Movie Review: The Sleeping Beauty

The Sleeping Beauty no stars

Directed by: Catherine Breillat   

Written By: Catherine Breillat & Charles Perrault.

Starring:  Julia Artamonov, Carla Besainou,  David Chausse,  Kerian Mayan.

Catherine Breillat is one of the most incendiary filmmakers in the world. All of her films are obsessed with sexuality, and most of them deal with pure virgins and the dastardly men who rob them of that virtue. In films like Fat Girl, Breillat puts that adolescent sexuality, in all its ugliness and beauty, right in our faces – particularly in a long sequence where the boyfriend of the protagonists younger sister gradually wears down her resistance and gets her to have sex with him for the first time – which of course leads the ugly final scene where the younger sister (the Fat Girl of the title) is thrilled that the rapist picked her instead of her mother or sister. Breillat is a woman who seems both fascinated by the beautiful young bodies she puts on full display in her movies, and yet repulsed by them – often showing sexuality as ugly and dirty and painful. She has made some films that are great – Fat Girl, The Last Mistress – and some films that are simply horrible – Romance, Anatomy of Hell and many that are somewhere in between. Unfortunately, The Sleeping Beauty is one of those horrible films.

Watching The Sleeping Beauty, I became increasingly frustrated, because in all honesty, I really have no idea precisely what Breillat was trying to achieve here. If you want to say I hated the film simply because I didn’t “get” it, then go ahead – I can live with that. But what I saw on the screen was a director flailing around for ideas, trying to make it all seem so important, and looking absolutely ridiculous in the process.

The film is pretentious crap, featuring an adorable 6 year old girl going through one fairy tale setting after another – encountering boiled covered giants, knife wielding gypsies, snippy dwarves, an icy snow queen, topless fairies and evil witches – all before she drifts off for her 100 year sleep. When she wakes up, she is now the type of 16 year old girl that Breillat loves – innocent and naïve, yet curious about sexuality. She first meets an impossibly handsome young man, said to be the great-grandson of her long ago lost love, but when he leaves, she meets up with her old knife wielding gypsy friend (who for some reason hasn’t aged much more than the sleeping beauty herself in 100 years), and they two of them share a lesbian tryst. Then the impossibly handsome young man shows back up, and we are treated once again to Breillat’s favorite scene – that of an innocent young painfully losing her virginity to an insenstivie, uncaring young man who will say anything to get into her pants (although this time it should be noted, he doesn’t have to say all that much).

I’m sure Breillat thinks all of this is terribly important and artistic – and I look forward to reading someone’s no doubt incredibly positive take on the film, explaining to cinematic idiots like myself why this really is a masterpiece. There are admittedly some very strange images in the film (a group of kindergarteners in strange, bright pink kimonos was more disturbing than any of the monsters she encounters), and I suppose you could say that the movie is really takes place in a dream world, so narrative coherence is not really a must – but all of that strikes be as excuse making by critics who want to seem hip and defend a film that almost no one would actually want to sit through. The Sleeping Beauty is an absolute horrible film.

The Best Movies I've Never Seen Before: Two Lane Blacktop (1971)

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) ****

Directed by: Monte Hellman.

Written by: Rudy Wurlitzer and Will Corry.

Starring: James Taylor (The Driver), Warren Oates (G.T.O), Laurie Bird (The Girl), Dennis Wilson (The Mechanic).

Two-Lane Blacktop was supposed to be the movie event of the year in 1971. Before anyone saw the film, Rolling Stone called it an instant classic and Esquire put it on its cover, and published the entire screenplay. This was supposed to be the next Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde or The Graduate. Then it opened, and no one showed up. The film didn’t even come out in any form of home video until 1999. Now it is regarded as a classic – which it surely is – but in 1971 it was a flop.

