Tag: George Miller

Action/Adventure/Heist · Uncategorized

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

LizLockeLeave a comment
Image: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, 2024

As I wait for peach season to fully hit central Texas, I’m getting a taste of my favorite summertime fruit with a sparkling cocktail and a post-apocalyptic film about maintaining hope in the darkest of times. I have two peach trees that haven’t yielded a single fruit in ten years, but somehow Furiosa can grow one in a dry wasteland whose main crops seem to be gasoline and bullets. Make it make sense!!! Buckle up, fill your tank with gin—we’re watching Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Disc/Download).

I’m sure I’ll always regret not watching Fury Road upon its initial release (mostly because my husband still hasn’t forgiven me for abandoning him at the movie theater), so when Furiosa came out several years later, I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. This high-octane thriller carries the visual masterpiece torch perfectly, serving as a prequel to Fury Road by focusing on the origin story of that film’s badass female protagonist. We learn how Furiosa’s mother died, we learn how she lost the arm, and we learn what pushed her to finally make her great escape with the Wives. Along the way, we get another unhinged cult leader in the form of Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, acting as foil to original evil cult leader, Immorten Joe. Anya Taylor-Joy does a fantastic job filling in the blanks left by Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, and I’m still amazed that a movie marketed toward the male populace managed to birth one of our greatest feminist action heroes. Ladies, there’s plenty here for you, too.

Furiosa carries a peach pit from her homeland, “the place of abundance”, as a reminder of what the world could be like without the corrupt leaders of the Citadel. Let’s cool off with a cocktail that might be icy cold, but still has a subtle bit of heat behind it. While watching Furiosa, I recommend drinking this Spicy Peach Spritz.

Spicy Peach Spritz

1 ½ oz gin (I use Engine, which is not only thematically perfect, but also very tasty!)

1 oz St. Germain

2 slices jalapeno pepper, seeds removed

1 basil leaf, plus more for garnish

2 oz peach juice

3 oz Prosecco

2 oz sparkling water

Muddle the jalapeno and basil leaf with St. Germain and gin in the bottom of a shaker. Add peach juice and ice, and shake to combine. Fill a glass with ice, then double strain the contents of shaker into it. Top with Prosecco and sparkling water and stir gently. Garnish with a sprig of basil.

Having watched the original Mad Max, and half of The Road Warrior before I fell asleep, I can say that I absolutely love the new direction George Miller has taken this franchise. No longer are women relegated to side roles, gimmicks, and victimhood; they are the main characters and heroes of these movies. The visuals just get better and better, and so too does the political, sociological, and environmental commentary. I don’t know what’s next for Mad Max (if anything), but if this saga is over, at least it went out in a blaze of glory. Cheers!

Action/Adventure/Heist

Mad Max: Fury Road

LizLockeLeave a comment

Mad Max: Fury Road
Image credit: Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015.

Chris Locke, for Splotch! here, guest correspondent for Cinema Sips (and husband of Liz Locke).

On the surface, Mad Max: Fury Road (Disc/Download) is a two-hour car chase, with a heavy dose of shoot-em-up, which makes it easy to see why my wife skipped seeing it in favor of some Jane Austen / Currer Bell movie with lots of stuffy accents and wooden buttons.  But Proust and Joyce don’t really fit the Splotchlife Criteria for Good Movies.

Three ingredients indicate huge potential for a high-quality movie.  Dust, dried blood, and fast cars.  It’s not that all good movies have these things, or that all movies with these things are good.  It’s just that in the Venn Diagram of Good Movies, there is a huge overlap between the circles that contain them.*

The problem is, my wife judged this movie based on the trailer, which doesn’t serve it justice.  Mad Max: Fury Road is a wild ride filled with themes of redemption, reluctant commitment, survival of the underdog, and once the viewer realizes it’s really not about Max, the whole thing changes.  This is the story of Furiosa, a tough-as-nails woman risking her life to save other more vulnerable women.  And where does she take them?  To the land of women, of course!  It’s an authentic feminist dream wrapped in an action burrito of explosions and motorcycles, and when you look for the parallel romance stories (between Nux and Capable, but also the classic “enemies-to-lovers” pairing of Max and Furiosa), there is certainly enough to entertain any open-minded person.

