Tag: Fury Road

The Brilliance of Junkie XL: A review of ‘Fury Road’s’ soundtrack

I was just a bit stunned by the wonderful music I heard while watching the latest Mad Max film.  You can see a bit of why in the video clip below dedicated to the composer Junkie XL—who used to be a DJ in a previous life.  The music to me sounded remarkably like Hans Zimmer’s score on Man of Steel.  So I wondered if Zimmer knew that Junkie used some of his Man of Steel music in Fury Road.  After a quick check I discovered that the two composers have studios next to each other in Santa Monica and that they have become close friends.  So that explained why the music was so jaw dropping phenomenal.  The use of drums in Man of Steel for me was a major milestone in soundtrack design and I have been looking forward to other scores utilizing the same creative use.  Fury Road was that next film and the music is so heart pounding excellent that the moment the movie was over, my wife and I went on an incredible journey to find the soundtrack.

On May 15th I had long-planned to take the afternoon off my normal obligations and see Mad Max with my wife.  When we were dating I showed her all the Mad Max films along with Dirty Harry so we could see if we’d like each other enough to continue our relationship.  She of course loved them, so we got married.  For me, if a woman didn’t understand Mad Max and Dirty Harry, she wouldn’t be capable of sharing a life with me, so liking those films was a deal breaker.   For me it’s almost a religious experience to see a Mad Max film, so I blocked off the afternoon to see the move.  Before the film I was able to have lunch with my wife, one of my daughters and my grandson.  It put me in an exceptionally good mood for actually seeing the movie.  I knew I would like the film—I wasn’t sure how much—but it was overall leading up to the movie a very positive, long-planned experience.

After the movie my wife and I looked at each other knowing we had just watched a masterpiece for the first time and professed our love for the film until the last credit cleared the screen.  READ MY REVIEW BY CLICKING HERE.  But that soundtrack for Junkie XL was stuck in my head and I wanted the music.  I didn’t want to wait to receive it from Amazon.com.  I wanted it in the car for my ride home.  So we went on a journey all over Cincinnati to find it.  We checked Barnes and Nobel on Fields Ertle Road first—they didn’t have it.  Then we went to Target and Best Buy in that same area.  They didn’t have it.  We then hit the highway and headed to the Streets of West Chester to the Barnes and Nobel there.  They surprisingly didn’t have it either.  I was really getting frustrated.  So we were about to give up and go home.  But not wanting to surrender we hit one last spot, the Best Buy at Bridgewater Falls.

I love the Best Buy at that location because it’s full of new technology all the time.  It’s a big store relative to some of the others and always has a nice ambiance to it.  I’ve bought a lot of computer equipment, video games and appliances there, so I generally love my visits to the Best Buy at Bridgewater Falls.  After some frantic looking I found two copies of Fury Road stuck behind soundtracks to Pitch Perfect 2—and I beheld them as if they were treasures from the Sierra Madre.  We bought one of them and headed to our car where we spent the next hour listening to the music from our sound system.  It was a brilliant score well worth the purchase.  I didn’t stop the music over the whole duration of the following weekend.

The key to the success of the music is the inventiveness of the ambition behind the score that obviously is inspired by Hans Zimmer.  But Junkie XL brought a kind of rock and roll ambition to it that is strangely evocative of the dystopian world of George Miller.  Unlike the old Blade Runner soundtrack which is a favorite of mine, Fury Road is full of hope and energy.  I found it strangely compelling which is something I didn’t expect.