Why no one showed up in 1971 becomes clear when you watch the film. This was never going to be the next Easy Rider – the film it most resembles of the three mentioned above – because Monte Hellman, the director, had no interest in doing a version of Easy Rider. The movie is actually the antithesis of Easy Rider. This is not a romantic version of two counter culture martyrs, who get high, hit the road, drop out of society, with a rock n’ roll sound track and orgies in cemeteries. Where Dennis Hopper’s movie celebrated its “heroes” (even giving them names straight out of Western – Wyatt and Billy, for Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid), Hellman sees their lives as empty and meaningless. The kids wanted fast moving, violent, sexy movies inspired by the French New Wave, and instead Hellman gave them a slower, more meditative film influenced by Antonini. Even something as simple as the direction they are travelling – from the West to Washington DC - flies in the face of movies like Easy Rider, where everyone always heads West. The question isn’t why no one showed up to see the film in 1971 – but why anyone ever expected them to.

But it’s these differences that make Two-Lane Blacktop seem so contemporary even 40 years later, and makes Easy Rider seem so dated. I like Easy Rider for what it is – a time capsule of 1960s cinematic style and attitude – but the film has never excited me as much as it did the kids in the ‘60s. It is from another time and place, whereas Two-Lane Blacktop still feels fresh.

Hellman’s movie doesn’t even bother to give names to its characters. Folk Singer James Taylor plays The Driver and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson plays The Mechanic. They have hit the road in their supped up 1955 Chevy, driving along Route 66 from one desolate town to the next, making money by drag racing, in which they never lose. They pick up The Girl (Laurie Bird), who simply gets into the back of their car one day. By the end of the movie, she will have slept with both The Mechanic and The Driver, but this isn’t a love triangle – that would require at least one of the characters to feel something and I don’t think any of them do. Along the way, they meet GTO (Warren Oates), who yes, is driving a brand new GTO. He is older than the others, but he gets sucked into their game anyway. They agree to race across country to Washington DC. The stakes? The winner gets the loser’s car. But pretty much right from the get go, no one seems all that interested in the race. The Driver and The Mechanic have an opportunity to put themselves so far ahead in the race early on that GTO could never catch up, but they don’t take it. Instead, they decide to help him out. “I have no interest in being 600 miles ahead” The Driver says at this point. The winner of the race is never determined in the movie – they simply seem to give up on the race altogether once The Girl leaves with a boy on a motorbike at a diner – leaving her backpack behind her.

I’m not sure if Taylor and Wilson are actually poor actors, or if Hellman told them deliberately to deliver all their lines flat and emotionless. No matter the reason, it works here. The Driver and The Mechanic never really say much of anything to each other – just talk about the car and what needs to be done, and their current money situation. They don’t even turn on the radio because it would be a distraction. They seem to have hit the road in order to avoid all sort of human connection to anyone else – including each other. They simply do not care. GTO is different – he seems to have hit the road because there is nothing for him at home, wherever that may be, and being on the road gives him the chance to talk to people. Throughout the movie, he picks up hitchhiker after hitchhiker, and tells each one of them a different story of what he’s doing on the road, and how he got the GTO. The last hitchhiker he picks up, he tells that he got the GTO by beating its driver in a cross country race in his supped up 55 Chevy – thus adopting The Driver and The Mechanic’s story as his own. Oates’ performance is the best in the movie – one of the best of the 1970s really – because it perfectly captures his story – that of an older man, who seems to have missed out on the 1960s, but is trying anyway.

The film has, what Richard Linklater has called, the “most purely cinematic ending in film history”, and in a certain way, he is correct. The film, as I mentioned before, doesn’t answer the question of who won the race, because no one seems to be racing anymore. Instead, it ends with The Driver and The Mechanic involved in yet another drag race – this time though, we don’t even get to the end of that race. The film starts slowly down, and eventually, will catch fire and simply disintegrate in front of our eyes – as if the film itself caught fire in the projector. As Neil Young once said “It’s better to burn out than fade away”.

