Blank Check with Griffin & David - Furiosa with Kyle Buchanan

Episode Date: June 2, 2024

We return to the Wasteland this week with Furiosa, and we’ve got quite the tour guide. Kyle Buchanan - author of Blood, Sweat & Chrome, THE book on the making of Mad Max: Fury Road - joins us as we do a definitive post-mortem on George Miller’s latest. Going up against the reputation of Fury Road was always going to be an uphill battle for the Anya Taylor-Joy starrer, and we go into all the ways in which this film matches, exceeds, or misses the highs of 2015’s action classic. Kyle brings with him plenty of behind-the-scenes details and shrewd observations, and Ben and Griffin bring a visceral report from their 4DX screening. And yes - of course we talk about how Dementus looks just like Guru Pitka.   Read Kyle’s writing at the New York Times Check out his Oral History of Fury Road as well as his book; Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road  This episode is sponsored by: MUBI (mubi.com/blankcheck) Zocdoc (zocdoc.com/check)  Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! 

Blackjack with Griffin and David Blackjack with Griffin and David Don't know what to say or to expect All you need to know is that the name of the show is Blackjack Ladies and gentlemen, start your podcasts. Is that Dementis? Yeah, I cannot do it. I was practicing it this morning. Sure. And I cannot do it,

cause I wanted to do one of the longer monologues. I cannot do it. I don't think I'm- I'm so thankful you did not do one of those monologues, cause they are meaty. Yeah. I don't think I'm quite good with the Australian accent to begin with.

And his voice in particular is- He's doing a voice. On top of that. Yeah, he's not just talking in his regular voice, his regular accent, he's doing a weird voice. Yeah. I actually, I feel like he's doing some stuff in this movie. Oh really?

It's not just naturalistic. I keep reading all these reviews that are like, Chris Hemsworth always plays himself, rolls out of bed, gives you the same old... Chris Hemsworth. We have to have a conversation about it. He based his voice on a seagull. Did he really? I have to know more.

Yes, he did. On like a squawking seagull when he was in the playground with his kids one day, he heard that seagull and he said, that is a skeleton key. That's a way into this character. Did he also base his nose on that seagull? No, but there's a whole nose story too. We need to hear the nose story.

I've actually been wondering about that. How do you arrive at what kind of fucked up you're going to be, right? In Bad Max. Here's my question right off the bat. How deeply embedded have you been on this movie? I know that so much of Furiosa in development is like inextricably intertwined with Fury Road, which you obviously wrote the book on.

But then once this movie starts up in earnest and production, like how how deeply embedded have you been on in it? And you can introduce our guest in a second, I guess. Not not embedded in the sense that, you know, I was on the set or anything. But having gotten to know so many of the people who worked on Fury Road, you know, there would be occasional texts or you. The relationships. Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, it was it was interesting. Also also when they were when I was when I was writing my book They were basically in pre-production for you know a while on furious

So I was hearing a lot of what they were up to it was happening which felt not real It felt this felt like a movie that was never gonna happen. It was more of a sort of like, yeah, well they'd always love to do that. Well, let's also acknowledge Fury Road was 20 years of, we swear to God it's happening. And then six months later, it'd be like, there was too much rain in Namibia, nevermind. Some weird shit happened. We're waiting two years.

It just felt like- And you're like, great, so that's never gonna happen. So it just, Furiosa, you're like, I know this dance. The fact that this movie got made in nine years feels astonishing. Like an astonishingly quick turnaround. Well, yeah, well, in a front burner kind of way, but they had written this back in, you know, 2003, 2004.

So in a sense, it almost took as long as Fury Road. It just wasn't on that front burner. Right, but then the other side of it is, the release of this movie has really made me struggle with the passage of time where I'm like, I cannot believe it has been nine years since Fury Road. The fact that he has three movies in nine years is unusual. Also feels weird.

Yeah. Like that feels like a sort of a normal amount of movies to have in nine years. If you're a big movie maker and not really for him. Obviously there was a big gap but. The only thing weirder than that he actually got Furiosa made and got it made within a decade of Fury Road is that he made another movie in between. That is the part that is astonishing.

And then you also factor in that there was a lawsuit that slowed this movie down. Well, we'll talk. All Well, what's this podcast? This is Blank check fury row, okay It's one check a Mad Max saga. What was our mad? Mad pod fury cast there you go. And they of course it was sure look This is a podcast about filmography's directors who have massive success early on in their careers such as making a movie called Mat Max and 45 years later, you're still fucking in that basically writing your own checks in That universe. Yeah, sure massive success given a series of blank checks make whatever crazy passion products

They want some tests. So she's clearing some testing Bounce baby. Yep. Mm hmm. Yeah. Your name is the wasteland. My name is Griffin. I'm David. This is a return to George Miller, a man we covered in 2020. Yeah, about four years ago.

The Fury Road of years. Yep. Yep. That was the podcast that straddled the pandemic, right? That was like half the episodes were done. No, I guess almost all the episodes were done. Yeah, IRL. Right. Now that I look at it. No, Pig in the City was the first remote episode we ever did.

Yeah. So there are a couple. And you'd never know it because the episode turned out perfectly and everyone loved it. But yes, no, that was one that we recorded. And and Emily's hot take was Fury Road is about the internet and we were like Yes, the most insane hellscape I can imagine us living through and then like six months later. You're like Fury Road is about this It's just about all of existence. Mm-hmm, but I mean I even in the Four years since we did that episode feel more confident saying maybe one of the best movies ever made. Fury Robe. Yeah. It always hits. I think it is almost

like Kyle agrees. No one is gonna call you crazy for mounting the argument is this the greatest action film ever made. I think within nine years it has been accepted of like yeah that's in the conversation. At the very least in the conversation, at the very least top five. And if I think at this point, if you did claim it as the best action film ever made, people wouldn't stand in the way and cry recency bias. It just feels right. It has completely codified. Exactly. It has settled firmly. It is in that way that the silence of the lambs

was the horror movie that broke through with prestige awards bodies. It was kind of the action movie that did that. I know it didn't win best picture, but right. Yeah. Like that never happens. And it did. Yes. And you're like, how did that happen? You're just like, it was just that good. Everyone was just kind of like yeah like right like the matrix didn't do that I'm trying to think of like other types of you know yeah the matrix is a big claimed action hits but that's not the movie we're here to talk about we're here to talk about its prequel yeah slash follow-up this is basically Fury Road minus one sort of we joke about movies having like

franchises that are so complicated that they branch out. Well, yes, but also this is the first Mad Max movie to feel connected to another Mad Max movie. This is what I'm saying. And that's not surprising. It's not like I watched

the trailers for this movie and I anticipated, yes, that this is set in the Fury Road universe. But then I was sort of reflecting on, like, he's never really done that before. The whole point was they were never connected in a way. But Furiosa, obviously, yes, it's a minus one. You're right. Our guest today is Kyle Buchanan.

Thank you. Took far too long to introduce you. Wrote the book on Mad Max Fury Road Kyle Buchanan of the New York Times The the succeeding New York Times not the failing New York Times But also yes the author of the New York Times bestseller, right? Do you have to have well that sounds you want to have New York Times by the times? Letting sweat and chrome. Yes The wild and true story of Mad Max. Fury Road, right?

It was, you know, you wrote the book on Mad Max, Fury Road. I did. Thank you, Rictus. Thank you, Scrotus. Who's Scrotus? Scrotus is the new David. You're Rictus. Oh, in our dynamic?

I was going to say, which is right. I think you're Scrotus. I'm not fighting that for a second. Right. Because I'm bigger. And Ben is Smeg? No, Smeg's on the other side. Ben is organic mechanic. that for a second. Right, because I'm bigger. And Ben is Smeag? No, Smeag's on the other side. Ben is organic mechanic. Ben is organic mechanic.

Yeah, Ben is organic mechanic. That is dead on. Yep. Absolutely. Yes. But I would listen to Blank Check with Rictus and Scrotus. Of course.

I think that fits, that slots neatly into the theme song. They have good taste. So Scrotus is new, yes? Yes. Yes, because Josh Hellman is in Mad Max Fury Road. He's the guy... The main war boy, kind of. Right, he's the guy with Nicholas Holt.

He's the one who's sort of leading. He goes like this at one point when he's behind the wheel. This is the thing I love that no one else would do. Where Miller's like, I got my stock company of actors. Right. And they're like, but you used this guy in the last movie. And he's like, I don't care. I like him.

I'll dress him differently and he uses two actors twice in this movie. Is that right? Well, yeah Elsa Pataki and Lakey home for Sam's worth wife. Yes one of the Vivalini and then is the you know, the only scarred right? Yeah, but you know Hugh He who keys burn who played in more than Joe in Fury Road, was Toecutter, the very first man-made villain. He sure was. And so many people were like, oh, so is this like secretly, it's supposed to be old Toecutter? And George Muller's like, I don't care about that shit.

I don't care about this timeline. I make the movie that I want to make, which does make this movie bizarre. Yeah, it's interesting. He's because he's not as lore-pilled as everybody else. No. And yet, Fury Road has this center of gravity from which this movie obviously sprung and the Max movie that they wanted to make after this, which, you know, Godspeed to them.

Good luck. Which would be The Wasteland. Would also have been a prequel to Fury Road. So weird. Which would be the wasteland? Would also have been a prequel to Fury Road. So this movie came along and kind of scrambled what was typically a mythology that would essentially just refresh itself. Wait, so there's two prequels, right, that were essentially written alongside Fury Road, right? And one explains... One is Furioso, this film. Well, wait, this...

And one explains Max's journey to Fury Road, right? This and Fury Road were written, like, completely simultaneously. I'm saying, but there's a third one, right? Right. But that was written later? So what happened is, you know, they wrote Fury Road via storyboards in the late 90s, early aughts, and they tried to make it with Mel Gibson in 2002. And when that fell apart, you know, a lot of normal people would have moved on, but

George Miller is not normal. And he said, I will still make this, but in the intervening years, why don't we drill down on all these characters and elements and, you know, sort of deepen them and see what we can come up with. Right. It was Sigourney Weaver was sort of the concept for Furiosa, right? In that 2000s, you know, Mel Gibson project. In some ways, I mean, they were looking at Uma Thurman, Monica Colucci, people like that.

But yeah, so him and Nico Luthuras, his co-writer, they wrote this Furiosa backstory as a screenplay, and they wrote a novella about what Max is up to in the year before Fury Road, which is the thing that they've been teasing on this press tour that if they would return to it, they would make. So they have no notion for what's after Mad Max Fury Road. No, I don't think they're even thinking about after, which is wild, but there's, there's, there's seeds of what that Max story would be in Fury Road.

Like keep seeing these visions that Max has of this child who's sort of speaking to him. That's a child that he tries to save in his, you know, in his backstory movie. Right. That sort of thing. So I said this, I think, when we did our Fury Road episode. I have no memory of that episode.

I don't either. Yeah, not saying it negatively. I just don't either. Not saying it negatively. That has always been my understanding. Fury Road was the big thing. In the 20 year journey plus to get Fury Road off the ground while this thing was on the burner. He kept on being like, well let's flesh out this other stuff. To the point where when Fury Road was close to happening, Furiosa existed as like a fully thought out movie. It started as sort of like, let's dig into what we need to know about this character

for ourselves. And then becomes like a thing that's ready to go. I was doing the oft referenced wildly successful movie, but where are the gonzo? The nightmare teen comedy in which I played horny Rob. You played horny Rob Becker, but Zoe Kravitz is in that film. Played Eazy E, I want to say. E.B. Wallace is how she's credited, but maybe Eazy E. Yeah. And she, in the middle of filming,

took a meeting with him. With George Miller. Yes. This is five years, I think, before the film actually starts filming, possibly. Well, so where The Gonzo came out in 2010, did you maybe shoot it in 2009? We shot it in 2009, so it's at least three years

before it starts filming, six years before the movie comes out. Sure. And she was saying- I think they were location scouting for a version of that movie that didn't happen yet. Well, and it got pushed for years. Yes, that's the thing.

She ends up off of this meeting getting the role and then within the movie waits two years for, because of weather. Toast the knowing. Right. But I remember her and I being in a waiting room together, uh, while other people were filming and her telling me about the meeting, me losing my fucking mind and her being like, he doesn't have a script, he has like 800 pages of storyboards and it's two movies.

And I was like, he's going to shoot both of them? And she was like, it's really unclear. There's this feeling of like, is he going to shoot one before the other? Is he going to shoot them simultaneously? Is he going to shoot one and hope that they've given them money for two? There was this sense, at least in how she was explaining it to me, and you obviously talked to a billion people around this, of like a bit of a coin toss, even though the thing started with Fury Road, about how do we make this? The thing that was sort of surprising was that once Fury Road happened,

he decided to double back to Furiosa. Yeah, for a little while, there was also a plan to do Furiosa as an anime. And they got pretty far down that track. You know, it had a director, Mihiro Maeda, and they, as George was getting sort of waylaid with Fury Road, the anime crew was making significant progress to the point where it just got too far down the road without George's overseeing.

And he was like, I can't have this come out years before Fury Road. This is when he's in like Happy Feetland. Yeah, that's when he's mired in Happy Feetland. Yeah, he's tapping away. He's with the prawns. He's with the prawns. Wait, what are they?

Shrimp, what are they? They're krill. Krill, of course, they're gate krill. Will and Bril krill, maybe? I don't remember. Will and Bill. Have you seen Happy Feet too? Yes, I have It's key queer cinema, which again was a movie that he originally planned to shoot alongside

Fury Road George loves it for a first time for as not prolific as he is He always wants to be making two movies at the same time his dream Which is crazy since each one of these movies is so all-encompassing that you wouldn't have time to do anything. Well, like Spielberg does that. But even Spielberg is like when, you know, that was crazy. It's not like Spielberg's like, I had a really easy time doing those movies back to back

or next to each other or whatever. Spielberg can shoot a movie really fast too. Right. And not go months over. Right. He comes in under. No offense to George Miller. Right.

No, not at all. I mean, that's built in. You've got to expect that from George Miller. But right. Exactly. Spielberg has this well-earned at this point reputation for being the guy who just walks in the room and knows how everything's supposed to look and where the cameras should go. And Miller, you know better than I, has this reputation for like, wait, what if we did this? And they're like, well, that would be an enormous, enormous

scale engineering project. And he's like, yeah, but what if we did that? And then you have to do it right. Like in the middle of a planned production. And then Tom Hardy is like, I don't want to come out of my trailer. Well, that at least they didn't have to deal with that this time, because that was a large part of why a Fury Road went on for as long as it did. Right. So you, okay. So Kyle, you saw Mad Max Fury Road in 2015, like the rest of us, and you probably thought it was pretty cool. Yeah, I did. Yeah. I saw it at a press screening in Century City and it totally blew my mind, like literally felt my jaw dropping was like cooting and hollering at the things I saw.

And actually the the Q&A afterwards was moderated by Edgar Wright, who recommended Anya Taylor Joy for Furious. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting, right? Because he worked with her on Soho. Yeah. OK. But then, yeah.

So when did it come together for you to write this gigantic oral history? Did you write the Times article first and that was sort of your proof of concept? Or did you- Yeah, I fell ass backward into it. Hell yeah. Yeah, it was, I wrote the oral history of Fury Road for the Times in,

I started working on it in April, 2020, April. When did the pandemic happen? 2020. This article published May 2020. Right. Yeah. Wow. My brain is scrambled. I just got back from two weeks abroad. But yeah, so in April 2020, when, you know, the movie release calendar just fell apart. Right. It was like, what the fuck do we do?

My job is covering new movies. So I thought, well, what am I going to write about? I still have to make a living. And I knew that it was about to be at that point, the five year anniversary of Fury Road coming out. And I had interviewed a lot of them when it did come out and they'd all sort of alluded to, you know, the contentious making of it. But there's so much that they couldn't really say at that time.

And I had heard stories over the years And I'd interviewed Charlize a bunch For other movies and we had a good sort of interviewer interviewee relationship So I just thought well, why don't I try to pull together a little oral history here? And of course also I was obsessed with the movie watched a million times It also feels like I mean and now maybe it's it's less bizarre But like in a lot of cases you'd be like, five year, that's a little premature.

Right, right. And I get that and also was facing that. Like people said that when it came out, like five years, be real. But it proved to be exactly the sweet spot for... Yes. Everyone still remembers. Yes. Right.

Yes. For these stories to feel still very vivid, but enough time had passed that people felt like they could speak freely. So I recommend it. Five years is just enough time to really get people to open up. I think you nailed it and it speaks to how quickly the reputation of this movie was completely solidified.

That by the time the book comes out, no one's questioning it. No one's like, this is staring back too recently. was also it is one of those movies that when you watch it You immediately have so many questions for how on earth was it made and what on earth is going on beneath the surface of it? As a story because I remember the first time I saw Mad Max Fury Road Which was with you Griffin Newman and it is famously where where you pitched me the idea of calling this show Blank Check. We were already doing the show. We were doing the Star Wars version of the podcast.

I show up to the screening covered in hives. I said, I don't know what's wrong with me and my body won't stop itching, but I think I finally cracked what the podcast is. Because obviously this movie, Fury Road, was this example of like, oh, like, here is a director weirdly getting a blank check. I pitched it before we saw the movie and then walking out.

We had some idea. Oh, totally. And then walking out, it's like, he fucking nailed it. Right. This is what the podcast is like, what if they pull it off? But the first time you see this movie, it throws so much at you with no explanation, which I love. And we I'm sure talk about that on our Fury Road episode, right?

