Flutterby™! : Cars & One Man Band 2006-06-09 16:23:05.299615+00

Cars & One Man Band

2006-06-09 16:23:05.299615+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

I don't know if I'm going to get to the movies this weekend either, got some monster projects here at the house, but Pixar's Cars is opening. More to the point, One Man Band precedes it. Mick LaSalle (whom I take with a grain of salt) isn't overwhelmed with the movie:

Here we have, for example, a young hotshot hot rod, Lightning McQueen (voice of Owen Wilson), who wants to win a great race. Great. In a 10-minute short, there would be nothing to think about. But in a 116-minute movie, questions seep into the mind: Why does he want to win? To have groupies? To eat in nice restaurants? To go on great vacations? The poor thing is an armless, legless, cumbersome creature, inhabiting a lonely landscape in which no real connection is possible. Antonioni should have made this movie. Or Tod Browning.

None of which is going to stop me from seeing this film in the theater. However, he also says:

However, condense all its delights and "Cars" is still no equal to "One Man Band." That four-minute short gives "Cars" a tough act to follow.

One Man Band is the short before Cars, and although I never got over there to see it, I've heard really good things.

Went and saw it tonight. I had a ton of fun, and I didn't get a fraction of the NASCAR/automitive references. I didn't particularly like One Man band.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-06-10 16:58:47.534718+00 by: mvandewettering

Oh my god, it's the greatest movie ever! I think that not only should everyone force everyone they know to see it multiple times, but they should go out and buy Disney stock and...

It's really hard to know what critics are going to say positive or negative about your film, but I have been finding most of the negative criticism about Cars to be a little hard to understand. In the quote above, the reviewer seems to want to know why Lightning McQueen wants to win. I think it's an absurd question. Why race at all? I mean seriously, do people go up to Dale Earnhardt Jr., stick a microphone in his face and ask him "Why are you trying to win?" Lightning McQueen wants to win because he's a freakin' race car you dolt.

The film itself is scoring around 77% at the moment with critics, but among their users, it scores around a 93%, with 27 positive and only two negative reviews. Obviously, that means that as a film critic, you are just taking things far too seriously.

Critics.. They think if they can't find something to complain about, someone will think they got paid to write nice things about it.