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Is "Ghost Rider" really Texan?

A scrubby pasture with a dusty rut of a path running through it. Bluebonnets poking out of the ground. And cattle lowing somewhere or other.
Ahhh, what a sight for sore, Texas-deprived eyes.
Wait a minute.
Those bluebonnets don't look like the right color.
And hold on.
What's that big ol' tree doing growing in a pasture? Shouldn't it be a twisted mesquite?
The tears in my eyes dried up as I began to wonder, just how genuinely Texan is the movie "Ghost Rider," y'all?

The flick made some pretty darn good stabs at it.
For one thing, the accents of the Texan characters weren't too bad. Nicolas Cage got it right most of the time as Johnny Blaze, except when he seeped into hokiness, telling Eva Mendez's character, Roxanne, something like "run along home now."
First of all, people in Texas -- in the 42 years I was there -- don't say stuff like that much.
Second of all, men in Texas know better than to give their woman marching orders. They don't like sleeping on couches or eating TV dinners eight days a week.
And those bluebonnets were too light blue. The bluebonnet is so dark as to be almost purple. Maybe them flars weren't supposed to be bluebonnets but another bluebonnet-like blossom.
That big tree growing up out of a hill (a hill!) on the prarie where Roxanne and Johnny pitch woo and plan their futures didn't seem right either.
However, I must take into account that I'm from the part of Texas where hills are a rarity and big trees were planted by somebody. To be true to my part of the world, the tree would be a mesquite, and the hill wouldn't be a hill.
It was a bar scene that cemented the authenticity of the movie's Texasicity.
The wooden shack-like structure rises up out of the night and is surrounded by wicked-looking motorcycles. Inside the bar, it looks like neither broom, mop nor Pledge have had free reign.
Rickety tables and sufficiently scruffy characters populate the place.
The drinking establishment quickly brought to mind two such enterprises back in Wichita Falls, the old Bar-L and the P-2 -- a.k.a. the Duece.
I could just about taste a red draw.
That, my friends, is pure Texas.
Every director with a movie supposedly set in Texas needs to drink a red draw at a beat-up table outside in Wichita Falls, surrounded by motorcycle riders, cowboys, suit-and-tie renegades and other lovers of that Lone Star beverage, the red draw.
Run along now, and get you a sip.

Posted by Trish Choate at 12:38 PM | Permalink