BEFORE: It's another one of those confluences, like we had last year. Remember when Valentine's Day was also Ash Wednesday and Easter was also Transgender Acceptance Day and the conservatives lost their damn minds? That continued all through the year, in smaller ways, but you know, I guess every day is some day, like they have National Donut Day and National Hot Dog Day and there are obscure holidays from other countries all over the calendar. It's not like we have 365 days in a year and the ability to spread these holidays out more...
Anyway, it's both Inauguration Day AND Martin Luther King Day, I'm afraid I don't have anything appropriate for the latter, I watched "Civil War" in honor of the first thing though. Well, I think this film is set back in the 1960's, I guess that's sort of almost like a tribute to MLK. I'm in the right time-frame, maybe then I can be in the right frame of mind, too. Well, I always managed to not celebrate Black History Month with my movies, because I'm always deep in the romance chain, that overlap is not my fault BUT I do watch movies like "Rustin" and "Selma", just not in February, I've given myself a pass.
Karl Glusman carries over again from "Civil War".
THE PLOT: After a chance encounter, Kathy is drawn to Benny, member of the Midwestern motorcycle club the Vandals. As the club transforms into a dangerous underworld of violence, Benny must choose between Kathy and his loyalty to the club.
AFTER: I don't have a lot to say tonight, because I don't have any experience with motorcycles, I was barely alive in the 1960's so I don't really grok the hippie movement or the Anti-Vietnam protest stuff, I was just way too young. This movie is really lucky to be part of the chain, because it doesn't seem like it's something I would choose to watch on my own, it was selected for this slot mainly due to its linking capacity - I can get to Tom Hardy, which gets me to "Furiosa", which gets me to "Dune: Part Two". Hey, today's film ALSO links to the "Dune" sequel via Austin Butler, but if I go straight there from here I'm going to miss a couple Tom Hardy films, one of which has been dropped from the countdown several times, I'll handle that one tomorrow.
But as for the stories of the members of a biker gang, as told to a writer via interviews, I'm sorry, but who the hell cares? OK, maybe if you were an adult back then and you want to feel nostalgic for that time, great, knock yourself out, but I was just a baby and I (sort of) remember the moon landing on TV, but that doesn't really make sense because I was under a year old at the time, there's no way I should have that memory. Most likely I've seen it depicted in so many movies and the story's been told by so many other people about watching that footage, it's probably a false memory in my mind.
This is a story about Kathy Bauer, a woman who one day finds herself drinking in a club where the motorcycle gang the Vandals hangs out, and she's not attracted to any of them - except one, Benny. Sparks fly, he follows her home and when that stops being creepy, she marries him five weeks later. Say it with me - "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?" Were there red flags? Sure, but we'll deal with that sort of thing during the February romance chain. Can these two crazy kids make things work when she (eventually) wants a normal life and he gets tired of being the hothead guy who both starts fights AND finishes them? Plus the gang is always going off on these hundred-mile road trips for days at a time and their parties are all just drinking, drag racing and fighting, not necessarily in that order. To be fair, any frat parties during that time were probably just as wild - but even though I love a party just as much as the next guy, I just didn't enjoy the parties depicted here, and not just because they always seemed to end in violence. Hey, I prefer to go to beer festivals where there is just as much drinking, NO drag racing (I even get home by public transit) and fighting is NOT encouraged, it's 99% a happy atmosphere. We even say, "If you can't make friends at a beer festival, there's something the F*CK wrong with you..."
The club goals are fairly pointless, just drink and cause mayhem - this is not really a civic organization designed to raise money for charity or register people to vote. So I think that spirit carries over to the movie, without a clear plotline, the movie ends up being just as pointless as the motorcycle club it depicts. Johnny is the club president, and what Johnny says goes, you might think of the other members kind of like the President's cabinet, if you will. But this is a President who makes up the rules as he goes along, is always looking for a fight or to badmouth someone, and really just wants to eat, drink and destroy things. (Hmm, does that sound like any other Presidents we know?). If anyone should disagree with the club president, they're free to challenge his leadership, but this is always settled with either fists or knives, and Johnny usually comes out on top.
The club expands to have chapters throughout the Midwest, and they also hook up with biker gangs from other cities for drinking or fighting or, ideally, both. Problems arise when Benny wears his gang colors into a bar that doesn't allow that, and two bouncers or very large patrons beat him up, drag him outside and beat him up some more, he almost loses his foot as a result. Johnny brings the whole biker gang to that bar to learn the names of the offenders, and while some gang members track them down and break their legs, the others burn down the bar where it happened. Well, it's good to know they've got reasonable ways to deal with this sort of thing.
Kathy wants Benny to quit the club, move to Florida and work as a mechanic, while Johnny wants Benny to stick around, he even offers him leadership of the club when he dies or decides to step down, but Benny's caught in the middle and can't seem to decide either way. Meanwhile a young kid called "The Kid" wants to join the group with his friends, but Johnny only offers him membership if he abandons his friends. When The Kid does that, Johnny turns him down, because he doesn't want anyone in the club who would abandon their friends so quickly, so that was a test and The Kid failed. Well, Johnny's got a point, if he'd bail on his friends wouldn't he be likely to bail on the other club members when they needed him?
Six years later, the interviewer tracks down Kathy again, and gets an update on what happened with the gang, who's still around and who's still gone? Yeah, it's not good for some members, they made bad decisions, or some had fatal accidents, some tried to leave the gang (a mistake) or worse, stuck around too long (another mistake). Geez, it's almost like being in a motorcycle gang is inherently a bad idea or something. You take all these burn-outs who didn't fit in anywhere else and put them together, so they kind of fit in for a while, but then they get on each other's nerves and before you know it, they're killing each other. So at some point, Benny did leave for Florida, but you know, he's doing really well down there, he doesn't miss the biker gang life at all...
This film actually has festival cred, it opened up in Telluride in August, 2023, but then its theatrical release was delayed by that SAG-AFTRA strike, like what's the point of releasing a film if the cast is prevented from promoting it? So it finally got distribution in November 2023, and a theatrical release in 2024. Honestly I don't really feel it was worth all that effort, it's a film that starts out OK but then really goes nowhere, it just kind of sits there and revs the engine a few times, but when it's time to roll, it stalls out, to continue the metaphor too long. So it's not really my thing, but as I always say, your mileage may vary.
Also starring Austin Butler (last seen in "Elvis"), Jodie Comer (last seen in "The Last Duel"), Tom Hardy (last seen in "Stuart: A Life Backwards"), Michael Shannon (last seen in "13"), Mike Faist (last seen in "West Side Story"), Boyd Holbrook (last seen in "In the Shadow of the Moon"), Damon Herriman (last seen in "Son of a Gun"), Beau Knapp (last heard in "The Guilty"), Emory Cohen (last seen in "All Is Bright"), Toby Wallace, Norman Reedus (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"), Happy Anderson (last seen in "The New Mutants"), Paul Sparks (last seen in "Thoroughbreds"), Will Oldham (last seen in "Junebug"), Nathan Neorr (last seen in "The Old Man & The Gun"), Mierka Girten, Paul Dillon (last seen in "On the Road"), Valerie Jane Parker (last seen in "The Last Summer"), Tony Donno (last seen in "Arsenal"), Michael Endoso (last seen in "Stuber"), Rachel Lee Kolis, Phuong Kubacki (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Erin Scerbak (last seen in "An American Pickle"), Andrew Riley Stephens, Forba Shepherd (last seen in "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile"), David Myers Gregory (last seen in "White Noise"), Michael Abbott Jr. (last seen in "The Death of Dick Long"), Maggie Cramer, Steve Marvel, Radek Lord (last seen in "Girlfriend's Day"), Anna Sheridan with archive footage of Marlon Brando (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed"), Elizabeth Montgomery, Agnes Moorehead, Dick York.
RATING: 5 out of 10 jean jackets with no sleeves
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