Because when I finished this series on 1995 I totally forgot to review two of the biggest films from that year, and I wanted to fill the gap…
The criminally conservative Braveheart is a tough sell in 2015, although it plainly isn’t so tough for director-star Mel Gibson. For all the damage he has done to both his own reputation and, more importantly, human progress in the ensuing decades, he is a passionate filmmaker, and in all three of his directed features, his love for cinema shows through. Questionable, problematic love that tends to hurt his films as much as it helps them, but a bastardized form of love nonetheless. In Braveheart, you find love in the luminous, misty myth cinematography by John Toll – which captures Scotland as it exists in myth more than reality and does the lion’s share of the work to overcome the film’s relentless problems with historical accuracy. You find love in Gibson’s grossly fetishistic, awestruck joy to observe men in the primal ballet of hacking limbs away from one another. You find love in his bald, open-hearted treatment of the Wars of Scottish Independence through the lens of a grandstanding 1950s Douglas Sirk melodrama, where any and all emotions are excuses to lose oneself to inhibition. Mel Gibson is many things, but he is not a cautious man, nor a cautious director. A Mel Gibson film goes big, or it goes home. Continue reading
It isn’t difficult to find issue with Beyond Thunderdome, nor is it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of the problems: Hollywood money, and the desire to go big or go home. Both things that Miller used like a sledgehammer in Fury Road 30 years later to wonderful effectiveness, but which here see him step up and trip over the need to focus on a plot that doesn’t much go anywhere. The pure cinema appeal of the series is certainly lost (with Fury Road, Miller managed to go big without inducing a case of the talkies), but it doesn’t do well to overly criticize something for simply having a more elaborate story. Still, admittedly, the focus on “plot” for Beyond Thunderdome sacrifices the queasy, nihilistic immediacy of the original Max and the off-kilter humor and the implacable malaise hanging over The Road Warrior, a malaise brought on precisely by the fact that the film never much “went” anywhere plot wise and established, instead, a feeling of stagnancy.
When we last left him, former police office Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) lost his family and his best friend, and had fulfilled a most unfulfilling form of revenge on the now lawless highways of the Australian outback. He had lost and repaid the loss only to realize that there was nothing to be won back. When we last left him, there was nothing left for him but the empty road.
Thirty six years later, with the release of the grandly, boisterously cinematic carnival opera of Mad Max: Fury Road, it is difficult to peer back through the looking glass and glimpse the humble origins of the Mad Max fiction. It is difficult to remember that, for all its commercial and critical success, the 1979 release of Mad Max was nothing more than a budget of 400,000 dollars (a paltry sum then and now) and one of the great modern cinematic visualists doing everything they could together to disturb, provoke, and ultimately, to entertain and thrill. It is difficult to remember how intimately inhuman the original Mad Max is, how nonchalantly brutal and matter-of-factly nihilistic it is in its almost impressionist depiction of apocalypse and social malaise propped up by stunning, startling car chases of unquenchable viciousness. It is also difficult, in lieu of the great majesty of the second film in the series, Mad Max 2:the Road Warrior, to remember how effective the original grinding house classic of action entertainment is to this day. 
The Long Take 