Free Style

Cripes, I forgot about this one.

Usually I try to do my write-ups in order of my viewing of the movies, but this time I screwed up. I saw this at the Cinemark in Fort Collins the day before my trip down to Westminster. Somehow it just sort of slipped my mind.

I hadn't wanted to see it that day, but I noticed that it was getting flushed out of the theaters about only a single week. I don't think I've ever seen that. Even Delgo, which set a record last December for the lowest opening weekend take ever for a wide release movie, hung around the Leominster multiplex for two weeks. But Free Style was a true one-and-done movie, at least in Colorado (later I found out that it stayed in Brighton a second week---but still...)

In case you didn't know, this is the story of Cale, played by Corbin Bleu, a teenage amateur motorcross rider in the Pacific Northwest who dreams of making it on the pro circuit. He's young and hungry, with a lot of heart. The odds are against him. We are supposed to root for him as he faces his obstacles---including poverty, a job that takes up all his time, a rival who is a bully, a faithless girlfriend, and simple bad luck.

It has the makings of a typical "underdog triumphs" kind story, set on the dirt track of motocross. Why did it do so poorly.

Well, it's just not a very good movie. In this case, it's not the story, which isn't that bad, even if its not very original (I can forgive unoriginality, so long as the narrative works).

What's horrible about this movie is the directing and the editing. It just went horribly, horribly wrong. As the movie started, I noticed that it seemed to be told in the hurried manner of a montage---many half-scenes piled on top of each other, the way the story of movie is sometimes accelerated in the third act of a conventional drama. But this wasn't in the third act. It was in the first act. It felt all herky-jerky, and made me feel like I was watching a trailer for the movie, instead of the movie itself.

By contrast, the actual motocross action scenes were often done in slow-motion. Should have been the other way around---the storytelling needs to come first. The action sequences, unless they are advancing the story itself, are just ornamentation.

I just now went and looked up the director William Dear on imdb. I didn't recognize any of his other titles, except for The Perfect Game, a little league baseball movie which was supposed to be released in the summer of 2008 (when I first saw trailers for it), but which still hasn't been released. A bad sign, to be sure.

Like I said, it wasn't all bad. I was most contented when this movie was sticking to the tried and true formula, for example in how the hero rejects his faithless girlfriend (she not only doesn't believe in his life's purpose, but then cheats on him) in favor of a new one, who is his true love (at least in narrative terms). The fact that she is so stereotypically Hispanic is a little bit of a canard, but I didn't mind it that much.

The movie did have its moments. CorbinBleu (Cale) is black, as is his younger sister in the movie. Their mother is played by Penelope Anne Miller. Just as I'm trying to figure that out, there is a scene in which the baby sister asks Cale, "Are we black or white?"

When a movie comes right out in the open and faces an issue like that, early on in the story, it gets a little gold star from me. Too bad this movie was returned by the choppy style in which is was made. It could have been a quiet little convention underdog story, with just enough original concept to make it worthwhile seeing. In that case, it might have even stayed around for a second week.