MINNEAPOLIS
We’ve got a long layover before the next leg of our flight back home from Alaska, which gives me an opportunity to explain what was wrong with the lousy in-flight movie on the way here from Anchorage. What was wrong with Need for Speed (2014) can be summarized succinctly — everything. It stars Aaron Paul, whom you most likely would recognize as Jesse, the young meth addict who served as Walter White’s accomplice in the popular AMC series Breaking Bad (2008-2013).
We flew here on Big Country airline, which has updated its delivery of in-flight movies so that you log onto an internal server with your phone or other device, and then have access to a variety of entertainments. With a five-hour flight, my first choice was the three-hour-long 2001 Michael Bay-directed Pearl Harbor. I recall seeing that when it was out in theaters, but for some reason it didn’t annoy me nearly as much then as I did rewatching it on the plane. If you think that the output of Hollywood only recently began to suck because of “wokeness,” you really need to take a critical look at Pearl Harbor. But why even bother slagging that movie, when Need for Speed so much more obviously deserves slagging?
“Why is this guy the hero?” That’s the question that began to bother me more and more as the movie went on. Perhaps I didn’t pay close enough attention to the setup in the opening scenes, but the movie is about illegal street racing, so the question occurred to me, why is the criminal Tobey Marshall, played by Aaron Paul, the hero, while “Dominic Cooper as Dino Brewster: a former Indy racer and Tobey’s fierce rival” (to quote Wikipedia) is the villain? The moral distinction between the two is not obvious, except that Tobey is a blue-collar hard-luck case, whereas Dino is apparently wealthy and well-connected. Quoting Wikipedia again:
Tobey Marshall is a former race car driver who owns his late father’s garage, Marshall Performance Motors, in Mount Kisco, New York, where he and his friends tune performance cars. Struggling to make ends meet, he and his crew participate in street races after hours. After a race, Tobey’s former rival Dino Brewster conscripts them into completing the build of a rare Ford Shelby Mustang worked on by the late Carroll Shelby, in exchange for 25% of the car’s sales revenue.
Does that make any sense at all? If not, it might help to know that the movie was an “adaptation” a video game of the same name. The screenplay is the work of John Gatins (who was nominated for an Oscar in 2012) and his brother George. Exactly how this project came about, I’m not sure, but I guess the idea of a tie-in to a popular videogame was the selling point — a ready-made audience of game enthusiasts — and the plot was contrived to give some kind of dramatic text to the movie’s main action-flick appeal, i.e., lots of car-chase scenes highlighted by dramatic crashes done with CGI effects. If the plot is implausible and the character development deficient, it’s probably because the producers figured, “Who cares? We’re making a movie for an audience of socially awkward teenage loners who have nothing better to do with their lives but spend endless hours playing a stupid race-car game.” Which is to say, the filmmakers have contempt for their audience, and really, who can blame them? Anybody who would pay money to see this movie deserves all the contempt they get. Honestly, I kind of hate myself for wasting two hours watching Need for Speed, and it didn’t cost me a dime.
“Why is this guy the hero?” That question applies not only to the character Tobey Marshall in Need for Speed, but also to the actor Aaron Paul, who plays him. What made Paul so believable as Jesse in Breaking Bad was that he gave off the vibe of the kind of small-town dopehead who would get mixed up in a drug-manufacturing scheme with his former high school chemistry teacher. There wasn’t anything remotely heroic about Jesse, and if viewers found themselves rooting for him, it was only because his and Walter’s enemies — rival drug gangs, etc. — were so monstrously bad. But that vibe doesn’t work in Need for Speed, where the protagonist Tobey is supposed to be a racing driver of exceptional ability who, unfortunately, never got his shot at the big time because his father died (or whatever). Sorry, but I just can’t “buy” Aaron Paul as an extraordinary driver. He is a UCLA film-school graduate’s idea of what a blue-collar hero looks like. And dear God, how the filmmakers strive to sell this underdog-from-the-small-town angle which, by the way, is utterly implausible because Mount Kisco, N.Y., is in Westchester County, an affluent suburb of New York City. While Mount Kisco is somewhat below the county average in terms of household income, it’s not the first place you’d think of when you hear the phrase “blue-collar America.”
