BuildaLibrary

I watched the Vimeo copy and there's a moment where, thanks to a really terrible editing choice, I thought the movie was going to be WAY darker than it actually was. When Cru gets called out to the car for his audience with Duke Best, he's excited and nervous. He gets in and Duke says, "How would you like to be responsible for bringing BMX to all of the small towns in the USA?" It then immediately cuts away -- to a nothing scene with Bart Taylor's two groupies mocking a local store. We cut back to the car. Cru is now mad and Duke Best is pleading, "You don't understand it's the chance of a lifetime!" The movie doesn't explain what happened in the car AT ALL. Cru just angrily says, "You and me, we don't think the same, not at all" and runs out of the car - with Best calling after him, "You'll regret this!" In the moment, I presumed that Duke Best had sexually propositioned Cru. "Hey, you can be my new Bart Taylor Jr. and work the small town circuit, if you'll submit to being my own personal BMX bandit." It takes the movie another 3-4 minutes to explain that Duke only proposed that Cru should throw the race for money, but why keep that a secret? Why not show that scene? Because, instead, they just showed a young teen get into a car with an old man, cut away, and then came back to the young man saying "no, no, no, no, no." WHAT WAS I SUPPOSED TO THINK?

Here’s my big issue with cryo-prison movies (and Demolition Man is a BIG offender)... What is the point in perfectly preserving society’s most violent criminals, in the prime of their youth, for potentially hundreds of years? You spend all of this technology and resources for – what? Making sure that Charles Manson will be alive and in perfect health in the next century? What’s the point of that? Even with the hypno-programming stuff – so what? Even if Manson won’t kill anyone and can knit like a fiend – do we still want him, virtually immortal, in the future where he can take advantage of all of our future medicines and hoverboards? Even if being frozen was akin to being tortured – like Spartan argued – you’re still perfectly preserving the worst of society FOR WHAT PURPOSE? If you freeze Manson into a cube and never plan to parole him and thaw him out, why did you freeze him? And, in cryo-prison movie worlds, why isn’t EVERYONE taking advantage of that tech? “Hey, everyone with cancer, let’s go get frozen until they come up with a cure.” “Hey, I’m a rich moron who wants to travel to Mars, I’m gonna freeze myself until interstellar space travel is perfected.” But NO, in those movies, we only ever freeze hardened criminals and/or roughnecks with a date with a planet full of facehuggers. It would make more sense if Cocteau had built the year-sucking machine from The Princess Bride – THAT would be a punishment. “Hey, asshole who killed that guy, we just took 20 years from you, don’t do that shit again.” But freezing them in perfect health, so that they can never age and one day live in a utopia, filled with yarn stores and shit-covered seashells? What’s the point?