In Cars, Owen Wilson plays the voice of a talking car who….
Talking car? Let me start over.
In Cars, the zombified carcass of Walt Disney (ahem, Walt Disney Pictures) grasps at the coattails of the animation powerhouse Pixar and its latest offering. And this time, it looks like a cartoon version of Oliver Stone’s U-Turn, except with J-Lo replaced by a Porsche, though hopefully without so much junk in the trunk. If you like automotive puns like that — God help you — then Cars is the movie for you! If you like a night of mixed feelings, check out Cars in a double-feature with Who Killed The Electric Car? and see what happens to all those adorable cars you fell in love with over the last hour and a half. Or try Cars with An Inconvenient Truth to see how our nation’s dependence on plucky animated race cars is destroying our environment.
Speaking of movies where the cars have all the personality, there’s The Fast & the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift. In it, Average White Guy and Average Black Guy meet Japanese people and are like, “Hey, Japan is a crazy place where everything is different!” I got the drift that this movie is made up nearly entirely of car races and car chases, so if the filmmakers aren’t going to pretend there’s anything more to Tokyo Drift than this, neither am I.
Switching gears (ugh), The Lake House stars Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock as a couple trapped aboard a speeding bus as a couple who share the same house by the lake, albeit two years apart. If only they had tried this in The Break-Up, I could’ve saved 90 excruciating minutes. The Shyamalan-esque twist is that while one lives in the eponymous lake house in 2006 and the other lived there in 2004, they still seem to be able to write letters to each other, which I think classifies this as sci-fi. Or if Sandra Bullock is supposed to be the attractive female lead, then fantasy. I don’t want to jump to conclusions with this touching fantasy romance with its elves and unicorns and magical time traveling postcards, but do you think it’s possible that… one of them was dead the whole time?!
Click. That’s me turning off the latest Adam Sandler movie.
I’ve tried looking up information on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford but I still have no clue what this movie is about, and the title sure isn’t any help. The closest I could find is a motorcycle mechanic by the name of Jesse James, so uh, I guess this movie is about bikers?
So this wraps up my round of movie reviews; I’ve left the critique of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 to the guy dressed like Jack Sparrow up on Hollywood & Highland — I figure he’s more of an expert on the subject, so ask him what he thinks if you see him on your way into Beard Papa’s.