Kung Fu Cinema

There has never been a better time than right now to get into Kung Fu cinema. And there’s no better place to start than with the brand new Dragon Dynasty DVD release of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.

Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on Kung Fu movies – for that I could easily refer you to a few I know – but I have been dabbling in the genre off and on for several years along with countless other Kill Bill fans. I’ve seen the hilarious and exciting Jackie Chan movie Drunken Master, much better to my eyes than any of his Hollywood movies. I’ve seen The Five Deadly Venoms knowing that it was an inspiration for Kill Bill’s DiVAS. (Honestly, the biggest thrill I got from it though was seeing the famous Shaw Brothers opening logo and fanfare somewhere other than at the top of Kill Bill.)

I’ve recently watched the Dragon Dynasty DVD for Have Sword Will Travel with its thrilling sword fighting climax up and down a pagoda and went through the semi-black market to get a copy of the amazing Shaw Brothers gangster epic The Boxer of Shantung. (For this one, think Scarface set in period Hong Kong with Kung Fu instead of “Say hello to my little friend!” and you’ll start to get the idea.) I even followed the advice of one of those Kung Fu movie experts I told you about and rented We’re Going to Eat You, a great action film set almost entirely on an island of cannibals that is – my friend assures me – the only such film to feature Kung Fu fighting on rollerskates.

None of these experiences prepared me for the greatness of The 36th Chamber though. It tells the story of a village cowering at the feet of a band of oppressors. Its reluctant young hero, San Te, feels that his village would be much better off if they all knew Kung Fu and knows that the monks of Shaolin Temple are the best teachers anywhere, but he doesn’t want to go seek their help since, “They aren’t interested in worldly matters.” But when the villains kill his father, he is forced into action in a scene as wonderfully dark and chilling as Luke Skywalker’s discovery of his murdered aunt and uncle. San Te is now committed to becoming a Jedi Knight … oops, I mean a Kung Fu master.

When San Te arrives at the Temple, by stowing away with some vegetables, he finds himself in a special new world completely insulated from the one he left behind. After a year in the temple though, he complains that he wishes to learn Kung Fu but hasn’t seen anything like it yet, just a lot of yard work and doing dishes. His new masters calmly tell him that all he had to do was speak up and his training – which consists of lessons taught in a series of 35 chambers – could begin.

Again, much like Luke Skywalker, San Te is impatient and wishes to jump straight to the last and toughest chamber to get through his training quicker. And with a sigh, his master obliges and escorts him into a room full of meditating monks. He walks to the end of the room and stands before the head monk who looks up at him with scorn for his impudence and knocks him to the ground merely by the power of his thought, much like The Force. San Te then reconsiders and decides to work his way up from the bottom.

Just as Luke Skywalker had lessons to learn and skills to master before he’d be ready to face Darth Vader, San Te goes through many lessons – a Kung Fu movie expert told me that The 36th Chamber is rare in the huge amount of screen time it devotes to training scenes – and these lessons are widely varied, fun, and fascinating. And of course, just as Luke needed his training with lightsaber and trusting The Force rather than his eyes to defeat his enemies, San Te will need and make use of all of his lessons in often surprising and clever ways to defeat his village’s band of oppressors.

It’s not a coincidence of course that I’ve been comparing The 36th Chamber repeatedly to Star Wars. They’re both torn from the same mythical cloth – even The 36th Chamber’s Buddhist monks as San Te’s mentors have their parallel in Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda (Lucas has never tried to hide the Buddhist inspiration behind these elder Jedi). And I think anyone who enjoys the Star Wars movies will get a major kick out of The 36th Chamber. (No pun intended.) They’re both classic hero journeys and I’m convinced that Lucas had this and other Kung Fu films explicitly in mind when he developed his signature epic.

After watching just a few Kung Fu movies, I’m frequently amazed at all the places I note the genre's influence. It’s actually widely known that the Matrix movies are new school Hong Kong Kung Fu cinema in new clothing. When I finally got around to seeing Casino Royale, I was immediately impressed by its chase and fight scenes as being straight out of Jackie Chan and Jet Li. And just last week, I had a very eye-opening re-watch of Peter Jackson’s horror film Dead Alive. It was eye-opening because I’d forgotten just how great it is – best zombie movie ever I tell you – and because it contains a scene of a Kung Fu fighting priest who “kicks ass for the Lord.” This was a reminder that The Lord of the Rings is heavily influenced by Kung Fu cinema, from the sword fighting to the acrobatic antics of Legolas.

