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Screenplay by Roger Donaldson

Actors:

ANTHONY HOPKINS

DIANE LADD

PAUL RODRIGUEZ

AARON MURPHY

ANNIE WHITTLE

CHRIS WILLIAMS

JESSICA CAUFFIEL

CHRISTOPHER LAWFORD

CHRIS BRUNO

BRUCE GREENWOOD

WILLIAM LUCKING

This disarming film was thirty-five years in the making. In 1971 a young New Zealand–based filmmaker named Roger Donaldson directed a half-hour television documentary about a genuine “character.” Burt Munro: Offerings to the God of Speed focused on a colorful old codger whose devotion to his 1920s Indian motorcycle inspired his friends and neighbors to take up a collection so he could travel to the United States and race it on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

As Donaldson became a successful feature filmmaker, with such titles as Sleeping Dogs, No Way Out, Cocktail, and Thirteen Days to his credit, he repeatedly pitched the story of Munro, certain that it would make a compelling movie. He had several near misses and turned down concrete offers from producers and studios that wanted to subvert the true story. Finally the pieces fell together with Anthony Hopkins (who’d starred in Donaldson’s The Bounty) committed to playing Burt.

The distributor hoped Hopkins’s wonderful performance would earn him an Academy Award nomination, but that did not come to pass, and the film received a halfhearted U.S. release.

I went out of my way to screen The World’s Fastest Indian for my class at USC because I wanted my students to see a movie that didn’t contain an ounce of cynicism. That’s rare nowadays, fueled by many producers’ belief that young audiences won’t accept a film that isn’t “edgy.” Here is a happy exception to that rule.

When single-minded, small-town New Zealander Burt Munro arrives in Los Angeles in 1967, he depends on the kindness of strangers to help him make his way to Utah…and because he is so guileless and straightforward, they do. Everyone from a Hollywood transvestite (Chris Williams) to a used-car salesman (Paul Rodriguez) falls under his spell.

Once he arrives at Bonneville, he again relies on people’s good nature to help him out, even though he isn’t registered and his MO is unconventional. But Burt believes in himself—and his ancient bike—and as a result, people respond. He, in turn, surprises them all when he revs up his vehicle.

Anthony Hopkins is absolutely perfect as Munro, a man who seems to exist in a world of his own. He awakens his neighbors every morning with the roaring of his engine as he putters in his workshop, and seems undeterred by any and every obstacle that gets in his way, at home and on the road. The movie wouldn’t work if we didn’t believe Hopkins, and we do.

My students loved the movie and gave it almost unanimous approval. Several of them complained that the previews made it seem like just another formulaic underdog story and didn’t hint at the qualities that made it so appealing. That’s just one more case of “expert” movie marketers selling their audience short.

151. ZATHURA: A SPACE ADVENTURE

(2005)

Directed by Jon Favreau

Screenplay by David Koepp and John Kamps

Based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg

Actors:

JONAH BOBO

JOSH HUTCHERSON

KRISTEN STEWART

TIM ROBBINS

DAX SHEPARD

FRANK OZ (VOICE)

DEREK MEARS

JOHN ALEXANDER

Having loathed Jumanji, I was not looking forward to another fantasy/adventure derived from a book by the same author, Chris Van Allsburg. Judging from the lukewarm reception that greeted Zathura: A Space Adventure, I may not have been alone, and that’s a shame: it turns out to be a very entertaining, original movie.

Zathura won me over from the very start with an ingenious title sequence. Most popcorn movies nowadays eschew such niceties; they can’t wait to explode in your face. But director Jon Favreau understood that he needed to set the stage for this unusual tale, and realized that a visual prologue was the perfect way to do it. Zathura is all about a magical, “retro” board game, the type I grew up playing—only much, much cooler. In the opening montage we see how this wonderfully designed game involves a wind-up mechanism that