movement, vehicles and consequently, modern society.

Finally, the means of one’s journey is intrinsically linked to their inner journey, so to speak. We will thus explore how Furiosa and Max evolve as characters throughout the chase, but also to what extent they actually can escape their condition as drivers in the Wasteland.

Out here, everything hurts.  Journey from a thematic and structural perspective

Migration and exile: overarching themes

In this devastated land, migrations — individuals and groups moving from a place to settle in another — are an important dimension of one’s life. The population relying on Immortan Joe for water migrated to the Citadel but depend on the tyrant’s whims and wishes. The nuclear and ecological disasters forced the remaining population to move and eventually, submit in order to barely survive — we’ll come back to that.

The theme of exile is also tackled at the very beginning of the movie. Max is presented as a man with no home anymore — a stateless man. As the audience discovers, it is also sort of Furiosa’s case: she has been taken from her home as a child, and now fully intends to go back. The two lead characters are uprooted, in a desert maybe too dry to let anyone grow anymore. 

Finally, Furiosa and Immortan Joe’s Wives rely on the Rock Riders, who are sort of people smugglers, to cross a canyon: movement and travel in this world is controlled not by a state, but by lords, tribes… informal groups holding power on limited territory thanks to violence. The people smugglers too are an obstacle for Furiosa to overcome.

Subversion of the traditional journey narrative

But the most obvious type of journey or travel one thinks of when watching MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, is the chase. The chase seems at first to structure the narrative as Imperator Furiosa announces she wants to go to “The Green Place”, home. But the third and supposedly last of the three acts turns out to be short-lived: a plot-twist forces the story to go through two more acts, hence a subversion of the narrative.

The first act is Furiosa’s breakout: she leaves Immortan Joe’s Citadel, but the tyrant, his war boys, and other lords are chasing her. The second act focuses on how Furiosa, Max, the Wives and a War Boy succeed in escaping the antagonists: they are now heading to the Green Place, Furiosa’s birthplace. 

As the third act begins, we are expecting the difficult end and final arrival to this utopian world, a space for everyone to grow and settle for good. But the third act is very short and ends on Furiosa’s despair as she discovers that going home is no longer possible. 

Hence the unexpected need for a fourth and fifth act: the dramatic and epic journey back to the Citadel, and the arrival as the characters themselves have opened up and fought for what they thought they would never fight.

Travel, exile and migration are thus important elements in the overall narrative: they are themes directly addressed in the story, and they even bend the traditional hero journey. 

It’s a detour. Filming the means and symbols of journey

The means of the journey — and not just the ends — are themselves a theme explored in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD: they contribute to the depiction of the Wasteland, centred around movement, and a parallel must be drawn with a modern perspective on our own use of means of transportation.

Creative means of transportation and creative process to model the Wasteland

One the strength of the movie is doubtlessly its depiction of travel. Great effort has been put into the choreography of the chase by the creative team and Miller himself, but also in the conception of the motorised vehicles — and even other means of roaming.

The cars all have their specificity and identity. Furiosa’s War Rig probably is the best example: every detail inside and outside of the car is meaningful for the character, but also adapted to the Wasteland — for instance, Furiosa can extinguish fire thanks to the hinged front of the truck, using sand to smother it.

But two other striking elements caught my eye: the Crow Fishers and the Pole Cats.

The former, the Crow Fishers, are men wayfaring thanks to stilts. Their disquieting way of wandering stands in sharp contrast with every other characters’: this detail (just one shot!) shows how every surviving human adapted their means of travelling depending on their environment. 

The latter, the Pole Cats, are the men using swinging poles fixed to vehicles to swiftly attack the protagonists: their agility is remarkable and clearly exemplifies Miller’s will to show great spectacle. 

The chase itself, finally, is filmed in order to be simply remarkable, breathtaking and constantly frenzied. All of the vehicles are real, which is today extremely rare in the industry, hence the amazing effects and materialistic, raw dimension of the film. The use of fast motion (when the action filmed is sped up — a very eighties style of filming and editing), close ups, panoramas, travelings, steadicam… are all means to offer to the spectator an incredible experience of journeying in the Wasteland. 

Fanaticism, symbolism: depiction of movement and travel to question our own 

But there’s also a symbolic dimension of journey in-universe, hence a depiction of movement to question our own. Indeed, there’s a religious belief in the Citadel, focused around speed and driving cars, which of course evokes futurism and facism. Immortan Joe’s fascist reign is fueled by the War Boys fanaticism, praying before taking from the altar a wheel that seems sacred to them. 

To this religious symbolism is superimposed a political one: the means of migration belong to Immortan Joe who keeps them at the top of his fortress. A motorised vehicle for him is not just a means to go somewhere: it testifies of his domination and control of the resources (human and otherwise). The Doof Wagon and its iconic Coma-Doof Warrior demonstrates how Immortan Joe is the man who controls the gas, and that using it with such extravagance is his right. As Colin Gibson (production designer) says, “car have always been about power”.

Obvious parallels are meant to be drawn here. This movie seems to critique severely the disastrous and inequitable use of resources — think of the immigrants needing water we talked about earlier. “Then who killed the world?” Angharad ironically asks at some point, one of Joe’s Wives, clearly thinking of the tyrant and his kind. The glorious spectacle of the chase is also the symbol of a decaying world, destroyed — as it is reminded — by a nuclear and ecological calamity.

Well, you keep moving. Two drivers’ inner journey

All of that being said, this spectacular depiction of the journey mirrors the characters’ inner journey and evolution: but it appears that the periple itself changes deeply both Furiosa and Max, because these individuals, even though they want to escape their condition, can’t help but be submitted by the Wasteland — and hence, be drivers.

Furiosa’s and Max’s progression displayed through the chase 

Both Furiosa and Max are based on archetypes they escape from throughout the pursuit. Max is the lone wolf, wandering on his own, and his initial refusal to help Furiosa and the Wives hammers home that he does not belong to any community anymore. Furiosa seems to be the idealist: the prospect of freedom promised by her native country, the Green Place, keeps her moving.

But both evolve and learn to trust each other. Max eventually proposes himself to “slow down” the chasers, putting himself on the frontline and ready to sacrifice himself in order to save the small community he grew attached to. The stateless man found a shelter to their side.

As for Furiosa, she brutally learns that the Green Place is no more and that her only way of survival is taking back the Citadel. The pragmatic choice of transforming the place that once was her prison, Joe’s former base, is also an adieu to her hopes of travelling away.

The pursuit is a perfect context of this evolution, as the characters have no choice but to adapt or to die. 