Anyone who really wants to understand why movies like The Lord of the Rings are made the way they are really should take a look at some Kung Fu cinema like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Quentin Tarantino also feels very strongly about this and partially intended Kill Bill as a way to get moviegoers to take an adventure and start watching this striking genre whose popularity has sadly died out since the 70s and grindhouses and disco songs – remember “Kung Fu Fighting?”

Now, how to get more people to start watching the many great horror films that paved the way for the realistic and harrowing violence in films like Saving Private Ryan. I think I’ll save that for another time.

Transformers

Have you ever wondered what would’ve happened if Edward D. Wood Jr. had attempted a Godzilla movie? Until last night, the thought had honestly never crossed my mind. That all changed though while watching Michael Bay’s Transformers. As ineptly directed as humanly possible, it is also, I fear, destined like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Godzilla versus Space Godzilla to stumble its way into my pantheon of very guilty pleasures.

The “plot” involves a giant cube crashing to Earth and a bunch of non-biological aliens waging battle over some broken eye glasses left in the Arctic Circle by an adventurous scientist who happens to have been the grandfather of Shia LaBeouf. Shia is a rather un-nerdly nerd with nothing on his mind except mentally undressing the girl of his dreams who looks an awful lot like a Playboy playmate of the year. It also has a lot of actors standing around reading dialog like they’ve never seen it before and like they hope to never see it again. It even has Jon Voight and John Turturro popping up here and there apparently tricked into thinking this is a Spielberg movie by the opening image of a boy fishing from the moon. (I’d love to have seen their faces when they discovered the truth.)

We also get to watch a lot of cars race around and often transform themselves into really cool robots that fight with each other and smash other cars and houses and backyard water fountains. The good ones even protect Shia LaBeouf as if they’ve taken lessons from The Iron Giant. I chose the word “cool” because these scenes really are technically quite smashing and really did bring out my inner little boy. I found myself wondering if Michael Bay might be a pretty darn cool director if he made films without, you know, any human characters.

Transformers is the type of movie that I was ready to abandon after about ten embarrassing minutes of opening exposition. At that point, my teenage daughter who had already squirmed her way through it asked me what I thought. I gave her thumbs down and she chuckled telling me it only gets worse. I’m here to report that she was wrong, sort of.

Sure, every time a scene is slammed down in front of us with a bunch of people standing around talking without any cool robots in sight, Transformers becomes a truly dull boy. Fortunately, there are enough scenes with cool robots to allow the movie to build something close to an entertaining sense of forward momentum, even if it is of the three steps forward, two steps back variety. It also has a few aspects that I actually enjoyed.

At the center of this storm of half-baked ideas is a boy-and-his-first-car-coming-of-age-story, the boy being Shia LaBeouf. Now, of course this storyline has been penned with all the finesse of a 10-year-old boy with a box of permanent markers and Bay has once again demonstrated his history as a Playboy video director with his presentation of the love interest played by Megan Fox. (The pretty surfaces and ultimate emptiness of this boy wants girl, boy gets girl scenario is betrayed by the “big kiss” moment at the end which feels totally perfunctory and is allowed seemingly a split second of screen time amongst the hubbub.) All the same though, there is something indestructible about a boy getting his dream girl with the help of a cool car, not even Bay could completely mess it up. And when the car is this cool – the coolest movie car since Christine though of course not as benevolent – how can the boy in me not cheer?

Transformers doesn’t take itself too seriously, always a saving grace in a big bloated Summer blockbuster. There is a tiny evil robot that constantly flits about like a little spider, constantly verbalizing (all the robots talk in some sense) with little “oops” and “uh ohs.” It also gets in a bit of slapstick including a scene where it sneaks across an airport runway. The good robots get their time for slapstick fun as well by spying on and hiding from Shia LaBeouf’s parents outside their house – and totally making a mess of his father’s beloved backyard. One of the robots even gets peed on by LaBeouf’s dog and proves he learned his lesson by later peeing on the unlikable (here) John Turturro. (Okay, maybe that last bit was taking things a bit too un-seriously.)

