Blu-ray Review: Snake and Mongoose (2013)

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AKA: Snake & Mongoo$e

If it hadn't been for the popularity of Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book, the history of drag racing might look a whole lot less colorful because the film was still on the minds of many when a man named Tom McEwen began competing in regular races against Don “The Snake” Prudhomme.

And although they were infinitely well-matched on the racetrack, because they couldn’t have been more different in real life given Prudhomme’s serious, studious approach to the sport in contrast to that of laid back, smooth talking ladies man Tom McEwen, it didn’t take very long for people to start calling Tom “The Mongoose” who lived to chase "The Snake" around the track.

Admittedly as depicted in director Wayne Hollway’s fast-paced feature length biopic about the pair, the name took some getting used to for Tom, who wasn’t sure how to take it at first.

However, he soon latched onto in full force, cleverly taking the source material into consideration to become a walking PR campaign for the Tom McEwen brand, wearing Mongoose t-shirts and gradually talking his off-track friend Don Prudhomme into making a much more successful living as his two-decade spanning on-track rival.

Turning the formerly unpopular sport that only attracted gearheads and their girlfriends into a profitable family friendly industry that at last put them in the veritable driver’s seat of their prospective careers, Tom and Don went from barely scraping by to making a good living putting on exhibition races in hot-spots throughout the southwest.

Yet as in-demand as they were on the road, the demands of the road began taking their tolls on their loved ones back home  -- in Tom’s life in particular as his marriage began to lose momentum just as his career began picking up speed.

Inspired by his children’s love of toy cars, whether consciously or not Tom went back to the Disney well that had given him his name and image, teaming up with Don and Barbie manufacturer Mattel to dream up the idea of Hot Wheels with their animated logos painted on the side of the cars.

More psyched about the financial ability that Mattel’s corporate sponsorship would offer the brainy Don to build his ideal dream car than the children’s toys as he and his wife had put off having children temporarily due to the dangers of the sport, when Hot Wheels exploded in a big way, neither the Snake nor Mongoose had any idea what would happen.

Amping up their professional rivalry even more as the recurring champion Don’s Snake racer routinely outsold the Mongoose’s number two seller, when Mattel began to use their legalese to state when they needed to drive a car and which race type was in need of a commercial tie-in, tension began to build between Tom and funny car race weary Don.

Both driven to win but with vastly different approaches and personality types, while Don was in it for the love of engines, the PR savvy, fan-friendly Tom was often sidetracked by his love of the spotlight.

Yet as Holloway’s riveting film reveals, neither man is any one thing as the two learn from one another (whether they’re willing to admit it or not) over the course of their increasingly complicated dynamic when they’re hit with a few emotional roadblocks including one unexpected detour that forever affects both drivers on and off the track.

Well-acted by its talented ensemble led by the film’s remarkable duo of Jesse Williams and Richard Blake as Don and Tom respectively, Snake & Mongoo$e, which also features supporting work from Ian Ziering, Tim Blake Nelson, Kim Shaw, Ashley Hinshaw, Noah Wyle and Fred Dryer is a stunning achievement in independent filmmaking.

Passionately made with remarkable attention to detail from its colorful yet slightly over-saturated, warm ‘70s style cinematography to its mood-setting period soundtrack of deeper cuts than those traditionally served up in similar fare, Holloway’s film transcends its genre trappings as both a biopic and sports film right from its earliest moments when we hear Elvis Presley’s “Spinout” set to their first meet.

The very first film ever screened at 2014’s legendary Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale Auction in its 43 year history, Snake & Mongoo$e is sure to attract a larger word-of-mouth fanbase of viewers as more viewers discover the work outside racing events.

Beautifully transferred to high definition Blu-ray, Holloway’s film about two of drag racing’s most famous drivers continues to coincide historically with the Disney movie that gave their famous alter-ego’s life.

Arriving on disc shortly after the 50th anniversary of The Jungle Book, the amusing coincidence and great PR timing is an idea (almost) worthy of Tom McEwen himself and as such, it invites audiences to pick up both movies for an epic double feature as an animated snake and a mongoose move from the jungle to the racetrack.
   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

DVD Review: Blue Caprice (2013)

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Making an effective true crime thriller is like walking a tightrope wherein the success of your film depends on how well you can balance the devastating facts with sensitivity for the lives that have been touched by the tragic event.

You have to question whether any violence is gratuitous (even if you’re going by police records and press photos) and likewise be conscious of the tendency we have as people reared on heroic narrative journeys to unconsciously root for our main character to ask yourself whether you’re accidentally glamorizing the actions or turning the perpetrator into a hero.

At the same time, like a reporter who needs to remain objective and refrain from leaning too far to one side or another, you also need to stop yourself from going the other way to the point where the subjects lose their humanity and become as exaggerated as a silent movie villain tying the hero’s girlfriend to the train tracks.

