Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

(2015)

[Author’s Note: I originally wrote this back in 2017. Somehow it was overlooked when I was in the process of transferring my collected works to the WordPress platform. I was just starting to enjoy rambling about movies at that time but hadn’t quite developed the full fledged Non-review concept yet. Please enjoy this formative short essay.]

——One thing fans wanted, since Mel would not be playing Max in Fury Road, was at least a brief Mel cameo. Director George Miller, who directed all the Mad Max films, said that would be like Sean Connery showing up in a Daniel Craig Bond film and absolutely refused to do it. Is that really a valid point against though? Charleton Heston played an elderly ape in the Tim Burton Planet of the Apes. Sure, that’s not the greatest example but Heston’s cameo wasn’t why that movie was bad. Personally, I liked that version fine and Heston was icing on the weird banana flavored monkey cake!

—-However, an even stronger argument in favor of a Gibson cameo is the fact that Miller himself cast Hugh Keays-Byrne as Fury Road’s main antagonist, Immorten Joe! For those of you who are not chock full of Mad Max trivia, Hugh Keays-Byrne also played Toecutter, the main antagonist from the first Mad Max film! If he can play different characters in such prominence, not to mention several other cameos of past Mad Max players, why no Mel? George Miller’s argument is completely invalid.

——Even Bruce Spence was in two different Mad Max films as different but extremely similar characters.

—–Miller was unclear as to whether Fury Road was a reboot or a sequel, having flip-flopped the notions from one conversation to another and back again. A lot of ideas in the movie (Max’s hallucinations for instance) apparently came from the comic without much explanation. But as we’ve all been religiously reading the Mad Max comic for the last three decades, why explain anything? Oh, you didn’t even know there was a comic? Strange, neither did anyone else.

—–Anyway, it’s a decent movie made pretty much solely for the sake of the chase and that’s alright by me. I highly recommend splicing in shots of Mel from other movies and enjoy the hours you’ll spend explaining to your family what a chastity belt is, not that those two things are related. Maybe they should be?

—–Not into post-apocalypse movies but still want to see the same Fury Road chase scenes? Check out the film Stage Coach with John Wayne. It’s the same movie but in the old west.