Put “Rush” in the bin of most criminally ignored films of 2013. This terrific drama/action from director Ron Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan may just be the best car racing movie ever made.
American audiences largely ignored it, probably because it’s about European Formula 1 racing. The two main figures, James Hunt and Niki Lauda, are giants in their sport but virtually unknown here in the States. In the 1970s they fought an epic battle of wills for the racing crown, resulting in tragic events but also a strange, powerful bond that forms between rivals.
Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) is the prototypical bigger-than-life playboy, who raced for the fame and the thrills. Lauda (Daniel Brühl, who should’ve gotten an Oscar nomination) is the precise technician who approached racing like a business and a science, but had trouble getting along with the people.
The racing scenes are amazing both visually and aurally, as the filmmakers wrap the audience inside the buzzing tornado of a Formula 1 car.
Even better, though, are the exchanges between the rivals, which are sniping and ugly at first, but later take on a comradely, warm aspect that surprises both of them. The secret to this movie is that it’s a character study hiding inside the clothes of a racing flick.
It didn’t win at the box office, but hopefully “Rush” will take the checkered flag in its video release.
Video goodies are quite good indeed, including an expansive making-of documentary, “Race for the Checkered Flag: The Making of Rush,” and “The Real Story of Rush,” which explores the real-world events that inspired the movie. Howard also provides a behind-the-scenes look at his filmmaking process, and there are deleted scenes.
Really good racing movies are quite rare. They tend to slalom between being too obsessed with the on-track action ("Le Mans") or serving as vehicles for the star persona of the actors appearing in them ("Days of Thunder").
Ron Howard's "Rush" hits the sweet groove down the middle of the lane, coming up with a compelling story based on the real-life rivalry between 1970s Formula 1 superstars James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda
(Daniel Brühl). It's less a straight racing flick than a character portrait of two very different men who clashed violently in their contrasting approaches to pursuing the same goal. Brühl gives an Oscar-caliber performance as the driven, distant purist who relates better to machines than people. But Howard and his crew hardly give the racing sequences short shrift. Mixing recreations of existing footage with special effects and camera work in and around the cars, they've created a high-velocity thrill ride that gives the audience a sense of the, well, rush of driving a 500-horsepower metal beast. The sound work is especially good, the engines sounding like the biggest, angriest buzzing bee in the world zooming in and around your head.
Hunt and Lauda were as different as two men can be. Hunt was a British playboy, a natural talent and thrill-seeker whose aggressive moves on the track make him a dangerous but formidable opponent. He beds women prodigiously, boozes and smokes, and is quick as lightning behind the wheel.
Lauda was an Austrian (but dismissed as a "Kraut" by Hunt and his fellows) from a family of businessmen, who approached world-class racing with methodical precision. He knows every piece of his car better than the mechanics who built it, and can tell what's wrong with how it drives just through the vibrations it sends through his body. (My mind is pretty good, he says, but I was born with a great ass -- which is as close to a joke as Lauda gets.)
There's one telling scene where Lauda, stranded with his would-be girlfriend on a lonely road, is picked up by some racing fans who beg him to drive their car for him. This he does, but the women scolds him for driving "like a grandfather." Lauda is genuinely perplexed: Why would he risk an accident when he's not being paid for it? He can handle risk at his job, but if he found something less risky that paid better, he says he'd do that instead -- and we believe him.
The movie quickly -- and wisely -- skips over their rise from the lower tiers of racing to their campaign in the big leagues. Their 1976 contest for the Formula 1 championship is still the stuff of legends, with Lauda driving for the Ferrari team and Hunt his match in a McLaren car. They traded victories and taunts with equal relish.
I'm not giving anything away by revealing that toward the end of the season Lauda had a horrific crash (which has always been suspected to be caused by a failure in his suspension, something Howard explicitly points to as the reason). This was at a time when Formula 1 had a handful of drivers die every year. Lauda spent more than a minute trapped in his car roasting in 800 degree flames, suffering severe burns to his face after his helmet slipped off.
Howard depicts the crash and its aftermath with a stark, unblinking eye. Perhaps the most teeth-grating thing to watch is Lauda having to repeatedly have his lungs "vacuumed" of debris from the fire. Of course, he watches Hunt racing and winning on an omnipresent television, closing the gap on his points lead while he endures the pain.
