Tag: mad max

The best of the rest

CategoriesComic Books, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

My favorite movies about movies that never happened :The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened? & Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau.

supermanlivesBoth these movies, one about a Tim Burton Superman movie that would’ve been released in the late ‘90s and a different version of the Island of Dr. Moreau than the one that came out in ’96, are a fascinating look inside the moviemaking process. The reason behind why Superman didn’t live with Burton is because of the nature of the moviemaking business, of a studio in trouble after a series of costly flops and of being scared to finance another risky looking film. While Lost Soul shows that while the writer/director of a film can have an amazing vision, that vision isn’t enough to keep them their job when the two stars of the movie want him off the set.

My favorite comic strip: Willie & Joe: The WWII Years

I’ve been aware of the Bill Mauldin’s Will & Joe comic strip for many years now but only when it was referenced in other works about how accurately Mauldin was able to portray the life of soldiers serving during WWII. It was only after I bought the book Willie & Joe: The WWII Years and was able to experience the cartoons for myself, there are 600+ in the book, that I was finally able to see Mauldin’s genius first hand.

My favorite hardest working actor on TV: Bob Odenkirk

Bob Odenkirk
Bob Odenkirk

I mean, c’mon. In the space of two years the guy’s co-starred in two series; The Birthday Boys and Fargo, had the lead role in another with Better Call Saul and created, co-wrote and co-starred in the W/ Bob and David series. I guess Odenkirk’s one of those guys who’ll sleep when he’s dead — which hopefully won’t be for many, many years.

My favorite book: Roadside Picnic (1972) by Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky

I’m always on the lookout for old books that still resonate today. I heard of the book Roadside Picnic when I read about the ’79 film Stalker which was based on Roadside Picnic and decided to check it out myself. The book’s about the aftereffects of an alien visitation that only lasted a few hours but when the aliens departed they left all sorts of items behind. Is this “stuff” their garbage or something more? Some of it is extremely dangerous like a weird blue mist that turns bones of those who touch it to mush while others are beneficial like batteries that never run out of power.
Roadside Picnic mostly follows a new class of people dubbed “stalkers” who make a living and risk their lives venturing into these contaminated zones to take any of the alien leftovers and sell it to the highest bidder. But when the children of these stalkers begin displaying some weird birth defects, the question becomes are they only bringing out the artifacts or are they also bringing something else out with them?

My favorite post apocalyptic thing: Mad Max Fury Road

20120425222104In an era when there are loads of post-apocalyptic TV series and movies, I think the best of the bunch was the fourth film of the Mad Max franchise. Fury Road plays like some extended fever dream; from characters speaking languages the viewer can’t understand, to the oversaturated psychedelic landscapes to a movie that’s made of almost constant action… But it’s these differences from all the other post-apocalyptic TV and movies that set Fury Road apart and made it one of the best films I’ve seen in quite some time.

My favorite collected comic: Hellblazer

I suppose the only reason I started reading the Hellblazer comic was because of the failed Constantine TV show. But if that’s what it took then I’m okay with Constantine being cancelled. John Constantine, lead of Hellblazer, is a self destructive demonologist who, when he’s not battling the occult, is someone who mostly just wants to be left alone. Hellblazer, stories deal with everything from yuppie demons to a bleak, early 1980s Thatcher-lead England and new age cults, both good and bad.
Hellblazer was released in ’88 and I didn’t start reading it until this year, so I guess a 27 year wait to read something as good as Hellblazer is okay.

The Best Movie and TV Posters of 2015

CategoriesFeature, Movies, TVPosted on

2015 was a so-so year when it came to movie and TV posters. There were several strong poster designs in 2015, but in a year when dozens of movie and TV posters were released — there were only a few strong poster designs among the masses.

The best poster of 2015 was for the WGN TV series Salem.salem_ver8

Honestly, I don’t watch Salem. I tried but it’s not a series I could get into. However, after having seen one of the posters for the second season of the series it was an image that I couldn’t get out of my head and made me want to check out the show again.

The image features one of the witches of Salem perched atop the cross of a church. Except the poster is upside down and she’s not so much “perched” as she’s really hanging off the cross defying gravity. And with the image being rotated, off balance and the use of an inverted cross and all that connotes, I’m surprised the designers of this poster were allowed to execute this design at all. But they were/did and it’s one of the more striking images I’ve ever seen on a movie or TV poster in quite some time.

