Monster Block Party: ATTACK THE BLOCK

Science fiction has always been the medium of metaphor.  During periods of social and political restrictions, sci-fi was a way to mask a writer or director’s social views behind facade of the fantastic.  Writers could talk about touchy subjects like race, gender, and sexuality without getting people into a huff.  No, no, these are transsexual aliens that the humans have to learn to coexist with and respect.  No connection with anything in the real world (wink, wink).  What?  I just have something in my eye, that’s all (wink, wink, wink).  The interesting thing is, for the Western world at least, we can now pretty much just say whatever we want.  We don’t get arrested or blackballed anymore, just flamed on the internet.  We’ve reached the point where we can drop the metaphor and say “this is a movie about racial and socioeconomic disparity, the glamour of crime, and the nebulous nature of family.  Plus, there are aliens.”  Take ATTACK THE BLOCK (2011), for instance.

The Capsule:

A wannabe gangsta crew of South London youths picks a fight with a recently crashed alien monster.  That first one was not so tough, but they get more than they bargained for when its much nastier mates show up looking for it.  On top of that, they also have to deal with the police who think they are responsible for all the chaos, and a proper gangsta who wants them dead for bringing the cops into his territory.  Cool headed Moses (John Boyega) must lead his people, now including the nurse his crew mugged earlier (Jodie Whittaker), through a locked down high-rise without being shot, arrested, or eaten.  The boys (and girls) of South London are going to show the aliens that they attacked the wrong block. 

 

Director Joe Cornish starts his modestly budgeted sci-fi story off with a cute trick.  Moses and his crew of block boys are first shown as a menacing gang of criminals.  Their hoods are up, their faces are masked, and their eyes are cold and intense.  They confront a single white lady, threaten her with a knife, and take her most meaningful possessions.  After she runs off, they joke around with each other about the crime.  It’s a bold way to introduce the heroes of your movie.  Sure, we find out later that they are just a bunch of kids who were just as scared about robbing someone as Sam was to be robbed (debatable, since she seems much more shaken, while they laugh it off).  Later, they even apologize to Sam, saying they would never have done it if they knew she lived on the same block.  They turn out to be basically good kids, but they make a threatening first impression.

Now, that’s a clever narrative, granted, but that’s not the trick.  The trick is why they are so threatening.  They are threatening because they are urban youths.   On the one hand, duh, that’s the whole point of the movie.  When I really thought about it, though, I realized how insidiously effective it was.  It got me, and usually I see through that shit.  I didn’t realize how much it got me until the second watch.  When I saw Moses’ crew all lined up with bandanas covering their faces, I thought they almost looked like outlaws in a western.  Then it struck me.  Almost every spaghetti western starts with the (anti) hero doing something disreputable.  It adds a layer of complexity and transgression to the character.  As long as they don’t do anything too despicable, I have no problem getting behind them.  A simple robbery where no one was hurt wouldn’t even have fazed me.  It just shows that the main character is a bit of a scoundrel.  No big deal, scoundrels are cool.  Spaghetti westerns happen on the dusty streets of the Old West, though.  I don’t hang out much in the Old West.  Sam’s mugging happened on a dark street in the city.  Scoundrels lurking in places you may actually go are suddenly a much bigger deal.  Thanks to the media, I subconsciously equate hoodies and puffy jackets and masks with danger.  So without realizing, I took a mental step back.  These guys are serious.  

Except that they are just a bunch of kids who like to read Naruto comics.  It was a total manipulation, and I fell for it.  I feel even worse because without their scary masks and hoodies, the kids are adorable.  They talk about video games.  They tease the local girls (who give it back to them just as hard).  They call their mums to check in and lie about what they were doing.   Most importantly, they look out for each other.  Someone is always calling the other cuz, or fam, which the urban dictionary tells me is what you say when you consider someone family.  It’s a tight group, and everyone obviously cares about each other.  They just have really bad role models, like Hi-Hatz, the block’s resident drug kingpin.  He gets to boss people around, always has money, and even records his own rap songs.  The boys are so enamored—and scared—of him, they just want to impress him.  The mugging was just their attempt to follow in Hi-Hatz’ gangsta footsteps.  There are even a couple of younger, even more adorable kids that follow Moses’ crew around.  Wannabe wannabe gangstas. 

All the kids are great, but Moses is the stand out performance.  Going back to the western thing, John Boyega does a great Clint Eastwood.   He has an amazing physical presence, silent and commanding, but compassionate as well.  His deep, soulful eyes convey the uncertainty he won’t allow himself speak aloud.   He is the most mature and serious of all the block boys, forced to be old beyond his years.  When Sam sees the Spider-Man sleeping bag in Moses' apartment and realizes how young he is, it's heartbreaking.  It’s very fitting that Boyega was the breakout star of the movie, landing a lead role in another moderately budgeted sci-fi epic.  I believe it was about an awakening of some kind.  Anyway, I predict a bright future for the lad.

Jodie Whittaker also does a fantastic job as Sam, the put-upon nurse who gets pulled into this mess.  She plays a good mix of terror at the situation and lingering anger at being victimized.  When the boys come bursting into her apartment while fleeing the aliens, she does not hold back in telling them off, even as she helps them.  It gives weight to the bond she develops with Moses.  Their relationship evolves from fear, to resentment, to begrudging cooperation, to eventual understanding and admiration.  By the end, when she’s sticking up for him to the cops, it feels earned.  

All the boys except Moses have parents, but they barely appear in the movie.  There are only quick shots of them as the boys excitedly rush to get weapons to fight off the alien invasion (before realizing how much nastier the males are).  Dennis’ dad makes him take the dog with him.  That wasn’t a great idea.  Aside from Sam, the only bonafide adult to get a decent sized role is Ron, played by Nick Frost.  He is nice to the kids and gives them a safe place to hold up, but he’s basically useless.  Slightly less useless is Brewis (Luke Treadaway), the hopelessly square suburbanite who uses the word “shizzle” about a decade too late while attempting a fist bump.  At least he doesn’t use the word “square”.   He’s older than the block boys, but isn’t what I would call an adult.  When he complains to Ron about being busted for drugs once, he’s talking about by his parents, not the police.  

The aliens are basically wild animals.  They reach Earth by chance, not as part of an organized invasion.  They have light absorbing fur, no eyes, and a giant mouth full of iridescent lamprey like fangs.  Like a fuzzy shadow with glowing teeth.  Gorilla wolf motherfuckers, the boys call them.  Brewis creates a speculative backstory about them, but the movie never goes into detail about the species other than they like to chow down on people and there dozens of males and only one female (sort of the reverse evolutionary flaw of the dragons from REIGN OF FIRE).  It’s the female’s scent that is motivating the rest of the GWMFs.  Another interesting thing I realized on my second watching was that the boys basically saved the world right in the beginning when they kill the female.  Without her, the species can’t reproduce.  There are only a couple of dozen males running around the block to worry about.  Those cause a lot of problems, but nothing compared to what would happen if they got busy making baby mouth monsters.  

The one rough thing about having a great cast is that it makes the deaths hurt all the more.  No one has a problem when an annoying bunch of assholes get killed in a movie.  You might even look forward to it (Hi-Hatz, for instance, or to a lesser degree, his puppet enthusiast henchman, Tonks).  It’s a totally different dynamic when sympathetic characters eat it.  [Spoilers coming] Even though Dennis was the hardest and most sneering member of Moses’ crew, his death was hard to take.  He played tough to the end, facing down the monsters to protect his mates.  When the end came, though, his façade dropped and he was just a scared kid.  The worst was Jerome.  He was the smartest and most sensitive one of the group.  I immediately latched on to him as my surrogate into the film (though in reality, I am  closer to Brewis).  He’s the person I least wanted to die, so of course he’s a goner.  His death scene was terrifying.  The gang is fleeing through a smoke filled hallway when Jerome gets separated.  He hears the GWMFs around him and gets more and more desperate.  Just as he reconnects with one of his mates, the aliens pounce and pull him back into the smoke, screaming.  That scene is like a knife in the stomach to me.  It works wonders for the continued tension, though.  If they can kill off the most sympathetic character, then no one is safe.  

The ending is ludicrous, but it affords Moses a defining moment on the road to being a true hero.  He takes responsibility for his actions and is willing to sacrifice his life to ensure his family and friends (and Brewis) make it out.  Ultimately, he becomes a legend on the block, a role model for the kids worth looking up to.

