Thunder in Dixie

Behold, the power of reduced expectations! I'm not sure what I would have thought of Thunder in Dixie if I didn't watch Speed Lovers first, but I found myself more entertained than I had any right to be. Here was a movie where people could act! The camera was handled well! The score was jazzy! Hell, the script even had some tension in there! Plus it had main titles by Saul Bass' Non-Union equivalent, which was kind of neat. Overall, this movie was not awful, I'm impressed.

Once upon a time there was a race driver named Mickey (Harry Millard). He drove very drunk and killed the wife of another racing driver, Ticker (Mike Bradford). As a result, Ticker blames Mickey for his wife's death, and is very angry. He also wants revenge. So, at the first race Mickey comes back to, he intends to be very aggressive and hopefully kill him. This is not effective conflict resolution. Realizing this are the girlfriends of the drivers. Lily (Judy Lewis) doesn't want her husband racing anymore, and is trying to convince him to give it up. Karen (Nancy Berg) doesn't want boyfriend Ticker to die either, though admittedly she wasn't very interesting so I don't remember her character very well. It all builds to the climactic race, where we are promised thrills, spills, and so on.

Much like Speed Lovers, the bulk of the time is spent in hotel rooms. Unlike Speed Lovers, the actors involved can mostly put in decent performances. Judy Lewis is even somewhat impressive, doing a lot with a middle of the road script, and managing to give her character some depth and visually telegraphing her concern for her husband through just looks and the way she pauses. She even manages to build tension in otherwise boring scenes, as she acts her way out of the paper bag known as the script. The other actors are generally also not awful, and it makes the core story of the film believable and almost interesting. That's faint praise, but I'm coming off of Speed Lovers, give me a break.

Of course, it's not perfect, it clearly didn't have the budget for perfect. It needed a race, and it didn't have some racing driver to exploit footage of. As a result, the race is actually somewhat intense and easy to follow. It also is essential to the plot, unlike Speed Lovers where the race - much like every scene in the movie - isn't essential to anything. Unfortunately, it's also clearly the only race they could afford to film, and still mainly uses stock footage, so we have to deal with a cavalcade of hotel rooms yet again.

That's the real problem with Thunder in Dixie, it's cramming a full half hour of story into 80 minutes. Scenes repeat, constantly, and the action really goes nowhere for the entire middle third of the movie. To be fair, it was made for drive-in theatres, and that's prime make out time. Really, all you need to see is the beginning and end, as though the filmmakers knew to allow for heavy petting mid-picture.

It's dull, and really not a very good movie in the grand scale of things. What it is, however, is competent. That's not high praise, but having just seen Speed Lovers, competence is a wonder. I embrace this film's dull competence. Bless you Thunder in Dixie, you are not as bad as you could be.

As a side note, Happy New Year! We're coming up on a full year of Movies at Random, and what a year it's been! What can you expect in 2010? Well, we've got something from Belgium, something from Clint Eastwood, and more wacky adventures lined up. Stay tuned for more MaR, because I enjoy the project most of the time.

The Speed Lovers

Looks like we've got ourselves another theme week! Unlike the first time, this one is the result of a double feature. For some reason, I have two car racing based B-movies here, and the first one up on the plate is The Speed Lovers.

Once upon a time, writer/director/actor - and I use those terms quite loosely - William F. McGaha stumbled on some stock footage of a stock car race along with a stock car race driver named Frank Lorenzen. So, he decided that he'd use that opportunity to make a name for himself and a film he could star in. The auteur thus strung together a story about himself, as Scott, a car racing hopeful who has never actually raced before. While real car racers generally work at it from childhood, steadily improving their skills and getting into bigger and more powerful vehicles, he somehow believes that he can suddenly be the best racing driver in the world, instantly. He's looped into a highly ridiculous scheme run by Victoria and a fat guy - Peggy O'Hara an David Marcus - to make money and screw over real life racing driver Lorenzen.

The race footage is pretty solid, if disjointed. Lots of action, crashes, all of that fun stuff. Sure, the races aren't really easy to follow, but is pretty interesting. Surprisingly enough, Lorenzen is a better actor than one might expect for a racing driver. No, wait, that's not quite right, he really isn't a very good actor at all, where did I get that idea? Oh right, it's because everyone else is very bad at acting. It's like listening to the conversations of a forest, everything's wooden. The shining star of bad acting is McGaha, who doesn't seem to quite know his lines - which he wrote. The best part is that he gives himself the opportunity to be drunk, and dance, even though the concepts of drunkenness and dancing seem to be completely alien to him, like explaining the idea of swimming to a man in the desert.

His script is similarly well executed. The dialog manages to be both overly expository yet astonishingly vague. We're never given more than the roughest idea of what anyone or anything is, but that rough explanation is repeated constantly. Combined with the poor delivery and awkward phrasing, and it's like being bludgeoned with a particularly dull tree. Plus, the hero is amazingly unsympathetic. He's got an ego, he's annoying, he's a drunk, he screws everyone over, and he's an asshole. Yet, we're supposed to pull for him. Contributing to the joyous crap parade is some hilariously inept sexism. Characters are constantly saying things about how useless women are, dropping the lines with as much verve as everyone else in the film.

Oh, but crappy dialogue isn't the only wonder on display. We have a film about speed that never really leaves hotel rooms. But maybe that would be okay if the hotel rooms were filmed well, right? Well, after bringing together his racing relics McGaha seemingly had no money on such basic implements like a tripod. The camera simultaneously moves constantly and not at all. The framing is static, but the camera never stops shaking. Truth be told, the racing stock footage is good, but one can instantly tell where the stock ends and the footage shot for the film begins.

