Feel the Rush: F1 history lesson impresses

In the disco era, there was nothing more rock ’n’ roll than a Formula 1 driver. They rolled out of bed, untangled their driving suit from their one night stand’s underwear, sped to the track, downed a shot, chased it with some champagne, puffed some weed and off they went in their little “coffin with wheels.” The patch on their driving suit reads, “Sex: Breakfast of Champions.”

Maybe they weren’t all like this in the mid-1970s, but James Hunt was a unique creature, especially in Ron Howard’s Rush, an incredible analysis of one of F1’s most epic racing feuds. The film is told from two points of view: one from British driver Hunt (Thor’s Chris Hemsworth) and the other from Austrian virtuoso Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl). Other than being fantastic drivers, the two couldn’t be more different. Hunt, handsome and charming, walked around the pits without his shoes on. Lauda, exacting and talented, probably slept in his. The Austrian orbited around an all-consuming singularity — winning. Hunt’s motivation was simpler: defeating Lauda.

One of the more rewarding aspects of Rush is how Howard treats these two figures — the charismatic Hunt, and Lauda, dubbed “King Rat” by the other drivers — with such gentle compassion and careful framing. He likes them both, and it shows in their separate sequences, as well as in the kinetic racing scenes they share. A shrink could write psychological profiles on audience members’ favoring of one driver over the other. “So you like Hunt, which means you are wild and passionate, capable of throwing the rules out the window and flying by the seat of your pants.” Or, “You identify with Lauda because you don’t care what people think about you and you feel that caution and restraint are admirable qualities.” The movie is a litmus test for your own attitudes about competition and winning.

It’s also an engrossing story. It begins in Formula 3, where Hunt and Lauda begin their rivalry. Hunt seems to thrive by instinct alone; Lauda by knowing his engine and knowing the tracks he’s racing on. They immediately dislike each other, which is magnified exponentially when Lauda buys his way onto a Formula 1 team. “You can do that!?” Hunt groans to his team. Before long, Hunt’s on his own Formula 1 team and the rivalry continues.

Lauda is the better driver, but Hunt has style; if Lauda plays classical, then Hunt plays jazz. Their opposing methods are clearly evident at the German Grand Prix, a beastly 14-mile track called the Nürburgring, which sounds like someplace very evil in a J.R.R. Tolkien book. “A place of shadow,” Gandalf would say. Lauda protests the race citing weather concerns, but the other drivers think it’s a ruse to cut a race from a season that Lauda is likely to win. They all balk at his protest and the race continues amid dangerous conditions. Midway through the race, Lauda is in a nasty accident that nearly kills him. His car spins out and hits a wall, trapping him inside leaping gas-fed flames. You can YouTube the real footage of this crash, but it’s terrifying. The Rush version is only slightly less grisly, if only because that’s an actor and pyrotechnics and not a real human being inhaling fire as he fights seat restraints.

I’m giving away too much of the movie, but if you’re still reading this, it’s likely you’re a F1 fan and already know what happens. Lauda goes through an intense (and abbreviated) recuperation, while Hunt goes on and wins a bunch of races. In the end, it all comes down to the Japanese Grand Prix at the base of Mt. Fuji, where Hunt and Lauda will have to duke it out in the last race of the season. I will let you discover how it ends.

The technically proficient Howard, who reinvented fire for Backdraft and space movies for Apollo 13, does little for racing cinematography in the first half of Rush. The shots, while thrilling and lively, don’t reinvent driving or race cars, not like John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix did in 1966. Many of the shots involve static setups of cars careening around corners, or blurry side-by-side shots of F1 cars zipping down tracks. In a word, the races are bland. They do get much better, though, especially during the pivotal Nürburgring and Fuji races, which are exhilarating exhibitions of speed and drama. Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon) imbue the film with so much F1 trivia and authenticity that you’ll start to appreciate why Howard was on the starting grid at every F1 race for nearly two seasons — he was proud of the film he was working on. Current F1 fans will appreciate the name dropping and vintage cars, including that wacky six-wheeled Tyrrell car.

Better yet are the performances by Hemsworth and Brühl, who rise to the challenge of playing these complicated men with their dangerous hobbies. Now that he’s been Marvelized as Thor, I forget that Hemsworth can really act. And terrifically, too. He has a toe-tapping montage set to the Spencer Davis Group’s hit “Gimme Some Lovin’” and a sequence where we see his method of memorizing every turn and gear shift of a track. The wonderful Olivia Wilde has a small thankless role as his wife, who can't sustain him in his wreckless phases so she jets off to have an affair with Richard Burton. Brühl, who most will remember as the Nazi sniper and propaganda poster boy from Inglourious Basterds, is something to behold here. He has a scene set in the Italian countryside that is just splendid. It begins when a pair of Italian Ferrari fans (Lauda drove for Ferrari at the time) insist he drive their car after his breaks down. They sit in the back of their own car grinning like fools as Lauda pilots the jalopy around hairpin turns and up country hills. 

