Last night I went with Smoothie to see the new Max Mad. I liked it. But, being an old bag, there was one thing that really disappointed me, and perhaps this is true of all movies being made today.
Back in the day of the original Road Warrior, sonny, there was no CGI. So we knew that that desert, those desolate highways...they really did exist somewhere in the Australian outback. They were real places. If we ever took it upon ourselves to go there, we could actually be on those roads. Now with CGI, none of the places in the movie really exists. To me, this is a great loss for the movie-goer's imagination.
(Tom Hardy is no Mel Gibson. But that's another story. Not his fault, really. Nobody else is the young Mel Gibson either. Even old Mel Gibson is nothing like the young Mel Gibson. C'est la vie.)
But the point of this post is not Road Warrior 2.0 at all. It's Smoothie. As we were leaving the cinema, we were discussing sequels and remakes and how nothing lives up to the original (although Max Mad Fury Road IS a very, very good exciting action movie). And Smoothie pointed to one of the Upcoming Attractions posters and said "Like that one, The Man from You En Cee Ell Eee. I burst out laughing. It's Uncle, The Man From Uncle. BUT, BUT, there's a period after each letter! he argued. And I had to admit that for someone his age, not familiar with the show, it made perfect sense to think it was You En Cee Ell Eee, and not Uncle. He said, is U.N.C.L.E. some kind of United Nations thing? I thought that was what the U.N. stood for. Amazing to see this thing from another generation's point of view. Nothing is as obvious as it first appears.
