Cereal At Midnight

In the television series Ted Lasso , our perpetually-optimistic football coach says something along the lines of "it's like in that movie Showgirls . There are so many nipples that eventually you stop noticing them." The comparison applies to Furiosa , a movie that is so chock-a-block with mayhem that one is likely to go numb from it all long before the final credits roll. George Miller, the man behind every Mad Max movie made to date, directs Furiosa as if he may never make another film again--as if he has to tell every adventure of this post-apocalyptic wasteland in one single movie, which he also directs as if someone is going to take it away from him. For all I know, maybe they were.  I adore Mad Max: Fury Road . It remains my favorite entry in the series, a visceral, unrelenting experience that pummels the viewer with Miller's particular brand of ambitious Australian insanity. When I saw Fury Road in cinemas, the last shot of the film drew an audible (and entir...

Contrary to Tina Turner's proclamation that "We Don't Need Another Hero," the success of the  Mad Max  franchise in the 1980s spurred an entire exploitation cycle of post-apocalyptic movies that saw any enterprising filmmaker with a few bucks and a willing cast and crew trekking into the wasteland to cash in on the trend while the gettin' was good.  In many ways, it was a more innocent time when audiences demanded less from their entertainment. They would suspend their disbelief for 90 minutes to watch a hero or two struggle against some gasoline despot or rajah of the ruins who terrorizes a tattered band of survivors with an iron fist, or mask...or something made of iron (scrap metal is very important in post-apocalyptic movies, after all). There are almost always motorcycles that look like they've been kit-bashed from the remnants of an automobile graveyard because motorcycles look really cool zipping around sand dunes. One of the many movies to come out of ...

This ambitious Australian science fiction movie from 1987 never quite lives up to its own hype. Exhibit A: the poster for The Time Guardian  depicts a muscular guy in a sleeveless shirt and sunglasses, blasting what appears to be a robot or cyborg in the face with a huge laser cannon while the world around him crumbles and burns. The tagline reads "Time is just about the only thing he won't waste." This image and blurb conjures a Schwarzenegger-style action movie in which our hero takes on cybernetic hordes with no holds barred, delivering one-liners as he serves up destruction. In grand exploitation movie fashion, nothing in the actual movie comes close to being as cool as what this poster promises.

Pour a bowl of C-3PO's cereal, put on your favorite John Carpenter synthesizer score, and dust of the VCR, because we're going analog.