S4E41.5: Mad Max: Fury Road

I found the scene with the wives washing each other to be one of ecological horror: the water pouring on the ground gave me a panic attack. I viewed it as hard hitting commentary on waste

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I hate this film so, so much. I think it’s about average-level misogyny and I find the action slow and uninteresting. Very impressed with the production design and most of the acting, but HATE the overcranking on the footage. I found the truck scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc to be more impressive than any of the action scenes in Fury Road. Loved Mad Max 1-3 growing up, so I really don’t know why I can’t stand this movie when basically everyone I know loves it.

"This is all of our audience's fondest dream: To become friends with all of us in real life and then suggest an episode that they want us to do and then help us make it." -November Kelley... I feel so seen 😅 Thank you Nova!

I always read Immortans would-be-but-not wives having an out of place shower scene after max wakes up from the car crash early on as a surreal comedy moment both in and out of universe. Like; its the post-post-apocalypse, everything is grody and fucked up, Max just woke up in the middle of nowhere and is trying to escape his situation -and one of the first thing he sees is something that even pre-apocalypse would stand out as voyeuristically indulgent and unlikely to just happen -It's like a mirage in a desert of something you might desire- and he almost immediately holds them up at gunpoint to steal their water. It reads to me as a comedic refutation of everyone’s priorities both in-world and in-the-audience. Water is more precious and desired here and now than a too-good-to-be-true encounter with soggy supermodels, and it didn't feel very exploitive to me within its context of the rest of the movie showing them to be full human beings worthy of respect outside of their prospective breeding potential. Also every time I hear "Nux" meantioned I hear "Knucks" and imagine Knuckles the echidna in his place.

I feel like the Mad Max series has an inverse arc to the Fast franchise. The Fast movies started digging in harder to macho stereotypes for the main characters, overwriting their characters along the way. Mad Max kind of started there, with a macho, slightly fascy, character whose wife and kid gets fridged to provide motivation to tip him over the edge. Then for the next 3 movies the entire world devolves into madness alongside Max due to greed and those macho stereotypes and Max spends 3 movies getting people out of that situation so they can try to rebuild society while recognizing that he's become too toxic for a normal society anymore. Max isn't above the misogyny and "Might makes Right" mentality of the world he's in, he's steeped in it, but part of him considers it his job to pull people out of a man-o-sphere hell that he thinks he deserves but they don't. Meanwhile late series Dom Toretto would be up there with Bullet Farmer, or chasing his wife across the desert yelling "FAMILY!"

Unsubscribing because you didn’t mention the bit where the rig is on fire and they use the plough on front to smother the fire in sand and then the inlets open to let air into the engine and it’s the most satisfying shot in history

Hate to be an "um, actually" guy here (well, not really) but the youngest of the Vuvalini is played by Australian supermodel Kate Moss. I remember seeing this movie in the cinemas when it came out and kinda bouncing off it. I watched it like 2 or 3 more times and no, I agree it's fucking awesome. What was wrong with me the first time? I dunno. I guess I just don't respect women enough.

Devon referring to their 15 year old self watching this in the cinema just astral projected my soul from my body as I recalled watching this with my college sweetheart. EDIT - fun fact I discovered two weeks ago, if you mention you have suffered chronic headaches for most of your life during your screening, they won't let you donate blood unless you see a doctor. I have donated 5 times before taking a break to lose a bunch of weight. Give blood, only mention disorders that could impact the blood quality.

Made the mistake of watching the og movies after this episode. The first is pretty decent, but 1&2 have such relentless queer coding of all the villains

Yeah drinking piss is just drinking beer. Also doof is pronounced like “woof” as in a dog bark. It’s slag for electronic music. Such as, “I went to a bush doof” which means “I went to a rave in the wilderness”. The doof is for the sound the bass makes. Sorry, probably autistic Australian

Gal Gadot was my guess when Devon posited the question.

I want the yuri harem anime based on Charliz Theron having to take care of the wife actors for a year in the Namibian desert while filming a massively over the top blockbuster. How did Gal Gadot make it to the finals in casting this? That genocidal asshole can't act. Would she have come up with the scream? No. If someone else did come up with it could she have done it in a way that brought tears to my eyes? No, it would have been funny.

Unrelated, Hot-D is good. Fantastic work Abi 🖤❤️🖤❤️

Thrilled to hear these correct takes after screaming myself hoarse at Milo and Phoebe’s terrible takes over on MooD.

actually they are horse teeth.

Love love love Devon’s deep cut to the trashfuture CEO who said “Plan B is to drink our own urine or our competitors’ blood, stay in the foxhole.”

I expected this one to be a straight hour of "this shit is SO SICK" because that's more or less all there is to this movie, but kudos to Nova for sneaking in some actual Takes too !

