Movies: Road To Nowhere

Cars is clichéd, boring; Tokyo Drift is clichéd, exciting!

EVAN JOHNSON STAFF

Tokyo Drift’s Lucas Black ponders the larger questions PHOTO CUTOSY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES

I hate cars, so seeing both The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Cars in the same day was surely one of the most perverse and masochistic double features I could have imposed upon myself. The bizarre twist, however, is that it was the Pixar picture that left me totally bored while the second Fast and the Furious sequel actually had me entertained for more than half of its running time. What the hell happened?

In Cars (directed by John Lasseter), Owen Wilson voices Lightning Mc- Queen, a spunky but arrogant racecar whose dreams of corporate sponsorship are interrupted when an inadvertent detour finds him trapped in Radiator Springs, a forgotten town of quaint agrarian folksiness, lost to the world since being by-passed by the freeway many years back.

There, he learns the value of teamwork and friendship from a host of clichéd characters and vague ethnic stereotypes: there’s Doc Hudson, the crusty and secretive local magistrate, who dispenses unsettling but presumably car-related advice like “drive it in deep and hope that it sticks”; Sally Carrera, the curvaceous but sexually non-threatening Porsche; Filmore the aging hippie Volkswagen van; and Mater, the rusty, buck-toothed, moronic pickup truck, voiced with gusto by worthless idiot Larry the Cable Guy. Filmore, as voiced by George Carlin, delivers the film’s truest and most potent line, though it’s disappointingly passed off as mere conspiracy theory: “Oil companies have a grip on the government. They’re feeding us a bunch of lies, man.”

The film’s visual oomph is pretty much up to Pixar’s high standards, though the animation makes more of an impression in its detailed textures and background vistas than it does with the titular automotive characters, who are awkward and have to struggle against their constrictive frames in order to emote and express like humans. It makes you wonder why Lasseter and his team of ten screenwriters (ten!?) chose to make the film about cars at all; why not people? What, after all, is wrong with people? I suppose that if the film had been about people instead of cars then it would be all the more obvious how bland, predictable and preachy it is. “It’s not the ride. It’s the ride,” says Sean Boswell in the early minutes of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and I, for one, believe him. Or I would if I knew what the hell he was talking about. Part of the charm of Tokyo Drift is that it really doesn’t make sense (to me) on any level: the characters are only marginally motivated by authentic human desires and the major narrative shifts are determined solely by illegal nocturnal races attended only by thin, beautiful people.

The story, to the extent that there is one, involves Alabama boy Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) trying to balance his father’s stringent dictums (“no racing”) with his own need-for-speed nature; “I’m a guy,” he explains to his would-be girlfriend Neela (Nathalie Kelley), “it’s in my nature.” Lines like that tend to make my testicles feel really small, but Sean’s (and director Justin Lin’s) affection for racing is genuinely infectious. Luckily, Lin also knows how to keep things moving, so the narrative stupidities and inane dialogue are never really given time to settle and become irksome.

And there’s some additional good news. Those of us who’ve been in a suicidal funk since 1999 when Home Improvement went off the air might have reason to loosen our nooses: Zachary Ty Brian (eldest son of Tim the Tool Man Taylor) is back! And he plays a dude named Clay! And though there aren’t really any hilarious household hardware hijinks to speak of, Clay is a formidable presence in the first ten minutes of the film.

I suppose it would be remiss of me to write a Tokyo Drift review without using the phrase “high-octane,” but I just can’t figure out where to apply it. Certainly not to the acting: poor Lucas Black trips and tumbles his way through lines like “hey, never look back” or “thanks for last night” as though they were ornate Slovakian tongue-twisters. He has a certain blank charm, though, and it gets him far enough. Perhaps the racing scenes are high-octane; they have a kinetic energy that’s exhilarating even when they’re ridiculously implausible.

I don’t mean to get all ideological here, but both movies are stunningly oblivious to the contemporary world’s concerns with automobiles. With Cars, you get the sense that said obliviousness is just part of the movie’s nostalgic yearning for simpler times, when cars didn’t pollute, but it still sort of bugs me to see a piece of children’s entertainment that reveres cars so much. More cars, children: that’s what the world needs!

Tokyo Drift is less problematic, if only because it’s marketed at a slightly older demographic, the 12-to 14- year-olds. Luckily, help is on the way: on June 15 Stephen Harper’s Conservatives introduced a bill into the House of Commons that will make street racing a criminal offence! This doesn’t affect the Tokyo scene, obviously, but it’s a start. Sometimes logic comes from the most unlikely places.