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Flaviano Bada
Last year, hundreds of vehicle crashes happened in each of the three major freeway construction zones on interstates 275, 96 and 696 in western Wayne and Oakland counties. A spreadsheet of the crashes Hometown Life obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request includes 23 pages and about 1,300 incidents.
According to the data, factors like time of day, light availability or weather conditions don't matter much. Shaw said there's little to no difference between crash numbers in work zones and open roads, too.
MDOT has started putting reflective stripes, brighter orange barrels and rumble strips in work zones to help focus people. Brookes said he spends a lot of time creating features that can help keep drivers and work crews safe.
Brookes said MDOT views zero as "the only acceptable number" when it comes to traffic-related deaths. He said drivers have to partner with transportation workers, police and other agencies to get there.
If Little Red Riding Hood were alive today, she would find that the wolves are bigger and badder, and she'd need to be a lot more resourceful to stay alive. That is the lesson (if it has a lesson) of "Freeway,'' a dark comic excursion into deranged pathology. The movie retells the Grimm fairy tale in a world of poor white trash, sexual abuse, drug addiction and the "I-5 Killer,'' who prowls the freeways in search of victims.
Written and directed by Matthew Bright, who wrote the teenagers-in-trouble saga "Gun Crazy,'' it plays like a cross between the deadpan docudrama of "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" and the berserk revenge fantasy of "Switchblade Sisters." It seems aimed at people who loved "Pulp Fiction" and have strong stomachs. Like it or hate it (or both), you have to admire its skill, and the over-the-top virtuosity of Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland as the girl and the wolf.
The opening scenes play like updated Dickens, in which warped outlaws inhabit a lair. The heroine, Vanessa (Witherspoon), is struggling, at 15, to sound out such sentences as "The cat drinks milk.'' After school she meets her mother Ramona (Amanda Plummer) on the corner where she works as a hooker. They return home to Ramona's current husband, Larry (Michael T. Weiss), a stepdad, who complains: "Hey, me and your momma both spent the whole day in line getting rent vouchers, and we could use a little consideration.'' The family idyll is interrupted by a narcotics raid. The cops share a little family history: "There's some bad blood between your mom and grandma, on account of she threw a chemical on her face or something.'' The parents are taken to jail, and a youth officer is assigned to take Vanessa to a youth home; thinking quickly, she handcuffs the officer to the bed, steals the cop's car and hits the road--on her way to grandmother's house, of course. She packs a handgun given her by her boyfriend (Bokeem Woodbine).
After the car catches on fire, she's befriended by Bob Wolverton (Sutherland), who has all the right moves to sound like a helpful child psychologist. Vanessa confides in him ("It looks like my stepfather's next parole officer ain't even been born yet'') and opens her cheap wallet to show him a snapshot of her real father (the photo is of Richard Speck). Bob treats her to dinner and an attempted sexual assault, and chops off her ponytail before she asks if Jesus is his savior, empties the handgun into him and throws up. She sees a shooting star, a sign from heaven that she did the right thing, and crosses the border into Mexico, where she works as a hooker in Tijuana until she's arrested.
Am I giving away too much of the plot? Not at all. There's a lot more. And "Freeway'' isn't about what happens as much as it is about Bright's angle on the material; this is like a story based on the most disquieting and disgusting experiences of the most hapless guests on the sleaziest daytime talk shows.
Sutherland, who has played great villains before, outdoes himself this time. Turns out he was not killed by the gunshot wounds, but only wounded in all the most inconvenient places. The doctors patch him together into a Halloween monster whose face was shot away, who can hardly speak, who smokes through a hole in his throat, and whose other infirmities and amputations are too distressing to catalog. Backed by his all- American wife Mimi (Brooke Shields--yes, Brooke Shields), he appears on television to lead a campaign against coddling such human garbage as Vanessa. Of course Mimi does not know Bob is the I-5 Killer.
Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it. "Freeway'' is a hard-edged satire of those sensational true-crime reports that excite the prurient with detailed recreations of unspeakable events. We have a great appetite in this country for books, TV shows and movies about serial killers, perverted hermits, mad bombers and pathological torturers--just as long as their deeds are cloaked in moralistic judgments. We pant over the pages before closing the book and repeating, with Richard Nixon, "but . . . that would be wrong.'' "Freeway'' illuminates our secret appetites. Like all good satire, it starts where the others end. And its actors wisely never ever act as if they're in on the joke. Reese Witherspoon (who had her heartbreaking first kiss in the wonderful movie "The Man in the Moon") is as focused and tightly wound here as a young Jodie Foster; she plays every scene as if it's absolutely real. Sutherland plays his early scenes with the complete confidence of a man walking in the trance of his obsession. His bizarre wounds make him a figure of parody in the later scenes, but he plays them with complete conviction, too. All the way up to the end--which is, shall we say, not only predictable, but obligatory.
In this slow-burn apocalyptic thriller from Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail, based on Rumaan Alam's 2020 novel, one of the film's two core families reaches a moment of decisive panic halfway through the film. What it leads to is a timely commentary on fears around self-driving cars and automation, and what happens when transportation gets hijacked.
Amid a cyberattack across America, holiday home renters Amanda (Julia Roberts) and Clay (Ethan Hawke) have spent the last few days with their family and, unexpectedly, the house's owner G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha'la Herrold). As the reality of the disaster sets in, they decide to leave their luxe refuge. The plan is to drive their kids Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) to Amanda's sister's house in New Jersey. As G.H. warns them, it means they'll have to drive through New York City, where they can't be sure of the state of things.
Dismissing the warning, Amanda bundles her family into their Jeep Grand Cherokee and speeds off. They run into what appears to be a traffic jam on the freeway, the likes of which we've seen in countless zombie apocalypse films and TV shows. But the crashed cars are only Tesla Model 3s, and they're all empty.
Amanda screeches their vehicle out of the way just in time, as more Model 3s hurtle toward them. In one long shot, the camera pans around the terrified family to pause briefly, offering a look through the windscreen, then swoops up to offer a bird's-eye view of the highway, where cars of multiple models and makes are piled up, one after the other.
But the scene in Leave the World Behind is particularly similar in energy to a scene from 2017's The Fate of the Furious. In the heart of New York, Charlize Theron's villain Cipher pulls her "Night of the Living Cars" stunt that sees her remote-controlling cars on the streets and in showrooms across the city.
Jeeps and Dodges drive out of dealerships, Chryslers and Minis throw themselves out of fourth-story parking garages, Fiats and Hyundais careen around corners and through newspaper stands in the middle of Manhattan, causing self-driving chaos in one of the busiest cities in the world.
Of course, Tesla says its current features don't make its vehicles wholly autonomous: "Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment."
As Mashable's Stan Schroeder wrote in June, "Right now, Tesla's Full Self-Driving driving assistance package is still essentially at Level 2, with the car helping out in certain scenarios, but the driver having to be alert and ready to take over in all situations." In Leave the World Behind, Amanda points out that not one car in the Tesla scene had a driver at the wheel.
As for Tesla itself? In February, Tesla recalled 363,000 cars in the U.S. after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration raised concerns over the Full Self-Driving beta, which was rolled out in November last year. In July, CEO Elon Musk said the company might achieve fully autonomous driving "later this year." But just days ago, a former Tesla employee shared his concerns with the BBC, saying, "I don't think the hardware is ready and the software is ready," adding, "It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads."
In addition to an ongoing U.S. federal investigation over its Autopilot system, Tesla is facing a lawsuit over a fatal crash in 2019 near Miami, in which a Model 3 crashed into a truck that had driven into its path. The car's driver, Stephen Banner, was killed. However, Tesla has been victorious in court this year. In October, Tesla won a civil trial over allegations that its Autopilot led to the death of Model 3 owner Micah Lee near Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, though Waymo and General Motors' Cruise were granted 24/7 operating authority for driverless vehicles in San Francisco, Cruise lost its license in the city after one of its self-driving vehicles ran over and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet, after she'd been hit by a human-driven car. GM will "substantially lower spending" on autonomous vehicles in 2024 as a result.
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