They don't, they're not like, there's not some some dialogue of like well, we all know this about war boys It is the magic of this movie where the first time I watched it I was like, I probably understand 10% of what he's trying to convey. I probably understand 10% of what they're saying Yeah, like but like you can follow it on an action level on like just immediate objective And then every time I watch it after that I'm like I got another 20% of it, you know, and I keep thinking like oh now I'm at a hundred percent and then I'll watch it Again and be like there was another 20% I didn't realize Was there so what was it like right Kyle? That was right my question like talk now you're sitting down with everyone

You're talking about it What are you gleaning beyond that? It was insane to make and that tom hardy doesn't like to sit in his trailer sometimes sure sure Yeah, I mean like yes, you glean all the juicy stuff about the making of the movie and it is Juicy in the sense that you know, I think this has got to be one of the craziest movie productions there ever was But then also you really do get to know what's beneath the surface of literally everything. What's beneath the surface of every prop, the guiding philosophy that animates, you know, even the smallest performances, you know. Them putting the war boys through this sort of, these war boy classes that were almost cult-like,

where these characters could take ownership of the, these actors, these stuntmen could take ownership of their characters in a way that was really unusual. I think that's part of the reason that Fury Road felt like there was so much going on in the margins of the film that wasn't being touched on but that you could feel. Because absolutely every element of it was imbued with so much thought and that was helped by the fact that it took so long to make. And that during those hiatuses,

everybody would just continue drilling down on, well, what does this mean? Why are we drawn to this? Like, what are the underpinnings of all of these ideas? And you can feel that in the movie. Now, the exact thing you're saying is what makes the existence of Furiosa, Cole and a Mad Max saga very weird, right?

Because the cornerstone of this franchise, the movies really are all standalone. And he basically abhors explaining anything in any sort of literal expository way. You know, he is one of the most hyper visual filmmakers. It's not just because he creates amazing visuals. But Sean Fantasy on Big Picture last week, basically said George Miller basically makes the world's loudest silent films. Like that is what he does. He loves being able to convey things, whether it's like deep lore, or just the immediate stakes of a beat through visuals. So to like stop and slow down and basically being like, I'm going to do a U-turn and explain

this shit in a whole movie is bizarre for him. It's like out of character. And I also think there is a very clear analog to like Star Wars, the original Star Wars, where George Lucas writes this movie that's like supposed to be three acts chronicling three generations of the Skywalker family, and everyone's like middle act. The middle act, the Luke thing, that's a fucking movie that people can lock into, throw out this other shit, and he makes the first Star Wars with all the shit in his head that he developed. That he's able to sort of allude to that gives it this weight of like, holy shit, what is this unexplored history that he clearly has answers for that he's not telling me?

In most cases, the kind of thing you're talking about leads to like calamitous movies that are totally incoherent. I'm not saying it's at this level, but did you see Megalopolis again? Yes I did. So I feel like the response to Megalopolis is the kind of response, I would almost say it's the best case response to a movie like Fury Road, where some people are defending it, but everyone's basically like, look, this guy spent so many decades in his head just obsessing over this thing that like, he might have lost sight, he might have lost perspective.

Some of this is just kind of like, imperceptible. Yes, I would agree with that interpretation. I do think that... So excited. I would say that a distinct difference, having watched obviously Fury Road, but also Megalopolis, is that in the intervening years of, you know, however long it took to make Fury Road, Miller kept drilling down on, like, why did he want to make it?

What is he responding to? Let's make sure that he knows every element of this world. There's something that remained very disciplined and focused in his obsession over this movie. You do get the sense watching Megalopolis that Coppola was drawn to this idea, but then upon getting to set, did not know why or how these scenes should work

or what the animating ideas underpinning this whole thing are. So everyone is just flailing around. I also think Coppola for decades, it's not like just right now, has been interested in like, how can I flout and mess with the rules of cinema storytelling? Right. And has come at that in different ways. But even Dracula, like even movies of his that were commercial, those movies are doing things that you're like, well, this is, you know, this is not really done. But it is interesting. And it sounds like Meg, this is, you know, this is not really done.

But it is interesting to me. And it sounds like Megalopolis is doing many things that are not really done. How many people walked into Megalopolis seemingly assuming it was going to be Apocalypse Now level of experimentation, Right. Ignoring the last three movies where it's like, this guy doesn't give a fuck. Yeah. Honestly, I don't think people saw those last three. It's true.

They know. Those movies are our thumps. They don't know that, I mean, think people saw those last He reached an experimental phase that was not entirely successful and this movie is that writ large there were a lot of top-tier critics who gave it favorable reviews and I I Personally feel they're more reviewing the idea of the movie than the reality of the movie. Not to like besmirch anybody's take because movies are subjective. But yes, the idea of the movie, if I described to you things that happen in this movie, you would be like, I've got to see that.

But the reality of watching it with truly dire, stiff dialogue or flop, sweaty improv is a whole other thing. And there's also, Megalopolis is the most, the idea of a movie, movie ever made. Like, just the, everything around it is so, especially right now woven into it. I think you hit on something very important though, which is often these like, when a passion project is decades on the runway, right?

You're like, how do these guys not become Ahab? To quote Kevin Costner, right? How do you not just become so obsessed with the hunt of the whale, the whale becoming an idea that you don't even really know why you got into this in the first place? And I think that then falls apart when you get into the macro level of filmmaking

of actually like cracking each scene on its own, because these guys are coming to set being like, over the last 20 plus years, I have at different points been trying to make eight different versions of this movie. Whether the versions are wildly different from each other, or different only in cast, or time period or technology, how do you adjust that? And then they have a hard time making the movie that's in front of them. And Fury Road is like the ultimate like exception to the rule. And to have it like not only work, but work as commercial cinema, to have it be like Oscar beloved when it's the fourth Mad Max movie, a franchise that was ignored by Oscars. Like

everything about it defies logic. Which then when he announ, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna make the movie of all the work I did basically to make Fury Road work, you're like, to some degree he's doing the Cimmerillian? Like, isn't the major accomplishment of Fury Road that everything you did in figuring out who Furiosa was somehow seeps into the DNA of this movie and gives it weight and power? Do we really need it explained? That has been my attitude to this movie incoming for years. But then the second feeling I had that trumped that was like, this guy just painted the Sistine Chapel. Yes. Did you hear they're giving him a new church? Right. I not really I don't care what his angle is on how he's gonna paint

this one. I want to see how he paints the new church ceiling. I agree. And also he's a guy who's made this is not a sequel to prequel but you know who has made follow up films. Yes. That are always interesting. Now here's a weird thread. The three times let's ignore the Mad Max franchise because as we said those films are largely standalone, right? But let's go happy feet to babe pig in the city Furiosa all three the first one beloved by Oscars big hit Critically beloved right second movie people are like, I don't know. I don't know right Furiosa is having the most positive response of those three But it is still funny that all three times he has tried

to make a more direct sequel. People have been like, oh geez, wait. Each time he makes it darker and weirder. Darker and weirder and shaggier. And more alienating. And also in all three cases, they become like weird fables about the nature of storytelling. A little bit of that.

That are like far more heightened. Yes. I also think Fury Road is the most primordially satisfying film. Obviously, it's pedal to the metal. It's been discussed to death. It's you jump right into it. They're driving. It's the craziest thing you've ever seen. The ending. you're like, I hope they kill a Morton Joe They rip his face off and he dies and even they're like, yes, he's dead Trailer comes out. You're like nothing. I've ever seen before right? I cannot imagine this we're recording this in the immediate wake of Furious is surprising under performance at the box office, right? One of those surprising where you're like, wait, should I be surprised? But right

There whatever we can talk about I think for months everyone's attitude was like everyone loves Fury Road Aren't they gonna fucking line up for this and there was you in retrospect you go like from the moment the first trailer came Out people being like why does it look weird? What is this story do I care about this versus Fury Road? I think I walked out of I saw a second time last night and there was a guy walking out of the theater who was like, I was a little lost because I like haven't seen the first one. And he kept on talking about the first one. Right. And I realized he was referencing Fury Road.

Of course, he doesn't know the other ones. Right. But everyone who walked out of Fury Road, I never once and I saw Fury Road four times at theaters, five? I never once heard someone walking out and going, I was a little lost because I hadn't seen the first three. And I in fact think the majority of people who saw Fury Road in theaters had not seen the first three. Yes, I agree.

I talk to people all the time who love Fury Road who have not watched another Mad Max movie. Yeah, majority of people probably had not seen any Mad Maxes. Maybe a good chunk of people probably seen Mad Max 2, The Road Warrior. Seen one of them on TV. Or Thunderdome, right, maybe. Right, because those were movies,

but they were cult action films, even as they became things. Were you a big Mad Max guy, Kyle? Growing up, I'd seen Thunderdome probably more than any of them because it's kind of the most kid friendly. Oh, exactly. I feel like it was probably on cable and scraps of Road Warrior, which like then as I got older, like I could actually legitimately watch. Yes, I had really just seen them all like once or twice.

Yeah. Anyway. OK, Griffin, shut up for a second because I need to tell you about a special thing that only I know about. Now, you know this. This episode is brought to you by movie a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from around the globe from iconic directors to emerging art versus or something you to discover on movie.

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Bye bye. Furiosa. Kyle, what do you think of Furiosa? We're talking, we're here to talk about Furiosa. This is a complicated question. No, it's a simple question, but maybe a complicated answer because I do think that almost anyone watching Furiosa, there's no way you don't constantly compare every element of it to Fury Road,

which as stated before, a perfect fucking movie. So I think that the first time I saw it, and I should preface this by saying, like literally anytime you have George Miller making a movie, it's worthy. Like there's so many incredible elements in it, like literally anytime you have George Miller making a movie, it's worthy. It's a gift to culture. There's so many incredible elements in it. And there's so much more thought and craft

than, you know, most any other action film. So, this is, like, we're starting there. But I think that the very first time I watched it, I had a more complicated reaction to it than I thought. I didn't have, like, a 100%... You weren't just shooting a gun at me. exhilarated reaction, but also I was comparing it to the high water mark of walking out of Fury Road for the first time and like Griffin said, feeling like I've never seen a movie

like that. You know, this can't hope to give you that feeling because even at its best, it's reminding you of Fury Road. So it's not going to feel like a bolt out of the blue. Then I watched it a second time in Cannes and I do feel like I had a much more favorable reaction then because I could evaluate the movie for what it is rather than the weight of expectations of, you know, and comparisons to Fury Road. But I think it's a fascinating movie, no matter what.

I think it's ungainly, that's not always a debit, but sometimes it is. There's just so much there there, and I'm really excited to honestly even be doing this podcast so I can sort through all my feelings on it. I'm definitely still processing a couple things. I mean, it's like. If this movie exists in any other context,

I walk out of the theater like hooting and hollering and telling everyone I know this is the greatest shit I've ever seen. You got to go see this thing. If this comes out before Fury Road and I'm like, holy shit, George Miller has returned to Mad Max after decades away and you won't believe the way this thing fucking looks. It's sort of amazing to consider that, right? If he was introducing you to like Immortan Joe and all this stuff for the first time.

And then I'm like, and then the next one is gonna be fucking Tom Hardy as Mad Max and Charlize as grown-up. I'm going insane, right? Like imagining the universe in which he makes them at the same time or whatever. If this movie was a totally standalone thing, if this was made by any new filmmaker, I'd just be like losing my fucking mind. And I walk out and I'm like, this thing is somewhere between a 7.5 and an eight.

I like it a tremendous amount. It is stuck under the permanent shadow of Fury Road. I think the single biggest mistake this movie makes is the end credit sequence, showing you the fucking footage from Fury Road, which I'm like ending the film feeling pretty good both times, and then the second you show me Fury Road footage, I'm like,

Fury Road does kind of rip at a whole different level, doesn't it? That is true. Fury Road, the putting of Fury Road in kind of rip at a whole different level, doesn't it? That is true. I... Fury Road... The putting of Fury Road in the credits, I almost wondered if it was a studio note, although Miller does not seem like the one to really leap at studio notes. I have a read on it.

Based on no intel, but what I now haven't watched it twice, imagine this must be what he is trying to do there. Because it feels like such a foolish move Fast-tax a movie I abhor David and I saw together and I was like this is the dumbest way to start a fast and furious movie is showing me footage from fast-five and now this entire film is gonna make me conscious of and Furiosa does the opposite thing in like retrospect. I think it because by design, this movie cannot have a winner catharsis. Right.

And so he's putting that at the end credits to be like, and remind you it does happen, you just are watching it in the wrong order. But that in and of itself is kind of a boondoggle. No, I think it's a mistake. It's bad. But the first time I'm like, why would he ever do this? Sure.

And I do think that has to be the narrative reasoning. Like essentially, when you were describing earlier, well, what would it be like if I just saw this as a standalone film, you know, prior to Fury Road? I do think it would have to be configured differently because there is, to reduce things to like the most base state, there is a win condition that is set up for Furiosa

in this movie, which is escape and return to the green place, which she does not do by the end of the film. So essentially that Coda showing footage from Fury Road is a substitution for like literally the main thing the movie is promising. Now, of course, if you've seen Fury Road, you know she doesn't escape and return to the is promising. Now, of course, if you've seen Fury Road, you know she doesn't escape

and return to the Green Place in this, which may be, you know, something that reduces the imperative to watch this film for some people. You know, the trailer, at least the second trailer, which is trying to sell an idea of Furiosa's quest is selling the idea of like, I want to get away, I want to get to the green place,

give me back the things you stole, but we know she doesn't get those. So that is tricky for, you know, the average moviegoer who's like, well, but I need a quest I can believe in that I feel like can be seen to fruition. Obviously you get that from Fury Road, but you do not get it within the framework of Furiosa, Mad Max Saga. But like you say in Fury Road, you're getting emotional catharsis. And of course they do rip and morten dress face off

with rocks. But obviously, right. She does not find the green place really, it is gone. Right. You know, there's tragedy to that. Like she, and we're watching Furiosa. If you're a Fury Roadhead, you're like, this sucks. I know she'll never get back here. But on the other hand, I think the end

of Fury Road is so emotionally resonant and of course, authority. She's figured out, you know, yes. But also, Furiosa is about like revenge is a bottomless pit that will never satisfy you. Which is totally interesting to me. a movie's theme and ending.

It's just not as triumphant, but I can go watch Fury Road if I need more straightforward triumphantness. That ending is incredible before it gets to the fucking Fury Road supercut. But I did in real time while watching it go like, this is kind of doing the same fucking Matrix Resurrections thing that pissed people off. It is sort of like interrogating to some degree because Mad Max, the first one comes out of

George Miller just being like, can I build like a revenge-o-matic cranked up to the nth degree? And part of the whole fascinating DNA of Mad Max is like the sort of post-apocalyptic stuff, which is only at the very corners of a society that's beginning to collapse in the first Mad Max, it is not at the forefront, comes out of him being like, I can't afford to build a movie with a real world, with a real sense of scope or scale, but I can make the movie in a sort of tilted sideways world. I can make the barrenness of it part of the point,

all that sort of shit. And then Road Warrior, he obviously like synthesizes it to the perfect degree that he just then grows on and grows on and grows on. But the core of it was always like, a guy who experiences a tragedy so severe that the quest for revenge drives him mad. He is the titular Mad Max because this horrible, unbelievable thing happened to him.

And all the other Mad Max movies are about Max trying to help someone, save someone, right? It's always these sort of acquired, sort of like surrogate families that he's trying to surrogate families that he's trying to get vengeance for, protect, in some way to like overcome the cloud of his lost wife and child. And then this is the first Mad Max movie to be like, it's meaningless. It's meaningless. And of course it's meaningless because Max went through four fucking movies never getting resolution. You could argue that Fury Road does resolve the Max Arc

in a certain way because he walks away and is like, I did good, I helped someone else. I may be never gonna solve myself. And this is what this movie is about. Similarly, that Furiosa ultimately realizes like, I am so past the point of being broken when she's yelling at Dementis, like give give it back in sort of denial of like, what are you talking about?

Give what back? Exactly. Right. Your childhood? Your happiness? All of this is gone. You've turned into like a creature of the wasteland. There's no coming back.

And that leads to the connection, like the pivot point of I need to save the breeders, which then gives us the catharsis of the movie after this that is a fucking masterpiece. But the movie does end on this note of her being like, revenge just drives you insane. You'll never get what you actually want. The moment you're seeking it, you've already lost the thing. And everything he sort of says about,

like you become a creature driven by hate. This is Furiosa still at a point in her life where she can pivot and go like, I will not allow myself to go full Dementus, even if part of me is lost beyond recovery. I need to do something productive for other people. I do think that that sequence with her and Dementus at the end is great.

And I should note also that scene that they have together is what people auditioned with for Fury Road. Because since Fury Road doesn't really have a big dialogue. Right, it doesn't have like a lot of Furiosa. Yes, so they would come in once they had, you know, made it through the initial auditions, they would come in and do that. So Tom Hardy read that with Kat Dennings. Wild. Zoe Kravitz read that with Jeremy Renner. And also, they were just, they were described in the audition as S and D.

So, it's not even that Tom was auditioning as Furiosa or Dementis. I mean, it could have been either one. There was no sort of, you know, gender binary to it. So it's possible that that Zoe Kravitz played Dementis opposite, you know, Renner as Furiosa. They just were auditioning as F&D. So yeah, it's crazy. I would love to see that footage. This movie is so much talkier than any Mad Max movie. It's got the talkiest character in any Mad Max movie. That's the thing. Dementus is so talky.

Dementus alone maybe has more dialogue than any other Mad Max movie in totality. Yes, very possible. He's a very Shakespearean character. I liked that though, and he's- I do too. And that gave him a different flavor while still also very much feeling of this world.

But the Matrix resurrections of it all is that same sense of self-reflexiveness that I think some people viewed as like cynicism, but like is a bit of self interrogation of like, is the entire sort of effort of these movies foolhardy and it's very inception, and its core idea of vengeance being a thing that can drive you to any sense of accomplishment or catharsis or wholeness that I you know you can't say that

that's what stopped people from going opening weekend because the trailer is not forecasting that I think what stopped people from going up we can might be more of just sort of like prequel light as shit I think it's if we can if you we want to do this now it is sort of hanging over this movie in a way that's annoying and probably won't linger too long. I mean, a movie does badly at the box office and like Richard Rushfield just has to write a column that's basically like, is this it? Should we, should we lock it all up? Right. Like, oh shit. You know, and it's sort of like, you know, guys, let's all hold hands. The strike happened. We know there's very little like big stuff in 2020.

