Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Listen All! This is the Truth of It.

I haven’t had a great deal of luck with the Mad Max series, but like a Band-Aid, it’s best to just do them all as quickly as possible and move one. I felt that the first two were entirely overrated, but the second one was much more watchable. And though today’s Mad Max movie is the lowest rated of the series, Rotten Tomatoes and I have been at opposites over the series so far, so it makes me hopeful. Well, there’s only one way to find out. I must review Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, written and directed by George Miller, co-written by Terry Hayes, co-directed by George Ogilvie, and starring Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Angelo Rossitto, Paul Larsson, Bruce Spence, Angry Anderson, Helen Buday, Tom Jennings, Robert Grubb, Frank Thring, and Hedwin Hodgeman.

Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) makes his way to a small, sleazy community in the middle of the wasteland called Bartertown. On the surface, the town is run by Aunty Entity (Tina Turner), but the electricity is controlled by Master (Angelo Rossitto) and his muscle Blaster (Paul Larsson), who maintains his control by placing embargoes on the energy to show who is actually in control. Aunty hires Max to kill Blaster, leaving Master powerless and under her thumb. Max challenges Blaster to a fight in the titular Thunderdome and defeats him, but he refuses to kill him when he realizes that he’s mentally disabled. Everyone else is not so kind and they kill Blaster, but decide to exile Max into the wasteland for reneging on their deal.

As I suspected, I appreciated this movie more than I liked any of the other movies in the Mad Max series. Rotten Tomatoes and I will forever be at odds on this. The story of this movie was nothing special, but it was coherent and more along the lines of what I expected. It’s pretty much just a straight forward action movie. As little as I cared for the stories in the other movies, I did take issue with the fact that this movie seemed to completely disregard the history of the series. Road Warrior ends saying that it was the last time any of them saw Max, that Jedediah took over as the leader of the tribe, and that the feral kid took over after his death. The very first thing this movie does is have Jedediah and his son rob Max, and they see him a few other times later. So it wasn’t the last time they saw him, apparently. Also, Jedediah is a pretty shitty leader because the tribe is never seen, even though he is a few times, so he’s at least neglecting his duties. And I’d even say it was unlikely that the feral kid would take over for the former leader when that leader has a lineage. So fuck that last movie, I guess. I mean, I agree with that sentiment, but they’re the ones building on that legacy. They should show respect for the movies that came before them. The next time I got mad at the movie was at Max himself. When he defeated Blaster and stopped before killing him, my anger was twofold. The first problem was that he refused to do it. Why?! Okay sure, he does have a mongoloid baby face. That would add a level of emotional difficulty. But he was just trying to kill you. And if you let him back up, he will probably try to do it again. Secondly, that you turn to Aunty Entity and proclaim, “This wasn’t part of the deal!” What are you talking about?! The deal was for you to kill Blaster. That is EXACTLY the deal! Verbatim! Technically, I guess there was a third problem with that situation in that the fight was super goofy. Two mother fuckers fighting a serious battle to the death bouncing around one of those spherical jungle gyms on rubber bands? That is the definition of badass. Or the opposite. I’m not entirely sure right now. The movie actually found a way to get goofier when Max shows up at the village of the tribe of kids, but mainly because it felt like it was becoming Hook. Granted, Hook came a long time after this movie, but it was also a comedy/family movie. Not a post-apocalyptic action movie.

I really have nothing to say about the performances in this movie. They weren’t bad and they weren’t fantastic, but none even bothered to give me any material to make jokes about. Tina Turner did fine enough, but the highlight of her contribution to the movie was that “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” song. Also (and I’m not entirely sure why) I found Helen Buday strangely attractive. I’ll have to look into that.

I thought Beyond Thunderdome was the best of the Mad Max movies, but I also don’t really get the appeal of the series. The story remained nothing special, but it was at least more coherent and more in line with what I’d expect out of an action movie. The action was good enough, but I find the rubber band jungle gym fight to be leaning more towards goofy than anything else. I can’t honestly recommend any of the Mad Max series, but this one was the better of the group. They could well have been epic when they came out, but I don’t think they’ve held up. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome gets “Congratulations! You’re the first to survive the audition!” out of “Two men enter, one man leave!”

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What’s Love Got to Do with It? (1993)

Go Straight to Hell, Ike

Lest we jump to the conclusion that I’m a racist, allow me to assure you that I had a hankering to watch today’s movie long before it was requested of me to watch The Bodyguard.  I didn’t just watch The Bodyguard and say to myself, “Black people are very similar, and this movie reminds me of another movie about a black singer.”  It had simply been a really long time since the last time I had watched today’s movie, and talks between my roommate and I had driven us to want to rewatch it.  I found it at Best Buy for $5 and decided it was time.  Today’s movie is based on the life of another black songstress, and this time one that’s still alive, so I have no room to make inappropriate “dead person” jokes.  But this movie opens me up for plenty of other inappropriate “spousal abuse” jokes.  So let’s get into it, with my review of What’s Love Got to Do with It?, written by Kate Lanier, directed by Brian Gibson, and starring Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne, Tina Turner, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Jenifer Lewis, Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, Khandi Alexander, and Barry Henley.

