Rush (***1/2)

This Ron Howard-directed auto-racing drama shares its title with a movie about drug use, and the meaning is parallel. Racing a car at 170 mph, trying to maneuver past other cars, provides (I suppose) a similar high, a similar level of danger, with an added element of fear. In Cinderella Man, Howard elevated a conventional sports story by infusing the film with a sense of time (the Depression) and place. In this case, the settings are multiple and interchangeable, Formula One race tracks on four continents, so competition is the glue that holds the film together. British James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) began their careers around the same time (the early 1970s) and shared posh backgrounds that they had rebelled against. Hunt was an impulsive playboy, whereas Lauda was a shrewdly calculating loner whose appearance earned him the nickname “rat.” But they shared an ambition that made them natural rivals.

In reality, the two were friendly off the track and roomed together at one point. Here, their relationship ranges between antipathy and grudging admiration. Nonetheless, Howard uses a mutual antagonism effectively to bring out these divergent personalities. Hemsworth’s Hunt seems to be less complicated; if you imagine “English playboy race-car driver/badboy” you can conjure up most of the character. The Austrian is more difficult. Peter Morgan’s screenplay uses narration by the Lauda character as a framing device, suggesting a future in which Lauda has gained perspective, but I’m not sure what it is. (Morgan previously collaborated with Howard on Frost/Nixon, a film that artfully depicted a different kind of competition between a playboy and a dour antagonist.) Alexandra Maria Lara plays Lauda’s first wife; we can tell more about what she feels for him than the reverse. None of that is Brühl’s fault, though. He’s excellent, completely different than in the German-language roles in which I’ve seen him before. And Morgan’s dialogue is smart.

The movie concentrates most on the 1976 F1 season, which contained enough drama that here is where one might suspect some screenwriting embellishment. But in this area it turns out to be quite accurate. The racing scenes do a great job of providing a sense of danger —curiously, with few if any shots from the driver’s point of view — and less of a job of emphasizing the nature of the skills of the performers. Unlike in boxing, it’s hard to tell the competitors apart. But if Rush is not quite as moving a sports film as Cinderella Man, that’s no disgrace. Even if you don’t see the appeal of auto racing as a sport, and I don’t, this is a winner.

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viewed 9/19/13 7:30 at Ritz 5; posted 9/26/13

       

Speed Racer (**1/2)

In The Matrix, the Wachowski Brothers demonstrated their ability to create a stylish special-effects thriller built around a smart sci-fi premise. They redeemed themselves for its lackluster pair of sequels with V for Vendetta, another parable of totalitarianism for which they wrote the screenplay. And, in this, they shoehorn their obsession with opposing great power into an adaptation of a semi-forgotten 1970s cartoon that makes a pitch toward a family audience. That pitch will probably strike hardest at teenage boys. The younger ones may be put off by the fairly complicated plot and some of the darker textures, which somewhat harken back to the Japanese origins of the cartoon. This adaptation animates everything except the actors. Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild) stars as Speed.

For those who missed Speed, or were born too late, he’s, well, a racer. In childhood flashback scenes, we see that his obsession with driving began at an early age and runs in the family. (“Mom” and “Pop” are played by Susan Sarandon and John Goodman.) He has a childhood sweetheart called Trixie (Christina Ricci), drives a car called the Mach 5, and has a mysterious friend/rival called Racer X. But the movie’s main storyline concerns Speed’s opposition to a giant corporation that seeks to control the sport for financial reasons.

Of course, technology, not the story, is the draw here. On that score, it’s a mixed bag. The Tokyo-insired meglaopolis where villain, Royalton, runs his megacorporation is suitably futuristic, but the race course was unimpressive. It makes perfect sense that the movie has a product tie-in with Hot Wheels—the speedways where the racers do their thing looks like nothing so much as digitally manipulated film of a Hot Wheels set-up, complete with loop-the-loops. The scenes give you neither the feel of racing nor even the feel of watching a race. It’s more like watching a video game. Nothwithstanding all of the psychedelic graphics and swirling colors that illustrate the crashes, it’s all very…cartoonish.