You know, it's sort of like every week we kind of have to be like, guys. I also think Dune, Kong, Godzilla. Yeah, things were over. Planet of the Apes all overperformed. If those three movies didn't exist and it was like everything's failing. Right. I believe it a little more. There is a little bit. I think it's more of a case by case, like,

I don't think we have to do a thorough interrogation into why If bombed. Maybe because it looks like dog shit. If didn't even bomb. If did fine. Furiosa? Bombed. If. It bombed. Furiosa's performance is odd. But an underrated thing that I literally don't see anyone talking about this is that on box office tracking for the last two months, the

awareness was painfully low, painfully low compared to things like even fucking if. Like I was looking at the numbers for awareness thinking, what the fuck's going on? People don't even know that this movie is coming on and thinking, well, maybe they're just doing a late launch. And I feel like it all just came on way too late. They were not hitting female audiences where they live. So there was very little awareness from women. Like truly down to the end. I don't think there was a sense of it's coming out this weekend.

I think their marketing was cocky. Like their marketing, their whole promotion for this movie. It was kind of just like more Fury Road. What a glorious day. It just had the attitude of like you fucking aren't you thrilled that we're giving you more Fury Road. You'll come to us. We don't need to sell this to you. Doesn't everyone love this movie? Didn't Kyle Buchanan write an entire book about this? Like it had that energy. But I do think there's a few things. One, I do think as I said to you, Griff, we were talking about this.

Like it does feel like movies that are more marketed to grownups are rated kind of movies. This is an R rated movies have more of a ceiling right now. Young people didn't really show up to this movie, partly, probably because they just didn't want to partly. I do get the vibe ambiently of just kind of like, ah, that trailer look corny. Like, what, what is that? You know, like kind of just a disinterest. This movie kind of never beat the first trailer. The CGI looks bad. Yeah. I heard a lot of the CGI looks bad. There are people who are weird cops about CGI. I guess that's always been true, but it feels even more true now of like, right. I clocked in the C the CGI looking bad in the trailer. So now this is a movie I don't want to go to the mat for. I don't really, we're talking about people in this vague way. Statistically young people did not come is a movie. I don't want to go to the mat for I don't really we're talking about people in this vague way

Statistically young people did not come to the movie right like but no one came to this movie Australians didn't come to this movie Show up Australians, so do you have to imagine they thought to like we're putting anya tyler joy in this thing It's gonna go up with younger kids sure,, but she's no Timothy Shalimar. Well, that's the thing. I mean, no offense to Anya's Hillard drug. Anya's terrific, and there's very few people that you could cast. I mean, the only other one that I heard that they were legitimately thinking about was Jodie Comer.

Who's similarly kind of hot right now. Is giving a better thing for this movie, though Jodie is great. But it is the tricky thing where, you know, Charlize made that role as iconic as it is, and then she's not a part of it anymore. Right. So if you loved that character, maybe what you really loved is the performance.

And it just, I don't know. That is always the tricky part with a prequel That's always the tricky part with the recasting I don't doubt that you know to continue talking about fast and furious that after Vin finally hangs it up That they will try to do some sort of like young Dom or something like that Refashioning of this series. I'm sure they're rubbing their hands, they thinking they we can't wait to do something like that. I hope I am not betraying anything by saying this.

Oh, please. But, you know, in F9, they have the whole young the flashback where I like valued the fact that they weren't doing fucking de-aging and they hired an actor and he doesn't look or sound like Vin because no one does. But they're just like, this is young Dom. Right. And I heard on very good authority that the full intention was to do Young Dom sort of side series for Peacock and it got killed by the top people involved in the Has Some Furious franchise. Who thinks that's a good idea? The idea, and Dune is doing it now too,

this is the problem when things are owned by gigantic conglomerates who are like, well, we want to fashion this world out with streaming and stuff. That never goes well. That takes away from the specialness of seeing it on the big screen. Like fucking backstory, limited series, absolutely not. Then this is what everyone is saying about a movie like Furiosa, right? Not every, but like lots of casual fans are like, what? I don't care where Furiosa came from.

That's not enough for me to really get interested. I think that is the single biggest issue this movie is coming up against. But I think the other issue is that Mad Max as a franchise is a marginal franchise to begin with. It is. Fury Road did okay. In people doing, yes, the autopsy of this movie's box office failure, they're like, well, if you look at it, Fury Road bombed.

And it's like, Fury Road didn't bomb. Fury Road was not wildly profitable, which is a different equation. And it was successful, but it wasn't like billion dollar successful, which tends to be our benchmark. This thing seems like it's going to do half of that, but I do think there is that problem of do we care where Furiosa came from? I go to, if George Miller wants to make a movie, I want to see it. That's the thing. That's the difference.

Whereas like if Comcast is like what you want is the backstory to Dom Terretta, I'm like, no I don't. Shut up. But, right, if George Miller wants to make a movie, I'm interested. And he made this movie, and I think it's very good. I agree. Because he tends to make pretty good movies. He's good at making films.

Right, the movies he makes that I am less fond of are incredibly interesting and thoughtful. He doesn't toss off movies. No. And the thing that's frustrating is the reason I do at large agree with people with the sentiment of do I really care? I don't think I really care about where Furiosa came from is because of how holistically he builds that character in Fury Road, where I am able to infer a lot of backstory. Let's talk about this though.

Yes. Because the backstory. And some of it was different than what I thought. But watching Fury Road, I was like, well, the beauty of this movie is I think I get her whole life. But you know, Griffin, some of it is different than you thought because they changed it. Interesting.

So what did they change? The version that Charlize read is different than what we see on screen. And what Charlize is bringing and what you're intuiting from her performance is not what they ended up doing in this. And I would say the biggest change, and maybe it's it's one that like, you know, you could guess, is that the original conception for this is that Furiosa did become one of the wives. That was my assumption.

She doesn't escape right away, she becomes one of the wives, she is cast out eventually when she's infertile, and then she builds her way back into the society for revenge, disguising herself as a war boy. That is what Charlize played. That's why at the end of Fury Road when she's confronted with Immortan Joe and she says remember me It's a little bit of an interesting line because you're like, well, why wouldn't he remember her? He knows who she is This is Furiosa his, you know trusted lieutenant But what she's saying is I had a past life. I was that young girl who you raped as a sex slave

That was always how I read it. Now, you can understand why when it came time, you know, in the 2020s to actually make this movie that many people would have had second thoughts about a protagonist that is basically sold into sex slavery and for years has to endure this. That's a no-fly zone for so many people. Even if you don't show it, it's like, does that just cast a pallor over the movie that stops you from being able to have fun during a war rig heist? Right. And just makes it kind of, you're just buried in this like awful,

awful, awful trauma that's just very, very hard to wrap your brain around. Right. So I get it and I understand why they would change it, but it does scramble, I think, the connection between Furiosa and Immortan Joe and the need for revenge. The reason she'd even say, remember me. Right. It scrambles a couple of things. They're not as strong and clearly defined just as a result of that. Right. It scrambles a couple things. They're not as strong and clearly defined. Just as a result of that.

Right. There's still enough in Furiosa where she sort of changes personality. The line makes, has logic to it still. Yes. If that makes it, because yes, he was, she was sold to him as basically like a little princess. Right. She avoided that fate, but she was basically consigned to it. But it doesn't have the weight. Yeah. You know, it's more like, hey, remember me? And he's like, what? What's the deal with you?

Well, and I think that also presents some tricky new problems, which is, you know, if a young half-life girl goes missing and then is interacting with all these people a couple years later and is still a young full life girl, you know, one who is untinged by all these mutant monstrosities. And then they come upon one a couple years later and the timeline checks out and she's still interacting with Immortan Joe and Dementus, who would not think it was this girl who escaped. You would know immediately it was this girl who escaped. But this is classic like fucking Lucas prequel problems where like those three movies butt up against this shit all the time where you're like, wait, that I always assumed that was 20 years apart. You're telling me it was six months apart.

Then why wouldn't this person remember that this happened? Star Wars, of course, is the thing that shrinks you bring the most. At least in Fury Road, you're like, well, everyone is radioactive and insane. Right. So I can, I can, you know, and Morton Joe doesn't feel like the greatest man manager out there. Right. Like, I mean, he's a little more together than Dementus, I suppose. But at the end of the day, war boys are war boys. You know, they're kind of this just group to him. Right.

He's not thinking too hard about these people. And George Miller is a lot less prescriptive about this shit than Lucas was in terms of like, filling in the gaps and explaining the pieces to you. But this movie does, by the nature of what it's intending to do, have to be more explainy. Which I wouldn't say is like to its detriment, but every time you're just sort of like, I don't know if this is what I bought the ticket for. I'll take this. I don't resent it.

Everything you just said makes a ton of sense, Kyle. I was very surprised when she just completely eluded being a bride. It makes sense, but it does, like, it changes the narrative to basically this act of transference of she takes her own personal trauma and applies it to the wives in Fury Road and gives them the catharsis that she didn't get to have.

Yes, if she cannot rescue her own existence or experience, you know, childhood, at least she can maybe save their lives and change their experiences. Which is impactful and I do like I'm curious to re-watch Fury Road and see if any of it lands different for me on an emotional level with that character. Because that, I mean, in a way- I don't think it'll make any difference for me. No.

I enjoy this movie a lot. It's not like I watched this movie and I was like, now I like Fury Road even more. I don't think I could like Fury Road more. This is true. I'm kind of maxed out on liking that movie in a good way. Like it's just like... I always find New Heights, New Zealand. That's true.

Every time. But it's like you just watch that movie and you have, you know, like, but I liked watching this movie as a George Miller action movie. My plans changed, but I briefly thought I was going to be able to engage in the interesting experiment of going to see this movie with my sister who has never seen Fury Road and never seen any of the movies. And I was like, I would like to watch this next to someone who is just watching this as its own object. And even then telling them to watch Fury Road and seeing how it plays in that order. Whereas we have always contended that the Star Wars prequels

would make the original trilogy worse if you're watching them in George's numerical order. Sure. This might make Fury Road better. I don't know, but I agree with you. I'm just like, how could anything make Fury Road better rather than watching Fury Road? I'm just always gonna be pretty definitive.

Like you should watch the movie that came out first first. Yeah. And you should meet Charlie Steren's Furiosa first. As good, I think Andi Taylor-J Like you should watch the movie that came out first, first. Yeah. And you should meet Charlie's there in Sferiosa first. As good, I think on these other joys good in the movie. I'm just, but you know what I mean? Like before we dig into the plot, I just, cause you threw this out, Kyle, is there any other example of a franchise recasting like an iconic, beloved performance like that in anything but like absolute back up against the wall,

this person's gotten too old, they've done it six times, the person died. Like I cannot think of another case where they're like, we're doing Aliens and this time it's gonna start Deborah Wicker. Yeah, it's usually because the person's gotten too expensive or something, so they're like, let's pivot. Or it's like Michael Gambon, it's like, let's pivot. Or it's like Michael Gambon.

It's like, well, the guy died. Right. Here's Michael Gambon. You can't be mad at us. Right. You know, run dry. We need something to like put some lifeblood into this. Let's do a dumb and dumber prequel.

Right. And it's like, no people wanted to see Jim Carrey in that. Mel, Mel Gibson too anti-Semitic. It's going to be dumb. The thing with Gibson was he was also too old. Like even in a world where Gibson is just chill and normal, just the most chill normal bro in the world, by 2015 he would have been too old

to be in that movie, right? Yeah. Well, I do think a lot of it was conceived knowing that because the weight of it was, you know, that in the intervening years, he would have gone like completely bug nuts, Max, but then also Mel Gibson. And so Fury Road would have been about this,

really crazy battle scarred guy kind of working his way back to being a functioning human again over the course of the film. So they could have made that work, except that like, all the real world stuff happened with Mel and then that Mel himself was like, I'm too old to do all these stunts and be out in the desert.

So that was an issue for him, even though I do think that you can kind of see the version of Fury Road that feels designed for an older, crazier Max. So here's the last question I wanna just like, map over before we dig into the plot of this film, as we dig into the plot of this film. Watching it the second time, the thought that hit me, because I don't think there's another example of like the

public being like, yes we want to see more of X in the role of Y and the franchise pivoting away from it when the public is ready to buy. Does this movie work better? I guess, does it hit harder at the box office if it is more of a Godfather Part II where it's half Anya Taylor Joy prequel and half Charlize Theron post Fury Road? I think what you mean is, would it be better as a Mamma Mia Here We Go Again situation? Thank you. And my personal feeling is everything it be better as a Mamma Mia, here we go again situation. Thank you. And my personal feeling is everything will be better

as a Mamma Mia, here we go again situation. I like all the Furiosa prequel stuff and I understand why he wrote it. But also, yes, I do think that if you were like, here's Charlize continuing from Fury Road, that it might be, there might at least feel like you're giving a narrative that would entice a movie goer. Like what, what happens to her next? I want to know.

That's the thing. If, if literally your second trailer, your big trailer is selling, she wants to escape, you're like, oh, spoiler alert. I don't think that's going to happen for you. This movie has the prequel narrative dead end problem, which is just like, we're moving towards a fixed point we all know, it is the start of this movie. This film takes us up to like three seconds

before Fury Road starts basically. But by doing, a lot of people immediately after seeing the movie were like, I don't understand the timing of this, and I'm like, a tree grows. So you just have to think of that as the big time jump here. Because they're like, how could this possibly lead to Fury Road?

And I'm like, it doesn't. He's just skipping the filler stuff of her learning to be Furiosa. There's like a 15 to 20 year jump, but then the final shot of the movie is Charlie's footage that takes you to that very point. I said no. Okay. I mean, certainly all the stuff that is legitimately pulled from Fury Road is and there is a lot of deep faking Going on with certain characters, but to my knowledge

Charlize did not sort of allow them or license, you know her image to be used and There certainly there are moments at that in that coda where you're like, oh my god Is that Zoe Kravitz and is that Riley Keough? But everyone is kind of in shadow. I think there was enough plausible deniability to how they did it. And Anya is doing Charlize's voice, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's a pretty close match.

So, you know, you would be forgiven for thinking that is Charlize again, but you know, she did not show up on set and shoot that stuff, so. I just only noticed the height change in the final bit I just when they're going into the ring pinch and zoom that's what it is ah David yes ants ants aunts aunts aunts aunts aunts uh I hate getting cornered by him we all do I knew that was gonna be a relatable conversation starter Why aren't you getting married? What's going on with that promotion? Why haven't you moved out of mom and dad's basement Griffin?

Oh those were directed at me. I don't know I feel attacked Get out of the basement Griffin Listen she just judges judges judges you're getting together with your family. You might have to be in a barrage with these kinds of questions. Stay in there and grin and bear it. I don't want you feeling that way when you talk to your doctor about like a weird rash or that you eat pizza and went too many times a week or something else. Unfortunately. We have read for filth by this head copy right now.

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ulti Murray twice okay so this movie opens it has five chapters the first chapter is called the Pole of Inaccessibility. I completely forgot about the chapter titles. Let me see if I can find them. Oh yeah, I have them. I love chapter titles. The Pole of Inaccessibility. I'm all for a director's vision and pushing it. I love it. I love that he said, screw you casual audience. Yes.

This is a chapter movie and the first one is called the poll of accessibility. That is, that is the poll of inaccessibility for a mainstream moviegoer. It is already too highfalutin. He's calling it. This is the most overused term that any critic uses when a movie is kind of long and episodic, but it's very Dickensian. This film is, has this kind of picaresque structure. She's moving through Worlds within this large world, right? It's like it's it's very you know a young woman's ascension through the wasteland, right?

She starts out in the green place. Then she's a princess. Then she's a warboy. Then she's a you know Imperator whatever the fuck. Bilga's review is incredibly good for this film And and he made the argument that like that is the key to understanding These shift in visuals in this movie because for how much people want to stew on like why does it look fake? I'm like first of all this fucking Mad Max movie none of these things look real He's dealing in like degrees of heightened reality But I do think and this is Bilga's cont, that like he's going for more of a storybook vibe in this film. Sure. Narratively, he is giving you that.

And and the look of it, certainly even this opening section where we see the green place, it feels very like a fable-y. Alice in Wasteland. Yes. Right, because it's sort of her imagination. And it is this, well, in Fury Road, we sort of assume must be the sort of fake idea, right?

There's an actual kind of verdant paradise within the radioactive wasteland after the globe. We have the classic Mad Max opening of like, we're hearing weird broadcasts, news clips, right, of the world kind of coming to an end. opening of like, we're hearing weird broadcasts, news clips, right? Of the world kind of coming to an end. And this movie we should say starts with the storyteller, which is big. Cause basically every Mad Max movie, post Mad Max is being told by a different person.

It's part of the lack of coherent lore in these movies that every film is basically a like folk tale being recounted by someone. The history man, George Shvetsov. I don't know who that is, Kyle. I don't know if you know anything about this man. A different guy than they had, well, the Latin history woman, I think. Right.

Also, he was also the old storyteller in 3000 Years of Longing. Right. Yes. He's sort of like a Wikipedia. I like that idea that Dementis is like, I want a guy who's Wikipedia It also is funny that Kingdom of the Plan of the Apes has an almost identical concept I know, William H. Macy playing that role essentially

And it's the same thing of like let me get a really smart guy to explain to me History of- Kind of a court jester vibe. You want someone around who's just gonna like tell you stories But also I want to do a good impression of an old emperor. So tell me how emperors used to work. Oh, I thought you Griffin were going to do an impression. Oh, sure. Yeah. I'm always game.

I can't do the impression as I already said. He's got an incredible look. We got to say that. Yeah. Dementus? No, the history man. He's got tacks tattooed on his face. And all over his clothes.

Sort of a prison break vibe. Oh, huge prison break vibes. Wentworth Miller. Yeah. It's all on his skin. I feel like if you put him in some good kind of hype beast drapey clothing, I could see him in Silver Lake. The whole thing with these movies is you're kind of like,

we're only two steps removed from a rave half an hour from LA History man and some congratulations and he'd fit on that runway perfectly Yeah, this is the green place Let's say it looks fucking great looks nice Furiosa and her sister are picking peaches They run across a couple Raiders. This is a Valkrie, who's the Megan Gale character in Fury Road. I don't know if it's strict sister, but you know, they probably say sister. Bonded in sisterhood. Sure.

