Racing movies are almost always made by people that don’t know much about racing. Let’s be honest and confront that fact. Certainly, there’s an underlying interest, a common bond with some filmmakers and racing people, but most involved in any racing movie project fail to capture the actual grind of the motor racing lifer. Would a movie that looks more at the grind of the sport than the racing itself actually be entertaining? Would spending precious plot time showing the sleepless nights and ramshackle living conditions of the American race driver be an endeavor worth taking? Hell if I know, but while I’m holed up all by myself in a hotel room on a business trip we might as well make good use of the time. Let’s pop on Amazon Prime and take a look at a more obscure racing title from the first decade of the 21st century.
“Short Track” was a 2008 film written and directed by Marie Hopkins…whoever the hell that is. Produced by Mach 1 Productions….whatever the hell that is. Ok, look, even I can tell that this has the makings of a pretty independent film. Most people involved in the background only have THIS singular movie on their IMDB page, and the backing for this looks to have come from entertainment and racing stalwart Mike Curb. Anyway, boring office stuff aside, Short Track tells the story of Blake Beckett, a painfully middle-aged stock car racer with his own team and dreams of making it to the Cup series. The word “NASCAR” never comes up in this film most certainly due to copyright concerns, but we are definitely dealing with the era of Gen 4 NASCAR market penetration where anyone with a four wheeled racing car had universal dreams of hitting the big time on the white hot NASCAR scene. Beckett and his family race in the UARA series, which was a late model series that ran primarily in the southeast around the time of this movie. Much like the USAR or today’s CARS series, the late model racing circuit was known as a serious stepping stone to the big time, and the dreams of Beckett’s team make a lot of sense.
What makes less sense however, is pretty much the rest of the story. For SOME reason, Beckett’s late model team has a hot shot young kid come in from California to immediately sink millions of dollars into the team to launch a Cup series program, and everyone on the team just kinda gets on board with the idea. Meanwhile, Blake’s young son is old enough to get into stock car racing, but has trouble getting licensing due to the fact that he’s deaf. There’s a good bit of perseverance and adaptability fed into this part of the story that was nice to see, but it’s hard to keep up with this while the rich kid is looking to bone Blake’s daughter…and Blake’s wife is complaining about something involving Christmas…and the redneck mechanics in the pits are doing slapstick comedy…and about three other things are pinging back and forth. It’s unclear what the movie is trying to accomplish. Is it just the wheelings and dealings of a stock car team? Kinda. Is it a story of redemption? Sort of. Is the Andy Samberg looking dude seemingly plowing (my interpretation) the car owner’s daughter as expressed in a pop country music video mid-film really fucking weird? Absolutely. Suffice it to say, this movie is incredibly hard to keep up with. When things finally do hit the track however, there’s a much better time to be had.
As we’ve said a million times around here, the only thing that really matters about a racing movie, is the RACING. For “Short Track,” this section of the movie happens to be its strongest feature. The racing comes from stock footage of actual racing at tracks like Lanier and Hickory, with the character driven cars utilizing the results of some real world counterparts. There’s a couple of ok-ish Hollywood reenactments spliced in where it’s just the character cars to increase the drama a bit, but these shots were delightfully sparse. Even better, there were no instances of those annoying Hollywood style in-car scenes during the races. No mystery gear changes to suddenly make the car go faster, no tight shots of the actor’s face in stupid looking helmets…they nailed 99.9% of the racing scenes in this movie. It’s a shame they only had a few of them however, because it’s hard to call it much of a proper film otherwise.
Verdict: Short Track goes against the grain of the typical racing film that comes out in the digital age of cinema, and for that it deserves some real praise. The racing, the cars, the plot ideas, and the struggles of the racing families show there’s a lot of real world experience in the background, and most anyone with a racing interest will identify with something going on during the story. I’m using the word “story” loosely here though, as there’s barely enough elements to call this a narrative.
There’s a mishmash of linear and nonlinear story focus, and not going whole ass into the nonlinear style left a little something to be desired. This movie was never going to take a Days of Thunder type of place in the racing community (a fact somewhat pointed out in the film’s dialogue) so they could have gone even further into the avant garde. When you’re struggling to get to 90 minutes of script, you start to make some weird decisions. A 10 minute scene of the pit crew developing itself into a Cup over the wall crew was one of the stranger ones, and only needed a couple of moments to make its point.
Racing itself is the sort of thing that leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and a lot of loose ends never get tied up. Had this sort of idea been done on purpose, there could have been an arthouse impression left on the viewer of Short Track. While the finished product looks more a shambles than a risky artistic venture, the idea can live on in the heart and mind of this racing lifer, and for that this was a film worth making.
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