Friday new releases: 24 May 2024

Firstly, apo­lo­gies this is com­ing to you a little later than usu­al. I had a dead­line for a piece about TV for RNZ (post­ing on Monday) and some travel delays caused by a ‘nation­wide sig­nals outage’.

Back in the day, when I was writ­ing for the Capital Times weekly in Wellington, there might have been six to eight new films released in cinemas in any giv­en week. This week, only two.

And in anoth­er sign of the times, Luca Guadagnino’s tennis-romance Challengers is now avail­able as a premi­um digit­al rent­al (NZ$24.99) and it only landed in cinemas a month ago. Spare a thought for those movie theatres that are still show­ing it. It’s a tough busi­ness to be in at the moment and you would be doing the whole industry (and your­self) a favour by buy­ing a tick­et to the flicks this weekend.

Anyone expect­ing Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga to be as thrill­ing as George Miller’s last Max out­ing, Fury Road, are likely to be dis­ap­poin­ted. That was a once-in-a-lifetime dis­til­la­tion of the essence of action movies, a three-day road trip to the desert and back, chased all the way by a bizarre col­lec­tion of des­peradoes, each com­ing togeth­er build­ing on the last until the audi­ence is prac­tic­ally main­lin­ing adren­aline and gasp­ing for breath.

This film isn’t like that. While it is a superb film on its own terms, the real tri­umph of Furiosa is that it man­ages to make all the oth­er Mad Max films better.

By provid­ing more con­text for the world of the Wasteland (a lit­er­al waste land as well as a lit­er­ary ref­er­ence) the movie is able to draw deep­er emo­tions. When we real­ise that humanity’s self-inflicted fall from grace has been so rap­id – only one or two gen­er­a­tions not the cen­tur­ies that it appears to be – it reveals a pathos that I hadn’t noticed before.

We met one-armed Furiosa in the last film, when she was played by Charlize Theron. This film, without the Max factor (for­give me), is her ori­gin story. As a child (Alyla Brown) she is kid­napped from her “place of abund­ance”, a secret peace­ful com­munity with plenty of water and food. The film – and the pre­vi­ous one – are really just about her attempts to find her way home.

Her first captor is Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), a self-important fool whose attempts to take on the much stronger clans (the Citadel, Gastown and the Bullet Farm) leads Furiosa to Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), and her destiny.

What these later Mad Max films aren’t often giv­en cred­it for is their intel­li­gence. A clas­sic­al edu­ca­tion is not neces­sary to enjoy them but it sure helps. Miller and his col­lab­or­at­ors take this crazi­ness ser­i­ously and there is always some­thing strik­ing to look at. One example, off the top of my head, is the weapon that Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) uses to defend the rear of the shiny new war rig he drives with the now adult Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) as shotgun.

They are sol­id steel balls attached to the back of the truck on chains and when they spin at high speed, noth­ing can get through them. All well and good, except most of time they don’t spin, they are just dragged around look­ing like met­al ver­sions of those fake plastic testicles that people attach to their tow­bars for a laugh.

More poignantly, there’s the red cloak that Hemsworth wears, made from a plastic rain­coat, fad­ing to pink over the course of the film. He swears it wasn’t inten­ded to remind the audi­ence of his Thor cape but how could it not?

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

When I heard Hemsworth’s Aussie accent in the trail­er for Furiosa, I was curi­ous to see the extent that the fran­chise was lean­ing in (hor­rible phrase) to its Australian-ness. The films have always had plenty of Aussie details but I think it was only the first one that really loc­ated itself as Australia. Until now, the Wasteland could have been any­where – gen­er­ic post-apocalyptic desert – but the first visu­al in the film is the great brown con­tin­ent of Australia, as we zoom in to the tiny green oas­is where Furiosa and her moth­er lives.

And, sure enough, this para­dise is a pic­ture of peace­ful multi-cultural Oz. There’s even the sound of a didgeri­doo in the score at that moment. Of course, like peace­ful Australia in anoth­er era, this is destined to be dis­rup­ted by greedy, boor­ish interlopers.

But that’s pretty much where any com­ment­ary on Australia stops. Once Furiosa is in the clutches of the Biker Horde, we are off to the races and Miller has much big­ger things on his mind.

This one is going to bear mul­tiple view­ings, I think. It’s that good.

In 1970, 16 foot­ball teams went to Mexico to com­pete for the foot­ball World Cup. Brazil won it and, because it was their third vic­tory, they got to keep the trophy.

One year later, six more teams landed in Mexico to com­pete for anoth­er world cup, but this tour­na­ment – thanks to the utter short-sightedness of the sport’s gov­ern­ing body – has been for­got­ten by history.

Until now.

FIFA, the organ­isa­tion that ran world foot­ball, did not believe in women’s ver­sion of the sport, des­pite dec­ades of evid­ence that women were des­per­ate to play. Women’s foot­ball was not offi­cially sanc­tioned and there­fore a tour­na­ment like this one in Mexico was essen­tially a rebel ven­ture. Luckily, Mexican pro­moters and broad­casters saw the poten­tial and got behind it.

Because of FIFA’s ban, no sta­di­um affil­i­ated with the Mexican FA would have them. Luckily, the largest sta­di­um in Latin America, the Azteca, was inde­pend­ently owned so, in a ballsy move for women’s sport, huge efforts were made to fill all 76,000 seats for every game and they came pretty close.

Like most people, I had nev­er heard of the 1971 Women’s World Cup and James Erskine and Rachel Ramsay’s doc­u­ment­ary, Copa 71, is full of jaw-dropping rev­el­a­tions, not least the fact that the Mexico-Italy semi-final was so viol­ent that the game had to be called off ten minutes early.

As any­one who has been watch­ing the A‑League this sea­son will testi­fy, the women’s game is eas­ily as enter­tain­ing as the men’s, and it’s clear that FIFA shot itself right in the foot by keep­ing women out of the game for so long.