Tag: Featured

“Oh Sit” 
Wednesday 8pm, CW
When the fall of Western Civilization comes —and it is coming, I think we all know that —and someone asks you to pinpoint the moment you knew it had all gone wrong, I hope you say: extreme musical chairs. That’s the concept behind this new competition, in which a dozen contestants compete for $50,000 by trying to outsmart, outwit, and outlast each other in a cracked-out version of the popular children’s birthday party game. Instead of a scratchy record player blaring “Pop Goes the Weasel,” a live band will provide the sounds. Instead of rickety stools, there are space-aged perches (between this and “The Voice” we are living in a golden age of giant, ugly televised furniture). And instead of going around in a circle, these assholes will have to fight through ridiculous obstacle courses, pushing and shoving their way to victory. Congratulations, America: this is something that exists! Hosted by Jamie Kennedy (Scream) and Jessi Cruickshank, who I don’t think is Hermione Granger’s cat, but I can’t be sure.

“Married to Jonas” 
Sunday 10pm, E!
I am a whore for celebrity gossip, and I love a juicy blind item. A few months ago there was a particularly interesting one floating around the blogosphere (are we still calling it that?) that many believed pointed to this new reality show starring Jonas Brother Kevin (a.k.a. the one everyone forgets) and his wife, Danielle. I won’t go into the details, because I would like to not get sued. But suffice it to say, more than a few people have wondered about the origins of this series, which revolves around Danielle and her Jersey-fied family.

“The Inbetweeners” 
Monday 10:30pm, MTV
British teen sitcom “The Inbetweeners” is one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen. The tale of four horny smartass losers trying to navigate through high school was every kind of wrong, which wrapped it back around to right. It found a cult following in the States, and when MTV announced last year that it was making a U.S. version, the original show’s fans were furious. Their concerns are justified: the former music video channel completely blew the American version of my beloved “Skins.” But just based on the preview for “Inbetweeners,” the casting at least looks decent, and there are already jokes at the expense of the handicapped. So the spirit of the original, hopefully, has made its way across the pond.

And so another Philip K. Dick story gets another shot at being another movie. Funny how hard it is not to go in feeling protective and skeptical, as if Paul Verhoeven’s admittedly singular Schwarzenegger staple from 1990 were some kind of inviolable masterpiece. This version, from director Len Wiseman and a complex web of writers, seems fun enough while it lasts but in the end not totally recallable. No eyeballs about to pop, no “give deez peepul ayre,” no little man protruding from another man’s belly and demanding that you open your mind. Still, if not as camp then as midsummer popcorn dressing, it’ll do.

In a grimy, concrete city of the doomed future, a factory worker (Colin Farrell) takes a mental vacation from his job manufacturing law enforcement robots, only to find himself on the run from law enforcement robots—and by extension their boss, an evil tyrant (Bryan Cranston) with a world-domination agenda. It happens as a headlong rush of implanted memories, confused identities, and variously toxic atmospheres, not the least of which is our hero’s suddenly troubled marriage. His particular wife-or-dream-girl conundrum, with Kate Beckinsale as the former and Jessica Biel as the latter, involves the special intimacy of martial arts brawls and matching bullet wounds. (Wiseman is married to Beckinsale, and for several movies now he has enjoyed arranging and recording her action-figure poses.)

The movie’s gloomy, rainy sprawl suggests a deeper debt to Blade Runner than to its namesake, which might only mean that Wiseman isn’t fussy about sovereignty. He has vision enough: This domination-threatened world has reverted, post-apocalypse, to a very unhealthy colonial relationship between Great Britain and Australia, now connected by an enormous intra-planetary elevator. Perhaps befitting the impresario of all things Underworld, it’s a world of gravitational challenges, aesthetically intriguing for its extreme verticality of urban density, with characters tending to leap and fall more often and more articulately than they speak. One potential exception to that tendency is a tyrant resister played by Bill Nighy, but the film acts nervous around his intelligence, and squanders it.

