BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (33 OF 100)

 

"Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" (1985),
Dir: George Miller and George Ogilvie

$12,305,523 Budget vs. $36,200,000 in Gross

 

Haven't done one of these in a while and there's reasons. First, the return to my production roots: commenting less, producing more, and trying to build a minor Youtube army. Second is that I could not honestly think of any bad movies worth seeing lately. There are endless to choose from, but not many with redeeming qualities... Then I saw the new Mad Max trailer, and bingo! For this article, I picked the last of the trilogy, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. It's not the worst in the series, but not the best. I could easily have picked the first movie, but to be honest, I can’t argue it being worth the time. Yes, it’s got a younger, more Australian Mel Gibson in it. He plays a semi-future cop who turns his car into a weapon. But really, that’s it...

  

Other than being Mel's debut and us seeing Max go nuts (the murder of his wife and child... very Death Wish), it doesn't really hold much water to the rest of the series. You could watch the sequel and know all you need to know about the character from the title. (“Oh, he’s mad. I get it... Moving on.”) The first felt to me like a cheap superhero movie to me. When you hear people talk about Mad Max, usually they are referring to the second movie in the series, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, thinking it's the first one. Road Warrior has it all, from the crazy outback car chases, to the psychotic feral-people, to Lord Humungus, to that boomerang kid, to an epic car chase that made cinematic history. It’s kind of a masterpiece… And what does Thunderdome have? Well, it has Thunderdome!!

And as you can see, Thunderdome is f%$#ing awesome! That one sequence makes the film. The rules: two men go in, one man comes out. Pretty simple set-up... except Max has to take on the feared Master-Blaster (Blaster being a mindless goon, and Master being the midget who instructs him). It's pure cinema genius... and then it's over. And unfortunately, so is the rest of the movie.

After the glorious first-half of the movie, Max gets banished from Bartertown (which was actually parodied brilliantly by South Park). He goes on a new adventure and finds all these weird lost children, but after Thunderdome (without argument, the high-point of the film), it's hard to care. Firstly, the kids can hardly communicate with Max, which makes it kinda boring. Secondly, there’s this long journey to this passenger plane that they found, which apparently functions as a relic of the old-world and not a plot point. Now, me being a kid and the Mad Max movies usually being about vehicles, I thought this plane would be their escape from this terrible place. At the point in which they brought in The Pilot character from Road Warrior (the closest thing Max has to a friend in the series), I almost sure something was gonna come of this stupid plane… and it didn’t. So what was the damn point of putting it in there?! Planes aren't f&^%ing cheap!

The other major weak-point of Thunderdome for me was the casting of Tina Turner as the matriarch of Bartertown, Aunty Entity. Even as a kid, it never felt right to me… perhaps because it's glaringly Tina Turner, and not a movie character. But even then, I gotta ask myself when comparing this to Road Warrior (which has no shortage of misogyny and graphic rape), how did Aunty Entity acquire so much power in this f&#*ed-up, male-dominated world? Maybe she sang for them.

The movie is directed by two different directors and really feels that way at times. I can't really comment too much on the second-half of Thunderdome really, because I can't remember much. It's like the second-half of Stripes or Full Metal Jacket. Pretty forgettable, especially in comparison to its grand opening. That doesn't bode well for the last chapter in any series. Mad Max doesn’t end on a whimper, people. Mad Max ends on a kick to the nuts.

 

This is why the new Mad Max movie excites me. Whether a reboot, remake, re-launch, re-whatever, the original Mad Max franchise was rocky from the get-go and could use a jump-start. The last edition was in 1985 and the world of Mad Max was arguably not really created until the second movie, and then came to a grinding halt mid-third. So there is lots of ground to be covered and a new audience to enjoy it. Thunderdome is worth seeing because it gave us a glimpse of Max’s world when all the cars and explosions stop for a second… and then we get thrown into a messed-up Roman arena of pure awesomeness.

Check out this review of the second Mad Max film Road Warrior by my hetero-lifemates Seamus and Joe at Movies For Dudes right here.

MOVIE TROPES - DANCING RESOLVES EVERYTHING

 "MOVIES AND THE MYTH OF DANCING"

 
I like to dance. Lots of people like to dance. Men, women, children like to dance. But why do we dance? Is it the florid release of energy, the synchronized movement, or the fact that somehow a single dance number will solve all your worldly problems? Wait! What? That isn't true. I dance alone all time and I'm still balls-deep in debt! How come dancing doesn't make that go away? Have movies been lying to me about the awesome powers of dance my whole life?

Now I don't know where this trope came from, but I'd like to say 80s films like the John Hugh's classic The Breakfast Club. All those disenfranchised high school misfits went from hating each other to bonding over the course of a dance montage, becoming a harmonious unit... It's pretty cheesy, but beats the previous scene where they're all sitting around and f&$@ing crying.