Still not convinced? Look at it as an allegory of our current times. The whole story revolves around a bunch of warmongering starving diseased sycophants blindly following a sadistic obese tyrannical maniac who causes their hardships, hoards the resources, holds the power to save the people, and convinces the less fortunate to blame themselves.  “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!” he says, as he dumps their most precious resource down the side of a dirty rock cliff, then shuts it off before they can get what they need.  This guy is a real piece of work.

The main characters try to escape their situation and then (SPOILER ALERT) realize the best thing they can do is not to escape, but to go back to where they live and fix it.  They overthrow the tyrannical government and give the people what they need.  It’s a real breath of fresh air, especially given the situation we are currently suffering through.  The greatest thing that comes from this movie: the message that you don’t have to escape.  You can stay and fight for change.

My wife has come around on this movie, but she needed a frozen beverage to do it. She said all the dust and heat made her uncomfortable. Even while we were sitting in air conditioning. Whatever. So if you’re a ninny, watch Mad Max: Fury Road with this Frozen Milk Punch. If you’re a real man, sprinkle some dirt in a rusty can of warm water and call it a day.

Frozen Milk Punch

1 cup Whole Milk

1/2 cup Bourbon

1 cup Crushed Ice

1 tsp Vanilla extract

2 Tbsp Simple syrup

1 cup Vanilla Ice Cream

Grated Nutmeg

Blend together first six ingredients until creamy. Garnish with a pinch of grated nutmeg.

Frozen Milk Punch

*Footnote: Secondary indicators include (but not limited to) apocalypse, kidnapping, homemade weapons.  Tertiary indicators include amateur surgery and a scene where the protagonist hangs upside-down from a moving vehicle with their face inches off the ground.  Unfortunately, this movie does not contain any of the following: a cop close to retirement, a vendetta, a briefcase full of unmarked bills, Nicolas Cage, double cross, horses (as transportation, never as pets), a time bomb, or a heist.  The salvation of the harem may be interpreted as a caper for academic purposes.

Dramas

The Witches of Eastwick

LizLockeLeave a comment

witches of eastwick
Image credit: Witches of Eastwick, 1987

You know that feeling you get when the end credits are rolling on a particularly bizarre film, and you just sit, unblinking, trying to make sense of the last two hours? Such was my experience with The Witches of Eastwick (DVD/Download). Not having read any Updike before, including the novel this film was based on, I was wholly unprepared. What started out as a promising rom-com slowly morphed into a special-effects laden horror-fest, with a dash of surrealism. This one definitely needs some unpacking.

For the first twenty minutes, my take on The Witches of Eastwick was, “where has this movie been all my life???” Cher, Michelle Pheiffer, and Susan Sarandon sitting around, drinking martini’s, complaining about how there are no good men anymore- let’s just call this my ideal Saturday night.   They wish hard for the man of their dreams, not knowing that they’re actually a coven of witches.  Soon after, this mysterious stranger actually appears in the form of Jack Nicholson. And he’s a creep. And he has a teeny-tiny ponytail that’s distracting as hell. And he may or may not be the devil. But he has a mansion with an indoor pool, a healthy sexual appetite, and bowls of fresh cherries (we’ll get to that in a minute). So the three women do what dozens of Playboy Bunnies have done before and move in with the morally bankrupt old charmer. Despite a meandering plot and lack of character development, the performances of these three powerhouse actresses and the great Jack Nicholson basically playing Jack Nicholson, keep me watching long after the movie has gone down the proverbial drain.

One of the spells cast by the witches is a strange revenge on the local town prude. Instead of just poisoning her outright, Jack Nicholson urges his three girlfriends to eat pounds of cherries. Somehow this sanctimonious woman ends up with the cherry guts in HER stomach and well- things get messy. You’d think this would turn me off cherries for good, but I can’t resist that tart, sweet taste. Even better with some activated charcoal to make this the perfect Halloween cocktail. While watching The Witches of Eastwick, I recommend drinking a Black Cherry Martini.

Black Cherry Martini

1 ½ oz Vodka

½ oz Maraschino Liqueur

1 1/2 oz POM Cherry Juice

1/4 oz Lime Juice

1/4 tsp Activated Charcoal Powder

Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake until chilled, then strain into a chilled martini glass.

There’s definitely a lot to like about The Witches of Eastwick, and if you’re looking for a fun adult Halloween movie this year, this one is close to the top of my list. Despite the truly weird final act, it’s still fun to watch three women take a dance with the devil in the pale moonlight*. Cheers!

*wrong movie, still applies!