Mad Max: Fury Road

Olympus Pen / Ilford HP5

Off to the cinema, to see Mad Max: Fury Road, in which Tom Hardy plays a shattered wreck of a man trapped in the shattered wreck of a future Australia, although as every review must point out the film was actually shot in Namibia. Fury Road is the fourth Mad Max film; everybody remembers the second film, Mad Max 2, which worked as both a terrific action flick and an academic treatise on the construction of same. Fury Road is half an hour longer than its predecessor and feels thinner and less substantial, and it has a surprisingly weak ending, and Max barely does anything, etc, but on the whole it's great fun. Great, shallow fun.

Great, shallow, visually-stunning fun. About fifteen years ago it became practical for films to be edited with computers, so that by simply moving some sliders the colours could be made to look bright or dark or washed-out or pastel. Fury Road takes this to an extreme - everything is orange or blue - but does so with such forceful panache that I didn't mind. Director George Miller uses his computers for colour grading but otherwise doesn't tax them overmuch for the visual effects, which are for the most part practical. I felt a little sorry for the Namibian desert, because it now has long stretches of broken metal, shredded rubber, and spilled oil, but on the other hand I'm sure the sand will cover it over. On the evidence of Fury Road nobody lives in Namibia anyway. Perhaps Miller and his crew went back with dustpans and brushes and cleaned everything up. I hope they did, because Fury Road is likely to do for Namibia's tourist industry what Peter Jackson's Rings trilogy did for New Zealand.

Fury Road is essentially a High Concept film. Do you remember High Concept? It was big in the early 1990s. It hasn't really gone away, although the idea isn't novel any more. High Concept films are built around a central, immediately engaging idea; either a question or a concept. What if Martin Freeman was actually a tiny person, and not a normal-sized man? What would happen? He would of course try to steal treasure from a dragon. Adventures would ensue. Or what if Robert Downey Jr had a heart condition that forced him to wear a metal suit? He did a lot of drugs when he was young, it's plausible, and the answer is that he would naturally team up with a mutant, a Norse god, a resurrected super-soldier, and a foxy lady, and they would fight another Norse god.

What if Angelina Jolie's cheekbones were even more pronounced than they are already? She would become a witch. The most memorable sequence of the first three Mad Max films was the truck chase at the end of Mad Max 2, so what if a whole film was based around that truck chase, extended out for two hours?

And so Fury Road is an unusually focused, almost simplistic film, as if George Miller had set out to strip away absolutely everything that was not a stunt or a fight sequence. Tom Hardy's Max and Charlize Theron's Furiosa meet and bond with a bout of fisticuffs, and spend most of the rest of the film shooting, stamping, and hitting people, but they nonetheless develop a rapport. The film's few attempts to fill in Max's story or give us some light character moments don't work, nobody seems to have cared about them. Fury Road would have worked just as well if all the characters communicated with grunts as in Clan of the Cave Bear.

When we meet him Max is a traumatised wild animal, only capable of violence and threats; he becomes more socialised, but he still remains an empty cipher at the end. Furiosa hints at her life before the great kaboom, but the talk of redemption and fixing that which is broken comes out of nowhere and adds nothing. The spartan dialogue and Namibian landscapes occasionally put me in mind of the ape sequence from 2001, and it's a shame that Miller didn't opt decisively for one approach or the other, or alternatively ask the screenwriters to come up with some really good dialogue, instead of numerous variations of "they're coming" and "over here" and "fix that pipe".

Max himself is a curiously passive fellow who should be a bit like Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken - all growls and scowls - but Tom Hardy plays him more often as a bewildered victim. It's an interesting contrast to his work as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, where he was basically a swaggering, confident Mussolini figure. Here he's Mussolini after the fall of the fascist regime, waiting for the mob to come and beat him to death.

Let's talk about the plot. This will be a short paragraph. Tom Hardy is Max, who is mad, in the mentally disturbed sense, rather than the angry sense. He is instead surprisingly mild. The film is arranged so that whenever Max takes charge, the action moves elsewhere; when he goes to fight off the baddies, they attack one of his companions. In fact the film subverts the notion of Max as the big bad hero, because whenever he tries to takes control by himself it goes wrong. He's a terrible shot, he can't drive Furiosa's truck without her help, he's no good at diplomacy, and although he has a mean right hook he is continually saved by blind luck. On the one occasion he performs a daring feat of ultraviolence, it happens off screen.

Max is captured in the opening minutes, and his iconic V8 car is totalled. The car has a couple of tiny tiny cameos but otherwise the star of the film is a big truck, which is driven by Charlize Theron, a woman. Her character seems to be high-up in the empire of Immortan Joe, a bastard. He resembles Baron Harkonnen from Dune, with pustules and stuff. Joe has a private army of "war boys", who are reckless and so hungered. On the razor's edge they trail, because there's murder by the roadside in a sore, afraid new world. He tries to break his population by withholding water from them; he also has a private stash of women, and in a startling scene we learn that he milks some of them for their, well, for their milk, which is an image that you don't normally see in Hollywood films.

George Miller is Australian, and the Mad Max films are amongst the most internationally-visible Australian films. From a British perspective, Australia is stereotyped as a brash, vulgar, but fundamentally well-meaning nation of good-looking white people; they are chavs, but they are happy chavs rather than the baleful, hate-filled chavs of England. Australian culture has a cheerfully vulgar streak running through it, and there are flashes of this in Mad Max. The sequence in Mad Max 2 where one of the baddies tries to catch a metal boomerang and - slice! - his fingers come off, and he looks upset, is presented as slapstick comedy; the film trod a fine line between genuine shocks and black humour. It had the same tone as Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2, or Peter Jackson's early horror films, and Fury Road has a little bit of that as well. Only a little bit. Glimpses of it, but without the cheeky humour. Mid-way through the film one of the main characters is badly injured. She is in the very late stages of pregnancy, and another filmmaker would have shown either her or the baby recovering, or had their demise happen away from the action. Miller instead opts for a sequence that is both uncomfortable and off-hand, highlighting the brutality of life at the end of the world in a way that doesn't really fit. The rest of the film is too silly for that sequence to work, it's a jarring tonal shift.

Immortan Joe's private stock includes a group of supermodels who he keeps for breeding purposes. They are played by real-life It Girls, although surprisingly Cara Delevigne is not one of them. Perhaps she is being held by one of the other local warlords ("The Bullet Farmer", who has a stockpile of ammunition, or "The People Eater", who is corpulent). Furiosa and the It Girls aren't keen on being the playthings of an extremely powerful, wealthy old man - Fury Road does not take place in our world - so they hatch a plan to hijack one of Joe's convoys and escape. It's not a very good plan, and it seems to rely on divine intervention for it to work, but it does work so there's that. Furiosa and the It Girls would be a good name for a cartoon pop band.

Along the way Max is roped in to help the pursuers, and after an exciting chase through a dust storm he frees himself and latches on to Furiosa's gang. Then there is another long chase which ends with Max and his new friends seemingly free. At this point the cast includes Max, Furiosa, some elderly but surprisingly tough warrior women who are all that is left of a farming community, plus an upbeat chap called Nux. He is a war boy who has fallen out of love with Immortan Joe's propaganda. Nux is played by Nicholas Hoult, who channels the manic energy of Ewen Bremner from Trainspotting. He's the most engaging character in the film, a hapless but enthusiastic loser who is driven to heroism by his single-minded craving for pussy.