Finally, the whole film is really, as I alluded, designed as a giant monster movie in the grand old Godzilla tradition and it is fun in this sense. We get introduced to the good monsters and the bad monsters. We get just enough – mostly very silly – background mythology to explain their existence. Then they are set loose to bash each other all over the screen. And for most of the time it is fun to watch, although, as has been my experience with most giant monster movies of the Japanese variety, the climactic battle is more drawn out and busy than exciting. In Transformers, I actually started to nod off during what should have been the most riveting battle in the movie.

I didn’t choose to compare Transformers to Godzilla versus Space Godzilla just willy-nilly. That installment is the most child oriented I’ve seen in the Godzilla franchise and it seemed to work very well at giving children something to enjoy. At least my young daughter seemed to find it engaging. Transformers seems to be aiming at the same audience – it is based on a line of children’s toys after all. And it did take me back to my six-year-old days of playing with and destroying Hot Wheels cars. But its constant references to everything from the Iraq war to masturbation and its visual homage to Playboy and Kill Bill dragged it out of character and into horny teen land. I wish that Michael Bay had shown faith that he could get enough ogle-eyed young boys (and grown men who wish they were young boys) into the theater to make this work and simply cater to their needs. I also wish he’d cut out all those damn scenes of people standing around talking.

Stranger Than Fiction

All of our lives are stories and we are the hero of our own stories. That is what I took away with me after reading Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. That is also what Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell, learns in the movie Stranger Than Fiction.

Stranger Than Fiction tells the story of Crick, a man who lives a lonely and monotonous everyday existence. He is an IRS bean counter and his preoccupation with numbers and counting rules his life. He counts the strokes as he brushes his teeth. He counts his steps to the bus stop. He calculates the relative percentages of liquid soap remaining in a restroom’s dispensers. He even calculates the odds of his making a fool of himself as he talks to a woman of his infatuations aboard a bus. (And these calculations are cleverly illustrated for us by little graphics superimposed over the scenes with draftsman-like precision that I’m sure would meet Crick’s approval.)

Of course, a story wouldn’t be a story unless something happens that upsets things, and upsetting things is obviously especially upsetting to a man like Crick. So what happens that Crick finds so upsetting? (Have I abused that word enough to make my point that Crick finds an intrusion on his life upsetting?) He begins to hear the voice of a woman describing his actions. He starts to notice his every action is the subject of a constantly nagging omniscient narration.

At first, Crick reacts to this voice in all the ways one would expect in a movie with Ferrell contemporary Jim Carrey. (Stranger Than Fiction often reminds of Carrey movies from Liar Liar to The Truman Show and I suppose it would have worked just as well, maybe better, as a Carrey vehicle.) Crick talks back to the voice as bystanders ogle him as a raving lunatic and when the voice refuses to appear on cue, he smashes a lamp in hopes of hearing his crazed actions narrated. Happily though, the film takes a more promising turn leading Crick into the hands of an English professor played by Dustin Hoffman in one of his best character roles in ages and on a journey to learn just what sort of hero he is in this story of his life.

(Now, I’ll share a bit of honesty. Some stories require a certain leap on the viewer’s part to buy into their concept. And Stranger Than Fiction has a concept that took me two viewings to accept. It is actually constructed as two parallel narratives: the one I’ve described involving Crick and one involving a novelist, Karen Eiffel, played by Emma Thompson. Hers is the voice Crick hears. His story is being written by Eiffel as she struggles through her latest tragic work of fiction. That these two stories – of an author and the character of her story – merge together in the same reality was something I found just a bit too cute, too contrived. Then I came around and took it as a poetic expression of Eiffel’s Crick becoming so real for her that he – you see where I’m going – became really real for her.)

