The Trading Paint trailer dropped this week. It’s ostensibly about dirt track racing, but it pretty much looks like that Orange County Choppers meme played over guitar riffs and engine revving noises.
IMDb has the elevator pitch:
“Veteran race car driver Derek Bornt and his son, a fellow driver from a small town overcome family and professional conflicts, balancing competition, ego, resentment and a racing nemesis to come out stronger on the other side.”
We can distill that down to: “greased up grown men act like children on-screen, as Hollywood decides to skip the nuance of a potentially interesting subculture in lieu of one-dimensional characters, tough guy tropes and some version of a ‘family means everything’ theme.”
Also, there’s that guy from Game of Thrones and one of the baddies from Kill Bill.
In real life, dirt track racing goes down all year all over America. Wikipedia calls it “the single most common form of auto racing in the United States” but it’s more interesting than just ubiquitous. Dirt track, and circle track racing in general, is disappearing across the country. It’s a relic of an older, seemingly more dangerous part of our past that’s just barely hanging on.
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Competitors drive around an unpaved oval track, most notably either in Sprint Cars, which are open-wheeled machines with ridiculous looking asymmetrical roof spoilers (the cars only turn one direction, after all), or vehicles that look more like stock cars. In the case of this movie, we’re watching what are called Late Models.
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These cars are pretty much just big-ass V8s strapped to tube frames and surrounded by a thin body. They aren’t high-tech, but they’re much faster than you’d think, with an immense amount of horsepower and very little in the way of weight. They shoot flames. They get sideways.
Late Model cars kind of look like primitive NASCAR cars, and actually make almost as much power. Granted, the top speeds are lower but the racing is even more fierce.
Sprint Cars, unfortunately, gained some notoriety last year when 20-year-old driver Kevin Ward Jr. was struck and killed by racing superstar Tony Stewart in the middle of competition. Dirt track racing in general is still popular though, and there are a lot more types of vehicles that run on unpaved ovals besides the two I mentioned.
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For the record, not trying to dump on dirt track racers here. Based on that trailer, this movie has a lot more clips of people throwing things than actual driving action.
I’m going to go ahead and forget about Trading Paint until it inevitably shows up on the DVD rack at Rite-Aid. But I thought it was important that you know it exists anyway.
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