Death Race

There are some actors out there who are in it for the paycheck. There are some who are in it solely to explore their art. There are some who explore their art when they can and take the paycheck when they must.

I guess Joan Allen had bills to pay.

I'm tempted to write that DEATH RACE is a bad, bad movie. Its races are incomprehensible agglomerations of gunfire, explosions, and quick-cuts that left me utterly mystified. When a movie's ostensibly about racing, even death racing, shouldn't one be able to tell who's in the lead, or even what's going on, without a ranking board popping up every now and then? Ms. Allen has a climactic outburst of villainy that was so ridiculous I nearly laughed. And don't get me started on the crime to Robin Shou's hair that this film represents.

But 40-year-olds with colds who can't muster the energy to do more than see a bad movie are not the target demographic of this particular film. The target demographic of this particular film is males aged 15-25. I saw this movie at an on-base movie theater at a naval airfield in Japan. The crowd was 100% male, and I'm pretty sure I was twice the age of the next-oldest guy there.

They loved it.

They cheered the explosions. They laughed at the comical kills. They howled at the pretty women. They hooted at the dialogue. Man, they ate DEATH RACE up. It was like their favorite video game come to life. On the way out, they chatted and laughed and high-fived and generally went home happy.

So, hey, if you're a 15-25 year old guy, you'll probably love DEATH RACE. If not, well, you'd better have one hell of a cold.

Transformers

If you like your movies bright and loud, then TRANSFORMERS is for you. I like my movies bright and loud, so I blocked out a chunk of time, darkened the basement, fired up the big screen, and got the surround speakers humming. I was ready to be blown away.

And TRANSFORMERS tried hard to blow me away. Lots of stuff blew up. It was very bright. And loud. But it was so unreal that I was unable to suspend my disbelief enough to care about any of the giant robots or believe, on a visceral level, that the havoc they were wreaking was anything more than a combination of pixel arrangement and foley work. In fact, during the climactic battle, I was more concerned with whether protagonist Shia LaBeouf was gonna score with the apple of his eye than I was with the fate of the world (There's something unsettling about Megan Fox, the romantic interest, btw. Since she reminded my of a psycho ex-girlfriend, I was torn between rooting for LaBeouf and urging to run far, far away.). Romantic subplots are great and all, but that’s no way to run a movie.

On the up side, LaBeouf is a likeable presence, and John Turturro was utterly brilliant in his role as a slightly unhinged Man in Black. Never before have I seen a government heavy played for laughs in an action movie such as this, and it was a wonderful choice. Every time Turturro showed up on screen, the film recaptured my complete attention, making TRANSFORMERS worth watching for him alone.

I didn't go into TRANSFORMERS expecting CRIES AND WHISPERS, but I was hoping for something more evenly entertaining than Michael Bay's latest turned out to be. A little more Turturro and a little less CGI, and this one could have been a winner.