BEFORE: OK, so here's a film I wasn't really sure what to do with - does it belong in the documentary section, or in the drama section? Is it a doc or a biopic? It seems to somehow be both, like some kind of hybrid. Hey, kind of like a car. Well, it's a moot point because it needs to go here in order to get me from "Tár" to, well originally it was going to get me to "She Said", but now I think it's going to get me to "Maestro", if this works out. Back-up plan, it will get me to "She Said" and I'll just continue the chain as planned. But I'd like to get at least one more likely Oscar nominee in before February starts.
Alec Baldwin carries over from "An Imperfect Murder". This will make three in a row for Alec, but I just know that before the end of the month I'll be wishing that I had dropped "An Imperfect Murder", but I guess I've got to take the bad with the good, it seems.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Driven" (Movie #4,235)
THE PLOT: Who was the real John DeLorean? To some, he was a renegade visionary who revolutionized the automobile industry. To others, he was the ultimate con man.
AFTER: Well, if you don't know your 80's history, you might only know John DeLorean as the guy who designed that cool car that got turned into a time machine in "Back to the Future". Maybe you remember some scandal where he tried to do a drug deal to raise money for his company and got caught by FBI agents, and then lost everything. There's a bit more to the story, the long rise and the quick fall, whether his tale is an American tragedy or an American success story maybe depends on your point of view. Somehow he was kind of the precursor to both Donald Trump and Elon Musk, if that's possible. He started his own car company, like Elon Musk did with Tesla, and tried to revolutionize the whole industry - and like Trump there was a bit of shadiness in what his company did, perhaps always, or maybe just near the end.
So there are interviews here with people who worked for DeLorean Motor Company, and others who detail his rise in the ranks at the Pontiac division of General Motors, which at one time was the division that catered to the senior citizens, but then DeLorean came along and started putting out muscle cars, or rather the same cars with an option to put a REAL engine in them, and suddenly then driving was fun again, and soon even the youngs were buying Pontiacs because they preferred to get where they were going in record time. (Look, I'm not even going to get into how corrupt the entire auto industry was and probably still is, but one day we're going to look back on their promotion of fossil fuels and hesitancy to switch to electric power the same way we look back on the companies that sold our grandparents cigarettes and said they were healthy.)
More telling are the interviews with DeLorean's son and daughter, who are able to remember how broken the family was after their father got nabbed in an FBI drug sting operation, and it's clear where the filmmakers stand on this because they used the word "framing" in the title of the film. One could say that Mr. DeLorean was a normal guy who got tricked by the feds into doing a drug deal because it seemed like the fastest way to raise money for his company at a time when they were close to getting the next batch of cars out but also short on funds. I didn't know that DeLoreans were manufactured and assembled in Belfast, Ireland, but they were - and where some people just saw a city ravaged by decades of silly religious conflict, DeLorean saw a place to build a factory, where Catholics and Protestants worked side-by-side to build cars? Isn't that worth something? OK, maybe not a Nobel Prize, but points for thinking outside the box and trying to help the economy of Northern Ireland.
Then there are interviews with filmmakers and screenwriters who all took stabs at making a dramatic film about DeLorean's career, and they just can't understand why it didn't come to pass. His story had everything, cool cars and hot women and a drug deal, why didn't it ever become a movie? Yeah, well, those are all things that sound good on paper, and things that screenwriters would love to include in a movie, but I'm guessing the majority of DeLorean's career involved sitting in an office, taking meetings with GM executives, or running focus groups, checking sales figures, and really, all that sounds like the most boring movie ever. Even if you pad that movie with a lot of driving scenes and test-track footage, it's still the life of a car executive who got married three times and made a lot of pitch meetings. (It's why "Air" isn't going to do so well at the Oscars, I predict, because it's all pitch meetings and design meetings and focus groups and then meetings with Michael Jordan's parents. Je-SUS, if people wanted to watch more meetings they'd just go to work, right?)
