Cars 2 Review

Cars 2 Review

Pixar is known for its great animation, its clever and inventive stories, and its creative characters. They have defined their brand with quality. Each and every movie they have made has been top quality, and Cars 2 is no exception.

The first Cars was my least favorite Pixar movie.  I wasn't a huge fan of the idea of personifying cars, and lets be honest the story was a blatant rip off of the Michael J. Fox classic Doc Hollywood. I thought it was good, even the worst Pixar film is better than most other movies, but in my opinion Cars was not really their best work.

Pixar has stated that unless there is a good reason, a creative reason, there will not be sequels to their films.  This philosophy has served them well. Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 are great movies first, and sequels second. Cars 2 continues this trend.  The creators purposely avoided the pitfalls of making a traditional sequel and instead push the story in a wonderful new direction.

The direction they decided was brilliant. At its core Cars 2 is a spy thriller, with more in common with James Bond than with Nascar. They don't ditch the racing, but rather than focus on the racing which would have been admittedly repetitive, Cars 2 gears itself towards action and adventure.  Cars 2 is a much more exciting film than the first one. Just like a Bond movie, Cars 2 is full of car chases, tire to tire combat, and some very exciting action sequences.  The creators took this world they created in the last movie and purposely chose do something different with it.  There are several blatant, and brilliant nods to James Bond, Austin Powers, and many other classic spy films.

The plot is driven this time not by Lightning McQueen, but by Mater, the innocent, childlike redneck tow truck. Mater has unwittingly become the spy who knew too little. Aided by two British Intelligence agents, an Austin Martin named Fin McMissile (voiced by Michael Caine) and a Jaguar XJR-15 named Holly Shiftwell (voiced by Emily Mortimer), Mater must help save the world from a diabolical syndicate called LEMON. LEMON is of course comprised of famous clunkers, like Gremlins, Pintos, and other commonly known jalopies. Of course all of the makes and models of the cars fit perfectly with their stereotype characters.

One of the more interesting plot points was the concept of Big Oil using alternative fuels as a catalyst for controlled change.  If oil companies control alternative fuels then we remain at their mercy. Should these oil companies decide that alternative fuels aren't profitable, then we likely won't see change anytime soon. But maybe I am reading too much into the political subplot, maybe the creators just like in the Bond films made a villain interested in world domination, which in the world of Cars, would of course be control of petroleum products.

Overall Cars 2 was a fun and exciting movie.  It expanded the world of Cars, and allows for any number of stories to take place, and also allows the creators an opportunity to play with genre in a whole new way. Maybe we will get a Cars version of a comic book movie, or a science fiction thriller. The possibilities are now endless.

Midnight in Paris Review

Midnight in Paris Review

The thought of visiting your favorite time period, and visiting with the visionaries of the time is a concept that everyone considers at one time in their life. The new Woody Allen film, Midnight in Paris, is an insightful and charming look at this concept.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a hack screenwriter who dreams of becoming a great novelist. He visits Paris with his Fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her family.Visiting Paris feeds his dream of becoming a great writer in the most poetic city in the world.  He is in love with the notion of living in 1920s Paris, surrounded by the brilliance of expatriate writers and artists, and of course all this must be in the rain.

One evening after a wine tasting, a slightly inebriated and lost Gil finds himself alone on a Parisian street corner, as the clock strikes twelve.  As the bells chime, a 1920s Peugeot, pulls up and transports Gil to the 1920s.  When Gil realizes that he is actually visiting the past, experiencing his wildest fantasies, he becomes immediately entranced. He basks in the ambiance, and soaks in the wisdom of his idealistic golden age. Gil continues to visit the 1920s meeting and interacting with the contemporary visionaries of the time. The film is difficult to describe but it is lovely and the less you know the better. It is full of insight and quotable soundbites, and you will leave the theater with an appetite for life.

Woody Allen films are a genre in itself. He has made 41 films and all of them have familiar elements, from the credits to the characters you can find benchmarks and touchstones in all of them. His films are almost always personal to him in some way shape or form, and hit or miss, they provide us with some insight into his genius.  In this case, you have to believe that Woody Allen, has fallen in love with Paris, and this love has given inspiration to a beautifully insightful and philosophical film experiences in the last decade. Equal parts entertaining and literate, unlike so many movies today, so expect to be challenged and stimulated intellectually.

A major theme in the movie is that "nostalgia is denial of a painful present." The thought that even the best of times are only beautiful in hindsight. Of course there is also the notion that those who are nostalgic for the greatness of times past are short sighted in realizing that the time they live in will one day be nostalgia for some future romantic, who would love to live in our time, especially in the rain.