FORD VS FERRARI (2019)

At one point in FORD VS FERRARI, at about the beginning of act three, or perhaps the end of act two, when Christian Bale wins an important race, the people who he works for are... angry that he won... So here's a feel-good underdog sport film where winning is somehow rebellious... and Bale, as usual, deep-diving into the kind of old-school neurotic character-role that used to vanish into the background, steals the show...

But unlike THE FIGHTER, it's because the other players... including Matt Damon as the man who hired him to help Ford beat Ferrari at race car driving... doesn't have much to do but spout the kind of pump-you-up cliches that fathers bring their sons to movies for (that Tommy Lee Jones could pull off sleepwalking)... And for that, for pure mainstream popcorn entertainment, this is a fun ride, and simple to grasp... but the characters are either too roguishly-endearing or one-dimensional-greedy for the plot to really work since there's never anything to anticipate, or to be completely surprised about... Meanwhile, as otherwise intense actors, Damon and Bale are doing a general-admission imitation to please the kind of Middle-American/opening-night audience they'd personally detest, and would be better suited to a story with more edge and ambiguity (though the cookie-cutter anti-corporate spin would remain the same)...  So most likely, somewhere along the way, director James Mangold decided that jovial adrenaline was better acquired without too many distractions, which has made for a beloved, popular film... But if you go back and re-watch ROCKY, HOSSIERS or THE RIGHT STUFF, you'll learn how this sort of against-the-odds vehicle can work without trying so hard to always WORK FOR the audience instead of genuinely CHALLENGING them. Rating: ***

SIX PACK

title: SIX PACK

year: 1982

cast: Kenny Rogers, Diane Lane, Erin Gray, Anthony Michael Hall, Terry Kiser, Barry Corbin

rating: **

When people think of acting it's usually how a performer speaks his or her lines. But acting is just as physical as verbal. How a person walks, runs, sits, stares in repose/reflection, is just as important as line delivery, and Kenny Rogers does it all horribly. Witnessing a fat Kenny (with an always perfectly combed shaggy dog beard) playing a car racer who every woman on earth is nuts about (including Erin Gray) hanging out with a bunch of orphaned freewheeling car thief kids (including Diane Lane and Anthony Michael Hall) is as entertaining for bad movie fans as a bad movie gets. Just sit and stare at Mr. Rogers, who fully realizes there is a camera pointing at him, and you will be thoroughly entertained on a level impossible to explain till you experience it for yourself. For those who live for cinematic torture, I recomend this highly.

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP

year: 1971

cast: James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates

director: Monte Hellman

rating: ****1/2

James Taylor and Dennis Wilson's non-acting doesn't matter as they're part of the car and feel as the car feels on a first-person i.e. first-vehicle narrative through America. To counter-balance the purposeful non-acting there's legendary Warren Oates, providing not only the baseline but acting as both catylist and antagonist as two cars: the Chevy (Taylor, Wilson) and the GTO (Oates) "race" cross country for pink slips; stopping along the way in various small towns for local races. Laurie Bird is a pretty, dim-bulb hitchiker whose acting's on par with Wilson more than Taylor; yet if real actors sat in Taylor, Wilson, or Bird's seats perhaps the documentary real-life aura would be gone. What we have is an ueber-realistic, organically textured, subtly spellbinding journey with one basic (if primal) objective: to keep moving.