Musings, Ribs and Mad Max: Fury Road

So I’m on the bus the other day and with the road works effecting every conceivable route (all one of them) to my destination, I had much time to ponder and luckily having a window seat to peer out of made me feel like I was acting in a reflective scene for a film as well, I always enjoy that, just in case anyone is glancing in my direction.

After having had a wander around for a bacon cob and securing cinema tickets, a pint was well due, as my latest book (one for the anthropology fans amongst you) hadn’t been getting the love it deserved that day.  Partly because I had wandered into the big bookshop armed with my wish list and found none of the obscure titles that had taken my fancy, neither could I find the new titles being spoken of by my fellow bloggers which begs the question what do I do in future if I want to actually physically buy a book I want.

It is that becoming a reader with different tastes from the big name authors is actually a hindrance when shopping?  Maybe high street shops are redundant for me, as they aim for a different market, it’s a sad state of affairs but my mind quickly turned onto something more whimsical.   I was quite surprised to have found that alone with my thoughts and still not having read that book yet, I had been taking in this fairly surreal set up and it hadn’t clicked for at least twenty minutes.

All that was quickly put right by meeting Tom at a barbecue joint and having a can of Pistonhead Full Throttle, picked purely because it seemed appropriate for the film we were about to see.  Red’s True BBQ is a curious place, it’s very friendly staff seem not to notice that they work in a restaurant which is the spitting image of the location of the knife fight in West Side Story, the only difference being that Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix was blasting out which is always a welcome aural pleasure

So to Mad Max: Fury Road and my thoughts are all positive as one would expect, just from watching the trailer (handily placed below).  I won’t give away spoilers, not that there is much of a plot to speak of, what there is, is done well but this film is all about the action.  Before I get onto that though, a word on the world which is strikingly presented as bleak (yet sometimes beautiful) and apocalyptic, peopled with ridiculously over the top bad guys who the viewer can’t help but love to see on-screen

The vehicle designs are fantastically presented in a suitably souped up beyond sane way and it’s from there that the blockbuster action comes into its own and what a ride it is!  It’s high-octane, excessive and relentless, each scene is a frenzy of things happening in stunning ways with some nice nods to its 80’s roots.  The action though has a point, thinking about the reasons why the events happened as they do, reveals many reasons for the characters choices and motives, which is all the more impressive with such a lack of dialogue.

There has been talk of this being a feminist film which it is, that being the logical way to go with the franchise, one would imagine but what it does is treat the audience as intelligent and doesn’t force anybody to sit through a heavy-handed lecture.  I think its fair to say that many things have been ruined by a preachy motive in various media, not just feminism though I hasten to add.  This film is subtler than that, if you care to think about it. Even if you haven’t seen a Mad Max film before, it’s well worth a watch, it’s a great action film with plenty of depth to it and many impressive set pieces, it’s two hours of awesomeness that tired me out so much that I needed a nap after.