'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' and 'The Garfield Movie' briefings

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

3 (out of 4)

            Despite the twilight years, George Miller has been maxing out hard between his most recent efforts, if you don’t count Happy Feet Two — between Mad Max: Fury Road, Three Thousand Years of Longing and now Furious: A Mad Max Saga, it’s kind of insane how much vehement electricity is retained in these films vibrant, lucid frames. It’s odd that even with only Fury Road for comparison, the 80-year-old’s latest still somehow feels like its almost from a different hand, like Miller passed the beloved, unsullied series on to some digitally minded hybrid of Lucas, Rodriguez and especially the Wachowskis — Furiosa is wild and consistently inconsistent, visually cut from a much cleaner shade of crazy, yet the world is so much more grotesque than you’re used to, full of maggots and nipple rings. This advancement of even more sensory, kinetic delirious craft doesn’t make this anything less than authentically Australian or somehow unworthy of the Mad Max legacy of truly dreamlike, depthless, unimaginable yarns of future mythos, all the fire, blood, dust and diesel one can handle from the derelicts down under.

I’ve fallen asleep on this movie twice, and it’s because Miller can send you to your own desperate dreamland like no one else. The editing is crisp and roomy, the storytelling is even more roundabout and freewheeling than the original trilogy can prepare you for — for about an hour longer than the usual Saga, the structure is the only thing apart from the cartoon-caliber Fury Road aesthetic keeping Furiosa on its own slightly lesser echelon, this oxymoronic attempt to make the slightest entry the most epic. It all makes something of a more than complete world-building spin-off out of a cinematic franchise that never felt the need to explain itself or it’s situation, let alone bother to care about any continuity between each installment. Even in between my first-viewing naps I could glean how much politicking and pulling from every corner of post-pockyclips lore was happening, as the fifth Miller/Max motion picture incorporates the original’s simple revenge rev-up (and sweetness upended), the patience and payoff of Road Warrior’s iconography, Thunderdome’s gonzo, Spielbergian giddiness and of course Fury Road’s rabid, modernized, hard-R blockbustering about. All we needed was Mel Gibson, which would’ve beat a pointless blink-and-it's-done Max cameo considering there’s already diet Mad Max (Tom Burke) as Praetorian Jack.

Anya Taylor-Joy, boy if I was only in 60% of my own movie, I’d bring the little girl (Alyla Browne) on the press tour or else feel the guilt of undue credit! She does her best Charlize (and Max) impression, mostly by looking the part with occasional digital assistance and also saying very, very few words. Australian native Chris Hemsworth inherits the film's charisma, and with a protruding prosthetic schnoz he’s absolutely ridiculous but never winking the way the later Thor movies would have him. There’s a new Joe, and a host of other figures vying for the memory halls of turnpike biker pageantry (I ONLY ANSWER TO THE OCTOBOSS) but there’s nothing close to the The Nightrider or Master Blaster here, no way, though it at least contributes to an already full catalogue of memorable psycho-gearhead-gangsters. I can’t believe this eighty-year-old thought he was gonna make more of these in the even that this DIDN’T flop so very hard over Memorial Day Weekend. But dismissive audience don't deserve better than even the weakest in the Mad Max series, which still amounts to a handsome if uneven excursion into peak apocalyptic franchises, Apes be damned and that’s a good set of movies overall… Like Sam Raimi with Evil Dead (well before the 2010s), the Mad Max movies are just so strange, intimate, home-grown and unfettered by commercial concern. Even if Furiosa is the least of a fantastic series, that still makes it the best movie of the summer and then some, believe it or not (had Hit Man hit theaters for real there'd be a different story).

As someone who likes Fury Road a lot but never jumped aboard the ‘best of the century’ brigade, I will say if you crave ceaseless excitement Furiosa will not satisfy — there’s not an action sequence proper til an hour in, but when they get to the fireworks, despite the more insistent CGI (Fury Road had its share) the film is still a singular visual delight, like if The Wachowskis jumped directly from Speed Racer to this, the energy is that pinpoint and utterly berserk. Even if it only amounts to a meager but marginally mighty companion piece to Fury Road’s stunning display of pyrotechnic, acrobatic, automatic immediacy, this Mad Max Saga makes you hope the series either stops in its tracks right here or never makes its way into other hands, at least not of those in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Garfield Movie

1 ½ (out of 4)

            When I was younger and dumber and thought I was funny or artistic, I wanted to make comic strips, or I should say I did after I won a contest in third grade wherein you had to fill in Garfield’s thought bubble with anything at all. He was smiling and reading a book on the couch, and having heard the word onomatopoeia recently in a movie or TV show (Hey Arnold! maybe?), I thought it’d be a clever juxtaposition to fill in the spelling bee answer and “wow I’m surprised the Teletubbies know that word” even though what, are there Teletubby novels? Anyway I was one of 15 or so out of 1500 (or was it 15000?) nationwide, so I won some gifts and books and started to read strips — never had the comic books obsession. Through the years it became one of those weird collections one attracts and accumulates, like Criterion’s for me now or the Pokémon cards I stopped collecting probably around the same time as Garfield knick-knacks.

I regularly enjoyed what Jim Davis’ delivered, particularly the earlier stuff — by the time I started checking the funny pages I liked the most recent compilations but thought the current daily comics were a little lesser. The old Garfield was really fat, had no skinny legs and the tiniest of eyeballs. The modern output just doesn’t compare, and in general I realized Calvin and Hobbes was the finest of the medium, particularly because of its lack of commercialization to go with the wit, insight and beautiful artwork. In contemporary stuff, Pearls Before Swine perfected the snarky talking animals thing for the newspaper comics by the time it picked up a groove.

Regardless of 2004’s Garfield or 2006’s A Tale of Two Kitties, I don’t feel as though my childhood was ruined by The Garfield Movie, not that the billionaire merchandising magnate Davis would give a fuck anyway. All I know is Chris Pratt is no Bill Murray even on that washed up fart's laziest Monday, trained animals are more impressive than animation of Illumination ilk and I’d rather have a plot of Odie and Garfield becoming friends during the course of some adventure (or destroy Dickens with prince and the pauper shit) over some mishap of farm animal romance, trite daddy issues as emotional tethers and endless non-sequitur gags. At least Odie's still the bro who knows better than his bully, master, co-pet, though the poor, lovable beagle is underutilized.

Even to mix my one early nostalgia with my current kind (though Spy Kids probably paved the way), all the Mission: Impossible references are too much — despite Ving Rhames playing an anthropomorphized cow, he nonetheless remains the tech guy behind the middle act heist sequence. There's a moving train climax, Tom Cruise references and they even using the M:I theme overtly, it’s like being trapped in that one parody moment from Shrek 2 for 30 minutes. It was probably even worse than Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget's own heist-lampooning jail breaks, but at least there are some personal stakes — Garfield has no motivation here, nothing, it's not an origin story and outside of cute references in the film’s final moments to, you know, a more accurate, interesting display of what Garfield media is (imaginary scenarios, at least something with NERMAL PLEASE...) this movie is just a quell-your-kids affair and a shoddy one at that — Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4, as money-back-guaranteed general audience entertainment, will lap circles around this crap financially if not critically.

This isn’t Disney or Dreamworks, it's DNEG whose only other full feature on their own is Ron's Gone Wrong (no comment) plus a few assists for Universal and Paramount. All I know is this fits every definition of weak children's cinema — The Garfield Movie is visually textureless, kinetically exhausting, of course soundtracked by Pharrell or worse and plagued by the dullest wisecracks I could imagine thought-bubbling out of the world’s most sardonic kitty. It’s like my seven-year-old self wrote this shit for school.