There’s a bit of a shout-out to citizen journalism in Superman Returns. Mid-movie, Daily Planet Editor in Chief White, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen look at some photos of Superman spread across the chief’s desk. They’re great, iconic photos of the Man of Steel in action. White berates Olsen (and I’m paraphrasing here), “these are great and they were taken by a kid with a cameraphone. Whadda you got, Olsen?” Olsen throws his photos down on the desk; the one on top depicts a distant blurry streak across a blue sky.
Classic movies it’s ok to hate. I love the idea of this list but I’m not sure I agree with too many of the items on it…although I’m not sure which movies would be on my list.
[Warning, might be some spoilers.] Cars was perfect. The problem is that it was a little too perfect. After seeing the movie on Friday, Meg and I came up with three reasons why Cars missed.
1. Perfection. Some people don’t like Wes Anderson’s movies because of his emphasis on creating set-driven movies instead of plot- or character-driven movies (ditto George Lucas). With Cars, Lasseter has made himself a perfect world of cars — the petulant young racer, the lawyer Porsche, the Hispanic lowrider, the hick tow truck — but it’s a world without soul, without surprise. Everything was a little too obvious.
2. Inanimate characters talking. This was the first Pixar movie in which non-human-like or non-animal characters talked. In Toy Story, Buzz, Woody, and even the T. Rex talked, but the TV didn’t, nor did the Etch-a-Sketch. In A Bug’s Life, only the insects talked. In Cars, you’ve got these inanimate objects talking to each other, and while they did a great job making them seem human, I just couldn’t get into the characters; it felt fake and inauthentic.
3. Unlikable main character. For the first half of the movie, Lightning McQueen is a flat-out jerk with zero redeeming qualities. I remember reading an interview with John Lasseter recently where he was talking about one of the first rough cuts they did of Toy Story in which Woody was too sarcastic. After seeing it, they realized this and tempered Woody’s sarcasm with some like-ability, so that the audience would be pulling for him to change his ways, a deep-down good guy that needs to see the light. Lightning didn’t deserve redemption…he was just an asshole.
Cars is a fine movie with a lot to recommend it, but it’s just not up to Pixar’s normal standards. I was disappointed.
Some sweet soul has put Powers of Ten online. If you’ve never seen it, I can’t recommend it enough:
Powers of Ten is a short film by Charles and Ray Eames, whose work you may have previously sat in. The film starts on a picnic blanket in Chicago and zooms out 10x every 10 seconds until the entire universe (more or less) is visible. And then they zoom all the way back down into the nucleus of an atom. A timeless classic. (via youngna)
Headline writers everywhere are rejoicing the impending release of Pixar’s new movie, Cars. As with Apple’s release of their Tiger operating system, Cars comes loaded with so many opportunities for puns and metaphors that the media just can’t help themselves. A sampling of puntacular fun so far:
With ‘Cars,’ Pixar Revs Up to Outpace Walt Disney Himself (NY Times)
NASCAR, Hollywood share the fast lane (USA Today)
‘Cars’ Voices Toot Their Horns (Zap2it.com)
A toon-up for Petty (Orlando Sentinel)
With ‘Cars’, Paul Newman stays in the race (Malaysia Star)
Newman’s need for speed (Toronto Sun)
Cars: Cruising along in Weirdsville, Cartoonland (NY Times)
Cars’ Riding on Flat Tires (OhMyNews International)
Shifting gear (The Age)
Pixar’s Cars stalls with reviewers (Guardian Unlimited)
“Cars” is one sweet ride (Hollywood Reporter)
Cars rolls along like an animated version of Doc Hollywood (Canada.com)
‘Cars’ an auto-matic hit (Tucson Citizen)
Great-looking ‘Cars’ stuck in cruise control (goTriad.com)
‘Cars’ revs up marketing campaign (Inside Bay Area)
Disney/Pixar revvs up its latest cash cow (Monterey Herald)
Finely drawn characters drive ‘Cars’ and its director (St. Paul Pioneer Press)
‘Cars’ wins the race hands down for summer’s best film (Press & Sun Bulletin)
Kickin’ the Tires (East Bay Express)
Star vehicle veers a bit (St. Petersburg Times)
Pixar’s ‘Cars’ falls a little short of winner’s circle (SouthCoastToday.com)
‘Cars’ just can’t get it out of first (Statesman Journal)
‘Cars’ will take you straight to the dump (Scripps Howard)
Running on Fumes (Village Voice)
Headlines courtesy of Google News. If the movie were getting mostly bad reviews, one could imagine headlines like “Cars a lemon”, “New Disney movie is the pits”, and “Reviewers to Pixar: Your new film is car-rappy”.
On reverse snobbery. “Soon the competition for Most Ignorance became fierce. No one had ever seen ER, Law and Order, Lost, Desperate Housewives, it went on and on. We felt like fucking Kings! We were miles and miles above the Common Man. We knew Nothing of Anything popular and mainstream!”
I know I’m going to get mail about my five-star rating for this movie, but it cannot be helped. One summer when I was a kid, a friend and I watched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure — no joke — every single day for a span of 2 months. I still know every line by heart, the timing, inflection, everything. If there were a Broadway production of this movie, I could slide effortlessly into the role of either Bill S. Preston, Esq. or Ted Theodore Logan, no rehearsal needed.
In my high school physics class my senior year, we had to do a report on something we hadn’t learned about in class — which, I discovered when I got to college, was a lot — and I did mine on time travel. I went to our small school library and read articles in Discover and Scientific American magazines about Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, quantum mechanics, causality, and wormholes. To illustrate the bit about wormholes, I brought in my well-worn VHS tape of Bill and Ted’s (a dub of a long-ago video rental) and showed a short clip of the phone booth travelling through space and time via wormhole. I got a B+ on my presentation. The teacher told me it was excellent but marked me down because it was “over the heads” of everyone in the class…which I thought was completely unfair. How on earth is Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure over anyone’s head?
Fine interview with Pixar/Disney’s John Lasseter, who is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. “I believe in the nobility of entertaining people, and I take great, great pride that people are willing to give me two or three hours out of their busy lives.”
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