I don’t wish to give away much more in the way of story details. That might spoil the fun. But I’ll share some thoughts. Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces that all stories across all cultures are amazingly similar. They all introduce us to a character in his normal world; they put something in his path that gives him a reason to leave that world; after some reluctance, he leaves the familiar for the unfamiliar; he meets a series of mentors and learns some lessons; he is faced with challenges that ultimately kill him (usually not literally); and he is reborn as something different, possibly better. He is then free to return to his normal world to find that his changes have altered the very weaving of how he fits into that world’s fabric. Keep Campbell’s ideas in mind while watching Stranger Than Fiction, or any movie for that matter. I do think though that Stranger Than Fiction is more about this hero’s journey than merely following it.

The movie also explores the different types of hero – specifically comedic versus tragic as if toying with Ferrell’s familiar on-screen persona – and makes some fascinating observations about how a hero’s story is affected by his knowledge of his own future. Crick and Eiffel do meet in the movie’s pivotal scene and she shares with him the final pages of her “finished” novel. How he reacts to being offered this almost forbidden knowledge and what it tells him about his destiny draws clear parallels between Stranger Than Fiction and the greatest story ever told. At the same time though, it shows that we play an active role in the writing of our own stories, nothing is predetermined and everything can be re-written.

Ultimately, what surprised me about Stranger Than Fiction was finding myself in a Will Ferrell movie that snuck up behind me and replaced the over-the-top goofiness of Ferrell running around a NASCAR speedway in his underwear with a religious inquiry into the conflict between God’s plan and human initiative while still keeping things goofy enough to be fun and without a hint of the pretentiousness that could have so easily been the result.

I’m happy to say that Stranger Than Fiction is the rare fun movie about a meaty topic.

SiCKO

Oh, where do I begin with Michael Moore? I have so many thoughts up and down and all around concerning him and the films that bear his name. I’ll just say off the top that I consider him one of my favorite filmmakers and perhaps one of the most important now working.

He would be the most important without a doubt except for one problem: He has an irresistible drive it seems to aim a gun at his toes and pull the trigger. He gave his attackers an easy opening by fiddling with timelines in Roger & Me. Taking cheap shots at a decrepit Charlton Heston and giving the last (albeit shrewd) word to Marilyn Manson in Bowling for Columbine probably wasn’t a good strategy. He should have known that attacking George W. Bush so viciously during an election year in Fahrenheit 9/11 would leave no room for even a single error. (He made far more than one.)

I’ve come to anticipate each new film with a cringe of anxiety and with SiCKO he is at it again. Brick by brick, he develops his case like a college student writing an essay assignment in persuasion – to persuade us to feel despairingly about the state of health care in the United States. And it worked. My wife and I left the theater ready to up and move to Canada.

But on reflection, why did he choose to open the film by stabbing the now defenseless George W. Bush? Sure, his line about gynecologists needing a chance to show more love to their patients is a classic Bush-ism, but it really didn’t have a function in the film other than to start fanning the flames in the first five seconds. It certainly doesn’t support the film’s overall position that health care is an apolitical issue.

It doesn’t take much thought to become highly unconvinced by his “typical” middle class Americans living in France or his “typical” British doctor’s lifestyle. Yes, in the moment, they make very compelling cases for things being much better in other countries than the evil and broken socialism we are warned about in a propaganda film featuring Ronald Reagan. But, come on now Michael Moore, we all know the only thing “typical” about these examples is that they support your argument.

Finally, why did he have to blow off a few little piggies in the final section by dragging a bunch of 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba to show them getting better medical care than they’ve managed here at home? Sure, the whole escapade is vintage Michael Moore theatrics, but it brings the film to a conclusion that evokes the very communist fears he’s so far spent the whole film side-stepping.

(I thought he was about to blast away at another toe by bringing Hillary Clinton into the picture. I thought, “Oh great. Last time he tried to get George W. Bush out of office. This time he’s going to try to get Hillary elected. Then he threw a curveball by incriminating the Democratic candidate for taking a fat kickback from the big health insurance corporations.)

So, why do I like Michael Moore, let alone find him so important, so valuable? For one thing, his films are very entertaining – entertaining in ways and to a degree that people never thought documentaries could (or should) be. Now, I’m sure I find them especially entertaining – while the whole “Fox News set” considers them like multiple paper cuts beneath their fingernails – because I agree with Michael Moore, maybe not in all the little details, but certainly in the big picture. I feel much disgust for large corporations and fat hog corporate executives. I am for very strong gun control laws. I know in my heart that the nation went on the critical condition list the day George W. Bush stole the White House.