And then we are in a fairly intense chase early on, for as much as this movie is more deliberate. It does kind of kick off with some wild stuff. But it, I will say... But it's a kidnapping. I guess. Yeah. The tone of this sequence is so much more sort of like sadder and contemplative than most of the Mad Max action sequences.

Certainly the ones we've gotten used to. Charlie Frazer is her name. Yes, she kicks. Ah, so he's fucking good. Amazing. Now we all know her as the topless woman in anyone but you her only other screen credit insane In anyone but you the normal movie where everyone's normal which was also set in Australia where is she the X of?

One what's her deal? She's Glenn Powell's act. Why is she also in Australia? Why is that movie set in Australia? It's insane. She's Glenn Powell's she is she is Australia I know it's she's Glenn Powell's ex Why is Rachel Karpus not allowed to have an Australian accent? Everything about that movie is insane! I talked about that movie to my therapist for ten minutes because she was like I'm sorry I know this isn't what we're here to talk about but have you seen anyone put you and I was like, yeah I'm so ready to unpack this

It is so bizarre. But like, if you if you said to me like, oh, that the girl who played like the sort of free spirit in Anyone But You is like a badass biker, you know, mom in Furiosa, I would have been like, oh, OK, I don't really see how that's going to work. He is not bad in that movie. But he's fine. He shot this before Anyone But You. I think that makes sense.

This is like literally. Yeah, it was shot like yesterday. Right, right. Anyone but you is still being filmed. She rules. Yes. She rules so hard. Like it's so fitting that she comes from a place called the green place of many mothers.

Cause I said many mothers while watching her do her shit. Like I was mothering. I was like Jennifer Coolidge and White Lotus. I was like mother, mother, mother, mother, mother watching her take apart these motorcycles and all that. She's got that, you know, just, I mean, look, when I talked to George Miller, I interviewed George Miller for this movie. I haven't brought that up yet. All he wanted to talk about was like faces and eyes and silent cinema, all of his fascinations. These are not new fascinations

for him, but I do think he loves to strip out as much as he can from the dialogue, not with Dementis, who has like the specific concept of like the trickster, you know, who monologues, but everyone else. Right. And he, he's like, look, I know this is a cliche, but the eyes are the window to the soul. And she is just feels like someone he probably saw a picture of him was like that woman. She's an Australian model. Right. Like her, her, her like that woman. She's an Australian model. Right. Like in her eyes, there's just so much. And she gets so much out of her. It is such a complicated performance.

She is conveying so much and sort of emotional history, but also doing what we know to be incredibly complicated. George Miller shooting schedule shit where she probably was filming for 35 days and said 25 words, you know? Like all the pieces he has to capture. And it is so funny to view this in relation to anyone but you, where they're like, and your role in this movie is what if a woman had smaller breasts? Like she exists mostly as just a visual joke.

And then in this film, she is able to convey so much with every look. I it's one of those things where you're like, I know she's not going to win. Right. I know Furiosa is going to get kidnapped. Like she, you know, but you're just kind of like, I don't really see how this woman will be defeated. When she just kind of like sternly rides off after Furiosa, after these Raiders starts taking them down with a sniper rifle. I'm just kind of like, she's indestructible. She will triumph. To me, this is the best example in the movie of knowing what will happen, but still feeling incredibly invested.

100%. And even thinking, no, she can get away with it. She can reverse the course of what we think is about to happen because she's that good. and when she does finally get to Furiosa and escape with her, like, I'll be damned if I didn't think she's gonna pull it off. No more movie after this, but you know what? It's great. Furiosa will be safe. But you're getting at the key narrative tension that most prequels fail to identify, which is,

well, if you're moving towards a fixed point where we know where this has to end, what the status quo is gonna be by the end of the movie, introduce elements where we cannot do the math of, how could you possibly get from what I'm seeing in front of me to this point? Yeah. And it's like what David said, because she is so adept.

It made me really realize this first sequence, which I love, I think it's probably the best sequence in the film. Resourcefulness is a really appealing character trait. She has it, Furiosa has it, the way Furiosa bites into that fuel line, loved that. And the way that we're watching her mother constantly upgrade the bike

and try to figure out new ways to get to her mission. God, I mean, like, you know, there's that old studio note of the person, you know, the character has to be sympathetic. The character has to be relatable. The character should be resourceful. If you give me a resourceful character, even if it's a villain, I'm invested. I love watching competent people do things that I would never think of.

It's kind of exciting. It brings you along further into the sequence when you don't know what they're about to do next, but you know they know. Very well said. And I do like that. One of the major sort of themes of this movie is that like Furiosa is a person of many parents. Some of them chosen, some of them like given, some of them forced upon her. But her personality as we meet her in Fury Road develops through her time with all these different people. And it would be, in a lesser filmmaker,

they'd started out with she's just like a happy-go-lucky girl in the fields with a flower, and then she's curdled and made tough. But you were like, no, her mother is responsible for the first 30% of it. Before her life becomes an extended tragedy. Some of this has already been built into her personality.

Yeah, you get the vibe that they have already talked a lot about what to do in this situation, such as her gnawing through the gas line. She doesn't panic at all. She gets kidnapped not because she's escaping these bandits who found their way into the Green Place, but because she goes over to sabotage them, that's kind of bad ass, you know? It gives you an idea of what you're dealing with. So these guys who are, who are silly, right? But like they don't, they're not giving like hardcore assassins. Like they're two weird junkers who got really far away from their

camp, right? In search of something and they actually found something and they managed to get Furiosa to their settlement. I guess the biker horde, it's sort of like a moving settlement, right? Is that the idea? And Dementis is this is the leader, but he's this kind of. It's just so different from Immortan Joe, wisely, obviously, but it's like he's got this kind of like cult mystique about him,

but it's all personality and it's no resources. Well, first of all, like just classic George Miller visual storytelling, the fact that they are a biker gang and not a car gang immediately tells us something about their station relative to every other like bad horde we've met in the Mad Max saga, right? Like for primary antagonists you're like these guys are a level below. I saw this second time last night at the Alamo and they replayed these sort of do not talk turn off your phone message that they had recorded when Fury Road came out that is George Miller and Hugh

Keys barn who has sadly passed away now And I hadn't seen this in years and it was it was sweet to see again and the bit is they're intercutting between Burnt keys burn talking in real time giving giving a very flowery, very florid, very sort of like verbose, uh, monologue about the rules we make in a society and how people treat each other and what we should do upon and others and what have you with the footage of toe cutter from the first movie. And seeing that right before reminded me that like Dementus is closer to Toecutter.

Yeah, because Toecutter is kind of cultish. Toecutter monologues. And he monologues, yeah. And he's got this sort of weird like operatic sort of humor to him. But yes, this guy seems like a fucking goofball. Yeah. He is positioning himself at the beginning, it feels like closer to something like a spiritual leader. When we first meet him

And I saw the fucking movie with Ben We went to see it Thursday night in 40x and I had the joke in my head and I was like I'm gonna be the first to fucking make this joke I'm gonna make it on the episode and I'm gonna win an OB for this And then joke was all a friend of the podcast went on Twitter and beat me to the punch He looks he looks like he looks like guru pick up the love. He looks like the love guru He's got the mustache and the fake nose. But especially in the beginning when we meet him

and he's got the hood up and the white and he's in his sort of like tent. He might as well be playing nine to five on a sitar. And it would be funny and we would laugh. I would still give you at least a cable-ace award. Thank you. I just meet this guy and I'm expecting to hear the ding of him getting an erection under his chastity belt. Because he looks like Guru Pitca. What do you know about Dementus?

Kyle like the the look the approach like with Hemsworth always the guy like probably not I assume No, I don't think that George thought that he would cast someone like Chris Hemsworth but when they first met I think Chris really appealed to his sense of, A, being Australian, and B, like he wanted to do something that would kind of bust him out of this straight jacket of playing a hero. And the nose was a large part of that.

Like he wanted to look unfamiliar to audiences, which also maybe didn't help as far as box office. But you know, that allowed him to give a performance that he wouldn't normally give. The thing about the nose also is that George loves a nose like this. George tried to get Idris Elba to wear this nose for 3,000 years of longing. And Idris was like, I'm good with my nose. Thank you though. The ears are fine.

Let's keep it at that. Yes. So so but that nose did find its way onto a Sultan character in 3000 years of longing, who was played by the guy who plays Immortan Joe on that in this. Lakey Home. Right. That nose is also worn by George Miller himself, who has like a very brief cameo in 3000 years of longing. And you wouldn't know because he's got that fucking nose on. Like, Leiche Home, is it Leiche or Leiki? I always forget how to say this person's name, but I always love to shout out that he was,

he's in the Matrix sequels as Sparks, one of the guys on Naomi's ship, and he was briefly put on a list of guys who are auditioning for Joker in the Dark Knight. And it was with this narrative of like, this might be the dark horse guy who gets the part. He has since said that he never even met with Chris. He's always been like, no, I did not get far at all. And maybe it was just an overeager agent in a different era of the internet somehow convinced

someone. No, no, no, no, no. He's like one of the five, like, but he exists in weird Internet nerd lore as like a name that everyone was obsessed with 20 years ago. I just remember at, you know, in the mid 2000s, you would Google your who like, gee, I'll never heard it. And you'd Google him and you're like, I guess he kind of looks like the Joker. You know, he's got this sweat back hair and he's got now he's 20 years older, obviously.

Well, but who ended up getting that role? He's led sweat-back hair and he's got, now he's 20 years older, obviously. But who ended up getting that role? Heath Ledger, obviously. Who was supposed to play Max in Fury Road? Yes. Fuck. That's crazy. I will also say watching this film a second time. Obviously, Lecce Holm plays Rizdale Pell, right?

This like wacky Lieutenant to Dementis. Uh-huh. Yeah, so he plays two roles within this movie. Right, but then also plays Morton Joe. But like, wasn't Miller initially like, I'm just going to have a stuntman do it. And I'll film him from behind and I won't have him talk really. Right. And Leitchi was like, I can do it. Like, I look like him.

And it's like, also, I think I can do the voice. Right. I can do it. I think I could do a good tribute to. Which he does. He does. Yeah. It's pretty seamless. Well, they were also going to deep fake Hugh's message. Makes perfect sense. On to him. Right.

When he was doing the performance, George thought that it was good enough that they didn't have to mess with it. That's which I think was wise. Yeah. Um, you don't need to be defaking nothing. Watching this again. Yes. The first time I was like, who is, uh, uh, Hemsworth doing aside from obviously

a, a single, right? The answer is a single. I don't think he's ripping him off in any way, but this performance feels very in line with the energy that Heath Ledger was giving us in the last five years of his career. Sure. Where you were like, this guy has just uncorked now and he's completely surrendered his movie star image and he's just experimenting and throwing shit at the wall I do think I agree with you that like the nose is important

psychologically for unleashing this guy for letting Hemsworth like unlock parts of himself because obviously we're like Almost ten years into people being like do you know that Chris Hemsworth is secretly funny, right? We've all been in on this thing, but every other time he's been funny in a movie, it is, isn't it funny that this guy who looks like a pendant... This hottie, right, is behaving this way. And this is the first time he's freed from the way he looks and can just play an entirely different guy. More than that, Griffin, he's never really been allowed

to go full Australian before. And I'm not just talking about the accent, I'm talking about the sensibility. You know, last time I was here, we did Holy Smoke. So we were talking a lot about Australian accents, Australian sensibilities, Australian directors, but there's always this thing of, you'll push further, harder, into a more bizarre place.

They are not afraid to go kind of nuts. You know, certainly our best Australian tours are always pushing. And this is Hemsworth's opportunity to show he can keep up with that, that he's capable of that too. He's talked about in interviews, he desperately wanted to get an audition for Fury Road. It was before Thor where he couldn't get in the room. His father was a stunt driver on one of the early films.

Like he, this is like important cultural heritage to him. He dreamed to be part of this franchise at some point. Chris Hemsworth, he's an actor I've pretty much liked from the like the first time I saw him, which was his first film credit Star Trek, the first film credit he has playing George Kirk in this sort of like powerful opening scene in the movie, then he's dead But I basically just kind of always been like that guy's got a lot of presence, right? He has made so many interesting career decisions Versus the Chris Evans and Chris Prats of the world We've talked about it all flop, but they're all good or well, you know, like like if I just looking at this like rush

Black hat. I mean Ghostbusters sure, you know, like, like if I just look at this like Rush, Black Hat, I mean Ghostbusters, sure, you know, like El Royale, this even like Spider-Head, which he's also villainous in and is like really like going for it. And like, I'm like, I like all of these moves he's made and they rarely are hits. We've talked about it before probably in our Black Hat episode, but he was the only one of the guys after he gets his big Marvel role, who is like, great, I use my cache to get big budget adult grown-up movies made,

and has the run of Rush Black Hat in the heart of the sea that all bomb, and then it feels like he went into like, I need a second franchise cul-de-sac of Men in Black International and Huntsman and like Ghostbusters and all of that, but he's good in everything. He's talented.

I think he's become more interesting as he ages. Absolutely. As a person too. I remember interviewing him for Star Trek and I thought, man, this is one of the most dry toast people I've ever spoken to. Sure, straight across. And he probably had like the Marvel box around him.

But now talking to him for Furiosa he's chatty interesting thoughtful You know I think that he's deepened all of his quotes on this press tour have been like very introspective and interesting Men in Black International is the movie where I feel like he is doing the least and he is being asked Yeah, just do your kind of charming dude thing, please. And it's the worst he can be. It's basically a riff on Ghostbusters where they're like, oh, it's funny when you're kind of dumb and then handsome. Kind of a messy himbo. Yeah.

And it's the worst he can be. Yeah, great. And then this is like, this is right. This is the opposite where it's just like he's completely out of his comfort zone. He unlocks the attic. We're in like a whole different story of the house now. Yeah. I mean, he makes those extraction movies where I'm just like, I know he's in them.

I've seen them. I have no concept of what he even does in those movies. But here's what I like. He's got one fucking streaming thing he does, right? Basically the extraction movies. Sure. He's not a guy who's constantly doing your fucking red notices and red ones and whatever. Yes.

And his Netflix like franchise is also kind of like about its gritty modesty. Not those movies are cheap, but he's not doing the fucking brain. They're stripped down. They're not full of themselves. Right. Can I suggest that the thing that kind of kept Chris from being like a genuine star instead of a guy who's in the movies that you see is that somewhere along the line right after Thor, if this

had been the 90s when they were making every type of movie, he should have been cast in a fucking rom-com. He has an incredibly appealing energy where he could have been the hunky guy in a rom-com and he would have made you fall in love with his actual personality. It's what happened to Hugh Jackman. I don't know that he's always ever gotten to show it. So for as talented as he is and as castable as he is, if you ask me who is Chris Hemsworth, well, if you ask, you know, a normal person and I'm not a normal person,

but if you ask them who Chris Hemsworth is, they'll just say Thor. They're not, they don't know who he is or what he brings to the table. And I think he never really had a role that showed that. I think we're finally starting to get back to this. And Glenn Powell is like the case study of like someone... That's a good example. ...resetting to this model. But the way careers used to develop is it's like,

you make, you go through the checklist when you're on the cusp of movie stardom of like, got to make a movie for each type of audience. You got to flex yourself in a couple different genres. You got to win over kids. You got to win over women genres. You gotta win over kids. You gotta win over women. You gotta win over teenagers. You gotta make an action movie. And then you get to this point where you're like,

you're a five tool player now, you can open anything. And Hemsworth is an example of someone who was just squeezed by this model that wasn't allowing him to flex different genres in a lot of ways. That having been said, it is interesting. I feel like this list would look very different now. That feels like we're on the verge of a new wave

of movie stars finally rising. But there was that fucking public survey two years ago, I think, that was like, who are the top 20 movie stars? And the only guy who was under 40 on the list was Hemsworth. It was like he was the only guy who was under 40 on the list was Hemsworth. It was like he was the only guy who registered in a pretty wide-ranging public survey who wasn't someone who has been famous since the 90s. At the latest.

Was Hemsworth administering the survey? Maybe. I just found it interesting. But Chris's, he was the highest rank. Raising his eyebrow. Yeah. Think of Hugh Jackman, like I said, like emerges as a superhero. Right. And the response from Hollywood in 2000 is like, all right, let's get you in some Rothkommas, baby.

The last guys who got to do everything. Yeah. Like let's get you and Kate and Leopold. Hey, you want to bounce off Ashley Judd for a minute? There's a movie for you, you know, all that. And then, yeah, do your superhero stuff. Sure, sure, sure. But like then you got Hemsworth. We just talked about him and now Glenn Powell, it's kind of like that dude's not doing a Marvel movie. No. Like because now that's... He's turning down Jurassic. Right. Now it's kind of like, eh, you kind of get lost in those things and it takes forever and it clogs up your schedule.

I'm going to do this, that and the other and we'll see if it works and we'll see what the future of Hollywood is. And maybe it's time to just like You know put a big for sale Salome did a version of that like starting to get people doing it the old-school way again and it working I do hope this movie does not seem like it's gonna be a boon at the box office in general That it does open up Hemsworth a little bit right Me too. And he and and you know, obviously we know he's a formidable physical presence, but this movie knows how to use it.

In fact, I think they really delight in like tweaking him. I know that for a long time with Dementus, it was a question of like, well, what is he gonna look like? I think before they'd cast Hemsworth, the idea was that he would be like a beautiful, angelic faced man with like a gaping face wound. I know that's something that they played with at some point.

And even within the movie, like, Dementus goes through like three or four distinct visual phases. Yes, he's got different looks. Filker wrote a good piece as well about tracking the difference in his color palettes across the movie and what it says about him in each stage. It's great, because in a normal movie, in a superhero movie, I would just be cynical about it and say that they're trying to sell toys. But I do feel like it's useful for this movie because it takes place over such a long span of time that every time the visual sensibility of the way he presents is different and giving

an indication of how he's changed. And by the way, no fucking toys for this movie. No. I'm upset about this. I'm so sorry. He's a charismatic... You want a Dementus toy with his bleeding nipples? I want every version.