ATTACK THE BLOCK was Joe Cornish’s first and—criminally—only film so far.  He did a pass on the ANT-MAN screenplay, which retains a lot of his DNA (criminal becomes hero theme, sly humor, heart).  He was considered to direct one of the HUNGER GAMES movies, A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD (oh, if only), and the speculative GAMBIT movie, but didn’t get any of them.  Come on, Hollywood people, throw this guy a bone.  He clearly has the chops.  Maybe one of those Star Warses you’re always making these days.   I’m sure John Boyega would put in a good word.  I’ll bet he could even do metaphors, in a pinch.

C Chaka

Dumb Person Shooter: DOOM

Video game movies are never a safe bet.  There have been moderate successes, but nothing on the level of, say, movies made from amusement park rides (PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN).  They do, at least, fare better than board game movies (BATTLESHIP, OUIJA, SCRABBLE).  The biggest reason why they rarely live up to expectations is that games and movies are totally different mediums that don’t lend themselves to each other.  Games tend to be 15% story and 85% doing shit.  Even for the high budget titles featuring tons of cinematic cutscenes, most of the game is spent running around in real time dealing with repeating challenges.  This method doesn’t fit well with movies.  The only video game movie I can think of that was successful with this method is HARDCORE HENRY, and it isn’t actually based on a game.  Most video game movies do the inverse.  They expand out the story, rearranging or inventing key elements, and reduce the game play aspects to nods and references.  This approach rarely leaves anyone happy, but it is exactly what they did with the 2005 first person shooter inspired DOOM.  The good news is that there is still fun to be had, as long as you set your expectations low enough.  I suggest subterranean.

The Capsule:

It’s 2046 and bad shit is going down on a Mars research base.  Scientists have unleashed a destructive force that endangers the compound’s entire population.  If it breaches the teleporter, Earth itself may be at risk.  A marine unit led by Sarge (The Rock, pre Dwayne Johnson, or even Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) is sent in for rescue/containment.  As their numbers drop, they realize that all their firepower might not be enough to stop the unnatural menace lurking in the dark corridors.  They will also need bombs and punching.

There’s no getting around it, this is a dumb movie.  It hangs together fairly well on the surface, but if you start to really think about almost any aspect of the story, nothing makes sense.  Say, for instance, you discovered that the ancient Martians were monkeying around with genetic engineering just before they wiped their entire species out.  Should replicating those experiments – on death row inmates, for god’s sake – be your next logical step?  It’s the kind of dumb that I find endearing, though.  Like when a couple of marines are tensely searching the dead silent med lab and all the caged animals suddenly start making noise at once, as if they were waiting to yell “surprise” at a party.  Or the fact that the small Martian compound has an elaborate, city sized sewer system.  Also, instead of sneaking in the names of horror directors, the hunted scientists from the beginning have the names of the game designers.  

The US Marine Corps must have really lowered their standards by the year 2046.  The motley collection of grunts is clearly modeled after the Colonial Marines from ALIENS, but way more ridiculous.  First of all, everyone goes by a nickname, even when they are talking to civilians.  Is anyone going to take this guy seriously when he introduces himself simply as “Sarge”?  Yes, because he is played by The Rock.  You always take the Rock seriously, unless he’s playing a tooth fairy.  

Fittingly, the team is introduced by their talking guns.  Goat is an uptight religious weirdo who carves a cross into his forearm every time he blasphemes.   I guess a cuss jar is too awkward to carry on a mission.  Duke is the smooth talking lady’s man.  Destroyer is the silent type carrying the big gun.  Mac is the guy too insignificant to have a cool nickname.  Portman is the white trash pervert who is a really big fan of Natalie Portman, I guess.  They even have a nervous young rookie named The Kid, because why wouldn’t they?  

Rounding out the team is Karl Urban’s Reaper, who is the only person to have a real name (it’s John Grimm, get it?).  This is Urban’s dry run for playing Judge Dredd seven years later in DREDD.  Reaper is a dour soldier haunted by a Childhood Trauma, which, of course, happened on Mars.  He doesn’t have Dredd’s supreme confidence and resolution.  Reaper is more quietly introspective and full of doubt, especially when dealing with his estranged sister, Samantha, who, coincidentally, works at the Mars base.   Urban does a good job of portraying a man trying to keep both his pain and his potential locked down, but not always succeeding.  His performance is more effective than his hokey, generic family tragedy backstory deserves.  