Guess what? The target audience didn’t care. Need for Speed grossed about $45 million in domestic release, but nearly four times as much in foreign sales, especially in China. Perhaps something about the scenery of Mount Kisco made it perfect as a foreigner’s idea of what small-town America looks like and, of course, the casting of the movie placed the white protagonist amid an appropriately multicultural crew of “buddies” — a couple of Hispanic dudes and a black guy. Scott Mescudi (who, as a rapper, is known as “Kid Cudi”) as “Sergeant Benny ‘Maverick’ Jackson: a member of Tobey’s crew, and a former National Guard soldier. He is a pilot, able to fly small aeroplanes and helicopters. . . . He owns a Cessna 182” (again, quoting Wikipedia). Would you be surprised to learn that the population of Mount Kisco is less than 1% black? Would you be surprised to learn that very few black people in America are licensed pilots, let alone own their own plane? A used Cessna 182 costs around a quarter-million dollars, and then there’s the cost of hangar rental, maintenance, fuel, etc. Being a small-plane owner is not a cheap hobby.
So the audience is not only supposed to believe that Tobey just happens to be buddies with one of the few black guys in Mount Kisco, but also that Tobey’s buddy just happens to be a statistical rarity, a black pilot with his own plane. And, you may wonder, why does this matter? Because the second act of the movie involves a high-speed cross-country journey and Tobey’s pilot buddy Benny flies as aerial reconnaissance to warn him about cops up ahead or whatever. See, the filmmakers had to find some way to make it (remotely) possible that you could actually get away with driving triple-digit speeds all the way across America in the 21st century, when technology has given law enforcement an insuperable advantage in dealing with speeders. Being an aficionado of police videos on YouTube, I can assure you that Tobey’s cross-country journey would be impossible. And dear God, he’d probably get killed if he went through Arkansas, where the state patrol does not play around.
If it were so easy to get away with driving over 100 mph — which is what the audience of Need for Speed is evidently expected to believe — why doesn’t everybody do it? Video surveillance is omnipresent in America nowadays, and even if you could outrun those high-powered Dodge Chargers that state troopers use as pursuit vehicles, video evidence would permit them eventually to apprehend and convict you of fleeing-and-eluding (a felony). That is, assuming you didn’t kill yourself in a crash, which is not an uncommon fate for such criminals.
Street racing is a crime, and the idea that people who engage in street racing are exceptionally skilled drivers — well, where does that idea come from> Evidence against such a claim isn’t hard to find (e.g., “Tampa police say teens were street racing before crash that killed 2”), and most mature adults probably suspect, as I do, that street racers usually are just show-offs with misplaced priorities. And again, I return to this question about the protagonist in Need for Speed: “Why is this guy the hero?”
If you’re the kind of awkward teenager who wastes your life playing video games, I suppose, there might be a fantasy-fulfillment aspect to Need for Speed that makes you relate to Tobey as the hero. And that’s just the problem: The fantasies of maladjusted 15-year-old boys — the cinematic expression of their frustrations, acted out in cartoonish ways — are warped and unrealistic, and are not appealing as entertainment to any intelligent and emotionally healthy person.
Here’s something to think about: Why do we like car chases in classic action movies like Bullitt and The French Connection? Because in both of those movies, the chase involves the good guy chasing the bad guys — and the good guy is a cop. We understand that the criminal, in a desperate attempt to escape justice, will drive with no regard for public safety, and that this in turn requires the police to take risks in order to catch up with the bad guy. Thus, the risk of the chase is forced upon the police protagonist — it’s not what he wants to do, but he is left with no other choice because of the criminal’s action. What makes a movie car chase compelling is conspicuously absent in Need for Speed, which celebrates fast driving for the sake of fast driving, with no regard for motive.
Consider the series of events that leads to the climax of Act One, the death of Tobey’s buddy Pete. There’s this super-valuable Shelby Mustang, recall, and here’s the relevant plot sequence via Wikipedia:
The completed Mustang is displayed for auction at a party in New York City. Tobey and Dino meet Julia Maddon, an English car broker whose client, Bill Ingram, wants to purchase the car if they can prove it will drive over 230 mph, as Tobey claims. Despite Dino’s objections, Tobey takes the Mustang to a local race track and successfully drives it at 234 mph, convincing Ingram to purchase it for $2.7 million.
Enraged by Tobey’s disobedience to his objections, Dino challenges Tobey and his friend Pete to a race after Pete flatly tells Dino that everyone knows Tobey is a better driver than him. Dino offers to relinquish his entire share of the Mustang sale if Tobey wins, otherwise Tobey will have to forfeit his share. He challenges them to race with his uncle’s three Koenigsegg Agera R cars illegally imported from Europe. On the home stretch, realizing he is about to lose the race, Dino intentionally bumps into Pete’s car, sending it down a ravine and killing Pete as it bursts into flames. Dino disappears from the scene, while Tobey is arrested by the police and sentenced to two years in prison for involuntary manslaughter, unable to prove Dino was there.