You want tree Dementus and then it could be like a little tree on your desk? James Gravey wrote the piece about the color palette, not Pilga. Sorry, go on, David. He's a charismatic leader. He needs to like rebrand and update. You understand it. Because as to get back to the plot, like yes, David. Just, he's a charismatic leader. He needs to like rebrand and update. You understand it. Because as to get back to the plot, like, yes, initially he is, they are just a wandering horde.

This, this girl is delivered to them. He has lost his child. He's lost his family and a child is among them. He's got this teddy bear as a totem. An alternate version of a Mad Max. Do you believe that? I do. I do. I do.

Do you? Because he claims that Furiosa is his daughter, so he could be saying anything to Furiosa too. It's always tricky. Yes. My read on it is that he is an alternate sort of pathway for a Mad Max, someone who is driven crazy by the loss of their family, and is just like, you know, basically he goes into this swarm of hedonism of like, well, the silver lining of society collapsing is no rules exist anymore.

And if I just throw caution to the wind, I have nothing to lose. I can fucking gain it all. I can steal it all just through like being bigger than everyone else and what have you. I think his imprinting upon Furiosa is like him foolhardedly trying to do something similar to her, where it's it's like well if I just point to a new kid and Say that's my child. I will heal the wound of me losing my child I think it is why he's so attached to her even though he doesn't know how to relate to her Because yeah, like I never got over the death of my kid

I try to make fun light of it and just put a fucking teddy bear around my groin Right, but here a new kid new daughter great. I'm a dad again Sure, that's my everyone's brain is also just scrambled and the thing at the end where he's like, what about me? Like what about the thing I went through and I just kind of want to say Everyone in this world has suffered like right. There's no one in the Mad Max universe That's like I've actually had it pretty easy But that's his point. Anyone who survived this lost everyone else. His point to me that he's making at the end is like,

we're all fucking suffering, so you'd be an idiot not to also become... Dementist. Dementist. What's your read on it, Kyle? I think we do feel something weirdly sympathetic, some sort of pull of there's a real guy inside there with Dementus, which is almost something that makes him more dangerous. So you kind of can't tell if what you're witnessing or what you're feeling from him is something real or is something that he uses to entice.

Because very early on when he first encounters Furiosa, everybody is like, you know, playing bad cop and he very, you can see the gears in his head turn. And he's like, I'm going to play good cop. Go take care of this girl. Go wash her. Go give her food. And then I will deliver her to her home tomorrow. So, you know, he's looking for the best angle to play that's gonna get him what he wants. But also, I mean, it could be based on reality. Maybe he did have this family that this happened to,

and he's not afraid to use that as another tool in his arsenal if it will help him. It's interesting. I would rather not know, you know? I think that's what's enticing about trying to figure out the character. Until, of course, Dementus, a Furiosa saga. Right. We'll get the Dementus prequel.

And but like Miller said to me, like he's a trickster, like he's modeled on like the classic trickster in any mythology or literature. So, yes, you're not really supposed to totally believe anything he's saying 100 percent. He's probably mixing up lore and fable and his own life and Lord knows what else. Because that's what he's doing. He's just, you know, yeah, he's just, you know, he's almost like a certain orange buffoon. Oh, I said a different thing. Who would you say? I, Ben and I were walking out of the theater and I went Dementis. He's kind of gotten Ben went don't fucking say it

Don't fucking say no. He's got a guess what kind of energy he's got Ricky T vibes Oh the Joker is a bit of a Joker. Okay, at least it's not Ricky Stanicky vibes Well, I is so twisted. He writes parody songs about jerking off. Is that what he does? Oh, yeah. Okay It's after this that right then, Mary returns the mother, you know, furious his mother, right? And they she gets for you so far away, but she's shot her right. She's wounded. Sure. Well, there's also blow up her backpack and there's fire. Yes. But there's gas. But the moment in the cave where she's like, fucking drive away, don't come back for me, promise me this one thing, take this seed, she gives her the peach pit. Right, which is then this, it's the pit that she will use to grow the tree.

She has the tattooed map. And Furiosa thinks she can do both. She starts to drive away and then goes back for her mother and then directly witnesses her mother being tortured to death. Right. Being crucified by Dementus. Very sad. Right. And is now sort of semi-permanently caught in Dementus's clutches. Right. And then we're just kind of taking our first jump. I don't know when the chapter skip is. The next chapter is Lessons from the Wasteland.

This is played all by a younger girl who was... Yes. Who's excellent. ...played Young Tilda in 3000 years of longing as well, a Lila Brown who's wonderful. She's got She's in the first hour of the film on your eyes. Yes But like well she does and but she also has them deep fake on to her, right? Dementis Basically is the lead for the first hour of this movie I mean, I'm watching it going like is this gonna be a full two-hander like Fury Road?

He then, once you get to present day Anya, he recedes greatly until the end. 100%. But the first hour is basically driven by him. It is interesting though, because you know, the criticism from some with Fury Road is that Max is a passive character and Furiosa is the lead. And I did have a moment after she's captured by Dementus,

especially in that like second half hour in the film, where Furiosa feels like the passive character felt kept in check and it's Dementus who is driving all of the action. And then it evens back out, but yes, I had the same thought while watching it. So- The second chapter, they arrive, uh, they find a war boy and he's like, am I in Valhalla? And they're like,

what's up mate? And he's like, I'm a war boy. I'm from the, from the Citadel. And so they go to the Citadel. This is where I'm really, I think kind of like shocked at like how much this is a Mad Max Very Road prequel, I think, right? Where they just go visit the Citadel earlier. And they're like, knock, knock. And then Morton Joe's like, hello. The organic mechanic is part of Dementus's group. And you're like, we're even bothering to like plug in side characters.

How did they end up where status quo? Yeah. And Dementus shows up and he tries to sort of incite a grassroots rebellion in the Citadel. Right. Yes. That's his approach. And Morton Joe demonstrates the sort of like psychotic fidelity of the war boys. And also, as Miller put it to me, like his ultimate advantage, which is just gravity. Miller's just like, he's just like a medieval king. It's just like, he's just up there. You can't get him. This is chapter two lessons from the wasteland, which is basically Dementus's big play.

Can I seize the Citadel through charisma basically, right? And when a Morton Joe knocks him back down to earth, it's a cool sequence. Right. He goes, well, then what I need to do is seize one of the other towns. He's all go to Gastown. Which is, that's the one thing I thought when this movie was announced. I was like, surely we will see Gastown in the Bullet Farm, right?

That'll be it. Which we do. One's a big Gastown with oil everywhere. And one is, how would I almost describe it? One's full of bullets. And what is how would I almost describe it like a bullet song? Yes Right, I mean, I don't know what you guys think of all this stuff Yeah, he goes in and basically tries to like strong man his way to control and then get strategic and he's like, okay I'm not overthrowing him. But how do I get to a position of power? I'm in bed with him and negotiate with him I love how cleverly conceived the sequences of Joe saying, pick a war boy and we have something to show you. And again, it builds that anticipation of a character

thinking several steps ahead of us. He refuses in this very Scientologist way of like, if you answer a question, you're giving the question asker power, so he instead sends his craziest guy smegged to pick instead. So he doesn't have any. Copability in the choice. And then the war boy just fucking kamikazes blows up a ton of his guys. And Morton Joe's like, I got a million of these fucking dudes.

They're insane. You're not, but I, but I, I wonder if this might not be a good time to start really drilling down on the CGI of it all. Because... This is them swinging around. Obviously... Right. A location we spent a lot of time in the first movie.

Yes. Right. Yes, and we saw it in the first movie as well. Fury Road had plenty of CGI. It had plenty of compositing. You know, all these things that I think were somewhat more seamless in that movie. And yes, this movie has a surreal storybook quality, including how the Citadel is shot. It feels dreamier in a sense.

Maybe that's the more generous interpretation than it did in Fury Road. That's partially because it has a different cinematographer, the only major department head who did not come back from Fury Road. Because John Seale retired and is 80, yeah. Although he entices a lot of people back out of retirement for these films. But I do feel like and this is where it started to kind of, you know, all come together in my head. For as much as you can buy into the surreal storybook quality of it, I need to believe they're at least outside when they're outside. And there are a lot of moments in Furioso where I don't even believe they're outside.

And that is a problem for a movie that is coming on the heels of a film, Fury Road, where you unquestionably believe absolutely everything that you're watching. You think that what you're seeing is for real. So when the war boy jumps, again, I love this in theory, but I don't believe that war boy jump in the same way that I believe when a war boy jumps off the tanker early on in Fury Road, and I thought a man died. I thought we were watching a snipe. The classic Soderbergh quote, the how is everyone not dead?

Simon Dugan was the DP on this movie, who I think is an excellent cinematographer. But let me list some credits. I, Robot, The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Knowing, The Great Gatsby, 300 Rise of an Empire, Warcraft, Disenchanted. These are all films that have a very heightened sense

of artificiality. This almost seems to be a house style for him. It is different than the John Seale look. I know some of this is in post-production, but I also think a lot of this in how they shot the elements that they would later tile. There is something that looks very like collage-y. Watching it the second time, I was like, this feels very similar to the way that Wes Anderson now uses digital effects.

Where he's shooting all the elements for real in camera very often. Even if they are models or they're whatever, digital map paintings or what have you. But then he is sort of compositing them in a deliberately flat way. Which for him, we accept as part of his stylization. And for us, this looks very different than the movie we all saw nine years ago, that much like Matrix Resurrections in relation to the original Matrix, your response is, last time you made the best looking shit in the world,

why would you change this at all? Yeah. And you know, a lot of it is simply because they did not shoot it in Namibia at this time, you know, as you were saying earlier, Griffin, you know, they had planned to shoot Fury Road in the parts of Australia where they do end up shooting Furiosa, but Fury Road, you know, it got rained out. They, there was crazy growth, right? That was the problem. They were they were delayed.

They said, well, let's table this and then we'll come back to it. And then Doug Mitchell, who's the very wily producer of these films, decided the easiest thing would be to shoot it in Namibia. Not easy for anybody involved, but them and sent secretly all the vehicles to Namibia and notified Warner Brothers when they were already on the tanker on their way over. So they had no choice but to commit to Namibia as a location. But Namibia had perfect weather conditions for shooting this kind of movie.

It was one of those places where 360 degrees around, absolutely everything works for the film. You are not taking elements out if anything you're adding them. You're adding, you know, a cliff top or something like that. But you can shoot absolutely everything you need in that desert. Whereas with Furiosa, they were committed. Well, they were not going to shoot in Namibia again because it drove everybody crazy. It's very remote. It added cost, you know, a million things. They said we're shooting in Australia, come hell or high water.

And then what happened? Again, record rainfalls. But they were still committed to doing it. And Miller was like, I can just CGI this. I can take this all out in post. I can do a lot of replacement. So that's what happens. But I do feel like there is still a discernible sense of they're not actually out in a desert.

That you can feel, or that at least I can feel. Something else I want to say is, I don't know that everybody is as tuned into this sort of thing. You know, when you go over to somebody's house, I'll go over to someone's house, someone who works in Hollywood, they've got motion smoothing on. And I'm like, you got motion smoothing on? And they are not aware that they have it. They're like, what? Right. Yeah. So I'm realizing that not everybody is as clued into how a movie looks or should look

or whatever as I may be, you know, I talked to a friend who watched Furiosa and never felt that there was anything to question until the Fury Road footage at the end. And then could tell the difference. So I don't know that everybody picks up on this sort of thing, but I do feel like for me there was just, I don't know, a reality in that surreality that was hard to locate sometimes. It was also a pretty loud response when the first trailer came out. And I think like when people go, well, the CGI is bad. Part of what they're responding to is to some degree,

there is a level of effort and pain you can feel in Fury Road. Whereas this movie feels a little more hermetic and controlled. Right. My assumption, right, had more just sort of been like, right. Fury Road was the nightmare upon all nightmares to make. Yeah. So there were sacrifices and fidelity made. He's 79 years old. Although he's spry. He is.

I mean, that motherfucker is spry. I think there's also some tells. And I noticed this watching Furiosa and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. When a character jumps and it's like a motion captured character or something done entirely in the computer. I never buy it. I don't know why jumping is so hard to simulate. It's interesting. Even, you know, when with Planet of the Apes, I'm like, yeah, no, I believe that these are like,

you know, apes. I believe what I'm seeing. And then anytime they had to jump from one thing to another, I was like, that's fake. It's weight, right? It's just so hard to convey weight. And gravity when you're combining real environments and fake people or fake people in real environments or whatever it is. I also think like part of what was so astonishing about Fury Road might have been that shift to Namibia where like George Miller is literally dealing with a different palette now and his whole visual sensibility is evolving to the new resources he has around him and then he's building upon it, right?

This movie has backed itself into a corner where it's like you have to match locations and looks from the last movie and that calls the Artificiality out more because you're like I know what this is supposed to look like I've seen some people on social media defending the movie from the CGI criticisms and saying it's supposed to look like that against a real storybook quality. And I get that, but I know that there

were people who worked on Furiosa who felt not great about the CGI. And, you know, I mean, Colin Gibson, who was the production designer, was very candid with me about he said that he felt like they went to the CGI well way too many times, that, you know, that essentially they kept sort of solving things by saying,

we can do this in CGI, and him feeling like it wasn't a patch on what they could have done if they were pushed to do it or were able to do it for real. And Sims, I agree with you that I am pretty exhausted with CGI cops in our culture, but I also think it is one of the many things that people cite as one of the, like, graces of Fury Road over the last nine years. It's a thing. It's painful to lose that. That you're like the CGI in that movie is like the topping. It's the utmost layer. It's the sprinkles. It's the chocolate sauce

But can you believe they actually built this complex Sunday for real and put a camera on it and you feel that? That like the base of this is always pretty fucking real And then the CGI is used just to clean it up augmented height and remove the wires What have you and this movie exists in a far more? If it feels weightless in a lot of ways. But it's interesting because this is part of what George really responds to. He loves new technology.

He's obviously been using it for a while and things like Happy Feet. And I think having that template of tools keeps him really engaged. And you do see this a lot from directors you would expect it from, like a James Cameron or Robert Zemeckis, or directors you wouldn't, like an Ang Lee, where the thing that really makes them want to commit to a project is the technological frontier.

I can apply my toolbox. Yeah. Let's also say, I mean, because this this movie looks very similar to 3000 Years of Longing of longing sure what a movie I'd love I love as well surreal storybook quality. Yes perfect for totally years of longing and you understand him applying that technology Not just because that movie is made in like deep pandemic But also because this thing needs like a billion different locations because you're going through different stories in different eras You're not gonna be able to build all of these palaces for all the different

sultans and all the different stories. And so you accept, oh, here's the part of this movie that's real, that's set in a fucking hotel set. And when you go into the stories, it is kind of weird painterly CGI. It does feel like he carried over a lot of maybe what he learned on that movie to this. I think it's most glaring in the sequence we were just talking about, because again, people are flying through the air.

And then obviously later on, you have the sort of sort of crown jewel set piece with Praetorian Jack driving the war rig. Right. I'm just gigantic fight with the parasailors and all that stuff. Which is the peak of the movie. Which is the action peak of the movie for sure. And is, you know, is pretty seamless. Like close out chapter two, Lessons from the Wasteland.

He successfully pulls off this heist. He goes back to negotiate with the Morten Joe. Right, he takes over Gastown and then he's right now. He gets his nipples ripped off. He does. But he's into now he has a position. He gets his nipples ripped off. He does. But he's into it. Yeah.

He is. They're perbs when it comes to nipples in this franchise. It may be the most nippily of all major action franchises. Nipple focus. For sure. But, Immortan Joe insists on getting Furiosa, who Dementis is now dubbed Little D, Little Dementis. She is handed over with some reluctancy, but also it's like as much as Dementis, I do think, has some perverse care for her. His quest for power is like greater

than everything else. And from the second they like hand her off, she's plotting her escape. She makes the wig, she fucking attacks Rictus Erectus. She gets away, rebuilds herself as a war boy. We cut ahead as you see the passage of time through the tree again. And then it's chapter three, which is the Stowaway, which is, the majority of this is, what do they call it? The Highway to Nowhere was what they called it

when they were filming. Stowaway to Nowhere. Stowaway to Nowhere was what they called it when they were filming. Stowaway to Nowhere. This incredible fucking war rig sequence, which is like a thing that he's now doing for the third time, basically. And you're still like, I turned to Ben the second the sequence was done. And I said, this is the best shit on earth. It is.

It doesn't get better than this. I mean, I remember early, cause I walked out with David Ehrlich and he was like, look, I love that that movie's different. I love, you know, I didn't, it's not like I wanted it to be the same, but then when you see the action, like nobody does anything like that, but him.

So you are kind of like, I want as much of this as I can have. And the last movie, he built the entire thing out of that. Yes, he did. Yeah, but yet again, it would be so easy in the way that this movie suffers a little bit in other respects to have this sequence be like, it's good, but it's not as good as Fury Road. I'm not saying it's better than the sequences in Fury Road, but I was at no point comparing it. I was just so point comparing it like I was so wrapped up interesting

I mean look there's there's so many great things about this sequence right you mentioned You know the guys with the parachutes obviously that's fucking amazing That's your feeling is seeing the pole cats for the first time right loved it It's so well shot It is more real than some of the other action sequences that we see in the film, so all to the better for that. I think the reason why it's not, to my mind, as successful as Fury Road is the context of what the characters are doing, what they're trying to do, who's attacking them.

It's all a little bit more vague than the very simple thing of in Fury Road, they're trying to get away. They gotta get that way. They are trying to get to a destination. As fast as they can before anyone figures it out. And then once people figure it out, it's like, well, get them away from us. Right. I think that the average moviegoer may not even pick up on like, okay, is Furiosa stowed

away because she's working on the war rig because she's like, you know, she's stowing away so that she can escape through the war rig. Right, that's her job essentially, right. We have not really met Praetorian Jack. No, this is our introduction to Praetorian Jack. They're being attacked by sort of no-name characters. So those things all make it a little fuzzier.

