WRITING CULTURE 2012: Film, Food & Beyond

I have an unabashed appreciation for the automobile, and all things automotive. I could spend hours talking about it, and I often do. Daily. I understand that this makes me a bit of weirdo, and for that reason I understand why most “car movies” usually aren’t about cars. Or if they are, they’re inexplicably terrible.

There are a lot of movies with excellent footage of really cool cars doing fantastic things. Ronin, starring Robert DeNiro, Jean Rene, and a young Natascha McElhone (Hank Moody’s ex-wife on Californication), is among my favorites. Primary reason being it features a female assassin driving a BMW M5 the wrong way down a Parisian highway at insane speeds. It’s perfect.

The action in Ronin is very real, and very accurate and believable. It does without CGI or half-assed stunt driving – a total of 83 cars were destroyed during the production of the movie. Though I love Ronin for its stunt coordination and cynicism, it is not a car a film. It’s a movie about assasins who happen to have amazingly good taste in cars.

The reason for this is John Frankenheimer, the director of Ronin, is a bit of a  car fanatic. So much so that he directed Grand Prix a 1966 movie about Formula One racing. Though Grand Prix does have feature some great racing especially when you think about the tools they had available at that time the cinematography is nothing short of ground breaking. But once you’re finished nerding out, usually after the opening race scene there isn’t a whole much substance to sink your inner film snob.

The rest of Grand Prix is painfully boring, and though you might be roused from your sleep by some of the noises in the later racing scences you’ll quickly realize that you don’t care and fall back asleep. In short,  it’s boring as all hell. John Frankenheimer learned his lesson, and he never directed another “car movie” ever again.

The same goes for other car movies like Steve Mcqueen’s LeMans epic, which was actually filmed during the 1970 running of the famed 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race. The action is very real but I still fell asleep, and I’ve only watched it twice in its entirety.

So I can understand why Hollywood wants to make an entertaining car movie. a) its never been done b) it’ll make tons of money c) it’ll make tons of money. But the truth is every movie that Hollywood has made about “cars” either hasn’t actually been about cars, or was so incredibly inaccurate (because they didn’t listen to the car nerds they hired as consultants) that it could be classified an assault on human intellect.

Driven, directed by and staring master class thespian Sylvester Stallone, is a prime example. There are so many inaccuracies that the movie is unwatchable, But the scene where Stallone and some hunky looking C-list actor drive through the Chicago streets at 195 mph without eye protection takes the cake. I don’t know about you, but my eyes go dry in a 35 mph gust. You can watch the best moments of this racing fueled Hollywood debacle here.

Then there’s the Fast and the Furious series. Which to be fair, sparked an interest in import tuning here in America, but I think they way that actually  happened was totally unintended. People mocked the movie, and then went out and educated themselves on import tuning. But just an FYI when the “manifold” on your souped up Mitsubishi is in “danger” your laptop doesn’t display a warning, and your passenger floor board definitely doesn’t fall out. Your engine explodes, and you loose the race. It’s pretty simple. But here enjoy the “best of moments” of the Fast and the Furious franchise:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm_CrCyRHhc

The thing about cars is  they can be very exciting for a lot of reasons all of which are difficult to capture on film. Though some cars may look great the most exciting part about them has almost nothing to do with sight. There’s the sound, there’s the sweet smell of burnt gasoline, and the various vibrations that you can attribute to going fast. None of those can be conveyed on traditional film without being overly dramatic or just plain wrong.  In the end “car movies” and movies about cars are terrible because they ultimately fail at being entertaining.

Photo credit: Ronin