This is an incredible picture, but my only concern for Rush is that people won’t see it. It happened with Cinderella Man, Howard’s 2005 Depression-era boxing movie. It was a great movie, but it didn’t have an audience. After several miserable box office weekends, the studio told theaters to start issuing refunds to customers who didn’t like the film. The idea was that it would get butts in the seats, and then they were unlikely to ask for a refund because, after all, Cinderella Man was a fantastic movie. I’m very curious who the audience is for Rush. Formula 1’s largest audience is not in the United States, which largely prefers NASCAR and light beer over F1’s more challenging style of racing.

My hope is that non-racing fans discover the movie for its complex character studies, solid story and authentic setting. And if you like racing, well, then there’s a bit of racing here, too. Just a smidge.

De Niro vs. Meta-De Niro in The Family

Robert De Niro’s batting average fluctuates wildly. Many years ago, he was doing one stellar movie for every two movies made. Nowadays he’s averaging a homer about once every three at-bats. He’s a star, no doubt, but he swings at too many pitches.

Now, to follow this baseball analogy through to its end, The Family is not a grand slam, although it’s certainly the wildest inside-the-park homerun you’re likely to see for a very long time.

This is a strange, strange movie. So strange that I find myself at a loss for what it really is. At its heart, it’s a gangster movie, with De Niro doing his trademark mobster routine like a salty old pro. But it’s also a relationship drama about a Brooklyn family struggling to tough it out in the FBI’s witness protection program. There are subplots involving the water company and his daughter’s handsome teacher, monologues about olive oil and peppers, a curios middle section in which De Niro’s mobster-in-hiding plucks away at his memoirs in a greenhouse and a surreal scene at a film debate that turns absolutely bonkers.

Also, the whole movie takes place in Normandy, France, miles away from where American soldiers blasted their way into Nazi-occupied Europe. The setting seems odd, until The Family features its own military invasion late in the movie.

De Niro plays Giovanni Manzoni, an Italian gangster in hiding after he turned state’s witness for the FBI. He’s a rat, though not a proud one as he is unceremoniously shuffled from house to house, often in his scruffy robe, under the protection of his FBI handler (Tommy Lee Jones). The feds set the family up in a quaint cottage in Normandy; their cover is that Giovanni, under the name Fred Blake, is an author writing about D-Day, a subject which the town’s residents have a deeper more nuanced understanding of.

After living a life of crime, this family doesn’t mess around. Fred’s wife, Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer) is rebuffed at the local market when the French store clerk laughs at her request for peanut butter — “This is why all Americans are fat,” he says with an upturned nose. She does what any red-blooded American mob wife would do: she burns the grocery store down. Meanwhile, Fred’s teen children, Belle (Glee’s Dianna Agron) and Warren (John D’Leo), hit the high school with a vengeance: Belle assaults three people on the first day, including one with a tennis racket, and Warren sets up an extortion and bribery business that yields surprising results. Apples don’t fall far from the tree in this family.

While his wife and kids rip through the town, Fred shambles around the house plotting his next move. He has to be careful, though, because his old mob family still has a price on his head for ratting them out. The first order of business is to bury the seafood salesman in the garden. He tried to inflate lobster prices on the wrong guy, so Fred killed him. This is our first taste of violence, and it won’t be the last. Later, when he decides his water is coming out of the tap a little too brown for his liking, he takes on the town’s plumber, the mayor and the fertilizer plant owner. “We’re not in Brooklyn anymore,” Maggie tells him.

De Niro has done these gangster roles before, so it’s no surprise that he can do this one — a mash-up of his characters in Goodfellas and Analyze This — so well. De Niro’s performance is lazy and tired because poor Fred, beat up in this FBI program, is entirely defeated. De Niro’s meta-performance winks at us from behind those sad eyes because it knows we have seen the films it’s referencing. It will remind many people of The Freshman, Marlon Brando’s awful gangster movie that assumed its audience and characters had all seen The Godfather.

The Family doesn’t invoke The Godfather — don’t forget, De Niro starred in the sequel — but it does have a wonderful scene in which Fred/Giovanni is asked to debate a movie at his town’s local film club. The film: Goodfellas. All the FBI handler can do is roll his eyes. When it comes time for Fred to discuss the film, he can either play dumb or gush about the mob life in exorbitant detail. Guess what he does.

De Niro is impressive here, but so are the actors playing his family, Pfeiffer especially. Her Brooklyn accent floats in and out, but she plays the mob wife with such a feisty zest that you’ll hardly notice. Agron, usually confined to Glee’s two bland chords, finds some different notes to play here as the teenager with the dangerous crush on her teacher. D’Leo, a relatively new face, is also electric. His teen character has a recurring gag about swearing in front of his parents. “We’re not in Brooklyn anymore,” his mother says again.

The Family is a sharp comedy, maybe too sharp for its own good, which is why the whole thing was destined to end in a hail of gunfire and violence. I should have seen this coming, mostly because the movie is directed by French action auteur Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, The Professional). With Besson, creator of the Transporter series, of course this has to end with hitmen unpacking crates of silenced machine guns, tactical shotguns, military-style assault rifles and bazookas. Of course they all have to unload on Fred’s beautiful villa. Of course a swath of mayhem must be cut through this beautiful town and its quant inhabitants.