Humans unable to escape their path: one’s road is never independant from the world

Nevertheless, the end may seem bitter, especially on Max’s side. Indeed, even though he defeated the bad guy, the protagonist is shown again and again in the movie as a driver, unable to evolve past that — and consequently, is destined to be submitted to the Wasteland. 

The heavy symbolism of the driver clings as firmly to the War Boys as it does to Max: the shot after Max’s “retaliation” makes him appear as a ghost-like figure, almost otherworldly, holding the wheel — and it underlines how that dimension is part and parcel of him. When Furiosa and Max part, the protagonist walks against the current of the crowd — once again a symbol of his eventual loneliness, despite the temporary respite alongside Furiosa: he is ready to drive again, far from here, an eternal nomad.

Finally, the disparition of the Green Place is loaded with symbolic, even religious meaning. This edenic utopia does not exist: in this sublunary space, the overwhelming feeling of dereliction is a weight on Furiosa's shoulders. There is no alternative: Furiosa has no choice but to be part of the Wasteland she had tried to escape all along.

Conclusion

"Where must we go... we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?" asks the end of the movie. I think that the characters’ better selves (especially Furiosa’s and Max’s) emerge when they are together, because they find the human remains buried under all the sand. The spectacular MAD MAX: FURY ROAD seems to be, eventually, asking the audience to go on their own path as wanderers, showing how things may become if we stop moving, and thus, acting for a better future. Thank you.

so here it is... it would be waste just to share it in class. besides, this is the extended version, as i take about 15 minutes to read all of this out loud. god

i may have been caricatural here and there — and i KNOW that some of it is factually incorrect, specifically about Joe's control of gas. but you know, sometimes one HAS to lie during an oral presentation

[damienkarras73]

An essay on Furiosa, the politics of the Wasteland, Arthurian literature and realistic vs. formalistic CGI

Mad Max: Fury Road absolutely enraptured me when it came out nearly a decade ago, and I will cop to seeing it four times at the theatre. For me (and many others who saw the light of George Miller) it set new standards for action filmmaking, storytelling and worldbuilding, and I could pop in its Blu Ray at any time and never get tired of it. Perhaps not surprisingly, I was deeply apprehensive about the announced prequel for Fury Road's actual main character, Furiosa, even if Miller was still writing and directing. We didn't need backstory for Furiosa—hell, Fury Road is told in such a way that NOTHING in it requires explicit backstory. And since it focuses on the Yung Furiosa, it meant Charlize Theron couldn't return with another career-defining performance. Plus, look at all that CGI in the trailer, it can't be as good as Fury Road.

Turns out I was silly to doubt George Miller, M.D., A.O., writer and director of Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet One & Two.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is excellent, and I needn't have worried about it not being as good as Fury Road because it is not remotely trying to be Fury Road. Fury Road is a lean, mean machine with no fat on it, nothing extraneous, operating with constant forward momentum and only occasionally letting up to let you breathe a little; Furiosa is a classical epic, sprawling in scope, scale and structure, and more than happy to let the audience simmer in a quiet, almost painfully still moment. If its opening spoken word sequence by that Gandalf of the Wastes himself, the First History Man, didn't already clue you in, it unfolds like something out of myth, a tale told over and over again and whose possible embellishments are called attention to in the dialogue itself. Where Fury Road scratched the action nerd itch in my head like you wouldn't believe, Furiosa was the equivalent of Miller giving the undulating folds of my English major brain a deep tissue massage. That's great! I, for one, love when sequels/prequels endeavour to be fundamentally different movies from what they're succeeding/preceding, operating in different modes, formats and even genres, and more filmmakers should aim for it when building on an existing series.

This movie has been on my mind so much in the past week that I've ended up dedicating several cognitive processes to keeping track of all of the different ponderings it's spawned. Thankfully, Furiosa is divided into chapters (fun fact: putting chapter cards in your movie is a quick way to my heart), so it only seems fitting that I break up all of these cascading thoughts accordingly.

1. The Pole of Inaccessibility

Furiosa herself actually isn't the protagonist for the first chapter of her own movie, instead occupying the role of a (very crafty and resourceful) damsel in distress for those initial 30-40 minutes. The real hero of the opening act, which plays out like a game of cat and mouse, is Furiosa's mother Mary Jabassa, who rides out into the wasteland first on horseback and then astride a motorcycle to track down the band of raiders that has stolen away her daughter. Mary's brought to life by Miller and Nico Lathouris' economical writing and a magnetic performance by newcomer Charlee Fraser, who radiates so much screen presence in such relatively little time and with one of those instant "who is SHE??" faces. She doesn't have many lines, but who needs them when Fraser can convey volumes about Mary with just a flash of her eyes or the effortless way she swaps out one of her motorcycle's wheels for another. To be quite candid, I'm not sure of the last time I fell in love with a character so quickly.

You notice a neat aesthetic contrast between mother and daughter in retrospect: Mary Jabassa darts into the desert barefoot, clad in a simple yet elegant dress, her wolf cut immaculate, only briefly disguising herself with the ugly armour of a raider she just sniped, and when she attacks it's almost with grace, like some Greek goddess set loose in the post-apocalyptic Aussie outback with just her wits and a bolt-action rifle; we track Furiosa's growth over the years by how much of her initially conventional beauty she has shed, quite literally in one case (hair buzzed, severed arm augmented with a chunky mechanical prosthesis, smeared in grease and dirt from head to toe, growling her lines at a lower octave), and by how she loses her mother's graceful approach to movement and violence, eventually carrying herself like a blunt instrument. Yet I have zero doubt the former raised the latter, both angels of different feathers but with the same steel and resolve. Of fucking course this woman is Furiosa's mother, and in the short time we know her we quickly understand exactly why Furiosa has the drive and morals she does without needing to resort to didactic exposition.

Anyway, I was tearing up by the end of the first chapter. Great start!

2. Lessons from the Wasteland

Most movies—most stories, really—don't actually tell the entire narrative from A to Z. Perhaps the real meat of the thing is found from H to T, and A-G or U-Z are unnecessary for conveying the key narrative and themes. So many prequels fail by insisting on telling the A-G part of the story, explaining how the hero earned a certain nickname or met their memorable sidekick—but if that stuff was actually interesting, they likely would have included it in the original work. The greatest thing a prequel can actually do is recontextualize, putting iconic characters or moments in a new light, allowing you to appreciate them from a different angle. All of season 2 of Fargo serves to explain why Molly Solverson's dad is appropriately wary when Lorne Malvo enters his diner for a SINGLE SCENE in the show's first season. David's arc from the Alien prequels Prometheus and Covenant—polarizing as those entries are—adds another layer to why Ash is so protective of the creature in the first movie. Andor gives you a sense of what it's like for a normal, non-Jedi person to live under the boot of the Empire and why so many of them would join up with the Rebel Alliance—or why they would desire to wear that boot, or even just crave the chance to lick it.