It didn’t take much time for me to get the soundtrack on my iPod where I proceeded to listen to it on a loop for several days.  By the time I wrote this little piece on it, I have heard it upwards of 25 complete times and I like it more each time I hear it.  It is another wonderful and often unappreciated journey into musical mayhem by some of the most creative people in the movie business.  I have included some videos on this article about Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL to provide some context as to why I love soundtracks so much—often more than the movies themselves.  As I’ve said before there isn’t one work of music on my iPod out of 8 gigs of storage ability that is not a soundtrack to some movie.  I love mythology, movies are modern mythology, and the music of movies is what holds those stories together.  Without a good soundtrack, a movie isn’t much.  But with a good soundtrack, a movie can tell its story on a scale that lasts.  For me one of those benchmarks was the Man of Steel soundtrack.  So it came to me as a surprise to learn that Hans Zimmer and his friend Junkie XL were working on the soundtrack to Dawn of Justice together, with Junkie handling the Batman tracks while Zimmer works the Superman needs.  Now that I’ve heard Junkie XL named more formally Tom Holkenborg, create such a masterpiece with Fury Road I am eagerly looking forward to the next Superman film by Zach Snyder.

Music is one of those things that stays with you long after the lights come up in a darkened theater.  If the story was a good one, the music of the movie can go with you anywhere you wish by the soundtrack of the film.  After Fury Road I couldn’t wait to keep my mind in that mythology because there were thoughts there that were pertinent to my observations—and the music helped usher those thoughts along.  So the journey was hard-fought and worth the effort, because the work that Junkie XL brought forth is indicative of a treasure that will continue giving for many years.  And for me, that means many more Friday afternoons with my wife and the treasures of cinema that come from blocked off mythology given to minds that love the stories they tell on the backs of really good music.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

‘Fury Road’: Why the film is a work of George Miller genius

For all the reasons that Mad Max: Fury Road is a modern masterpiece on par with films like Citizen Kane, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and Ben Hur is to look at the film itself.  In 1981 if anyone would have predicted that the maker of the Road Warrior would 30 years in the future create such a scathing representation of human culture nobody would have believed it.  Yet our current society has devolved to such a degree that the evidence of such a future nightmare is fast upon us which brings a sort of exasperation at the end of the film.  Fury Road is many things all at the same time; it’s a modern morality western on wheels and can be enjoyed as popcorn entertainment.  This part of it was clear already in the previous Mad Max films.  But, there was always a hint at something deeper, which a younger director in George Miller probably wanted to utter, but didn’t yet have the whole package ready to wrap.  Fury Road dives deeper into the well of the human condition seamlessly like all great works of art.  It gives the viewer more of what they already know, and dares them to step beyond their comfort zone in a way that Picasso’s cubic paintings did.  But then again, Fury Road is deeper than even that—it jumps headlong into the vast depths of James Joyce’s literary masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake to play at Giambattista Vico’s four cycles of civilization.   When it is said that Fury Road is the work of genius, this would be the reason, it is modern art evoked in some of the most provocative ways ever put to film, and it is done so in a way that at the end viewers will wonder what the just saw.  Was the movie just another summer blockbuster in superhero clothing, or was it the genius of a new religion after mankind has fallen back to its beginnings as it has so many times before?

If George Miller was not a fan of Finnegan’s Wake, and had a firm understanding of the Vico cycle, I would be surprised—because that is clearly the theme of Fury Road.  Human beings have devolved from a race that once put satellites into the sky to a society clamoring over water.  Anarchy has given way to a new theocracy and at the end of the move, the last line shown on the screen before the end credits read like the first sentence in a new book of Genesis.  I can’t say that I have ever seen a critic rating of 98% on Rottentomatos.com for a movie, yet Fury Road had virtually everyone who had seen it eating out of its hand—something that certainly would not have been the case in 1982 when the Road Warrior came out.  Some radio movie reviewers on the Friday of the film’s release were actually giving the movie 5 out of 5 stars—which is something else I can’t ever recall happening.  Even great films typically get a 4 or a 4.5, but many critics were giving Fury Road a full unfettered five stars essentially calling it a perfect movie.  I don’t think Fury Road is a perfect movie.  It was on par to me to all the great western’s I have seen over the years—but it has the added dimension of hidden sophistication that all viewers sense which hangs in the air at the end of the movie.  It touches something very primal in us all and hints at long suppressed beliefs touched for the first time perhaps in some people’s lives.  Yes, the Vico cycle is well at hand.   In a time where nearly every movie is a retread from the past society has forgotten that all these retreads came from a period when our culture produced these kinds of stories every couple of months.  Just like the mixed up cars in Fury Road are representatives of a previous society which mass manufactured them, they are assembled on the screen hodgepodged together in bizarre and imaginative ways that still evoke a lesser society that inherited something great from the past yet didn’t quite know how to sustain them.  Fury Road is a metaphor of itself in a very tongue in cheek way.  There seems to be a very firm knowledge from George Miller of what he’s doing as he is clearly an artist at the top of his game.