When this movie was made, the Swedish-made Koenigsegg Agera had recently been crowned “Hypercar of the Year” by Top Gear magazine. If you had an extra $1.5 million handy, and an urge to drive 275 mph, this was your car. That Dino’s uncle just happened to have three of these exotic sports cars in his garage, and that Dino decides it’s OK to “borrow” them for his ego-inspired race against Tobey and Pete — well, if that’s not your definition of “implausible,” you need a new dictionary.
Perhaps there is somewhere in America you could get away with street racing in a million-dollar European supercar, but is Westchester County, New York, one of those places? And how many rich guys have three car like that which their nephew thinks it’s OK to borrow for a race inspired by personal revenge over an insult? Anyway . . .
Upon his release on parole, Tobey sets out to avenge Pete’s death. He borrows Ingram’s Mustang to enter the De Leon, a winner-takes-all exotic car race organized by the mysterious Monarch, but as a condition, Ingram requires Julia to accompany Tobey while Tobey is driving the Mustang. The pair have 45 hours to reach San Francisco before the race starts. In Detroit, they cause an interstate chase with the Michigan State Police and upload the footage. Dino offers his rare Lamborghini Sesto Elemento to anyone who can stop Tobey entering the race, causing a group of truckers to go after the Mustang as well. Julia retaliates by convincing Monarch of Tobey’s innocence, securing his invitation to the De Leon.
This idea of the “De Leon” as a sort of international championship of illegal street racing, “organized by the mysterious Monarch” (played by Michael Keaton) is preposterous. The “winner-take-all” means that six guys driving six million-dollar exotic cars (Bugatti, Lamborghini, etc.) are each betting their cars as the stakes, so that the winner gets the cars of the other five drivers. So, yeah, you’re so rich that you can spend $2.4 million for a Bugatti Veyron and you’re also such a macho egomaniac that you’re going to risk this expensive car in a street race against five other supercars, including a hand-built Saleen S7. Grant that some people are both rich and crazy — “Hey, let’s get in a carbon-fiber mini-submarine and go see the Titanic!” — but is it likely that six of them would be racing their million-dollar supercars this way? If you’ve got that kind of money to throw around, why not just rent a racetrack for the weekend?
Or, for that matter, why not build your own racetrack?
Obviously, I’m not the first person to point out this absurdity — or the many other absurdities in Need for Speed. My point, however, isn’t just that this movie is ridiculously bad, but rather that the people who made the movie believed that many people would pay money to see something this bad — and they weren’t wrong! This stinking pile of garbage cost $66 million to make, and it grossed more than $200 million worldwide, which is a sad commentary on the human condition.
In a world full of stupid people, all kinds of terrible things happen, and the fact that this awful movie actually turned a profit is almost as terrible as Joe Biden getting 81 million votes. But yeah, that’s a different definition of “implausible,” I guess.
Marion in the hands of the bad guys – but not for long…
After her memorable debut as Katy in Animal House, Karen Allen appeared in a sizable number of movies, but people probably remember her best as Marion Ravenwood, the feisty feminine foil to Harrison Ford’s adventurous archaeologist in Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequels, including the (apparently) regrettable Dial of Destiny. While it was tempting to go with Karen displaying her fine assets in Animal House, I decided to go with a more demure pic from Raiders of the Lost Ark instead, in the interests of keeping this blog PG-13. She still looks good, considering she’s in her seventies. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
Via Legal Insurrection, it appears that, per the Biden Administration’s illustrious peat muppetPress Secretary, SCOTUS decisions are tantamount to Constitutional Amendments:
“This is really, really important and I know the American people are really tracking this, as they should be. Dobbs decision, that was something that was decided on a year ago. Really took away the freedoms from women. I think about abortion, I think about reproductive rights. And that was unprecedented. Now you fast-forward to what we saw last week, affirmative action. Again, taking away important constitutional rights that have been in place for a long time,” Jean-Pierre said.
One is tempted to indulge in a little bit of fremdschämen, when one feels embarrassment on behalf of someone too thick to realize that they should be ashamed.
But, in defense of Karine Jean-Pierre, we don’t declare war or budget along Constitutionally coherent lines either. So possibly she makes a good point in passing: we need to either get this ship back on course, or just scuttle the whole mess.
