![]() You’re the first to survive the audition.” Her men defeated, she simply smiles broadly, satisfied: “Congratulations. ![]() The ensuing hand-to-hand fight sees Max emerge triumphant, of course, but Aunty’s reaction isn’t as easy to predict. Take what ensues after she first meets the “raggedy man.” She and Max engage in some brief small talk where she unpacks Max’s backstory – telling her own personal saxophone player who she employs despite it being the end of the world to “play something tragic.” Next thing you know, she bites into a juicy apple as a signal to her men to attack Max. But that relative lack of movie acting experience just adds to the unexpected pleasures of her turn as Aunty Entity. True, Turner had played the Acid Queen in the cracked movie version of The Who’s rock opera Tommy back in 1975, but for the most part her credits prior to Beyond Thunderdome had the singer appearing simply as herself. And that’s saying a lot in a realm where everything is powered by pig shit, Aunty is engaged in a cold war with a guy (guys?) named Master Blaster who controls said pig shit, and the way disagreements are settled is, of course, via the titular Thunderdome, where the aggrieved parties hang from giant elastic lines and fight each other mid-air with spears and chainsaws… and smarts. How could it not?įrom the first moment we meet Aunty Entity, as she drinks in the down-on-his-luck (even by end-of-the-world standards) Max and chuckles, “But he’s just a raggedy man,” it was clear that the actress-singer-legend was approaching this world on her own terms. So a Mad Max movie starring Tina Turner in a chainmail one-piece with '80s shoulder pads, complete with omnipresent music video tie-ins – where she was still wearing that chainmail! – must’ve made perfect sense to franchise auteur George Miller and Warner Bros. Yeah, the gazzzoline-deprived, post-fall-of-society setting is always the same (even if it’s under-sketched in the first film), but the specifics of each, and certainly the tone, have varied greatly across the four films. See, the Mad Max movies have always benefited from being quite different from one another. For from Aunty Entity’s high tower in Bartertown, a more fantastical, cleaner, and dare I say glamorous version of the Mad Max universe showered down. And while that may sound like a slight, it’s actually a compliment. ![]() That peculiarity was in large part the result of Turner’s presence and the rock- and pop-star theatricality she brought to the role. Hearing about Turner’s passing this week at the age of 83, I’m reminded of Beyond Thunderdome, which was not only the most commercial and Hollywood entry of what was back then the Mad Max trilogy (Fury Road would follow, finally, 30 years later), but also the oddest.
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