Talkin' Cars

When talking to people, like actually speaking with them, using my voice and hearing their voices and sometimes seeing their spittle fly out of their mouth, many of them said they didn't want to see this movie because the trailer makes it look bad. I, personally, can't remember when a Pixar trailer ever looked good. Can you? So, when deciding whether or not to see a movie made by the Pixar people I think about two things: The first is their record of making a stream of wonderful and fun movies. When I can only compare one Pixar movie to another Pixar movie to try and find fault with it, which means they're always better than the average film out there. When I think about their movies and A Bug's Life is the worst one they made, but I still think it's charming and fun and better than most things that came out that year, it means they've made a bunch of good movies. The second thing I think about is the fact that they take classic plots, plots that we've seen on TV and in the movies more times than we want to count, and do them better than anyone else has in recent memory.

Cars is about Lighting McQueen (Owen Wilson), a big shot racing star, who gets stuck in a nearly dead hick town on Route 66. He destroys property and is sentenced to stay in town and fix what he destroyed. While there, he learns that not life in the fast lane (HAHAHAHAHAH!) isn't everything and that sometimes it's better to slow down and find something to care for other than winning.

Sound familiar? The basic plot reminds me of Doc Hollywood. (I'm sure that there are older movies with the same plot, but Doc Hollywood was the first movie I remember seeing with this plot and it has a naked girl rising from the lake, which left quite an impact on my young mind when I saw it.)

The thing is, the movie is so much more than its plot. It's all the wonderful side character. There's Doc Hudson (voiced wonderfully by Paul Newman) who's the little town's sharp doctor and judge and he has a past that no one in town knows about. There's Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) who's as dumb as the tractors he tips but the most loyal and trusting tow truck you could ever meet. There's Ramone (Cheech Marin) the low-rider who runs the body shop and changes his paint on a daily basis and Flo (Jennifer Lewis), his wife, who runs the diner. There's Sally (Bonnie Hunt) who used to live in LA but fell in love with the small town and want to bring it back to what it was. And on and on. Each character in the town has enough personality that I was able to build elaborate back stories for them that told me why they live there and why they didn't leave when the town dried up.

Then there's the way the film looks. The animation is stunning. I found myself captivated by the shadows cast by the cars in the racing scene at the beginning of the film. The backgrounds (I'm talking landscape here) are full of visual car jokes that it took me way too long to see and when I did, I couldn't help chuckling at them. Mater looks like he's made of rust and if someone sneezed on him he'd just blow away. The reflection on Lightning when he's in bright light is amazing. And the paint job he got near the end, the fact that Pixar could do it with a moving object, blew me away.

For the most part, the voice acting was superb. Paul Newman blew me away as Doc. And Jennifer Lewis cracked me up when I heard her speak. Owen Wilson was the only disappointment. It seemed to me that he was just phoning in his performance by playing character's he's already been. (Hansel from Zoolander and Roy O'Bannon from Shanghai Noon seemed to be the big influences.) His performance wasn't bad, just not as good as the others. There were also a bunch of cameos by famous car people, but I didn't recognize most of them, since I'm not a race fan, but I did recognize Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, who host Car Talk on NPR. (I am such an NPR geek.)

One question that I kept coming to throughout the movie was, why are there sidewalk? (See this comic for a similar thought.)

The only problem I had was with the ending. (I usually have a problem with endings, don't I?) Yes, I knew it would end happy and I was pretty sure how it would end and I was thrilled at how the final race was concluded, but the final ending was just too pat, too sickly, gooey sweet. A little realism there would have gone a long way with me, but it probably would have left the rest of the audience a really bad taste in their mouths.

So, I say go and see and enjoy Cars. It's not their best, but it's certainly better than most of the other things you'll see this summer.