Genuinely incredible movie. I’ve probably seen it 10 times. Hoping this episode gets more people to watch it, because it deserves it (and because I want people to get my references)

Charlize Theron, the Tenchi Muyo of the movie set.

wild that Tarman was such an accomplished director before the Death Stranding and ends up just being my cab driver when i need to schlep around a load of road building materials

A nice detail on Max’s blood bag tattoo is that he’s measured in hands, like a horse.

Before truck season ends, I hope you watch Smokey and the Bandit, an extremely fun movie that posits the truck and car as allies against the true enemy of all thinking beings: the police, as represented by Jackie Gleason playing sheriff Buford T. Justice. (Or you could do the thing you like to do and watch the sequel first, which is much worse but has Dom DeLuise, an elephant, and Canadian and gay versions of Buford also played by Gleason.)

Man, as an aussie I so often forget how much our speech is misconstrued. Like 'drinking piss' (alcohol) Also this movie spawned so many meetups of people in america who legit spend the whole year welding all sorts of crap to their cars so they can drive to the desert and drink piss together while dressed in rags and scraps of leather

"... I don't think a human can make those noises" *I start compiling a list of incredible metal vocalists who can*

im really excited for everyones reactions to baby driver. a movie i deeply love because i have the exact same lining things up with music autism as the baby driver and a love of driving cars. they made the movie for me. also its set in atlanta. maybe the worst place to drive in the south AND theres spaghetti junction mentioned. however the entire rest of the movie is so stupidawful and so midcentury american that it makes me almost proud that people decided it was worth spending money on

fucked up cars subplot technically a heist weird ideas about detectives movie i need to pitch is the nice guys which is a movie that

My favourite fan theory about the Mad Max films is that the first one "really happened" and the rest are fireside stories that people tell about this mythological guy that existed just before the apocalypse. That's why his interceptor gets destroyed each time, and why after the first one he shows up to help someone else in their story rather than being the focal character. Also, precisely when the apocalypse happened is a bit iffy, like the Gyrocopter pilot in the second one mentioned how much he misses lingerie. Also, I choose to believe that the granny bikie gang, the Many Mothers, was founded by the badass grandma from Mad Max 1, who I think was his mother in law? (It's been a while since I saw it.) Also, the first one isn't really apocalyptic - they have cops and lawyers and the bad guy, Toecutter, kept getting off on legal technicalities. Mad Max gets mental health leave, lol. I don't think it's that physical deformity is a sign of evil as much as it is that everyone is very unhealthy. Mad had a leg brace and a limp, Nux has tumors, Furiosa is missing an arm, Bruce Spence had those teeth, the engineer in the second one is paraplegic, etc. Minor pronunciation quibble: the Doof Warrior's name comes from doof doof music, pronounced like "look" not "proof," and is onamatopoeiac. Also, "piss" is cheap beer. I like to think Mad Max killing the Bullet Farmer off screen is like Kyuzo getting that gun off screen. A cool detail about the colours is that daytime is red, nighttime is blue, and the Green Place does not exist. The third primary colour is only at the Citadel. If you don't think people can sound like dragons, checkout Alex Terrible.

ARRFF BARK BARK BARK ARRFFFF ARRRFF

Bullet Farmer with the greatest crash-out in cinema. La Fortuna kicks in as he stands upon his moving car-tank, dual- wielding Heckler & Koch guns. The greatest detail for me is that when we cut to the reaction shots at the War Rig, La Fortuna is playing, but distant like the gunshots. Bullet Farmer aura farms so hard he summons La Fortuna around him.

Fuck, as a long time listener and fan, this 10 min intro finally got me. I was at my personal limit on subscription, but fuck, three days ago I saw a rig big enough to haul that tanka, wannagetouttaheralive talk to me. Thank you guys for the continued laughs, commentary, insight, and just damn it - Thank You.

On the note of parasocial recommendations - Steve McQueen's 2018 film Widows

So Furiosa's skeleton arm on her door is just a trucker thing. It's a Mad Max post-apocalypitc trucker thing, but you will just see that sometimes irl.

We've explored carman, truckman, and now truckwoman. Might I propose, to round things out, possibly the ultimate carwoman movie; Adolescence of Utena?

I had just randomly watched Fury Road last weekend and spent the whole time thinking "KJB would do a great episode on this". I was right.

Fury Road is of course amazing and the Grimy Ghost remix is essential viewing: https://archive.org/details/fury-road-master-9-18-22

Sing brother heckler!!! sing brother Koch!!!

