Thunder Road

After Two Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point there was a suggestion to watch Thunder Road because it was often double featured with those.

Now having watched it, Thunder Road was better than Vanishing Point, but they sure picked some bad music for drive sequences. Some scenes came across almost as Looney Tunes with that accompaniment. It also left me enough time to wonder, before the movie was even over, about some of the details. A 250 gallon tank, in that car? Did they take the back seat out to fit it? Is he getting 000 for a single 250 gallon shipment? That's /gallon, presumably wholesale rate. Is that cheap booze for 1950-something? I'm not sure. But if it's not cheaper than taxed liquor, there's no reason for moonshine.

I later found out that the alcohol tax in 1954 is the same as the alcohol tax now. It's never been raised even as inflation has diluted the dollar. So what was onerous then is not as big a deal today.

So far, for classic driving movies I have watched (roughly ranked, best to worst, in my subjective opinion):

• Two Lane Blacktop
• The Wages of Fear
• ...
• Thunder Road
• Death Race 2000
• ...
• Vanishing Point
• Damnation Alley

Obviously "classic driving movies" is a broad and idiosyncratic collection. I'm not including things just with good chases, like Bullitt, Or motorcycle films (Easy Rider). Of those above, I think only 2LB does not have a named character die. The one death is an unknown person, shown only in the grisly aftermath of the collision. That scene packed a punch.

Really, the only reason to watch Damnation Alley is for the vehicle (or the unintentional humor).

Vanishing Point

At imdb, people who liked Two Lane Blacktop also liked Vanishing Point, so I found it to watch, the 1971 version not the remake.

Scott Dorsey offered to let me watch his print — if I were in the same state as him — and said Clevon Little was worth the price of admission. I've trusted Scott Dorsey's movie recommendations before, but I'm going to have to disagree with his opinion here: Super Soul (Clevon Little) was the most annoying part of the movie. Psychic DJ and just-so disembodied guide voice just isn't my scene.

I'd never watched it before, but I had seen a scene from the film. The snake hunting prospector to faith-healer viper buyer bit. It was another hard to accept (in the suspension of disbelief sense) sequence. Not that those people might not have existed, but that they'd be there where Kowalski has run short of gas.

Amusing trivia: According to imdb, Gilda Texter was the "Nude Rider", but then she went on to a long career in movie costuming. (you can see Gilda has shoes on in one scene, so not completely nude.)

The Secret Life of Pets

Secret Life of Pets at IMDB

Meh.

The kids (15 and 11) enjoyed it. And they needed to be out of the house last night anyway. I struggled to find things that were funny. There was one scene that looked like Minions animators had watched a Sausage Party trailer, thought back to Cloud Cukoo Land in _The Lego Movie_, and then channeled Busby Berkeley. Dancing sausages wearing Josephine Baker gherkin skirts with pools of mustard and ketchup and cheerfully being consumed by dogs. That was a rare bright spot in this otherwise forgettable film.

Many of the trailers looked like they are for even worse films.

Man on Wire and The Walk

I rewatched Man on Wire (currently streaming on Netflix) and then went out to see The Walk in "Imax 3D".

Man on Wire (2008) at IMDB

This is a charming and engaging documentary about the tightrope (er, wire) walker Philippe Petit. A Frenchman with a passion for heights, he pulls some stunts putting up wires in public places, eg, Notre Dame and Sydney Harbor Bridge, then walking on them for a while before getting arrested. But then he learns that the towers of the World Trade Center have been finished, and what purpose could those have been built for but to let Philippe run his cable and walk on top of the world....

There is much about the planning of this undertaking (you need a lot of heavy wire for the "rope", and how do get it across that chasm?) with modern interviews with participants and recreated scenes. The end is probbably not a surprize to anyone, so I'll let slip that the title comes from the desciption of the crime in the police report.

Petit's worst luck was the date, which had more newsworthy events.

The Walk (2015) at IMDB

Both concern Philippe Petit's ambitious goal to high-wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, a plan that starts to form in his mind before construction begins. Man on Wire is a documentary that ends with the event. The Walk is a recreation that puts a lot less emphasis on the preparation and a lot more on the actualization. Instead of seeing how many times Philippe flies across the world, to practice on the Sydney Harbor Bridge, or to study things at the site in Manhattan and then practice in a carefully measured out space in a field in France, that is largely compressed. Instead we watch them sneaking the supplies into the building, hiding from the guards, attaching the cables (main and stabilizers), and the Walk.

The camera follows Philippe out over the Void, looking down that vast distance, too far to even register in the 3D projection, and follows him as he walks back and forth, teasingly avoids the cops at either end, and puts his show 1300' in the air.

I've read that some people have felt vertigo and nausea watching this, but I did not feel anything approaching that. The projection was pretty sharp for 3D, in close-ups of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's face, I could see that he was wearing contacts, but the most I was jolted was an early scene where a young Philippe has a rope snap on him. That incident prompts him to seek lessons from a professional, Papa Rudy, who is not in the documentary.

Apparently Philippe taught Gordon-Levitt to tight-rope walk for the film. In the time he spends walking for the camera, Gordon-Levitt looks a total natural. Clearly it was a casting / teaching job well done.