The first two Mad Max films were a product of their time; sex, violence, bad language and bloody gore were all the rage in the late 1970s, although with Australia being a relatively conservative culture there was less of the sex than in, say, France. The first two films were products of an era when heroes were motivated by the rape of their loved ones, an era when rape was shown on screen, firstly to demonstrate that the baddies were cads, secondly as an excuse to show some nudity. Fury Road is an exploitation film in the modern style. It reminds me of Christopher Nolan's Batman films, in that it manages to imply a mass of violence and unpleasantness without actually showing very much. The violence in Fury Road is bone-crushing but mostly bloodless, and although we see human bodies smashed and broken they tend to be tiny little specks of people wheeling through the air. There is some blood, but it is cut so quickly that it barely registers, and indeed the death of one of the main characters is hard to follow because of this. Off the top of my head I can't remember any bad language at all, except for some made-up future-speak. There are some queasy make-up effects, but they're mostly incidental details.

Mad Max 2 was unusual in that the covert homoeroticism of contemporary muscle-man action films was brought to the surface; while the likes of Commando and Predator were full of sweaty topless sexless men and sexless, ineffectual women, Mad Max 2 portrayed the villains as explicitly homosexual, with an implication that the unavailability of women had driven them into the ultimate depravity. At the same time they were shown to be competent, tough fighters, although it's a stretch to argue that Mad Max 2 was a great leap forward in the portrayal of gay characters on screen.

In contrast Fury Road has no time for sexual subtext. The "war boys" are anaemic, and there's an implication that Immortan Joe is spiking their drinks with the futuristic equivalent of bromide. Max and Furiosa become platonic friends; the issue of Nux getting it on with one of the It Girls is waved away, presumably so that the film doesn't have to deal with the possibility of their baby being deformed. Which would in turn raise a host of other questions. In a world where everybody is deformed, what's wrong with being deformed? Are the It Girls supposed to be an unironic vision of loveliness, or a subversion of this? They're presented as a precious, angelic hope for the future of humanity, which seems unfair to ugly girls, and it's hard not to notice that they're so, well, so white. Even Zoe Kravitz is white, and she's black.

Fury Road is a boys' film, and in a boy's world girls are either very attractive or invisible, and thus superfluous. And yet Fury Road subverts this during the final chase, in which it becomes apparent that the most effective fighters are a bunch of old women - they are far more effective than Max - but this smacks of impossible expectations. In Fury Road women are either exceptionally attractive or crack shots cattle, there is no middle ground. But isn't this true of us here in the real world? There's a fiction that we are all equal, but in reality we are all - men and women alike - either exceptionally attractive, or very good at something, or we are cattle. In this respect perhaps Fury Road is simply being honest.

Let's wind back to Nux. He has more dialogue than Max and more character development, and in fact the film could easily have been written without Max at all. Nux, Furiosa, and the warrior women do most of the work; this is really their story, and I wonder if Nux was conjured up in case the producers couldn't get the rights to the Mad Max franchise. Perhaps there is a parallel universe in which I have just come back from seeing Nux: Mutant Warrior, or something.

On a racial level Fury Road is a white film crafted for an audience of white people. It's about heavy metal petrol bandits pillaging their way to Valhalla. The villain has a metal soundtrack delivered by a guitarist whose guitar is also a flamethrower. All of the characters are white, and I have to assume that the apocalypse that wiped out civilisation also killed off Australia's Asian population. The most beautiful people in the world are the It Girls, who dress in white, in fact their diaphanous white dresses are explicitly used as a symbol of hope for the future. As with Peter Jackson's Rings films the racial coding is presumably unconscious. The Rings films were shot in New Zealand, where the pool of extras was presumably mostly white; Fury Road was of course shot in Namibia, which... well, I'm guessing that the actors were imported and the locals weren't allowed to be in the film.

I was talking about the plot. Max is captured, and then there's a chase, at the end of which he breaks free, and then there's an inventive fist fight, and then there's a second chase which ends with all of the characters facing a long trek across a salt plain towards probably nothing. So they decide to go back, and so there's a third chase, and then the film ends. That's Fury Road. Three chases punctuated by a fist fight.

With some dialogue, but not very much. How do the characters whisper to each other in the cab of a truck? Let's assume that Fury Road is a kind of live action cartoon. George Miller's last big hit was Happy Feet, a cartoon about some penguins, and Fury Road has the kind of visual inventiveness that characterises the best animated films. We're supposed to call them animated films, aren't we? They aren't cartoons any more. They're "animation". Cartoon illustrators have time and freedom to fill the frame with little details, and live action films directed by cartoonists often work as a parade of still frames, a succession of inventive set-ups - Brazil, Tron, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, John Carter and so forth were all visual feasts. Fury Road's post-kaboom world is a fascinating, post-steampunk mish-mash of Ben Hur, Metropolis, Modern Times, with bits of Lawrence of Arabia and, inevitably, the ramped frame rates and stylised colour palette of 300. The saturated palette puts me in mind of Katy Perry or Nicki Minaj, in the sense that the film looks obviously artificial, but intentionally so; it has a deliberate visual language that is at times gorgeous, and will no doubt sell a lot of 4K televisions.

The plot falls apart at the end, although on further contemplation I'm not sure that any of the plot makes sense. How did Furiosa expect to escape? Her escorts are attacked by bandits, but how did she plan to escape the bandits? If Max is so keen on survival, how come his souped-up V8 can't outrun some dune buggies? Why is a society that seems to have lots of bullets relying on petrol bombs? Why has everybody chosen to live in the middle of the desert? Not even the aborigines bothered with the outback, and the few that did only managed to sustain small settlements. Perhaps the coasts are radioactive, but why not tell us? Max's plan only makes sense if we assume that Immortan Joe sends all of his warriors on the road to stop Max, and that the remaining citizens embrace Furiosa as their new leader, but (a) how come he's the expert on Joe's society all of a sudden (b) obviously some of the warriors stay home (c) it's not clear how much authority Furiosa has (d) she's in bad shape when she gets back, and what's to stop one of Joe's lieutenants from kicking her to the ground and proclaiming himself king? Immortan Joe rules over a load of elderly peasants who should have died years ago, and what for? They don't seem to do any work. Why keep them alive? Etc.

Ultimately Fury Road doesn't work as a conventional narrative. It needed either more exposition or less; and even if Max's plan is sensible, it feels unsatisfying to just rewind the action back to the start. In a post-Game of Thrones era of realistically downbeat fantasy the chances are that Furiosa will become just as big a tyrant as Immortan Joe, because in the real world people are at the mercy of events and are moulded by their environment. Literally so in the case of Joe and his followers, because they're radioactive mutants. How is Furiosa going to cure that? How will she provide them with wives? Will she tell them that their future is just metastasising cancers, excruciating pain, inevitable death, with no hope at all? Hmm? Max himself walks away, perhaps realising that Furiosa has no future.

Let's talk about the Mad Max films. I'm not sure whether Fury Road is supposed to be a fresh start for the series. Max is still haunted by the death of his family, which suggests that it follows directly on from Mad Max. He begins the film with the cool V8 interceptor from Mad Max 2, but wasn't the car destroyed during that film? I don't know. For the purposes of my film reviews I try to read as few contemporary sources as possible, lest I end up simply copying other reviews. The first Mad Max was shot on a budget of twenty Australian dollars. It starred a bunch of cool cars and some nobodies, but such was the appeal of cool cars smashing into things that it became a substantial international hit, at least for a cheap exploitation film. It was so cheap that it made a profit on international sales before it had been released, and for many years it was the most profitable film of all time. It was a kind of pre-apocalyptic biker film, with a dash of "stuntsploitation" thrown in.

