I love Anthony Lane
Last year I spent several months happily devouring "Nobody's Perfect", a series of movie and book reviews by the New Yorker's most excellent critic, Anthony Lane. Since being denied a lengthy fix of his incisive wit, every week with luck one can find his reviews on the New Yorker website. Here is his latest, a sharp take on Pixar's latest, Cars:
The opening as follows,
"If movie studios run on a blend of gamble and caution, then Pixar has been one of the few, in recent years, to get the mixture right. The aesthetic dazzle of “Toy Story” and “Monsters, Inc.” was, in a way, the pure product of economic sense; given the digital care that is lavished on a single image, and the intrinsic difficulty of persuading a large green furry biped to come back for re-shoots, you might as well take the time, and the trouble, to get your gags running smoothly before the filming starts. In the case of “Cars,” the latest Pixar project, three thousand computers toiled away without coffee breaks, and the average frame is said to have required seventeen hours to complete. Not even Marilyn Monroe needed that long. As for the game plan behind “Cars,” my guess is that it went something like this: take “Days of Thunder,” crash it into the rear of “My Cousin Vinny,” set half of it in the landscape of “Stagecoach,” and pitch it squarely at the kind of ten-year-old male who locks himself in the bathroom and devours his dad’s copy of Mustang Monthly."...
Read the rest at - http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/060619crci_cinema:
The opening as follows,
"If movie studios run on a blend of gamble and caution, then Pixar has been one of the few, in recent years, to get the mixture right. The aesthetic dazzle of “Toy Story” and “Monsters, Inc.” was, in a way, the pure product of economic sense; given the digital care that is lavished on a single image, and the intrinsic difficulty of persuading a large green furry biped to come back for re-shoots, you might as well take the time, and the trouble, to get your gags running smoothly before the filming starts. In the case of “Cars,” the latest Pixar project, three thousand computers toiled away without coffee breaks, and the average frame is said to have required seventeen hours to complete. Not even Marilyn Monroe needed that long. As for the game plan behind “Cars,” my guess is that it went something like this: take “Days of Thunder,” crash it into the rear of “My Cousin Vinny,” set half of it in the landscape of “Stagecoach,” and pitch it squarely at the kind of ten-year-old male who locks himself in the bathroom and devours his dad’s copy of Mustang Monthly."...
Read the rest at - http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/060619crci_cinema: