Lovely Day For Mad Max Fury Road in Cannes

George Miller restarts the V8 of Mad Max Fury Road on the Croisette for a triumphant post-apocalyptic opera with nitromethane-doped action.

Thirty years after creating the Mad Max post-apocalyptic genre, the Australian over-motorized roaring-of-terror odyssey on wide studded tires, Oscar-winning filmmaker George Miller came back with Mad Max: Fury Road, a symphony of sand, steel, blood, a “visual music” orchestrated by the sound of rumbling doped V-8 engines, drums beating and flame-spitting guitar. Let us enter the shiny and chromed Valhalla of Road Warriors for a two hours trip into a high-octane hell of sand, blood and steel, where only the unforgiving V8 God will help us to get out relatively unscathed.

Acqua Cola or mummy’s milk

Survival, fighting for survival in a world where “hope is a mistake”, a world where water has become Acqua Cola, harshly rationed by the Citadel’s tyrant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a villain who has been surviving – for 30 years – by sipping mummy’s milk, when Mel Gibson turned into Tom Hardy. The latter, seemingly haunted by a troubled past and walking away from a little girl, is now the property of a War Boy who shamelessly sucks his survival from his blood.

Private harem gone

Steel-arm Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is to drive a War Rig trailing a huge tank full of gasoline to deliver. But her cargo is much more precious than Gaspi: she is fleeing with Immortan Joe’s private harem. Enraged, the Warlord and all his gang ruthlessly pursues the runaways aboard monstrous, heavily armed hybrid vehicles spitting flames. A rolling and roaring carnival of motorbikes and muscle cars will bounce over the dunes and engage in a full-blown war.

Furiosa:Fury Road?

The film could have been named Furiosa:Fury Road, as Charlize Theron’s character and performance outshines Tom Hardy’s, who, if he has Mel Gibson’s frame and impressive skills for action, is missing a sparkle of dimension in the eyes. Moreover, his minimal dialogue part does not serve him. On the other hand, Oscar-winning Charlize Theron seems to be able to explore dark sides into her inner self for her character of female warrior to be more credible. The role of women in the film is more important than in the previous films: they bravely refuse the role of poor laying things Immortan Joe wanted to confine them to, but bear the future of the new humanity and the seeds of a new life.

A brilliant cast

Oscar-winning filmmaker George Miller wrote the film screenplay with Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris. The film also stars Nicholas Hoult (X-Men: Days of Future Past) as Nux; Josh Helman (X-Men:Days of Future Past) as Slit; Nathan Jones (Conan the Barbarian) as Rictus Erectus. Collectively known as The Wives, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (Transformers: Dark of the Moon) is Angharad, Riley Keough (Magic Mike) is Capable, Zoë Kravitz (Divergent) plays Toast the Knowing, Abbey Lee is The Dag, and Courtney Eaton is Cheedo the Fragile.

Tale of Tales

Salma Hayek

A wonderful film, admirably shot, with gorgeous landscape taking us into a world of dream and poetry, not without risks and cruelty.

Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales depicts three stories blending the real and the fantastic world of fairytales freely inspired from Lo Cunto de li Cunti by Giambattista Basile, a Neapolitan author of the seventeenth century, precursor of fairy literature. Witches and fairies, fearsome monsters and ogre, three different kings and queens in perched castles, all these characters are looking for happiness in a cruel world.

Bitterness, greed, and weakness

The Queen of Longtrellis (Salma Hayek) has his king husband (John C. Reilly) get killed in a fight with a marine creature. The heart of the creature will provide her with a baby. Alas, the virgin servant who cooks it also gets pregnant with what will turn out to be the Prince’s twin. An old greedy lady takes benefit of the naïveté of the King of Strongcliff (Vincent Cassel) to provoke his passion and abandon her sister to her fate. The weak King of Highhills (Toby Jones), loving in secret a giant flea, will let the impossible occur: an ogre takes his young daughter away as his wife.

All of life’s opposites

The stories told in The Tale of Tales cover all of life’s opposites: the ordinary and the extraordinary, the magical and everyday’s life, the regal and the ugly, the sublime and the filthy, the terrible and the tender, with mythology and popular wisdom. The tales show human feelings pushed to the extreme, and not everybody will know a happy ending even if courage is always rewarded.

The moral of this story is that any action causes a reaction whose consequences can’t be perceived on the moment but may strike you later. Well, that’s too philosophical. Let’s rather say: keep an eye open if you use magic and don’t trust a knife sharpener for making you look younger!

Umimachi Diary – Our Little Sister

The Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda provides one year of a family saga highlighting four girls who become sisters and form a real family.

 Adaptation of a manga by Akimi Yoshida that fascinated Hirokazu Kore-Eda by its dimension of moving familial drama. The film tells the story of Suzu, a 14 year old girl who met for the first time her three half-sisters at the burial of her father. The three decide to ask the orphan to come and live with them at their family house in Kamakura.

Tenderness fireworks

The reconciliation of the survivors from a broken family is taking place in an atmosphere of freshness and tenderness in a calm and relaxing coastal city. A delicate interlude in modern Japan where family, absence, grief, resentment toward parents is treated in an intimate style. The different personalities and nuanced characters of each sister will surely help the teen heroine to form her own personality and to flourish, while casting aside the pain that her birth brought.

Hirokazu Kore-Eda won the Prix du Jury in 2013 with Like Father, Like Son