The Best Movies I've Never Seen Before: The Gleaners and I (2000)

The Gleaners and I (2000) ***

Directed by: Agnès Varda.

Agnes Varda marvels at the new digital cameras available to her early on in her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I. No long do movies have to have big budgets and backing from outsiders, but allows a filmmaker like Varda to simply start filming things that interest her and see if there is a movie to make out of it. Varda made her directorial debut in 1954, and was really the only female director involved in the French New Wave. She has made 17 films in her career, including some documentaries, some fiction films. Somehow, I managed to miss them all until The Gleaners and I.

The film is about the practice of gleaning, that is still legal in France. Essentially what it entails is that after a crop is harvested, people can come into the farmer’s fields or orchards and take whatever is left over. Farmers don’t really seem to mind this very much – it saves a bunch of rooting fruit and vegetables from sitting on the ground, and they don’t have to pay anyone for it. Varda captures all sorts of people who practice gleaning, which dates back to the 1700s, and it is remarkable how much food they find. Some potatoes are rejected because they are too big or too weird looking. Fruits stays up in the trees, hidden from workers trying to get their job done quickly. Some of these people are poor, some simply want free food. Varda then shows us people in the city who practice a kind of gleaning themselves – by finding food in dumpsters. Unlike the farmers, the store owners don’t really seem to like this practice very much – one even pours bleach into his garbage to prevent it, which simply makes these modern gleaners trash the area around the dumpster. Unlike the gleaners in the country, these urban gleaners just seem like unemployed, unmotivated, young slackers. There is a difference.

Varda says that in many ways, she is a gleaner herself – except she is collecting images instead of food. With her new digital camera, she is shoot whatever she wants to, and see later if it works as part of her movie or not. She doesn’t need a crew or a budget – just herself and her camera. The movie ends up being as much about herself as it does about gleaners.

I found the movie fascinating. I like documentaries about practices that I know nothing about going into the film – and I certainly knew nothing about gleaning when the film started. And I liked how Varda opens herself up, so she becomes as much a subject as anyone else in the film – perhaps even more so. But there is lies the dilemma for me as well. Since I did not know Varda’s previous films heading into this one, it can be somewhat tougher to get inside her head. That’s not the film’s fault, but my own – and one that I hope to correct as I see more of her work.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: The Misfits (1961)

The Misfits (1961) *** ½

Directed by: John Huston.

Written by: Arthur Miller.

Starring: Clark Gable (Gay Langland), Marilyn Monroe (Roslyn Taber), Montgomery Clift (Perce Howland), Thelma Ritter (Isabelle Steers), Eli Wallach (Guido), Kevin McCarthy (Raymond Taber).

The story of the making of The Misfits is at least as interesting as the movie itself. It was the last film of both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe – he died just 12 days after shooting wrapped of a heart attack (which many blamed on the strenuous shoot – although the man did smoke 3 packs of cigarettes a day), she died just over a year later of a drug overdose. Monroe was already struggling with alcohol and drug dependency during the shooting of the movie, often showed up late to set and struggled to learn her lines, written by her then husband Arthur Miller, who was constantly re-writing the script. When the project started, they two were recently married and completely in love. When they started shooting the movie, they bloom was off the rose, Monroe had moved out, and Miller, deciding perhaps to try and embarrass her, put many uncomfortable autobiographical details of her life in the script. Co-star Montgomery Clift was also struggling with drug addiction, and was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Then there was director John Huston, who was suffering from emphysema at the time, and was sometimes too sick to show up on set. When he was there, he was often exhausted, because the film was shot in Nevada, and Huston was a chronic gambler who stayed up all night at the casinos. They even had to shut down production for a week when Huston went over his “gambling allowance”, and had to come up with more money. When the movie opened in February 1961, critics and audiences both disliked it, and it became a high profile flop for all involved. But over the years its reputation has grown, and now watching it 50 years, it is considered a minor classic.