Stuntsploitation was a peculiar micro-genre of Australian films that emerged in the mid 1970s. The genre was essentially the brainchild of director Brian Trenchard-Smith, who was at least enthusiastic. His secret weapon was stuntman Grant Page, who was prepared to set himself on fire, leap off cliffs, crash cars etc for our amusement and Trenchard-Smith's financial gain. Page also worked on Mad Max, and performs a memorable stunt near the beginning where he smashes a car through a caravan. Stuntsploitation was fundamentally goofy, whereas Mad Max has a dark edge that sets it apart from the work of Trenchard-Smith; it also has a slick commercial sense that distances it from the artier Australian new wave films of the 1970s.

In the UK Mad Max was released with a X certificate, which at the time was essentially the equivalent of the United States' R, but felt meaner. It reached a wider audience on home video, in which format it was released before formal video certificates had been established (the VHS box has an informal "Cert 18" on the spine). Along with the likes of The Exterminator and Friday the 13th I recall that it was a quasi-video nasty, the kind of thing that your parents would not have been keen on. The BBFC cut about a minute out of one sequence and it always had a mean, evil aura. The film must have disappointed people expecting lashings of ultraviolence, because it's relatively restrained, and quite talky at times. George Miller had never directed a film before - he was a doctor, not a filmmaker - but Mad Max feels very assured. The editing is exciting and the cinematography makes good use of the widescreen format. The cars are always shot from a very low angle that has the effect of making the chases seem faster.

Mel Gibson was a complete unknown at the time. The film introduces him as if he was already a big star - we see his sunglasses, his gloves, we feel his reputation preceding him - and when we first see him striding towards the camera, after having dispatched one of the villains, by golly he is a big star. In terms of global box-office, Gibson took a surprisingly long time to find his feet, and in fact he didn't become a genuine draw until Lethal Weapon, which was released two years after the last of his Mad Max films. Until that point he was one of those famous actors that had an air of stardom about him, without actually being very popular; his films, such as The Bounty or Year of Living Dangerously, also had an air of being major productions, without actually making any money. Part of the problem was that Gibson was born to be middle-aged, and as a young man he looked a bit dorky, in my opinion.

Is Mad Max any good? It's well-made and the chases are exciting, judging by the clips I have just seen on Youtube. I can barely remember the rest of the film. It is set in a future version of our world, in which Max lives in a house with his wife and child. Max is unhinged at the start of the film and becomes more unhinged when he loses everything he ever loved, but Gibson's performance doesn't really reflect this, because he merely goes from being morose to being angry and morose. I remember being disappointed with the film. Max's orgy of revenge is abrupt and seems surprisingly easy. If the world is falling apart, what's so shocking about a cop meting out private justice? It's curious that nobody else can track down a bunch of extremely loud, very conspicuous bikers, and the budget wasn't enough to show a crumbling world, so the film ends up feeling very small.

In contrast Mad Max 2 feels huge. It was released in 1981 and is one of the best action films of the 1980s, vying with Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Terminator, and Die Hard. Like those films it's the kind of thing that might be taught in film school because it's a model of clarity and focus. The plot is almost archetypal, essentially a socialist variation of Yojimbo, in which the roaming samurai finally decides that some people are worth helping after all, even at the cost of his own life. It even has a similar structure - Max observes the situation from afar, introduces himself, there is some action during which he proves his worth, then he is captured and beaten half to death, then he recovers and delivers payback, end. The film is presented as a fable related to us by a character who is just a kid during the events he describes, and so for all we know his story of a band of heroic civilians under siege in an oil refinery by paramilitary bandits might be propaganda, but I'm digressing here.

The second film opens just like the first, with a car chase, but it never lets up; it moves seamlessly from exposition to action and back again without any flab. There's the merest hint of a romantic subplot, but it doesn't involve Max; he begins and ends the film as an acerbic loner, and every line of dialogue exists to set up something later on. The characters are colour-coded for our convenience, with the heroes dressed predominantly in white and the baddies in brown. There are no loose ends.

John Carpenter often points out in interviews that you can edit really quickly with widescreen and it doesn't throw people off, and so when he came to make Assault on Precinct 13 he ensured that he had enough money to shoot in proper 2:35 scope ratio. Mad Max 2 is also 2:35, and it's the kind of film you might watch if you were studying action editing. The editing is just showy enough that you notice it, but not so showy that its gets irritating. There's a sequence during the final chase where Max fires his shotgun at a pursuing vehicle - he hits the driver full in the face, and the editing is perfect. In a series of quick cuts we see the car, Max levelling his shotgun, the impact (with a subliminal exploding head), a reaction shot of the feral kid, the car swerving, Max returning to his seat, in the space of five seconds. In a neat touch it's not clear whether the feral kid is shocked or thrilled by the exploding head.

And it's not just an isolated gag, because the driverless car then crashes into a dune buggy, which sets up one of the most astonishing physical stunts in the film, where a bandit is sent flying through the air. A lesser film would have had a dummy, but we see quite clearly a real living Australian man tossed several metres towards the camera at high speed to certain doom. Australians live short, brutal lives, and Mad Max 2 presumably gave Australia's stuntman community the chance to show off their skills for Hollywood.

On the level of plot and story Mad Max 2 has a clear, logical progression, and the ending chase makes sense in context. In this respect it beats Fury Road; once it becomes apparent that Furiosa's "green land" is a poisoned swamp, Fury Road runs out of plot, whereas every chase in Mad Max 2 has a clear goal. In my opinion if Fury Road had been a straightforward remake of Mad Max 2, with the stunts of Fury Road, it would have been an unqualified success. As it stands Fury Road is technically smart but has a perfunctory, mostly incoherent plot, and although it'll have a long afterlife chopped into bits on Youtube I worry that in years to come I will barely remember it.

How hard is to to write a good action film plot? More to the point, how expensive is it? Fury Road was written by Miller himself, so perhaps he started with the chases first and then ran out of time when it came to giving them meaning, in which case the film reminds me a bit of the computer game DayZ, which has a detailed but mostly empty world devoid of gameplay. There's a co-writing credit for Brendan McCarthy, who usually works as a storyboard artist. He started out on top Brit sci-fi comic 2000AD, where he was one of the artists who flowered during the comic's eccentric, early-90s acid phase. Fury strikes me as the kind of film that has a big thick visual storyboard with the script written on a few Post-It notes.

Mad Max 2 was very influential. It looked expensive despite its tiny budget. From the point of view of rival film producers, all that was required to replicate its success was a truck, some off-roaders, a lot of leather fetish gear plus some porn actors to wear it, and some rugged countryside. California has plenty of those things. The film was released a year before Conan the Barbarian, which sparked off a wave of similarly frugal swords and sorcery films that had similar ingredients, minus the truck and the off-roaders, but inevitably the imitations were naff. Poorly-written, with uninteresting actors and boring direction. The likes of Metalstorm, Steel Dawn, The Highwayman (a TV show from 1987), Spacehunter and so forth helped kill off interest in any more Mad Max films. The waste-punk look of the Max generation directly inspired mid-80s glam rockers Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and it strikes me suddenly that most of these cultural echoes date from a good five or so years after Mad Max 2 came out. My hunch is that although it made a profit at the cinema and was extremely successful for an Australian action film, it was nonetheless only a very modest hit in objective terms. In the United States it was released five months late, and wasn't among the thirty highest-grossing films of 1982. Conan, for example, outgrossed it by quite a way. As with the original Mad Max the sequel was a bigger hit on the home video market, where it took longer to become iconic.