Furiosa is one of those rare great prequels because it makes us take a step back and consider the established world with a little more nuance, even if it's still all so absurd. In Fury Road, Immortan Joe is an awesome, endlessly quotable villain, completely irredeemable, and basically a cartoon. He works perfectly as the antagonist of that breakneck, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote-ass movie, but if you step outside of its adrenaline-pumping narrative for even a moment you risk questioning why nobody in the Citadel or its surrounding settlements has risen up against him before. Hell, why would Furiosa even work for him to begin with? But then you see Dementus and company tear-assing around the wasteland, seizing settlements and running them into the ground, and you realize Joe and his consortium offer something that Dementus reasonably can't: stability—granted, an unwavering, unchangeable stability weighted in favour of Joe's own brutal caste system, but stability nonetheless. It really makes you wonder, how badly does a guy have to suck to make IMMORTAN JOE of all people look like a sane, competent and reasonable ruler by comparison?!?

…and then they open the door to the vault where he keeps his wives, and in a flash you're reminded just how awful Joe is and why Furiosa will risk her life to help some of these women flee from him years later. This new context enriches Joe and makes it more believable that he could maintain power for so long, but it doesn't make him any less of a monster, and it says a lot about Furiosa's hate for Dementus that she could grit her teeth and work for this sick old tyrant.

3. The Stowaway

Here's another wild bit of trivia about this movie: you don't actually see top-billed actress Anya Taylor-Joy pop up on screen until roughly halfway through, once Furiosa is in her late teens/early twenties. Up until this point she's been played by Alyla Browne, who through the use of some seamless and honestly really impressive CGI has been given Anya's distinctive bug eyes [complimentary]. It's one of those bold choices that really works because Miller commits to it so hard, though it does make me wish Browne's name was up on the poster next to Taylor-Joy's.

Speaking of CGI, I should talk about what seems to be a sticking point for quite a few people: if there's been one consistent criticism of Furiosa so far, it's that it doesn't look nearly as practical or grounded as Fury Road, with more obvious greenscreen and compositing, and what previously would've been physical stunt performers and pyrotechnics have been replaced with their digital equivalents for many shots. Simply put, it doesn't look as real! For a lot of people, that practicality was one of Fury Road's primary draws, so I won't try to quibble if they're let down by Furiosa's overt artificiality, but to be honest I'm actually quite fine with it. It helps that this visual discrepancy doesn't sneak up on you but is incredibly apparent right from the aerial zoom-down into Australia in the very first scene, so I didn't feel misled or duped.

Fury Road never asks you to suspend your disbelief because it all looks so believable; Furiosa jovially prods you to suspend that disbelief from the get-go and tune into it on a different wavelength. It's a classical epic, and like the classical epics of the 1950s and 60s it has a lot of actors standing in front of what clearly are matte paintings. It feels right! We're not watching fact, we're watching myth. I'm willing to concede there might be a little bit of post-hoc rationalization on my part because I simply love this movie so much, but I'm not holding the effects in Furiosa to the same standard as those in Fury Road because I simply don't believe Miller and his crew are attempting to replicate that approach. Without the extensive CGI, we don't get that impressive long, panning take where a stranded Furiosa scans the empty, dust-and-sun-scoured wasteland (75% Sergio Leone, 25% Andrei Tarkovsky), or the Octoboss and his parasailing goons. For the sake of intellectual exercise I did try imagining them filming the Octoboss/war rig sequence with the same immersive practical approach they used for Fury Road's stunts, however I just kept picturing dead stunt performers, so perhaps the tradeoff was worth it!

4. Homeward

Around the same time we meet the Taylor-Joy-pilled Furiosa in Chapter 3, we're introduced to Praetorian Jack, the chief driver for the convoys running between the Citadel and its allied settlements. Jack's played by Tom Burke, who pulled off a very good Orson Welles in Mank! and who I should really check out in The Souvenir one of these days. He's also a cool dude! Here are some facts about Praetorian Jack:

He's decked out in road leathers with a pauldron stitched to one shoulder

He's stoic and wary, but still more or less personable and can carry on a conversation

Professes to a certain cynicism, to quote Special Agent Albert Rosenfield, but ultimately has a capacity for kindness and will do the right thing

Shoots a gun real good

Can drive like nobody's business

So in other words, Jack is Mad Max. But also, no, he clearly isn't! He looks and dresses like Mad Max (particularly Mel Gibson's) and does a lot of the same things "Mad" Max Rockatansky does, but he's also very explicitly a distinct character. It's a choice that seems inexplicable and perhaps even lazy on its face, except this is a George Miller movie, so of course this parallel is extremely purposeful. Miller has gone on record saying he avoids any kind of strict chronology or continuity for his Mad Max movies, compared to the rigid canons for Star Trek and Star Wars, and bless him for doing so. It's more fun viewing each Mad Max entry as a new revision or elaboration on a story being told again and again generations after the fall, mutating in style, structure and focus with every iteration, becoming less grounded as its core narrative is passed from elder to youth, community to community, genre to genre, until it becomes myth. (At least, my English major brain thinks it's more fun.) In fact there's actually something Arthurian to it, where at first King Arthur was mentioned in several Welsh legends before Geoffrey of Monmouth crafted an actual narrative around him, then Chrétien de Troyes added elements like Lancelot and infused the stories with more romance, and then with Le Morte d'Arthur Thomas Malory whipped the whole cycle together into one volume, which T.H. White would chop and screw and deconstruct with The Once and Future King centuries later.

All this to say: maybe Praetorian Jack looks and sounds and acts like Max because he sorta kinda basically is, being just one of many men driving back and forth across the wasteland, lending a hand on occasion, who'll be conflated into a single, legendary "Mad Max" at some point down the line in a different History Man's retelling of Furiosa's odyssey. Sometimes that Max rips across the desert in his V8 Interceptor, other times driving a big rig. Perhaps there's a dog tagging along and/or a scraggly and at first aggravating ally played by Bruce Spence or Nicholas Hoult. Usually he has a shotgun. But so long as you aren't trying to kill him, he'll help you out.