The theme song is remarkably annoying as well, though I like the band they got to perform it. Why? The same reason I love Cheap Trick, the drummer looks like an insurance salesman.

McGaha was a man with a dream, he wanted to be a star. He wanted to be a triple threat, a writer, director and actor. Unfortunately, his direction is inept, his writing is comically awful and the less said about his acting the better. It's a bad movie, poorly done in every conceivable manner. Let's all just forget about it yet again. Until next time, where we have the other half of this double feature.

Yet I'm intrigued to see that he went on to play Jesus (!) as the leader of a biker gang (!!) doing LSD (!!!). I wonder how bad that is.

Kiki's Delivery Service

Bringing Miyazaki Week to a close is Kiki's Delivery Service. When I first realized I was going to have a theme week, I thought that it would give me a platform to talk about animation, Japan, dubs vs. subs, Disney and all manner of other tangentially related topics. And I was tempted to try to shoehorn those things in there on multiple occasions. So it's a credit to these films that I decided that doing so would just be distracting from the matter at hand, the beautiful films that absolutely everyone should see.

Coming of age stories are common because the experience is universal. Everyone understands what it's like to be 13 and not quite popular, not quite mature, and yet wishing you were both. So that's probably why everyone and their dog has taken a crack at it. So, for a film to be a coming of age story and good besides, it's got to be special and different in some way.

Kiki's Delivery Service makes the story about a witch, going out on her own for the first time at 13, somewhat uncomfortable with being a witch and different, and like any young kid not completely confident in herself. So, a coming of age story then. But why is it so special?

It's Miyazaki, that's why it's so special! Well, that's simplifying things a lot, but the fact is that very few other directors could spin a pretty standard story like this into an absolutely beautiful and absorbing movie like this. So how does he do it?

First step, he has a gift for making likable, believable characters. Kiki is immensely charming, making it easy to identify with her and her plight. Her wisecracking cat is amusing and a nice cynical contrast to her initial optimism. The baker she meets and who becomes like a mother, her friend the painter who coaches her through a spot of angst, her enthusiastic would-be suitor, they're all beautifully captured characters. As a result, you care about what happens to these people, and get wrapped up into the storyline. The disappointment Kiki feels when a gift she and her friends worked very hard on isn't well received is felt by the viewer as well, as you've watched them work, and genuinely like them too.

Second step, he doesn't worry about having villains and obvious conflict. A lesser man would probably try to put some sort of foe that Kiki has to best in order to overcome her problems. Here, there isn't one. There's conflict sure, and a dramatic conclusion, but there's no evil. And yet, it manages to be all the more satisfying than if it did. See, Kiki succeeds to defeat her flaws, and her own lack of confidence. So when she manages to overcome those problems, you feel better about it because it's a problem every one of us has faced, and we've grown to like her and hope for her success. It would be easier to have her beat a cackling baddie, but it wouldn't be worth as much.

Third step, he makes it pretty. Like usual, the animation is absolutely stunning, the art direction is fantastic, and the music is mostly great. But really, that could describe any film from Studio Ghibli. Actually, in the pretty department contains the few flaws. Precisely, two flaws, the opening theme and the closing theme. Very cheesy, very 80s, very bad. Luckily, those are only two songs in an overall amazing soundtrack. Well, one of the songs sounds very similar to the theme used in the shops in the first Final Fantasy, a song I've grown to hate as I played that game and heard it blasting far too loudly in NES synth, but that's not the movie's fault, is it?

As a result, we get a movie that does what every movie should, it makes you happy. Watch it, and you're glad that you're watching it, maybe even thinking about watching it again in the near future. And you can go in depth all you want, but that's all you really need in a film, isn't it?


Screen taken at 55:07

Porco Rosso.

Improbably, for a site involving movies sent at random, there's a theme week this week. It's Miyazaki week everyone! I've got two Miyazaki movies sitting here, and while I might be accused of tampering with results to get a wacky theme, that's not the case, honestly. Someone out there decided I needed a theme week, apparently, and at the very least I have a theme based on one of the best directors working in animation.

I love Hayao Miyazaki, mostly because he elevates animation to an art form. Watching one of his movies, you're often struck by the atmosphere, the detail, and the sheer beauty of the film he's made. Too often with animation, it feels cheap, or as though the production team is mostly concerned with doing something easy for the kids. With him, you know that he's making an animated movie for the love of animation and pure style he can bring to it. If someone dares suggest that cell animation is a dead art form, they just need to watch some Studio Ghibli films in order to be proven otherwise.

So from that one can assume that Porco Rosso is beautifully animated, well written, and as a whole a fantastic film that everyone should see. It was published by Disney, so it's got a lovely DVD package along with a sometimes questionable dub featuring celebrities, including half asleep Michael Keaton in the lead role. There, this is going to be the easiest week I'll ever do!

Alright, fine, I'll get more in depth. Porco Rosso is about a fantastic pilot who is also somehow a pig. He's a bounty hunter who hunts pirates, who are getting sick of being hunted down and have hired the Frenchest American ever to shoot him down. I have a feeling something was fudged in the translation, because I don't think an American would wear a french flag as part of his clothing. This whole thing is set on the backdrop of rising fascism in Italy.

The movie is something of a homage to old Hollywood, the stuff they made around the second World War. In atmosphere and style, it's a lot like movies like Casablanca. Something informed by the nearby war, but really about how people in the countries deal with the changes. Everyone smokes a lot, people hang out in classy bars and listen to french singers and the hero is surly but good and honorable at heart.

This is a love letter to movies, to Hollywood, to the great actors and directors of a bygone era. In every frame you can see the great affection Miyazaki has for film. And watching this, it become apparent that if cell animation ever dies out, it'll be the greatest loss that ever has happened in film.


Screen at 34:59