The violence is especially cold and heartless, even for a comedy this dark. Women, children, teens, police officers, firefighters … no one is spared. In the big battle sequence, Fred’s neighbors, who we’ve come to know through the course of the film, all pop out of their gates to see what the commotion is. The mobsters kill them all one by one. Yeesh.

Aside from the violence and some meandering segments in the middle, I rather enjoyed The Family and its snarky characters. The dialogue is especially witty, even as it descends into a swear-a-thon and then into De Niro’s vast library of mob-isms. You’ve seen this De Niro performance before, but never like this, and that is the film’s charm.

Riddick franchise gets much-needed jolt

“There are bad days, and then there are legendary bad days,” Vin Diesel’s lumpy muscleman says in hard-boiled narration during the opening moments of Riddick.

Today is most definitely one of the latter, although Riddick doesn’t have many lounging-in-sweatpants days or eating-cereal-out-of-salad-bowls-while-watching-Cartoon-Network days. So how he judges good days from bad seems to be determined by how much murder he commits. Today there is murder, though not an exorbitant amount. Give him a day or two to catch up.

I will not hide my true feelings about the Riddick franchise: it seems entirely unnecessary. Certainly Pitch Black was interesting as a sci-fi horror experiment, but I would have never guessed it could launch an entire string of sci-fi murderfests. My estimation was reinforced with 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick, overproduced, overcooked, overwritten space schlock. It was to Pitch Black what The Scorpion King was to that Mummy movie that spawned it — it was the red-headed step-child. Surely, the franchise was dead now, right?

Nope.

Now here we are with Riddick, a movie so impossibly redeeming to the franchise that I’m actually looking forward to the next entry. Yeah, folks, Riddick is fantastic, devilishly so. It shocked me how fun it was. I could have left the theater to find Vin Diesel personally washing and detailing my car and I would not have been more surprised than I was with Riddick, with its wacky sense of purpose, its macabre humor and Diesel, glowing as he plays the galaxy’s unluckiest ultimate warrior.

The movie involves a simple premise, to which the movie will forever be in its debt: Riddick is marooned on a planet by villains from the last movie. He hacks his way through the local bestiary to a remote outpost, a cop-op shack used by galactic mercenaries. He turns on the beacon to be rescued, but the beacon scans his body and alerts a fleet of hired killers that Richard B. Riddick, a wanted man with a large bounty, is the one making the call for help. Two different merc teams arrive to collect. They want Riddick, and Riddick wants a ship to fly home. And that’s all there is to it.

The first 30 minutes of the movie are the most curious, though, as Riddick hoofs it across a Martian-like wasteland. For a franchise so obsessed with needless action and laser battles, I was struck at this sequence’s slow pace: Riddick hides in a sulfer pool to escape dingoes, he wedges his broken leg in a crack to perform a maneuver not recommended by your local chiropractor, and he injects himself with a swamp bug’s venom to build up an immunity. The whole sequence creeps along at a lazy pace with Diesel’s trademark octave-dredging voice. Speaking of his voice, if the fabled Brown Note exists it must certainly exist within Diesel’s doomy rumble, often compared to an idling Harley Davidson but with more gravel and grinding. (For Brown Note history, please refer to South Park or Mythbusters.)

Eventually, Riddick activates the emergency beacon and two separate teams of killers arrive to claim the bounty. One team is made up of ruthless hooligans and murderous madmen. The other team is more professional with “matchy matchy” uniforms and a sense of integrity that must pass as space ethics in their line of work. The second team also has a lady, Dahl (Katee Sackhoff, Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica), who is threatened with rape so many times that I lost count. This is my only complaint with Riddick: in the future, in space and even on awe-inspiring distant planets men think rape jokes are funny. Even her name — Dahl, as in “sex doll” — seems like a perverse pun for Riddick’s more misogynist subset of Neanderthal fans.

Mostly, though, Riddick is campy, which is charming under the film’s unique arrangement of sci-fi conditions. Riddick, for example, roams the alien prairies with this giant Flinstones-sized switchblade made out of animal bone. In other sequences, men ride hovering jetbikes are photographed against hilariously obvious green screens. The effect reminded me of those early surf movies with a bunch of actors standing on stationary surfboards as waves were projected on screens behind them and members of the crew dumped buckets of water from outside the frame. Other Riddick campiness includes a bit with a package of outdated “crab enchilada hash” and an actual segment of dialogue wrapped around the line “take the jinx out of our janx.” Another sequence, a 10-minute segment involving an explosive combination lock on a storage cabinet, is equal parts thriller and comedy.

I’ve seen much better movies this year, but Riddick is the first high-octane action bonanza that didn’t make me roll my eyes with every new scene. It’s not high art, nor is it cinematic brilliance. But it is an entirely capable and completely entertaining big-budget action movie. And though the violence is often grisly and the tones dark, Riddick seems to have been made by people with wicked senses of humor because it shows up there on the screen.

Assuming the next franchise entry is as original as this one, this Riddick guy might have some staying power after all.