5. Beyond Vengeance

The Mad Max movies have incredibly iconic villains—Immortan Joe! Toecutter! the Lord Humongous!—but they are exactly that, capital V Villains devoid of humanizing qualities who you can't wait to watch bad things happen to. Furiosa appears to continue this trend by giving us a villain who in fact has a mustache long enough that he could reasonably twirl it if he so wanted, but ironically Dementus ends up being the most layered antagonist in the entire series, even moreso than the late Tina Turner's comparatively benevolent Aunty Entity from Beyond Thunderdome. And because he's played by Chris Hemsworth, whose comedic delivery rivals his stupidly handsome looks, you lock in every time he's on screen.

Something so fascinating about Dementus is that, for a main antagonist, he's NOT all-powerful, and in fact quite the opposite: he's more conman than warlord, looking for the next hustle, the next gullible crowd he can preach to and dupe—though never for long. For all his bluster, at every turn he finds himself in way over his head and writing cheques he can't cash, and this self-induced Sisyphean torment makes him riveting to watch. You're tempted to pity Dementus but it's also quite difficult to spare sympathy for someone who's so quick to channel their rage and hurt and ego into thoughtless, burn-it-all-down destruction. When you're not laughing at him, you're hating his guts, and it's indisputably the best work of Chris Hemsworth's career.

It's in this final chapter that everything naturally comes to a head: Furiosa's final evolution into the character we meet at the start of Fury Road, the predictable toppling of Dementus' precariously built house of cards, and the mythmaking that has been teased since the very first scene becoming diagetic text, the last of which allows the movie to thoroughly explore the themes of vengeance it's been building to. A brief war begins, is summarized and is over in the span of roughly a minute, and on its face it's a baffling narrative choice that most other filmmakers would have botched. But our man Miller's smart enough to recognize that the result of this war is the most foregone of conclusions if you've been paying even the slightest bit of attention, so he effectively brushes past it to get to the emotional heart of the climax and an incredible "Oh shit!" payoff that cements Miller as one of mainstream cinema's greatest sickos.

Fury Road remains the greatest Mad Max film, but Furiosa might be the best thing George Miller has ever made. If not his magnum opus, it does at least feel like his dissertation, and it makes me wish Warner Bros. puts enough trust in him despite Furiosa's poor box office performance that he's able to make The Wasteland. Absolutely ridiculous that a man just short of his 80th birthday was able to pull this off, and with it I feel confident calling him one of my favourite directors.

[sophieseals]

FURIOSA SPOILERS

Dementus parachute cape going from white in the beginning like a ‘saviour’ to covered with red paint once he meets a war boy and darker towards the end of the film has a GRIP ON ME. I’m torn as I think it could relate to two things.

1) how his followers see him as a saviour figure, and how active he is to use them as cannon fodder/ no true loyalty or freedom he pretends to uphold in order to gain followers. (See the Citadel Speech)

We all know Dementus is a manipulative prick the first time he ever meets Furiosa however, would be able to hide his true intentions to any child that wasn’t trained/like Furiosa. Taking the best care of her and saying he was going to take her home if she gave him directions seeming as if he was a good man when he did this in order to find, destroy and parasite off of the green place. His followers at this time see him as a saviour maybe not to the effect of immortan Joe but they see hope in finding a ‘better land/resources’ (See beginning of the film/ fruit tent scene)

It first becomes muddied when he encounters his first war boy (not after he commits his first act of violence!)This scene is later followed by his Citadel speech scene and follows his followers getting fucking blown to pieces by his arrogance and he doesn’t even try to save them. He only goes after Furiosa and the poor man who’s his walking dictionary only to further his own needs. His followers see him less as a saviour and the gang starts to split between leaders (see gas farm decoy scene that follows this, where there is tension between gang leaders AND he starts shooting his own men for decoy). (Also the Citadel I just mentioned)

And then lastly we see it towards the late second to third act of the film once he is separated from Furiosa where the top of the cape has gone black almost like it is covered blood. This is when he acquires gas farm and bullet farm (the black could also represent tar and the fossil fuels of both plants/greed). However this is when he is at his most volatile, his own people in the respected farms are planning a district 8 style uprising and he can’t keep his own gangs together due to his reckless behaviour. This is also best shown in the final act when he uses two out of four of them to be literal decoys for him so he can escape with his life. His followers no longer see him as a saviour and he has only has core followers left.

[alpaca-clouds]

Writing Redemption Arcs

I am rambling a bit about writing this week. Specifically about writing concepts that irk me in the way they are often portrayed. And yes, I know, some eternity ago I wrote about Redemption Arcs before, but let me go into it again.

See, here is the thing: I love redemption arcs in concept, but I rarely like them in execution. And I think they leave a lot of open questions in many regards.

Here is the question: What is redemption?

Technically speaking redemption is a theological concept of course. Generally speaking it is acting in a way that makes God or a variety of gods forgive or erase a person's sin or guilt. Details depend a lot on the religion in question, but the concept shows up in several religions.

If I was petty, I would talk about how Christian redemption is the most losely defined, because the church used the promise of redemption as a way of manipulating people over the course of centuries. While other religions have been a lot more consistent about how their redemption works.

However, generally speaking redemption usually comes almost always in two parts:

Confession

Rependence

Basically, who ever wants to be redeemed needs to admit that whatever he has done was wrong from their perspective. And they need to act in a often self-sacrificial way to make up for it. In religion this often happens through community work and/or financial donations. But of course, this would not feel right within a story.

So, within a story, usually a character has to do acts of self-sacrificial heroism to be redeemed. And this gets me to the main issues I have with redemption arcs.

My main issue with a lot of redemption arcs is, that it never really considers many perspectives but that of the heroes in terms of what the redeemed villain has done. Sure, in some fandoms this works, as the redeemed villain has only done wrong by the main characters. This is often the case in Magical Girl anime for example. Sure, technically the villains here use souls or whatever of innocents to create their monsters, but usually those people rarely even remember it. Yet, we also have other franchises, like Avatar or Star Wars, where sure, whatever villain did annoy the main characters. But often their actual most notable crimes happened against unnamed background characters.

Like, Kallus in Star Wars Rebels has done a lot worse against unnamed characters, than he did against the crew of the Ghost. And Zuko as done a lot worse by some random citizens of the Earth Nation specifically, than he has done by any of the main characters. But this stuff rarely gets talked about, because the audience has no emotional connection to those random background characters, that died and got tortured, and hence narratively it does not feel as important.

