Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review

    Furiosa: A Mad Max Story is the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the best movies of the 21st century as well as arguably the best of the Mad Max franchise. The movie was originally supposed to be filmed back to back with Fury Road, starring Charlize Theron, but events resulted in it being filmed a decade later with a new actress. The recasting and the long wait time may have contributed to its failure at the box office. There is also the question of how much of a niche property a Mad Max movie is without Mad Max.

    The premise is that Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a young woman living in a desert oasis when she’s kidnapped by raiders and brought before wasteland warlord, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Dementus is a bizarre and flamboyant character, leading his biker gang as much on whim as anyone coherent strategy. Dementus adopts Furiosa, against her will, and kills her mother before her eyes. Thus begins Furiosa’s decade-long quest for revenge against the individual that involves rival warlord, Immortan Joe, and his army of War Boys. Furiosa also befriends a rig driver named Praetorian Jack, who may be something more.

    My opinion on the film? Well, it’s good but not great. A prequel is something that always has an uphill battle to win over viewers because a large amount of the tension is removed. We know Furiosa is going to live and eventually rebel against Immortan Joe. Thus it is on the movie to make side characters whose fates we care about or make the events compelling enough that we don’t care about knowing what is going to happen to them. Furiosa, unfortunately, doesn’t quite do either.

    Anya Taylor-Joy is likable enough as Furiosa but it is hard to believe she is the hardened protagonist of Fury Road. She is mostly silent throughout the film and while this is the case for Mad Max himself in most of the movies, this is a far more talky film than most of them. Some more scenes where we find out what she thinks of her Devil’s alliance with Immortan Joe and her relationship with Praetorian Jack would have been welcome. Indeed, the complete lack of romance scenes despite one being central to her relationship to Joe’s regime is unfortunate.

    As a result of Furiosa’s silence, Chris Hemsworth steals the movie for better and worse. The movie makes the bizarre choice to give him a fake nose and teeth, perhaps to distract from his natural good looks, as well as have him speak in an especially nasal voice that is just confusing. Dementus is perhaps the most interesting character in the movie, though, with a surprising amount of nuance. He does terrible, unforgivable, things in the movie but you understand his perspective. Indeed, part of the movie’s problem is Dementus is charismatic enough and Immortan Joe is so one-dimensionally evil that you root for the former against the latter. This despite Furiosa being on Joe’s side(ish).

    Really, the movie feels like a tamer and toned down version of Fury Road. Fury Road was in your face about its feminist message, contrasted with two hours of relentless action that, nevertheless, kept its message clear. Furiosa, at its worst, feels like the PG-13 Hunger Games version of the post-apocalypse. Furiosa is sold to Joe’s harem and it pretty much skips over that part (not that I wanted to see the trauma involved) despite the fact that seems like it is a pretty important part of her story. We also have only a couple of other women in the movie, none of whom really interact with Furiosa. She is, to quote a lot of bad fiction, “not like other girls.”

    Spectacle-wise, the movie also falls short. It’s a very pretty film, don’t get me wrong. Unfortunately, CGI is heavily relied on in this film to the point that it feels less gritty and grounded by a significant degree. Fury Road had some CGI, but it’s a lot more noticeable here. The characters pull off cartoonish stunts that make it feel like an anime at times. I think it says a lot about my opinion of the movie that some of my favorite parts of the film were the appearance of Mad Max video game characters like Scrotus and Chumbucket, canonizing them.

    It’s not a bad film, but if you want to know a single moment that defines it for me, it’s when Furiosa has been masquerading as a boy for years in the pits of Immortan Joe’s mechanics shop. The wind picks up at one point and reveals her beautiful flowing hair, revealing her to be a girl to Praetorian Jack, which says the movie didn’t think that Furiosa would shave her head to protect her identity. It’s the kind of thing that takes you out of the film.

Available here 

My small town protest

 
    I live in Ashland, Ky, which is a medium sized city in Kentucky (pop: 21,154) but surrounded by smaller towns like Russell (pop: 4000). Ours is a deep Red state but people who hate tyranny and the abuses of power going on in our country do exists. I'm a crazy leftist so I could be here all day saying what I hate about Trump but let's say I dislike deportations without trial to countries where we're paying to hold people indefinitely, the Medicaid cuts to pay for rich tax cuts, the cuts to foreign aid, and those damn tariffs.