That’s all very subjective though and says as much about me as anything. It demonstrates that I’m a rather radical Democrat. Woo Hoo! Where I find the most value in Moore’s cinema though is in its basic, fundamental, constitutional expression of free speech. I see Michael Moore as a ranter (MS Word’s squiggly line tells me I just coined that term) who has found a very vocal, highly visible vehicle for his rants – certainly more visible than even the highest profile blog and right up there with nationally syndicated columns and the Rush Limbaugh radio show. He gets all worked up about something and shares that passion with the world. And just like Internet bloggers, getting the facts straight or being fair and unbiased isn’t a top priority. Getting people’s attention and getting their tongues wagging is what counts.

Michael Moore is one of our most important filmmakers because he forces issues that are burning a hole through his heart out in the general consciousness where real discussion can begin. And he goes after issues that I feel should be burning holes through all of our hearts. Maybe someday he’ll put it all together and make a film that is as bulletproof in its arguments and fact-checking as it is hilarious and crafty – and effective at raising temperatures. But would that really make it a better film? Is it even possible in this bi-partisan country to pull both sides together on these issues? Or is flame fanning really our best compromise?

Akeelah and the Bee

Akeelah and the Bee has a handicap to overcome that is as challenging as anything its 11-year-old heroine has to face. It has to overcome a sense of déjà vu, that sense of “I’ve seen this oh so many times before.” The fact that it overcomes this so satisfyingly must go down as one of the major movie triumphs of 2006. I watched Akeelah with my family last night. Afterwards, I told my daughters, who were still bouncing around the room from the experience, that I was going to write a review. They told me, “It better be a good one dad.”

This was a rare occasion for me. I had no idea who directed this movie as I watched it. I’m usually really up on that sort of thing, but in this case I just wanted to see a good movie about a girl competing in a spelling bee. When the credits rolled, I saw the name Doug Atchison flash by and I was surprised. Not that it was Atchison – a name I’d never heard before and, after checking Internet Movie Database, one that still means nothing – but that it wasn’t John G. Avildsen the director of Rocky and The Karate Kid.

And there is the source of my déjà vu. If you’ve seen those movies, not to mention Bad News Bears and just about any other sports movie, you’ll feel your thoughts just a bit ahead of every twist and turn. We have a talented heroine who reluctantly starts down the road to glory with everything in her upbringing working against her. We have the stern mentor figure who insists she prove herself before he accepts the role of coach. (And of course, he also has his own skeletons that make his involvement in the relationship painful and yet also inevitable.) There are exciting training montages that felt only to be missing “wax on, wax off” to be complete although they did contain the physical challenge of holding up a rather large and heavy book and the meaningful and rhythmic use of a jump rope. We have early competitions with necessary lessons to be learned before taking on Goliath. And speaking of Goliath, he has a father as clearly and vicariously re-living his disappointing childhood through his own child as the dark pitcher (son)/coach (father) relationship in The Bad News Bears.

So, how does the movie manage to still feel fresh and alive? Well, first off and to be fair, I was caught a few times patting myself on the back for my cleverly figuring out what was going to happen next only to be surprised by an unexpected twist. This always brought a most welcome blush to my experienced movie geek sense of pride. I love it when a move that seems predictable proves me wrong. That really isn’t the reason I ended up loving Akeelah and the Bee though.

I loved it because I loved the characters. Sure a few never convincingly took flight like Akeelah’s mom played by Angela Bassett or the poor boy saddled with the thankless role of Akeelah’s sour and humorless arch rival or the poor man stuck playing the rival’s father with a steady, stern sneer, the source of his son’s sour humorlessness. But soaring far above these stock characters are the magnificent performance by the always reliable Laurence Fishburne as Akeelah’s spelling coach and the totally appealing work by the young J.R. Villarreal as Akeelah’s competitive soul mate, guide, and first crush in the dog-eat-dog world of competitive spelling. He delivers one of my favorite lines, “I almost had to start tap-dancing,” after stalling a panel of judges for what must’ve seemed an eternity on Akeelah’s behalf.