Rosamund Pike (the GONE GIRL herself) does a nice job as Sam, being appropriately annoyed and concerned about him.  She needles him about giving up on science for a career of shooting things.  I believed them as siblings, though not necessarily as twins (one marine asks if they are identical, not sure if he was being ironic).  She is the smartest person in the movie (not a huge feat) and is brave without needing a gun.  Her American accent wanders a bit (Mid-West? Southern?), but otherwise, she’s a solid character.  Aside from Sarge, Reaper, and Sam, everyone else is pretty disposable.  It’s appropriate, since that’s what happens to them.

Several of the game’s iconic monsters are well represented by Stan Winston Studios (though not Stan Winston himself).  When people are infected, they change from zombies into Imps (Alien/Pumpkinhead type things with detachable worm tongues) into Hell Knights (big ass Imps).  The zombies are fairly standard, but the later stage monsters are all imposing and visceral.  Professional freaky monster actor Doug Jones (HELLBOY, PAN’S LABRINTH) plays various different beasties, infusing them with his decidedly unhuman physicality and grace. There’s a cool scene where one of the imps gets stuck halfway through a futuristic door when it rematerializes, and he keeps twitching in the background.  There are only a few monsters at first, but the floodgates open up near the end.  One guy, a bureaucrat who lost his lower half in a teleporter accident, turns into a pink, eyeless demon bulldog dragging a Segway-like trolley behind it.  That was a nice touch.

The most innovative – and goofiest – part of the movie is the first person shooter sequence.  It was the gimmick the entire movie was built upon.  Near the end, Reaper has to fight his way through the compound against a hoard of monsters.  He picks up his gun and we go to his (sort of) uninterrupted POV through the whole segment.  I remember being fairly amused the first time I saw it, but that was before HARDCORE HENRY.  That movie managed to use a single person’s POV to tell a (ludicrous) story, include bits of character development, and maintain a frantic pace through the entire film.   The DOOM FPS sequence does not hold up well by comparison.   It actually seems like one of those mid-range amusement park simulator rides.  Everything goes super slowly and precisely.  It’s more like Reaper is having a casual stroll rather than a race against the clock.  I guess the filmmakers figured that if it went by too quickly, as in regular speed, the audience wouldn’t be able to make out what was going on.  Or they would get motion sickness.  It is the complete opposite of immersion.  It practically screams “Now let’s watch our video game sequence!”  There are some things going for it, though.  Like HENRY, it is punched up with comically over the top gore, at least in the unrated version.  It also leads to some hilariously stupid gags, like when Reaper blows up a monster with a mine while standing three feet away.  The explosion liquefies the beastie, but doesn’t even nudge Reaper.  That wouldn’t have even happened in the video game.

Probably the best thing about the movie, though, is The Rock.  At first, it seems like his no-nonsense, badass jarhead will be the lead.  But interestingly, and rather suddenly, [SPOILER coming], he becomes the main bad guy.  The genetic C24 “infection” (the science is iffy here) seeks out and mutates people with psychotic tendencies, but Sarge has a serious mental break well before the monsters ever tag him.  Near the end, he goes into full containment mode, determined to kill everyone who was evacuated from the compound to avoid an outbreak, regardless of if they are infected or not.  Any of his troops who object is shot for insubordination.  At first I thought this change came out of nowhere, but on rewatching, I saw the signs earlier on.  Right in the beginning, as he is listening to his mission orders through the radio, he robotically repeats things like “search and destroy” and “with extreme prejudice” and other phrases which sound like either action movie titles or Trump presidential campaign slogans.  I got the impression that he was so indoctrinated to the corps that he would follow any order blindly.  Sarge was just a well-disciplined psycho waiting for the opportunity to cut loose.

Being The Rock, his showdown with Reaper is impressive.  Reaper himself is juiced up with the experimental C24, which gives nice people like him super healing instead of turning them into monsters.  It makes things a bit fairer.  Urban is a big guy, but he’s no The Rock. The action is shot wide enough to tell what is happening and the editing is clean.  There’s a bit too much reliance on wire work for my taste, otherwise, it’s a solid knock down drag out fight.  They start with the corny tough guy tradition of laying down their guns and putting up their fists.  That always makes me smile.  