But the myth of the star-studded dance number goes back further than that. One could say as far back as Old Hollywood with movies like Singin' In The Rain, which was a song-and-dance musical about performers in song-and-dance musicals. Typically with these films, the conflict would be resolved with a final dance number, stunning producers and sourpusses alike, marking the big payoff. But what never made sense to me about these films was how one particular dance number seemed to vanquish all dilemmas, but the dozens of others prior (even the more memorable ones) had no affect at all.

This same school of logic was reflected in the Oscar-Eating-Monster The Artist (which is actually a great movie) when the two leads managed to sway their old crotchety producer John Goodman with a starry dance number that would win the old lug's heart, but also serve as nice transition to the film's ending where the leads are on top of the world again.

But that's just something that happens in hokey musicals, right? There's a dance number and all's well that ends well? Not in every musical. West Side Story is an odd exception. In that movie (where all gangs dance and jump on top of each other when they fight) the characters are introduced as using their ability to dance to intimidate people, showing ownership over the neighborhood (but also being the daintiest gang ever). Tony, the leader of The Jets, gets murdered in street and no amount of dancing or singing brings him back. It's actually a surprisingly tragic ending to a musical and has no final dance number to cap things off. 

However, twenty years later, Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsen would do the leather-pants number at the end of Grease and give everyone the happy ending West Side Story never had. Gang feuds are resolved, classic conflicts are washed away, teen pregnancies were, um, gone suddenly, and there was even enough time for a big hooray-hooray before the credits rolled.

In some cases, the movie dance is just a coping mechanism and solves nothing. Take Alex Cox's gritty bio film Sid And Nancy for example. If you can actually stomach this piece of sh%# film, the climax is Sid Vicious stabbing Nancy Spungen to death in a testament to their toxic relationship, and Sid going to jail for being a woman-killer. Once Sid is released, he runs into some rapper kids on the street. They tell him not to not be "so stuck up" and dance with them. He does so, forgetting that he's a f&%$ing murderer for a second. Then a cab pulls up. The door opens and Nancy is inside, alive. Sid gets in and the two drive off into whatever crappy city they live in, excusing Sid of murdering this person and giving us the most condescending happy ending bull$%& I've ever seen... Now, this isn't a dance number per say, but it follows the trope that dancing makes everything okay, and in this case is used very manipulatively. God, I hate this movie so much. As the British would say, pure rubbish.

Personally, I thin dance numbers are their most effective when they cap off a movie in a way that words cannot. For example, Napoleon Dynamite's Jamiroquai dance number won Pedro the election. How? Doesn't matter. The final dance number of Chicago shows that Roxie and Velma have now joined forces and become bigger than they ever were alone. How in reality do a pair of murderesses get so famous? I don't know (ask Sid Vicious), but regardless we accept it.

Then you have a climax like the one to Little Miss Sunshine where it tries to show the family uniting in a way that most dialogue scenes leading up to this could not do. During Olive's semi-stripper dance, the family joins her on stage and supports when the crowd doesn't. Then they all get arrested, but as a family, together. Does that win them Little Miss Sunshine and absolve them of any crimes they have committed? No. Does that resolve their inner dysfunctions? Not really. Does it illustrate a connection that would otherwise be cheesy in words? Yes, it does. Does it make the audience feel good about themselves and laugh? Absolutely, which is exactly the point.

Perhaps the dance number is the comedy/musical answer to the action movie's final fist fight between between good and evil. Neither musicals or comedies usually have villains, so the movies themselves don't really have a visual outlet for what is usually a character's internal struggles. Perhaps the dance number is the answer for those particular genres... but then again, you also have endings like the big dance recital in Staying Alive and realize that sometimes dance numbers a punch in the face might be better.

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (2 OF 100)

 

"Star Trek: Generations" (1994), Dir: David Carson

$35 Million in Budget vs. $120 Million in Gross

If one were to trace back to where Star Trek really departed from being stories about the ethics of the future, it would probably be with Star Trek: Generations. For the first outting of The Next Generation crew, it feels less like a celebration and more like the franchise's garage sale. Up for grabs was William Shatner's integrity in the Captain Kirt role. Some would argue the Shat never had any to begin with, but Patrick Stewart certainly did in the enlightened, forward-thinking role of Jean-Luc Picard. Instead, this deflated cinematic adventure just marks Picard's gradual transformation into a geriatric Bruce Willis. And finally, there was a clear fire-sale of whatever uniforms were leftover from the previous films and Deep Space Nine. The outcome was the most disappointing writing for Star Trek since the original series (and that tar monster episode in TNG). The rest of the Next Gen movies would be rocky or forgettable, and now that the studio's have rebooted the original crew in action movie form, I have a feeling the characters of Next Gen will be forgotten in the world of cinema... for the better, probably... They were TV people, unlike the radiant Nichelle Nichols. Pff! Zoe Saldana, my ass.



For your viewing displeasure, my favourite critic since Roger Ebert, Mr. Plinkett, does an indepth analysis of this... thing.