Post #76: Television, Television, and Steve McQueen

Lo and behold summer has returned and holy triple digits, Batman it is roasty. But hey, Summer TV is on, so at least there's that. Aquarius is still great, and I'm trying to finish Last Ship so I can watch the new season, Graceland is back and Dominion starts next week! Yay! And Dominion has thirteen episodes this season and not six, so it should carry me right into the fall TV season. And on one of my wacky rabbit ear sub-channels, Police Surgeon is on every night! It is honestly the worst show ever made and only got four seasons because Palmolive-Colgate wanted an entire show for just their commenrcials and it's my favorite! Dr. Locke is so handsome and the plot is so corny and it's Canadian and it's awesome. It's perfect for trying to eat a popscicle before it melts and there is nothing else on. The ridiculous plots are so fun and so mindless. Last night this guy was trying to sell an entire attache case of heroin and then on the other episode a guy was in deep with some loan sharks who had the most seventies-tastic mustaches.
Poldark stared on Masterpeice last week, and it's got the exceptionally attractive Aiden Turner as the titular character and there is nothing else on so it's great. Crimson Field, which is on after Poldark is legitemately fantastic, and it's got some Downton peeps and Hermione Norris from MI-5, and some cute doctors. But it is really good, even if there is nothing else on.
Since there is nothing on TV (besides Police Surgeon) I've been watching Route 66. I scored the first two seasons on Ebay for $25 (yay!) and I love it. Martin Milner and George Maharis are swell, as Tod and Buz, repectively. The trouble those two boys get into in that Corvette is so entertaining, and sometimes still really relevant and poignant. There's even an episode set in Reno, NV ("Like a Motherless Child", S1Ep20). It Features the Mapes Casino, located at N. Virginia st and First Street, which was demolished in 2000. Someday I'm going to do an ultimate road trip and visit all the cities Tod and Buz (and later Linc, played by Glenn Corbett) visited. Probably not in a Corvette, but that's ok.
This week, my new favorite thing ever is Steve McQueen. I watched Bullitt and The Blob, and I've got six more of his movies sitting in my stack. I know this is a total cliche, but that man is cool. Super dead, but still super cool. I have never seen a man look so good in a cardigan as he does in the red one in Bullitt. I'm going to make one for myself. It's beautiful, even in that wacky burgundy red color. And The Blob is the greatest, shlockiest movie I have ever seen. And I love that even at 27, he looked like a teenager, and his girlfriend looked 35.  Everything about that movie is magic.
"Time starts now" - Bullitt
-D.

Post #75: Some Thoughts on the New Mad Max

This post contains serious spoilers for Mad Max: Fury Road. Go watch it and then come back. You have been warned.
Holy Mutant Vehicles, Batman! Mad Max was flipping amazing! From the crazy rides to the barren postapocalyptic wasteland, this movie was insanely awesome. I love Tom Hardy and Nicholas Hoult, so I'm a little predisposed there, But even Charlize Theron (who I'm not a super big fan of) was good.
On the surface, the plot was standard apocalypse fare, but  it was way more complicated than crazy warlord runs the postapocalyptic death world and people make a run for freedom. All of the characters, even the really super evil bad guys had interesting motives, and all of the motives at their most basic were about survival. Max's maint motive is survival, Furiosa wants redemption (which she tries to achieve by helping others survive), the wives/breeders of the crazy warlord Immortan Joe want to escape him and survive, even crazy-flakes Immortan Joe wants to survive, and is using whatever means necessary, and by that, I mean taking five wives to have babies for him and turning young men into crazy cult members, like Nux, who (spoilers) doesn't survive.
There are plenty of blog posts devoted to the feminist undertones of Mad Max, and I encourage you to go read them (this one from NPR is a good place to start), I will simply say this film had some of the most bad-ass, real women I have ever seen. And I will give ten more points for the fact that Max and Furiosa (and the ladies they were with) worked to each other's strengths, whether male or female. No one ever seemed helpless. Especially the women.
The crazy car battles were awesome. The mutant vehicles were awesome, there are some super cool articles about the cars, mechanics, and the guitar player who made it all awesome. The theatre shaking explosions were awesome. The fact that "Dies Iae" from Verdi's requiem was not only used as part of the soundtrack but also as the underlying theme of the whole soundtrack was awesome.This is a movie I will buy when it's released on DVD. 

There were only two things that jolted me from the movie trance. 

The first was the water thing. I live in a drought state, so water is a hot topic right now, and there were moments where I squirmed a little as water was wasted. The parts where the water was wasted by crazy flakes warlord Immortan Joe didn't bug me That's a crazy flakes warlord thing to do. It was the bit where Furiosa and Co. have escaped (sort of) and Max find them. They are hosing each other off and when Max shows up, they just let it run. I'm not sure how long they expected to be on the road, but I imagine you would want to conserve water so you don't die while trekking across a desert wasteland. There's only so much in that tank. Later in the movie they explain that Immortan Joe and Co. have been drilling for water, and that there's plenty of it, which also begs the question, if you are being held to have children because you are exceptionally healthy and it's in Immortan Joe's best interests to keep you hydrated, it seems unlikely that you would behave as if you hadn't seen water in ages, the way Max does. 

The second thing was the "blood bag" thing with Nux and Max. In terms of apocalyptic power and terror, it's brilliant to use people as walking blood banks. And I love that they took into account that keeping Max's body elevated above Nux would keep the blood from flowing back, similar to the concept of keeping the placenta above the baby when you deliver a baby in a terrible 'help is a billion hours out' scenario. Max is a fairly big dude, (Tom Hardy is about 5'9", if you were wondering) and in the movie is declared 'High Octane', implying that he has 'crazy blood', so I'm going to be generous and say he maybe has 12 pints of blood in his body in peak condition (the average adult has 8-10). Let's say it takes 30-45 minutes to directly tranfuse 1 pint of blood between Max and Nux. Max and Nux had been there for while, so Max is down at least 1 pint, which if you factor in that Max is probably dehydrated, should knock him out. But it doesn't, Max is high octane, whatever. So he keeps losing blood as Nux and his buddies chase down Furiosa, and then they are involved in a high velocity accident, so at this point he's most likely down two or three (at three pints, you are at risk of dying without immediate attention) pints, and Max still manages to carry Nux and a car door. And then a day-and-a-half later he gives Furiosa probably three more pints, and considering he's still slightly dehydrated and wouldn't have been able to properly replenish the blood he lost, he should have passed out, if not died. So that bugged me, but otherwise, it was easy to get lost in the movie.

A thought on Aquarius - The dialogue on this show is great ("What are you going to with that? Pistol whip a midget?" - Hodiak on a fellow detectives new secret gun). Barring of course the fact that they'd be cursin' sailors off the ship, the way they talk to each other is pretty realistic. 

"It's not the load that breaks you down. It's the way you carry it."- C.S. Lewis

-D. 

P.S. The Popular Mechanics review of Mad Max is a good read too, f you're interested.