Earlier up the page I mentioned Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was released in the middle of 1981. The timing is such that George Miller was probably aware of Raiders during the production of Mad Max 2, and I wonder if Miller was trying to one-up the Nazi truck chase in Spielberg's film. The two chases are the action high-points of their respective films, with an array of clever practical stunts and lots of brutal violence. Nowadays their measured pace feels a bit staid, but it's still possible to appreciate the derring-do of the stunt work. Raiders was marketed as a family-friendly blockbuster with some scary moments, but it's a surprisingly brutal film, barely less violent than Mad Max 2, with a higher body count. Mad Max 2 has a man nearly decapitated with a boomerang, but Raiders has rotting corpses, exploding Nazis, and Pat Roach sliced into ribbons by a propellor. We don't see it, but it's still nasty. During the truck chase Indiana Jones tosses a man into the windscreen of a jeep, bashes a man's head repeatedly against the dashboard, and then runs him over! The truck even bounces into the air! It's hilarious, but also not the kind of thing you'd see in a family film nowadays. Have we advanced, or regressed? That's really the topic of a separate essay, I'll stop now.

There was a third Mad Max film. Beyond Thunderdome. George Miller set out to make an expensive mainstream action fantasy blockbuster, with mixed results. It smoothed off most of the hard, brutal edges of the first two films, and although it often looks wonderful it still feels like watered-down Mad Max. Fury Road resembles it at times. The two films take place after the apocalypse, during the early stages of reconstruction. There is a strong female lead. Max spends a lot of time held captive in both films, and ends up having to rescue a group of people he initially doesn't care much for. I'm just listing things, aren't I? That's called padding. The problem is that the Mad Max franchise is essentially Mad Max 2, because the first film was a cop revenge drama and the third was a generic 1980s fantasy film. Miller himself barely remembers making Thunderdome. His heart wasn't in it because his great friend, producer Byron Kennedy, had recently died in an aviation accident. Kennedy produced the first two Mad Max films, and I suppose we will never know what influence he might have had on Thunderdome. It at least has a coherent plot that builds to a logical conclusion; my recollection is that it was nice, which felt wrong.

Roger Ebert, in a rare lapse, wrote that Thunderdome was "not only the best of the three Mad Max movies, but one of the best films of 1985". I disagree with the first part, but given that 1985 was also the year of A View to a Kill, National Lampoon's European Vacation, Police Academy 2, Spies Like Us, The Jewel of the Nile, Rocky IV, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Out of Africa - all of which made more money than Thunderdome - I'm willing to go along with the second.

Back to Fury Road. It has all kinds of connections with the other films. There's a little music box, like the one from Mad Max 2, and the main villain is played by Hugh Keays-Byrne from Mad Max, although he's obviously not the same character. Instead, he feels like a variation of Mad Max 2's Lord Humungous, with his quasi-military bearing and medals, although Humungous appeared to have earned his medals legitimately, whereas Joe's are fabricated from circuit boards and junk. 70-year-old George Miller returns to the director's chair and demonstrates that he can still get it up, action film-wise; Mel Gibson does not return, for reasons which I will not go into. I'm starting to list things again, which is a sure sign that I'm running out of things to say.

What else? At one point Max is confronted with a group of semi-naked women and a truck; he jumps in the truck and drives off, leaving the women behind, in a sequence that made me immediately think of the end of Dumb and Dumber ("What were we thinking? The town is back THAT way!"). It's supposed to make him seem like a single-minded, tormented loner, but it comes across as silly; Max's mental trauma isn't compatible with a film that has a group of semi-naked supermodels hosing each other down in the desert. Those two concepts cannot co-exist in the same framework and a part of me wished that a younger Quentin Tarantino had been asked to give Fury Road the once-over. Everybody hates Tarantino but, in my opinion, he's a natural for the Mad Max franchise.

Ultimately Fury Road is a triumph of action filmmaking, a visually stunning masterclass in editing and worldbuilding. The performances are all uniformly solid, albeit that Tom Hardy is given very little to do. The It Girls are feisty, Charlize Theron is both tough and vulnerable, in fact she's slightly better than the film deserves. The elderly warrior women - the "Vuvalini" - steal every scene in which they appear, and make me wonder if the film's abundance of tough female characters is an apology for killing off the warrior woman in Mad Max 2. Nicholas Hault appears to have had a tonne of fun playing what amounts to a living cartoon. It's one of those films in which every character has a certain look, and it must have taken ages to do the casting.

And it's a testament to George Miller's skill that a film which consists of the same basic car chase repeated three times never feels boring or repetitive. The problem is that without a coherent plot it all comes across as a meaningless exercise in style, and I worry that it won't have legs. Like the recent Godzilla reboot, or the various attempts to get Superman to carry a film by himself, I worry that Fury Road will make a fair amount of money and then fade away.

And yet it's infinitely better than Michael Bay's Transformers movies, which are longer and louder and have far more plot than Fury Road, except that it's meaningless wheel-churning gears-grinding film-padding plot in which people run back and forth but nothing happens. Fury Road just needed a bit more work, a blood transfusion from Mad Max 2. That would have done the trick.

No, tell a lie. There is one good line. "Straight through the medulla".

V1

Roger Ebert: Life Itself

Off to the cinema, to see Life Itself, a documentary about top late film critic Roger Ebert. Roger Ebert loved the movies, and now there is a movie about him. He was never a major public figure here in the UK. I knew of him because the Internet Movie Database used to list his name at the top of their reviews. It was a distinctive name. For a long time he was unconsciously engaged in a war with top late German politician Friedrich Ebert for domination of Google’s search results for “ebert”.

Whereas Friedrich Ebert had no firm political convictions and became President of Germany at a terrible time, dying of appendicitis ten years later, having achieved nothing of substance, Roger Ebert loved films and had the good fortunate to become America's top film critic during a fortuitous period in cinema history. Life Itself shows us some of his early work as a student newspaper editor, and I'm sure that if Germany had offered him the Presidency in the 1980s (say) he would have done a good job. But that's enough of Friedrich Ebert and Germany. Begone, Friedrich Ebert. I will not write of you again.

Life Itself is directed by Steve James, who also directed the classic documentary Hoop Dreams. If you look up Hoop Dreams on the IMDB, Roger Ebert is listed at the top of the reviews (twice - he loved it); the same is true of The Godfather, Five Easy Pieces, The Princess Diaries 2, and of course Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, which is about a giant prehistoric turtle who can fly. He is the friend of all mankind, and enjoys nothing more than fighting gigantic evil bats. Ebert’s review is warm and funny, and he clearly enjoyed the film. This is one of the reasons why his writing appealed to me. He seemed to genuinely enjoy films. He didn’t sneer, and conversely he didn’t seem over-awed by highbrow art films, and even when the film was forgettable he always had something interesting to say.