Right. They are spinoffs from Dementis's gang, those guys. Right. Yeah. They're in the gang initially and we sort of overhear that, yeah, they've kind of gone their own way. Yeah. But I wouldn't hate if Dementis himself were in that gang, because that would

have been giving us, that would have been reconnecting to Furiosa, that would have been working with characters we know. I think it's maybe a little too late in the movie to be, to have the major sequence, you know, to have them antagonized by people to whom we don't have a strong relationship. We're over an hour into the film now. It is a sequence that I feel like is,

he's almost narratively banking on you're not going to ask those questions and you're not going to complain about the lack of those like connection points because I'm doing the thing you know happened in these movies. I'm doing the guitar solo. I think the other thing is it's iterative. Part of the delight of this sequence is the amount of things the war rig can do. The way she keeps moving to a new part of it and like pulling some lever, fixing something. The Bolo truck nuts. Right.

But like, you know, and so like her kind of growing seamlessness with the vehicle itself, obviously what Jack is seeing in her, you know, in that skill, right. And that she's learning it in real time. Her resourcefulness is, I feel like the thing Anya Taylor-Joy keeps talking about in the interviews is like. But it's real, it's appealing. They spent like 80 days shooting this one sequence. She's like, there's 80 days where I don't say a word,

but the narrative beats of it are so clear, even if it's a little maddening to have to play out, because it's like every moment of it is her learning something the truck does and Figuring out how to use it to her advantage or against someone else, right? It's also for the fuzziness of the sort of external stakes the external context of the sequence There are great stakes within the sequence Which is like the number one thing is you know the the little war asking, is it time to do the Bombie Knocker yet?

And you're like, so you're waiting for like this big thing to happen and it's like a lot of not yet. That is such a simple but effective way of building suspense, you know? It's great. I cannot wait to see whatever the Bombie Knocker is. Yeah, you know it's going to be good. Cabbage Boy was what I kept calling him in my head. I do feel like, yeah, the stakes of this are mostly relationship based because it is about

her and him and it's also about her and like Praetoria and Jack. I'm also so deeply in the bag for Burke. It's same as a performer that the second I see him, I'm pretty much just like as much of this guy as you can give me. Yeah. But the stakes of this sequence are, can she win him over? Sure. Can she sort of impress him? Can she show her value to him in a way where he will...

they can unite? He... I mean, what do you make of Burke in the movie? Beacon. I love him in this. It's such unlikely casting, especially because he replaced Yahya Abdul-Mateen. Very different. I can't imagine going from one to the other. I can imagine what Yahya would have done with the movie and he probably would have been good.

Like he's got a George Miller vibe. I think he was just too burned out when it came. He'd been working nonstop and you know, you don't want to go burned out into a Mad Max production. But Tom Burke usually plays, like, compelling little pricks. Yeah. He's hot in this. He's really hot. I'm not sure what it is. I wouldn't have thought that you could make him feel hot and real

in this kind of franchise, in this kind of getup. But there is something... I think what's most appealing in this kind of getup. But there is something, I think what's most appealing is his sense of stillness. Everybody else is peacocking like crazy in this world. And this is someone who just has a very quiet confidence. And that's, it's really magnetic. Such a George Miller move to look at an actor

with like a corrected cleft palate scar and go like, that's a good start. Right. Let's give it all the way up. 70% all the way up. I also like even though that there's room to think otherwise, but essentially as the movie presents it, their connection is platonic. There's a moment where it seems like maybe they could have an off-screen thing. So you could read that in if you wanted to. But I think it's extremely powerful that the most

romantic thing they do, the thing they do to codify their bond is not kiss or have sex. It's to put their foreheads together. Something that she took as the utmost sign of affection and respect from the Green Place. To see a sort of romantic lead, if you will, that like respects her, that's like the number one thing that he can reach is just like an overriding respect. I see you and I know you're good. That's really enticing. Yeah. I mean, he's like the one force for good in this movie. He is like the one sort of like steady...

He's been through the same trauma that everyone else has been through, the end of the world, and alludes to loss in his life as well. And he is right. He is the opposite of Dementus and that he is not like this just weird mirror version of like, you know, daddy and has not allowed it to curdle him and it sort of says to her like, straightforward, if you spend time under me, I will teach you the skill set to be able to get whatever it is you want. He can see the sense of like drive and longing and her. There are some objective you have. I will give you the tools to get there and I will let you go.

Right, obviously he's styled like Furiosa will be styled. He's covered in motor oil essentially. And styled kind of like Max Houston. He's styled like both of them, which I do think adds an interesting wrinkle to Fury Road in the way that Furiosa perceives Max where she's sort of gauging out, is he like these other guys I've met or is he like Pretoria and Jack?

Is he the rare, right? This guy's somewhere in the middle. Which he kind of is. Right. But he's great. There's, there's the, so the reveal at the end of the sequence is that she has long hair, that she's a girl. Yeah.

This is something that I have complicated feelings about. Um, I think as a visual reveal, it's great and powerful. It's striking. There's a couple sequences where her long hair is used to great cinematic effect. Unfortunately, and I think the prequel of this prequelness of this movie compounds this issue. It doesn't feel like it makes sense for her to keep long hair. She is determined to not be found out, determined to blend in with these men. For her to risk an extremely easy reveal with this long hair feels like folly to me.

And I do get the sense because we see young Furiosa shape her head that maybe in the original conception of it, well, I should say, in the original original conception, Furiosa never had a shaved head. This is only something that Charlize brought to the character, brought to George Miller as an idea. So obviously they want to work that back into the prequel. I thought that they had an incredibly effective, smart, resourceful moment where young Furiosa

shaves in. She's using it as a way to escape, right? Yeah. Yeah, uses it as a way to escape and then blend in with the war boys. So for her to grow it back, I think that's where you start rubbing up on some of the hand wavy stuff like, okay, you're conveying that you are a full life girl and everyone could around you can probably put the pieces together as to who you are. Didn't I get this?

I know that that for Anya, for Leslie VanderWalt, who ran hair and makeup, they both were like, we're not sure about this, but Miller loved the hair so much. It's a weird double B. Didn't I get it from your profile? I can't remember. But Miller just loved her hair. He's like, don't cut your hair Your hair looks great. Yeah, but it's a it's a weird double B because you have the first moment

We're like, well, that's why she shaves her head Makes sense, then she puts the cap on to hide and you assume that she's been shaving her head regularly in these years that she's been living fucking underground With the other guys and then it's like oh no No and underground with the other guys. And then it's like, oh no, no, now she has to shave it a second time symbolically at a moment of like emotional import. And I do feel like they do a similar thing with the arm where when she first gets her arm sort of like caught in the truck chase, it's so frenetic that I'm like, oh, it's that it's kind of interesting that her arm loss is such a meaningless sort of moment in the chaos of everything Visually, you cannot clock that. In fact, her arm is not it's not gone. It's severed, right?

It's right and then there's the second moment like five minutes later where she detaches her own arm to escape She makes that sacrifice, but it's a little bit lost in the like. I thought we went through this one time I agree Griffin I but it's a little bit lost in the like, I thought we went through this one time. I agree, Griffin. I guess that second example is somewhat more effective because at least they sell the hell out of the moment of the missing arm. But I loved that, you know, and I literally yelped in my seat

when her arm is smashed in between those two vehicles because it comes out of nowhere. It doesn't feel teased, like it's not like a, it doesn't. Will John Locke be in his wheelchair? It does not feel like the boring prequel should have like, and that's why 3PO has a different arm. And the fact that it happens in the middle of a sequence where she just pulls back into the car and she's sort of in shock, but she has to stay in a Mad Max movie. Like she doesn't have time to mourn the arm.

she has to stay in a Mad Max movie. Like she doesn't have time to mourn the arm. Praetoria and Jack kicks her out of the war rig as she requests and circles back to her. As we said, all this like, yeah, I can teach you. Yeah, that's basically the end of Chapter three, which is the Stowaway. Then we go into Homeward, which is like she's now been full. I was about to say, we're sort of cutting ahead. Yeah. In terms of like, we don't see Jack teaching her.

We don't see them going on war rig adventures. That sounds like a fun action movie to me. Yeah. But I understand Miller being like, you get it. Like. Right. The, the. It's distilled in the one action sequence of them working together.

Like it was just more of that. Chapter four and five and one and two are more continuous. There are big jumps between two and three and three and four. Right. Yeah. But it is interesting again to see her return to the Citadel sort of under the auspices of Pretoria and Jack, but like with her hair just out, and she's like, yes, I am a woman, and you're dealing with it.

And at this point in the movie, you're like, she's 90% of the way to the Furiosa, we meet in Fury Road. Yeah, but I do think it's a key thing and potentially a thing that people could bump up against, where it's like, in this male dominated, threatening society, you know, she's fully broadcasting who she is. And, you know, it's meant to be like, that's how much respect Jack wields. But I do think that the original conception of this, like where she was a much more, or at least when, the way Charlize thought of it, which is like, you know, she's a shaved head woman who's like, blended into the war boys. And that's how she builds her way back up. Like, might have been a more plausible thing. There's just, for as much danger as is set up, for everybody to just be like,

I guess we'll be chill about the fact that, like, you know, your trusted lieutenant is this woman, and the timeline kind of checks out with this missing girl. It is. It's a thing to bump up again. To not even give it one scene where, like, Praetoria and Jack marches her back into the Citadel and goes like, she is under me now, you all have to accept her and have like, Rictus Erectus go like, what? It is, it's a big leap in everything we know about this world.

I will also say just in terms of how I had always inferred shit from Fury Road, I mean, you said the like, infertility thing. Uh, and obviously I know this is not a trait that would be passed on genetically, but these two movies are so obsessed with this idea of physical perfection in like a deteriorating radioactive world. Obviously the whole idea is that a Joe wants an air that is not a half life or a radioactive mutant person or whatever. I had always assumed that part of like Furiosa being one of these war rig drivers, but also

being this like vaguely cybernetic woman with a shaved head was that like at some point she loses her arm and that loses her value as one of his wives. She no longer looks like one of the models that he keeps. You thought wrong baby. I did. I mean, I don't, I don't bump up against this stuff because they're stupid. Like Rick does and squirted us. Obviously you're very stupid. Um, but even a Morton Joe, he's, you know, smart in a very brute force, medieval sort of a way he's smarter than Dementus, right? He seems to have a little more sort of tactical acumen than Dementis. When Dementis tries his big coup at the end of the movie, Joe seems kind of aware of the

sort of game that's being played. Right. Yes, they're all stupid, but like, like literally the dominant thing they do is imprison beautiful women. So you do have to, I mean, look, this is all implied and sometimes it's better for a movie to imply than have to spell it out, but I do think it confuses the stakes of the movie somewhat. I would agree with that.

I think Joe is also like, he, the thing he is clever about is letting people project things onto him. It is part of the sort of like, he's got this ridiculous armor on. But also that he surrounds himself with like 10 people who he lets speak for him as trusted authorities. Versus Dementis being like, shut up, shut up, let me speak. Joe is like, it's more evocative if I let other people say the shit and I stand behind and people go like, wow, that guy's is so powerful He doesn't even need to talk

Which does mean the more time we spend with Joe the kind of less interesting he becomes Yeah, the less of Joe the better. Yeah, I Almost right. I almost struggled with just having him show up and be like hello Like you know, I'm just kind of like I you know Do not become addicted to water is just the most incredible, like introductions to a person, a character like this. And like he only in furry road, he just howls and right. Like there's no point when he sits down and he's like, so where do we think they went or it'd be like, there's not scenes like that in this, you have this as time has moved forward, Dementus is in charge of Gastown.

Unsurprisingly, he's really bad at it. He's not like, like whatever this future needs in terms of just a planned leader, planning leader. Like so Gastown's in ruin. That's why Joe wants to take it over. I remember when we saw the first trailer, David, and you and I both had the exact same takeaway, which was, oh, Hemsworth is playing young Immortan Joe, right?

I first wondered that. I imagine this character he's playing will end up getting the bottom half of his face ripped off. And there was whatever flash of Immortan Joe in the trailer, and we were like, that's probably Hemsworth in the makeup at the end of the movie, whatever. And when the second trailer came out, or when they announced that Lyche B. Hume was playing the role, I was genuinely surprised that they wanted these guys to co-exist in the movie. Because as you said, Kyle, it feels like,

isn't her whole thing just about the relationship to Immortan Joe? Well, I do think that's tricky because, you know, ultimately the climax in her revenge is against Dementis, and we're losing a little bit of that with all the Immortan Joe stuff. It's interesting to bring in Dementus and have him, you know, so strongly in opposition to Joe, because Dementus comes off like the crazier one, and it makes Joe seem more savvy and strategic,

dare I say, more normal. Like, it's almost like bringing in Niles to make Frazier look more normal. So Dementes is the Niles. Very well said. And it's interesting. I mean, like you could be into that, that it's kind of humanizing Dementes, making us kind of get him a little bit more or maybe not. I mean, it's the prequel problem.

Yeah, it's the prequel. It would be impossible for this movie to just not really address anything. No. But right, every little bit you learn, you're kind of like, did I need to know that? I'm not sure.

But at the same time, I cannot help but like world building. So I am kind of like, yeah, it is sort of interesting to me that this is this triangle, the most rudimentary, like distillation of like the military industrial complex, which is like water, gas, bullets, right? Like that's it. That's all that's left in this world. Most people don't really get to live lives

that are meaningful in any way, but like that's just the economy that's left. I also, I love this world. And to his credit, George Miller has not allowed for there to be a lot of supplemental material like there were those five comic books that came out when Fury Road came out that everyone said sucked and there was the video game that came out I think a couple years after that that was mostly just letting you play the world of the previous movies but he's not a guy who's farmed this out where there's a ton you can dig into so if he wants to give me a movie of like the appendixes and all the notes and whatever, I'm like, it's not my favorite movie, but also like I prefer this to most things that people make.

The video game as it was conceived had a lot of spoilers for Furiosa that they ended up like, you know, that all sort of like fell by the wayside because the game engine wasn't capable of what they wanted it to do. But it practically did spell out the entire story of this movie. Because then Furious is not in the game, but the War Boys are, is my memory. Yeah, I mean the whole world is in this game. Like it's implying so many of the things that we see in this film. Dementus is alluded to, all these things. I don't know if you heard this at the time in your research, but I think I saw was that

part of the game shifting focus on top of the game engine thing was also that Warner Brothers, obviously licensing this out, was very changed in their attitude by the Arkham Asylum game and going like, this is the model. You don't do fucking tie-in games. If you're doing a game with a legacy property like this, you do the sort of definitive, this is the video game universe game rather than Fury Road the game or the Dark Knight the game. I also think for as ambitious as George is when it comes to these worlds, and he's very ambitious like originally when they were pitching Furry Road and Furious was going to be made

as an anime prequel, they also wanted to do these big road shows that would involve all the vehicles and like be monster truck rallies. So he's always coming up with things like that, but then the reality of the situation is that George also is a very hands-on director. And so to have major things happening that he doesn't have full creative control over that aren't constantly happening under his watch, sometimes these things get too far ahead of him and it's an issue for him. I would even say that when I was writing my book, originally George was super cooperative with this

and authorized a lot of people to speak to me who had never given interviews about their relation to Fury Road, that had never had public acknowledgement of it. And everybody I talked to was like, well, let me just check with George, and they were always cool about it. But the very final interview that I was supposed to do, once I'd gone down the path of interviewing like 130 people, with George and they were always cool about it. But the very final interview that I was supposed to do

once I'd gone down the path of interviewing like 130 people, like the last one, the big cleanup interview where I asked him about all these things that I've learned. I'd done a bunch of interviews with him earlier on. That one he kept pushing back, pushing back, pushing back. And I could sense that there was this feeling of, has this big thing about Fury Road been made that I have no creative control over and do I have ambivalent feelings about this? You know,

I really had to work to get that last interview because they were ready to just cancel it and say, no, I don't think we need to do more for this project that we don't control. So I think that George is always into the idea of building out this world, but ultimately is only comfortable with it happening 100% on his watch. Which is probably the best way for it to be if I had to choose. You know, and I was being a dumb, dorky baby earlier and complaining about the lack of Furiosa toys, but there is, like,

because he has retained most of the rights that this universe and he only will let things happen if he personally approves of them, there is that level of control and purity to this world and like there are like z-grade horror franchises and I will use that term loosely that have far more merchandise and circulation now than Mad Max does. Like things like Creepshow, there is like more Creepshow shit you can buy now than Mad Max shit, you know, just because he's like, I personally am deciding whether or not I'm in the mood to let this stuff happen or not. Well, we wouldn't even have Fury Road and Furiosa if it weren't for toys.

Because of Happy Seed? When they were, well, prior to even developing Fury Road, when George thought that like he tabled Mad Max forever, Warner Brothers licensing was like, I think we could do some toys or maybe make this into a syndicated series. So they were kind of noodling down the idea of like a syndicated Xena type series and George went in to meet on it and they presented him with these toys, these potential toys that kind of drew from all three movies and seeing all of that kind of blended together really got his juices flowing to return to this world,

but not as a syndicated series, as a movie. I have all those toys now. They're... Ah! Ah! N2 Toys, this company that then, they had more announced and then they pulled them and they had always said it was because George Miller

killed the line and they're really bad, but they exist, they're 20 plus years old and they exist as the only shit you can get from Mad Max that isn't like Funko, that isn't like dumb, stylized bobbleheads. And it just feels like every time like all the toy companies I follow on Twitter get Q&A's with people being like, why don't you get the Fury Road rights?

They're like, it's not a conversation. They're not open to talking about it. One day, perhaps. One day. I don't know. And then I will finally find peace. Like Furiosa. Right. Just, we don't need to really lay down every-

Chapter four is him being like, I feel like I'm ready to help you do whatever it is you've been wanting to do now that you've trained yourself. But this then all gets swirled in with Immortan Joe is like, it's time for us to take Gastown, go to the bullet farm to get ammo. Yeah. Again, this is all laid out pretty loosely in the movie, but bullet farm, right. Is where they have the big fight with Dementus. Yes.