It’s not only the look of the movie, but yes, that story that make the big-screen Speed seem like only a little more than what it is, a retread. For all I know the Wachowskis could have dusted off a few of those 1970s scripts. Mom, Pop, brother, Trixie, and even Chim Chim, the family chimp, seem like the cast of a forgotten old sitcom. The humor runs along the lines of Trixie saying “Was that a ninja?” and Pops replying “More like a non-ja!” Okay, it’s not all that corny. Most of it is perfectly serviceable, and the centerpiece of the movie, a dangerous cross-continental race in which Royalton drivers try to take Speed out, is exciting. Hardly anyone will call the movie slow. But in a couple of months, hardly anyone will be calling it anything at all.

IMDB link

viewed 5/10/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 5/15–16/08

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (***)

? Will Farrell re-teamed up with his Anchorman cowriter Adam McKay for this tale of a North Carolina NASCAR racer whose swagger is crimped by a new challenger, a gay Frenchman. Sasha Baron Cohen plays the rival with an accent purposely silly enough to rival Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau. John C. Reilly plays his fellow driver, perennial sidekick, and all-around BFF. Story-wise, it’s sort of an adult version of Cars.

+ Interesting setting, goofy humor (like the way Ricky Bobby insists on praying to “Baby Jesus”), clever ending, convincing performance by Ferrell, even when his character seems to be undergoing some too-rapid transformations. Reilly has some of the funniest moments, yet brings a lot of heart to his dim-bulb character.

- Occasionally goofiness becomes silliness. It would have been interesting to see more of the kind of cultural satire hinted at when the Frenchman makes his first appearance at a local bar. The product placement for a certain chain restaurant borders on the obnoxious.

= *** It should appeal to Anchorman fans, as it tells a similar story of a selfish hotshot who suffers a fall and has to cope with a new rival who threatens both his status and his cultural values. The humor is probably more consistent than in Anchorman.

IMDb link

Cars (**3/4)

Pixar Animation’s seventh feature film is also its weakest, set in a world where everyone’s a car, the humor is tepid, and life is about as exciting as watching auto racing on TV. Okay, not that dull.

This is the seventh in a string of wildly successful features released by Pixar Animation Studios, now owned by Disney. All of the earlier ones (the Toy Story movies, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles) have not only been big hits, but are beloved by audiences and critics alike. Cars, directed by Toy Story’s John Lasseter, has the top-notch computer animation that no doubt goes part way to explaining Pixar’s success. But story-wise, it’s a dodgier affair.

It begins with an auto race, where we can see that the cars are driving themselves, and that the audience too consists of cars. Everyone’s a car, but the fastest is cocky Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson). In the film’s only memorable line, he nicknames his chief rival “Thunder,” noting that “thunder comes after lightning.” But pride goeth before a fall, and so Lightning must learn an Important Lesson about needing others. This he learns from the forlorn folks in a left-behind town on old Route 66 (the old song’s heard in two versions), most notably the old racer appealing voiced by Paul Newman. Cars isn’t awful, but it’s less funny and probably has less all-ages appeal than the other Pixar flicks. It also continues the Pixar pattern of giving much more prominence to the male characters (The Incredibles being an exception). Bonnie Hunt plays a lawyer who doubles as a sort of love interest for Lightning, but all the physical work is done by the he-cars. (The racers are all male, too.) Hunt’s paean to the pre-Interstate highway system is more touching than anything else. The theatrical release of Cars was preceded by the charming, Academy Award-nominated short One Man Band.

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The World’s Fastest Indian (***1/4)

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Anthony Hopkins perfectly plays Burt Munro, a New Zealand eccentric who dreamed of racing his jury-rigged 1920 motorbike on the salt flats of Utah.

The title refers to the forty-year-old motorbike New Zealand crank Burt Munro tinkers with in his garage, not to the crank himself, who’s played by Anthony Hopkins. Munro was a real guy who, four decades ago, lived out his dream of going to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to attempt a speed record on his fragile-looking vehicle. This is another underdog sports story, but the movie puts the brakes on the cliché moments and concentrates on the journey to possible victory. Along the way we get to see some now-faded bits of Americana, like the old Burma Shave signs. Hopkins plays the appealingly eccentric Munro perfectly. Already in his sixties when he attempted his records, Munro/Hopkins looks as frail as his jury-rigged little bike. I knew the story and I still kept worrying he’d crash the bloody thing. Written and directed by Roger Donaldson (The Recruit), The World’s Fastest Indian is a sometimes-funny visual memoir as charming as its subject seems to have been.

IMDb link

posted 9/17/13