Trailer Review: Death Race

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

OK, so it’s called Death Race, and the characters utter the phrase “Death Race.” But this just doesn’t feel like Death Race to me. First off, the race is all wrong. Quick- what’s the first thing people generally remember about the original Death Race 2000? Chances are it’s the fact that racers get points for running over innocent bystanders. Yet for some reason Paul Not Thomas Anderson and the producers of the film decided to put the film on a closed course. Now, where’s the fun in that? It’s just a demolition derby with added firepower. Practically the only novelty in the remake is the casting of Joan Allen as the villain- sort of surprising to see Hollywood making a woman the baddie in a testosterone-laden guy’s flick. But if that’s all the original ideas you can bring to the table (while taking away just about everything that made the original movie unique) then there’s really no reason to check out the movie. You didn’t need me to tell you this, but I’ll do it anyway- rent the Carradine/Stallone version instead.

Morning Deal Report: Knowing Nicolas Cage

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

The ever-amusing Nicolas Cage will star in Knowing, a new thriller from Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) (oh, and I, Robot), as "a teacher who examines the contents of a time capsule unearthed at his son's elementary school. Startling predictions in the time capsule that have already come true lead him to believe the world is going to end at the close of the week and that he and his son are somehow involved in the destruction." That sounds just about stupid enough for Nicolas Cage to participate. Nicolas Cage trivia note, courtesy of IMDb: Cage titles in the works include "G-Force," "Amarillo Slim," "Time Share," "Electric God" and "Bangkok Dangerous."

Joan Allen joins Lasse Hallstrom in a remake of the Japanese film Hachiko, A Dog's Story.

Paul Rudd will star in I Love You, Man. Presumably a Paul Rudd biopic.

— Peter Smith

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Sandy McCallum as Mr. President/David Carradine as President Frankenstein, DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

In many ways, Sandy McCallum's "Mr. President" in the sci-fi satire Death Race 2000 was a political leader far ahead of his time. He was a charismatic evangelical in tune with the religious right (he began all his presidential addresses with the line "My children, whom I love"); he remained sequestered in his vacation home even in times of crisis (what is Mr. President's fabled Winter Palace in Beijing but a slightly more grandiose version of the big ranch in Crawford?), and most importantly, he struck home with the American people by isolating and identifying the sole cause of all our national woes, foreign and domestic: the hated French! Still, every great leader's time must eventually pass, and when Mr. President finally lost his life in a freak automotive accident, his successor (likewise ahead of the curve: a popular athlete who parlayed his celebrity status into a career in politics), the wonderfully named President Frankenstein, took over. At first, America was worried — the new president, with his outspoken First Lady and his program of progressive reform, seemed like he might be some sort of bleeding-heart liberal — but our minds were eased when his first official act in office was to run over pesky news media personality Junior Bruce with his car. America loves you, President Frankenstein!

Jeff Bridges as President Jackson Evans, THE CONTENDER (2000)

President Evans is a supporting character in this dull message movie about the trouble his female vice-presidential nominee (Joan Allen) has in getting approved, but he's also the movie's wild card, a slick charmer who isn't actively opposed to doing the right thing whenever possible but mostly seems interested in winning with a minimum of confrontational hassle. His hobby is torturing the staff of the White House kitchen by testing their ability to serve him anything he asks for at any hour of the day; at one point he's spotted wandering the halls and ignoring the person talking to him while munching his latest snack and muttering, "Shark steak. Fuckin' shark steak sandwich. . ."

Henry Fonda as The President, FAIL-SAFE (1964)

This grim melodrama, in which American bombers nuke Moscow because of a technical error, opened some ten months after Dr. Strangelove, an unusual case of the straight version of a story coming after the parody. Actually, this version is fairly funny if you watch it now in the wrong spirit. The nameless president winds up averting World War III by ordering a nuclear strike on New York City to make it up to the Russians, even though the First Lady happens to be in the Big Apple. The movie also came out the same year as The Best Man, in which Fonda played a presidential candidate too pure in heart to develop the killer instinct needed for the job. Fifteen years later he would play the U.S. president again, this time in the disaster movie Meteor. (And let's not forget that one of his early roles was as Young Abe Lincoln in the John Ford classic.) Maybe the real question posed by Fail-Safe is, if Hollywood is such a bastion of liberal bias, then how come every time Fonda, the movie star known as the embodiment of liberal humanism, got cast as the leader of the free world, half the planet wound up in danger of obliteration?

Franchot Tone as The President, ADVISE AND CONSENT (1962)

When Otto Preminger's Washington melodrama opened, New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther glowered at it through his lorgnette and wrote that the filmmakers' "intense and deliberate projection of a cynical attitude toward the actions of politicians extends right up to the President of the United States, whom they frankly portray in this fiction as a man of peculiar principles. He is made (in a tasteless portrayal of a sick, testy man by Franchot Tone) to be tolerant of cheap conniving and the telling of lies under oath." Translated into English, this means that Tone's character is one of the few movie presidents one can imagine actually running the country, a tough, hard-bitten old son of a bitch who knows how to play the game. Unfortunately, we all have our bad days, and he comes to grief after he makes the mistake of trying to appoint — it's him again! — Henry Fonda as Secretary of State. Tone's president, worn out from political machinations and Fonda's high-minded dithering, ultimately succumbs to a heart attack, leaving the country in the hands of his vice-president, Lew Ayres, who makes Hank Fonda look like Solomon crossed with Sean Connery.

Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. Whitmore, INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996) and Gene Hackman as President Alan Richmond, ABSOLUTE POWER (1997)

Taken together, these two films, originally released a little more than six months apart, go a long way towards summing up the Clinton presidency as it was filtered through different fantasy lenses in the popular culture of its time. Pullman's president is, like President Bartlett on The West Wing, a fantasy of an improved Bill Clinton, the Clinton that some disappointed observers wanted him to be: a sensitive liberal-minded family man, but with a record of military heroism (in the first Gulf War) and the ability to keep his dick in his pants. When the movie opens, he's struggling to keep his job as the media and his political enemies paint him as spineless and ineffectual, but the extraterrestrial invasion gives him the chance to show what he's made of: he dusts off his flight suit and kicks a little alien butt, albeit only after the destruction of the White House and the death of his First Lady. (She's played by Mary McDonnell, who wound up getting her own TV presidency after robots took their turn trying to wipe out the human race on Battlestar Galactica.) President Richmond represents Clinton the defiler, the rampaging amoral deviant unfit for polite society, let alone high office; the film's director-star, Clint Eastwood, has to take matters into his own hands and bring about justice after he's seen Richmond's Secret Service bodyguards kill a woman who was trying to defend herself from a violent sexual assault at POTUS's hands. The cover-up is handled by the president's evil, female chief of staff (Judy Davis), a Hillary even he couldn't bring himself to marry. Oddly enough, Absolute Power also laid the seeds for a future TV presidency: one of Richmond's murderous goons is played by Dennis Haysbert, who later became the martyred President David Palmer on 24.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov

Check back tomorrow for Part 3!

The Screengrab : joan allen

Trailer Review: Death Race

Morning Deal Report: Knowing Nicolas Cage

Top Thirteen Greatest Fictional Movie Presidents, Part 2