It’s a difficult thing to describe a movie that just follows the life of someone famous, but here goes: This is Tina Turner’s life, give or take a few truths.  The end.  To give you a little more, she starts off as Anna Mae Bullock (Angela Bassett), a fairly naive young black lass from Tennessee.  She moves in with her mom and sister and starts going to a club where she develops a crush on a local singer named Ike Turner (Laurence Fishburne).  She gets up on stage one night and turns out to be a very good singer, so Ike pounces.  They begin to develop a certain degree of fame, and a romance develops right along with it.  They eventually get married and her name inexplicably changes to Tina Turner.  I thought Ike and Anna sounds just as good as Ike and Tina, but they begged to differ.  Over time, fame brings a cheerful white powder to the nose of Ike, which in turn brings a less cheerful black fist to the face of Tina.  Ike starts getting abusive and Tina just ignores it … or becomes brain damaged by it.  Who can tell?  Eventually, Tina’s probably going to want to remember what it’s like to see the world out of both eyes and leave Ike, and I have a feeling this plucky young broad will do alright.

I had a hard time formulating an opinion of this movie, but I think I’ve worked one out by now.  I liked the movie, but I feel like the story shouldn’t get that many of the kudos.  The writers can kind of breeze through it because it’s just based on a book that was based on the life of a real person, but they did throw a couple of things in that didn’t actually happen for emotional emphasis.  I guess the most accurate way to describe how I feel about it is that Tina Turner’s life was a great story, and this movie didn’t fuck it up.  Part of the problem I had with the movie is that I had seen it before, but probably right around when it came out.  In the ensuing years, I’ve forgotten it almost completely.  And what I hadn’t forgotten was the beatings, so I found myself waiting for those to happen with a level of excitement I should feel bad about.  I can’t say I didn’t find the movie interesting by any stretch, but we should all be acquainted with how I feel about dramas by now.  This one is a lot more tolerable than most dramas as it has a happy ending.  I can’t bring myself to consider it a spoiler that Ike and Tina don’t work out, Ike walks alone into the night with subtitles informing us that he later got caught with drugs and arrested, but not being able to inform us that he also died from cocaine overdose because that happened 14 years after the movie came out.  It also ends with the real Tina Turner singing “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” and giving us an unnecessary subtitle that she’s doing alright in her music career.  Since I’ve already compared this movie to The Bodyguard, I’ll keep it up a little.  In comparison to The Bodyguard, this one can’t really match it in the song category.  I can’t claim that I’ve ever been that big of a Tina Turner fan, but this movie did give me the two songs of her’s I know and enjoy, those being “Proud Mary” and “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”  Tina’s got a different and interesting voice, but I just preferred Whitney Houston’s.  The only thing in this movie that confused me was the chant that she gets obsessed with at one point in the movie.  I admit that I know nothing about Buddhism, but I would assume that the entire thing is not just chanting “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” in front of some candles, let alone being called that.  If it works for you, that’s great, but I assume it wouldn’t change my life one bit to kneel in front of something that was on fire and repeat some words.  And that’s coming from a lifelong Christian!

The story didn’t impress me in this movie all that much.  What should truly impress anybody is the performances, and pretty much all of them.  Angela Bassett was pretty damned impressive in this role.  She starts off super innocent and naive, but she gets that beaten out of her by about halfway into the movie.  She then becomes a pretty timid character that mostly just tries not to rile up Ike.  At the end of the movie, she becomes the Tina Turner we want her to be: one that spouts gibberish at candles and kicks Ike in his smug fuckin’ nuts.  Yeah, she still got fucked up in that fight, but you shoulda seen the other guy.  The biggest thing that kept occurring to me through the entire movie was how little sense it made for Tina to be getting beaten up by Ike in the first place.  Bassett had fucking super hero arms!  I am not too much of a man (by a long shot) to admit that Bassett scared me with how ripped and muscular she was in this movie.  Plus, I’m a little afraid of what she might do to me if I didn’t admit it.  I was actually envious of her arms!  She had a vein in her bicep!  It also made me confused, because when they showed the real Tina Turner at the end, she was nowhere near that level of ripped.  And it was weird to me that Angela Bassett was able to still be attractive somehow, even though hugging her could leave me in traction.  Laurence Fishburne was also pretty impressive.  He acted exactly as you’d expect that kind of guy to act.  He starts off seeming like a pretty nice, if a little cocky, guy.  You start to see him get really jealous of Tina because he’s always going to play second fiddle to her.  It escalates first into verbal abuse, and the cocaine gets that kicked up a notch into the physical department.  I believed his performance the entire time, but I also found myself thinking that he was doing a Samuel L. Jackson impression for parts of it.

I was perhaps a bit harsh to imply that the writers of this movie should be considered transcribers instead.  They did a good job taking a person’s life and turning it into a movie, so I guess I’ll at least muster up a golf clap.  The real reason to see this movie is the performances by the two stars, and that’s worth the price of admission alone.  I don’t know what they went up against the year the movie came out, but I would not have argued if both Bassett and Fishburne got Oscars for this movie.  It’s definitely a good watch, and since you can purchase the movie for $5 from Best Buy, I think we can all agree that’s a fair price to pay.  What’s Love Got to Do with It? gets “Eat the cake, Anna Mae” out of “If you die on me, bitch, I’ll kill you!”

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