My Review of The Original Mad Max

My Review of the Original Mad Max

Before The Fast and The Furious, Speed Racer, and all of today's hybrid human/cgi rendered cars and blue screen chase sequences, there were movies with real stuntmen and real gas guzzlers from Detroit that made a lot of noise. Of these films, Australian director George Miller's 1979 dystopian film Mad Max--and its follow-up, The Road Warrior--exemplifies the extinct breed of animal known as muscle cars, or, in this instance, Australian muscle!

In a nutshell, Mad Max is about a good cop named Max Rockatanski (Played by Mel Gibson) who gives in to the dark side after a ruthless motorcycle gang led by the Toe-cutter ambushes and tortures his best friend, the "Goose." The real star of this film, though, are not the many muscle cars used in this film: Max's yellow Interceptor squad car; the Kawasaki motorcycles; or The Mad Max revenge car, the Pursuit Special at the end of the film. No, the most important star of this film is the driver's seat perspective of the road itself.

Can't say enough about this film which was Director George Miller's 1st film, putting him up with the likes of Scorsese's 1973 film Mean Streets, and Christopher Nolan's 1998 film Following as among the best debut films ever. Like James Cameron's 1984 film The Terminator, Mad Max's sequel is as good if not better than the original. If you haven't seen this film in a while, you should see it on blu ray. It's like seeing it for the first time.

My Review of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira

My Review of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira

Director Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 anime Akira takes place in the year 2012 in Neo Tokyo following an event similar to the atomic bombs America dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A boy named Akira is the subject of secret government experiments that give him access to superhuman powers. Things get out of control when the government does the experiment on a biker named Tetsuo who becomes obsessed with his best friend's motorcycle and who has been picked on all his life for being short.

This anime, like a lot of sci fi anime reference Japanese culture after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a way of signaling the death of one age and the birth of a new age. Looking at this anime and others like Ghost in The Shell, the influence of Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner is obvious in the fusion of industrial-looking tech combined with social and environmental issues like crime, poverty, overcrowding and lots of consumer products marketed on just about every square inch of available space. These elements together describe an aesthetic known as cyberpunk. Watching Akira, it is easy to see how much Blade Runner influenced the artwork and, in a lot of ways, Akira takes it a step further. Watching it, even after 30 years since it was made, it can easily take a couple of nights just to take in everything. And, unlike most anime where only the main characters in the foreground move, everything and I do mean EVERYTHING moves in Akira. Otomo is a gear-head and his obsession with detail, particularly machines, verges on the insane. Up to the time it came out, the only animation you could find this kind of motion was Disney. But Disney was for kids in those days but Akira was aimed at adults. This, if anything else, explains the cultural perceptions that American film audiences and Japanese film audiences have about animated movies. If you have heard of anime or if all you know about it is Dragonball Z or Pokemon, seeing Akira for the 1st time is going to be somewhat of a shock to what you are used to seeing, especially the level of graphic violence including blood. 

I still have my VHS copy of this film and recently, I upgraded to blu ray. This film looks incredible. The colors are popping and saturated but they don't bleed over the details. The opening scenes at night are absolutely crazy. The rainbows chasing the motorbikes, the motorbikes themselves, the clothes, the cityscape, everything looks better on blu ray. 

Despite the look of this film, the dialogue is bad. Otomo shows his weaknesses in the writing department but I'm not sure how much this has to do by it being translated out of Japanese to English. 

I read someplace that they were thinking about turning it into a live action movie but I don't think it'll work because the story itself is rather convoluted. Plus, I don't think that every good anime translates to live action. Look at what happened to Ghost in the Shell. I believe, too, that the sophistication of live action effects in recent years has not only equaled but has exceeded what you could only show in an animated movie. If they did make a live action Akira, I would like it to be Japanese. These films have a way of being Westernized with White actors like Ghost in the Shell was and Robert Rodriguez's upcoming action film Alita: The Battle Angel. If it is produced into a live action movie, though, I'll still go to see it. 

Finishing up this review, I'm glad to say that even after all these years, as far as animation has come, Akira still looks good. I think what makes this film age well is the fact that what you see on the screen is completely organic and hand-drawn by real people. This type of anime or animation period is gone now. I even read that Hayao Miyazaki's next animated film will be all CGI. That'll be interesting.