I understand this on a cognitive level. Believe me, I do. However... It might be my autism talking or something, but to me it feels wrong, because... objectively it is from the in-universe perspective.

Now, it should be noted that a character can be redeemed within the perspective of the audience without anyone forgiving them. Forgiveness and redemption are two very different things, even though both things often get mixed up in a lot of stories.

Ironically for me this means that my favorite redemption arcs are those, that do not expect any character within the story to forgive the character who tries to redeem themselves. Meaning, yes, my two favorite redemption arcs are Furiosa in Mad Max Fury Road, and Isaac in Castlevania (the Netflix series, obviously). Furiosa is super interesting, because until last year we did not even know what she wanted to redemption for - and Isaac very much looks at redemption from a very religious perspective, rather than the usual narrative perspective.

My other main issue is, that often stories - due to limitations of their respective media - boil down redemption to one to three big gestures, rather than a slow and arguous process. To call to Star Wars again: Kylo Ren is a good example. He gets himself killed, instant redemption. And yes, the "character sacrifices themselves" is to me one of the most unsatisfying sorts of redemption, because it often happens very suddenly, and has no character resolution.

What I personally would just love to see more often is a character, who gets to redeem themselves in the eyes of the audience, but get told by other characters within their universe, that, no, they will not be forgiven. Because again: Redemption does not equal forgiveness. And too often characters are expected to forgive some former villain a lot of shit (slavery, genocide, or at least the murder of their family) just for it to serve the former villains redemption arc. And I just wished that more stories had the guts to challenge this sort of narrative.

And then there is the other thing that some stories fail - not all. This is something I think the Zuko arc excells at, but others defintiely don't: Often a villain gets their redemption arc, after for one reason or another being cast out by the other villains. So basically they do not have anywhere else to turn to but the heroes, and afterwards are also never tried to be recruited back by the villains. So... From a character perspective, their redemption is kinda their only choice - so not a choice at all. And in those cases... redemption feels hollow.

Again, I love redemption arcs as a concept. Literally one of my favorite tropes, so to speak. But I am often unhappy with how it gets executed.

I don't know. What are your favorite redemption arcs?

[spiders-rob]

Ok so, I think why it haunts me so much, why Nux's death never sat right with me and I'm back to thinking about it YEARS later is: he was told that his only purpose was to die a "noble" death and then for a few scenes the movie is like "what if it was actually to survive as long as he could, even if that's a shorter time than other people, and live a noble life." And his death after that felt like a "haha just kidding". Like it kinda seemed like a slap in the face to his arc to some degree. Like yeah, he was gonna die soon. Maybe in days. Maybe weeks. Maybe months or years if he got lucky. But he should have gotten a chance to embrace that time. Not just "oh well you're terminally ill so the best thing you can do is go die I guess". Like...terminally ill people can still have lives! And purpose! Beyond anything to do with their death! Anyway rant over. Enough Nuxposting on the Renfield blog. I'll stop now.

[bradleycarlgeigersonandorian]

BRADLEY CARL GEIGER DESCENDANT OF ANDORIANS

PERFORM BODY SHAPE ANALYSIS OF ENERGY SIGNATURES, SIMILAR TO GENDER ANALYSIS AND SURVEY FOR ANTENNAE

[cloud3francois]

Mad Max: The Symbolism of Nux's death

[traewilson]

Saw Quinton Reviews' side video talking about Star Wars and how the brand's strict dedication to continuity leads to past "mistaken" continuity gets snipped off, like Sebastian Shaw as Anakin Skywalker. It got me thinking: Star Wars, deep to its most primordial basic structure, isn't actually myth - that's the bones of the body of Star Wars. In its proverbial genes, its history, and even cursory knowledge of how George Lucas tells stories shows this. American Graffiti is the most obvious example of this, being a dramatization of Lucas' childhood experiences. Indiana Jones is another example (until the last one, anyway, but we don't talk about Dial of Destiny). The first three films are defined by the pop culture trends of the time they were set. The villains in 1940s serials were, naturally, Nazis, so the villains are Nazis in the Indy films set in the 40s. This commitment to historical accuracy does lead to problems, however - namely, another source of villainy in the 40s were racial stereotypes of tribal peoples. Cue Temple of Doom, and the cartoonishly bigoted portrayal of Indian people in that film. This is why Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the way it is. In the 50s and 60s, the villains of American serials were the Soviets, so the villains are Russians. A chief obsession of that time was with aliens, so, like how religion was a big obsession in the 40s, aliens are a focus on Crystal Skull. Dial of Destiny partially failed because the filmmakers didn't engage with the series' formula, or rather, the executives didn't want Indiana Jones to deviate any further from what fans were nostalgic for. This results in a sort of bizarre feedback loop, where Indiana Jones is now referring back to ITS OWN PAST, ITS OWN HISTORY, rather than the actual history of the pop culture of the real world. The villains in the Indiana Jones films everybody likes are Nazis, so we're doing Nazis again.

Indiana Jones was on a trajectory where it would mirror the pop culture of the time period its set in. In the end, it abandoned this and gazed down its own navel, harkening back to the history of its own series, nonsensically contradicting the pop culture of the late 60s going into the 70s. Star Wars ran into a variant on this issue with continuity - with history.

Star Wars, of course, is obsessed with its own history. George Lucas himself was obsessed with the history of the Star Wars universe, at least the continuity of the films he made. The creators involved in the Expanded Universe were allowed to do their own thing, provided they didn't contradict his films, and with full knowledge their stories are only as canon as Lucas wanted them to be - which resulted in situations where stories about the Clone Wars pre-Prequels were essentially erased from existence because they, inadvertently, were inconvenient to a constantly revised history. To be clear, this isn't adjusting actual real life history, where it is a good idea to keep its narrative as accurate as possible. These are stories, fiction. And yet, creators and fanbase alike are as obsessed with the minutiae of Star Wars' history as the preacher is obsessed with the minutiae of the Bible and Biblical narratives.

