Investing & Maybe Fantasy Baseball

For the first ever in my life I saw a movie on the first day of its release and needless to say I am very happy I choose Mad Max: Fury Road to be that film. This is easily the best Mad Max film and one of the best action movies I’ve ever seen.

For those of you who do not know me, I adore Tom Hardy. When I saw the movie Bronson 6-7 years ago I knew Mr. Hardy was going to be a great actor. I never thought he would be one of the five best actors in the world. I also had the opportunity to meet him at Comic Con a couple of years ago while he was promoting the movie Warrior. Hell, I even named my first dog Hardy. The reason for the long diatribe was the reason why I saw Mad Max today was because of him, the previous Mad Max’s (mostly the second and third ones) and how awesome the trailers looked.

It wouldn’t be a Mad Max movie without a couple holes in the writing (honestly the flaws in the writing are only minor quibbles), but people are not going to see this movie for the writing. They will go see it because they want to see cars smashing into other cars and for things to blow up spectacularly. If that’s what you are expecting to see then you will not be disappointed. I actually laughed a few times during some of the chase scenes (which is a good thing) because of the scale of the explosions were so big and how what I was seeing had little, if any, CGI. The explosions and collisions were awesome, but what may get overlooked is how beautiful a lot of the shots were, which elevates the film a car chase novelty to a beautiful piece of art.

There’s so much detail in the film that I’m going to watch it frame by frame when it comes out on Blu-Ray. For example, the dashboard of Immortan Joe’s (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne who was Toecutter in the first Mad Max film) car is full of unique decals from other cars. Most of the action takes place in real time so there is very little CGI. With the CGI that is in the movie its obvious writer-director George Miller was involved with that process too, which is a breath of fresh air from typical blockbuster movies where the CGI looks disjointed from the rest of the film.

Even though Mad Max is in the title the core of the movie is about not about Max, but the self-redemption of Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron. There is hardly any dialogue, which suits Mr. Hardy and surprisingly by Mrs. Theron. If you watched The Drop and/or Locke you know all too well Mr. Hardy has the uncanny ability to tell you everything he’s thinking just with his eyes. Mr. Hardy does a great job of acting (as usual), but there wasn’t much for him to do in regards to character development. Instead, most of the opportunity for a great performance is given to Mrs. Theron and she knocks it out of the park.

Mrs. Theron has given so-so performances in the movies immediately following her Oscar (for Monster). However, in the past year or so she’s given remarkable performances in Young Adult and Snow White and the Huntsman. We don’t ever know why she’s trying to redeem herself, but her performance is so good we can infer everything by looking at her eyes.

I don’t want to talk about the plot of the film because movies are better when you do not know what to expect to see. I hope this movie makes truckloads of money because I would love to see more of the Mr. Miller has created. Tom Hardy has already signed up for four additional Mad Max’s so its possible more could be on the way. The movie is two hours long and it was one of the fastest two hours I ever experienced in a movie theatre.

If you want to see how three white, spoiled upper middle class high school losers spend their time outside of school then Palo Alto is the movie for you. I’m 32 years old so I’m 14 years removed from the life of a high school student so I’m probably going to come across as the “get off my lawn” old man, but do all teenagers party, excessively drink, smoke cigarettes, weed and other substances all the time? When I was in high school I never had anything close to that experience and neither did my friends. Granted, I was kind of a nerd, but I wasn’t at the level of Sam Weir, Neal Schweiber and Bill Haverchicck from Freaks and Geeks.

When I watch a film I try to emphasize with the characters, but all these characters do is get wasted while their parents do nothing and are getting high themselves. I grew in a suburb in the Bay Area and I never experienced close to anything close to what’s depicted in the movie, but I grew up with kids like the protagonists. The two male protagonists are the types of people who you’ll find working at a Costco their whole life while the female protagonist is attractive enough she’ll end the CMO of a middling app start up that folds in three years. When I was high school I thought those kids were losers and that’s exactly what I was thinking the whole time when I was watching the film.

Maybe I’m missing something and this is a hyper reality. An example of how this could be the case is one of the characters leaves a party after drinking and smoking weed all night, gets into a car, hits another moving vehicle and flees the scene. The character gets caught by the police. When the character goes to court he/she is sentenced to 150 hours of community service and has to give an in-person apology to the person he/she hit.

Even though I didn’t relate to anyone I have no idea what the movie was trying to say? Maybe parents have forgotten to be parents? Kids are growing up without any direction and their only ambition is to party all the time? There were some nice shots and the writer-director definitely had a vision for how she wanted the film to look, but overall I found this movie to be a mess without direction. At one point one of the characters was driving down the freeway on the opposite direction and I was rooting for that person to hit the oncoming traffic. It takes a lot for a movie to get me extremely angry during and after watching a movie, but Palo Alto achieved just that.

Grade: 20 (on the 20-80 scouting scale)

Jaime Marks Is Dead is an ambitious film that will have its faults overlooked by the audience because it is an independent movie. The movie is at its best when no one is talking. Some of the shots are breathtaking gorgeous, but the holes in the script take what could have been great story into a film that makes you feel just as lost as Jaime Marks.

The movie opens with Gracie, a young teenage girl, finding the body of a dead teenage boy, the often bullied Jamie Marks, near a creek. As someone who was bullied very early in life (not nearly to the degree what’s depicted in the movie) seeing that took me out of the movie and made me remember some memories I didn’t want to remember. In one bullying scene Adam, the main character, sees what’s happening to Jaime and does not help or ever had a conversation with him.

In the aftermath of Jamie’s death the life at the high school goes on seemingly normal, like nothing ever happened. It was as if a ghost no one thought was real to begin with disappeared. After school Adam visits the creek where Jamie’s body was found and he meets Gracie for seemingly the first time. After a brief conversation she invites Adam over to her house. (If only it was that easy to receive an invite to a girls house back when I was in high school.) While in Gracie’s room Adam sees Jamie for the first time, standing outside. To Adam’s surprise Gracie sees and has seen Jamie for quite some time. At this point you’re either going to go with the story or just turn it off.

When Adam leaves her room he meets Jamie and they begin a friendship. The biggest tragedy is they could have been really good friends if Adam ever had the courage to talk to Jamie while he was still alive. The idea of a lost great friendship is sprinkled throughout the film, but I think the film would have been better served if it focused more on that than the subplots about the courtship with Gracie, the new found friendship between Adam’s Mother and her new friend and the other “people” Adam and Jamie meet.

Some plot points were unnatural and occurred simply to move the plot, which took me out of the film (I was saying to myself, “Why would he do that? It doesn’t make sense for him to do that.”). I applaud the filmmakers and the financers for taking a chance on a movie they had to know going into it the subject matter they’re exploring are subjects most people do not instinctively want to see. There are few scenes of horror that feel a little misplaced, but the biggest horror was no one knew how smart and caring Jamie was; that Jamie had to create his own Shakespearean Tragedy in order to feel love.

Grade: 40-45 (on the 20-80 scouting scale)