6/15/09

Where’s the good car movies?

I was running on the treadmill watching The Fast and the Furious.  I know, the movie is ridiculous, but it’s entertaining enough to watch while jogging on the ‘mill.  I love good car chases and generally am a fan of car movies.  As I was running, I got to thinking about what car movies I love.  I came up with (in no particular order):

  • The Fast and Furious
  • Smokey and the Bandit
  • Gone in 60 Seconds
  • Cannonball Run
  • Days of Thunder (I love Days of Thunder for many more reasons than there are cars in it.  The fact that they used the Top Gun script and used the Find and Replace option in Word to produce a movie is just terrific)

And I realized that is about it.  Why are there not more car centric movies made?  Everyone loves cars, this is America dammit!  While I don’t have the sequels listed above, they did pretty well at the box office….well enough to be considered a financial success.  FF: Toyko Drift was pretty bad, but that was because they got away from the “undercover cop drives car” formula.  You could almost categorize Transformers as a car movie, but we’ll leave that out.  I thought The Transporter series wanted to go in a car centric direction, but they liked Stratham’s action moves better I guess.  So, in the last 30 years since Smokey and the Bandit has come out, we’ve only had 4 or so good car movie ideas.  Gone in 60 seconds was a remake, so do we count that?  <sigh>  It’s depressing almost.  With all the crap that people try to come up with for movies….we love cars.  The horrible Knight Rider remake got decent ratings for half the season until they turned KITT into a freaking truck.  (a truck???? NNOOOOO!!!!)  Off the top of my head, the only major car movie bomb was the F1 movie with Sly Stallone.  That was just a ridiculous premise, so I hate to even compare it to these other ones.

I wanted to take a whole paragraph to pay homage to the best car movie made.  It’s actually not even a movie, so didn’t put it on the list above.  The best car movie was actually a set of commercials commissioned by BMW 10 years ago or so.  I was lucky enough to order them from BMW a few years ago and have them on DVD.  The series of commercials is called “The Hire”.  I believe most of them live on youtube in some form or another.  Here’s a link to the best one, it stars Madonna and “the snap turn”.  We spend a couple hours watching that 9 minute commercial over one St Pat’s weekend back at Rolla.  These commercials should be the outline for any car movie made.  The outline is right there!  There’s even a bit of story there.  Why would someone not slip in and pick this up for full movie?  Arg….

In closing….let’s make some car movies!  The car industry is in the crapper right now, a feel good, fast car driving movie could be just what we need to re-awaken our love of cars.       

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