Used Cars

(Used Cars has some pretty amazing gags that depend on what you don’t know. I urge if you haven’t seen it to hold off on this review)

They don’t make movies like Used Cars anymore. Oh sure, comedies will play dark now and again, but it takes a special kind of movie to play dark enough to kill off its “cuddly old mentor character” in the opening reel. It takes a specialer kind of movie to use the increasingly grisly fates that befall his corpse as a running gag.

Used Cars follows Kurt Russell as the amoral head salesman of a broken down lot, whose trying to raise the fifty thousand dollars he needs to buy himself a seat in the state senate. Things escalate rapidly when the brother of the owner of Russell’s lot, murder’s his brother in an attempt to gain the extra lot. Russell having promised never to let the old man’s lot fall into his mercenary brother’s hands, starts an all out war. The result is a comedy that’s absolutely relentless.

Zemekis combines the character based comedy and relentless pace of The Looney Tunes with the “cram a gag in every corner of the frame aesthetic of Mad Magazine in its prime. And in the meantime manages to fit in one of the greatest mass car chases inbetween The Road Warrior and Gumball Alley. It’s a strident uber confident style of comedy, that is just unbearably fucking funny, and just kind of have to speak for itself. All I can say is out of context the following scene is pretty great. In context it’s nigh unbearably hilarious.



Kurt Russell anchors the film. Used Cars is a thoroughly cynical film. Its unthinkable that a movie like this would get made today without a scene to reaffirm that Russell is basically a decent softy underneath all the bluster. But Used Cars is too brave for such platitudes. Russell is an asshole at the beginning of the film, and he’s an asshole at film’s end. He struts through the movie like an amoral Bugs Bunny, with so much charisma to burn that we can’t help but like him, despite the reprehensible things he does. He’s just so good at blowing up the Elmer Fudd’s the film lines up for him.

To draw those two comparisons, you’d have to guess that Used Cars is a movie with some serious verve. Robert Zemekis it goes without saying, has become THE head cheerleader for Motion Capture Technology. It’s kind of a shame. To a certain extent this doesn’t come as a surprise. The best of Zemekis’s scripts have this kind of precision, that could only come from a dedicated control freak (Back To The Future is a fucking Swiss watch). And well before his obsession with Mo Cap, his tech head tendencies were in full flower (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, What Lies Beneath). The Mo Cap technique springs from a tendency to control every aspect of the frame, in a way that neither animation, nor live action will allow. It’s just too bad that a filmmaker who could make a film this loose, this wonderfully spontaneous and mad could fall to such a model maker’s impulse.

A Christmas Carol

Elwood over at From The Depths Of DVD Hell has asked some bloggers for their ultimate Christmas Movie. I’m going to be kind of uncreative here and say A Christmas Carol.

The very name might make you roll your eyes, A Christmas Carol is one of those stories that keeps getting retold and retold, it seems like every other Christmas there’s another version of the story. There’s a reason for this though. I don’t want to get controversial here but that Dickens guy was a pretty good writer. Carol is one of those rare pieces of work with a story so strong and themes so primal that you have to be a literal moron to fuck it up.

I just saw the Zememkis version of the new story, one which has caused quite a few people to assign the dunce cap to Zemekis. I for one liked it. Say what you will about Jim Carrey but if ever there was an actor designed for motion capture it was he. He does strong work as Scrooge and the three ghosts, bringing each to life with solid body work. Gary Oldman also does strong work as Marley and Cratchet (Tiny Tim as well though he barely amounts to a cameo) Colin Firth on the other hand still seems a bit stiff. The Three Christmas Ghosts are all very well animated, the idea of making The Ghost Of Christmas Future Scrooge’s literal Shadow works quite well. And the whole movie has a shockingly eerie tone, extending even to a surprisingly unjolly Ghost Of Christmas Present (Whose demise pushes the needle into gruesome)

I also have to give credit to Zemekis for fearlessly tackling the tougher parts of the book, that filmmakers are usually loathe to touch with a ten foot pole. The Ignorance and Want scene is here in all its didactic glory, as is the scene of the ghostly cavern over London, hell Zemekis even puts in the weird little rant the Ghost Of Christmas Present, has about the church closing down community kitchens on Sunday. Surely a hot button issue.

Still the movie’s not perfect, It rushes through things, particularly in the rather key Ghost Of Christmas Past, and features long interminable tech demos, that try to show you how awesome 3D looks with long frantic sequences of the camera following Scrooge as he rushes around. Its tough for me to describe how painfully uninteresting these scenes where. And will undoubtably become even more so once it reaches home video. Though in all fairness, Disney 3D has the best system right now. And on the whole I’d argue that A Christmas Carol makes a much better argument for the potential of Motion Capture and 3D then Avatar did.


But for me the ultimate version has to be A Muppet Christmas Carol. One of the few Christmas traditions my family actually manages to keep is the watching The Muppet Christmas Carol. And its still my favorite version of the story.

When stripped to its bare essentials A Christmas Carol is basically the story of someone’s personality having a complete meltdown by himself in its room. The sentiment that gets ladled on at the end comes after a surprisingly dark core. And for all the wise cracks A Muppet Christmas Carol remembers this, anchored by a surprisingly grave performance by Michael Caine. He never once winks at the material or his “actors”. Always more of a consummate pro then showboat in many ways Caine is the ideal actor to perform opposite Puppets with cut in half ping pong balls for eyes. A Muppet Christmas Carol was the first Muppet Movie Made after the death of Jim Henson, and it remains their most successful work without him. The work that retains the most of the beloved virtuoso’s spirit and style. It stands as a loving tribute to a master craftsman through the retelling of one of the most beloved stories of all time

One of the reasons A Christmas Carol continues to resonate is the way it avoids all the baggage that comes with the season. The message of A Christmas Carol has nothing to do with religion, its just asks “Wouldn’t it be nice if we all took one day when we weren’t such total bastards to each other?” Its one of those rare works of art that challenges you to be a better person without beating you over the head with sentiment and very special lessons.

I hope you have a Merry Christmas.