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Furiosa (again!)
Went to see Furiosa again, this time with Austin, and aided by us having rewatched Fury Road together as our date night last week. On the way walking back, Austin spoke anathama by saying "I think I liked that better than Fury Road" and I managed to not be a complete asshole and instead of decrying him on the spot, said "huh, art sure is subjective, I think I disagree" and then we've had a very merry 45 minutes or so debating the relative merits and flaws of both.
(this is, to be clear, comparing creme brulee and baked alaska, everything is good and fancy and probably on fire at some point.)
Anyways, spoilers ho! All these thoughts are gonna be jumbled together.
I think the biggest difference between them is that Fury Road is a very short and straightforward story of escape (taking place over like...a week max?) while Furiosa is literal years of character building and vignettes, and that makes for very different pacing and very different kinds of stories.
Fury Road is a story _about women_ and it presents women having interiority in a way I feel like I have basically never seen otherwise. This is a huge part of what is so important about it. As I quipped to Austin "I'm not even positive Furiosa passes the Bechdel test".
(I'm not positive, and as always, the Bechdel Test is not the be-all-end-all of feminism in film and shouldn't really be applied to individual movies so much as the broader trend. But it is disappointing?)
((Oh wait, Furi and Valkyrie talk in the opening scene about peaches, and I suppose Mary Jabassa talking to Furi about escape is not strictly about men.))
Still though, in Fury Road you get multiple women with different and distinct (albeit overlapping) growth and stories. Austin notes that in the Fury Road Art Book we were reading last week, it talks about how the actresses who played the wives practiced moving together to emphasize how they were always so close, and he started to say it makes them seem like a single character.
At which point I named each one and emphasized what their own separate stories are --Toast is the only one I think who gets shortchanged on character development, but she sorta makes up for it by coming in with more competence than the others. But Capable has Nux, Dag has The Keeper of the Seeds, and Cheedo has the whole magnificent growth of constantly wanting to run back to Joe, and finally doing so as bait to drag Furiosa up and able to stab him.
(Splendid gets shortchanged as well, her story cut off halfway through, but it almost feels like we are seeing her own phenomenal character growth that has already happened, whatever it took to get her to rally the others and listen to Furiosa and believe in their journey.)
Furiosa is a movie about _a_ woman. And it's really neat because she's not a sexy lamp1 despite how badly everyone else wants her to be. But...after the first thirty minutes of the movie, she's it.
Pivoting some, I fucking love Dementus as a character so much. He's so rich and interesting and chaotic. Austin pointed out that he is clearly still with it --he got his empty water bottle and his immediate reaction was not "oh shit, I miscounted water" it was immediately "something is wrong". I love his ~theatrics~.
He's clearly powerful as fuck, he has enough to pull in a quite dedicated gang, he can keep his own history man and court jester (HE HAS A FUCKING COURT JESTER MY BABES). But he's not so good that he can always keep cohesion --one of his side gangs straight up abandons him, the town he is ruling is prone to riots. It's such a contrast to Immortan Joe's power, which feels more traditional, more mature, and also just...more dull?
"Make it epic" like _oh god_ even at the end he is just in total thrall to The Drama Of It All.
I lightly cosplayed him tonight --really substantially more "inspired by" than actually made, and I'm kinda thinking about doing a more thorough version. Making the Red Dementus or better yet, Dark Dementus cloak would be fun as hell.
Both times I saw Furiosa, I appreciated very much figuring out the scene where Dementus is creeping along while dumping huge amounts of gasoline before him. Is he showing off? He's so rich he can pave the roads with oil? No, he's just ensuring that the dust won't rise behind him and give away his position!
(And then the counter-subterfuge of the Citadel sending off cars to drag huge rakes and make disproportionate dust.)
Watching the last scene with Furi and Jack is harder when you know it's coming, dang.
I certainly have more things to say, but I have gotten very tired and reached my word count. Goodnight!
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Some movies have a woman in them who you could pluck out and replace with a sexy lamp and it would make no difference.
(this is, to be clear, comparing creme brulee and baked alaska, everything is good and fancy and probably on fire at some point.)
Anyways, spoilers ho! All these thoughts are gonna be jumbled together.
I think the biggest difference between them is that Fury Road is a very short and straightforward story of escape (taking place over like...a week max?) while Furiosa is literal years of character building and vignettes, and that makes for very different pacing and very different kinds of stories.
Fury Road is a story _about women_ and it presents women having interiority in a way I feel like I have basically never seen otherwise. This is a huge part of what is so important about it. As I quipped to Austin "I'm not even positive Furiosa passes the Bechdel test".
(I'm not positive, and as always, the Bechdel Test is not the be-all-end-all of feminism in film and shouldn't really be applied to individual movies so much as the broader trend. But it is disappointing?)
((Oh wait, Furi and Valkyrie talk in the opening scene about peaches, and I suppose Mary Jabassa talking to Furi about escape is not strictly about men.))
Still though, in Fury Road you get multiple women with different and distinct (albeit overlapping) growth and stories. Austin notes that in the Fury Road Art Book we were reading last week, it talks about how the actresses who played the wives practiced moving together to emphasize how they were always so close, and he started to say it makes them seem like a single character.
At which point I named each one and emphasized what their own separate stories are --Toast is the only one I think who gets shortchanged on character development, but she sorta makes up for it by coming in with more competence than the others. But Capable has Nux, Dag has The Keeper of the Seeds, and Cheedo has the whole magnificent growth of constantly wanting to run back to Joe, and finally doing so as bait to drag Furiosa up and able to stab him.
(Splendid gets shortchanged as well, her story cut off halfway through, but it almost feels like we are seeing her own phenomenal character growth that has already happened, whatever it took to get her to rally the others and listen to Furiosa and believe in their journey.)
Furiosa is a movie about _a_ woman. And it's really neat because she's not a sexy lamp1 despite how badly everyone else wants her to be. But...after the first thirty minutes of the movie, she's it.
Pivoting some, I fucking love Dementus as a character so much. He's so rich and interesting and chaotic. Austin pointed out that he is clearly still with it --he got his empty water bottle and his immediate reaction was not "oh shit, I miscounted water" it was immediately "something is wrong". I love his ~theatrics~.
He's clearly powerful as fuck, he has enough to pull in a quite dedicated gang, he can keep his own history man and court jester (HE HAS A FUCKING COURT JESTER MY BABES). But he's not so good that he can always keep cohesion --one of his side gangs straight up abandons him, the town he is ruling is prone to riots. It's such a contrast to Immortan Joe's power, which feels more traditional, more mature, and also just...more dull?
"Make it epic" like _oh god_ even at the end he is just in total thrall to The Drama Of It All.
I lightly cosplayed him tonight --really substantially more "inspired by" than actually made, and I'm kinda thinking about doing a more thorough version. Making the Red Dementus or better yet, Dark Dementus cloak would be fun as hell.
Both times I saw Furiosa, I appreciated very much figuring out the scene where Dementus is creeping along while dumping huge amounts of gasoline before him. Is he showing off? He's so rich he can pave the roads with oil? No, he's just ensuring that the dust won't rise behind him and give away his position!
(And then the counter-subterfuge of the Citadel sending off cars to drag huge rakes and make disproportionate dust.)
Watching the last scene with Furi and Jack is harder when you know it's coming, dang.
I certainly have more things to say, but I have gotten very tired and reached my word count. Goodnight!
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Some movies have a woman in them who you could pluck out and replace with a sexy lamp and it would make no difference.