As for Akeelah played by the young and startlingly talented Keke Palmer, this is one of those star-in-the-making performances that I never wanted to see end. I could’ve watched her natural, instinctive talent win, lose, or draw spelling bees for six or eight more hours and, if she decided along the way to switch to baseball or swimming or playing the piano with her toes, I would’ve followed her there as well. She is that good. She is just that appealing. We’re going to see a lot more of this girl in the years to come and I’ll be keeping my eyes pealed.

Or, maybe, there is something more primal behind my attraction to this movie, as well as my love of every movie I earlier lumped together as examples of sports movie predictability. Perhaps, as Joseph Campbell demonstrated in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, we have a collective need for heroes who take these journeys and succeed against the odds, heroes who reluctantly enter a new world, work with tough trainers who teach them important lessons, confront their dark side, and experience their own form of triumph. If it was good enough for Luke Skywalker, it’s certainly good enough for Rocky Balboa, The Karate Kid, and, now, Akeelah.

A Scanner Darkly

"Making the wearer of the scramble suit the ultimate everyman. He looks like a constantly shifting vague blur … Let's hear it for the vague blur." Laughs and applause erupt in a room full of businessmen.

This dialog occurs in an early scene from the fantastic and fascinating film A Scanner Darkly written and directed by Richard Linklater. Our protagonist, Bob, an everyman even by name, is addressing a room of generic businessmen, a twisted satire of a Lions Club luncheon. And as early scenes typically do in movies, the theme of the film is established. We are watching a film about the “faceless establishment,” “big business,” or whatever else you wish to call it versus the “people.” Bob goes on to worry about how Substance-D (more on this in a moment) is hooking our kids at a young age and to express the urgent need to rid the country of its dependency on this drug. His voice trails off to a mutter as the businessmen grow restless, their financial motivations for the continued success of Substance-D quite clear. He takes his seat and the moderator retorts, “Let’s eat.”

A Scanner Darkly is a science fiction film about a drug-addicted public of the near future based on a novel by Philip K. Dick who also brought us Blade Runner. It stars Keanu Reeves as an undercover agent, Bob, assigned to gather information about himself. (Agents wear scramble suits that hide their identities even from their superiors making this strange situation possible.) Bob shares the screen with an assortment of companions played with loopy druggie logic and behavior by Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey, Jr., Winona Ryder, and Linklater regular Rory Cochrane and, as in all of Linklater’s dialog driven, often conspiracy theory fueled films, the verbal interactions between these characters are at dazzling center stage.

What a viewer will find most immediately striking about the film is its visual style. Like Linklater’s earlier film Waking Life, a technique called rotoscoping has been used throughout the film. This technique involves shooting real actors and then creatively tracing, drawing, and otherwise animating over the top of that reference footage to create a realistic yet oddly detached and dreamlike impression. Both Waking Life – about dreams – and Scanner – about characters losing grasp with reality – benefit strongly from this approach.

Back to that drug Substance-D. It is, both for the radical 60s writer Dick and for the like-minded Linklater, a metaphor for how people are subtly made dependent on the proper consumer lifestyle by “the establishment” – recall Bob’s concern about kid’s getting hooked at a young age and notice how in today’s world advertising makes it essential that kids keep up with the latest Nintendo, etc. Slacker, Linklater’s breakthrough film, depicts do-nothing Austin, TX denizens leading a laid-back resistance to America’s addiction to consumerism. The relationship of this to drug addiction is interesting. How many times have you heard that, no matter how rich you get, you never have enough? Any amount of wealth and possessions merely breeds a need to have more. And no dosage brings the same level of pleasure for long. Something -- higher taxes, higher cost of living, or the latest expensive stuff you must have to stay "happy" -- always comes along to make a level of income less satisfying this year than last.

Linklater’s Dazed and Confused is about the final day of school for some high school kids and how they blow off steam that night. What that film methodically depicts is a process of molding and shaping boys and girls to become men and women who fit acceptably into society and the ugly results of this process if it goes awry (or goes too perfectly?). Because of this, Dazed has been referred to as a horror film with a hero who resists doing what is expected and, like Scanner’s Bob, goes cold turkey by refusing to sign away his life to tradition. This makes Scanner a remake of sorts of Dazed with the making of good, proper little Americans by “the man” represented by drug addiction and high school hazing respectively.

