Unknown Legend

Rachel Getting Married is a movie that I never would have considered watching had I not read a bunch of great reviews. While I believe that truly great art is by definition accessible to almost everyone, there's a lot of good art that is only accessible to those equipped with the tools to truly understand it on multiple levels. Rachel Getting Married may fall into that category, or it may be a self-indulgent piece of trash, or it might just not be my kind of film. Roger Ebert's review, which I did not read until after watching the movie, is particularly interesting. He loved the movie, but his review barely even talks about the story. That may be because there isn't much of a story being told, and that was my biggest problem with the film. The viewers of the movie are essentially guests at Rachel's wedding weekend. We watch it unfold and get some details from the past through conversations that the characters have with each other, but that's about it.

I found it funny that B-movie legend Roger Corman played one of the guests at the wedding and that there was a thank you note to him in the credits, but after I reading his bio, I learned that in addition to making lots of cheesy movies, he also gave a ton of big-name Hollywood types their start in the show business, including Jonathan Demme, the director of Rachel Getting Married.

I also had no idea that the groom's character was played by the lead singer of the band TV on the Radio. I know little about the beyond beyond being aware of their existence, so it's not surprising that I didn't recognize their lead singer. This information does help explain his acapella rendition of Unknown Legend during the wedding vows (perhaps my favorite part of the movie). The funny thing is that had I not decided to log onto the internet and register my disgust, I never would have learned about Roger Corman's contributions to the more respectable side of Hollywood or Tunde Adebimpe's (the aforementioned groom) acting career, both of which made the appreciate the movie a little bit more.

In the Year 2000

I recently had the pleasure of viewing Death Race 2000 for the first time. If you aren't a fan of B movies, you can stop reading right now. If you are a fan, this is definitely a must-see. It was made in 1975 and set in what was then the not-too-distant future and what is now the recent past. In the movie, the America of the year 2000 looks a lot like the America of 1975, except that the country is ruled by an absentee authoritarian regime headed by the inscrutable Mr. President and an annual coast-to-coast, no-holds-barred car race is the opiate of the masses. I didn't realize that it was a Roger Corman picture until the ending credits rolled, but in retrospect, I should have known from the ample amounts of T&A and completely unrealistic gore.

The movie has an unmistakable 1970s feel. The main character, Frankenstein (David Carradine), is the race favorite and the only current surviving champion. Frankenstein is a broken man, both physically and mentally, and a textbook 1970s anti-hero. His main rival, Joe "Machine Gun" Viterbo (Sly Stallone), is a tightly-wound ball of rage. The Resistance, an underground movement that is determined to stop the death race by any means necessary, fills the role of the progressive anti-establishment group. Rather than trying to explain how America wound up in such a sorry state, the movie makes allusions to works such as 1984 and assumes the viewer can fill in the details.

There's an interview with Roger Corman in the DVD extras. He makes a comment about how prophetic the movie turned out to be. I don't know exactly what he was talking about, but I will give him credit for a couple of things. The first is how Mr. President blamed the French for all of the acts of sabotage committed by the Resistance. I'm guessing that the blame the French meme existed before this movie was made, but the way that it was used was nearly identical the our last flare-up of anti-French hysteria during the run up to the Gulf war. The other thing that really stood out was how the political party that ruled the country was called the Bipartisan Party. That name reminded me of the "a pox on both their houses" sentiment that you often hear expressed by pundits and voters. I've always felt like that sentiment is much more common today than it was 30 years ago, so I'll give Corman some credit for that.