Posted on 11/23/2019 7:02:48 AM PST by Drew68
This post contains spoilers for Ford v Ferrari, a bad movie that you should not see.
In the opening moments of Ford v Ferrari, racecar driver Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) is somewhere around the halfway mark of the 1959 24 Hours of Le Mans, the grueling French endurance race in which drivers speed around an 8.5-mile circuit as many times as possible for 24 hours straight. Its the middle of the night, and fatigue is obviously starting to catch up with Shelby. He slows down for a pit stop and warns his crew that the engine is running hot. Right on cue, flames leap out of his car and onto his suit. After a tense scuffle, the pit crew puts out the fire and looks nervously at Shelby.
Am I on fire? he shouts. He is not. Then fill her up, he demands. The race must go on.
The scene is, in itself, a neat metaphor for our societys addiction to fossil fuels: Even in the face of disaster, Shelby is too addicted to speed and glory to fathom not refueling his vehicle. He has a compulsion to continue doing literally the exact same thing over and over and over again, even if it threatens to kill him and those around him. The ensuing two and a half hours of Ford v Ferrari are slick with the same uncanny symbolism: Though director James Mangold never once even winks at the negative environmental effects of combusting all that gasoline, he has unwittingly managed to create a striking cinematic allegory for the climate crisis.
The critically acclaimed Ford v Ferrari, currently the No. 1 movie in the country, is a celebration of all the American values that got us into the climate emergency and a repudiation of the values well need to get out of it. The plot concerns Ford Motor Companys entrée into designing race cars in the 1960s, a gambit that a craggy executive played by Jon Bernthal best known for playing the title role in Netflixs The Punisher series explains will help the ailing auto manufacturer sell more cars to teenagers. After a botched attempt to buy the niche Italian company Ferrari, Ford hires Shelby and a hotheaded British driver named Ken Miles (Christian Bale) to build a car that will beat Ferrari at Le Mans. The rivalry is personal: Henry Ford II (an entertainingly blustery Tracy Letts) decides to greenlight the racing project after hearing that Ferraris president called him fat, a son of a whore, and a pale imitation of his famous grandfather*.
All the greatest hits of American exceptionalism are baked into the script. Individualism? The central tension of the movie is between Shelbys desire to do things on his own and the auto companys habit of succeeding via collaboration. (You cant win a race by committee, Shelby tells Ford at one point, articulating the films thesis statement.) Norm-breaking? Shelby and Miles masterstroke for winning Le Mans is to swap out their cars brakes midway through the race, a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Le Mans rulebook. Xenophobia? Ferraris execs are painted as backstabbers who deserve a comeuppance, and frequently their Italian dialogue doesnt even get subtitles, so uninterested is the movie in their perspective.
White masculinity? There is not a single character of color in the film, and only one female character with a name: Kens wife Mollie, played by the appealing Irish actress Caitriona Balfe. In lieu of interiority, Mollie is given a lust for speed to match her husbands, at one point zooming the family car around a winding suburban road, careening past other cars, while Ken yells at her to slow down. (Ford v Ferraris idea of feminism: Women 👏 can 👏 pollute 👏 and 👏 endanger 👏 peoples 👏 lives 👏 too 👏.)
Of course, weve seen all these tropes before in most sports movies and in nearly every biopic about a Great Man Who Sees Things Differently. Usually its possible to squint at a cinematic celebration of individual male greatness and find some virtue or at least some fun in it, if you dont think about it too hard. But in the self-serious Ford v Ferrari, the dark side of these tropes is tough to ignore this is a movie thats literally about burning fossil fuels as recklessly and noisily as possible. Americas dependency on individual convenience, tolerance for rule-breaking, indifference to people of color and everyone else inhabiting our planet, and deference to white male corporate executives are some of the main reasons were the biggest carbon polluter in history. But hey, those traits also won us some car races!
Near the end, it looks like Ford v Ferrari is about to make a sop to the value of teamwork. Shelby and Miles car is laps ahead of the competition in the 1966 Le Mans, easily on the path to winning the race. Then a sniveling Ford vice president played by Josh Lucas has a suggestion: What if Miles slows down to allow two other Ford cars to catch up to him, and then they all cross the finish line together as a testament to Fords greatness? Miles uncharacteristically decides to go along, selflessly stopping to wait for the other Ford drivers before they hit the 24-hour mark. But its a trap! Despite Miles obvious superiority, one of the other Ford drivers wins Le Mans on a technicality. Take that lesson to heart, kids: You should never sacrifice your own personal glory for the greater good.
As wildfires rage in Australia, a record-breaking hurricane season draws to a close, and meteorologists predict that this year will go down as the second-hottest in recorded history, its clear that Ford v Ferrari is the wrong movie for 2019. It would have also been the wrong movie for 2009, 1999, and 1989. It might have seemed OK in 1979, when fossil fuel companies like Exxon knew about the peril of global warming but the American movie-going public did not. Ford v. Ferrari feels like a stinking relic dug up from the bowels of the earth and endlessly refined until it acquired a nice plastic sheen. It should have stayed in the ground.
Can't tell if this is satire or not.
Ping
<< Shelby is too addicted to speed and glory to fathom not refueling his vehicle. He has a compulsion to continue doing literally the exact same thing over and over and over again, even if it threatens to kill him and those around him. >>
Has to be satire.
If this guy is serious, he should leave the cars to the men and get back on his bicycle...
It had to be, I thought, but Grist is a pretty solidly lefty website so I think they're actually trying to be serious.
FvF is a GREAT film, BTW! A rare treat celebrating conservative values. And it turns out to be a massive hit! Go figure?
Hell, that makes me want to go see it 3 or 4 more times.
Well, it was definitely more fun to read as satire. If not outright sarcasm!
Warning: F vs. F is not a film for Beta Males and other limp-wristed weaklings, simps, and losers.
if you have a resentment against achievement and hatred of winning
Damon is in it is reason enough to no go see it.
So the message here, from a Leftist, soy drinking pole smoker is, “Winning is bad, because losers. In the People’s Utopia, we will not tolerate winners.”
” a bad movie that you should not see “ ?
That’s a general rule with Matt Damon flicks, isn’t it ?
Kept me smiling....I must wonder what this author must be like to write an article like this. Mind bending
Climate Emergency! The new cry for more taxation! It for the children!
The more triggering the better.
Really.
They have two minutes of hate, we’ll do four minutes of hate.
Take what the walking talking piles of excrement do and double it.
Each time.
Folks, there is NO alternative.
But even with the sarcasm cranked to 11, this review pales to the unmatched, ROFLOL funny that is the AICN review of 300 from 2007.
Matt Damon does a fine job as Carrol Shelby.
I know you're (kinda) kidding, but not.
That this is a real article is fantastical in itself. Climatism has become a religion for these godless, brainless fanatical climatoids.
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