Miller’s purpose in writing the script was to debunk the myth of the rugged, individualist life of cowboys. Instead, he saw them as lonely, pathetic men, whose days was over, but they simply could not admit it to themselves. The movie stars Clark Gable, in one of his greatest performances, as Gay Langland, an aging cowboy who was once a star of the rodeo and could make money “mustanging” in the mountains of Nevada – where they round up the wild horses to sell to people who wanted them for kids. He still mustangs, but now there are fewer horses, and the only people who will buy them are dog food makers. The romanticism of his life is over.

Until, at least, he meets Roslyn (Monore), a free spirited, yet spiritually pure, ex-stripper who cannot help it if every man she meets falls in love with her. Roslyn first meets Guido (Eli Wallach), when he comes to fix her car – that her soon to be ex-husband gave her as a “divorce present”. He convinces her and her friend (the acid tongued Thelma Ritter, great as always) to come to his house out in the country with him and Gay. Guido is still reeling from the death of his wife, but thinks that perhaps Roslyn can cure him – but of course she falls for Gay. Later, they meet up with Perce (Montgomery Clift), a younger, more idealistic version of Gay, who has hit the road because when his father died, he left to family ranch to her mother, who has now remarried and her husband runs the ranch. He spends time at the rodeo, but agrees to come mustanging with Gay and Guido – who bring Roslyn along, who is horrified when she discovers what is going to happen to the mustangs.

The Misfits is a Western, but it is a modern day one – and one without action until its final sequence out in the desert when they all go mustanging. Watching the film, I was reminded of another film I reviewed earlier in this series – Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty men. Both films are about aging, broken down cowboys, realizing their lives are empty. Perhaps that’s why Huston wanted to cast Mitchum in the Clark Gable role in this film (apparently, Mitchum thought the script was incomprehensible, so he dodged Huston’s calls until Gable was cast). Both are very good films, but I think I prefer this one – which isn’t quite as obvious. This is a movie about buried secrets and resentments, coming forward. Clark Gable saw much of the film before he died (Huston shot in sequence and edited as they went), and he felt it was the best work of his career, and it certainly gave him a more complex role than he normally had. We immediately like Gay, because he is Clark Gable, and is so charming and likable, but as the movie progresses, and his darkness and loneliness comes out, we start to have our doubts about him. Gable plays it brilliantly. It is certainly the best dramatic performance of Monroe’s career. Yes, the movie still views Monroe as a sex object, but in this case, it isn’t so simple – it’s almost more of the fact the characters view her as a sex object, a woman who can redeem them, even though they don’t even know her. Whatever her problems on the set were, Monroe was able to give the most complex performance of her career in this film. The underrated performance in the movie is by Wallach, you seems like such a nice guy, who is really a lout. He hates Gay, while pretending to be his friend. He may have even hated his “beloved” dead wife. When Monroe finally calls him on it, something inside of him breaks. Thelma Ritter does what she was cast to do in her brief performance – dole out sarcastic comments, as an aging woman who the men take along to get to Monroe. For the most part though, Montgomery Clift is wasted as Perse – I understand he was supposed to be a younger, more idealistic version of Gay, but his character isn’t developed enough for him to truly fill that roll.

Ultimately, although The Misfits is not a great movie, it has greatness in it. Yes, critics at the time were right to call the film flawed. And yet, there is so much in the film that works wonderfully well, that I cannot help buy love it. If you ever wondered if Marilyn Monroe could actually act, rent The Misfits, and she’ll remove all doubts.

The Best Movies I've Never Seen Before: Fists in the Pocket (1965)

Fists in the Pocket (1965) ****

Directed by: Marco Bellocchio.

Written by: Marco Bellocchio.

Starring: Lou Castel (Alessandro), Paola Pitagora (Giulia), Marino Masé (Augusto), Liliana Gerace (Mother), Stefania Troglio (Chambermaid), Jeannie McNeil (Lucia), Gianni Schicchi (Tonino), Alfredo Filippazzi (Doctor), Pier Luigi Troglio (Leone).

