unclefestering Blog

Under discussion:

Death Race 2000  (1976)

Death Race  (2008)

No one is going to confuse Death Race for an Oscar contender. It is a loud, fun, explosive action movie. While it has been changed considerably from the original Death Race 2000, it has kept much of the same feel, while losing the moralizing of the original (not that there was much of that). This is a great movie to end the summer action season. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and delivers what it promises.

The year is 2025. The American economy is in the toilet. The crime rate has exploded. The overcrowded prisons have been privatized and one warden has found a solution to both the prisoner population and how to turn a profit: Death Race. Three days of heavily armed and armored cars driving around a secure track doing anything to win. Any racer who wins five times gets their freedom. Any racer who survives is skillful and lucky. The entire race can be watched from hundreds of cameras broadcasting on a pay per view basis.

Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) has recently been convicted of murdering his wife, a crime he did not commit. Ames was a race car driver before running into trouble with the NASCAR circuit. The warden (Joan Allen) informs him that she want Ames to take the place of the race’s biggest star, Frankenstein (so scarred from past races that he always wears a metal mask) who died in the last Death Race. Frankenstein’s death has been hidden from the public to prevent a decrease in subscriptions. Since this would be Frankenstein’s fifth win, Ames can go free, if he wins.

Statham is convinced to race after a further round of blackmail and gets to meet his crew and opponents. Frankenstein’s biggest competitor in the race is Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson), who doesn’t know he killed the real Frankenstein and still harbors a vicious grudge. After this quick setup we move into day one of the race. From the green light, it is a mix of fast cars, crashes, explosions, weapons fire.

Statham and Allen both make this movie. Both are ruthless and willing to double cross each other to get what they need: ratings for one and freedom for the other.

Under discussion:

Wristcutters: A Love Story  (2007)

Wristcutters is equal parts roadtrip, and bitter comedy. It is a tough pair to pull off, especially when all the characters in the movie have committed suicide. This movie isn’t for everybody, but if you have the patience for it, it does pay off.

Zia (Patrick Fugit) puts his world in order and then takes a razor to his wrist. He wakes up in a world depressingly like the one he just abandoned, only more washed out and one where everything is somehow broken. This world is inhabited by all the suicides. They all bear the physicals scars of their death into their new life, where even emotions are drained.

After a while, Zia discovers that his girlfriend has also killed herself. He decides to find her, so he and his friend, Eugene, a Russian rocker who electrocuted himself on stage set out across the desolate landscape to find her. Along the way they pick up a hitchhiker (Shannon Sossamon) who claims that she is there by mistake, because she never killed herself.

The humor in this movie is not the knee slapping laugh out loud kind of jokes. Rather it is just the wry observations of people stuck in situation which may never get better for them. Raspy voice Tom Waits also stars in this movie as the leader of a camp where some of the suicides hang out.

Under discussion:

Enemy at the Gates  (2001)

Enemy at the Gates is an attempt to put a human face on the seemingly endless siege of Stalingrad, one of the longest battles of World War II. It is an admirable effort to continually narrow down the scope of the movie until it seems to involve just four people in a city of thousands. If only the story had been able to sustain the feeling of desperation and anxiety instead of settling for a routine love triangle story.

The movie starts out with a heightened intensity as German bombers sink tiny boats ferrying soldiers to the city that so many know they will never leave alive. The soldiers who survive the crossing are immediately shoved to the front lines of the battle. Only half are given rifles. The idea is that when they guy next to you gets shot you either grab his rifle or ammunition and keep in shooting at the Germans.

One of these soldiers is Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law) a barely literate peasant who learned to shoot from his grandfather. Zaitsev gets pinned down hiding in a fountain under other dead bodies. Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), a political commissar, also ends up in the fountain and watches Zeitsev stealthily shoot their way out.

Danilov uses this incident to turn Zeitsev into a folk hero, building and promoting his own career on each of his friend’s kills. Both fall in love with Tania (Rachael Weisz) a former college student and Jewish soldier who at first is enraptured by Zeitsev’s reputation which grows into love. Danilov also falls in love with her.

And that’s where the movie falls apart.

The rest of the movie is supposed to hang in the sniper duel between Zeitsev and the top German sniper. Nothing in the sniper duel can match the beginning of the movie and that duels seems to be much less important than resolving the love triangle. The problem is that by this point, it becomes hard to care about either.

The role that saves the movie for large parts is Bob Hoskins’ fantastic turn as Khrushchev. He plays the role incredibly well. He is in turns belligerent, paranoid and angry; ready to kill his entire staff and every soldier in Russia if it will keep him safe from Stalin and maybe Hitler.

A much more interesting movie could be made looking into the problem of trying to decide which evil empire someone should root for. Enemy at the Gates just dodges this question, almost acting as if it isn’t important that the Russians were at least as cruel and ruthless as the Nazis.