Yeah. Where Jack is going to die. Because like, what are we rooting for here? You know? Right. where they have the big fight with Dementus. Yes. Yeah. Where Jack is going to die. I think this is also a little fuzzy because like, what are we rooting for here? You know? Right. In this battle between Alien versus Predator. Like, our characters are kind of along for the ride, but what's their specific mission?

This is, they kind of, what they're trying to do is essentially they're implying as they go into this mission that this will be their last mission and then Jack will relieve her of her duties, blah, blah, blah. But I still also think that takes a little bit of the driving force out of this mission because we don't care to see Immortan Joe capture this place. There is no like good conclusion to the mission that they're on, which makes it somewhat less Again makes it fuzzier in terms of the fuzziness is also she kind of has two goals One is escape back to the green place and the other is like no but revenge on Dementis And so now they get to the bullet farm and he's there, but he wasn't there target. No, right

So now they're kind of in this fight with him that's almost by accident. And she does shoot at him during the sequence, but she's also seen him before this and didn't take revenge. Now, there's something to be said, just as Furious's mom does at the beginning, for finding the right moment to take revenge, but this is not an easy thing to convey to the average moviegoer. Instead, there's a feeling of passivity of a character being held in check. And when you just compare it to how clean everything is in Fury Road, sorry, it's just an unavoidable comparison. Not to keep repeating myself, but it feels like yet another double-beat in the movie where when the sequence starts and then she's face-to-face with him,

knowing the way George Miller operates, you're like, this might just be a pedal- the metal, 40 minute continuous set piece that starts with them trying to get the revenge and runs all the way through without break to her face to face with Dementis in the final showdown. Instead you get this whole sort of like failed seizing, which causes all this destruction. Which is cool.

I mean, like the image of the bullets flying around and all that, there's some very cool stuff in here. And then her and Pretoria and Jack get out, right? Make it back and go like, OK, so we're going to choose to mount our final stand. It is split into two parts. Right. When you could imagine a movie running this straight through to the end. Well, there's also around this time, a 40 day war that basically. Right. They do a yada, yada, yada of like 40 days past.

That's a big thing. Here's the great strategy. That's the crazy part. So that, that is right. That comes after Dementis, after she loses her arm and Dementis tortures Jackie, you know, ties them to a car and drives them around very medieval of him. But then, right. And then history man's like, Hey, it's me again. Anyway, much as the, you know, Babylonians fought them anyway, there was a 40 day war. And you're like between Jack and Dementia. I assume all of it. Oranges, OPM, yeah, between Dementia and Joe. Yeah. Right. Joe and Dementia. Sorry. And so the idea being in this, and that's when I'm like realizing, dawning, it is dawning money on me sitting in my chair. It's like, right. This movie is not ending with, and then Furiosa leads

a battle against Dementus where she exacts revenge on her hated, you know, captor, right? Instead it's like, no, then she comes across him after he's basically been annihilated by Joe to begin with. Yes. He's sort of in charge of just a few people at this point. The war is ending and she captures him and they have a long sort of discursive debate on to what extent she can get anything out of killing him. Yeah. Emotionally.

It's also like the D5 chapter format of this movie. Its main function seems to be that Miller's like, I'm just telling you the parts I wanna tell. Right. Because there are huge swaths in between these pieces that other people might go, isn't that the movie? Don't you wanna spend 30 minutes there? And he's like, I'm picking and choosing

which parts of this are essential. And that's like, yeah, you could imagine an entire fucking movie of just the 30 day war. Or you could imagine that being 40. You could imagine that being the entire final act of the film. But instead, it's like all of that's going to play out so then we can get back to her one on one with him in the desert having a conversation, which is incredible. I really love the final showdown.

I think it's like the key to the entire film. Yes, exactly. And it solidifies what I think this film does do well and its reason for existing. But you cannot deny that much in a way similar Matrix resurrections where that movie ends. It's a B minus cinema score ending. Right, where it's like.

Now I'm not saying that's a negative thing. I'm just saying. Wait, what cinema score did it get? That's a great question. Great question. But the main character finally confronts the villain and goes like, I don't want to do your fucking big end set piece thing.

It got a B plus. Okay. Although obviously even a B plus is seen as sort of like, oh, not too good. Like deadline sort of. Look, George loves, he's a very inventive ending guy. Like fucking 3000 years along, you were like, I think the movie's over.

And he's like, no, no, no, 5G messed with his brain though. And you're like, oh, okay. Or like Happy Feet where you're like, and then he lived in the Central Park Zoo. Like becomes live action. Right. And you're like, what is this? Like Happy Feet 2, which has the most transcendent

ending in the history of cinema. Of course. And then the krill dancing are part of the magical. Yes. Again, I'm a studio executive. I'm like, and then Furiosa destroys like, you know, Dementus in a pitch vehicular battle. Right. No, they talk in the desert. She decides to turn them into a tree. This also feels like a 79 year old man looking back on the universe he still

lives in that was created by a man in his 30s where he's like what I would tell that younger guy now is that like revenge is not really a healthy thing in any way you know all these movies are sort of based upon a lie that you can ever get and I think the films have always been wise enough to know that, like, Max can't really be solved. I think Fury Road solves him as much as he ever could. Because much like Furiosa is set up in this movie, it's like, he's not going to get catharsis. He can give someone else catharsis. Niko Lethoris, who co-wrote this and did so much of the development of this entire franchise, told me that the only thing that would ever solve Max is if he returned to the

graves of his wife and kid. And he never will. It's like he's always scared to do on the move. Yeah, right. He's a fascinating. What's that guy? Because that guy's only writing credits are these two movies, right? Nicola Thuris. Yeah, he's he's been in this world since the beginning. He has a really fascinating backstory of being an actor. He literally is a mechanic in the American acting and performances. He's a very highbrow person to speak to. He showed me this, like, fascinating,

incredibly lengthy document that he put together when he first read Fury Road. Because it was, you know, it was made and storyboarded before Nico came on the original incarnation. So when he came on, he really tried to deepen all the themes and tie everything together, which is interesting because though this is thematically deep Furiosa, it's not as neatly tied together as what he ultimately did with Fury Road.

And so for the quibbles I have with the lead up to the final confrontation with Dementus, I do think that that's great. And I do think that the final shot of, or the final idea of the tree growing out of Dementus is incredibly powerful. That is an incredibly powerful, potent cinematic image. Everything about it. Well, and it's like, exacting revenge just starts a new loop. The only productive thing is, you can do is to turn your trauma into something that can help other people in a way, right? Like, it's like you could kill him mercilessly or you could turn him, you could turn this into something that feeds other people, that nourishes other people.

Well, and again, you know, I mean, not to sound like a studio executive, but, but it is typical in a story like this for the protagonist to think that they want something and they realize around the time of, you know, the, as the third act is beginning, that they don't actually want it, or they get it, and it's not satisfying. This is ultimately what happens with Furiosa, but, but there isn't a prolonged come down from that where she finds the thing she wants. It is just truly like a very brief scene of the tree, you know? So it's not necessarily satisfying in a way that audiences are primed to find that.

And you get the history man calling this out, like saying, a lot of people find this ending unsatisfied. Oh, but okay, so we yada yada'd when we were yada yadaing the 40 day war, we do get some brief cameos in the sequence. Right, we should see the duourier briefly and we see Max. So what do you make of the Max thing? I don't like Max. I don't either.

That was the one thing I wasn't angry, but I was just sort of like, I saw one argument for it that sort of made sense. I think it was a Bill Goode piece. I can't remember. I can't remember. Of just kind of like, he's not ready yet. Like to engage in this more sort of straightforward heroism or whatever we, you know, we expect maybe mad max to eventually do like he's watching her dispassionately from a cliff as she's struggling. Right. And kind of a not my problem

vibe. Sure. Like that's sort of interesting at the same time. I'm just like, I'm not worried about max or it doesn't. It's not important to me to know what he's doing when anything. And it's just odd to sort of visually reference the start of fury road pretty much exactly. Right. Like his pose is the way he's sort of arranged with no real meaning. And it's like timeline wise, this is years before fury road. So who cares? I agree Yeah, I don't really know what that is in the movie. It doesn't help tell the full story of the movie We already know that in Fury Road. It's giving Dave Filoni Star Wars series on Disney Plus

Oh, what are you talking movie is above this? Star Wars series never does any fan service. I didn't I didn't even like seeing the Diff warrior who I love I keep seeing him briefly. I'm like seeing the diff warrior who I love. He's one of my best friends. Just seeing him briefly, I'm like, this is just giving remember that thing. I agree. A little bit. I mean, if there isn't space for it in this story, you, you don't have to force it or allude to it. I'll indulge. If Miller is literally just feeling nostalgic, I'll indulge the guy for the rest of time. It's fine. But I do think there's a weird energy to such an incredibly

interesting energy. And then being like, and of course, as we then know, Fury Road happened. Here's sort of five minutes just kind of revving you for that. And I'm just like, are you worried that I don't know that? As we already talked about this. Or are you worried? Are you looking for a cheap pop?

Yes. Or are you worried that I'm walking out feeling too weird and you're like, but don't forget that eventually Furiosa had this noble goal that she accomplished. That having been said, the moment they show me the flash of Doof Warrior, I do go, hey, I am relieved that this movie didn't feel the need to explain Doof Warrior. Well, no, no, specifically. Although they have a big long backstory for him too. I know, but I'm like, I was so ready for this movie to introduce us to a character who we

love and then the last act go like, oh, fuck, he becomes the Doof Warrior. But you know, Griffin, like if they had, at least that would justify his presence. I agree. I don't want to see him here. Again, like if you are going to watch these as a back-to-back thing, leave him for his introduction in fury road that's better yes there's nothing is accomplished by having him here except remember that thing were you happy to see him ben i mean you love the dufaurier i don't know i didn't really get ben's fury osu take i'm with you guys sure do you want to give us some takes

yeah before we do the bar any any any lingering Furiosa feeling you love Praetorian Jack Yeah, I was all in on that guy It was just cool to see the design and the world building of this like class of warrior Well, also ben, you didn't just see the movie. Did you? I smelt it Yeah, how was the 40x 40x we saw in 40x now ben and I were were 40x. We saw it in 40x. Now Ben and I were 40x warriors. We're 40x war boys, let's say. We're on the front lines very often. And one of our complaints, often with this format, is that we love the idea of the smells, but the smells feel often underused and it feels

like the only thing they're actually good at producing scent-wise is gasoline. Garbage smell essentially. Great news. that fits perfectly on this film. Sure. It was well executed. It was incredible. Yeah. The theater smelled like it was on fire the entire time, which was great.

It was perfect. Finally, a good fit. That's awful. The thing you said to me that sounded cool was that your chairs would just rumble like you're in a go-kart. This is the great thing. Right, yeah.

It felt like there was some discipline to how the movement was applied knowing that this is a two and a half hour movie and it could literally cause you to herniate discs if they went too hard with the chase sequences. But basically any time a car is moving, they at least sort of mirror the revving of the motor, which did feel very immersive. It did. I didn't love when we got sprayed in the eyes. Sure. Quite hard. Right, and sometimes that's supposed to represent piss.

Well, right. Which kind of grosses you out. The moment that stuck out to me was when they shoot the flare into the sand. The sky blood, yeah. Yeah. That was shot right in our eyes. Sure.

Strongly. Yeah. Strong bit of water. And it hurt, truly. The gentleman's format. That's how movies were meant to be seen. And felt. Yes. And it turned you into the Red Ben.

It did. It did. Yeah, you can't see Kyle because Ben's behind the monitor right now, but he is bright red. I am. What else? I mean, I enjoyed this movie, but I really do agree with like the general take, I think, from this episode of just like it just it can't live up to Fury Road. It's very difficult.

How can you? It's like what that movie is just everything we all love most about this movie is when it's not trying to live up to Fury Road. Yeah, right. Yeah. Right. And when it's not explaining something from Fury Road, when it's just, again, teasing out other elements, that's great. Why do they have the fucking squid balloon as like, you know, in Dementesis camp? I don't know, but I love it. I don't need to know. That thing is cool. Just show that to me. It's like cool and evocative and makes me wonder things.

But that is almost always the case with prequels. It is this problem of like, what you think the audience wants, what often they are telling you they want is actually a thing that's not going to satisfy them, that is not nourishing, that is empty calories. I'm not saying I wish this happened in the movie, but for prequels to get over this problem, they usually need the thing of like, oh, Morton Joe's all over this thing. And then halfway through, a Morton Joe dies. And you're like, what the fuck? But I know a Morton Joe's still alive in the second movie.

How does this fucking happen? And then it's like, Dementus assumes the role of a Morton Joe. I'm not saying this movie needs to narratively do that, but I'm saying this movie doesn't really attempt anything like that, where it plays with your expectations and subverts them in, how could this possibly fit with what I know? There's a movie that I saw at Cannes

where the opening sequence, the protagonist dies at the end of it, and then it flashes back to, you know, him as a teenager, and it basically pulls him towards that sequence. And then when it happens in the movie, he doesn't die. He does exactly what you had hoped he would do at the beginning. He listens to his girlfriend and doesn't die and then it continues from there.

And I was like, yeah, that's pretty good. That did exactly what you're hoping will happen. But of course, I know, I mean, you can't do that with Furiosa, but it is a thing. Like a prequel locks you into something, you know? In a normal version of this movie that was conceived first, it would not end with her at the Citadel. Her whole thing is, I want to escape

and go back to the Green Place. It's tricky when you have to have your characters in a certain position at the end, only because that's where they begin. Right, she cannot make it back to the Green Place. She needs to have the emotional revelation of its loss in Fury Road, which we have seen. Yes, which rules. And look, it's still good and complicated and raises interesting questions. It's just inherently going to be more unsatisfying because of that.

Yeah. By the way, the movie you're talking about at Count was Despicable Me 4, I assume, not to spoil an upcoming release, but that's... That is... Oh no! This time I will not die! You mentioned to me, I don't really know what that movie is about and every trailer I see is different. And then I finally, when seeing a movie that we're about to talk about in the box office game

this week, saw the trailer for it, saw a trailer for it, which involves like the minions getting roided up and turning into like super minions. I've seen three different theatrical trailers for that movie that you could convince me are selling three entirely different films. Well, it's not even that they don't share footage. It's each one seems to present a new hook

to what the plot is. The original Despicable Me is this like fabled story of advertising where they initially were leading with like, yeah, it's about this super villain guy. And then halfway in, they started being like, this movie's about these little yellow things that are in it.

Everything else is not important. And I remember at the time, deadline and people being like, is anyone giving give a shit about these like yellow guys like remember seeing that marketing pivot and going like this is panic desperation. Like, oh, they've got some like, goopy little guys who cares. And then it was like, no, of course, it's not an empire. But then this France's economy hums along thanks to minion love. But they still aren't even about the minions enough. The only the only one in this franchise that I've seen is Minions, the Rise of Gru. Same.

In a prequel. The only one I've seen as well. It should be about the minions. Like, this is what is too much about Gru. So fucking insane to me. I am uncharmed by the minions. They say banana. I say banana. They make.

Banana Taylor Joy. Same bro. They make three Despicable Me movies. They're huge. Right. Does the first Minions happen in between Despicable Me 2 and 3? 2 and 3. OK, so they make the.

Check the lore. Right. Then people are like more minions, less of this other shit. They make the movie that's just minions. It makes a billion dollars. Right. And they put in little grew to sort of

like, yeah, we got to build up to this. Take you to point one. Here's how they meet the guy. Right. Then they go dollars and they put in little grew to sort of like, take you to 0.1. Here's how they meet the guy. Then they go back and they make Despicable Me three and everyone's like, well, you're not going to not have the minions in them, but how do you differentiate between a minions movie and Despicable Me movie with minions when these things are already becoming minions weighted? And then they go back to minions too. And they're like, well, now it's a prequel to grew. And I'm like, why are the minions movies more about grew and the despicable me movies now more about minions?

And again, then you have to start answering questions like why did the minions not help hitler? Well because Or whatever right my favorite thing in the world and now they're gonna be like going for like jordan peterson or whatever Like there's they could I don't know All know. All right. Anyway, box office game. This chair, one last thing, please Dementus. Cause he, I think is like the breakout character. He fucking rules. And he's very, he's so entertaining in this. The comment I made to Griff was to me, he feels like in this universe, the character that's reminds me the most of the world before it ended. He's not so totally warped yet, right? Like he doesn't have the future speak as much as everyone else does.

He like is out for himself. He's selfish in this way that feels like the world before everything went to shit. I really love when and you touched upon this a little bit, when he's doing a bad job at Gastown and there's a moment where they go to get gas and everything has been thrown into chaos. Like he is not doing a good job as a ruler to a point where he comes to help them, get them out,

because his legions of, you know, gas people are gonna like basically like take over the war rig. And so he like leads them out. And it, to me, I don't know, there's something about it. I liked that how like, it was like, he's just like, it's so humanistic and just like, he's like, I'm fucking up.

Like, I'm not good at this. He's not very good at it. Also the book and walking out, Ben said that to me and I said to him, he reminds me a little bit of Ricky T, the Joker, but his final sort of speech to her, the like, do you have what it takes to make it epic? He's basically saying like, the failing of these fools who surround us is they act like there are still rules,

that there's anything to uphold. Like there's any way that humanity and some sense of basic civilization can be retained or restored. The only thing that matters is being like fucking wild and doing crazy shit and living for the moment because we live in hell. And that's his dare to her. And it's so telling that like at first she's torturing him and he does not recognize her. And he is sort of glibly throwing out like redhead,

brunette, like who is your mother? None of this. And it's only when her like, you know, claw arm is revving up, when he comes to after being fully knocked out that he's like, oh my God, little D, look at what a magnificent creature you've become. Like you've become fully warped by this horrible world we live in. As a child, I like admired your purity as like, this is a way to reclaim the sense of fatherhood I

had before my child was taken from me. Now I have more respect for you because you become a monster like me. And the second he looks at her with that energy is the moment she realizes I cannot kill him That wins that's that sells his argument as correct. It's um You know seven it's you're completing the wrathful sir exactly that stuff shout out pissboy to the pissboy guy So this movie opened last weekend To well look the three day is twenty six.3 million it's a bit underwhelming everyone's basically like it's over baby pack it in well and people were saying how embarrassing is it gonna be if this movie loses to Garfield I think it

cares the original movie got lost to pitch perfect exactly is that it yes yeah but made a lot more money it's's the thing. Both Pitch Perfect 2 and Fury Road. It's not just over. It's in Morton Jover. Made a lot more money in basically the same weekend slot. That was the thing. Like if Garfield was going to beat Furiosa, people wanted Garfield to be making 50 to 60 million dollars versus both of them ending up in low 30s. I mean, Garfield performing probably more around where I figured

Garfield was going to be performing. That movie wasn't coming in mean, Garfield's performing probably more around where I figured Garfield was going to be performing. That movie wasn't coming in hot. Garfield also a prequel. Isn't it about his dad? It's about his dad who's played by Samuel L. Jackson. Big Vick? Who's a prison cat. I personally did not see the Garfield movie.