    The "No Kings" protest is one of those things that are trying to show America that Donald J. Trump is someone who does not have a mandate to do the things he does. Only together all at once can you make a loud enough noise to actually make a difference. The fact it would happen on his birthday during his expensive parade misusing money that could be used to help Americans during these times of cuts was especially symbolic.

    Well the story begins with the fact that I wanted to attend this protest because, well, if I didn't attend this protest then any political beliefs I profess are just so much talk. You can't really claim to be an anarchist or progressive if all you do is talk smack on the internet. That's not activism, that's just being a troll. Everyone can complain on the internet but it takes the absolute BARE MINIMUM of effort to show up to a protest.

    I had multiple choices of places to go for my protest and considered Huntington because it was where I went to college. It would be a thirty or forty minute, which is nothing except for the fact that I am terrified of highways. Much to my surprise, though, there was one that was in my own city (okay, Russell) and I believed that I could do that one and if no one was there then I would go to the one in Huntington. I was annoyed it wasn't at my college, though, I shouldn't have been surprised since that isn't the kind of liberal activist school that loves progress but instead money.

    Unfortunately, the internet site that said where it was going to happen was rather frustrating in its directions and just said "outside the IHOP." I knew where this was because, again, I was going to the local one but it was weird they didn't say something more concrete. Still, I showed up and hoped there would be a modest crowd.

    Aiding me in this agenda was my nieces, all three of them from my wife's side (I have a niece from my late brother as well but she lives in Colorado). I have very little craft skill so they took the poster board I bought and made some very good signs. Notably, I wanted "NO KINGS, NO MASTERS" and "TRUMP IS A VILLAIN" for simplicity. They went a little further with their own that they wrote on the back including, "TRUMP IS A RA_IST" that isn't really my bag. They couldn't attend because their mother would kill them and also had made plans that couldn't be rescheduled due to not knowing about the protest.

    There was no one, which was not a good sign. Still, I decided to stay and hoped someone would show up. The stated protest time for this was only two hours and the worst I could do was simply display my niece's homemade sign for the good folk there to gawk at. I also debated going to Huntington anyway for what I hoped would be a larger gathering.

    One thing I did get as a benefit, though, was that I got a sense of how other Kentuckians who weren't as terminally online as myself were feeling about Trump. In this case, they had decided to join the protest because while they'd never been fond of Trump, it was the fact he was going after migrant workers they knew and businesses that employed them. The cruelty and pettiness of the administration was straight in their faces. Still, seeing only the three of us show up was something deeply deflating and they were debating going over into Ohio to another larger city (Ironton, population: 10,104). Given these numbers, you probably think that Appalachia is inhabited like Fallout's America with only a general store and some burnt out building frames. You'd be half-right.

    At this time in other cities, there were crowds of eighty thousand or more so I wondered if it was really worth it but saw, to my surprise, another couple arrive to join my one-man protest. They were from a neighboring church to mine and disappointed in the crowd side just like mine. We were a bit early but didn't have much faith things would change. 

    They did, though!

    While we were waiting for nothing to happen, much to our surprise, we started to hear a chant and discovered that the protest was going on! We just were at the IHOP itself and it was at the roadside where all the cars were passing. We were not alone! There were actually hundreds of people who had showed up that we couldn't see because we'd come in through the other side of the IHOP and the parking lot was full!

    An eccentric collection of people were present including a lady dressed as a Handmaid with the white bonnet and red dress. There was rain but the nice couple traded an umbrella for one of my signs. A lot of cars honked their horns in support and some shouted obscenities at us. In the end, it was a good experience. I was a part of something greater and I'm glad to have done something, however small.

Paradise (2025) review

    Paradise is a 2025 political thriller that shockingly diverts into a science fiction one after the first episode. It’s one of those things that is best experienced without spoilers so if you want to enjoy Paradise in the best manner possible, you should go and watch it without reading any further. It’s a good series. There are some flaws but it is a solid and serious take on the subjects it tackles. It also has a truly spectacular seventh episode. That’s about as much as I can say about the series without spoiling anything.