Other progressive reviewers saw in Immortan Joe a greedy capitalist regulating vast resources to enslave people.  To their minds Immortan Joe was the Bilderberg bankers and Illuminati currency manipulators of the current times and the revolution of the people to overtake such a greedy bastard is communism so everyone can have equal share in the wonders of water stored in his magical pumps within his fortress Citadel.  Yet again, Fury Road is a deeper movie than that—it cuts to a primal rage contained within every human being—the desire to be free.  Immortan Joe might have been slain, and a new government might rule in his place—but the results would be the same.  So long as mankind follows the trends of the Vico cycle whoever is in power will always seek to suppress those under their control.  The reason the film has such high critical ratings is because of things like this, where the kinds of topics that are really important to people are expressed.  But like all great works of art, those people are limited by what they can see.  They may not have the ability to see too far, so they only see representations of feminism, or communism as factors for redemption—but there is clearly more going on.

I thought the most powerful part of the movie was a quiet scene where the characters named brilliantly, Toast the Knowing, Cheedo the Fragile, and the Capable were watching a star filled night sky as they saw a satellite flying across their view from horizon to horizon.  They contemplated the previous culture that actually made such things that could talk to people across the whole of the world.  They wondered who killed the world.  It’s not global warming which has done the destruction.  It was the Vico cycle—mankind’s innate desire to advance and regress along its formulated parameters.

As I bought my ticket for Fury Road the attendant whispered to himself, “Max, great choice.”  He locked knowing eyes with mine.  “I loved it.”  And that was the general feeling of everyone I bumped into who saw the movie.  They realized that they were seeing something that was strangely important, yet they didn’t really know why.  It is our present story played out in a way that they can easily see no matter what vantage point of political reality they approach the subject—because the road all leads to the same place.  It doesn’t matter if the vantage point is conservative, liberal, deeply socialist, fascist, or manically religious it all ends up in the same place, the cycle of Giambattista Vico, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, followed by anarchy which has persisted in human lives for as long as we have had breath.  Most of us want to be Max or Furiosa, but know that they will always ever be at best like the old lady in Fury Road, the Keeper of the Seeds.  Worse yet, most people will spend their whole lives begging for water, or allowing themselves to be harvested for their bodies–their motherly milk, or their blind devotion to a male patriarchy more concerned with their place in a masculine peaking order than in inventing satellites to go to space.  Even though the world has gone mad Max at least has not surrendered himself to its cycle.  In the end he is the hero who carries those who want to back to a hope of advancing their cause instead of just retreating from it. It was a brilliant film by a brilliant director at the absolute top of his game.  The above and below line talent in the picture are all at the peak of film making genius and if there is any justice Fury Road will win many Oscars in 2016.  But that in and of itself will prove just how valid Fury Road truly is.  In a free culture capable of making all the stories it can deem possible, it is a retread from the past that is evoking so much of a response in a culture that subconsciously seems to realize it is slipping back into the abyss of anarchy and theocracy.   They don’t understand why or how—but know that it’s happening.  And the only way they can measure that slide is with a good ol’ Mad Max movie which shows them the map of how it’s happening, even if they are powerless to stop it.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