This obsession with historical revisionism for a history that does not actually exist is resulting in the eradication of elements that are no longer convenient to its narrative. Sebastian Shaw as Anakin Skywalker, Clive Revill as the Emperor, all performances destined to become pop culture relics, only known by the most devoted of acolytes at the altar of Star Wars. I'd argue this started all the way back with Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the novel that was essentially George Lucas' backup concept for a Star Wars sequel if the first underperformed, realized. This novel is meaningless to the grand Star Wars continuity. An odd little curio; a peek into a future of the faith that could've been. I only know about it because I was obsessed with Star Wars as a kid. Less and less will know of it as time goes on, because it's basically a heretical text written in unwitting defiance of a constantly rewritten history. This eradication is deeply unfortunate, and actively works against Lucas' undeniable mythical inspirations for Star Wars. Myths are fluid, dynamic, ever-changing. Star Wars only changes as nostalgia and continuity so allow. This will be a BIG problem with Star Wars going forward - both the religious fanaticism of the fandom's strict devotion to their particular denomination of fandom faith (the Prequels are the best! The Originals are best! The Sequels are best! If you don't think that'll happen, I wouldn't bet on it.) and the strict devotion of the creators to the constantly changing, constantly eradicating, timeline of a world that is entirely fictional. Star Wars confines itself like this to its own detriment. Luke Skywalker won't be nostalgic for people forever. Anakin Skywalker won't be nostalgic forever, and in time, Rey won't be either. They will, gradually, over the course of time, become confined to the dustbin of history, along with Sebastian Shaw's Anakin, of Clive Revill's Emperor, as Splinter of the Mind's Eye, or Gennady Tartakovsky's Clone Wars miniseries. Some of this, of course, is the relentless march of time's fault, I get that. But the structure of Star Wars has grown to such an extent that stories are becoming harder and harder to write for it. You can't do too much; you absolutely cannot change Anakin's fate, or a different end for Luke that contradicts Last Jedi, or a British guy as Darth Vader's true self.

All this buildup to say George Miller and how he's handled the structure of the Mad Max franchise will give it a longer life, I feel, once its originator has passed on. George Miller is, frankly, a much better mythical storyteller than George Lucas. Anyone can be Max. Anyone can be Furiosa, or Immortan Joe, or Dementus, or Lord Humungus or the Doof Warrior or Aunty Entity. That's the beauty of this series; since anyone can be anyone, and hard facts are few and far between, this allows much more room for creative experimentation.

Anyway that's my ramble for tonight. I'm sure this will be a mess to get through, but it is a somewhat accurate picture of how I think. I'm a natural rambler. This is why Xwitter and I are not getting along lately.

[roopnavarro]

Furiosa Trailer Analysis - Bullet Farm Edition

In the 2022 book "Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max Fury Road," Kyle Buchanan interviewed the cast and crew about the making of "Fury Road" and the future of the "Mad Max" franchise. Here's what was said about "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga."

According to "Fury Road" production manager Dean Hood, we'll be seeing the Bullet Farm. We may have already gotten a glimpse in the trailer that's been released.

Most attention has been placed on this image of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) getting bullet bukkake'd pelted by a stream of ammunition while hanging over a pit of fire.

Here's the most detailed concept art we have of the Bullet Farm, found in the "Art of Mad Max: Fury Road" by Abbie Bernstein. It's basically a pit, surrounded by a berm that's topped by a track and some guard towers. The landscape is punctuated with towers and cranes. Now for the trailer footage.

My money's on this being the Bullet Farm.

[calder]

I'm most of the way through my first real playthrough of New Vegas, and I've had posts of yours in the back of my mind the whole way through. How'd you get started amassing all this knowledge? I want to Know Things like you do

im sitting on a few asks to this effect so i'll try to go into detail

i spent years arguing about the fallout setting (dont do this) until i became encyclopedic in the rhetoric, mythos, and iconography which constitutes its functional legacy among nerds. i turned over my understanding of the premise so regularly that it became a revolving door. i found that a holistic literalist interpretation--as in biblical studies--simply wasn't a functional engagement of the text, but it remains the dominant level of engagement with the fiction

fallout discussion circles are plagued by rampant projection, pretense, and condescension, and i grew to be morbidly fascinated with this in itself. thematic assessment is routinely drowned in stupid trivia. fallout lore is wielded to defeat valuable creativity and analysis. any lore that makes people uncomfortable is cast as surely unintentional, or a joke, or otherwise not real fallout. i wanted to developed a way of engaging deeply with the fiction, by approaching it as a flawed legend, defined by the myths and stories and coincidences it leaves in its wake.

fallout canon, as a concept, is a formless shadow. it does not mean the same thing to any two people, but everyone takes their own unique perspective on it very seriously. it's not unlike the dull stagnation of biblical canon, and the insight to be found in learning the apocrypha it corresponds to. these themes grew loud for me after listening to the radio play of "a canticle for liebowitz", a direct and clear influence on wasteland and fallout in its own right.

these games are also my outlet for occult thought in general. i am fascinated by conspiracy theory and the paranormal, but those things are not toys. this blog is a game-fiction-hobby context where i can indulge in "baking" "signs from god" without it being, yknow, intrinsically extremely dangerous and irresponsible. it gives me a place to try to understand that sort of thought without constantly exposing myself to real propaganda. does that make sense?

my approach was also influenced by taking an interest in george miller as a thinker and filmmaker. his work has always been inspired by the nature of legend and religion. just for instance, he made fury road contradict previous mad max lore from its first scene as a statement, to bounce people who would approach these stories through the sterile, fake-intellectual lens of grand fictional consistency

[theuniversitychallengereview]

Some Good Old Fashioned Number Crunching

Winningest

Imperial and Manchester are the two winningest institutions in University Challenge history.

Whenever I have used 'winningest' in the past I have always done so with an air of the tongue-in-cheek. With the assumption that it wasn't actually a real word, and that it was just something American sports commentators said. But it has just occurred to me that not everyone reading this will be consumers of American sports commentary, so to those people it may be coming across as bizarre at best, or just downright wrong.

However, in the manner of fleek, skibidi toilet and bae, it has entered the conventional and agreed upon lexicon. Language is constantly evolving, and as demonstrated by the wave of ever-cringier TikToks/adverts doing the rounds on Twitter this week, new terms are constantly being coined.

But back to Manchester and Imperial.

Let's Crunch Some Numbers

I have finally managed to do some data analysis. This is something I've been saying I was going to do for years, but I've never done it.

Until now.

I thought I'd need to write some proper code for it and (not knowing how to write proper code) have been put off.

What I was forgetting is that most of the time a Pivot table will do.

Pivot tables - the saviour of many a work-spreadsheet (and of my iTunes most played artists data, as I discussed in this month's Patreon post) - have come up clutch once again. (Coming up clutch is another American sports-ism, incidentally).

So I have crunched some numbers on these most winningest of teams, and can share some with you below.

Appearance Data

4-time winners Magdalen are the most appearingest (okay, this one isn't a real word) Oxbridge college with 1 more appearance than Trinity, Cambridge (themselves 3-time winners).