Did you see Louis Vartel's Portmanteau for the weekend? You know, the Barbenheimer Portmanteau. Please tell me. Called it Lasagna Taylor Joy. That is so much better than Garfuriosa. I've been waiting for that. So good. That's really good.

You said no one was expecting Garfield to do better. My man, Lights Camera Jackson, has for the last three months been calling that Garfield's the biggest movie of May. He's been circling the calendar, it's true. Lights Camera Jackson would be a good wasteland name You could drop like camera Jackson dressed behaving talking Exactly the way he does into this universe and you go like this is the most demented warlord I've ever We think he would thrive

40 years of positive associations. This thing's gonna be huge Obviously the number one movie that lights Cameron Jackson would work in is Seabiscuit. But this is probably number two, right? You can just see that guy in Seabiscuit, right? Playing the William H. Meesey role. Yeah, there's something like that. In a bunch of fucking-

I say, sir, your horse is a fine-looking steed. Like something like that. He would be good in that. So number one- LCJ, a Mad Max dog. Number one, Mad Max. Number two, the Garfield movie. Number three, Griffin, what is it? Number three would be Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

No, that is number four. Now that is a movie that's actually performing fairly well. Number three is if holding on slightly better than people anticipated. If just in that family movie way of like, eh, they tend to have legs. People will go see anything at a certain point in the summertime with their kids. I would assume, I was ready to assume that Garfield would absolutely just eat up all of its audience, much like Garfield eats up a plate of lasagna. If's doing fine.

But it's doing fine. Have you seen If, Kyle? I have not seen If. No, I haven't seen If. They were really cagey about screening it for people. And then I was interested reading all the like bad reviews that came out while I was at Cannes. Yes, really did not seem to like it.

People did not seem to like it. I think if it had gotten even like just sort of three out of five kind of review, you know what I mean? Kind of like, oh, it's fine. It would have done better. I do think obviously kid movies are more critic proof But the fact that this movie was basically being you know people were screaming from the rooftops that it was awful Yeah, that that's gonna ding anything. Yeah, well, yeah, if whimsy is strained There's there's hardly anything that's worse to sit through

It's made 60 million dollars in two weeks, which is not bad for a movie that looks like dog shit. No offense to IF. Maybe it's great. Probably not. King of the Planet of the Apes, though, I saw and enjoyed. I did contemplate a nap in the middle. I appreciate that it's low energy

and kind of light on set pieces for a big summer blockbuster, but that's definitely a swerve. It's kind of three on set pieces for a big summer blockbuster, but that's definitely a Swerve it's kind of three distinct movies. Yes, and I think they're not of equal quality Then terms of like it has three narrative ideas The first movie I am not interested in. The first movie when it's like these three apes and they're like we have to get our egg For the choosing or whatever. I'm just like, get me out of this YA garbage. Well, this is the thing. West Ball doing the Maze Runner movies, everyone was like,

this is kind of elevated YA. He's doing this with a little intelligence. But the Planet of the Apes movies, save for the Burton, have always been pretty heady. And now he's bringing kind of elevated YA vibes to it in the first act. And you're like, this is below what we usually get from these movies. Did you see? Yeah I don't I did see it. I don't think Kingdom of the Planet Apes is about like an interesting social idea unlike the other ones. It's got a couple.

This one is just like a you know it's a it's a familiar journey story of you know I'm the young son of a ruler and I'm sheltered and oh I guess I gonna have to grow up now because you know, everything's been destroyed. I think in the final act, it throws three big social ideas at the wall and says like, do you guys like any of these? Tell me which one you want me to build the trilogy around. Right, yeah. I'm like, I mean, let me know what you want to do with it. Now, I don't love Rise.

I don't hate it or anything. But like Rise to me was a similar movie where I was kind of like, I'm kind of in and out on this. But then when it ends, I'm like, I'm interested to see what you do with this. And then what they did with it was interesting. I love Rise save for the the Franco Pinto. Franco is kind of yellow. Well, those characters are so uninteresting. That's my problem. Like Cox and Lithgow are interesting in it.

Dawn gets the humans right, is far and away the best of the three for me, and War I like, but I don't feel as effusive about as I do about Dawn, which I think is like a perfect masterpiece of modern blockbuster filmmaking. It's not at the level of Fury Road, which is clearly the high water. Dawn's very good. It's very well done. This, I mean, I like apes movies. That's well established on this podcast. What I like is that America likes apes movies.

I like, yes. This movie came out and got okay reviews and had kind of nothing to sell it on. And people were still like, there's apes, I'll go. So I'll get off the ground. They wanted this movie to be doing better than it is. Sure, I mean, everyone wants everything to be doing better. Especially in relation to everything else.

Right. Like, I think the three sort of undeniable blockbusters, I'm not talking about profits and losses, but just in terms of them like, seeming to hit with audiences at the level that people want this year, as I said earlier, Dune, New Empire, and Kingdom of the Plane of the Apes. Like, big budget movies that are kind of working. Dune, I have to imagine, is exactly what Warner Brothers hoped would happen with this movie.

Of like, the first one did pretty well in theaters, and then since Time has been canonized, it's like a classic, it got a bunch of fucking Oscars, and now the audience is gonna be rearing to go and like double triple what the first movie did. But obviously Dune had three years, and this had nine. Right. And it's a sequel, not a prequel. Apes and Monsterverse are interesting to me and being kind of paired as franchises that kind of have like no cultural presence in between entries. And then every time a new movie comes out without

having the same kind of hype cycle as like a Marvel movie people are like Oh, yeah, I guess I like those they go see them They go in droves and then it sort of disappears again until the next one comes out Civil War also did really well, right? There's appetite for these more mid-sized movies like Civil War and challengers But obviously, you know blockbusters of the lifeblood of cinema. What were you gonna say? Yeah, sorry Well, I also think I remember, you know, blockbusters of the lifeblood of cinema. What were you going to say? Yeah, sorry. Well, I also think I remember, you know, I did this feature for the Times pre-pandemic about what will the movie business look like in 10 years?

Because it seemed like a point of uncertainty even then. And I interviewed a whole bunch of people. And truly everything that they said, or they feared would happen in 10 years, suddenly happened in the blink of an eye because of the pandemic and streaming and all that. But Kumail Nanjiani said something really interesting to me about why he thought a lot of comedies were failing in theaters and, you know, getting shuttled to streaming. He says that he thinks the average household will see four movies a year. And so those four slots really have to be reserved for movies where they're

like, I know I need to see this. And so some of those might have already been used up. And when they're looking at the summer, are they going to run out to see Furioso? Or are they like, no, I'm holding that slot for Deadpool. Yeah. Like if Deadpool, Despicable Me or Inside Out underformed, then we can like actually hit the fire alarm. But I do feel like there's been a lot of hand-wringing around like movies are dying and you're like there are hits and some of them are performing to surprising degrees, where it's more about like we're back to the old fucking Hollywood thing of nobody knows anything, and you're having to individually analyze

why this movie underperformed, versus I think at the time you were writing that feature, there was this feeling of, well, Marvel movies do well, and almost everything else flops, and that's the answer here. People don't wanna go. Well, but even back then,

there were still movies that would come out in theaters that would do well. Like, you know, like if House of Gucci had come out pre-pandemic, it would have made bang. You know, Parasite was an enormous hit. I don't think in the specialty market, especially now like Little Indies. It's really hard to once in a while. Now, they'll overperform.

But we cannot sound the alarm and make this argument that only the top tier of blockbusters is big enough to get people off the couch when fucking anyone but you made almost a hundred million dollars domestic. Which is a movie that was made to be watched on a fucking Apple watch. And so we're back to now going like there's not a clear formula to what people will go to the theaters for versus won't. I don't think it's and it's no longer just because there was all this like debate over Fall Guy, and Dave and I have had this conversation that's like, why wasn't that movie made at half the budget

level? That's number five of the box ups, just FYI. And the answer is, I think all these studios got into a headspace where they're like, if your movie doesn't cost $20 million, it needs to cost closer to $200 million, because why are people going to go see Fall Guy unless it seems to be delivering Marvel level of visuals? Right. I mean, that is my problem with that movie. They've maybe disabused themselves. They're turning into like budget hawks, but I mean, even if it were made at half this half the price, would people have gone to see Fall Guy? I don't know that they effectively sold it. With Anyone But You, TikTok helped a lot. Tremendous amount. But then also the fact that it was just a romantic comedy.

They weren't like that's romantic comedy and an action movie. That's my big thing with the fall. Right. Rare to get just romantic comedy. And fall guy was like, it's an action movie, but it's also a romantic comedy. I think sometimes people just want like the thing. I completely agree with you. Don't mix the other stuff.

Don't make a movie that's trying to be all things for all people. If you have the budget of the Fall Guy, and I'm not trying to be about it, I'm more talking about the scale that story's told on. I like the Fall Guy too, it's a good time. Yeah. Like, and it's about a stunt man and there are stunts in the movie and it's like crazy, but it's not about also basically like a criminal action adventure story. Yeah. Like it might be a little less of an overwhelming movie

that feels a little bloated at times. Oh yeah. No, I mean, it was my big complaint, but what's the JLo Josh Duhamel movie? It was like shotgun wedding where like that movie where I was like, must every rom-com have guns in it? Yes. And must every rom-com character be a crack secret agent on the side or what? Like, why does this keep happening? And it's because studio execs are like, yeah, we need to appeal to every quadrant and there needs to be action for the boys or whatever. Neither one of these exist anymore. But like within a month of each other at either the end of last year or beginning of

this year, there were there was a Netflix movie and an Amazon movie, and one was Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Moynihan, and the other one was Kayleigh Kuko and David Aiello. And both of them basically had the exact same premise of one half of a Mr. and Mrs. Smith, boring suburban couple with family, and one of them previously was- The family plan and role play.

Yeah. The two movies you're discussing, yes. And you're just like, why are these? The movies that we're all still discussing. Right, why are we still doing this fucking over and over again? These movies just feel anonymous. My biggest thing is like, Hollywood is making lots more movies for 2025.

They're doing that because they've realized that they probably cannot make money just making streaming movies. They're also realizing they they've realized that they probably cannot make money just making streaming movies. They're also realizing they need to take more chances and flyers and try weird things again. And so they are pivoting in a panic, something Hollywood has done many, many times in its existence as an industry. But like, that's why I'm kind of like 2024 is what it is.

If it sucks, that sucks for you guys. I don't really know what you're going to do. You kind of made your own bet on this one. Right. And so just deal with it. This is the business end of years of you building your model around streaming, crashing into a year of you halting all production because of strikes

that you didn't avoid. Right. And also still learning the wrong lessons. I mean, it takes a long time to make a movie, but you know what movie doesn't take a very long time to make? A romantic comedy. You know what movie genre has a ton of stars out there clamoring to do it? Like, you know, I.O., Paul Meskell, any young star, Chris Hemsworth.

Everyone's like, put me in one. Romantic comedies. You know what? Was genre just had a big hit? Romantic comedies. You could get one into theaters just had a big hit? Romantic comedies. Hey, man. You could get one into theaters by the end of the year if you wanted. Yes.

But there won't be any. I mean, I just- There'll be like one and a half, right? Like that's- It's like Project Artemis, but again, it's not just a romantic comedy. Yes. It's a very expensive romantic comedy. It's like moon landing and like all these things.

Just do a fucking romantic comedy. There's obviously an appetite. Who do we put Chris with? I don't know. Chris Hemsworth? Yeah. Who would you have put him with when Thor came out? Right, in 2011.

And he was actually most castable to be dropped into the movie. Right, when it's the sort of Hugh Jackman thing of like, okay, who's Ashley Judd right now? Like, let's just like, within minutes you are cast in a movie that's just like, you're a guy and there's a girl and now you're gonna figure it out Like who's that in 2011? I mean well also someone who should have been doing them was Jennifer Lawrence Yeah, obviously Linings playbook is a stealth rom-com, but David or Russell would never let you call it that Yeah, those are two people who are extremely well served in like straight-up comedies and rarely do them that would have been good

I mean still can think it the stars at that time are include Charlie's Theron. Obviously, he's a big actor. He's worked with that point. Amy Adams, like, you know, I guess like Elizabeth Olsen is new on the scene. Kirsten Dunst is kind of coming back. I'm trying to think of someone who isn't tiny. That's the main thing I'm trying to do right now. Kira Knightley, she's thin, but she's tall. Kira could have been fun. I'm trying to think of someone who isn't tiny. That's the main thing I'm trying to do right now. Keira Knightley, she's thin, but she's tall.

Yeah. Keira could have been fun. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. I saw the trailer for Amazon doing a teaser for a Nicholas Stoller movie that's going straight to streaming a year from now. That's Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon fighting over who has the wedding reservation for their venue

And it looks very like one-up'smanship like shit goes wrong comedy And uh, I was just like why aren't we making a fucking Reese Witherspoon? Chris Hemsworth rom-com Here's why are we putting the two of them together? Although she is also tiny. Here's what's important. It has to stand on five Christmas gifts It'd be fun. I like a good height difference. Kyle. thank you for being on the show. Thank you for having me. Kyle, thank you for being on the show. You gotta come IRL next time. Yeah. Yes, and maybe do some sort of movie that doesn't have anything to do with Australia.

The Australian desert. I feel like that's all I'm talking about. But I would love if you gave me the challenge of like a movie that couldn't be more different and we somehow rest the topic back. Anytime you have a New York trip on the horizon, let us know and we will give you a weird collection of titles that you can pick from. Maybe a rom-com. Sure. Maybe. Yes, if they make them.

Are you guys excited for this Martin Brest series? Martin Brest series is good. It's good. It's good shit. That's basically in the can. A couple left. It's good. It's good shit. Yeah. That's basically in the can. Most of it locked and loaded. Yeah. A couple left, yeah. I remember a long time ago, I hooked up with this dancer and he was like,

and I was just asking him about his job and he's like, I just came off doing this really big movie. Like this has this really huge dance sequence and like I was a part of it and it was like super lavish and you're gonna wanna see this movie. It comes out next year. And I'm like, well, what's it called? And he's like, G.

Lee. Wow. G glee. I'm not sure. I'm not sure he pronounced this. Yeah. Cool. I didn't know G.

Lee had a big dance sequence. Forgot about that. It does like the end on the boom. We'll dig in. I think that was a reshoot. Kyle. Everyone should read Blood, Sweat and Chrome if they haven't already. And in all of your work at the New York Times, you had the incredible piece that just came out around the release of Furious, so Rania Taylor-Joy said she will not talk about what she actually feels for 20 more years.

Yeah, boy. That was unusual. Everyone was DMing me being like, what is she alluding to? And I was just like, look, man, I don't know, but I think she might just be being an actor as well. These movies are tough Yeah, like actors are intense, you know I'll say this too because I don't know if we shouted at how good she is in this film enough There's the quote you got out of her where she's talking about her most satisfying moment in being an actor is when she's able to marry The emotional is something that's very technical the like dance side of Choreography and you're like, well, she is such a good fit for George Miller,

where it's like, hold on to this intense emotion, but it's about you hitting specific things by the millimeter, and your eyes moving this direction at this second, all this shit. You just see her being a perfect lead for him, and yet she still comes out of it and is like, I will spend two decades processing this with my therapist. Well, you know, it's interesting because she does love George.

Not long after I did the interview with Anya, I was doing a Zoom with George. So I did the interview with Anya. We had like a two-hour lunch in Beverly Hills at this hotel. And then I went into another room and Zoomed with George because it was the only slot he could do. And then Anya dropped in on the George interview and the way he lit

up seeing her, the way she lit up talking to him. And then when she left, he's like that smiling blonde woman. I'd like I've never seen her before. Like that, you know, he was dealing with something different. Everybody's going through something

on the set of a Mad Max movie. But it was that was an unusual moment when profiling someone for them to allude to a certain thing that they don't want to discuss. Usually if there's an actor who doesn't wanna talk about something, they wouldn't even introduce the idea of it. Right, they would just talk around it, yeah.

It was a very interesting moment. I think a lot of people are reading it as like there is a specific thing She is avoiding talking about and that was not my read on it. Who knows? Who I mean there might be but but it's up to her to I guess figure out how or If ever she'll discuss it. Well, go see Furiosa Mad Max saga in theaters if you're listening to the show support weird BlinkCheck movies. Yes instead of Guess if is also a weird BlinkCheck movie The big takeaway here for your local if go see if go see if everyone please go see if

Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate review and subscribe Thank you to Marie Barty for helping to produce the show, A.J. McKeon, Alex Barron for our editing, Pat Reynolds, Joe Bowen for our artwork, Liam Montgomery, the great American all for a theme song, JJ Birch for taking a big ol' nap. That's not true, he's prepping a bunch of dossiers. He's doing work. But he didn't have to do anything for this one. Tune in next week for the start of Podverly Hills Cast,

a series on the films of Martin Brest. Wow. Going in style with James Urbaniak, returning guest. Good app. Talking about old timey actors, a perfect fit. Of course you can go to blankcheckpod.com for links to some real nerdy shit, including our Patreon, blank check special features,

where we do film series commentaries and other sort of bonus stuff. We'll be covering Martin Brest's first film and short film, Hot Tamaro's and Hot Dogs for Guggen over there. But also we're rounding out the Ninja Turtles, our time with the turtles. And as always, Yes.

Piss Boy Innocent.