    You ready for more?

    Okay then.

    The premise for Paradise is that Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) is the head of the United States Secret Service, protecting the President of the United States, Cal Bradford (James Marsden). Cal is assassinated and there’s a severe question of how the Secret Service could fail so utterly. A lot of allusion is made to things having gone horribly wrong as well as a once close friendship between the two that went horribly wrong. At the end of the first episode, we finally find at least one of those secrets out.

    You ready?

    No take backs.

    Specifically, the secret is that the two are living in a massive underground city and the rest of the world has been destroyed in some sort of unnamed catastrophe. The disaster was successfully predicted by a billionaire tech mogul, Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) who used both her and their government’s resources to make a luxury bunker to ride out the apocalypse.

    Paradise basically takes the premise of Fallout and proceeds to do it completely straight. If I had to make a comparison, I’d say it’s what happens if you combine Fallout with Lost. Every character is carrying immense survivor’s guilt as well as dealing with a variety of tragic backstories. America was not in its best shape even before the apocalypse and what happened to the surface world is another driving mystery. We get a decent set of answers to most of the pressing questions but, like all good writing, adds more questions.

    Sterling K. Brown does a fantastic job at making a lead that isn’t necessarily the most likable individual. His wife didn’t make it down to the bunker in time for it to be shut and his hatred for both the President he’s sworn to protect is only matched for his own. The fact his kids depend on him to provide a semblance of a normal life and the remainder of what qualifies as military force/security in the 10,000 person community falls under him doesn’t relieve his stress. James Marsden also gets to show off his acting chops as Cal is a somewhat Bill Clinton-esque figure who has his vices but was, ultimately, a good man in a horrifying situation. Much of the series deals with flashbacks to his tenure as President as well as setting up his life in the bunker.

9/10 

If the episode has a highlight and lowest point, it will be the seventh and eighth episodes. The seventh episode finally provides concrete answers as to what happened during the End of the World and how everyone responded to it. It is well-written, dramatic, and even genuinely horrifying at times. Some of the best television I’ve seen in the past decade. The eighth episode, sadly, provides a thoroughly unsatisfying answer to the President’s murder.

Paradise has a lot of themes of class consciousness, environmentalism, wealth inequality, government corruption, corporate malfeseance, and more but they’re all very subtle. All of the survivors in the bunker are the “lucky ones” that get to live in a climate controlled Rockwellian community while the rest of humanity has gone extinct (maybe). However, society is set up so there’s still people who clean the toilets, pour coffee, and serve an elite that doesn’t make any sense to have anymore.

In conclusion, I strongly recommend this series. It’s some of the best science fiction I’ve seen in years and certainly deserves to have many more people talking about it than I’ve seen. I was a bit disappointed by the final episode but absolutely want to see another season of this if not several more.

The Last of Us season two review

    THE LAST OF US season two was...okay.

    If that sounds like I'm soft pedaling the opening to a negative review, well, then you are extremely perceptive. The Last of Us season one was one of the best, if not the best, video game adaptations of all time. The only real competition I would say it has is the Fallout show and that is an entirely different genre despite them both being post-apocalypse science fiction programs. It was immensely popular for a reason and introduced a whole new audience to the world of Joel Miller and Ellie Williams. I feel like the attempt to retain this audience is what hurt it versus challenging them like the video game, The Last of Us 2, did.

    The premise is that a fungal outbreak has turned the majority of individuals into horrifying monsters. Ellie Williams (Bella Ramsey) is a young girl immune to the condition protected by Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) that ended the previous season with a devastating secret between them. The second game was deeply controversial as it shifted focus from the relationship between these two to a devastating cycle of revenge between Ellie and a new character, Abby Anderson (Kaitlyn Dever).

    I'm generally a defender of the video game and its most controversial choice (spoilers ahead) with the fact that it is an attack on the typical post-apocalypse lack of morality that is in so many works. The two women are incredibly hardass survivors and vicious without civilization to hold them back. However, it is shown to be a dark path that doesn't make either of them better. Instead, it just gradually winnows down their morality and breaking the cycle of violence is more important than any form of justice. It wasn't very popular in some circles because of Joel Miller being the most popular character in the franchise by far but it was an effective artistic statement.