‘Fury Road’: Rebelling against Giambattista Vico

I have a general assumption about mankind that is quite opposite of typical academia. Civilizations rise on the backs of innovative individuals and flourishing capitalism. They decline with more centralized control and absorption of individual achievement into the fabric of a collective society. When an unworthy king or bureaucratic democracy takes over the direction of economic enterprise and invention, a society is in decline. It is due to the hard wiring of human beings trained from their infancy to follow the Giambattista Vico cycle always witnessing societies fall only to be born again in a much regimented pattern. This holds true no matter what the society, whether it be the Mayan people, the Inca, the Mongol, the Roman Empire—all societies so far have followed the Giambattista cycle. This is why anybody with any honesty looks at George Miller’s Mad Max films and declares him a genius. It’s also why it was more than symbolic that Mel Gibson showed up at the premier of Fury Road, the latest Mad Max film now staring Tom Hardy. Studios didn’t want Gibson in the film as the Vico cycle declares that what’s old must be recycled to make way for the young and new. But Gibson showed up to give the young Hardy a bit of support because any Mad Max fan knows that Mel Gibson will always be the iconic Road Warrior. It all started with this movie.

Our current world is not very far from the world of the first Mad Max movie. Police are now being openly murdered and Vico’s final phase of anarchy is fully at hand. What happens next is the rise of a theocratic society followed again by aristocratic, then democratic rule, followed by chaos once again. In the film Fury Road we find that in the period between the first Mad Max film society has devolved into the rise of theocratic civilization. No longer is society concerned with missions to Mars or inventing a new iWatch—now the primary concern as it has been in the past is to establish a new deity figure for the society at large.

I have always loved the Mad Max character because he maintains himself throughout the entire cycle as a constant reminder into the phase of the Gambattista cycle from which everything was taken from him, his wife, child, friend, career—everything he cherished from that time. Unlike the rest of the world he finds himself standing up against the tide of regression. He is a representation in these Mad Max films as Nietzsche’s ubermensch-otherwise translated as the overman. Nietzsche’s ubermensch is one who has graduated from mankind and stepped away from the Gambattista cycle all together—and has decided to advance their life based on individual creativity.   But this is a dangerous road, Hitler tried to take Nietzsche’s ubermensch and advance Germany, but failed in his interpretation and instead moved his country into a Karl Marx inspired socialist democracy—followed by war defined anarchy, then back to a theocratic/democratic existence where it currently finds itself in a European Union—otherwise a democracy that is once again plunging into anarchy now inspired by the failing economies of Greece.   Mad Max is the figure who refuses to submit to these tides of the world.

I have no doubt that George Miller would agree with this assessment. He knows all too well what he’s doing. He’s not just making a popcorn action thriller with great car stunts and bizarre characters. He’s making a rejection statement against Gambattista’s famed cycle. He may not have set out to be conscious about that statement but rather let his intellect drive those elements of the story along as evolution of the various aspects of the story evolved, but based on the presentation of Fury Road, it is clear he understands what he’s doing all too well. It’s also clear why so many people are excited to see such an apocalyptic story and why after all these years it’s so close to the hearts of so many people. This is not a typical summer blockbuster film.

So, how excited am I for the upcoming Fury Road? Well, let me tell you, I have dedicated this upcoming Friday to seeing it. I will certainly be one of the first, and I will likely see it several times. I love the action, I love Mad Max and all that he stands for, but more than anything I love seeing the Gambattista cycle challenged. The world may have went crazy in relation to the advanced days of invention when oil was being produced to propel cars from city to city, to instigate the growth of economies of various trade. All that can and will fall apart within just a few decades of human development—just like the Maya abandoned their cities apparently very fast—as if they just evaporated. It’s not that such people abandoned their cities because they left earth for alien destinations, the people of Ur did not suddenly become equivalent to the Neanderthal after building hanging gardens and massive temples—they regressed because they emerged into war then reinvented theocracy starting the Vico cycle fresh again losing all that they had gained before. Mad Max is that personality in these George Miller movies who in spite of everything that he has lost and continues to lose, refuses to give up on his heroic past and be the last representation of a time when mankind was truly great.

