jackhack

My latest kick: "Mad Max" and "The Road Warrior". I've been re-watching them a lot lately. I first saw "Mad Max" on late-night HBO when my parents were asleep, and it kicked my ass. A few years later and I snuck into "The Road Warrior" with a friend; It was opening night (yeah, I'm that old), and I had no idea what I was in for. I walked out of the theater convinced I'd just seen the coolest movie ever made. 25 years later and I'm still not convinced any movie has ever beaten "Road Warrior" in terms of stunts, cars, action, characters or balls-out, exhilarating awesomeness. And at this stage I find it difficult to believe any movie ever will. There's no way, in our cgi-drenched moviemaking climate, that anyone will ever top the stunts in this movie. And don't bring up "Terminator 2" or any other bloated Hollywood flick; I like quite a lot of these big-budget movies quite a bit, but when you have that much money to throw at every challenge, it had better be good. "Road Warrior" was made for just under 4 million dollars, in 1980 money. That probably translates to about 10 to 15 million now, which is still just mind-boggling. So I was hanging out with these kids in Culver City a few weeks ago, real boot-wearing, aggro-loving modern primitive types. We were talking about d.i.y., underground culture, etc., and I asked them what they thought of the Mad Max movies. They looked at me, cocked their heads like a dog being shown a card trick, and asked "what's that?" My jaw dropped and I immediately changed the subject lest I berate them for being such assholes. So what if it's 25 years old? So is "Star Wars", but everybody knows what that is, and the worst Max movie ("Thunderdome") is still light years better than anything George Lucas has done in, well, almost 25 years. Am I getting that fucking old? Is the generation gap not a myth? What the fuck?