BEFORE: Heading into another weekend, I'd try to catch up but Saturday we'll need to go grocery shopping, and Sunday I have to work, so it's not going to be easy. I'm also behind on TV and a few other things, so maybe I should just try to stay current (or a day behind) and just leave it at that. Any progress made is good progress, right? Two weeks ago I went to that beer festival and then spent a couple days in Atlantic City, and that's where I fell behind, but it was OK because it actually made a better film land on St. Patrick's Day, and then I adjusted my chain from there. It's OK, it's all going to be OK, the chain is still holding and I can always compensate by finding something to drop, or something to add. Just have to keep my head down and stick to the schedule as best as I can.
Archie Madekwe carries over from "Heart of Stone". The bigger question looms, which concerns what I'm going to watch after "Oppenheimer" - I have no idea, and just a little over a week to figure that out. Mother's Day is SO far away, it gives me about 40 slots that have to be filled, and I could end in a number of different places, like there's "Because I Said So" and "Georgia Rule", or "All About My Mother" and "Parallel Mothers", or "Being Rose", "As They Made Us" or "All We Had". I'll just have to riff for a while and see what's possible, because from "Oppenheimer" I can pretty much go anywhere I want. I think it would almost be easier to pick two good Mother's Day films and work backwards, because any tree-shaped chart of possibilities is bound to include "Oppenheimer" at some point. I should probably start working on that.
THE PLOT: Based on the inspiring true story of a team of underdogs - a struggling, working-class gamer, a failed former race car driver, and an idealistic motorsport exec - who risk it all to take on the most elite sport in the world.
AFTER: Yesterday's film touched on some issues regarding A.I., though things were very muddled indeed - those spies used the "ultimate" A.I. to predict possibilities, recommending courses of action, like if Rachel skis down the mountain, she won't get there in time to kill the enemies, and people will die, but if she uses the paraglider, she'll arrive in time and there will be a better outcome. Of course we don't have this kind of predictive technology available to us yet, and we can't trust A.I. enough to follow its advice. However, there is an exception to this rule, we've been using video-games like flight simulators to train pilots, because some of the simulations are that good. There are occasional news reports of someone with flightsim experience landing a plane when the pilots are incapacitated, however getting a pilot's license still requires a substantial amount of real-world flight experience, you can't just study for x number of hours in a simulator and then expect to be handed the controls of a real plane. By contrast, there's a news story from last May of a person with NO flight experience landing a plane in Florida, just by taking the advice of air traffic controllers.
But this movie wants us to believe in the power of the Gran Turismo video-game, which apparently is SO life-like and SO well researched that a team from Nissan agreed to put the top 10 players in the world through a real auto racing Academy - note that there was actual physical training involved, plus education on the mechanics and operation of a real car in the real world, and so people just did NOT go from being a champion in the Gran Turismo game to driving in a real-world auto race. In other words, the racing simulator is good, but it's not THAT good. I'm playing "Red Dead Redemption" now for the first time, and whatever happens in the game, I'm not going to consider myself an expert in fighting gun duels or skinning coyotes. I've already died many times in shootouts, which the game allows me to do an infinite number of times, but in the real world, I know I can only do that once.
I haven't watched a good auto racing movie in quite a while, and I think that's because there just aren't very many of them? Boxing is a much easier sport to do a movie about, because two men get into a boxing ring, one is the star of the film, so guess which one is going to win (or at least go the distance), plus there isn't a lot to explain, they just punch each other and maybe we find out the best time to throw a left hook, or maybe we don't, but either way we understand punching somebody until they fall down. Auto racing is a lot more complicated, there are different tracks and different driving conditions and techniques for getting ahead of the other drivers (I think going faster might be the key, not sure). Why. somebody would have to spend hours and hours learning every track and every possible scenario to the point where every possible action to take under every possible set of circumstances was ingrained and had become second nature to them, and that's exactly what a gamer would do, play the video-game every possible waking moment until they had that down.
Unfortunately Jann Mardenborough was born into a football (soccer) family, and his father was a footballer and his younger brother seemed to be on that track, but his father just couldn't understand the merits of video-gaming, because to him it wasn't real, and therefore a waste of time. The first half-hour of this film is the same argument, over and over again, on this very point. "When are you stop playing that game and get a real job?" followed by "But DAD, you said I should do something I love!" followed by "Yes, but I meant something you love that I also approve of..." followed by "But DAD, you don't understand!" and then back to the beginning. And the problem here seemed to be that Jann had no concrete plans to get out of working in a department store selling socks, and not even the fact that his mother was in the Spice Girls could help him advance. Until one day...
The GT Academy was dreamt up by a marketing guy at Nissan, which I've been pronouncing wrong all this time, apparently - my wife has leased three Rogues and we say "NEE-san", but now I guess we should have been saying "NISS-ahn", or "Niss-AHN" maybe. He wants to tap into the group of gamers that are 80 million strong, because those are the people most excited about driving, but also those who think that dying in a fiery crash on a racetrack is really cool. Well, you can just start the race over, right? What's the harm? Yes, realizing that the Gen Z gamers think they have infinite lives kind of explains a lot, doesn't it? In my day you had THREE lives and that was it, before you had to put in another quarter. Anyway he sends out messages via the game to the people with the fastest lap times, the ones who have been playing so long that they've got the game beat, and what do you know, they all live within traveling distance of the same track or else they all were able to come up with the airfare, I don't know. But since this is EXACTLY what Jann had been dreaming of, he's able to quit his job and convince his parents to let him study to be a real racer in the real world. If this wasn't a true story, it would probably seem too far-fetched to even be a movie.
There are hurdles, for sure - even after Jann beats out nine other teens to get his shot at real-time racing, the contract with NISMO is contingent on him finishing at least fourth in one of six races in the season, so at first he's an unlicensed driver - perhaps it's a bit like getting your SAG card, which you can't have until you've been in three movies, but then how do you get cast in a movie if you don't have your SAG card yet? Then there are the other drivers, who totally resent this SIM driver being in the race, so they all do their best to either make him crash or not get past them in the race. Driving "defensively" on a race track seems to be a bit different in the racing world, we use that term IRL to stand for driving safely, but on the track it means not letting the other racer get ahead of you.
After an accident, there becomes a rising tide of anti-gamer sentiment, and the NISMO team decides that the only way to counter this is to have Jann and two other gamers compete at LeMans, which is a 24-hour race and an endurance test, if they can make it to the podium there, then it will prove that they were right to put SIM drivers behind the wheel. It isn't easy, because during a pit stop a crew person drops a wheel nut, and doesn't have a spare, and the NISMO team drops from fifth to ninth, and in the end it's up to Jann to climb back up through the ranks, pass all the other drivers using the techniques he learned playing the video-game (again, I think going faster might be the key) and breaking the course lap record in order to win? Nope, to make third place, which somehow is just as good as a win in this crazy mixed-up world.
This depiction of pit stops is something I can sort of understand, like if a racer pulls into a pit-stop, and the crew takes too much time to fill the tank, change all the tires, and umm, do the other things, then naturally that racer will fall behind in the race. What I still don't understand, no matter how many times someone explains it to me, is how they keep track of which car is in which position when they're always coming in and out of the pit stops. Like how can a car be in first place, go into a pit stop, spend the minimum amount of time off the track, and come out and STILL be in first place? Didn't every other car pass THAT car while it was getting its tires changed and its tank filled? How exactly does that work? I'm still baffled.
Anyway it's a solid effort, despite the fact that to make this one racer the hero, they had to make every other driver into villains (twice) and I'm just not sure that's how auto racing works. Yeah, sure I get that it's every man for himself, but there are racing teams, too, and success on a circuit is cumulative, right? I think in those NASCAR series there are individual winners for each race, but another winner for the whole season, unless I'm mistaken. Bottom line is that there's still a lot I don't understand about the sport, learning one person's story didn't seem to be that much help there. Still, "Rocky" but in racing cars is a hell of an idea. And the message of being able to succeed in life by playing video games better than anyone else should appeal to people under a certain age.
Also starring David Harbour (last seen in "No Sudden Move"), Orlando Bloom (last seen in "Needle in a Timestack"), Takehiro Hira, Darren Barnet, Geri Halliwell Horner, Djimon Hounsou (last seen in "The Four Feathers"), Josha Stradowski, Daniel Puig, Maeve Courtier-Lilley, Pepe Barroso, Niall McShea, Nikhil Parmar, Thomas Kretschmann (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Akie Kotabe (last seen in "The November Man"), Sadao Ueda, Wai Wong (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Jamie Kenna (last seen in "Stuart: A Life Backwards"), Royce Cronin (last seen in "Bohemian Rhapsody"), Harki Bhambra, Emelia Hartford, Lindsay Pattison, Mariano Gonzalez, Maximilian Mundt, Sang Heon Lee, Theo Christine, Lloyd Meredith, Ciaran Joyce, John Carter, Selin Cuhadaroglu, Richard Cambridge, Jann Mardenborough
RATING: 7 out of 10 Instagram posts
No comments:
Post a Comment