I initially had Durham 4th, but at the last minute I spotted an oversight - 11 of their appearances had been logged as "Uni of Durham" rather than "Durham Uni". It is very possible that there are more errors like that in the data, so if you spot any mistakes please let me know.

But how many points have each of these institutions scored, I hear you ask. I hear you clamouring for that information, actually - and here it is.

So far we have done some counting (to get the number of appearances), and some adding (to get the sum of the points), but we haven't done any real number crunching, which is what I promised.

I have removed institutions with fewer than 10 episodes, because thats the kind of thing you do when you are crunching numbers. I will also note that although some of the teams look like they have the same points per game, when you go to multiple decimal places the order is correct. I could have made this more obvious by adding the decimal places to the table, but I think that would have made it a bit busy.

I don't want to waste all my stats ammo on one post, so let's move onto the episode - could Imperial start closing the appearance gap on Manchester?

If you want to watch the episode beforereading the rest of the post you can do so here.

Here's your first starter for ten.

Sutherland is first out of the gate for Manchester, but unfortunately her guess of moth is wrong. I had guessed butterfly, so was thinking for a second that she may have been quite unlucky, but Spry buzzes correctly with armadillo so she (and I) can't feel too hard done by.

A full set of bonuses on maritime republics (called thalassocracies), which are not to be confused with hydraulic empires (which is a civilisation ruled by a monopoly on the water supply, like in Mad Max: Fury Road), gives Imperial (another word relating to empires) a 30-point lead. This quickly becomes 55 thanks to Salamanca Camacho and a hat-trick on mythology.

Spry buzzes on the next starter and pulls a face like he thinks he's screwed up, but his guess of Kissinger is correct, and it is allowed by Rajan who lightly scolds him for the slight delay in answering. They finally drop a bonus, giving Versailles instead of Paris, and Easow follows this up by dragging Manchester out of the negatives with theravada.

Sign up for The University Challenge Review

Could this be the turning point in the match?

Spoiler - it was not.

Manchester lost another five points thanks to a precocious buzz, and Elkouby picked it up to reaffirm Imperial's control. Spry's third put the London side into three figures, and they continued their charge from there.

Imperial are looking ominous at this point, which is perhaps unsurprising given their recent pedigree in this competition. Because while they have only won one more title than Manchester, three of their five wins have come in the past five years, while Manchester haven't won for eleven years. And indeed Manchester's semi-final appearance last year was their first at that stage since their 2013 victory.

Which makes Manchester the fallen giant of University Challenge, with Imperial rising to challenge their dynastic run from 2006 to 2013 in which they never failed to make it to at least the semi-finals.

No Mercy

Going into the music round, Imperial hold a lead of 140 points. Manchester's only hope is to squeeze their way into a high-scoring loser spot, but that would be possible only with the help of Imperial, who show no signs of letting up. Spry turns to Salamanca Camacho, clearly the classical music expert of the team, and he buzzes confidently with Rhapsody in Blue to take the starter.

The man from Madrid brings up Imperial's double-century, before Easow wakes Manchester from their slumber with Walt Whitman. It was going to take a huge effort to even break into triple figures from here, but Crossley wasn't going to give up with out a fight, taking their second consecutive starter with Congo.

Imperial 310 - 75 Manchester

Its early, but Imperial look like one of the teams to beat again this year (along with their fellow 300-ers Bristol). Manchester can count themselves unlucky to have come up against such a juggernaut. At the very least they managed to add one more appearance to their existing record, which Imperial are coming for.

Join me next week for Reading (19 apps) vs Exeter (24 apps), and subscribe if you haven't already for more excellent data analysis.

[fortunatelychaoticphantom]

Highlighted Posts - Fandom Topics

For some explanation, see serious topics post.

Avatar the Last Airbender / Legend of Korra:

Aang, forgiveness and violence in The Southern Raiders (meta).

Aang’s (lack of a) character arc (meta) + same response, posted independently from the original chain post with a bit of revisions (meta).

Avatar, violence and last second anti-killing rhetoric (meta).

The actual advice the past Avatars gave Aang (meta).

Aang vs. Ozai final battle and Star Wars influences (meta).

The Great Divide is good actually (meta).

Aang being rewarded by the universe? (meta).

Third season Scorched Earth plan out of left field (meta).

Bloodbending and Energybending (meta).

Katara didn't have a “plot armor” in the final battle with Azula, she's the epitome of a warrior (meta).

Katara and non-lethal battle winning (meta/joke).

Katara didn’t beat Pakku (meta).

Katara didn’t choose Aang “over” Zuko (meta).

Anastasia!Zutara AU (headcanon).

Mai and Zuko, what should have been (meta).

Mai happily joined Azula to hunt Zuko (meta).

Kanna and Pakku... why??? (meta/joke).

Gender equality in the Fire Nation and WW2 equivalents (meta).

Legend of Korra, the status quo and the institution of the Avatar (meta).

Making Korra’s dad chief is just… awful (meta).

Harry Potter:

The Malfoys didn’t have a redemption in canon (meta).

Michael Gambon is great, you guys are just mean (meta).

Snape, Dumbledore and the Defence against the Dark Arts (meta/joke).

No thanks, I don’t need a young Snape movie (joke).

What Harry’s reaction to his name being pulled from the Goblet should have been (joke).

The Tri-Wizard tournament has no rules (meta).

Star Wars:

Star wars and Pirates of the Caribbean are the same story (meta).

Kylo Ren and redemption in the Star Wars universe and Hollywood [tlj post] (meta).

DC:

so... does Superman have an appendix? (joke).

Why Selina Kyle never goes to Arkham (joke).

The Scorpion King/Wonder Woman comparison (joke).

Marvel:

Infinity War and the horror of the snap (meta).

Who’s the avengers’ designer? (joke).

Black Panther and The Lion King similarities regarding women (meta).

Shipping in the MCU (joke).

Antman and family (joke).

Pirates of the Caribbeans:

Elizabeth and Will’s relationship is the heart of the movies (meta).

The best things about PotC (meta).

Disney:

I sort of wrote a one-shot about the bimbettes from Beauty and the Beast (fanfiction).

Belle in the Hunchback of Notre Dame (meta).

Del Toro, monstrosity and Beauty and the Beast (meta).

Inner Workings is amazing (meta).

Frozen’s Anna and Hans (joke).

Quasimodo is awesome (meta).

Around the world with Captain Phoebus (joke).

Pocahontas’ ending is subversive as fuck (joke/meta).

Hercules didn’t know who Hades was (joke).