The fine line between making a mere point and making a message movie becomes yet another obstacle that threatens to knock you off that thin piece tightrope even if you know how to balance as well as a Cirque du Soleil acrobat because you’re dealing with a topic that has in all honesty affected each and every potential viewer.

Whether they'd heard about the event, turned on the news or picked up a paper to take in the aftermath, you must be ready to accept the fact that every audience member who sees it will bring their own point-of-view and preconceived judgment about the case to the theater before the first frame of your film even flickers.

Instinctively aware of these concerns, in his feature-filmmaking debut former music video and short film director Alexandre Moors takes on an altogether minimalist, unexpected approach in his psychological cinematic portrait of the two men who shared a father/son bond beginning in Antigua and ending upon their arrest for the horrific October, 2002 D.C. Sniper killings.

In Blue Caprice, Moors recounts the history behind the events that terrified the nation’s capital and shocked the globe with the senseless murder of thirteen men, women and children.

Focusing on the facts mainly to construct the overall framework for the characters’ timeline, Moors and his cowriter R.F.I. Porto opted to push the actual violent crime elements toward the periphery of the picture and instead fixate on the relationship between the two men.

Opening with the abandonment of the Antigua teen by his mother, Lee (Tequan Richmond) is left to fend for himself when – following a desperate moment in the sea – he finds a replacement parent in Isaiah Washington’s John, the American man who rescues him.

Having fled to the island after kidnapping his three children in the midst of an ugly custody battle with his soon to be ex-wife, John takes in the boy and teaches him “how to be an American.”

While he’s forced to relinquish his kids to their mother offscreen, John returns to the states shortly thereafter with the orphaned boy whom he begins referring to as his “other son,” soon grooming him for his own version of a battle against the citizens of a country he feels has wronged him.

One of the most frightening explorations of a disturbed, vengeful psyche since Robert De Niro threatened to shoot his mirror for looking at him in Taxi Driver, Isaiah Washington’s utterly mesmerizing turn as the mastermind of the sniper attacks is chilling in the way he begins slowly losing his grip on reality, which escalates from start to finish.

We see him change drastically from one moment to the next as John plots the “random but not random” shootings in a grocery store before quickly turning on the charm to con the manager into releasing his “son” back into his custody after Lee was caught stealing veggie burgers.

And through it all, Washington’s portrayal of John’s disturbing metamorphosis and eerily seductive chameleon-like ability to talk people into things is further proof that he’s one of contemporary cinema’s most underrated actors.

After realizing the teen is a natural with a rifle once the two goof around with the gun collection kept by John’s Army buddy (played by Tim Blake Nelson), John begins to train his protégé for battle, conditioning and manipulating him to prove his love and obedience with a few test crimes in Seattle that set them up with the used blue Caprice John fashioned a shooting bay out of in the trunk.

And when the wife of Nelson’s character (played by Joey Lauren Adams) remarks “what an awful car” as the two men drive out of sight, her dead-on assessment is the understatement of the film as little did she or the rest of the world know what madness John had in store with regard to that blue Caprice.

Admirably avoiding the actuality of gory carnage and senseless shootings which makes the emotional impact of the implied violence all the more horrific, Moors spends a majority of the final act investigating the dynamic of the men and the way they execute their plan as opposed to zeroing in on the killings themselves.

Serving as yet another reminder that a movie is far more thought-provoking for what it doesn’t show than why it does, Blue Caprice likewise raises more questions than it offers answers.

Respecting the intelligence of his audience, Moors and Porto strengthen their already solid movie by ending things on such an abrupt note that it forces viewers to engage in a conversation about what they’ve just seen The noblest goal for any true crime thriller – Blue Caprice gets people talking about why these things happen in the first place.

And while it’s unfortunately too late to change what happened in 2002 – as Moors drives home in his striking debut feature it’s never too late to try and dissect events of the past to see if we can learn from them in order to stop these things from happening again in the future.

Yet far from being a message movie or too overly optimistic, Caprice reminds and ultimately warns us that sometimes as much as we want answers, there’s no reasonable explanation that could make us understand why and how someone could do what these two men did in 2002 that could put a stop to all public shootings in the future.

Leaving us with as many dead ends as there are potential solutions, one of Blue’s strongest realizations is that while one of the sniper’s motives was vengeful madness, from the eyes of a teen desperately in need of a parent, another motive was love.

And given the two conflicting thoughts pulling us in two different directions at the same time, we begin to see that what Moors needed to make the film is the same thing we need to view it – namely, the balance to keep everything in perspective.