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON Kings Mountain reaches an altitude of 5,800 feet above sea level, towering nearly 3,000 feet above the Matanuska River valley below, and there’s really no way that a photo can convey the impression of standing there in person looking up at that massive peak in three-dimensional space. Breathtaking is all I can say, and while the Alaska Chamber of Commerce isn’t paying me to say this — c’mon, hit the freaking tip jar — I’d certainly recommend that every American should pay a visit.
About three hours from now, our plane leaves for the return flight home, and we’ve had a wonderful time during our visit. Just driving along the highways here is a splendid adventure, surrounded by vast forests of fir, birch and cottonwood, with gigantic mountains on every horizon, their peaks often shrouded in clouds, making them look like scenery from a Lord of the Rings movie: “Here be orcs!”
‘Who you calling an ‘orc,’ mister?’
Our granddaughter Juniper is about two months old and, as you can see, is about twice the size of a 12-ounce cup of coffee. That photo was taken Saturday at the Alaska Zoo, where we spent about five hours, including a break at the zoo coffee shop where we enjoyed some entertainment.
Walk don’t run to see the SpeNerds
The SpeNerds (their name a play on words for the Spenard neighborhood of Anchorage) bill themselves as “Alaska’s Premier Instrumental Surf Trio,” and let no man dispute their claim to that honor. Among the various tunes they performed was Dick Dale’s classic “Misirlou” (which gained renewed popularity in the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction). At one point during their performance, they played the theme song from Goldfinger, and talking to them after the gig, while they were packing up their gear, I suggested that should have been segued into “Secret Agent Man” by Johnny Rivers, to which guitarist Fred Brosius replied that they’d played that one before I arrived. My son plays guitar, and I was telling him how the surf rock sound came about at a period when the electric guitar was still something of a novelty, and guitarists were experimenting with effects like reverb and tremolo, and this sonic experimentation must be appreciated in its historic context. Cultural education is an ongoing obligation of parenthood. Meanwhile . . .
The sergeant gives Juniper airborne training
We spent the Fourth of July at the Glacier View Car Launch, and I apologize that I don’t have any videos of my own to share, but they’re easy to find online. And, of course, I bought the T-shirt, because what’s the point of visiting Alaska if you don’t bring home some souvenirs?
The sergeant and his familyWith Mrs. McCain at the Car Launch
Well, we weren’t just tourists, here for sightseeing. We wouldn’t have visited Alaska if not for the fact that our son and his family are here, and this was our first chance to see our newest grandchild. They’ll be coming to visit us at Christmas, but for now I must pack up the laptop and head to the airport, leaving just enough time for me to once more remind readers of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:
So after getting whupped in Philadelphia, the Senators boarded the train to Baltimore hoping to regain their road warrior mojo, but it was not to be: while Joe Coleman won the opener to balance his record at 2-2, Pat Dobson got outdueled by Andy Messersmith and Jim Kaat got pounded in an 8-1 rout. So the lads limped home to RFK, and whipped the Cubs in three hard-fought games to notch the first series win at home of the season and hang onto a second-place tie with Pete’s Brewers in the AL West. Juan Marichal outdueled Juan Pizarro in Game 1, which was won by Willie Mays’ home run in his first at-bat of the game. In Game 2, Joe Coleman held the Cubs to three runs, but the game was won by Darold Knowles in relief as Jeff Burroughs hit a sac fly in the bottom of the 9th to score Hal Lanier. The Nats benefitted from three errors by the Cubs and three double plays, as well as a great throw by Rick Reichardt to nail Vada Pinson at home. Game Three featured Pat Dobson holding the Cubs to four runs while the Nats pounded Clyde Wright for seven runs (six earned) including homers by Rick Reichardt and Jeff Burroughs. Thus we ended the week 4-2, and will face the division-leading A’s at home on Tuesday. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts. Anybody know what’s going on with Weasel Zippers? Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
Most “mass shootings” in urban America are actually shootouts between rival gangs, or personal disputes that turn into gunfights in crowded areas where bystanders are among the killed and wounded. And, since we’re clarifying phrases, let’s admit that “urban America” is a polite euphemism for where black people live. We have been taught by the news media to think of “mass shootings” as a category of crime whose perpetrators are crazy white men, e.g., Charles Whitman, who killed 15 people on the University of Texas campus in 1966, or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999.
