Let me set the scene: you’ve had a shitty week and you want to escape. You haven’t seen a movie in theaters for a while and the January “dumping ground” of unmarketable trash is overflowing with sub-tier titles to get your tiddies hard from the thought of the camp value. You convince your wife to go with you to a double-feature (but nothing subtitled, so you still haven’t seen Parasite). What do double-features in my family mean to me? It means sneaking-in from one movie to another. It doesn’t mean LEAVING THE THEATER to re-up only to have to come back in and pay for the second ticket. You need to be prepared: bring edibles; make sure you’ve gone to the bathroom; and go on a day when the ticket-taker wicket isn’t set up at the West Wing entrance where your two movies are going to be (the apps let you check your theater number now too). We had it all worked out: Ford v Ferrari was at 12:15 and ended at 15:00; Dolittle started at 15:00; and the theaters were side-by-side. Dolittle is really what we wanted to see but the timing wasn’t working: sometimes the second movie starts right away, and sometimes the gap between them is too long. This sounded like it would have worked like a dream. THANKS GOD. And then I had to piss. And Ford v Ferrari is not a short movie. A good movie, but not short. So I held my pee. And what happens as I leave the theater? They have the wicket set up at the end of the hallway, AFTER the men’s bathroom. Granted it was “Cheap Tuesday” but usually they have the L-shaped divider set up and it wasn’t there this time. The women’s bathroom doesn’t have any security: it’s halfway down the hall. And the East Wing of the theater doesn’t have the wicket set up after the bathroom! So I had two choices: either pee into my water bottle that I sneaked McDonald’s ice tea into and try to remember not to drink from it for the next two-hour movie (because we couldn’t get any snacks from concession either because of where it was located; that’s why my wife brought her purse the size of a knapsack) or pee like a normal person and skip the second movie. So we skipped the second movie.
Personally, I didn’t want to see Ford v Ferrari. Dolittle was my first choice (just to see what they did with the material). So the lesson here is, if you are planning your own double-feature, you should see the movie you want to FIRST and if sneaking into a second-or-third movie works then you can fly by the seat of your pants. You can’t plan on a solicited double-feature anymore: not when Cineplex is trying to outpace Landmark with their “new” seat reservation for all theatres. Landmark has beautiful, reclining seats, which tilt ALL THE WAY BACK and have a whole foot-and-a-half of space between your fully-extended toes and the row divider. Each seat is reserved; there are no jackasses behind you putting their feet on the seats next to you; and everyone is too far apart to hear anyone else talking during the movie. The only downside is that my favorite seats – the first-row of the front-half – don’t work there because of how the seats are positioned now: we had to watch xXx 3 lying almost-horizontally to see the screen. PLUS, theater sizes differ at Landmark too, so not only do you have to buy your tickets early but you have to know which theater has which seats where etcetera. At Cineplex, they took a label maker and literally numbered every old janky seat in their unrenovated isolation tanks and called it “reserved”. AND IT DOESN’T EVEN APPLY TO ALL MOVIES. Even if you WERE able to sneak in to a movie these days, there is a one-in-five chance that particular screening will have reserved seats lest you end up sitting in someone else’s spot and god-forbid have to act out a whole Punch-and-Judy show with total strangers when you just want to sit in a dark room and be left alone. If you haven’t figured it out already, we saw the movie at Cineplex. And THEN, halfway through Ford v Ferrari, the losers sitting behind us put their feet on the seat. If you want to disassociate me from whatever it is I’m watching, then go ahead and put your smelly, dog-poo covered, rank, ruder slippers up so I can see them through my peripheral vision for the rest of the film. Guaranteed I will remember more about your soles then I will the plot of what I’m supposed to be watching. IF YOU PUT YOUR FEET NEAR ME DURING A MOVIE THEN YOU ARE PERMANENTLY ON MY SHIT LIST. I don’t care if you’re Force Ghost Mother Teresa.
PHEW! That’s out of the way! Now what about the movie itself? Well, it was OK, wasn’t it? I wasn’t excited because the trailers made it look like every other docudrama about real-world events: famous actors playing famous people reciting well-scripted lines of expository dialogue in a way that makes me feel like I’m reading one of those children’s books about animals at the farm with the buttons on the side that you can press to hear a pig go Oink or the farmer go Get Off My Daughter. “So that’s what a cow sounds like? NOW I AM INFORMED.” Ford v Ferrari was very content to spoon-feed me their cited research like well-ground Gerber paste. This vomit-inducing style of filmmaking is campy-enough to qualify it for January viewing but the movie came out in November of last year and is still running shows all-day-long. Maybe there’s something else that kept audiences coming back? Oh I dunno, maybe it’s the AWESOME RACING SCENES that DOMINATE the other 60-percent of the movie. I haven’t seen car chases this effective at getting my adrenaline going since the original Gone in 60 Seconds or the first five minutes of Quantum of Solace, and I usually don’t get that way unless I’m playing a video game: the way I sit in my chair and sway back and forth like I’m the one driving. But this is James Mangold we’re talking about: the man made Logan! He knows how to shoot action fluidly and coherently and Ford v Ferrari is the perfect vehicle – ahem – to showcase his talents.
Alas, that is only 60-percent. The other 40 of the nearly-two-and-a-half-hour picture is maddening. History will not be kind to Henry Ford the Second, nor Leo Beebe (the Man In A Suit responsible for reporting Shelby’s progress to Ford). Good job to Josh Lucas for really, genuinely making me hate a guy: that he isn’t a fictional character but based off a real person means that the film will assume that I will hate him, as it wants me to. What would Beebe’s family have to say to this legacy? Is this one already shared within the community? And that’s really what the film is about, or at least should be about: the legacy of Miles and his relationship with Shelby. Yes, Ford was as instrumental in the development of the GT40 as Supreme Commander Kathleen Kennedy is to Disney’s new direction for Star Wars (Money. They put up the money). But the scenes with Ford – and especially Beebe – butting heads with Shelby about his choice to put Miles in the driver’s seat (because he is an outspoken Brit who doesn’t follow orders) are exasperating. It ultimately brings the movie down. There may even be a different movie here that works better: maybe just centered around the 24-Hours at Le Mans? One without the Lizard People politics and more about the responsibility of remaining true to history? True to Miles? True to Shelby?
And then it all ends in a most spectacular fashion. I haven’t seen a movie in a while where it hits all three strikes: the hero doesn’t win in the end; the big bad corporation gets off (and lands the photograph that Bebee insisted on); and our main character dies. AND IT’S ALL TRUE. It then goes on for another age to grieve for Miles when the film already had the bittersweet images of his death and Shelby’s opening narration repeated. At that point I was ready for Text. The movie isn’t called Ken Miles v The World: it’s called Ford v Ferrari. Ford did technically win. So isn’t the movie over? I left confused and angered that what should have been a celebration really was just another money laundering enterprise. Is it worth watching? Well, 60-percent is still an above-average grade so yeah, I guess it’s worth it… maybe. Maybe for Tuesday prices. It still doesn’t make 100. I think it was former video game critic Cam Winstanley who once said that nothing is so terrible that it’s worth 0 but nothing is so great to be worth 100. When you think of it like that then maybe 60 just isn’t good enough anymore. If it was shorter and structured differently then it could have distinguished itself. You don’t care. It has fast cars and manly men sticking their middle finger to the Man. You’ve probably seen it already. I’m two months late and it still managed to take my money. You’re getting into the right profession, Jason.
//jf 1.25.20
theory of a daskeman 