    Season Two of the Last of Us seems to really wish it wasn't adapting the second game. I say that as a strange criticism but it feels like the best summary of the show I can think of. It doesn't change everything but it tries to softpedal, move around events, explain everything, and generally screwing with the tone. Ironically, it doesn't change any of the actual story so that its efforts are more or less vain. Like if you have someone who hates beef stew (or grimdark), you can't really prepare the beef stew in a way that will satisfy the negativity. The story is a horribly dark and depressing one that was still too dark for a lot of people.

    Since it's Pride month, it's also fascinating to see how the show handles its queer romance and leads with Ellie and Dina. The show seems to be much more interested in the chemistry between Bella Ramsey and Isabel Merced. The show seems like it would much rather be doing a story about them falling in love in the post-apocalypse rather than how vengeance poisons even the best things in our lives. Maybe I'm merely misjudging the pacing and we'll see that happen. Also, the scenes between the two are genuinely cute with some bittersweet ones like the fact the pair have no idea what the rainbow signifies when they enter one of Seattle's neigborhoods.

    The show has some genuinely fantastic acting throughout with Pedro Pascal and Jeffrey Wright (who was the voice of Isaac in the game) doing amazing jobs. Bella Ramsey is always great when she's the younger Ellie and Isabella Merced is a cool collected survivor throughout. I certainly don't think the show is bad by any means. I'm definitely going to watch the next season. However, I think the show pulls its punches.

    Ellie Williams in the game is someone on a horrible road of revenge and while the show version definitely does some terrible things, I feel like it doesn't feel like she's fully committed to the path of revenge that would match a book accurate Arya Stark. This one seems to not fully in the mind of wanting to kill Abby and all of her crew but just Abby, which doesn't make sense to me and weakens the game's message. I think this may be a Catch-22, though, because a lot of more casual viewers were horrified by even the softened version on display here.

    Oh well, we'll see where the road of revenge leads in...two years.

    Oof.

The Return of Supervillainy is now available on Kindle

THE RETURN OF SUPERVILLAINY (Supervillainy Saga #10) is now out! The latest installment of the fantastic superhero parody series takes our protagonist against a superhuman supremacist, an insane tech bro, and his own past.

THE RETURN OF SUPERVILLAINY

"Gary’s back. Tell a friend.”

Gary Karkofsky AKA Merciless: The Supervillain without MercyTM has managed to fall into a comfortable routine as the (acting) Supreme Archmage of Earth. More hero than villain these days, he’s recruited to a shadowy black ops team with a shocking mission: assassinate Helios: The Sun King, ruler of Tomorrow Island. Gary immediately twigs to the fact he’s the fall guy even as he has his own score to settle with Helios. Joining him will be a number of fan favorite characters as well as several new additions to the surreal world of the Supervillainy Saga.

The Return of Supervillainy is the tenth volume of the Supervillainy Saga, following the world’s worst (best?) supervillain. It has two bonus stories in “Sidekick Girl versus Merciless” and “The Freelancer’s Cunning Plan.” It also contains “The Guide to the Supervillainy Saga” which will detail the entire history of the setting for long-term and new fans.

Available here

Thunderbolts (2025) review

 
    THUNDERBOLTS (2025) is a movie that I was looking forward to a lot more than a lot of other Marvel Cinematic Universe fans. I enjoyed the original Thunderbolts comics with Baron Zemo, Hawkeye, Songbird, Mach IV, Moonstone, and others. I also really enjoyed the Black Widow movie that was an underrated gem of the “original” Avengers era. I also am one of the people who really does love goofy antiheroes doing goofy superhero-adjacent stuff as anyone who has read my Supervillainy Saga books will know.

    I’m even fond of the Sentry, a C-list character that has a very complicated history but has been involved in several fantastic stories. A part of me was also fully prepared to hate this movie because a lot of the praise coming back mentioned things like the handling of mental health and illness. Without getting into any specific diagnoses, I am neuroatypical and my family has so many mental conditions in our history that we might as well be H.P. Lovecraft protagonists, I also was one of the people who fully hates the idea of the Sentry being the poster boy for the mentally ill in Marvel as I’d much rather Bruce Banner (a hero) be the guy over a guy I associate as a cautionary tale of Superman gone wrong. I like the Sentry but I don’t want him to be a functioning hero but a tragedy, if that makes sense.

