Ford v. Ferrari (3/5 Stars)

Ford v. Ferrari is a pretty good snapshot of all the contradictions of the sport of car racing. The fan base of this sport are red blooded Americans from those parts of the country that are all about less government and more bootstrap. They wear cowboy hats, eat steak, and drive cars, that most singular way to travel. But is there a sport out there that is less beholden to corporate interests? Look at those NASCAR cars. They are covered head to toe with advertisements. No car racer owns his own car. It is the corporation's car. This is because it takes a hell of a lot of money and engineering to build a car that can compete in these races. So much so that it may be a question as to whether the individual driver is all that important. Particularly in long races like the one at issue in this movie, the 24-hour race at Le Mans. No individual racer drives all the race. It is the car that goes the distance. But how do you tell a story about the car to the NASCAR fan base who are highly individualistic. (Were Carol Shelby and Ken Miles really ignorant of the rule that affects the end of this race? I mean, really?)

Ford v. Ferrari is a basic and competent sports story about simple and rebellious protagonists and affluent and beholden antagonists. It works on this basic level and is anchored by a cast of manly men: Matt Damon as coach/car builder Carol Shelby and Christian Bale as the driver Ken Miles get the job done on the ground. In the Ford office are Tracy Letts as Ford CEO Henry Ford II and two of his senior employees Jon Bernthal as Lee Iacocca and Josh Lucas as Leo Beebe. Ferrari is not played by a name actor and actually does not have much to do in this movie. The main conflict is between Lee Iacocca who wants to give our heroes (Damon and Bale) more discretion and Leo Beebe who is mainly interested in marketing. Why can’t our driver be more photogenic, asks Leo, we could totally sell more cars that way? This question becomes the linchpin of the movie. Will the corporation give the renegades enough leeway to succeed? Leo Beebe is portrayed as a scheming pretty boy. Josh Lucas does his smarmy best (I remember him from American Psycho).

Is Ford really an underdog here? It has all the money and talent and a willingness akin to the NFL’s Patriots to undertake courses of action that aren’t technically cheating, but probably should be. Reading between the lines, I got the feeling that Ferrari did not have much of a chance. All Ford needed to do was show up and care. The main impetus for the whole rivalry was the hurt feelings of Henry Ford II after Ferrari used the Ford Company’s interest in acquiring his company to run up the price on the other buyer, Fiat. Lee Iacocca reports this failure back to Henry Ford II and adds that Ferrari called Ford cars ugly and Henry II fat. Henry Ford II gruffly declares that the Le Mans racing team has a blank check. The rest is history. Ford won the next five years. I expect Ford stopped winning because it stopped caring. It made its point and went back to more profitable ventures, like selling cars to regular people. Meanwhile, we are told that Ferrari went bankrupt chasing perfection at Le Mans. There is a female character in this movie, the wife of Ken Miles. She feels out of place in this exorbitant high-stakes pissing contest.

This is one of those movies where I sort of wish there was a less Hollywood version. I would like to know more about the engineering and science of making a car go really fast for a very long time and less about the mystical and intangible qualities of race car drivers. Having said that, Christian Bale once again showcases his superhuman ability to gain/lose weight. Last time I saw him, he had the gut of Dick Cheney. Now, he is thin and wiry again. That talented jerk.

Logan (5/5 Stars)

The resiliency of comic book franchises rests on the enormous wealth of material that subsequent installments of the franchise may draw upon. Whereas a franchise made originally for the screen like a Rambo or a Die Hard often face a narrowness of choice (in chronological order and with bigger explosions), something like the X-Men franchise has an extraordinary versatility in the types and time periods in which the story-lines take place.

After three movies that took place in the early 2000s (X-Men in 2000, X2 in 2003, and X-Men: the Last Stand in 2006), the next movie took place in the 1960s (X-Men: First Class), another one simultaneously in the 1970s and the apocalyptic future (X-Men: Days of Future Past), another in the 1980s (X-Men: Apocalypse) and two Wolverine centered movies (X-Men: Origins Wolverine, I think in the 1980s and The Wolverine (set in 2010s Japan).

Now we have Logan, which is set in the future in 2029. Logan, like all the others, is based in part on a comic book. Like all the others, it does not feel like the intuitive choice for the next movie in a franchise (i.e. in chronological order and with bigger explosions). It’s tone and style is very different, more Western than Superhero blockbuster, which says much about the incredible diversity in X-Men literature. I’m sure there are nerds out there fretting what the presence of “Logan” does to the canonical X-Men Universe. These movies don’t always fit together. (In fact, I think because of the time paradoxes of X-Men: Days of Future Past, the events of the third movie X-Men: The Last Stand has now officially never happened.) Who knows what the installment of “Logan” will do to the status of the overall story, given that it is particularly dark and according to its plot, all the mutant X-Men are dead.

What is left in the dusty world of bleak 2029 is an aged Wolverine who is slowly losing his powers of indestructible healing, a now dangerously senile Charles Xavier (played again by his old counterpart Patrick Stewart), and their albino housekeeper named Caliban (played by the comedian Stephen Merchant.) They live right across the Mexican border on a dusty farm. Charles is being housed in a giant steel tank and takes knock-out medicine. His mind is too powerful and unstable to focus. Technically the government now considers it to be a weapon of mass destruction.

Everything is bad and then it gets worse. Logan is found by a nurse who has absconded with a child that was created with mutant powers by an evil corporation with the evil intent of patenting the mutating genes. She asks Logan for help, Logan is reluctant to help, Logan reluctantly helps, and many people die in the aftermath.

“Logan” is a great movie masquerading as a comic book blockbuster. It directly reminded me of the Christopher Nolan “Batman” movies in style and tone. There seems to be almost no digital effects. Everything is down to earth and gritty. The movie was written and directed by James Mangold who has shown before the ability to not confuse spectacle with drama (“3:10 to Yuma,” “The Wolverine”).

Hugh Jackman, as Wolverine, puts in his best performance out of the now nine times he has played the character. He also has never looked so much like Wolverine. Patrick Stewart makes a great case for why a man of his dramatic talent should be in a superhero movie at all. Stephen Merchant, best known for being a comedian, is an inspired choice of casting for the dramatic role he plays. And then there is Daphne Keen who puts in a performance that should not be possible given her age. I feel like I need to see a documentary in the quiet revolution of child performances in the past twenty years that make something like Ms. Keen possible. For those of us who remember Macauley Kulkin being the best child performer of his time, it is a revelation to see children pull off the myriad of great performances in “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Looper,” and now “Logan.”

Over the soundtrack the sound of old Johnny Cash plays. It is a fitting end for a great character.