Anchored by the haunting turns of its two leads including Tequan Richmond’s understated performance that helps ground Washington when his John begins to dominate, Moors's auspicious debut is now available on DVD to coincide with and celebrate its Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

New on DVD for the Week of 10/19

Video Pick of the Week: Rain Shadow

The Go-Getter

Gunnin' for that #1 Spot

The Incredible Hulk

Kiss of the Spider Woman

Rain Shadow: Series 1

Sweeney Todd (Arriving on Blu-ray)

New Releases via Amazon

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Director: Louis Leterrier

Whereas Iron Man began with a testosterone shot of military hummers, war torn Afghanistan, and with a soundtrack blaring classic hair metal rock, the second Marvel studio release, The Incredible Hulk begins like an exquisitely beautiful and delicate silent movie. I’d almost call it arty if I wasn’t afraid it would conjure up bad memories from the nearly universally loathed, most recent Hulk incarnation from director Ang Lee. No, the 2008 film opens with a terrifically edited montage—a visual tapestry and feast for the ears as well as Scotish Moulin Rouge! composer Craig Armstrong’s impressive musical score (which has now become one of my favorite of 2008) is synched along with images that brings even those of us unfamiliar with the comic book mythology up to speed, with nary a trace of dialogue. In order to best capture the back-story in an efficient and sweepingly visual way, French director Louis Leterrier (Transporter 2), the talented Australian Die Hard 3 cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr. and Hulk’s three person editing team utilize classic cinematic trickery along with telling newspaper headlines and data from pertinent documents to chronicle the sad tale of brainy scientist Dr. Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) whose experiments with radiation resistance went horribly wrong, not only poisoning Dr. Banner with dangerous levels of gamma rays but also morphing him into a violent, super-sized green Hulk who unleashes fury when angry, leaving bodies and injury in his wake, including accidentally harming his beloved Dr. Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) in the process.

Once the credit sequence ends, our hero vanishes for five years and-- instead of offering a tried, true and admittedly tired superhero paradigm-- the film admirably stays in the mold of great "man on the run" pictures including The Fugitive and The Bourne Identity trilogy. Soon we catch up with Banner hiding in Brazil where-- when he isn’t concentrating on controlling his anger levels with breathing techniques-- works as a lowly factory bottling employee. Now with the sneaking suspicion that he was manipulated by Betty’s shady military general father William Hurt into using the science he assumed was for good for violent ends instead in the General’s quest to harness the Hulk’s capabilities into creating a super soldier where man becomes a weapon for Iron Man hero Tony Stark’s weapons conglomerate Stark Industries, Banner makes strides in contacting a U.S. based scientist to try and reverse the experiment.

Of course, it isn’t too long before the General becomes aware of Banner’s location and sends a team in with enough firepower to take out the entire country, headed up by the ambitious career soldier, Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), who after realizing that Banner is “a whole new level of weird” finagles a deal with the General to be injected with the very same product in order to level off the playing field of an unstoppable Hulk whom bullets nor bombs can penetrate.

Realizing that he has no choice but to face the life he’s been escaping, Banner returns home where he unintentionally reunites with his love Betty Ross, now a professor at Culver University in Virginia. Quickly the two go on the lam to search for a cure, with time running out as the General and Blonsky continually track their whereabouts and with every new annoyance, Banner’s pulse increases dangerously towards the magic number of 200 wherein he turns into an uncontrollable version of himself that he most fears, namely The Incredible Hulk.

Although Norton lacks the easy mischievously sexy, albeit sometimes over-the-top charisma of Iron Man’s Robert Downey Jr., he is the quintessentially earnest everyman and one we instinctively empathize with as a likable scientist who’s trying to right some extraordinarily unfortunate wrongs. Granted some critics have-- similar to their main Iron Man attack-- found legitimate fault with Hulk’s lack of a real worthwhile villain although, as a fan, I enjoyed seeing Roth play evil once again. Despite this, the film works best when it’s understated in its attacks, especially in a phenomenally choreographed battle at the university midway through the film and at its absolute worst when it relies too heavily on frankly lackluster special effects in a damn near deafeningly loud, overwhelmingly cheesy video game styled final battle between Norton and Roth that seems to last longer than watching every installment of both The Thorn Birds and Roots miniseries combined.

However, aside from the overly long confrontation which will wear on the patience of a majority of audience members who aren’t fourteen year old boys, as it stands The Incredible Hulk is a superior film to Iron Man—majestic, beautiful, with a more compelling and richer storyline and of course that fantastic score, although this being said, when held up next to Iron Man, it’s nowhere near as fun. And, even though his cameo seemed to last no longer than two minutes, it was an incredibly lively and welcome sight indeed to see the handsome, impeccably dressed Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) arrive in the concluding moments of the film to set up the Hulk sequel and you could audibly hear the anticipation, gratitude, and amusement of the audience who let out either a chuckle or a small admiring holler at the prospect of the two franchises linking up... (okay, so that last cheer may have come from this reviewer).