I was coming at it from the point of view of “I wants boobs in my Mad Max” (which I honestly don’t remember from the first two movies anyway*. Maybe some of the toecutter’s first victims were fucking or something?). And if you want that, someone redescovering sex for their own pleasure would work. Thinking about it some more though, like with the blood bag, you probably need the dark counterpart to make that really land, and then you’re knee-deep in icky territory again. And again, there’s no space for it.
I’d agree that they do reclaim their sexuality, but not in the scenes you mention – anyone could basically reach out to Nux at his nadir and save him. Instead, I’d point to the scene where the chastity belts get cut off, with added stomping and/or spitting from The Dag.
(Also, pretty explicit visual/thematic symmetry with Max’s muzzle there.)
In conclusion: Fury Road is the best.
*Although to be fair, my recollection goes more or less like this:
Mad Max: Saxophone. Car. Discrete shot of wife and toddler getting run over. Rorschach should pay royalties.
Mad Max 2: Leather Jacket. Car. Dog. Feral kid. Boomerang. Chopped off fingers. Annoying hippies. Is the commando villain ever not gay? Insane tanker chase.
The only boobs in the Mad Max movies were viewed from an extreme distance. In Mad Max, there’s a scene where the cops are spying on a couple in the distance having sex. I believe they’re seen through binoculars or maybe a sniper scope. In Road Warrior, Max and the Gyrocaptain see a vehicle trying to break out from the siege. The vehicle is wrecked, the male driver is murdered, and the female passenger is raped and then shot with a crossbow. Those scenes made an impression on me as a kid as early examples of R-rated movies, but I didn’t miss any such scenes in Fury Road. I can’t imagine why anyone would associate nudity with a Mad Max movie.
And there was nudity in Fury road, just not really sexualized or titillating. The kind that you could probably get away with as the single “hey, you’re pushing it but we’ll let it go” scene for a PG-13 movie, but for two different scenes and on top of all the violence, makes it no surprise that the MPAA gave this an R.
What was the nudity in Fury Road? If you mean the naked girl on the tower, her naughty bits were always strategically covered. I guess that does set it apart from the nudity in Mad Max and Road Warrior that I presume Desslock is talking about.
Pretty sure you still saw her butt. Then there were the other…I don’t know if they had a name, but the women producing milk for Joe. Again, both minor things, but easy for me to imagine had a cumulative effect in guaranteeing an R rating.
Dude, you can see butts on network TV. And I don’t think the milking scenes showed nipples, so that’s totally not nudity!
-Tom
EDIT: IMDB’s dispassionate descriptions of “objectionable” material, which are written to be helpful to parents, make for some hilarious reading. Here’s the “sex and nudity” bit for Fury Road:
A nude woman crouches on top of an old electrical tower, wailing. We see her nude when she stands up. We also see her slide down a rope and land on the ground and visibly still nude.skimpy clothing in some versions, like the one shown in India.
A man wears a suit out of which two large round holes were cut to reveal his nipples and he rubs one nipple as he contemplates battle.
Several women throughout most of the movie wear somewhat translucent gauze robes through which we can visibly see the nipples on three of the women.
A woman is scene giving birth. Nothing graphic is seen and younger audiences might not know what is going on.
Some women reveal moderate cleavage while others show bare midriff areas; after several days their outfits rip down to skimpy bikini-like gauze bras and legless shorts whose waistbands end just over the pubic area.
Eight women sit in chairs, nude except for cloths covering their lower abdomen and pubic area and with wide-diameter flexible metal tubes from a breast pump machine attached to each breast with a large metal disk (we see some cleavage and navels); a man tastes some of the milk from a milk bottle. Barely seen in some versions, like the one shown in India.
A woman teaches other women to use bolt cutters to remove chains and chastity belts with long metal teeth.
Why are you guys so hung up on the word “nudity”? I wanted realism. Not some love story between a whatever and who the fuck cares? Is that what you guys want? All the stunts were realistic, stupid, but doable and a lot of them were made using practical effects. You can see it from the dolls falling from vehicles and such. They didn’t shy away from CGI because of some arbitrary limitation, all the filtered violence was indeed an artistic choice.
All I’m saying is that choice neutered the experience to me. I noticed it and started wondering why. I don’t care if it is a trademark of his, it was ridiculous in Sin City as well.
This is the franchise that built Wasteland and Fallout, remember? We get some non story that is censored.
I had just watched movies such as Apocalypto, Eastern Promises and A history of violence, these movies do realistic violence without being gore films. I’ve watched the original Mad Max movies, well the first two, they have an unsettling feel about them that I didn’t get from this at all. It felt like the Indiana Jones of hardcore post apocalyptic violence movies.
I don’t really care why they did it like that, most of you seem to think it was great, but that I noticed it took away from from the experience for me. I didn’t need to see boobs for the sake of it, but when you have scenes with scantily clad ladies that go out of their way to not show skin, it reminds me of sex scenes in movies where the actress struggles to cover her breasts. It looks stupid.
I find it hilarious that you clearly have the wrong person, as I’ve never used that term in my life, and that quote isn’t from me. I hate that identity politics shit, personally, but if you want to further explain your previous statement: “all vaginal sex is rape, even if you have a tiny pecker” go to town. I feel kinda sad for anyone who thinks in those terms, as they just seem unhinged.
With respect to my tastes in movies (and fiction generally), I like what I like, which is what I’ve always liked: well written, believable characters; human drama and heroism; grounded and realistic tales in even fantastical contexts (i.e. more GoT than WoW); depictions of violence that show its effects and consequences on people; some novel human experiences; and ideally intelligent, strong male characters that I can relate to and perhaps some gratuitous female nudity because it’s pleasant to observe. Pretty basic and common, I think.
I don’t care if other people don’t like those things, and I don’t care in the least if other people have preferences for things I’m disinterested in (like 99% of all network TV shows since the 50s) or enjoy inane garbage, as long as I can still find stuff that appeals to me, and since there’s over 100 years of movies from around the world to choose from, so that has never been a problem (although 60s and 70s American movies and 50s Japanese movies hit a real sweet spot).
With respect to Fury Road, I enjoyed it, although not as much as others apparently did – but much more than Thunderdome or any summer movie I’ve seen this year, including Avengers 2. I preferred the first part - the journey out, meeting the different tribes (I half expected the Baseball Furies to make an appearance) a lot more than the return trip portion. But while I’ve said in other posts earlier on this page that it was overly optimistic to expect a more grounded take given the stylish setting history of the series, I felt Road Warrior was just the right amount of absurdity while still retaining some roots to reality.
I also realized that as much as I’m an advocate for practical special effects work, I didn’t really appreciate them as much as I expected to in this movie, since everything was so fantastical that I still felt the same CG-tedium-effect - just supersaturated with superpeople stuff these days, and would have preferred something more toned down and gritty, like I feel Road Warrior was.
Saw the movie 4 times. There was no time when I felt “This is ridiculous” in regards to nudity or lack of it. Nothing in the movie was “Let’s cast Jessica Alba as a stripper, knowing the actress doesn’t do nudity” silly. Or “And now, Alice Eve in her underwear. Because reasons.” absurd.
Some people had more clothes than other people, but it all made sense IMO. It’s not an erotic thriller, or erotic anything, where viewers can expect to see nudity, it’s an action movie. Die Hard, not Basic Instinct. Or Saw.