How many people do you know who would at the drop of a hat become one of the mindless followers of some future attempt at theocratic rule? The current Muslim obsession is but the latest. How many maniacs would kill the masses for a chance at everlasting life in the hereafter because some slug of a wanna’ be king dictated that such a thing would bring redemption to the soul? The answer is probably everyone that you know. Most of the people shopping at the grocery and working in a corner cubical would gladly trade in their suits and ties for a thong and Mohawk if some skull inspired death cult instructed them that through worship of his heavenly presence that someday they too might rise up to greatness if only they adhere to the tenets of collectivism.   Miller’s brilliance is that he was able to see such a clear vision from our present age. It’s not easy to see that overweight school levy supporter buying meat at the grocery as a future sex slave to a blood thirsty cult fighting over the worship of water—but Miller does, and with a grand design. It’s not easy to see that corrupt politician kissing babies and whatever else as the skull wearing Immortan Joe hunting down the wives who are desperate to leave him. But in Miller’s films, it is quickly recognizable that most people we know under similar conditions would find themselves as some character in that wasteland. It doesn’t take much to forgo everything we have ever been and throw it away in exchange for basic human necessities, like food, water, and sex.

I am excited for Fury Road, but for reasons that go well beyond the visual spectacle. I love it for the rebellion against Vico. On one hand the Vico cycle is shown in all its brutal honesty, but through the character of Max—using almost no dialogue—Miller beholds the ubermensch—a character that launched the career of Mel Gibson who in almost every movie refused to buckle under the pressure of Vico to decline—but always to advance. Whether it was Riggs from Lethal Weapon or William Wallace from Braveheart, Mel Gibson started as Mad Max, that hero from the past who punched through the Vico cycle with the throttle down and the skill of a Road Warrior as the rest of the world attempted to drag him back into the Stone Age. That’s why Fury Road is more important than a four-year degree in college studying history and the Vico cycle. Because Fury Road shows through art the results of that path—and how treacherously close we always are to falling off the edge of reality into an abyss controlled by maniacs like Immortan Joe—or the Toe Cutter.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Dreaming of ‘Fury Road’: The beauty of chaos shown honestly

There is a beauty in the honesty of George Miller’s films whether we are talking about the children’s classic, Babe, or the wonderful Mad Max films. But I’ll admit to being a little blown away during a recent trip to the movies where Fury Road was releasing its second promotional trailer—and it was something to marvel at. The images, the content, and the way it was orchestrated together looked and sounded like the exact constructs of my daily thoughts and it was hauntingly surreal. Likely most people may not be quite so affected by it, but for me, it was a religious experience. Suddenly Fury Road is the film I am most eager to see in 2015. When the smoke clears, it is likely going to be that film that will be the stand out most to my liking. Check it out for yourself and welcome to the world of my thoughts.

What I have always loved about Miller’s over-the-top villains is that they are attempts at the honesty which manifests inside the typical collective brute and his Max stands against the tide of such swarms with minimalistic viciousness that is entirely appropriate. Specifically, take the average person who puts on a nice face and attends a funeral, or wants to be a Facebook buddy, and you are getting one of these vile Miller villains most of the time disguised behind one of their social masks. The moment—the exact moment that society strips away its convention, they deregulate themselves into anarchy and chaos insanely fast and leave in their wake destruction and pain.

You can see the cracks in the corners of civility among our own youth with the tattoo culture that has emerged among them in a struggle to show personal identity, along with the body piercings. Underneath their thin layers of social maintenance is the brute of Miller’s villains—the type of people functioning just above the social condition of a typical animal. Yet the piercings and tattoos are a form of radical tribalism that is directly associated with collective identity, not individual merit.

