Favorite character traits: SLIT BEING A DICK

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Favorite character traits: SLIT BEING A DICK

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Favorite world-building elements: Realistic depiction of trauma

One of the things that makes Fury Road so immersive is the way it presents the result of violence. Unlike movies in which characters shrug off what in the real world would be horrific injuries*, the inhabitants of the Wasteland experience the full effect of the bad things that happen to them.

Some examples:

• Angharad’s graze wound. When Max shoots The Splendid Angharad in the leg, we see a close-up of the injury. When Furiosa asks her how it feels, she says, “It hurts,” and it apparently is a factor in her subsequently slipping from the war rig and being crushed. In the world of Fury Road, even a relatively minor injury can have severe consequences.
• Avoidance of gratuitous on-screen gore. At the same time, the film avoids depicting injuries just to be shocking. When Angharad is dying and Immortan Joe orders her cut open to try to save the fetus, we see the scene unfold – but we don’t see the actual procedure. The movie only shows enough for us to understand what’s happening. That restraint reflects a maturity in how the film approaches trauma that contrasts with the adolescent gross-out porn of other action movies.
• Realistic emotional responses. The inhabitants of the Wasteland carry both literal and figurative scars of past experiences. Angharad has a history of self-harm. Max exhibits a degree of PTSD that leaves him unable to speak. I ship Max/Furiosa, and there’s a side of me that wants to believe there were sexy fun times in the back of the war rig during that one chance Nux and Capable had, but I appreciate that the film respects its characters and what they’ve been through enough not to force them into emotionally false situations.
• Furiosa’s chest wound. When Furiosa is stabbed with the gear-shift dagger, we see the pain of it in her face. Especially given how stoic she’s been up to this point, the increasingly desperate look in her eyes during subsequent events shows the effect it is having on her. Unlike less-realistic movies, where such an injury might lead to a) a quick clichéd death scene with a few coughs of blood, an exhortation or two, and boom, dead, or conversely b) lots of ass-kicking followed by a wince and some light-hearted banter in the denouement, Furiosa’s injury follows a steady and clinically realistic progression through increasing distress and eventual loss of breath function due to tension pneumothorax. That the true emotional climax of the movie centers on an act of healing, as Max decompresses her chest and then treats her subsequent exsanguination with a transfusion of his own blood, is a beautiful inversion of action-movie tropes.

George Miller financed the original Mad Max with his earnings as an ER doctor, and made the movie in part to explore the effects of trauma on people who encounter lots of it. Although he hasn’t worked as a physician in many years, his experience clearly still informs his approach to storytelling, and adds greatly to the believability of Fury Road.

*No disrespect to Holy Grail. That shit’s hilarious.

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sylvia-morris-reblogs:

lies:

gingersnapwolves:

as much as I really loved Mad Max: Fury Road, I feel like someone should have checked their math

because like

“If you drive 160 days that way, all there will be is more salt”

okay so let’s say they drove 25 miles per hour (which is much slower than they would need to across a salt flat) and drove for 12 hours per day on average (which is possibly less than they would have)

in 160 days they would travel 48,000 miles

which is enough to travel the circumference of the earth

twice.

Max could be speaking metaphorically, continuing his line (almost his only other complete sentence) about how “if you can’t fix what’s broken you’ll go insane”. He could mean that even if Furiosa does circle the world twice, she’ll still carry the Wasteland inside her.

Like he does.

Yeah also: how much fuel do you need for 160 days? Surely more than they are carrying…

That’s a good point, which someone else also commented on earlier in the thread. At 100 mpg (which is probably overestimating their fuel efficiency), they’d need nearly 500 gallons of fuel per vehicle, which they don’t appear to have with them.

I feel like the rest of the movie is too obsessively grounded in physical reality for Miller & Co. to have just made a mistake like that, or to have said, “you know what? Screw it. Let’s say 160 days because it sounds more impressive, even if it doesn’t make sense.” So the answer must be something else.

Maybe the discrepancy arises from our assuming that Furiosa is talking about riding the entire 160 days. They don’t have enough guzzaline for that, obviously, and since the scarcity of it is one of inviolable principles of the world, they’re not going to casually assume they’ll come across more. So maybe the 160-day estimate assumes they’ll only be riding until their fuel gives out, after which the remainder of the journey will be on foot. That solves both problems at once (the distances not adding up and their not having enough visible fuel).

I don’t remember the exact dialog from the night before, when Furiosa explains the plan to Max. (Sounds like a great excuse for another trip to the theater; yay!) But the part where Max overtakes them and has the conversation the next day, when Furiosa agrees to go back, is included in the promotional clips on YouTube.

Max says:

Look. It’ll be a hard day. But I guarantee you that 160 days’ ride that way there’s nothing but salt. At least that way you know we might be able to – together – come across some kind of redemption.

It’s true that he says, “160 days’ ride”. But that could be shorthand, eliding the fact (known to all present, and therefore not needing to be stated explicitly) that they don’t actually have 160 days’ worth of fuel, so they’re going to end up walking well before that point.

That’s the best I can come up with for now, at least.

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sonnywortzik:

little fury road things i dig way too much:

• toast knowing her way around guns. just. every gun. all of them
• toast saying they can “squeeze off this little [gun] a raunchy 29 times” and looking at max like maybe she’s trying to get a reaction out of him but he does fuck-all
• nux kissing capable on. the cheek. a cheek kiss. on the cheek. boy was spraying poison on his face a few scenes ago now he’s kissing people on the cheek don’t touch me
• nux still referring to max as “blood bag” even after he’s part of their little makeshift family & how it’s another illustration of nux’s weird innocence. ‘cause “blood bag” isn’t inherently a derogatory term in his head it’s just stating a fact and he doesn’t have anything else to call max so it doesn’t occur to him that maybe max doesn’t want to be called “blood bag” but here we are
• “tree thing”
• the fact that the wives know what trees are even though they’re around the same age as nux (or younger) but they’ve got books/have probably read about trees & deduced that that thing is, in fact, called a tree
• “stay where you are little joe. it’s kinda lost its novelty out here” dag pls
• “warlord junior. gonna be so ugly” “it could be a girl” KEEPER OF THE SEEDS PLS
• the way they light max’s eyes in the “hope is a mistake” scene 
• when max tells furiosa his plan about cutting back through the canyon and blowing it up behind them and the kEEPER. OF THE SEEDS. SAYS “KABOOM”
• aND MAX SMILES AND POINTS AT HER LIKE “she gets it”
• that black-top in the final battle trying to intimidate furiosa by hissing at her and she roars and head butts him so hard dickhole probably ain’t got a face anymore
• furiosa and max’s last fights being edited together because parallels and also punches n stuff being timed w/ drumbeats because the actual hero of this movie is punk rock 
• when furiosa and the wives are pulled up on the platform at the end and they pull other people up w/ them (as opposed to those people being beaten down at the beginning)
• the closeup of the dude w/ the facial growths who gets pulled onto the platform and is open-mouthed smiling so hard while gazing upwards idk he just makes me happy
• the women who were hooked up to the milking machines being the ones to start the water flowing once they see immortan joe is dead
• all the “fuck capitalism” content in this movie culminating in one big happy “NO SERIOUSLY FUCK CAPITALISM” final scene

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Favorite Movies – Children of Men (2006)

“As the sound of the playground faded, the despair set in. Very odd, what happens in a world without children’s voices.”

I think this might be it at the moment: my actual favorite-favorite movie.

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