Ruminations in Korea

I just finished watching a pirated copy home viewing version of Ghost Rider that I downloaded managed to acquire. (SHAME on you pirates! Now I will have to pay money to watch it when if it gets to Korea, which I will assume will happen as the star is married to a woman of Korean heritage.)

First, my review of the movie and then my critique of the critics, my review of the reviewers, those who, by and large, are a generally useless class of human beings.

My conclusion, in a nutshell, is that it is a good, clean, harmless, fun movie, particularly if you like movies adapted from comic books. If you are a biker, especially one who rides cruisers, then you should enjoy it that much more.

The movie is not Oscar material. It is not one of the greatest movies ever made. It was never meant to be any of that. It was meant to be pure, escapist fun, and that is what it is. There are worse ways to spend and hour and 45 minutes of your life.

Nicholas Cage plays Johnny Blaze, a stunt rider who sold his soul to save his mentor/father from cancer. Blaze becomes the devil’s bounty hunter, rounding up some escapees from Hell, including the devil’s son, who are trying to steal a soul contract signed by an entire town 150 years or so ago. Along his journey to get the contract back, he meets up with a previous Ghost Rider from the old west who had originally rebelled against the devil by refusing to enforce the contract signed by the townspeople. Blaze also begins to control his powers and use them for good.

A few comments about the movie:

Sam Elliot played the older Ghost Rider. Elliot always looks great and sounds great in cowboy roles. This movie is no exception.

Peter Fonda plays Mephistopheles, who is apparently the devil (as opposed to Mephistopheles sometimes portrayed as chief of all demons). Being a big fan of classic biker film Easy Rider, I enjoyed seeing Peter Fonda as the devil employing the services of biker to do his bidding. Another fun little homage to Easy Rider was the muffler pipes of Blaze’s chopper were the same style pipes that Fonda had on his bike in Easy Rider.

Now…On to the critics and movie reviewers. I generally have no use for them. If I want to see a movie, I usually do not read reviews for that movie until AFTER I see the movie. One good thing about living in Korea is that I am able to miss out on the hype and negative publicity of movies.

It seems to me that reviewers do not know how to have fun. Moreover, they generally seem not to understand certain genres of movies, comic book adaptations especially. It must be sad not to be able to be entertained by entertainment. Simply put, just because you do not enjoy a particular genre of movie doesn’t necessarily mean that the movie is bad. Often, I wonder whether the critics even watched the same movie as me. Take, for example, this review from The Salt Lake Tribune.

At first, it seems like director-writer Mark Steven Johnson (who also adapted “Daredevil,” another Marvel Comics title) is embracing the absurdity of this story… It’s hard to look at the comic-book imagery of the Ghost Rider’s burning skull, metal-spiked leather jacket and flame-rimmed chrome-plated chopper — the sort of thing junior-high school boys draw during a dull social-studies class — without starting to snicker.

Well… First of all, the use of the word “absurdity” is objectionable. It is meant to cast disdain on the story and to show how ridiculous the reviewer finds the story line. Personally, I find it absurd that a movie review would think it necessary to point out to people that a movie based on a comic book story about a biker possessed by a fire elemental and serving as the devil’s bounty hunter is absurd.

Secondly, of course it is the sort of thing that junior high school boys draw in social studies class!!! That is the point of comic books! That is the target audience for comic books and movies adapted from comic books, the kids that are currently drawing the pictures in junior high and the older guys that remember drawing the pictures in junior high. What one reviewer would snicker at, many “regular” people would find to be cool and exactly the way an escapist comic book movie should be.

And Johnson even tosses in some offhand (and possibly inadvertent) references to the Coen brothers, with a scene of Johnny meeting the devil at the crossroads (a la “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”).

This is just ignorance on the part of the reviewer. The devil at the crossroads has been around long before “O Brother, Where Art Thou”, at least since before Robert Johnson was singing about it in the 1920s. And even if he is aware of this fact, it would take a large leap of the imagination to assume it was a reference to the Coen Brother’s movie.

But Johnson falters badly when he expects us to take this silliness seriously. … What begins as a campy goof falls apart when it becomes bloated by self-importance and overblown special effects.

This is where I started to wonder if we had watched the same movie. This movie NEVER takes itself seriously. There are sufficiently campy comic book lines and moments throughout the movie. Take this sequence approximately 15 minutes from the end of the movie, for example. Keep you eye on the lizard in the bottom right corner of the pictures. This is CLEARLY not a movie that takes itself seriously:

Another reviewer who embodies the “just didn’t get it” crowd of reviewers states:

A Marvel Comics adaptation that, frankly, never should have even made it past the pre-production stage. This is a shapeless, confused and entirely muddle-headed movie…The basic problem with Ghost Rider: It’s not about anything. … Well, it’s about a skull-faced undead motorcycle rider who wields a chain and whose face is on fire. Beyond that, I give up.

Don’t give up. That’s EXACTLY what it’s about…Except he’s not undead.

However, there are a few who understand. Like this reviewer:

Although “Ghost Rider” wouldn’t necessarily qualify as a “good” movie, it does have a few wonderfully goofy moments squeezed in between a lot of unspectacular visual effects and ho-hum plot points Those who have no tolerance for jokiness where comic book icons are concerned will probably hate “Ghost Rider,”

And there a very few who completely get it, like this reviewer.

He spends his days in human form and nights as a skeleton flambe’ee battling evildoers on a burning chopper…The daytime Cage is without a doubt the weirder of the two identities…Writer/director Mark Steven Johnson (”Daredevil”) manages to spoof superhero, Western and biker-movie cliches and also play them straight. When you stunt-cast Peter Fonda as the devil in this film, you get a respectable performance and a joke all in one.

Perhaps the best, and most “with it” review of the movie was from E-Online’s Luke Thompson. He got straight to the point, which meant straight into the heart of the vast majority of critics and reviewers:

Seriously, people, if you’re going to go see a movie you know is about a biker with a flaming skull and magic chains, you forfeit the right to complain about how the plot isn’t logical or realistic. Or that there are too many special effects at the expense of story.

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[T]he Easy Rider summons the Ghost Rider up to do battle by proxy. Everything after that seems like it was made up as they went along.

Had, say, Ben Affleck been the star, the movie would suck hard. But Cage is allowed to let his freak flag fly, downing jellybeans from martini glasses and repeatedly making scary faces at himself in the mirror. If you can roll with that, take the ride.

Take the ride!