Marco Bellocchio is a very interesting Italian director. He made a big splash with his debut film, Fists in the Pocket (1965), funded by his family, but his career has been up and down ever since. He has never garnered the recognition of many of his contemporaries in Italy, and often his films have been hated or ignored. But he is currently undergoing a little bit of a renaissance – his 2002 film My Mother’s Smile was highly acclaimed (although unseen by me) as was his most recent film – 2009’s Vincere, which I saw at TIFF that year. Because his films have not been as popular as some other directors, they can be hard to find. Personally, up until I watched this film, the only one I had seen was Vincere. On the basis of those two films, I wanted to see more of his work.

Fists in the Pocket is not an easy film to love. It is a film without a redeeming character. The star is Lou Castel, playing Alessandro, a budding young psychopath, who targets his family. His older brother Augusto (Marino Mase) is supporting the family, in their large rundown house in the country – but is tired of doing so. Their elderly mother is blind and needs constant care, and Augusto is engaged to a beautiful young woman, and wants to move to the city. But Alessandro needs Augusto around. Thinking that if he got the mother out of the way, Augusto may stay, Alessandro pushes her off a cliff. When Augusto seems more determined than ever to leave, Alessandro sets his sights on his younger brother – who is mentally retarded. Then there is their sister Giulia (Paoloa Pitagora), isn’t much better, and is certainly sexually attracted to both Augusto and Alessandro – and may have actually acted out her fantasies with the later. She is amused by Alessandro’s games, until she realizes that he may set his sights on her.

Fists in the Pocket is credited alongside the work of Bernardo Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini as a new step in Italian cinema that was still very much in the neo-realist mode of post WWII in the mid 1960s. This film lashes out against that, in a surreal, dark comedy where Bellocchio pays homage to two of his heroes – Michelangelo Antonnini and Luis Bunuel – two directors who ironically issues very public put downs of this film.

The film exposes the middle class, Catholic hypocrisy that Bellocchio, who was then a Marxist, saw all around him. This is a movie about a family of horrible people, who seem to know in advance what their ultimate end will, and perhaps even welcome it. Augusto is portrayed as the type of bourgeois that are hated by Marxists – people who care about money and material things, rejecting humanity. It is not a flattering portrait of him, but it is also not one without sympathy, which is what separates Fists in the Pocket from other such screeds about middle class values. You have to almost admire Augusto for not simply running out on his eternally screwed up family – many others would have. The mother is seen as pathetic, collecting thousands of magazines, even though she’s blind and cannot read them, and constantly whining right up to the point when she’s pushed off that cliff. Giulia may simply be bored – there is little else to do out in the country, and she enjoys the darkness that Alessandro indulges in. In the role Pitagora is truly remarkable, because she is the character in the film that is the hardest to read. She’s unstable yes, but just how unstable? How far has she gone with Alessandro? When she writes a note to Augusto’s fiancée, why is she trying to break them up? Augusto’s fiancée, from outside the family, correctly sees this family as insane and destructive, and simply wants to get Alessandro away from them. You can hardly blame her for that either.

The best performance in the movie is clearly by Castel as Alessandro, the young psychopath. Castel is great in the scenes where he kills his mother and later his brother, although he takes no joy in either killing. Nor does he take any joy in a party that Augusto brings him along to – we see him constantly on the outside looking in, trying to figure out just how everyone else in the room ticks. Yet Bellocchio may in fact have more sympathy for Alessandro than anyone else. He is the only one who at least sees the hypocrisy, the meaninglessness of the family’s life more clearly than anyone else – and he does something about it. It’s certainly not the right thing, but at least it’s something.