In fact his reviews made me feel incredibly jealous, because they seemed effortless. This is something that Life Itself unfortunately doesn’t get across. For a film about a man who made his living writing about the movies, it has surprisingly little of his writing. I learned that he could knock out a review in thirty minutes, and that writers once used paper notepads, and that they dictated reviews down the telephone(!), all of which made me feel pampered and inadequate, but what inspired Ebert to write? What did he like to read? Hmm?

Nonetheless I can understand why the writing takes a back seat. During the section on Siskel And Ebert At the Movies we see some of... sorry, Siskel And Ebert AND the Movies, we see some of Ebert’s early television work, and because he was simply reading his newspaper reviews out loud the results were stilted and awkward. Prose that works on the page generally doesn’t work on the screen, and so the film rarely quotes at length from his writing. I’m not sure how Steve James could have surmounted this problem. Ebert doesn’t talk about writing in the film and we never learn where his ideas came from, or who inspired him. It feels wrong to rag on Life Itself for this, because it’s clearly supposed to be a celebration of his life rather than a penetrating examination of Ebert's motivations, but I was drawn to Ebert by the pieces on his website rather than his television appearances, and that part of his life feels missing.

But it would have been easy to turn the film into a crass run-through of his most famous quips, and to the director's credit Life Itself doesn't go down this route (there's nothing about how Ebert "hated, hated, hated" North, for example). At one point we see one of Ebert's friends reciting the last page of The Great Gatsby from memory, but it doesn't work. Firstly because it's hard to savour words if they're being delivered in real-time - each new line overwrites the last, so that you only remember the last line, albeit that Gatsby has a cracking final line - and secondly because there isn't time to adapt to the style. "Something commensurate to his capacity for wonder" feels fussy unless you’re attuned to Fitzgerald's writing. Without preparation it just sounds fussy.

Also, the last page has the word "breast" on it. Why were authors so enamoured of the word "breast" in those days? Characters were forever clutching things to their breasts; great passions erupted within their breasts; even when the characters were men, who don’t have breasts. Next paragraph.

Siskel And Ebert A... And the Movies was never shown on television here in the UK. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert belong to a great sweep of American television stars who were massive in their home country but obscure in Britain. Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Tina Fey and ninety per cent of the post-1981 Saturday Night Live cast are essentially names and faces that don’t mean anything. Ultimately it was the internet that made Roger Ebert mean something to me. Toiling away in an office with a computer I could surreptitiously read about American Splendor, Nine Lives, Undertow, films that were unlikely to go on wide release over here, or that wouldn’t be released for many months. This being the 2000s I could always have downloaded them, but I would never have cared about them without Roger Ebert.

Our equivalent was Barry Norman, who presented Film Night on the BBC until 1998. He was a familiar figure but I really can’t tell if he was any good as a film critic; he didn’t transition to the internet, and in any case I always felt that he was doing it as a job rather than because it was his life’s calling. Roger Ebert didn’t just review films for a newspaper, he organised film festivals, he gave talks on films, he even wrote a film once. It wasn’t a very good film, but it was great trash.

He also wrote the screenplay for Who Killed Bambi?, a movie starring The Sex Pistols as themselves. Sadly the film was never completed. The screenplay features a scene in which Steve Jones makes love with a groupie called Soo Catwoman while Paul Cook accompanies them on drums. There's another scene in which Sid Viscous berates Johnny Rotten for singing out of tune. I'm not sure if Ebert really "got" The Sex Pistols, but by God I wish that film had been made.

Life Itself shows Ebert interacting with his fans and generally communicating with the world via his MacBook. Ebert’s punchy, straightforward style transitioned well to the internet. I'm part of the first generation of people who grew up with the internet; I remember the pre-internet age of printed newspapers and magazines, but I can’t feel it. On the whole the internet has been a great boon for writers, but it has a terrible problem whereby there is not much diversity. Let’s ignore creed and colour and gender and nationality; the voice of the internet is young, almost uniformly young, so uniformly young that it doesn’t realise there are older voices. Roger Ebert had a wealth of experience and gave the impression that he had been around the block, and that he had nothing to prove; but whereas so many people would use this experience to moan about how the modern world is rubbish and that young people are stupid and shallow and nothing is as good as it was, he came across as a kindly uncle who still loved new films. Life Itself shows a man who was obnoxiously arrogant when he was young, but by the 2000s he had mellowed.

The film puts this down to the love of a good woman, his indomitable wife Chaz, who he met relatively late in life while they were both at Alcoholics Anonymous. And presumably the AA helped as well. Some people are happy drunks, Roger Ebert appeared to be a happy-then-angry drunk. He always looked to me like a perpetually-disappointed cat, but during the internet period his claws only came out occasionally, notably in his review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo ("Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks") and his rebuttal to Vincent Gallo following his disappointment with The Brown Bunny. When he laid into a film it was entertaining, and perhaps because he had made a film himself it never came across as simple abuse.

Roger Ebert got the internet; he was one of us. He had no inherent bias against action films and sci-fi, indeed he resembled a typical sci-fi nerd, except that he was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning serious writer who hob-nobbed with blonde ladies at Cannes, and had Martin Scorsese’s mobile phone number in his mobile phone. Scorsese appears in Life Itself as one of the few Hollywood talking heads, along with Errol Morris and, very briefly, Werner Herzog, who is in the film because every documentary has to have Werner Herzog in it at some point. Despite coming across as a friend to all nerds Ebert was not however an ingratiating sycophant. Famously he engaged in a lengthy online argument on the artistic validity of computer games - his position was that they would never be "art" - and he attracted a great deal of flack for it. I agreed with the surface of his thesis*, but I felt that his reasoning was flawed and ultimately it struck me that, yes, for one moment he was an old man moaning that modern life is rubbish.

* A computer game of sufficient artistic merit to be presented as "high art" would no longer be a game; any more than Grayson Perry's pottery sculptures are presented as pots, or any painting is presented as an exercise in craftsmanship. Nobody cars how Joan Miro held his brushes. And although the likes of Vib-Ribbon, Shadow of the Colossus, Journey etc are visually stunning, nay breathtaking, or in the case of Vib-Ribbon intriguing, the same is true of a Boris Vallejo painting or Marilyn Lange's May 1974 Playboy centrefold. The effect wears off, and then it's just a pretty picture. Is there an emotion, a concept, an idea that only a computer game can get across? Is it possible for such a resource-heavy medium to foster a distinctive vision? I digress.

I saw Life Itself at the Curzon, Soho. Part of the appeal of the Curzon is interacting with the bar staff as you order drinks, because the bar staff are effortlessly hip, and for a moment you can imagine that you are effortlessly hip as well. Part of the appeal is sitting in the window with an opened MacBook, with the Apple logo blazing onto Shaftesbury Avenue, listening to people mock the new Sainsbury’s Christmas ad. It uses the 1914 Christmas Truce in order to sell cut-price chocolate. And part of the appeal is striding onto Shaftesbury Avenue at the end of the film. This being the Curzon you wait until the credits finish. As I casually strode onto the pavement I deliberately ignored the passers-by, the little people. I remember thinking how much I hated the little people and their small, tiny minds...