It’s not all dumb fun.  There’s some painful dumbness.  It has a terrible score, generic synth and guitar bullshit.  There is a nice Nine Inch Nails song for the credits, otherwise it’s a total loss.  They make a huge deal of the BFG, or Big Fucking Gun, that Sarge carries around, but for all the fetishistic attention, he only shoots it twice and misses both times.  It was a bit of a let down.  Some of the dialogue is creaky, and not always matching the situation.  Someone says “we need to destroy these discs,” while holding up some props that are in no way disc shaped.  On a side note, one of the marines knocks around a Hell Knight by swinging a 2046 era CRT monitor.  We have teleporters and nano doors in this future, but flat screens are out of our technological league.  

This movie can be an amusing distraction, as long as you don’t raise the bar higher than ankle level.  The main actors do a decent job with what they’ve been given, and there are enough weird touches to make it interesting, when you’re not rolling your eyes.  I picked up the DVD for $3.99, and I can confidently say it’s worth every penny.  Before tax.

C Chaka

Insanely Fast: REDLINE

Japan, land of the rising sun and robot hotels, has its own special brand of crazy.  A million different influences are filtered through its unique cultural outlook.  This is especially evident in its movies. Sometimes they can be too obsessive to hold my attention.  Occasionally they can be so disturbing I don't even want to translate the title, much less watch it. Often, though, they hit a sweet spot between relatable and unexpectedly bizarre.  This is why BATTLE ROYALE is so much more interesting than its slick, melodramatic western ripoff, HUNGER GAMES.  Japan's cartoons are probably the purest distillation of this. Anime is unbound by anything but imagination. I’ve been out of the anime game for a while, but a recent recommendation pulled me back in.  Weirdly, it’s a movie about car racing.  For a movie to get me interested in car racing, it would have to be pretty special.  REDLINE is pretty special.

The Capsule:

Years after transitioning to fancy “air cars”, traditional car racing has gone underground.  By traditional racing I mean no rules vehicular mayhem over miles of dangerous terrain driven by aliens and cyborgs firing missiles and grappling hooks at each other.  I’m not that familiar with NASCAR, but I’m assuming it’s similar.  The most popular and most dangerous of these events is the Redline.  The long shot this year is “Sweet” JP, a human rocking a huge pompadour and a badass yellow muscle car.  He is only in on a technicality after being “accidentally” blown up by his mobbed up partner Frisbee just before finishing the qualifying race.  His competition is considerably more intimidating.  There’s Machine Head, a huge cyborg with a piston shaped skull and his own theme music who is literally built into his vehicle.  The Mad Brothers, Lynchman and Johnny Boya, are a pair of bounty hunters with a penchant for sabotage.  Gori Rider is a renegade cop who plays by his own rules, most of which involve demolishing people.  The Super Boins are glammed up psychotic sex starlets from Supergrass, “a planet ruled by a princess with magical powers.”  The odds on favorite is Sonoshee, a perky but single minded human racer with a tricked out hover car.  The chances of surviving, much less winning, are astronomically low, though, since this year’s Redline is set on Roboworld.  The ultraconservative militaristic autocracy that rules Roboworld considers itself the moral paragon of the known galaxy and will stop at nothing to wipe out the lowlife racing scum.

First off the bat, this movie is gorgeous.  It is practically all hand drawn cell animation, as far as I can tell.  It’s beautiful from the opening frame, and that’s literally a shot of garbage.  Scenes of actual pretty things look even better.  The animation seems to be a mix of styles, all working perfectly together.  Sometimes it reminded me of non-Japanese stuff like Aeon Flux or HEAVY METAL.  You don’t need to know shit about animation to appreciate this, though, only eyeballs.  

 
Second off the bat, this movie is mind-bogglingly insane.  It’s the kind of movie Vin Diesel’s character from THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS would dream up after watching a STAR WARS marathon while on peyote.  There are so many bizarre layers swimming around together that it’s almost overwhelming.  There are some parts that are literally indescribable.  As in, I cannot figure a way of accurately describing them.  They look cool, though.  

The alien designs are outstanding.  There are dog people, guys with “T” shaped heads, guys with no skin who are extremely emotionally sensitive, tiny parrot headed swindlers in track suits.  JP’s partner Frisbee is some kind of reptilian dude with narrow bands of regular flesh across his scaly face, like a stencil pattern.  Even his crusty mechanic, Old Man (or Pops, if you are reading the subtitles) is 8 feet tall with four arms and moves around like a spider.  After all that, the cyborgs from Roboworld seem quaint. 