The apex of the story would be dismissed as the fantasies of a Hollywood screenwriter if it hadn't actually happened. Just six weeks after his crash, the skin grafts on his face still raw and bloody, Lauda climbed back into a racing car to continue his struggle against Hunt. The eventual winner would take the championship by a single point.
The once-bitter enemies find themselves growing a strange sort of respect for each other, which surprises even them. The dashing Hunt had often mocked the uncomely Lauda for his rat-like appearance, and even jokes that he was the only man who could have his face burnt off and it be an improvement. Yet when a journalist pesters Lauda with invasive questions about how his appearance will affect his marriage, it's Hunt who rallies to his defense.
The film starts with Hunt the clear center of attention, but in the end it becomes Lauda's tale to tell. Here is a man so closed off from others that he complains to his new bride on their honeymoon that having something to lose will weaken him as a driver. Yet in his competition with Hunt he found his own best self, leading him to unexpected but fully satisfying choices.
"Hunt was one of the few I liked, and fewer still that I respected," Lauda narrates. "He remains the only person I ever envied."
I have a feeling anyone with dreams of making a film about racing will say something similar about "Rush."
"Hereafter" is not a typical Clint Eastwood film. But then, is there even such a thing anymore?
North of 80, Eastwood continues to be the rare filmmaker who takes genuine risks, trying different genres and approaches to directing with seemingly every new turn. Perhaps it's because he was so pigeonholed in his acting career in the 1960s, '70s and '80s that he's spent the last 20 years throwing changeups from behind the camera.
Here's a guy who made a stolid World War II picture ("Flags of Our Fathers") and then followed it up with a better one, in Japanese subtitles, that portrayed the same battle from the perspective of the enemy ("Letters from Iwo Jima"). He also directed Oscar-caliber performances out of Angelina Jolie in the under-appreciated "Changeling" about an obscure 1920s child disappearance case, and Hilary Swank in a movie about girl boxers ("Million Dollar Baby") that packed a sneaky, sentimental haymaker.
Eastwood even starred as a crotchety retiree facing off with hoodlums in a film ("Gran Torino") that was essentially a rebuke of his own tough-guy star persona.
Even when the results are plodding and predictable -- "Invictus," the wildly overrated "Mystic River" -- we never lose the sense we're watching a talent perennially in search of new stories to tell, and new ways to tell them.
"Hereafter" will go down as one of Eastwood's minor works, but it's still a worthwhile one.
It's a tender, probing drama about an international trio dealing with death -- and what comes after. The original screenplay by Peter Morgan is deliberately paced and even languid at times, as the audience awaits the inevitable denouement when their storylines will intersect.
Matt Damon plays George Lonegan, a real-deal psychic who ditched budding fame and fortune for an anonymous job at a factory because he couldn't handle the emotional turbulence that follows in the wake of his readings. "A life that's all about death isn't any kind of life at all," is how he put it to his opportunistic brother (Jay Mohr), who wants to cash in on the gift George considers his curse.
It's an intentionally cramped, interior performance by Damon as a guy with an extraordinary ability who yearns for a mundane life. George purposefully fills his days with distraction, from listening to audio books of Charles Dickens to taking an Italian cooking class, where he stumbles upon an attraction with another student (Bryce Dallas Howard) that lights a tiny spark of hope in his ascetic existence.
The second leg of the plot revolves around Marie LeLay (Cécile De France), a famous French television anchor who is nearly killed by a tidal wave while vacationing in South Asia, in the film's pulse-quickening opening sequence. Actually, technically she was killed, traveling through a wispy world of light and indistinct figures before being revived.
It sets her off on a wild jaunt to explore her near-death experience, and take on an establishment that dismisses such tales as hokum. As a result, she finds herself being elbowed out of the mainstream success she craves, both professionally and romantically.
The weakest third of the movie centers on Marcus (Frankie and George McLaren), a British boy whose twin brother was killed in a car accident. They're clever lads who used their wits to outsmart the social services investigators who wanted to take them away from their junkie mother (Lyndsey Marshal).
When he's assigned to foster care after the tragedy, Marcus seeks out a string of bogus psychics to find some way to continue their sibling bond beyond the grave.
"Hereafter" is less concerned with the metaphysics of existence after we die -- contrasted with the celestial, CGI-assisted playground of Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones" -- than the earthly tribulations of people still alive who struggle to cope with the brush of Death's hand.
While George's ability to reach across that divide drives the story, the conclusions the film reaches are unsettled and may be unsatisfying for audience members who crave crisp closure. Only Eastwood is daring enough to make a movie more concerned with raising niggling questions than answering them.