... and then a voice appeared in my head. It was Roger Ebert's voice, delivered via a speech synthesiser. "You learned nothing from this film", it said. "You are not the one." Life Itself points out that Roger Ebert was a populist. He was the best sort of populist. A Beatles-style populist. He loved films and wanted other people to love them as well. From a British perspective he struck me as the film world’s version of John Peel, if John Peel had tried hard to be a mainstream Radio One DJ. It's difficult to compare a radio DJ with a film critic, because their markets are fundamentally different (and John Peel was a unique case). Roger Ebert was fully aware that if he devoted himself solely to the study of obscure but excellent Japanese cop dramas he would no longer have an audience, and in those days if you weren’t on television or in a national newspaper... well, you could create a fanzine, but Roger Ebert wanted to be famous.

Consider the list a few paragraphs above - Nine Lives, Undertow, and add that that Crash (the 2004 Best Picture winner, although Life Itself shows Ebert reviewing the 1996 David Cronenberg film) and Lost in Translation and Juno. It's fashionable to sneer at these films nowadays, especially Crash, and I wonder if this is why Life Itself shows Ebert reviewing the Cronenberg movie. My recollection is that it was fashionable to sneer at Juno even when it was new. Yes, he liked Garden State as well.

Ebert is occasionally derided in hipster circles as a middlebrow, shallow man, akin to the sentimental painter Thomas Kinkade. I never had a handle on his tastes - I was drawn to the craft of his writing - but in my opinion Roger Ebert always made a good case for his choices, even if his choices have not aged well. I can accept a Roger Ebert who was sometimes barking up the wrong tree; I cannot accept an oleaginous cipher who is always correct. If Ebert had tried to tailor his opinions to match the prevailing winds there would have been no point to him. Most of the aforementioned films appear in his Best of 200X lists, not because he felt pressured to include them, or because he wanted to win the respect of fashionable people, but because he thought they had something good about them. Does this mean that his opinion was worthless? I believe he was right far more often than he was wrong.

Right and wrong are loaded words. During one clip of Siskel And Ebert, Roger argues forcefully that opinions are subjective, which is true. In theory a film is neither right nor wrong, good nor bad, it is simply a mass of cuts and edits and noises until someone views it; but, dammit, Deep Star Six is a pile of cack and John Carpenter’s The Thing is fantastic and anybody who thinks otherwise is wrong. Their opinion is theirs alone.

Life Itself generally doesn't try to place Ebert within the context of other film critics. Pauline Kael is mentioned, and there's a suggestion that Ebert was not interested in being Chicago's Pauline Kael. This mostly went over my head. Pauline Kael died when I was young, but her heyday had been the late 1960s and 1970s, at which point I had not yet been born. I have read some of Pauline Kael's writing and it didn't stand out at all. The opinions seemed arbitrary, she appeared to hold French directors in awe - France is much less mysterious and otherworldly if you're British - and there were no funny bits.

I keep saying that Life Itself isn't about this or that, why not describe the film? It's a documentary about Roger Ebert, interspersing scenes of his day-to-day life in the early 2010s with talking head reminisces of his life, plus photo montages set to readings from his autobiography. The format never really gets inside his head, and it's a shame that Ebert didn't make the film himself. The paradox is that although I would feel uneasy about such a film - what kind of man makes a documentary about himself? - I would pay money to watch it. Steve James famously didn't win an Academy Award for Hoop Dreams, in fact the film wasn't even nominated for Best Documentary despite near-universal praise (Roger Ebert wrote that "it gives us the impression of having touched life itself", which would be a good title for a film). This was a major scandal at the time. Neither Hoop Dreams nor Steve James appear in Life Itself, which has a transparent style and... I was going to write "feels as if they were on a tight deadline", but that goes without saying. They were on a tight deadline. Schedule. They had a tight schedule. I shouldn’t say deadline.

His day-to-day life. In the 2000s, early 2010s I assumed that Ebert wasn't all that ill, or rather I accepted that he was gravely ill but I couldn't feel how bad it was. And I assumed he had written a stockpile of reviews in advance, because his writing never faltered. In reality there was no stockpile. He was thoroughly professional; his writing never faltered. Looking back, it seems that all throughout the time I was reading his reviews he was ill. He was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002, and although it was treated successfully I imagine that the fear never went away. In Ebert's case the cancer came back, and it eventually took away his jaw, and with it the power of speech and the ability to eat and drink. On the bright side, he could still write. If Roger Ebert had been the world's greatest trumpet player he would have had to retire. There is no bright side beyond that.

Life Itself shows Ebert struggling to get back on his feet after a nasty hip fracture. It's painful to watch. The fracture was the result of the metastatic cancer that killed him. He was 70 when he died. He had almost died once before, but good fortune gave us a short while to remind us of what we were about to lose. We never got to hear his opinion on The Hobbit. 

At least he lived a life. Hollywood raised its game in the 1970s and film criticism became, for a short while, big business. Film critics were respected, and on a commercial level Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide was a regular best-seller. If Roger Ebert had been born a few years earlier he would probably have spent his career as an editor or sports journalist (I can picture him as a sports journalist), and you or I would not remember him. Over the last twenty years the internet has broadened the pool old of writing talent, which has had the inevitable effect of making individual voices less dominant, which is perfectly natural; the days when a mass audience pored over Movie Guide are gone. It's easy to be nostalgic about the past. Here in the UK our Leonard Maltin was Leslie Halliwell, who wrote an annual Film Guide. Halliwell was famously dismissive of popular films from the modern era, which in his case mean anything post-1966. If Roger Ebert represented a positive vision of old people, a good argument in favour of keeping them around, Leslie Halliwell embodied all the negative stereotypes of old age. He was a dominant voice in British film writing for several years, and he was wrong. Time has been especially cruel to him. Not only is his work forgotten, his medium - film directories - has died off, replaced by the internet. And he has been doubly forgotten, because the internet is American, and although I have heard of Roger Ebert, who in America has heard of Leslie Halliwell?

Will Ebert be remembered in the future? It's a difficult question, the answer largely tied up with the fate of the films themselves. He seems to have reviewed every major film and tonnes of minor ones released in North America between the 1960s and 2012, so as a resource for 4K re-releases and promotional websites of the future he is invaluable. Ebert is an unusual case in that his reviews were often entertaining even if the film was dire. Especially if the film was dire. His review of the forgettable, forgotten 1996 gangster film Mad Dog Time has a timeless quality, not just for the quip about it being less interesting than watching a blank screen, but for the observation that it was "like waiting for a bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line". I wish I had thought of that line.

If you imagine bad films as rabbits, Roger Ebert will be their General Woundwort. And when there is a good film he will be their Frith. Yes, over time his website will be shut down and nobody will care what he had to say about Prizzi's Honor and The Great Muppet Caper, but the same is true of everybody, every film critic, the vast majority of writers. Ebert earned a crust, was married to a woman he loved (and who loved him), got to hang out with Russ Meyer, presumably got to see a lot of very large breasts, that's enough. It's a shame he couldn't have died older and less painfully, but two out of three is better than none.

When Douglas Adams died he left behind h2g2, an online encyclopedia published by the BBC. But h2g2 never amounted to much, and along with a clutch of similarly ambitious but ultimately unpopular digital initiatives the BBC abandoned it in the 2010s. After John Peel died there were several John Peel Days, and the Glastonbury Festival has a stage named after him, but I suspect that over time we will all drift apart. It happens to everybody. Ebert's television appearances diminished greatly post-2006 and At the Movies was cancelled in 2011, but his writing was sufficiently good and modern that it doesn't feel fusty and staid, whereas (again) I can't see Pauline Kael's work appealing to new generations. Her books are still in print, and people still buy them, but I suspect this is because she is among the set texts of university courses rather than because she has a great popular following.