And speaking of those assholes, Roboworld is a piece of work.  It’s like Donald Trump’s vision of a future utopia.  The whole moral angle is bullshit, they are just scared people will find out about their sneaky deals and plots.  We’re first introduced to the President of Roboworld as he’s complaining about all the refugees on one of their habitable but kind of shitty moons.  They can’t touch the racers who are using the moon as sort of an Olympic Village because they gave the refugees autonomy in exchange for staying out of Roboworld proper.  Now all they can do is whine about it and try to intimidate the racers.  Once they set foot (or wheel, or hover) on Roboworld, though, the top brass plans to obliterate them with an orbital cannon.  Luckily, Redline is a big deal in the galaxy, and the organizers sabotage the cannon and cause enough of a diversion to get the competitors in.  They are still being dropped into the middle of a war zone, however.  Roboworld throws everything they have at the racers, including a massively powerful illegal bioweapon that looks like a giant plasma baby.  It’s named Funky Boy.  Because why not name your secret superweapon Funky Boy?  You would think this was in response to a full scale planetary invasion, but no, it’s just to stop a bunch of racers.  Slight overreaction, if you ask me.

Not that the racers themselves are harmless.  With the exception of JP, everyone’s vehicle is loaded with missiles, machine guns, eyeball lasers, and other dangerous racing accessories.  Some of the missiles have faces and laugh manically when launched.  The Super Boins’ lady car transforms into a full-on (and ludicrous) humanoid mecha.  All of this is fully sanctioned, even encouraged, by the Redline organizers.  They seem oblivious to any corruption or unfair advantages as long as the competition remains popular and brings in the money.  You know, kind of like FIFA.  

For those of you who thought the physics in the Wachowski’s SPEED RACER was too grounded in reality, REDLINE should be right up your alley.  Virtually everything that happens in this movie would kill a normal person.  JP goes so fast he begins hemorrhaging from his nose, and that was just in the qualifying race.  It would be impossible to control any of these vehicles.  The conditions are so extreme that even little Anakin Skywalker would sit this shit out.  At one point, JP’s car spins like a top and skips over the water, only to recover afterwards.  In the context of this movie, it seems plausible enough.  The action is so far over the top, you just go with it.  

It gets so crazy near the end that, in order to stop the out of control Funky Boy, one of the Roboworld generals transforms himself into a giant, um, thing?  That’s one of the indescribable moments I was talking about.  So, suddenly in the middle of a race movie, there’s a huge kaiju (monster) fight.  Who wins?  No idea.  Once the racers get past the battling beasties, it’s never brought up again.  If it’s not part of the race, it’s incidental.

At its core, though, REDLINE is a simple underdog sports story.  JP is like the lifeline, just hold on to his story and you’ll make it through unharmed.  He’s a great anchor for the movie.  Even though he’s established as a rebel with a devil-may-care attitude, he’s also a pretty good guy.  He has a laid back charm that’s easy to like.  He’s fiercely loyal to his friends (even to those who don’t deserve it), relentlessly confident (but not cocky), and fearless.  He’s even a romantic.  Sonoshee catches his eye because of her racing prowess and determination, not just because she’s a cutie.  Their chemistry together is very sweet.

[Spoiler]  When Sonoshee’s vehicle is taken out of commission, JP even lets her continue the race in his car.  She’s not just a spectator or a passenger.  They become a real team, working together towards the common goal.  The two of them cozied up in JP’s one person cockpit is pretty sexy, even.  It reminded me of the trunk scene with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez from OUT OF SIGHT, except ridiculously more unsafe.  

[Even more of a SPOILER] The end of the race takes it just as far as it could possibly go.  JP is pushing it so hard in the last stretch against Machine Head that his car completely disintegrates.  His and Sonoshee’s bodies are sent hurling across the finish line a millisecond before Machine Head.  Either there was some kind of anti-gravity safety net or it was a mystically transcending experience, because they just float together in each other’s arms instead of becoming red paste.  The best thing, though, is the reactions of all the other racers.  They are all happy for JP and Sonoshee, even the ones who were trying to kill them a few minutes before.  I think it’s because they know it was an amazing finish to the race.  And it’s all about the race.

I would like to know what happened to Funky Boy, though.

C Chaka