Other:

Bullshit “feminist” retelling and Mad Max Fury Road (joke/meta).

“Feminist” retellings explanation (analysis).

She-Ra and the inherently good protagonist (meta).

I hate the ending of She-Ra (meta).

Once upon a Time, Regina and redemption (two diverging threads of the same post) (meta): First and Second.

Ross Geller isn’t that bad, you guys are just mean. Or: The unbelievable cruelty of what Carol did to Ross (meta).

Bella Swan and Hermione Granger comparisons are bullshit (meta).

Twilight and depression (meta).

New Moon reread comments (meta).

Eclipse reread comments (meta).

Breaking Dawn reread comments (meta).

The Good Place is the greatest show in history. But also I have thoughts (meta).

The single most beautiful Geralt and Jeskier art ever made [The Witcher] (fanart).

Dimitri wanted to find the real Anastasia all along in hopes that she survived the revolution [Anastasia 1997] (meta).

Godzilla, Pacific Rim and Hollywood: between grim-dark and camp (meta).

Wednesday Addams and the usurpation of the summer camp for rich white kids (meta).

Debbie Jellinsky is the best [The Addams Family Values] (joke).

Achilles and Patroclus sitting in an urn. K.I.S.S.I.N.G. (joke).

Of course the Jewish women are the witches in Oz the Great and Powerful… (joke/meta).

Bird Box and mental illness (meta).

My problems with Carmen San Diego (meta).

Ice Princess and teenage movie tropes. Or: They're lesbians Harold (meta/joke).

Lord of the Rings life goals (joke).

The School of Good and Evil and that little bit of antisemitism… (joke).

Game of Thrones / House of the Dragon genetics are weird (joke).

Why wouldn’t I keep talking about old fandoms? (joke/analysis).

I hate Barbie. Sorry. (meta).

[tortoise-n33ds-purpose]

Awesome Analysis of Mad Max: Fury Road

[jakey-beefed-it]

List 7 Comfort Films and Tag 7 People

Tagged by @knighthawkchapter. Haven't done one o' these in a while, but here goes. For my purposes, 'comfort movie' is 'movie you would pretty much always plop down to watch if it came on the tv' as well as 'movie you genuinely enjoy'. Comfort in the more strict sense doesn't really factor into all of these.

Willow- The tone is pretty much exactly what I strive for in my d&d games. Yes, there's a plot, there are stakes, and it's fairly serious, but there are also drunken French brownies and slapstick shenanigans taking the piss out of the self-proclaimed great warrior.

Ladyhawke- Different tone from Willow, a bit more earnest and a lot more Medieval (except for the gloriously 80s synth soundtrack) but still a great story about the persistence of love and the shittiness of the church.

Independence Day- An extremely stupid movie with an extremely stupid premise (conveniently biologically similar aliens with even more conveniently compatible computer systems invade Earth for its resources rather than just bombard it from orbit and sift the debris) but lots of fun to watch.

Aliens- The film is just a sci-fi horror action masterpiece. The best parts of Alien- vastness and hostility of space, mounting tension, sense of creeping dread -but with lots of exciting action and character development to boot. And then Ripley and Hicks retired to raise Newt together; end of franchise.

Ghostbusters- Pretty dated already in some critical ways and only getting worse as time goes on, but many of the jokes still land and no movie has made me laugh as consistently throughout my life. Also one of the first films that lodged itself so thoroughly in my psyche it permanently warped my vocabulary.

Pacific Rim- Look. I could probably have just said 'The Entire Guillermo del Toro oeuvre but this one probably better fits the definition of 'comfort' than, say, Pan's Labyrinth or The Shape of Water. It's just a delightful film about choosing hope in the face of incredible odds. Also there are kick-ass kaiju, giant fighting robots, mad scientists, and one of the best love stories (platonic or otherwise) on film. And then Mako and Raleigh retired to hang out together; end of franchise.

Mad Max: Fury Road- I mean, you've seen it, right? Fucking look at it. It's pretty much the Perfect Film- pacing, characterization, cinematography, thematic consistency, law of conservation of narrative. Rewards casual viewing, REALLY rewards analysis. Still frothing at the mouth about this movie after eight years.

Tagging- @motheatenscarf, @petepaintswarhammer, @copperforge, @relentless-endurance, @savvylikeyeahhh, @13skeletons, @adhdgrapher, and anyone else who feels like it and needs the excuse. As always, please regard my tagging you as an invitation which you are free to ignore or decline without causing any offense.

[sistersorrow]

I'm subbed to a lot of analysis channels where they clearly enjoy the things they're discussing, but I just started watching this Cinema Wins video on Mad Max: Fury Road and God needs to send angels to bless and protect this fine man so he can continue doing God's work

The analysis channels I follow are great, but their enjoyment is kinda academic in nature (which I of course like, otherwise I wouldn't be subbed to them) but just hearing this guy gleefully geek out about Immortan Joe's character designs is just a treat

[pompous-puffed-up-penguin]

Got tagged by @coffeeandconundrums to talk about 10 movies I like, so here we go:

1. Yellow Submarine: While I think The Beatles are mediocre today, I was OBSESSED with them when I was little. My dad had a DVD of this movie and I watched it over and over, so much so that I can probably quote the whole thing.

2. Who Framed Roger Rabbit: The special effects in this movie are ASTOUNDING. And it combines two of my favorite things: cartoon slapstick and gritty detectives.

3. Batman Returns: Got to add at least one Batman movie to the list. I love Danny Devito’s portrayal as The Penguin. This movie made me much more interested in the character than before I watched it.

4. Beetlejuice: This is one of my comfort movies. I just adore Michael Keaton’s performance (even if he is only in there for like 30 minutes).

5. Monty Python and the Holy Grail: I love this movie so much, I wrote an analysis on it for a film class I took in college.

6. Batman (1966): Another comfort movie. You can tell how much fun the actors were having during filming, and it’s infectious.

7. Army of Darkness: The movie where I realized I had a crush on Bruce Campbell (and other older men, haha oops)

8. Mad Max: Fury Road: When I was walking out of the theater after seeing it, an older gentleman in front of me said it sucked. Obviously, he doesn’t like having fun.

9. WALL-E: I don’t think I know anyone who didn’t like this movie. This movie convinced me robots can be cute.

10. The Road to El Dorado: Love triangle? No. Polyamory. (And I also just really love the animation in this movie, it’s a crime that it didn’t do well in the box office.)

And I will tag @finniestoncrane, @march-harrigan, and @sweetums0kitty (along with anyone else who wants to share! I love hearing about what people like)