Bellocchio said that the best thing about debut films is that because you have no past, you are free to take whatever risks you want to. No one expects anything from you. And perhaps that’s why Fists in the Pocket seems so daring, even today 46 years after it was first made. Bellocchio may not have had quite the career that he wanted to after making Fists in the Pocket – but with this film, he forever altered the landscape of Italian cinema, and cinema around the world. You may never look at teenage outcasts the same after seeing this film.

Movie Review: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Transformers: Dark of the Moon **
Directed by: Michael Bay.
Written by: Ehren Kruger.
Starring: Shia LaBeouf (Sam Witwicky), Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (Carly), Josh Duhamel (Lennox), John Turturro (Simmons), Tyrese Gibson (Epps), Patrick Dempsey (Dylan), Frances McDormand (Mearing), John Malkovich (Bruce Brazos), Kevin Dunn (Ron Witwicky), Julie White (Judy Witwicky), Alan Tudyk (Dutch), Ken Jeong (Jerry Wang), Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime), Hugo Weaving (Megatron), Leonard Nimoy (Sentinel Prime)

The first Transformers movie was big, loud, dumb and incredibly fun. The second movie was just big, loud and dumb – and left me with a throbbing headache – it was Michael Bay at his most out of control and at times visually incoherent. The third movie falls somewhere between those two extremes. Needless to say, it is big, loud and dumb, but it isn’t quite as much fun as the first film, yet didn’t leave me angry like the second one. The first 90 minutes or so constantly threatened to over the edge into the same territory that made Revenge of the Fallen so awful, but aside from a few moments never quite did. The last 45 minutes rank among the best sustained action sequences that Michael Bay has ever put on film – although after about half an hour of it, I was ready for it to end. Yes, if you did the math, the movie is well over 2 hours, and that is still way too long for a movie about giant robots fighting each other. And yes, the film is so loud for so long, and features such wonderful actors as John Turturro, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand going so far over the top it is tough to watch them at times. Perhaps it’s just because of lowered expectations, but I didn’t hate Transformers: Dark of the Moon as much as I thought I would. I certainly didn’t like it very much, but there are things here that are quite good. But there’s just way too much of everything else.

The movie once again stars Shia LaBeouf as Sam Witwicky – now graduated from the Ivy League, and struggling to find a job. His girlfriend (who was played by Megan Fox) has dumped him, but he has found another hottie, Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who makes Fox look like Meryl Streep by comparison), so he’s doing fine in that department. Once again though, Sam will find himself drawn into the war between the Autobots and the Decepicons. It turns out, that the entire space race of the 1960s was to retrieve all they could from a crash landing on the moon of an autobot craft, piloted by Sentinel Prime, with a weapon that would have won them the war. The government, of course, never told the Autobots about this, and now they are pissed. Optimus Prime uses his powers to bring Sentinel Prime back from the dead, and of course, all hell breaks loose, because everyone wants the weapon. For some reason, what took me less than a paragraph to recap, takes the movies more than an hour and half to get through. It is this part of the movie where Transformers: Dark of the Moon is at its worst. It is filled with over the top moments of comedy, that quite simply fall flat (like an extended sequence featuring The Hangover’s Ken Jeong, which is quite simply painful to sit through). There are a host of unnecessary characters either added to the movie, or brought back to the series, that simply add nothing. This section drags on and on, and I was quite seriously bored by it.

But what everyone will leave the theater talking about is the final 45 minutes – which is a robot battle royale on the streets of Chicago. I have often criticized Michael Bay’s films for their incoherent action – which values speed over clarity – but when he gets one right, he is as good as anyone. And he gets this action sequence right. This is what audiences come to the theater to see, and Michael Bay delivers it in the last 45 minutes of the film. Yes, it goes on far too long, and after a while, my eyes simple glazed over as the film was going through the motions, but for the most part, this part of the movie was pretty damned good – that is if all you want to see is giant robots fighting each other. And if you don’t want to see that, why the hell are you going to see a Transformers movie in the first place?

But for me, Transformers: Dark of the Moon is just too bloated to really be satisfying. This is empty, soulless action movie, which you expect going in, but you don’t expect to be bombarded with it for almost two and half hours. It’s just too damn much. If Bay had found a way to make this film 90 minutes – and I see no reason why he couldn’t, as it’s not like he has a story or characters that anyone could possibly care about to get in the way – than this could have been one of the best guilty pleasure movies of the summer. But at this length, it’s an endurance test.

Movie Review: Cars 2

Cars 2 ** ½ Directed by: John Lasseter.
Written by: Ben Queen & John Lasseter & Brad Lewis & Dan Fogelman.
Starring: Larry the Cable Guy (Mater), Owen Wilson (Lightning McQueen), Michael Caine (Finn McMissile), Emily Mortimer (Holley Shiftwell), Eddie Izzard (Sir Miles Axlerod), John Turturro (Francesco Bernoulli), Joe Mantegna (Grem), Thomas Kretschmann (Professor Z), Bonnie Hunt (Sally), Tony Shalhoub (Luigi), Jeff Garlin (Otis).

For the first time in their history, Pixar has made a movie that I have no desire to see again. Even when Pixar has failed to deliver a film up to their almost impossibly high standards in the past – with films like A Bug’s Life or the original Cars – they still made an entertaining film that was miles beyond most animated fare. But with Cars 2, I think they forgot what makes Pixar movies so special. This is a film that is so full of plot and action, that the characters in the film get lost. Most Pixar movies are simple stories, where the characters end up learing something, and also end up touching the audience members hearts. Here, the film is so busy that the film never connects on that emotional level. Each of the last 4 Pixar movies – Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up and Toy Story 3 – not only made my annual top 10 list, but also made me cry like a little girl. Cars 2 is quite simply not in their league.

One of the reasons I don’t think Cars 2 works very well, is because it switches focus off of Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson), the big headed, race car who had to learn to slow down and enjoy life in the first film, to his comic relief sidekick, Mater (Larry the Cable Guy). Mater was, without a doubt, the most popular character in the first film, but he was a supporting character – and that’s where he belongs. He is there to play the “best friend”, not the leading man. Here, his character is asked to carry the movie, and it simply doesn’t work.

The story follows McQueen as he is challenged to take part in the first ever World Grand Prix – a series of three races, where all types of race cars will compete. What that means is the McQueen’s biggest competition will be the F-1 car Francesco Bernoulli (John Turturro), who can go faster than McQueen, a Nascar, but not for as long. The first race is to take place in Japan, and McQueen decides to bring his best friend Mater along with him. But Mater being Mater, turns out to be an embarrassment to McQueen, who snaps at him, and makes Mater sulk away. But little does Mater know that he has becoming an unwilling dupe in a complex spy game – with Finn McMissle (Michael Caine) and Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) of British Intelligence on one side, and a nefarious group of “lemons” on the other side. It is this plot that doesn’t work, and takes up the vast majority of the running time of Cars 2.

This being a Pixar movie, there are things to praise about it. The animation is still top notch (but, having seen the film in 3-D, I have to say there is little to no reason to shell out the extra money to see it in that format). The background of Cars 2 is filled with excellent, visual touches and jokes – I did particularly love all the anime references when the movie was in Japan.

It’s just, to me, Cars 2 is everything that Pixar movies are not. I see no reason why kids – especially little boys – will not love this movie. This is the type of fast paced, colorful, action packed movie that kids will simply love. And more power to them. But to me, Pixar has always succeeded in making movies that work on level for kids – the action, adventure, comic level – and another for adults, where more serious issues of love, loss and aging are brought up. This seemed like a perfect marriage – because kids got what they wanted to, and adults still got to see one of the very best films of the year right along side them. So, if you have kids, by all means, take them to see Cars 2, they’ll love. But for the first time ever for a Pixar movie, I can honestly say that if you don’t have kids, there really is no point in seeing the movie.