Wild Tales (***1/2)

With so few venues for shorts, there should be more films like this. The aptly titled Wild Tales is a anthology film that brings together half a dozen stories, otherwise unrelated, that all stem from the brain of Argentinian director Damián Szifron. To be sure, some elements show up in multiple stories — revenge, characters turning smaller problems into larger ones, violent reactions, issues surrounding motor vehicles — but the only thing that truly ties them together is Szifron, whose penchant for creative plot turns and mordant humor makes this a tasty cinematic buffet.

Typical is the brief pre-credit story: A model meets a music professor on a plane, and it turns out they have a common acquaintance…but maybe that’s no coincidence. In a later episode, perhaps the most clever and visually arresting, a minor road rage incident also turns into something more. In each case, Szifron dispenses with lengthy set-ups and puts the viewer right into the story.

The plot twists and humor in each of them takes nothing away from the emotions of the main characters. Even if you wouldn’t go as far as they do to resolve their problems, you’ll identify a little bit with them, or at any rate laugh at them. One actor, Ricardo Darín, has also starred in Nine Queens and The Secret in Their Eyes, two other excellent Argentinian films.

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viewed 4/29/15 at Ritz Bourse and posted 4/29/15

The Goods: Live Hard * Sell Hard (**)

An awkwardly titled comedy with the grating Jeremy Piven as the leader of a guns-for-hire team of sales folks who aim to rescue a family-owned car dealership in a no-holds-barred weekend sale. I have no idea if such folks exist, but I’m pretty sure no one c0nnected with the script knows anything more about selling cars than a couple of Google searches would turn up. No, the main idea is to present a bunch of people acting outrageous. The lone female, for example, lusts after the dealership owner’s son, who is supposedly ten years old but trapped in the body of a thirty-year-old. Heee-larious?

Some of this is fairly funny for a bit, depending on your taste for the tasteless, but when the old salesman makes his fifth or sixth racist/sexist comment it ceases to be daring or outrageous and becomes merely tiresome. Then you start to notice that all of the characters, even Piven’s, are pretty one-dimensional and the plotting is out of a Comedy Movie 101 course.

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viewed at screening [Bridge] and reviewed 8/15/09

Flash of Genius (***1/2)

This movie’s subject, Robert Kearns (Greg Kinnear), is barely a footnote in history, but an illustrative one. He is less known as the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper than for the lengthy legal battle he fought to be acknowledged as such.

Kearns, an engineer, is both selfish and completely right in his fight with the Ford Motor Company, which consumes him to the point that it threatens his relationship with his wife (Lauren Graham) and children. That’s the contradiction explored here and what makes it a cut above the typical underdog drama. The screenplay by Philip Railsback does a good job of summarizing the history of Kearns’s invention and his crusade for recognition. A non-lawyer will have some idea of why it can take so long for the wheels of justice to turn. It seems more authentic in this respect than the still-worthwhile North Country, the most similar film I can think of. (That was about sex discrimination.)

There was only one time watching this movie where I said, no, I can’t imagine it happened like that, and that was when Kearns apparently learns his invention was stolen only when he drives down the highway and sees someone using it. About the only other inauthentic thing is the timeline, which the movie slightly fudges, along with Kearns’s age. This is no big deal, but a stronger period feel would have have made the story even richer. Despite the title, the movie is not at all flashy, and so not similar to Tucker: The Man and His Dream, another automobile-related biography, but of a larger-than-life sort of individual. Here, Kearns is a both an everyman character, lately a specialty for Kinnear, and a man of extraordinary persistence. The portrayal is sympathetic, but some people may find him foolishly uncompromising. In any case, they will wonder how far they would go to defend a principle, and be reminded that, no matter what decision they would make, something must be sacrificed, even if it is only time. Thus the movie is bittersweet, and therefore, to me, unexpectedly moving.

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viewed 9/11/08 (screening at Ritz East); reviewed

Who Killed the Electric Car (***1/2)

-->  Filmmaker Chris Paine delves into the curious mystery behind GM’s decision to produce, then recall, its entire fleet of EV1 electric vehicles.

When I was growing up, I remember hearing a story that there actually existed a tire that would never wear out, only the tire companies had bought the rights so as to preserve their profits. This movie documents a true-life story something like that. The “killed” in the title is no hyperbole, as most of the cars in question were literally crushed between 2003 and 2005. You might be forgiven for not knowing that there had been any electric cars marketed since the internal combustion engine became the technology of choice in the 1920s. The movie mostly tells the story of the EV1, the General Motors vehicle that was designed from the ground up and represented the first entry in the potential new market. It was GM’s prototype that originally inspired California to pass since-revoked legislation requiring 10% of vehicles sold in the state to have zero emissions by 2003. Interviews with some people involved in the GM project, politicians, automotive experts, and EV1 owners (most notably Mel Gibson) form the basis of the film. What the movie lacks in innovative techniques it makes up for in the story it tells and the way it’s carefully structured as a mystery. The oil companies and recent presidential administrations come in for predictable criticism, but the more interesting question answered in the movie is why the automaker would create a car and then do so little to sell it to the public. Whoever did this killing, I came away from the movie mourning the loss.

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Cars (**3/4)

Pixar Animation’s seventh feature film is also its weakest, set in a world where everyone’s a car, the humor is tepid, and life is about as exciting as watching auto racing on TV. Okay, not that dull.

This is the seventh in a string of wildly successful features released by Pixar Animation Studios, now owned by Disney. All of the earlier ones (the Toy Story movies, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles) have not only been big hits, but are beloved by audiences and critics alike. Cars, directed by Toy Story’s John Lasseter, has the top-notch computer animation that no doubt goes part way to explaining Pixar’s success. But story-wise, it’s a dodgier affair.

It begins with an auto race, where we can see that the cars are driving themselves, and that the audience too consists of cars. Everyone’s a car, but the fastest is cocky Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson). In the film’s only memorable line, he nicknames his chief rival “Thunder,” noting that “thunder comes after lightning.” But pride goeth before a fall, and so Lightning must learn an Important Lesson about needing others. This he learns from the forlorn folks in a left-behind town on old Route 66 (the old song’s heard in two versions), most notably the old racer appealing voiced by Paul Newman. Cars isn’t awful, but it’s less funny and probably has less all-ages appeal than the other Pixar flicks. It also continues the Pixar pattern of giving much more prominence to the male characters (The Incredibles being an exception). Bonnie Hunt plays a lawyer who doubles as a sort of love interest for Lightning, but all the physical work is done by the he-cars. (The racers are all male, too.) Hunt’s paean to the pre-Interstate highway system is more touching than anything else. The theatrical release of Cars was preceded by the charming, Academy Award-nominated short One Man Band.

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