Years ago—2009/2010 I was in the process of putting together information for a motorcycle documentary showing why motorcyclists were America’s backbone of independence. However the more I looked into the collectivism that embodies most people in motorcycle groups, from criminal gangs down to the simple enthusiast organization—you get at their core an animal seeking its place in the pecking order of the forest and awaiting its time and place to die in the theater of existence. So I abandoned the project out of sheer disappointment. It is no wonder that shows like Sons of Anarchy did so well on cable television. I can’t relate to them in any way, yet I ride motorcycles more than most gang members will ever dream of. I spend more time on a motorcycle than most of the hardest core riders who make yearly pilgrimages to Sturgis. Yet I can’t relate to a single one of those riders because the essence of their experience is rooted in the collective goo of animal concerns, and not the plight of the individual against the thug. Most people at their core are thugs by choice.

In the new Max film it is said that the main protagonist only has about ten lines of dialogue through the entire picture. This too is like me most of the time. I have a lot to say obviously if left to my own individual endeavors but once I have to make a decision to mix with others functioning from animal needs, I say very little and watch the clock frequently for the first moment that I can part company. The reason is that there is no way a common thug or the average person whose sole purpose in life is to “fit in” can possibly understand anything I am saying—so I don’t even waste my time.

Miller’s basic premise is that the moment society strips away that thin veil of orthodox European civility backed by Christian righteousness that mankind quickly falls from grace into the kind of characters in his Mad Max films. And I agree with him emphatically. The common thug is quick to invent new religions to formulate their social aims of collectivism, they are quick to attack like insects the foundations of individualism and the worst of the characters are those with the most piercings, and most elaborate tattoos, because it is they who are most prone to assimilation into collective opinion.

It is not hard to imagine characters as vile as the ones Miller places into his movies because the masks which conceal the tendency is not very well hidden and is easily removed. It wouldn’t take much to plunge our society into the world of Mad Max if one looks at it honestly. Fury Road if it is like the other Mad Max films will undoubtedly take an honest look into the nightmares capable by the human mind and explore the role of collectivism in all the worst forms with color and spectacle that is unmatched anywhere.

I understand why Mad Max works by himself. I understand why he is weary to have connections to people, and why he spends most of his life as a solitary figure only helping people occasionally out of compassion—which always puts him in peril. Now that Miller has a reputation as a filmmaker with great commercial successes like Babe, Happy Feet, and of course the previous three Mad Max films—he can pretty much make the film he has always dreamed of. After all, he may not ever get a chance like this again, so he might as well take his shot and it looks like he succeeded.

There is something beautifully honest about symphonic music applied to the absolute brutality of the animalistic human and its desire for bare essentials, food, sex, and tribal approval. In the Mad Max films gasoline means food—or the ability to get it—so it’s at the heart of all car cultures, particularly those in Fury Road.   In the Max films the protagonist is often the only one who is truly sane—the only one capable of survival because he is free of that collectivist viewpoint. So the commentary of the plot lines is particularly potent. The films are popular because they touch on an honesty which many can perceive but fail to properly identify. But after so many years of manifesting in the mind of a great writer/director, George Miller looks to have been given the opportunity to conduct a great fortissimo on the human experience the moment that convention is stripped away.

I know many beautiful people who are every bit the thug from Fury Road. I know many smiling faces that are just as vile as the worst shown in that series of clips promoting Fury Road. You can see them on Facebook discussions, you can see them in protests, you can see them at the traffic light texting nobody on their phone while somebody sits next to them wanting companionship. You can see them in the tattoo parlors as helpless parents pull at the skin of their faces and wonder how and why they failed their children then to hide their crime of upbringing failure—promote that they too will join their children in getting a tattoo on their ass—so to make the whole thing seem more appropriate. You can see the thugs of Fury Road fresh out of their suits and into their golf cloths renting a cart for a quick afternoon game. The Fury Road thugs are in their eyes there too as they flip through Internet porn on their cell phones and the young girls shown there between golf swings while the lady of the house buys new diamond earrings at a jewelry complex ahead of the next charity event. After all, one must show off their current social status within the tribe—no matter if it is a motorcycle gang or a fundraiser for political candidates. They are all thugs. And nobody gets to the heart of the matter better than George Miller.

I can’t wait for his new film. I’m sure it will be one of my absolute favorites.

Rich Hoffman

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