I can’t decide if I LOVE or HATE the poster campaign for the movie Ant-Man, but since I’m still thinking about it months after it was released I decided it needed to be on this list. The early posters for Ant-Man featured the title character who has the power to shrink atop Avengers things like Captain America’s shield, Thor’s hammer and Iron Man’s shoulder. It’s a neat way to both introduce the character to an audience who’s probably unaware as to who the character is, to show that he fits in with the other Marvel movies and even bring in some of the comedy elements to the film too since the photos feature a teeny-tiny man who has some large shoes to fill.

ant_man

There’s a few things that I don’t like about the poster for the TV show Supergirl but there’s a lot more that I do like. The poster is simple, with just the title character swooping down between skyscrapers with a blue sky in the background. But it’s what this poster does so well that many other movie and TV posters fail to do; it sets tone and expectations for the series.

supergirl_mission_impossible_man_from_uncle

Another poster that I think sets expectations well is the one for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. Pulled straight from the movie trailer, the poster has lead character Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) holding onto the side of an airplane for life as it lifts into the sky. Where the tendency of most movie posters these days is to cram as much onto the poster as possible, from actor’s names to movie title to tagline to who the director is… the poster for Rogue Nation is one of the more simpler ones out there with just the movie title, release date and other minor legalese on it.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. flopped at the box office, but that doesn’t mean that the poster promoting this film was a flop. Much like with the poster for Rogue Nation, the poster for U.N.C.L.E. takes the simpler is better approach, though not to the extreme that the poster for Rogue Nation did. Here, we get a shot of the two leads along with the title on a yellow background. And while the poster might not have a lot to it, the contrast between the two figures on a simple background makes this one catch the eye.

mad_max

I really liked the poster campaign for the movie Mad Max Fury Road. Not only does it feature some nice images, but the contrasting warm/cool color combination and off-balanced layouts make these posters very appealing.

The posters for Fury Road are the question to the answer of how exactly do you sell a movie that’s a continuation of a series that’s been going on since the ‘70s? What the designers did here was rather than try and copy what was used in the past, to instead come up with something new that borrows from the look and feel from the film while at the same time showcasing the new actors in the Mad Max universe as well.

Mad Max: What a lovely day

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It took me a lot of years to fully appreciate the movie Mad Max (1979). I saw that film many times on TV during the 1980s but if you would have asked me back then if I’d preferred Mad Max or its sequel The Road Warrior (1981) I would have gone with The Road Warrior every time.

BKBKRH Film Mad MaxIt wasn’t until Mad Max was finally released on DVD in its unedited and undubbed form that I began to see the strengths that movie had and slowly began to consider it the best Max movie of the bunch.

Since the fourth Max Max movie Mad Max: Fury Road is out May 15 I decided to watch the original Mad Max again. This time through I noticed something interesting that I hadn’t taken note of before. In Mad Max there’s a long stretch of film that has almost no dialog for more than 10 minutes. Which might not sound like much but in Mad Max which on its surface seems to be nothing more than a b-grade Western with cars instead of horses it’s something special.

In Mad Max, it’s the near-future and Max (Mel Gibson) is a police officer who gets on the bad side of a gang of bikers who murders his wife and child in retribution. Max, who goes “mad” as the Australians say “crazy” as Americans do, heads off on the hunt for the gang to kill each and every one of them.

Max is run down
Max is run down

Which by all accounts is b-grade material that’s been used in loads of revenge movies/stories for years and years and years. But where Mad Max is different from what’s come before are those 10 minutes.

Over that stretch we see the bikers go about their activities bar hopping and stealing gas all the while being stalked by Max. Who eventually catches them on the open road and runs some of them down. The surviving bikers start looking for Max, ambush him and shoot him in the knee and run over his arm.

Here’s where the only bit of dialog in those 10 minutes comes in. There’s a total of nine words spoken between the two biker leaders as Max lays helpless on the road:

Toecutter: “Quit toying, Bubba.”
Bubba: “Easy, I know what I’m doing.”

The Toecutter
The Toecutter

And that’s it. Max gets the upperhand, kills Bubba and in a spectacular real-life stunt chases the Toecutter with his car mere inches from the back wheel of the bike as the two scream down the road. Eventually the Toecutter crashes and is killed by a semi.

Then Max goes off to find the last member of the gang Johnny the Boy in a final scene that’s back to dialog.

But those 10 minutes are something to behold. It seems today that every movie, be it action or otherwise, is chock full of dialog. And it’s easy to see why. It’s simpler for a character to tell the audience what’s going on (“We need to go over there!”) rather than showing them doing it. And with movies that have a lot of story this is an easy way to save time.

A chase in Mad Max
A chase in Mad Max

Where this technique goes askew is with modern action movies that are so complex the characters need to literally tell the audience what’s going on to keep them from becoming confused as to what’s happening on-screen. Things are exploding and there’s heroes fighting here and villains fighting there. And if someone’s not telling the audience what’s occurring it all becomes a mess and the viewers can become lost.

When I wanted to become a comic book artist I once read an article that recommended watching movies with the sound off. It said that if you can understand what’s going on with without dialog then the writer/director’s done their job well.

Which is what I thought about the last time I watched Mad Max. This whole 10 minute chunk of the movie plays out perfectly well with perfect visual clarity. There’s not a question as to what’s going on or why Max is going after these guys on screen. I was never confused as to what was going on and any extraneous dialog would have added nothing to the scene.