BEFORE:Isabel Arraiza carries over from "The Little Things", and here are the links for the rest of September:
Corey Stoll, Jon Bernthal, Saniyya Sidney, Lorraine Toussaint, Idris Elba, Daniel Adegboyega, Bobby Cannavale, Jennifer Saunders, Russell Brand, Taraji P. Henson, Annabeth Gish, Matt Smith, Adria Arjona, Lex Scott Davis, Cindy Robinson, Edwin Hodge, Frank Grillo, and Mykelti Williamson, that should get me to October 1. Good luck trying to figure out what I'm about to watch!
THE PLOT: Intense thriller where politics, big business and narcotics collide, based on the real events of the John DeLorean celebrity scandal.
AFTER: Everybody, please say it with me today - "This is a weird movie." Not because it's got aliens or animated lizards or Eddie Izzard fighting Nazis, or even animated alien lizards voiced by Eddie Izzard fighting Nazis. No, it's the fact that somebody made a movie about the John DeLorean scandal and decided to make that a comedy, when there's really nothing inherently funny about his story, not at all. At least I think this was supposed to be a comedy, but it's very hard to tell, and therein lies the problem. Did someone realize how sad this auto designer's story was and said, "What this story needs, really, is some jokes..." and then that same person sort of forgot to write the jokes? Or was this designed to appear to be unintentionally funny, like they hired a bunch of comedy actors and then just kind of hoped that everything would fall into place and people would laugh at it? That's not how comedy works - I think being funny on purpose and succeeding is one of the hardest things, it's probably much harder than being dramatically important. And anyway, sad funny isn't really funny - and this film is just sad funny at best.
For those out there who weren't around in the 1980s, John DeLorean was a car designer who worked for General Motors for a long time, had a hand in creating the Pontiac GTO, the Firebird and the Grand Prix. Muscle cars - for those who weren't around in the 1980's, cars used to run on gasoline, not electricity, and they used to make a lot of noise and go FAST. Some of them, anyway. Then he worked for Chevrolet, redesigning the Corvette and the Chevy Nova, while adopting a celebrity lifestyle and owning shares of sports franchises like the San Diego Chargers and New York Yankees. But he quit Chevrolet to start his own motor company, the Delorean Motor Company, which produced cars called DeLoreans - most notably seen in "Back to the Future", when Marty McFly drove one around a mall parking lot, and that's really the furthest that any DeLorean had gone without breaking down.
Maybe Johnny D. had good intentions, it's tough to say - he designed his car to be made of stainless steel, so it would be lightweight (to be faster or get better mileage? I don't know, I'm not a car person) and it would never rust, like every other car eventually does. Plus, they had gull-wing doors that opened UP instead of to the side, which I'm guessing meant that they would ALWAYS scratch the car next to them in the parking lot when the doors opened - jeez, at least if you're parked too close to another car with regular side-opening doors, you can open the door just a bit and try to squeeze out. Not with the Delorean, it was open all the way or not at all, which probably led to a lot of arguments in parking lots. Plus you could scratch up the car next to you when you got in, but then you had to sit there because the DeLorean wouldn't start, so that was probably awkward for everybody.
DeLorean was a little like the Elon Musk of his day, but he was also like the Donald Trump of his day, too - like Musk, he tried to change the way the public thought about cars, tried to change their habits, consider an alternative to the Detroit companies. And like Trump, DeLorean was always looking for investors and then diverting the money invested straight into his own pockets. He built an auto plant near Belfast, Northern Ireland to make the cars, and got millions in financial incentives to build that, but the factory didn't produce as many cars as it was supposed to, and then the money started going missing. (Did they check his resort in Florida? Just a thought.). And then DeLorean got caught buying drugs in an FBI sting operation, which was set up by his friend, James Hoffman, who was a secret FBI informant.
This film suggests that Hoffman was trying to help the FBI catch a certain mid-level drug dealer, but when DeLorean needed a quick influx of cash to keep his company going, he approached Hoffman to make a quick run to Bolivia to pick up cocaine that he could sell very quickly, and turn $2 million into $30 million. Well, sure, but what businessman in the 1980's wasn't trying to do the same thing with cocaine, like all the time? Who hasn't fantasized about get-rich-quick schemes, most people don't actually act on the idea, because they don't have the seed money to begin with. It turned out that neither did DeLorean, but there's a whole other story there - I think maybe he was never really rich, he just had like $50,000 that he kept moving around from one company to the next so his books always reflected that he had money coming in, when ha ha, the joke's on everybody else, because that's the same $50,000 just being moved around again and again!
DeLorean's gala parties always seemed to turn into fund-raising events for his car company - and he was hitting up celebrities like Johnny Carson to become investors, but eventually even those celebs figured out that there was no worthwhile product being made, nor would there be in the future. That's very Trump-like, because how many scams did Trump pull, between Trump Air and Trump University and Trump Steaks, all were garbage companies that weren't delivering what they were supposed to, but people kept believing in his B.S. and buying into his brand, and then even after four years as the WORST President ever, still some people said they'd vote for him again, and it's only now, with proof of treason and hoarding secret documents are some people starting to realize that there's no decent or competent person there, not at all. You can't fool all of the people all of the time, but you can certainly fool SOME of the people often enough.
There's another film about John DeLorean which appears to be part documentary and part fictional re-enactments, that's called "Framing John DeLorean" - I may track down that film one of these days, but it doesn't seem to be readily available right now. Oh, wait, it is on Netflix and Hulu, but still, I can't link to it any time soon. Well, if I do get to it, I hope that it will be at least more accurate, or at least funnier, than this one.
Also starring Jason Sudeikis (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Lee Pace (last seen in "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day"), Judy Greer (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Michael Cudlitz (last seen in "Forces of Nature"), Erin Moriarty (last seen in "Captain Fantastic"), Jamey Sheridan (last seen in "Life as a House"), Iddo Goldberg (last seen in "The Zookeeper's Wife"), Tara Summers (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Justin Bartha (last seen in "CBGB"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Daniel Salinas Gonzalez, Yuji Okumoto, Tyler Crumley (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Asher Miles Fallica (last seen in "Tully"), Guillermo Valedon (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Bruno Irizarry (ditto), Valentina Portela, the voice of Jim Meskimen (last heard in "Scoob!") and archive footage of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather.
RATING: 4 out of 10 micro-cassette tapes
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