we’re going to go see it in about an hour - will post my review when I return.
Quoth Dewey Finn:
Not really, but I can imagine a Ratatouille-branded toy kitchen set.
We enjoyed it - the visuals were amazing (as expected) - the story was reasonabley good, atleast as put together as teh average ‘spy movie’ would be, if not better than some.
The kids in the theatre clearly enjoyed it - my wife and I had quite a few good LOL moments, and had the standard amount of injokes and genre references. Some scenes were quite touching.
It’s not ‘better’ than Cars 1, but it is every bit its equal - which means if Cars didn’t do it for you, this one won’t either.
I realized something in this one that wasn’t as apparent in 1, watch this movie and let your mind go back to when you were a kid playing with your matchbox and hotwheels cars -
That’s what makes these movies work.
I keep getting people on Facebook talking about how good it is. Then again, I live in Northern Arkansas, where we try to out-South the South.
Other than Sig Hansen voicing a crab boat for the movie, are there any other oddball cameos?
I have an alternate idea. They have to flee Italy in the steerage commpartment of a tramp steamer to escape a family vendetta. Then Luigi get hooked up with an auto theft and chop shop gang. Eventually his kid serves honorably as a Jeep in the war, and though they try to keep little Jeepie out of the family business, eventually he’s forced to run over a police car. Eventually to protect his family he has to have the best cars of Ford, GM, and Chrysler crushed down to metal cubes in a junkyard.
My younger son was frustrated by how difficult it was to find toys and other cool stuff with Remy (and Emile) on it…
I enjoyed It more than I thought I would. And more than the original - though that one is my least favorite Pixar movie.
That being said, I have no reason or desire to see it ever again. It is a movie in search of a purpose. There is no “there” there.
“They want to arrange a meeting between me and Hicks. In Mater’s garage. Where I’ll be safe.”
“Mater. I always thought it would be Ramone.”
“It’s the smart move. Mater was always smarter.”
Was money the overriding reason Cars 2 was made? I’ve just seen it and do not think so.
The animation was uniformly excellent. For instance, the cityscapes of London and Paris, the Italian Rivera, as well as the seascapes, were gorgeous, while my Japanese sister-in-law says the attention to detail in the Tokyo scenes was dead-on. Yes, even a cynical money-grubbing release by Pixar would be expected to be made with some attention to detail. Yet I think this slide show illustrates pretty well that more than just a cursory attention was made to the visual aspects of the movie.
As for the story, it was reasonably engaging to me, and easily held the interest of my 8 and 10 year old niece and nephew. Of course story quality is subjective, but the relative complexity of the one here shows that it wasn’t just some thrown-together bit of fluff with only an eye toward selling video games and stuffed toys.
Does the movie as a whole it succeed? Maybe, maybe not, but I think the effort put into this movie shows that Pixar had every intention of making Cars 2 both a work of entertainment meeting its usual standards, while at the same time of course bringing in a decent profit.
Except for some fiddly little “arthouse” cinema, I believe that money is the overriding reason that ANY film gets made. That doesn’t mean that the cast and crew won’t or can’t do a professional job.
That being said, I am not interested at all in seeing Cars 2. My children are both college-aged girls, and they have no interest in the film either. (Being geeks, we are all looking forward to Captain America.) I do not doubt it is a fine piece of filmmaking, but my family is not the target demographic.
Saw it with the twins (8 years old) this weekend. Twin #1 has motoroil for blood, naturally, this was the best movie he’s ever seen. Twin #2 was entertained enough to behave well.
I liked it…it was better than Tuesday Night ReRuns. As a car guy, I liked the HUGE amount of hidden automotive lore in it (Yeah, you think the mountains that look like cars was the subtle thing, you’re only scratching at the first layer…dija see the great big Wankel Rotor at the Japanese press junket?) We’ll own the BLuRay of this so that I can look for the details and Twin 1 can wear out the disc.
So, I liked the story, I liked the subject, I LOVED the easter-eggs, but I also recognize I’m not the average moviegoer, and I could see how the average moviegoer could leave underwhelmed.
In some theoretical world where it is not possible to profit from a movie, certainly very, very few, if any would ever be made. Some people here have suggested money is the only reason “Cars 2” was made, and perhaps that is the word I should have used. I would still think that the vast majority of the decision makers at Pixar want to put out a product they could be proud of. Of course I have no way of knowing this, but I hope that is the case.
I don’t get it. Do most kids pretend their cars are alive? I just pretended they had little people in them and ran a lot of police chases with massive pile-ups and cliff jumps off the coffee table.
To be honest, it’s more like 85% money, 10% car nuttness, 5% everything else.
And to all the ‘sidewalks?’ type haters, I’ll say what I said on another forum:
I don’t know about toys, but Patton Oswalt (voice of Remy) did have a bit in his standup routine about how a kid came to his house on Halloween dressed as Remy, and Patton said, “You’re inside of me!” and scarred the kid for life.
Apart from that, the one Ratatouille item I can remember seeing are little pie-shaped critter treats at the pet store, made for guinea pigs and rats and the like. Merchandising isn’t all about toys, but I’m sure they’re more lucrative than bunny snacks.
I guess it depends on the child - clearly - but at some point when I was playing with my cars and having adventures - the different cars had personalities and voices - they did crazy things, they flew when they shouldn’t, they became submarines, the boats had voices, things exploded - etc.
It was as I grew up that I became more concerned with how fast they should go (my gremlin can beat your corvette) or how far I could make them jump with the track, etc, and then eventually i started collecting them and they just sit - they lost their adventure.
That’s funny, my kid did not mention Up, Wall-E, or Toy Story 3 after watching Cars. He didn’t even talk about the Cars Rotten Tomato reading either. He just wanted to play with cars! He enjoy the movie and watched parts of it over and over when he got the chance. Although admittedly it doesn’t have the same heft as the previously mentioned movies, It’s an OK goal for a kids movie to be entertaining for kids.
There is a reason that Cars merch as sold so well over the years. Kids like the characters and they are fun toys to play with. Do you want Disney to make and sell toys that are not fun, don’t make people happy, and are not going to sell well? Is that the way that you would run your business? Why criticize Cars for having successful toy sales?
No studio exec has ever forced me to buy a toy. I buy toys that are fairly priced, well made, and what my kid has expressed he would like to play with. That being said, we have a lot of imaginative fun with the *Cars *toys. And besides, they are a lot more fun than the “Painful Unfufilled Promise to Dead Wife Action Kit” that my kid has from the movie Up.
I don’t care who you are, that’s some funny stuff right there! </mater>