icarus-suraki: almostdefinitelydying: icarus-suraki: You know how you sometimes try to share…
You know how you sometimes try to share something (a book, a movie, a song) you’re really, really into with someone else that you think will also be really, really into it and they…aren’t?
Like, they’re just sort of lukewarm on it at first and then they start straight up making fun of it? So it sort of sours you on this thing that you really, really fuckin’ liked?
Yeah. That’s where I am right now.
I’m sorry. It sucks.. It’s like “here, have a piece of my innermost soul” and then they laugh at it…
Hilariously (I guess?) the “thing” in question that I tried to share was Fury Road.
My folks kept saying, “Hey, Fury Road is up for all these awards. Is it really that good? Should we see it?” And I said, “I happen to have it on DVD and you happen to have a sizable television with a DVD player–let’s watch it sometime!”
So we did. And it didn’t work out as planned.
I had figured that, since they tend to like things like Star Wars, they would be able to deal with this, get into it, catch on to the nuances, understand some of the underlying ideas, and so on.
Instead, they kept walking in and out to get coffee or whatever, kept pausing it for one thing and another, didn’t laugh at the right parts, laughed at the wrong parts, nearly missed Doof Warrior’s flamethrowing guitar entrance, kept asking me who these people were or who those people were, didn’t think the storyline was “all that good,” didn’t pick up on the visual storytelling elements, actually talked over “Hope is a mistake” and then had to ask me what Max just said, thought the Vuvalini were “sort of unnecessary” and didn’t get why I like them so much, and (maybe worst of all) thought Furiosa’s anguished scream in the desert was “overly melodramatic.”
But, they said, we can see why it would be nominated for some technical stuff.
And I’m just like…are you actually being serious with me right now? I fucking love this movie. I don’t think you understand.
So I’m feeling a bit sour and salty right now.
I could totally see this happening. For me, it took some time to get into Fury Road. I mean, I _liked_ it fine when I first saw it (and my first viewing was in the theater, which I think was important), but I was mostly responding at first with: whoa! That was a fun ride! And it had some really cool elements that, the more I thought about them, seemed cooler and cooler.
And then because I’d seen it with my son but not with my wife, and she wanted to see it, too, I saw it in theaters a second time, and started to really fall in love with it, and then I fell down the rabbit hole with all my wonderful fellow obsessives, and we know where that ended up.
But it was a slow fuse at the beginning. I had a hard time really _seeing_ all the cool stuff because I wasn’t expecting it to be there. The movie’s almost deceptive in that way: it looks like a genre movie with stunts and explosions, and a lot of people (or at least people like me) have been conditioned to have low expectations of movies like that. And with the visual storytelling, you have to be paying attention to see it (or have obsessed online friends willing to point it out in loving detail).
In all honesty, too, especially at first when I wasn’t really processing all that was going on in terms of the deeper parts of the story, the scream in the desert kind of did seem overly melodramatic, and the Vuvalini did seem sort of underdeveloped. I don’t see them that way now, but I empathize with a first-time viewer who has that reaction.
Beginnings are delicate things. It can be hard when you love something and want to share it, just like it can be hard to be on the other side of that, when someone you care about who’s really excited to share something that you’re just not connecting with.
Maybe they’ll come around in time? But in the meantime, sorry you had to deal with that.
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Tags: fury road.