NITPICK POINT: OK, so at one point there were maybe five different movies about DeLorean in development, and none of those got made. The writers and producers all say what a shame it is that a proper movie about him never got made - only one DID get made, it was called "Driven" and it came out in 2018. Does that one not count because it was kind of comedy? It was released a year BEFORE this hybrid documentary/re-enactment, so what gives? OK, I'll allow that MAYBE those interviews were recorded earlier, perhaps in 2017, before "Driven" got released. It can take several years to make a proper doc, after all. Also, I might be the only person who watched "Driven", it's a bit hard to say.
But the weird part here is the re-enactments of key moments from DeLorean's career, starring Alec Baldwin as DeLorean (remember, Alec also played Trump on SNL many times before they hired a new guy who did a better impression). After getting the wig on and some prosthetics and some bushy black eyebrows, Baldwin really does LOOK like DeLorean, at several stages of his life over the course of the movie. But please explain to me what, exactly, about dressing up like DeLorean and saying things we think he might have said allows Baldwin any insight at all into the man's behavior, attitude or personality? OK, fine, Baldwin is also been married a couple times and is considerably older than his current wife, like DeLorean was older than Cristina Ferrare, but so what? You can't really know a man unless you've walked a mile in his shoes, but there's no saying about what you gain by just wearing his hair and eyebrows for a few days.
I guess I can see the reason for the re-enactments, like without them this would have all been just talking heads and archive footage. That doesn't mean they totally work, but I grok why they're here. It's just unfortunate that the behind-the-scenes goofing around scenes feel longer than the re-enactments themselves, in other words, Baldwin spends more time TALKING about playing DeLorean than he does actually DOING that. Just saying.
Remember, kids, drugs aren't cool. They may be legal now, but that doesn't make them cool. And dealing drugs is even less cool. Though now working at a legal dispensary might be slightly cool. Man, things are complicated now, aren't they? It was just so much simpler when Nancy Reagan told us to "Just say NO" even though that never really worked, did it? Also remember that losing your company and going bankrupt isn't cool either, and DeLorean's real goal was to be that guy with the cool car and the cool car company. But back in the 80's DeLorean cars were never cool, not until somebody put one in "Back to the Future", and even that came about just a little too late.
Also starring Morena Baccarin (last seen in "Greenland"), Josh Charles (last seen in "The Virgin Suicides"), Dean Winters (last seen in "P.S. I Love You"), Michael Rispoli (last heard in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), Jason Jones (last seen in "Rosewater"), Dana Ashbrook, Josh Cooke (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Sean Cullen (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), William Hill (last seen in "The Company Men"), Eli Tokash, Kayla Foster, Grayson Eddey (last seen in "Here Today"), Porter Kelly, Paul A. Saltzberg (last seen in "Tesla"), Debra Lord Cooke (last seen in "Café Society"), Jonathan Hart, Glen Lee, Ryan Redebaugh,
interviews with Jay Alix, Tamir Ardon, Colleen Booth, Bill Collins, Kathryn DeLorean, Zach DeLorean, Bob Gale, Chris Hegedus, Alex Holmes, Chris Hughes, Steve Lee Jones, Hillel Levin, Bob Manion, Adam Maxer, D.A. Pennebaker, David Permut, Robert Perry, James Prior, Don Sherman, Nick Spicer, Colin Spooner, Ben Tisa, John Valestra, Howard Weitzman, Jerry Wiliamson, Barry Willis, J. Patrick Wright,
and archive footage of John DeLorean, Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Worth"), Phil Donahue (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirere"), Cristina Ferrare, Michael J. Fox (last seen in "De Palma"), Christopher Lloyd (last seen in "Wit"), David Hartman, Nancy Reagan (last seen in "The Dirt"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Margaret Thatcher (ditto), Barbara Walters (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), Robert Zemeckis
RATING: 4 out of 10 F-bombs dropped by John DeLorean's son (good thing he's not bitter about the whole thing)
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