Tag: George Miller-3

Watch: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Meets Buster Keaton (Really)

Watch: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Meets Buster Keaton (Really)

Once upon a time, there were two directors. One was named George Miller and the other was named Buster Keaton. They lived many, many years apart, and their films were very, very different from each other. George Miller directed the ‘Mad Max’ films, a series of apocalyptic car chase action social commentary science fiction road movie romance thrillers (set in Australia, maybe), while Buster Keaton directed and starred in silent comedies, dependent largely on slapstick and a vast Rolodex of remarkable facial expressions. One day, a film editor named Walter Rafelsberger discovered that if he put the soundtrack to ‘Mad Max: Fury Road‘ (2015) behind a famous chase scene from a Keaton film called ‘The General‘ (1926), the two parts… just… fit! And the result is what you see above.

Watch: The POV Shots in the ‘Mad Max’ Movies Make All the Difference

Watch: The POV Shots in the ‘Mad Max’ Movies Make All the Difference

Even if you don’t like action movies, don’t like cars, don’t like Mel
Gibson, or don’t like Australia (or the apocalypse), it would be hard to
be immune to the charms of George Miller’s original, primal Mad Max
films. As the newest installment, ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’
blazes a trail of high ticket sales through cineplexes across the land,
it’s more than worth a look back at these earlier films, which might
show up as examples if you were to look up the term "action film" in an encyclopedia. Because that’s what they were: pure, unmitigated action. As Rishi Kaneria points out in this excellent 3-minute toe-curling video head-trip, the source of the movies’ effectiveness was, at least in (large) part their use of point-of-view shots. Since those shots were most often deployed to place the viewer in the seat of a fast-moving vehicle speeding away from or towards a conflagration, explosion, or desolate spot outlined against a limitless hoizon, you might often finish one of the films feeling both winded and scared for humankind. If you aren’t familiar with the earlier films, take a peek at this video and then: start your engines.