What…What was…I don’t…Who’s that…What happened?
Now, for post-Crank thoughts, here are my reasons why Crank should have been nominated in several Oscar categories.
Best Screenplay: I didn’t understand half of the words Jason Statham was saying, and there were so many characters I had no idea what most of them were doing in the movie. This is similar to my past experiences with Shakespeare.
Best Actor: Chev Chelios needs to keep moving and keep his adrenaline pumping to survive. Bringing this character to life is an impressive achievement, largely due to the fact that actor Jason Statham normally never seems to get more excited than, say, Clint Eastwood. One assumes, given the fast pace of the movie and what people would normally call “dialogue,” that Statham actually took some sort of drug to speed up his metabolism and risk his life, and one has to admire that sort of commitment to the craft.
Best Supporting Actor: Dwight Yoakam creates a character by literally phoning in his lines. I’ve never seen anyone do that before. Now, in this category there could be competition from some of his own Crank castmates. After all, you can’t completely discount the performances of The Guy Who Played Pedro In Napoleon Dynamite (Efren Ramirez) and The Guy Who Played Weevil In Veronica Mars (Francis Capra). But I’d give it to Dwight.
Best Supporting Actress: Amy Smart is so natural in the role of Eve it’s almost like she didn’t realize she was in a movie. I don’t think she did. I think, during the take, Jason Statham just showed up at her apartment and she improvised as well.
Best Cinematography: One take, ninety minutes of following an adrenaline-fueled Jason Statham around while he’s improvising. ‘Nuff said.
Best Director: True, it might seem easy to take that screenplay and those actors and turn out the best movie of the year, but directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor took it all one step farther: They were brave enough to have a word appear, most of the way through the movie, for one second, floating by itself on Statham’s forehead, with no real context or precedent. How often do you see that? Martin Scorsese didn’t do it. Neveldine and Taylor did.
Best Foreign Language Film: There were smatterings of English, but that shouldn’t disqualify it. This movie’s native tongue was the whole-body sign language called Action!
Best Picture: Not Crank. Apocalypto. Apocalypto is like historic Crank, and history always makes films better.
Did you miss one of the great films of our generation in theaters? Not to worry. April, 2009… CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE!