This year the incident was a minor car accident. I was taking a SuperShuttle van home from Dulles Airport late Sunday night (I had snuck off to Minneapolis for a long weekend, calling in sick to work Thursday and Friday), and the brainiac driver decided to stop in the middle of the street to debate with two passengers about which one would be dropped off first. As we were sitting there, an SUV rear-ended us. Long story short, I ended up having to lug my suitcase nearly a mile home at about 1 a.m. On the plus side, I saved $22 because the driver didn't charge me.
So I took yesterday off work as well, more from sleep deprivation than effects of the crash. I didn't think I was injured -- my head and neck hurt, but my head and neck usually hurt. Still, during the day yesterday, my headache got steadily worse, and I couldn't turn my head without wincing. But did I let that stop me from seeing a movie? Of course not! What am I, rational or something?
I wish I'd picked a better movie, though. Despite its tepid reviews, I wanted to see Joy Ride because it was directed by neo-noirist John Dahl (of The Last Seduction and Red Rock West fame) and starred Steve Zahn, who's nearly always enjoyably loopy. On the scale of psychotic trucker movies, though, I'd have to rank this somewhere below Breakdown (and I'm starting to think that once you've seen one psychotic trucker movie, you've seen them all). Zahn is fun, and Dahl elegantly ratchets up tension through atmosphere rather than dialogue, but the plot holes are large enough to, well, drive a truck through. If you asked me to describe the movie in two words, they would be "distractingly stupid."
The luscious Paul Walker (I'm not going to even mention the characters' names, because they're so inane, like "Venna" and "Fuller") decides to drive home to New Jersey from college in California so that he can pick up platonic-but-ready-for-more friend Leelee Sobieski in Colorado. Along the way, he bails his fuck-up older brother, Zahn, out of jail. Zahn promptly installs a CB radio in the car and encourages Walker to play a prank on a truck driver by pretending to be a woman and offering to meet him at a motel, room 17. The boys are in room 18, and they hear the trucker arriving for the rendezvous, finding the room occupied by a man, and not taking the disappointment well.
This is where it gets stupid. The trucker somehow figures out that Walker and Zahn are the ones who tricked him, which car they drive, what their names are, and even that they're brothers. Even though he's driving a huge, smoke-belching, thundering truck, he somehow stealthily tracks them without ever being spotted. He corners them and smashes their car against a tree until they apologize to him. Then he just leaves. Somehow the boys get the car fixed as good as new at some dirtbag, roadside gas station. They go get Sobieski. And the trucker comes back for no apparent reason. Things just get dumb and dumber from that point on, including one stunt where the trucker insists that the boys go into a truck stop cafe buck nekkid. It's completely pointless and unbelievable -- but thank you (or should I say "merci beau cul"?) (did I mention that Paul Walker is a hottie? Nothing like hot male nudity to distract you from head trauma).
The trucker is some omniscient being who can jump ahead of the boys or be right behind them, who knows which road they'll take, who knows who their friends are. In a way, this movie would have been better if the villain had been a supernatural entity, because as it is, I spent the whole movie wondering where he was getting his information (and why he didn't just run the boys' car off the road instead of going to such elaborate lengths to torture and threaten them, putting himself at risk for a huge range of criminal charges and no doubt failing to deliver his shipment so that my Safeway runs out of their cappuccino drink again because he never showed up with it, forcing me to take a Vivarin with a chocolate milk chaser). And the ending goes beyond the bounds of idiocy to a whole new world of utter stupidity.
It's a shame, because Walker and Zahn have such great chemistry that a tighter, smarter plot would have made this a terrific movie. Zahn is especially good in a role that's deeper than it seems at first -- he's a smart-ass screw-up who pretends not to care, but he's jealous of his little brother. Walker's not really that good an actor, but he's likable... and did I mention how attractive he is?
This may be
the first movie since the 1970s to highlight the dark side
of CB radio (this may be the first movie since the '70s to use the
phrase
"CB radio"). I remember we had one back in the '70s; my father's
handle was "Silver Ghost" (we drove cross-country in a silver Dodge
van).
As Zahn puts it, it was something of a "prehistoric Internet" -- I
remember
thinking it was unbelievably cool. Little did I realize the danger we
dodged.
Of course, my father never pretended to be a lot lizard named "Candy
Cane"
... as far as I know.
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