The point is that any discussion of “mass shootings” involves stereotypes, simply because of the way the media covers crime. The Gun Violence Archive (GVA) defines a mass shooting as one that involves “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed,” distinguishing this from the category of mass murder, which the FBI defines as “four or more victims, killed, not including the shooter. Mass Murder by gun is a subset of the Mass Shooting count.” By Thursday, July 6, according to the GVA, there had been a total of 361 mass shooting incidents in the United States in 2023, of which 27 were mass murder incidents (at least four killed, not counting the shooter). Thursday was the 186th day of the year, so simple math tells us that we’re averaging about two mass shootings per day this year, and about one mass murder per week. Given the frequency of such crimes, the national media can’t give full attention to all of them, so they tend to be selective in their coverage, and therefore most mass shootings are considered to be strictly “local news.”
What happened Monday night in Philadelphia’s Kingessing neighborhood was definitely not the typical urban mass shooting. A lone gunman, wearing a ski mask and a bulletproof vest, walked down the street “aimlessly” shooting random people with an AR-15-style rifle. The gunman also carried a 9mm pistol and multiple magazines of extra ammunition. This rampage killed five people and wounded two others. Kimbrady Carriker has been charged with five counts of murder and several other felonies. Many hours elapsed after the shooting before Carriker’s name was made public, but almost as soon as it was, we learned that Kimbrady Carriker was a cross-dresser.
The main problem with mass shootings, according to liberals, is not that people get killed, but that the “far right” might blame someone — i.e., that conservatives will point out that this crime doesn’t seem to fit the preferred media narrative about who commits mass shootings. The other problem: What about his/her/their pronouns?
There was some confusion initially about Mr. Carriker’s gender identity and in a news conference on Tuesday, authorities used the pronouns “they/them.” But on Wednesday the district attorney’s office said it had no information indicating the suspect considered himself anything but male.
“It creates a situation where mostly Black and Brown people can’t be in their neighborhood enjoying summer weather. Kids — anyone — enjoying their block should not live in fear of being shot and killed,” she said Tuesday.
Now that Democrats control the state house for the first time in 12 years following last November’s election, [Council Member Jamie] Gauthier said some movement on gun control legislation has started. However, any house bills would still face opposition in the GOP-controlled state senate.
“In Pennsylvania, you have Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the cities and outside of that, you have a lot of rural areas that don’t look like us and don’t have the same issues with everyday gun violence — and don’t have the same motivation to really cut off access to these types of weapons,” she said. “We have a long way to go to get these kinds of weapons off the street.”
There are 67 counties in Pennsylvania — Philadelphia (1.6 million people, about 12% of the state population), Allegheny (i.e., Pittsburgh, 1.2 million people, about 9% of the state population) and 65 others with about 10 million people total (about 78% of the state population). The two big cities account for slightly more than one-fifth of Pennsylvania’s population, but in 2021, when there were 1,027 homicides in the state, these two cities accounted for about two-thirds of the total; Philadelphia alone had nearly 55% of Pennsylvania’s homicide total that year.
The per capita homicide rate in Philadelphia was more than triple the rate in Pittsburgh, and more than 10 times higher than the rest of the state. This is not a gun control problem. This is a people problem; specifically, it’s about the people of Philadelphia who are either (a) part of the problem, or (b) too stupid to understand how to fix the problem.
If you’re voting for Democrats like Jamie Gauthier, you are the problem. Gauthier can only think of violent crime in terms of passing new laws to “get these kinds of weapons off the street,” so that it never occurs to her that, by enforcing existing laws, Philadelphia could get these kinds of people off the streets — put them in prison where they belong.
Or in the lunatic asylum, as would seem to be the case with Kimbrady Carriker, who not only occasionally dressed up in women’s clothing, but also at different times used his (or “their”) social media to express support for Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump. As I said of another notorious cross-dresser, Carriker is self-evidently “daft, deranged, bonkers, berserk, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.” The evidence of his craziness is impossible to overlook:
Philadelphia Shooting Perp Says
He Opened Fire to Help the City
Do Something About ‘Gun Violence’
. . . The shooter accused of killing five people during a harrowing rampage in Southwest Philadelphia Monday night told police the shooting spree was an attempt to help authorities address the city’s gun violence crisis, and that a deity would be sending more people to help, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
The assertions by Kimbrady Carriker were made to police in the hours after Carriker was arrested on the 1600 block of South Frazier Street, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation.
Carriker first told responding officers who made the arrest that they had done a good job, the sources said. Carriker also told them the gunfire — which spanned several blocks and struck people, including two children, who had no apparent connection to one another — was an attempt to help police because “all these guys are out there killing people,” the sources said.
I keep telling you: Crazy People Are Dangerous. And the national media will now decide this is strictly “local news.”
Via 
