Being Evel: His Landings were not Always Happy

If you were kid growing up in the late Seventies, you were probably all about Stars Wars, but if you were carrying a lunch box to school before 1976, there is a good chance Evel Knievel was on it. Subsequent decades were hard on the self-styled daredevil, but fans like skateboarding champion Tony Hawk and Jackass’s Johnny Knoxville still remembered the tarnished icon. Daniel Junge revisits the highs and lows of Knievel’s story in the Knoxville-produced Being Evel (trailer here), which opens this Friday in select theaters.

Butte, Montana was still a bit of a rugged frontier town when young Knievel grew up there, but their cops were pretty funny. According to legend, Knievel once spent a night in the holding cell with a fellow troublemaking named Knoffle, prompting a deputy to dub them “Evil Knievel and Awful Knoffle.” That worked for Knievel, after softening the “Evil” with a second e.

One can find barnstorming precedents for Knievel’s death-defying stunts, but Knievel came up at the perfect time to most fully exploit the media. There were only three real networks in the 1970s, so just about every sports fan watched the buffet-style coverage of ABC’s Wide World of Sports on Sunday mornings. Somehow Knievel talked his way on as the opener for a dirt track race and quickly became a media phenomenon.

Seeing docs like Being Evel reminds us just how much the media landscape has changed within our lifetimes. It also explains the influence Knievel had on the culture, inspiring the extreme sports movement of the 1990s and perfecting an unparalleled personal merchandising machine. You will not see a lot of documentaries co-produced by Knoxville and George Hamilton (who played Knievel in the John Milius-scripted 1971 film), but here it is.

While carefully tracking Knievel’s cultural significance, Junge never loses sight of the outrageousness of his stunts. Frankly, he crashed out more often than his fans probably remember, which still makes voyeuristically compelling viewing. Junge talks to just about all of Knievel’s surviving family and associates, including his much neglected first wife and his former promoter, Shelly Saltman. Despite being on the business end of Knievel’s notorious baseball bat attack, the latter is remarkably gracious, all things considered.

In many ways, Evel Knievel exemplified American self-invention. Being Evel clearly establishes his many flaws, but the risks he ran were still very real. Junge assembled some spectacularly dramatic and telling footage that evokes an era that is no so long ago, but feels so very far away. Briskly paced and stylishly constructed, it is one of the more watchable documentaries of the year. Recommended beyond the Knievel-extreme sports fanbase, Being Evel opens this Friday (8/21) in select theaters, including the Roxie in San Francisco, and also releases on iTunes.

Meet the Hamiltons: My One and Only

Everyone who has ever wondered about the formative influences that made George Hamilton the actor he is, should take heart. Your portrait of the tanned celebrity as a young man is finally here. While the subject matter might sound predictable and self-serving, the execution is breezy and relatively diverting in Richard Loncraine’s My One and Only (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York in advance of its September 4th national roll-out.

George Hamilton was the son of the society bandleader George “Spike” Hamilton. In Charlie Peters’s somewhat fictionalized screenplay, he is the son of big band front-man Dan Devereaux, who might be a one hit wonder with the title song, “My One and Only,” but is still famous enough to attract plenty of volunteers for his serial philandering. Catching him in the act, his exasperated wife Ann responds by pulling George and his half-brother Robbie out of school and heading out on the open road in a newly purchased Cadillac.

With limited funds, Ann plans to fall back on the only work she has ever known: marriage. Starting in New York, they generally work their way west as Ann looks up a parade of former beaus and eligible bachelors, played by a who’s who of former sitcom stars.

In Boston she finds her old flame Wallace (Steven Weber from Wings) has fallen on hard times, so she gets hitched Dr. Harlan Williams (Sex and the City’s Christ Noth) instead. However, he turns out to be an unfortunate caricature of the uptight veteran and not proper marriage material after all. Moving on to Pittsburgh, she briefly reconnects with Charlie (Eric McCormack of Will & Grace), a former lover even shallower than herself. Eventually, the trio is forced to crash with Ann’s sister in St. Louis, while she romances Bill Massey (a regular on The Office), an heir to the local paint store fortune.

Renée Zellweger is perfectly cast as Ann Devereaux, a woman desperately trading on her former cuteness. As young Devereaux/Hamilton, Logan Lerman shows tremendous screen presence, giving a nicely nuanced performance. (In fact, he probably shows more potential here than Hamilton did in his early roles.) However, Kevin Bacon seems off-key as Dan Devereaux, sounding like he is trying to do an impression of someone famous, but failing. Still, it begs the question whether Only counts as a “Seven Degrees” connection between him and Hamilton, even though the tanned one never appears on-screen.

Composer Mark Isham deserves credit for a swing-oriented score that keeps things peppy and buoyant. His themes evoke a time when you could still have an elegant evening dancing in a hotel ballroom, even though the sounds of rock-n-roll could be heard just over the distant horizon. Peters’s screenplay has some surprisingly witty verbal sparring and avoids some of the pitfalls of the familiar road movie conceit. Unfortunately, every flamboyantly effeminate cliché is liberally applied to Robbie, the fashion expert, reducing him to a mere stereotype. Still, Loncraine wisely keeps things moving along, never letting the film get bogged down in family melodrama.

One might reasonably expect Only to be painfully campy, but it largely plays it straight, resisting the urge to constantly wink at the camera. It affectionately recreates a sense of groovy Route 66 America (nicely supported by Isham’s very hip score), and provides some decent laughs along the way. It opens this Friday (8/21) in New York and Los Angeles.