4 posts tagged “torque week”
“What is it about driving cars that makes you all such assholes?”
It’s a valid question, to be sure, and one of the probing conundrums that is central to the awesomeness of Torque. Torque finds its Buddha in the guise of the car movie, and as is wont to happen in such situations, Torque kills the Buddha. Torque makes fun of cars and car films (“I live my life a quarter mile at a time.” “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!”), all the while indulging in the same stunt artistry, testosterone-fueled plot and characters, and the same man/horse cowboy dynamic as any other film we’ve shared during TORQUE WEEK! In fact, Torque does all of this better than any other movie of its type that I’ve seen. They key difference? Instead of ricers or muscle cars, Torque uses bikes, choppers, hogs, etc. As far as I can tell, the only benefit to this is that it makes everyone look like a complete dickhead.
Pretty much all of the characters wear these leather jumpsuits for pretty much all of the movie. I suppose it’s authentic biking attire, but you know what? Yellow and blue spandex is an authentic look for Wolverine, but the movie went a different way to keep him from looking like a giant flaming idiot.
Torque is blissfully aware of its silliness. It goes for bad puns (like having Ice Cube shout “Fuck the police!”), its opening minutes are like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, full of zany physics defying theatrics, and it has one of the most clichéd plots ever conceived by mankind. Fortunately, the plot (which involves generic badass Ford being framed for the murder of Ice Cube’s brother, placing Ford on the run while he tries to clear his name – just in case you were wondering) is only present as a structure to facilitate racing and fighting, and these are things the film handles with aplomb.
And how can’t it? Look at Torque’s pedigree. It’s written by a guy whose only other credit is a movie about Jessica Alba diving for pirate gold, and it’s directed by a guy who’s most notable for making Britney Spears videos. In fact, Torque is the only movie that Joseph Kahn has ever made, and it's a living, vital testament of the zomg factor that the MTV generation thrives on so heavily. The film puts Ice Cube behind the wheel of a souped-up stock car, which is reason enough to seen it.
Cube (actually on a motorcycle there) is probably the best thing about this movie, since he’s actually a pretty decent actor playing a silly, broad role, and that’s always fun to watch. There’s also an awesomely bad catfight between white trash empress Jaime Pressly and the totally forgettable Monet Mazur, as seen below.
The back-and-forth between the two is so fabulously cheesy that I kind of want them to fight over me, just so I could listen. Here:
China: You messed with the wrong chick!
Shane: [Shane knocks China off her bike] Looks like you did, bitch!
It’s Shakespeare caliber stuff.
If you’re looking for a bad, fun movie, you owe it to yourself to watch Torque and spend an hour and a half just reveling in cinematic Simlish – it’s oddly compelling and addictive, but it means absolutely nothing. It goes out of its way to be over the top and melodramatic, but neither of those things are bad things. In fact, those things are rocktober, maybe even radvember. Its totally unironic cotton-candy appeal is what sets it head and shoulders above the other contenders. It is not the greatest movie – despite my earlier claims – but I will tell you all day long that it is the most awesome.
Torque is airing on TBS next Saturday at 2:15 am, so those of you with Tivo are already programming that information into your magical boxes as we speak. The trailer, which is also pretty magnificent, can be viewed here.
Next up on aLoGT: Horrorfest!
It's most notable for its extravehicular fight scenes, but I love The Transporter. For all the face-rocking that Jason Statham does out of the driver's seat, the character is, in fact, a wheelman, and the movie does meet the two all-important qualifications for inclusion in TORQUE WEEK: cars go fast, and shit gets wrecked.
If Tokyo Drift is the modern cowboy film, then The Transporter is the samurai flick redux. It deals with the interplay of Frank Martin's code of honor and its conflict with the basic humanity that he tries so fervently to deny. This is externalized as lots of guys getting punched and kicked, and lots of things exploding, which is the important thing. There's not much else to say about the film, as it's more a visual treat than a cerebral one. In fact, the whole thing is a blatant cliche that doesn't have any real emotional stopping power left to mine - an enigmatic protagonist is forced to choose between preserving his personal code and sacrificing everything to champion the less fortunate. In this case, the less fortunate are a bunch of Chinese immigrants being ferried around in a cargo container.
The Transporter also has a villain so non-threatening and laughable that he's awesome. Matt Schulze's Wall Street has to be the result of someone asking a five year old French socialist about why he hates Americans, and then taking that description and further caricaturing it. In fact, Wall Street is so silly that you can't wait for The Transporter to kick him in the face until he dies. I think it has to do with his mustache, or the short-bus look he has on his face when he fires a rocket launcher at The Transporter's superawesome house. A rocket The Transporter deflects using simple kitchenware. You read that right. That's how sucky Wall Street is - the most potentially dangerous shit he can pull on you is not a threat at all. I'm still sure that he's only able to strangle one of his henchmen because the henchman is on the verge of death anyway when he does it.
The goal of Torque Week was to chronicle awesome popcorn flicks about modern heroes exploring the last great frontier - the frontier of driving fast and causing massive collateral damage. I was going to stick to movies that I can enjoy in a totally unironic way, but I'm off message already, because today's flick is Cannonball Run.
Like any movie starring any member of the Rat Pack (except The Manchurian Candidate and Miracle of the Bells), Cannonball Run is, simply put, a bad idea. If you pitch a movie that involves Dom DeLuise playing a mentally unstable mechanic who thinks he's some kind of Liberace-inspired superhero, then you should have your Guild membership revoked.
To come up with that concept, and that concept alone, requires a number of drugs that I cannot fathom, not having a degree in Mathemagicks. To take that concept, and add it to Burt Reynolds driving an ambulance with a crazed walking malpractice suit and a Patty Hearst stand-in across the country and speeds that were simply not possible in the dark ages of the 1970s causes the mind to dizzy further. Now, factor in that these people are racing against Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. dressed as priests, a Japanese super-robot car driven by Jackie Chan, Roger Moore playing a guy who thinks he's Roger Moore, Jaime Farr's horrendously caricatured Sheik character, and seven Care Bears in a stolen food services truck being driven by a hooker with a heart of gold who is masquerading as a Hindu snake goddess in order to clear her four year old son of a bogus murder rap*, and something akin to reality breaking can be heard. Due to the arcane maelstrom that is Cannonball Run, at around the 50 minute mark of the film, weird backwards chanting starts and a strange portal to Gemworld will open up in your living room.
Cannonball Run is only fun to watch if you appreciate its camp factor, and even that doesn't fully proof it. It's always going to be the ugly redheaded stepchild of films like It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad x10 World, with its high-cachet cast and silly, barely-there plot. In fact, the only saving grace of Run is that it's probably the best American film that Jackie Chan has made. If you don't believe me, check out the Hong Kong promotional art for the film, because promotional images never lie:
The greatest thing about Jackie Chan's appearance in Cannonball Run is that he is in fact not Japanese, and doesn't even bother to pretend to be. Even during the film, he and his copilot speak Chinese. Lame? Hell yeah it's lame, but it's 3 times better than Shanghai Knights.
* only one of these is made up.
I was going to devote today's post to The Return, but since everybody in America went to go see Borat again instead, I feel confident that if I postpone my review absolutely nobody will care at all.
Instead, I'm going to kick off a theme week. For the next five days, we'll celebrate TORQUE WEEK!!!!! Yes, all those exclamation points were totally necessary. Leading up to Friday's TORQUE EXTRAVAGANZA, I'm going to be featuring one awesome movie about guys racing cars each day, and today, I'm going to get the engine revving with some thoughts on The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
Tokyo Drift, like so many street racing movies, is a modern cowboy movie. Let's face it - the attraction we have to that genre isn't so much the hats, the guns, or the horses - it's the brilliant lie about outlaws whose only crime is not doing what 'the Man' wants or going where 'the Man' wants to go. It celebrates a freedom that absolutely nobody has in real life, and it makes criminals into sympathetic heart-of-gold types that are needlessly romanticized. Yeah, I get all of that, but damned if I don't want to be Doc Fucking Holliday every time I watch Tombstone.
Sean Boswell has two great passions in life - driving fast and not taking shit from anybody. Fortunately for Sean, his bad attitude means that there's a steady influx of people ready to start shit with him. Unfortunately for Sean, a bunch of stiffs who don't 'get' him - his parents and the police - want to put him in jail just for doing what he loves. If I ever drove a Dodge Charger through a house - which Sean does in the movie's opening minutes - I would want everybody to just back off, because 1) that's pretty awesome, right? (I'll answer for you: it is) and 2) we were racing, and when it comes to racing the only rule is the rule of the road, which does not prosecute for wanton property destruction. In fact, the rule of the road's only comment on wanton property destruction is, and I'm quoting section XII part C: "It's pretty awesome."
In a completely realistic scenario, the police let Sean off the hook as long as he leaves the country. Or something. His mom - who is destitute from buying her son a new muscle car every few days and then moving to a new town to escape persecution after her son drives through a house (again) or runs over a cheerleader or beats the teacher who keyed his car with a wrench until he swallows his own shattered molars - pawns him off on his absentee ex-military dad, who's living in Tokyo in a stereotypical LOL Japan tiny shoebox apartment. Oh, and Dad's restoring an old Mustang that he happened to 'find' laying around. This is in no way going to be important later on.
Anyway, Sean gets a couple of rules from his dad, and they're pretty simple - no racing, and no staying out late. Predictably, on his first night in Tokyo, Sean stays out late racing, the obligatory race where he loses to the film's villain very badly, setting up the conflict and establishing the movie's philosophy.
Yes, philosophy. In terms of high concepts, Tokyo Drift is all about one principle, stated early in the film and exemplified often: "It ain't the ride, it's the rider." That's right - racing, and one's success or failure at it, is a measure of their character and overall worth. See, it is just like the Western, and of course, the Bushido films that inspired Westerns. The notion creates a kind of caste system where nonparticipants are not even human beings, and the less capable are beholden to the more capable by divine right. It's silly, illogical, and pretty stupid when examined any kind of deep way, but despite that, it's a great shorthand for establishing character and motivation for the supporting cast.
What that means for moviegoers is less time spent on development and more time spent on party montages where the DJ is always wearing a strange hat, and women are always making out with other women. Some movies are content to give audiences one party scene and just move on. Other movies, like The Matrix Reloaded, are content to give you one party scene that never moves on (that sad, plodding Zion rave is still going on at this very moment somewhere). Tokyo Drift uses party scenes like people use commas and periods.
When there isn't a party going on, the movie is either following Sean as he hits on the bad guy's girl (while not necessarily a staple of the Western, this is a major plot point in The Karate Kid Part 2, which is like a punching and kicking version of Tokyo Drift) or as he learns the art of drift racing, which is he very, very bad at. Either via strange magicks, or the strength of his character, though, he improves exponentially over the course of a montage. A new status quo is established for the hero, and that can only mean one thing: it's time for a Shane Moment.
Shane, for the uninitiated, is one of the five greatest Westerns ever, and also the story of a reluctant gunslinger making a new life for himself on a small farm. Since that doesn't allow for a whole lot of asskicking, the Shane Moment happens - the event that forces the hero out of the status quo and back to the corner of Fist and Face. This usually involves the hero losing absolutely everything, and then another montage. In Tokyo Drift, the montage centers around the rebuilding of that old Mustang, which is now, despite all logic, a really excellent car for drift racing. Then he races down the most insanely designed piece of roadway in the entire world.
Now, I understand that Japan, being a post-apocalyptic society, is 100% insane on a national level, but looking at the roads they pave really drives that point home. In fact, I'm now convinced that the only sane response to living with the driving conditions presented in the movie is wanting a bipedal tank or a flying fucking robot. I still don't get the tentacles or the lobster dinner vending machines, but the mech stuff I understand now.
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