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Movie Review: Furiosa A Mad Max Saga

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For the latest Mad Max movie “Furiosa A Mad Max Saga” the most impressive parts of this film have nothing to do with the screenplay or the acting. This movie is all about sand dunes, old beat-up cars, dune buggies, tractor trailers, and insane special effects. This movie was shot in the deserts and barren locations of Austrailia in the hot sun, where filming had to be a day by day nightmare, of cars breaking down and sand getting into the engines and transmissions of all the vehicles that were driven hard and destroyed within this story. The heat for the actors during so many hours of filming had to be extremely difficult to work in, reminding all of us who are movie fans that movie making is very often not the easy road many think it is most of the time.

This movie stars Anya Taylor-Joy as the lead character Furiosa, who starts as a young girl who loses her mother to a group of criminals and animals. She then grows up to be a great fighter who battles insane gangs in a world that is rapidly coming to an end. Her nemesis is an insane evil character Dr. Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth. Unfortunately, the story is boring in too many areas and once again, this movie is way too long at 2 hours and 28 minutes.

This is yet another example of special effects and action scenes over a great screenplay – which is always the hardest thing to accomplish within any effort to produce and direct a new movie. The “Mad Max” name recognition is the reason why the producers think “who cares about the story, lets create explosions and car crashes in a huge desert, nobody cares about the story”.

I have never been fan of any of the Mad Max movies, often wondering why anyone likes a movie like this, with characters who are dirty and disgusting and barely alive in a world that is barely worth living in.

The Rotten Tomatoes high ratings of 89% – once again – make no sense, with my rating of 60% and a big pass for this film.

Movie Review: Back to Black

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The problem with being hugely successful at a young age, especially in the show business industry is if you realize that you are extremely depressed, even though you are world-famous, rich, and have won several awards – the only place you can go is down. This has happened to far too many celebrities in the music industry, including Elvis, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. Most recently the downturn of the life of Brittany Spears has been almost daily celebrity news for years.

The new movie/biopic “Back to Black” is about the life and tragic death of Amy Winehouse, who died in July 2011 at only 27 years old. Her tragic and untimely death was after she had a huge hit album, received 6 Grammy Awards, and was world famous and wealthy. Despite great success, what Amy really wanted to be married and have children. From Amy’s perspective, her world famous career had her believe that it was all causing her to miss out on what she wanted the most.

Like Whitney Houston, Amy’s alcohol and drug abuse was caused by dating and then marrying the exact wrong man, who caused her nothing but frustration and misery. Amy’s only way of coping with her personal life was to drink heavily, which eventually caused her to die of alcohol poisoning at the young age of 27 – after being sober for a long period of time after rehab. Losing her mother from lung cancer was another huge cause of pain in Amy’s life and despite this, Amy continued to chain smoke non stop throughout this story.

This movie stars Marisa Abela as Amy, Lesley Manville as Amy’s mother Cynthia and Eddie Marsan as Amy’s father Mitch. Abela’s acting and singing in this movie is very good, making the overal quality of story, more unfortunate, wasting what otherwise would have been a more recognized acting performance.

The reason for the low critical score of only 36% for this film is that the screenplay was not worthy of Amy Winehouse’s life story. There were too many boring and unnecessary diversions and depressing scenes of Amy’s life and struggles and not enough on her singing career and musical performances. There were holes in the story, especially with the details on why her husband went to jail. A better screenplay should give equal time to a young woman who skyrocketed to fame and fortune so early in life along with the downsides that far too often follow the very few in the world to seem to be so lucky and have it all.

My rating is not as low as the very low critical ratings of only 36, with a 70% and a marginal recommendation.

Movie Review: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

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The latest installment of the 10-movie Planet of the Apes movies, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is another one in the series that seems more like a compilation of scenes with Apes and Humans, running for their lives, trying to kill each other with reminders of the first movie, “Planet of the Apes”, released in 1968. This new movie is supposed to be a prequel of the original movie and there are several references at the end of this movie, inside a cave that have many reminders of the original film.

There is nothing in these two hours that we all have not seen before, with a story that seemed to go nowhere and an ending that at best was illogical. From the original story, Apes are now the intelligent species with the implication that this was caused by a nuclear war. In this film, there is mention of a man-made virus that destroyed the intelligence and speaking skills of Humans and made Apes intelligent – not a nuclear war.

One of the main characters in this movie is named Nova, who can talk, but the Nova character in the original Planet of the Apes could not talk. So the woman in this film named Nova, is by coincidence not the woman named Nova in the original movie that is supposed to be the sequel to this movie? This is another example of this illogical screenplay.

This movie has mostly unknown actors, with the exception of William H. Macy who plays a human named Trevathan – who is part of a scene with Nova at the end of this story, that for me, made absolutely no sense.

This movie is also way too long at 2 hours and 25 minutes, and way too boring and slow in too many places.

As far as so many Planet of the Apes movies, there should be a documentary made about the life of any actor who has to endure hours of makeup application and removal, every day for 12+ hours a day, wearing an extremely hot costume for months. All of these movies have always been a bonanza for makeup artists for decades since the release of the original film. I would find a documentary about the making of these Ape movies more interesting than the majority of the movies themselves – including this one.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are too high 80%, with my rating 70% and a marginal pass.