Sadly, as is expressed in Scanner – “the world is getting worse” – things have gotten bleaker in Linklater’s outlook. In Dazed, the hero escapes and hits the road to buy Aerosmith tickets. In Scanner, Bob, now on a rehab work farm, plucks a blue flower, the source of Substance-D, and quickly tucks it into his pocket.

Talladega Nights

When the most memorable characters in the movie are supporting players, there is something very wrong in Talladega Nights. Something got lost in Will Ferrell’s attempt to turn Ricky Bobby into a comic legend of the speedway. As I sit and write this, all that sticks in my mind is a guy running around in his underwear believing he is in flames. I’m not sure if I can attribute this memory to the movie though. I had already seen this bit 247 times on television back when the trailer continuously interrupted everything from Lost to Bobby Flay’s Throw Down. (I kept count and can prove this number if you give me a few minutes to falsify my data.)

Ferrell doesn’t seem to have it in his genes for improvisation. Situation after situation gets set up, but never makes that jump from this dimension to the one where comedy re-defines the laws of nature. When he runs about in his underwear or rides a child’s bicycle, he doesn’t take it anywhere. He just keeps doing it and keeps doing it with the fierce belief that duration breeds funniness. It’s as if Charlie Chaplin’s gold prospector had waddled up to the table and started eating and eating and eating and had never been struck with the idea to make his bread rolls dance.

Farrell doesn’t seem to have any more feel for verbal improvisation. In a dinner table scene, he prays to baby Jesus and defends his preference of a child in diapers against his family’s protests that the real Jesus is a man with a beard. His protests merely lead once again to him assuming something of a seated fetal position just short of sucking his thumb and repeating over and over that his Jesus is the baby Jesus. It made me wish the scene had been handed to the young actors playing his sons. We get a snippet of their verbal invention here and elsewhere and we get far more in the DVD bonus materials.

The best evidence of Ferrell’s barely dripping faucet of comedic inspiration is the obligatory (though maybe not for Ferrell) bloopers reel during the end credits. None were funny. None made me glad to stick around and learn that the steadicam was operated by Joe Chess. None displayed the sense of easy, effortless nuttiness that flows so naturally out of Jim Carrey. One can never blame Talladega Nights’ failings on a film editor who lacked a sense of humor. He seems to have determinately kept everything in the movie that was even remotely funny.

On the memorable side is Gary Cole’s rendition of Ricky Bobby’s father. We never really get to know the guy, but Cole brings so much nuance and body language to the role that we effortlessly fill in the blanks. All his fast but pathetic living and his life-long passion for the fine art of refusing to grow up can be spotted in his odd flair for clothing, in his unkempt hair, and in his air of boyish recklessness. He is like an archetypical wayward father miraculously filled with little surprises.

Also memorable is Sacha Baron Cohen’s Jean Girard. His is a towering, slicked back, reptilian presence. I’m not entirely sure where he thought he was going with his take on the sports movie villain. He never really became someone worth hating. He just felt like a writer had grabbed the first idea that raced past him while searching for an opposite to Ricky Bobby’s unsophisticated white trash. Why of course! Make him an elitist French culture snob. All the same, Cohen played it for everything it was worth and seeing Jean Girard in the heat of a race quietly perusing a copy of Camus’ The Stranger gave me a smile and a chuckle. Now there was something I didn’t expect to see. It’s a bad sign though when an underdeveloped character and a misconceived character overshadow the hero of the story.

Maybe I’m assigning too much blame to Will Ferrell. I do find his Elf endearing and Ferrell’s testing the Jack-in-the-Boxes for defects in that movie is a bit of true comic genius, perfectly timed, perfectly funny. Maybe instead of all this meandering improvisation a sports movie needs a more predictable arc and the discipline to touch all the key bases that make us care. By the time Talladega Nights arrives at its big confrontation, it feels like a complete after thought. I didn’t care who crossed that finish line first. Imagine The Karate Kid ending with just two boys fighting instead of a kid we have grown to love coming of age by defeating pure evil. That’s what Talladega Nights gives us, just two guys working their way perfunctorily toward a checkered flag.