In 10 days the Academy Awards will be announced. One film whose name won't be mentioned, but deserves to be, is "The Damned United."
This excellent drama about Brian Clough's disastrous 44-day tenure as manager of the powerhouse soccer (football) team Leeds United features a terrific, charismatic performance by Michael Sheen. Sheen plays Clough as a brilliant man whose pursuit of excellence was so single-minded, he let his ego and his arrogance overwhelm him.
But no Best Actor nomination for Sheen. Red card, Academy!
Another name that won't be called is Timothy Spall, who gives a great understated turn as Peter Taylor, the quiet genius who stood behind and to the right of Clough.
Even for someone like me who doesn't care for soccer, "The Damned United" offers an engaging portrait of the game circa 1974 -- the managers, the players, the owners and the media.
At first the film's focus is on Clough's obsession with eradicating the memory of his predecessor, Don Revie, who preached a win-at-all-costs creed that Clough deemed cheating.
But gradually the focus shifts to the sibling-like relationship between Clough and Taylor. It was a partnership of very different men that resulted in sports glory.
The expansive and impressive video extras are the same for Blu-ray and DVD versions.
A commentary track by Sheen, director Tom Hooper and producer Andy Harries is an insightful give-and-take, including the revelation that Leeds was hesitant to let them film at their stadium because they feared a hatchet job. Having finally secured permission, the trio joke that they then opened their movie with a montage of footage showing cheap shots by Leeds players.
Nine deleted scenes total more than 30 minutes of screen time, and reveal a deeper take on Clough's rift with his star player, Billy Bremner.
There's a fairly conventional 16-minute making-of documentary, and featurettes with Sheen talking about how he developed his character and delivering media bites dubbed "Cloughisms." Sheen offers the startling observation that Clough's mesmerizing power over his players was almost cult-like.
For football fans, two other features give about a half-hour of perspective on the real Clough and the game of the 1970s, including interviews with some of the real Leeds players depicted in the movie.
Mercifully, there is precious little soccer in "The Damned United." I know, I know: Fans of soccer -- excuse me, football -- get awfully defensive about how unpopular the sport is on this side of the pond.
I'm just telling you where I'm coming from: Someone who hates watching soccer and absolutely loved this soccer movie.
The film, directed by Tom Hooper, tells the saga of Brian Clough's ignominious 44-day tenure as the manager of the powerhouse team Leeds United back in 1974. Although he would go on to become one of the greatest managers the sport had ever seen, he completely muffed his time at Leeds because he was arrogant and alienated his star players.
Screenwriter Peter Morgan, who based the script on the book by David Peace, has been on quite a tear lately, penning "The Queen," "Frost/Nixon" and this film -- all starring actor Michael Sheen -- plus "The Last King of Scotland" and "The Other Boleyn Girl" to boot.
On the surface, the story appears to be about Clough's obsession with supplanting and surpassing Don Revie (Colm Meaney), the previous manager of Leeds, who employed brutal tactics to win at any cost. There's a great scene near the beginning where the Leeds owners berate Clough for giving a controversial television interview right before taking the team's reins, and he assures them that he will not rest until his name has blotted out Revie's.
But really, the heart of this movie is the relationship between Clough and his assistant manager, Peter Taylor, masterfully played by Timothy Spall. Taylor is the unassuming, mild-mannered yin to Clough's self-aggrandizing, pompous yang.
The story begins in 1974, with Clough arriving at Leeds, with Taylor conspicuously absent. Despite a decade of success together, their partnership has ended for reasons that won't be revealed for awhile.
The film then jumps back to 1968, when Clough and Taylor were running a basement-dweller team in Derby, and got a chance to play Revie's Leeds hooligans. The head of the local owners (Jim Broadbent) is ecstatic about the match-up with Leeds because of all the money it will generate. But Clough is mortified when his team is embarrassed on the field, and Revie appears to ignore him.
The timeline jumps back and forth between Clough's Leeds tenure and the intervening years, as his ego and ambition race further and further out of control, and his relationship with Taylor grows acrimonious.
Sheen's performance is a real standout. He shows every little scrap of Clough's narcissism and off-putting manner, and yet somehow makes the character likeable. Sheen portrays him as a well-meaning man who can't take his eyes off the prize, to the detriment of those around him, especially his sibling-like relationship with Taylor.
"The Damned United" wisely keeps the action off the field, where the really interesting byplay happens.