I think Abi's end-of-movie diagetic subtitle promo might be my favourite bit of the entire podcast, it takes me out every time without fail

Literally my favorite movie. I've been waiting for this since atomic blonde. Let's fucking GOOOOOOOOO

No. I have no desire to help yall make an episode. I do not want to see the sausage get made, I am just curious as to what is produced by a series of inputs

Post-apocalyptic wasteland Mao Zedong be like: Women hold up half the horsepower.

Fun moment when Max opens the double doors in the citadel, a warboy chasing him accidentally falls past him off the cliff and tries to get a "witness me" in

I would suggest the movie Batteries Not Included if I were actually friends with you. It's got cool practical effects, and it's about immigration, defending your found family against evil property developers.

The first time I saw this movie we had to catch it at a cinema in the next town over (everywhere else was sold out), which is a drive along a big american interstate and across a huge river. I was driving a 1986 Subaru Justy that I'd bought on Craigslist for $350, (which um. Looked it -- non original seats, no floor carpet, exposed wire everywhere) and which had an ignition sequence that involve manually turning on the fuel injection via switch underneath the steering wheel. By god driving that car home after the movie was a Peak Life Experience.

I would be curious to see you do an ep on Furiosa, it was a very different creature, but I did quite like it.

Nico Lathouris is my uncle, I just wanted to point out that as a long time collaborator with George Miller he was in the first Mad Max, and also acknowledge that as dramaturg when the stunt crews and extras were getting the on set coaching he was a big part of that, building their characters and performances which I do think really comes through in the film. Filming was intended to be in Namibia but had to be moved to Australia due to issues stemming from the Iraq war, but then the whole thing had to be back moved from Australia to Namibia as an unprecedented wet season turned what was supposed to be an arid wasteland into a verdant paradise covered in green. I have fond memories of him at family Christmas lunches (over a number of years) being very vague and noncommittal about Fury Road as a lot of people had no idea if it would ever be finished.

Looking forward to a Bronson ep - I'm still not sure if it's mainly a movie with things to say about masculinity or a movie with things to say about one extremely strange man

can't believe hugh keays byrne was not mentioned for his role in the man from hong kong!!

"...fat, degenerate, nipple-pierced pervert..." Hmm? You rang?

“I just watched Mad Max: Fury Road again last week, and I tell you I couldn’t direct 30 seconds of that. I’d put a gun in my mouth. I don’t understand how [George Miller] does that, I really don’t, and it’s my job to understand it. I don’t understand two things: I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.” 
- Steven Soderbergh

"explosives-first" is the best phrase I've heard in a minute

Check out Sorcerer 1977 please! Criminal truck drivers transporting volatile nitroglycerin through south America

What a day. WHAT A LOVELY DAY!

I googled what Hugh Keays Byrne looked like in Stone out of curiosity about what Devon thinks is the sexiest anyone has ever looked and I was unsurprised to discover that he looks quite a lot like Devon.

Mediocre!

By „drinking piss“ I just assumed he meant shit beer, which is often called „piss“ by a certain kind of Aussie guy

The second time I watched this movie in theaters, a Tumblrite friend of a friend watched it with us and she was audibly scoffing and giggling throughout the movie

I suggested this movie at the start of truck season so really the thing happened to me. I shall remain normal.

Big shout out to the Black and Chrome version which pegs so hard. A happy editing accident that inspired a whole remaster of the film for grayscale.

I can say I pulled a fan jutsu on y'all by suggesting Big Trouble, which was my favorite episode of this year. Until the Blues Brothers episode hits my timeline, that is...

….okay maybe it isn’t the dumbest timeline after all.

i saw this film with my brother and cousins when I was about ten, and i guess i must have been pissed off at them for some reason because i committed the cardinal sin of spending the entire movie being deliberately annoying and trying to find plot holes in anything. I have zero excuse and i dont even remember what i was mad about

Just started the episode and my dear hope is they pick Babe 2 Pig in the City as the next bonus.

I mean, going to the length of becoming friends with you all IRL to suggest an episode is a bit much; I'm happy to just hurl DVD cases of 'Arlington Road' at any lookalikes I spot on public transport.

I can understand casting Armie Hammer because his diet has for years been method acting for the post apocalypse, but it's more The Road than Mad Max

"Drinking piss" in this case most likely slang for beer

My brother in law worked on this movie.

Please I gotta let you know that 'drinking piss' is Australian slang for drinking alcohol, I know I know we sound so stupid

I argue pretty dang hard that Mad Max: Fury Road is in my frame for best movie for me. I liked it so much that I paid for three separate groups friends to see it with me, and it was only slightly because the movie was fueled with the tears of MRA assholes. This, Dredd, and John Wick would be my picks for the most important action movies of the past 25 years and arguably of all time.

I've been waiting for a review of this movie since the original Doctor No review.

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A ray of light in what has been a dark week.