Wednesday, March 20, 2013

The Duck's Guts

Mad Max (1979)
directed by George Miller
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Carnegie Library

Stone (1974)
directed by Sandy Harbutt
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

I tried to figure out something interesting to say about Stone that a guy named Mick hasn't already covered on IMDb (his one and only review), but I couldn't. When I read about the movie's influence on Mad Max, I walked up to the library to make it a double feature. And I'm glad I did!

It's an obvious double feature, but a nice contrast between good feelings and a great movie. Stone features pretty girls, burger joints, and motorcycle races in the summer sun. The plot defers to this holy trinity at least three out of every four minutes. "When you're 18, off your nut on drugs," writes Mick, "and that Z1 starts up with the baffles removed at the beginning of the movie, it's mind blowing!"

In my next life, I'll do it right. But my grandmother baked me a cake on my 18th birthday, and I missed the boat on Stone. I'm just too old.

But no one's ever too old for Mad Max, the best title for anything since The Great Gatsby. I realized, for the first time, that all of Ozu's movies are shot from the same perspective as a roller coaster. George Miller is an Ozu fan, but he corrects for speed.

The dystopia of Mad Max is less the expected post-apocalyptic wasteland than a recognizable rurality. People still eat in cafes and get their cars fixed by mechanics. Families take vacations. If you love the desert, it's beautiful. If you love words? Toecutter, scoot jockey, hoon.

Toecutter is an incredible villain, all charm. You think that he'll get the best of pretty Jessie in the forest  - that fairy tale forest, improbably large, between the farm and the beach - but he doesn't. She makes it to the water and back again. You think he'll get her then, by the barn. But the old woman saves her, Rachel Cooper gone to Australia.

But then they hit the highway. And Max Rockatansky is somewhere else, too slow. George Miller was a surgeon before he directed Mad Max. He saw a lot of death and he wanted to make a picture about the dangers of the open road.