Kael and Ebert belong to an era that will probably never exist again. During the 20th Century entire countries, whole cultures were united by shared mass media; television programmes, books, albums sold in the millions, and there was a mainstream canon that most people shared. Roger Ebert was part of that canon, but now culture is fragmented and even the greatest stars of the age have album sales and viewing figures that would have been very poor in the 1970s. If Ebert's work appeals to an ever-smaller niche, the same is, again, true of everybody.

The film taught me a bit about Gene Siskel. He died in 1999 and is even more obscure in the UK than Roger Ebert; it seems that he was a regular guest at the Playboy club during the pre-silicone era, and indeed the funniest moment in Life Itself is the word “boobs”. They were frenemies, working for rival Chicago newspapers, and the film has some priceless behind-the-scenes footage in which they lay into each other like an old married couple. Albeit that Ebert generally lays into Siskel, and putting on my amateur psychologist hat I wonder if this was a result of Ebert being depressed. Siskel and Ebert were driven by a lust for fame, money, glory and - yes - boobs, and we’re supposed to tut-tut at that kind of thing nowadays, and it would have been easy for them to come across as coke-addled monsters, and perhaps if I had known them in the 1970s I would have hated their guts, but with distance and time they now come across as charismatic men who meant no-one any harm. Mammals are naturally obsessed with boobs, there are solid biological reasons for that, and both Ebert and Siskel were mammals, and so I am.

Life Itself points out that Ebert was accustomed to loss. His father died when he was young, Siskel died long before he should have, Ebert himself realised during the 1970s that he was going to die if he didn't stop drinking. He went dry in 1979. Throughout the film his weight goes up and down, and although the film strongly implies that he suffered from depression for a long time it has to be borne in mind that his job consisted of sitting in a chair, writing (or sitting in a chair, talking). He enjoyed food enough to write a book about it, The Pot and How to Use It, and I have the impression that Christmas at the Eberts was a jolly affair.

Nineteen Seventy-Four

I feel at a disadvantage writing about Roger Ebert. He wasn't part my culture when I was young, and he won his Pulitzer Prize in 1975, a year before I was born. He apparently won it for the totality of his criticism during 1974, work I have not read. Fifteen years ago, if I wanted to read Roger Ebert's reviews from 1974, I would have been out of luck. Now I just have to Google ""roger ebert" 1974" and then abandon that and use the advanced search to restrict Google to the www.rogerbert.com domain with "1974" and... well, let's have a read.

(reads) Chinatown, Young Frankenstein, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Great Gatsby, Death Wish, The Godfather Part II. Blazing Saddles, that can’t be right. But no, Mel Brooks was on a roll in 1974. The year belongs to the pre-Star Wars era and thus the distant past, and some of those films are better than others, but I can see how a writer might relish them; Roger Ebert must have relished the chance to get stuck into Death Wish. For the record he grudgingly respected Chain Saw Massacre ("in its own way the movie is some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement"), he was impressed with Death Wish on a purely technical level, although the review feels more of a plot summary than a proper critique, but having said that in 1974 it was presumably just another thriller.

Reading his reviews of The Sugarland Express and The Parallax View I'm struck by the limits of film criticism. In theory those two films have not changed in the years since, but the context around them has grown, and criticism is really all about placing something within a context. Ebert's piece on The Parallax View is straightforward and surprisingly short - just shy of 500 words - because of course he was writing for a newspaper and had limited space. Over time, films like Parallax and Get Carter (which he liked) have grown, and it's to Ebert's credit that he was willing to go back and re-evaluate them for his website many years later. I briefly worked as a computer game reviewer - not a critic, a reviewer - but it seemed futile, pointless. How can I evaluate something without the benefit of time? Sometimes passion fades, and sometimes it grows, and it's the passion that grows that matters most. It has substance in a trivial world.

He loved Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, was greatly disappointed with The Great Gatsby, loved Chinatown, loved Amarcord etc. I was originally going to quote from those reviews but they're straightforward and to-the-point, perhaps because he was writing about serious films that he wanted to treat with the respect they deserved. He seems to have had trouble ending his reviews, and with the exception of The Conversation they generally stop dead. Overall Roger Ebert circa 1974 seems reverent and a bit staid, but context etc. Perhaps he loosened up over time. Then again, his review of Zardoz is unmistakably him:

"Sean Connery wanders through all this with a slightly bemused expression on his face.  He begins as a barbarian given to distrust and childish impulses, but after he gathers all knowledge to himself (the movie is full of phrases like "gathers all knowledge to himself"), he turns into a sort of body-building Einstein who sees into the centre of the Vortex, deciphers the wisdom of the crystal, stimulates the Apathetics, makes love with a good-looking Immortal dame (she regains the knack), and finally turns into a fossil while the soundtrack milks Beethoven's 7th for all it's worth."

I have seen Zardoz. It is one of those films. Ebert's review is spot-on and encapsulates most of the film's appeal. Sean Connery really does have a slightly bemused expression on his face. Murder on the Orient Express begins in medias res, something which is quintessentially Ebert:

"There is a cry of alarm, some muffled French, a coming and going in the corridor.  Hercule Poirot, adjusting the devices that keep his hair slicked down and his mustache curled up, pauses for a moment in his train compartment."

At which point I’m hooked. The description of Poirot as a man scurrying about like a paranoid crab is another neat turn of phrase. Crabs are paranoid, aren't they? Everything wants to kill them or rip their legs out. That's why they developed pincers and tough shells, and yet they still die, in their millions, every year. Ebert opens his review of Lacombe, Lucien in much the same way. The same year he gave The Godfather, Part II three out of four stars; revisiting his decision in 2008 he concluded that he would not change a word of his review, arguing that although the first two Godfather films were collectively a masterpiece, II was less effective than I taken in isolation, which is what he had to do in 1974. But if crabs actually are killed in their millions, surely they aren't paranoid. Right? They're justifiably anxious.

NB. Ebert's website mixes contemporary reviews with retrospectives written in the 2000s. However I'm not sure where the contemporary reviews come from; some of them describe the film in retrospect, and so they might be drawn from material that was written later. But perhaps films were released in a more leisurely fashion in 1974, and it took months for them to reach Chicago. I just don't know.

Somewhere back there I was writing about Life Itself and not crabs. It's a simple, straightforward film that showed me something of Roger Ebert. Goodbye Roger Ebert. A full exploration of his life and times would be sixteen hours long and would place Ebert within the context of his times; it would be Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as a miniseries, and it will never be made.

I was lucky to catch Ebert's work during his final years, and he was a terrific writer. Now it's our turn. It's up to us and our younger siblings and children, and the gleams in our eyes. There comes a horrible time in a man's life when he realises that his heroes are all dead, or old, or sick. They ran up the beach and now it's your turn, your generation’s turn. And you look left and you look right and it looks hopeless, because you're a bunch of kids cowering in the shadows of giants. Giants who slew dragons in an age of fire.

But the giants were kids once, and you only see the shadow, not the man who cast it, and the dragons and the fire are shadows as well. I learned from Life Itself that when the pain got bad Roger Ebert wanted to die; but the pain never dulled his writing, because he had a soul of steel. His last piece, A Leave of Presence, begins by thanking us, and promises great things to come on the digital front. He thanked us. A day later he was dead. Someone else will have to go back, forty years from now, and make us want to watch The Tree of Life and Beasts of the Southern Wild one more time. And Gamera.