With time, completist fans will scour minutiae for illuminating points of continuity between this Total Recall and the first one. At first glance it seems most telling that both invoke fears of accidental lobotomy early on, both find room in their dystopias for a three-breasted sex worker, and both prompt our hero to ask, “If I’m not me, who the hell am I?” Farrell delivers that theme summarizing line with adrenalized desperation, his forte. Having also been in Minority Report, he obviously feels comfortable within Dickian confines of mind-bending pulp; on the run and unsure whether to trust anyone, including oneself, he’s at his best. Farrell’s half-innocent badass beefcake seems more anonymous than Schwarzenegger’s, and that only affirms the perpetual movie-readiness of the source material. As for its cultural staying power, we’ll know more whenever the next version comes.

Total Recall/ PG-13, 118 minutes/Regal Downtown Mall 6

Charlottesville has a habit of slowing down during the summer months. Most UVA students and many faculty are on summer break, cutting the population by nearly a third. Some art galleries close, concerts and performances are comparatively sparse, and many local residents take a vacation. It’s true that Charlottesville has a wealth of worthy summertime activities, from seasonal food vendors to nearby swimming holes, but sooner or later the broiling heat sets in and the remaining, sweating townies desire larger, more extravagant entertainment to appeal to our baser instincts. For this, we turn to surrounding counties for one of the most exhilarating events of the summer: the demolition derby.

As a city kid, I had never even heard of demolition derbies. Attending one for the first time as an adult, I found it to be a thrilling pinnacle of DIY, lowbrow entertainment. Summer blockbusters may provide spectacles of mayhem, but there’s nothing quite like watching two (or three or four) vehicles deliberately smashing into each other in a semi-controlled and ostensibly safe environment. Since my first derby years ago, I’ve made it a point to attend at least one every summer.

For the uninitiated, a demolition derby is basically a sport involving competitive car crashes. In a flattened dirt pit, surrounded by concrete safety barriers, the drivers compete in a series of heats in which an increasing number of vehicles are pitted against one another until only one remains functional. Any car that stays stationary, or fails to make contact with another car for a certain period of time, is eliminated.

What begins as uncontrolled mayhem —a half-dozen vehicles playing bumper cars with real cars—is soon sorted out into a competition, as the toughest vehicles and best drivers compete against one another, strategically ramming vehicles into the barriers and each other until their frames are mangled, their engines crushed, their wheels thrown askew, and they can move no more. For the derby’s final heat, all cars that can still get their engines started compete against each other, often with as many as a dozen vehicles at once.

For use in a derby, the vehicles are stripped down: The passenger seats and the dashboard are ripped out, the interior is gutted, the window glass and lights are removed, the doors are welded shut, safety bars are installed, and the gas tanks are replaced (often with boat tanks), holding just enough fuel to compete in the match —any cars leaking fluid, or repeatedly catching fire, are disqualified.

It’s an odd procession of vehicles, mostly cars from the ’70s and ’80s which, having outlived all other usefulness, get fixed up just enough to function in a competition that will leave them totally demolished. A few participants drive sturdier, elongated station wagons (I’ve even seen what looked like a hearse), although they have a tendency to jackknife upon heavy impact. Trucks and farm vehicles are out, as they would dominate the competition—most of the cars tend to be sturdy American-made ones (some derbies even insist on it). It’s not just rural American pride, but also an issue of practicality—most of the smaller and lighter foreign cars would be crushed immediately.

A number of websites track an index of all the scheduled fairs, and many drivers are semi-professionals, spending their summers competing around the state—the winner, after all, receives a cash prize. More seasoned drivers who are looking forward to showing down against one another may even pick off the more vulnerable or less experienced drivers before they face off. But some of the competitors are also local, often sponsored by a nearby auto shop. Many cars have advertisements or humourous slogans crudely spray-painted on their doors, and the crowd is never more riled up than when cheering for a hometown hero.
Those looking to add further debauchery to the spectacle of two hours of car wrecks can indulge in the guilty pleasure of heart-stopping fairground food: chili cheese dogs, funnel cakes, and deep-fried Oreo cookies.

There are a number of events held at various county fairs throughout the summer. Several derby events have already come and gone, but there are more to come. Albemarle County Fair, sadly, does not feature a demolition derby, but nearby Harrisonburg is hosting one on Friday, August 17 at the Pepsi Grandstand as part of the Rockingham County Fair, which runs from August 13 to 18. Tickets for the derby are $15 and under, and, like the fair, the derby is an all-ages event.