Ghost Rider

Set up the Mac beta of Netflix yesterday. It's great for checking out films that aren't worth a rental. My instant list now seems to be populated primarily by Nick Cage films. I watched the beginning of Ghost Rider, a case of attempted style over substance. I'm still trying to figure out why the opening montage doesn't work. The film plays like a typical B-movie—a series of incidents strung together without concern for emotional understanding. Like the devil shows up and promises to heal your sick father and you just believe him. The attempted stylization is interesting too... like where Peter Fonda (the devil) forms a creepy shadow as he talks to a young Johnny Blaze. But like everything else, it is just an image stirred into a vacant stew. There's no anticipation and no resonance. One thing that stuck out was the scene in which Johnny Blaze discovers his dad is sick by finding a letter from the hospital in the trash. I've been thinking about discovery events because it's a common way to keep the plot moving. We have one in noise film when Ben sees the Turning's End flyer. One fancy one that I remember is in Amelie where a rolling ball leads Amelie to a cache of ephemera. The problem with Ghost Rider is that this incident, like everything else in the intro, is a bridge to nowhere. It's as if Mark Steven Johnson had a check list of events he had to cover and then he went down his list. And then when we finally get to the present day, nothing happens. Ignoring the fact that medical test results don't come in envelopes, the problem is not young Blaze's reaction (or lack of it) but the contrivance of this event to begin with. Bad news usually tries to conceal itself shrouded in whispers or euphemisms. The action scenes are a problem too. It's as if there wasn't enough coverage shot to work with. There was no way to build and extend the drama. The early love scenes are similarly problematic—there's some really stilted blocking and a wait to reveal Blaze's girlfriend's face that never pays off. It's as if Johnson had no idea of how this thing was going to be cut and only thought about his crane shot. What makes Ghost Rider interesting is not that it's bad, but that it's instructively bad.