    So was it good? Was it, as Cyndi Lauper would say, “good enough”? Or was it terrible? Are we grading on the curve enough that I was okay with Captain America: Brave New World? Well, the answer is it’s closer to the “good enough” versus the good. It’s good-ish. It’s better than the vast majority of the Disney Marvel mill’s products and has some genuine pathos, which I legitimately thought was absent after Thanos sacrificed Gamora. It has a couple of actual things to say but being deeper than a kiddie pool doesn’t mean it gets deeper than the shallow end of the pool. Solid B+ movie that I will probably watch again with my niece when it comes out on streaming.

    The movie is fairly straightforward even if there’s a few twists and turns. You’ll be completely spoiled if you watch most of the trailers. A bunch of characters from Black Widow, Ant-Man, and Falcon and the Winter Soldier are being used by Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis Dreyfus) to do dirty ops for the CIA. Unfortunately, like many spymasters, she’s actually up to her neck in the Military Industrial Complex and we get the first piece of unbelievable fantasy that someone wants to actually hold her account for human rights violations. Highlighting she’s complete scum, she murders almost all of her scientists and researchers in her private supersoldier program before trying to have the assassins killed.

    Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) is more or less the star of the film and feeling deep depression over all the people she murders for the government black ops group. The movie sort of skates past how many people she’s murdering on behalf of her evil CIA handler because she feels bad about it. This part I didn’t hate because, obviously, Yelena is not going to have a well-developed moral compass with being a child assassin. Still, unlike Natasha, Yelena never really gets herself out of the shady work she hates.

    Things go to hell for her and everyone else once they realize that they’ve become loose ends and very reluctantly team up to survive. This group including John Walker AKA US Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ava Star AKA Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Bob (Lewis Pullman) who seems to be an utterly normal person caught in a bad situation. The Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) end up joining their ad hoc group as well. Fans of Taskmaster and hoping for a Bond girl repeat performance by Olga Kurylenko will be disappointed. Action scenes happen, character arcs occur, friendships are formed, the power of family prevails, heroic sacrifices are made, and so on.

    The much praised handling of mental illness wasn’t a disaster like I was expecting but it’s not exactly great either. Mentally ill people are still people and not violent psychopaths (unless they get infused with powers from demon dimensions). It turns out what most of them need are hugs and not beating them up with superpowers. If you think that’s a spoiler, you will realize this is not the case within a few minutes of Bob’s introduction. It comes as a bit ridiculous after we had the same plot beat in Brave New World. The comedy is also far more prevalent and less cringe than I expected. A running gag is that the Thunderbolts are named after Yelena’s childhood soccer team that sucked but I actually found that kind of touching. Certainly, it’s better than trying to pass these guys off as the next A-Team.

    I mentioned that Disney screwed up by making some of their ideas into TV shows rather than movies with Kenobi, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, and Ms. Marvel all being things that probably would have benefited from being trimmed to 2 or 2 and a 1/2 hours. This is the opposite where just too much happens that doesn’t get developed. A lot more time could have been devoted to the politics behind the scenes, Sentry’s slow descent into megalomania, and all of the characters’ individual traumas that we’re les shown than told. A seven to eight hour miniseries would have been meatier I think but I’m never not entertained either. Better to be all the good(ish) parts and underdeveloped than a slog.

    Watch it.

    But don’t expect to be blown away.

Two United States of Monsters novels planned for 2025

 
I have two more United States of Monsters books planned for this year: QUEEN OF BLOOD which is the backstory of Ashura (as well as New Detroit's vampires as a whole) and follows up Brighteyes' ending and VWA AND POSSE which will be Peter getting suckered (no pun intended) into becoming an assassin of the European Vampire League's King.

A lot of people wonder why I combined all of my books into one series but it's really because of two reasons. 1] Because a lot of people never got all the many connections between the various books. 2] It's much, much easier to market.

Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJDKDP29