Reviews

I am a racing fan and a child of the American hot rod culture--my Dad built race-and-championship-winning auto engines for Chevy and Ford in the late Sixties and early Seventies--and I really enjoyed this movie as a chronicle of an exciting race and what a story--the small-town sponsored the boat and got the win at its own race. Beautiful. I appreciate those who have posted corrections to factual errors in the movie, but I would suggest that any race fan critical of this should step back and enjoy the show and what it got right--and it got a lot right. I particularly enjoyed seeing the one kid in an STP windbreaker. I had one, too, back then and I wore it with pride. STP meant racing and racing was my thing. Not football or baseball or anything else. And, for sure, the son of the boat racer riding his Sting-Ray with the stick-shift and high-rise bars and all--that is what kids did back then, rode their bikes and pretended they were racing. And thanks to some crazy kids and their parents and some promoters in Southern California who took it a step further, the sport of BMX was born in that era. (And if you are a fan of that, you have to see the documentary Joe Kid on a Sting-Ray, just the best.) I really enjoyed this movie--a feel-good racing movie in the same mold as The World's Fastest Indian.

I recently rented this on DVD because the store labeled it as a 'hot new release.' Well, I had never heard of it but I was willing to give it a go. And it was alright and seemed believable and I was following along and wondering what was going to happen when, suddenly, it just kinda ended 'six months later.' Maybe I missed something but it just seemed to fall off a cliff there at the end. And I really didn't understand her tossing a snide remark at the investigator at the end--something about how investigators, too, were attracted to images of under-age girls. A simple 'thanks' or something like that would have been more appropriate, it seems to me.

I thought the premise of this was fun--college-age employees making the best of their lame jobs at an aging amusement park. And there was a bit of that in this movie and it was funny and reminiscent of that kind of work--the kind that builds character, or whatever. But what really dragged this movie down for me was all the drama over the relationships in the life of Kristin Stewart's character. She hated her father for dating a woman she hated. Well, so what, move on, girl. Parents are free to choose their partners and children don't really get a vote in the matter, no matter the age or maturity of the children at the time of the parent's selection. And then, and remember this was supposed to the Eighties when people of that age revered all things YUPPIE, her character was sleeping with a guy who drove a DUSTER. Did any college babe in the Eighties do that? Maybe, but it took more imagination for me to believe that than it did for me to accept that young Captain Kirk could be exiled to the frozen tundra of nearest planet and conveniently land within walking distance to Spock's cave in that Star Trek movie. And the irony is that if they movie had been topical, not based in '87, it would have been understandable why she gravitated toward a dude with a Duster. Now it is a vintage muscle car and probably a chick magnet.

I went into this with an open-mind and as a non-Trekkie, that wasn't hard to do. I had heard the hype and figured, well, why not, I liked the original TV series and this one seems to be getting good reviews, so I'll pay the big bucks for a ticket and get the soda and popcorn, too. It was alright, I guess, but it kinda reminded me of that third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where when something goes awry, don't worry about it because, bingo, the next scene will be a cheesy solution. Kirk gets exiled to the frozen tundra? No worries, Spock lives in the nearest cave--oh, I should say the original Spock lives there, not the young Spock at the wheel of the Enterprise who had just kicked Kirk off the ship. And it gets so much worse than that, script-wise. And I kinda empathized with ol' Nero and his misunderstanding of the cause of the destruction of his planet. All in all, it had a whole lotta potential, the re-boot deal, but it just kinda sailed over the cliff like that Corvette in the opening.

I give this film a 10 out of 10 because it is exactly as billed--both a behind-the-scenes and in-the-audience look at three music festivals and the train rides between them and the artists who performed and the promoters who put the whole thing together. The two-disc offering is very generous, the movie and several additional concert performances on disc one and interviews and a short about the production of the movie and more on disc two. Anyone who is a fan of these artists in particular, or of the music scene of that era in general, should not miss this ride across Canada with the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, the Band, and..as they always say.."more."

In Risky Business, Tom was the happy-go-lucky high school senior with that ever-present peer pressure to have sex and party hardy while trying to meet his parents' expectation to make it to an Ivy League school. Rebecca was the high-priced call girl with a hot body and a certain edge and chill and a focus on extorting all she can from her naive new customer. Tom's impulsive late-night decision to ask Rebecca for a house call while his parents are out of town set in motion a whole lot of personal chaos, including his wrecking his father's Porsche and opting to fund its repair by letting Rebecca and her friends ply their trade among his friends in the neighborhood by opening the house up for a one-night hoe down. As the Tangerine Dream music created a smoldering timelessness to this movie, his friends intent to spend their futures making more money, one friend's lament about paying four-dollars for a cup of hot chocolate in a trendy restaurant, and Tom's entrepreneurial bent unexpectedly opening the doors of opportunity all dripped onto the canvas and gave us a glimpse of the economic reality which would be pursued by much of the generation which came of age in the 1980s. In the end, Tom may or may not have gotten the girl, but you knew he was going to get the money, and that was a happy enough ending.