In his writing I only saw the shadow. Now the man is gone. The shadow remains.

Microprocessor

Going through the archives I stumbled on this tune, which I wrote ages ago and still like:



I also decided to use up some of my Polypan film, loaded into a Fujica ST605, shooting with a Chinon 55mm f/1.4. Because I have a commitment to messing about I stuck a vaseline-smeared filter on the front of the lens, although as it turned out I used too little vaseline to make much difference.

The ST605 is a generic mid-70s M42 body, the lens was a popular third-party f/1.4 lens of the period. Ergonomically the body draws heavily from the Pentax Spotmatic.

Pentax SP500

The Pentax Spotmatic is one of the most fondly-remembered SLRs of the 1960s. It was cheaper than a Nikon, smaller, and it had a built-in through-the-lens lightmeter, which was unusual at the time. The original Spotmatic was only on sale for a few years, and in practice when people nowadays talk about the Pentax Spotmatic they're probably referring to all of the various models that Pentax sold during the 1960s and early 1970s. They were physically and technically very similar. For example, the internet tells us that The Beatles owned Pentax Spotmatics, but on closer inspection it looks as if they have pre-Spotmatic Pentax S1s or SVs (the rewind knob and metal around the lens mount give it away). Ringo Starr has such kissable lips, doesn't he?
 
I say Pentax - the camera was, strictly speaking, an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic, because in those days Asahi was the company, and Pentax was the brand name, and Spotmatic was a kind of subtitle, because the camera had a light meter, and matic. Got that? The lightmeter was centre-weighted, and there was nothing automatic about the camera - you had to meter and set the controls by hand - and so it should have been called the Asahi Pentax Centremanual, but obviously the men at Asahi decided that poetry was more important than technical accuracy. Don't worry, the rest of the post is easier to read. Writing a blog post is very much like making love - it starts off with a flurry of technical details, and then you get into a groove, and at the end you think "is that it?", and you wonder if it was worth the expense. And then you spend a few minutes looking at old issues of Record Mirror with Johnny Rotten on the cover.

Still, in the US it was often called the Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic because it was imported by a company called Honeywell, a giant conglomerate that made or makes fridges, thermostats and cluster bombs, including the awesome Vietnam-era MK-20 Rockeye and the CBU-87 Combined Effect Munition, one of the stars of the first Gulf War.

Pentax followed the Spotmatic with a pair of budget models, the SP1000 and the SP500, which lopped off the self-timer but were otherwise much the same. The SP1000 had a top shutter speed of 1/1000, just like the original Spotmatic. The SP500 had a top speed of 1/500 but - as every article about the camera is obliged to point out - this was achieved by rubbing the 1/1000 mark from the shutter speed dial. You could still select 1/1000, although it wasn't tested by the factory to be accurate at that speed:

Pentax had pulled the same trick before, with the S1a. It comes across as simultaneously shrewd and a bit unfair; it's odd that the company didn't put a hotshoe or a film memo holder (for example) on the Spotmatic, and simply leave it off the SP1000 as a cost-saving measure. Still, I'm not an engineer.

Here's what the camera looks like. I have no emotional connection with Pentax and so I bought the cheapest working model I could find, which was £9:

That didn't include the lens, of course, although after using it for a few years it ain't pretty no more (a screw was loose, and so I had to take off the front bezel, which scratched it to botheration). The 50mm f/1.4 Super Takumar is lovely to use, look through, and hold, with pleasant bokeh and a good chunky focus ring. It's an M42 lens, which means that it has a 42mm screw mount. The M42 mount was shared by contemporary Prakticas, Zenits, OEM Cosinas, and even the very first full-frame Olympus SLR, the FTL.

Record Mirror, 11 December 1976: "like hit men they have come out of the night to shoot the legs off a tired music industry that has relied on crutches far too long". Barry Cain, I ask you - what's the point of shooting the legs off a person who already uses crutches? The metaphor doesn't make sense.

Seriously, "dah dah dah has come to pour petrol on the crutches of a tired music industry" or something along those lines would have made a lot more sense. Hitmen kill people with petrol; crutches are made of wood, it works. If only I could go back in time to 1976 and become editor of Record Mirror, I might have done some good. If only.

M42 lenses are cheaply available on eBay, although beyond the Takumars there weren't very many stand-outs, and the range is generally limited to 28mm at the wide end and 200mm at the long end. And they're mostly half a century old by now. Nonetheless the Russian 16mm Zenitar fisheye is available in M42, and there were several long M42 mirror lenses. Very few zooms. M42 was briefly revived in 2003 with the one-off, limited-edition Voigtlander Bessaflex TM, which came with what must be the last new-production M42 lens ever, a Topcor 58mm f/1.4. This was discontinued in the mid-2000s although a rebranded version for other lens mounts is still sold as the Voigtlander 58mm f/1.4 Nokton.

The Takumar has a 49mm filter thread, and because I have some old filters lying around I decided to have a go with a Hoya Star-Six. This has lines engraved in the glass that make point light sources look like the opening credits of John Nathan-Turner's early-80s Dr Who opening sequence. With Peter Howell's reworking of the classic Dr Who theme, performed with a mixture of Yamaha CS-80 and vocoder. Fifteen years later, when the kids were old enough to afford musical instruments of their own, they formed Orbital and The Future Sound of London.

Er, yes, star filter:

The effect is naff if you overuse it, so that's enough of that.

Not many shops sell film in London in 2013, but there's one on Tottenham Court Road that does (for £7.99 a pop, mind). I used a mixture of some long-expired Fuji 400 that I bought ages ago, some new Kodak Ektar, and some new Kodak ColorPlus 200, the absolute cheapest 35mm film you can buy new in the UK today (at £2.39 a roll with eBay prices, in a pack of five). Here are some shots taken with this film, on an overcast day, with the colours balanced for daylight - they looked a bit green straight from the scanner - and the contrast turned up:

BOWIE IS LONDON, do you see? Also, his eyes are records.

But, the camera. What's it like? Not bad. The major innovation at the time was the light meter, which on my example was naff. Even after using the correct and tricky to source battery it seemed to be a stop under in bright daylight but roughly correct in dimmer light, so I used a handheld meter instead. Ergonomically the design must have had some thought put into it - the speed dial is right up against the shutter button, so it's a cinch to change speeds whilst holding the camera up to your face.

On the other hand I wasn't enamoured of the meter control. I can see how it's supposed to work. You hold the camera in your left hand and use your thumb to trip the meter, with your fingers changing the aperture. But I never became comfortable with it. In my opinion the unlovely, unloved Praktica LTL of the early 1970s got this right, by putting the lightmeter control right next to the shutter button (which was, unusually, mounted on the front of the camera).

Objectively, of the film cameras I've had a look at this year, I still prefer the Olympus OM-2. It's smaller than the SP500 and it has automatic exposure, which is the kind of thing that macho hardcore photo purists despise but, dammit, it works and it saves messing about. Yes, I said messing, I apologise. Of course it's not a fair comparison. The SP500 was an evolutionary update of a design that had its roots in the 1950s, the OM-2 was state-of-the-art for the mid-70s. A more fair comparison would be a Pentax ME.

Whilst I wandered around Soho and the area around Charing Cross and latterly Kensington, did any young ladies accost me and demand that I take their portrait? No, and so in that respect the SP500 failed. Perhaps it's not the camera. Still, my search continues.