Movies

The Gran Turismo movie, appropriately named Gran Turismo, opened on Friday.

Did you see it? If not, do you plan to?

Motor1 brings us a report of a replica 1975 Ford Gran Torino that has popped up on Bring a Trailer. It's a replica of the Gran Torinos that starred in the Starsky and Hutch TV show.

The Batmobile from the Tim Burton era of films (Batman and Batman Returns) is on sale, though you’ll still need access to Bruce Wayne’s fortune if you’re interested in buying. This particular movie car is being priced at $1.5 million – likely due to it being one of the more influential designs.

In 1968, Warner Bros-Seven Arts released a film that forever changed the way in which car chases were shot. Directed by Peter Yates, and starring Steve McQueen, Bullitt became the gold standard for how to capture automotive mayhem in a realistic manner that would force an audience to the very edge of its seat. Despite the plot allowing for one, we never got a sequel. However, it looks like Steven Spielberg is producing one of those remakes that’s not really a remake with Bradley Cooper co-producing and assuming the lead role.

The ninth Fast and The Furious epic was announced during Super Bowl LV in typical Fast fashion, with an over-the-top trailer to herald yet another chapter in a franchise where the stars outgrew the cars central to the theme.

What’s the difference between art and modern art, between Michelangelo and Mondrian? The best way I know to explain it is this: Modern art requires a deep grounding in a particular context. Modern art is reactive. It assumes you know the history and that you’re capable of seeing how it reacts to, and interacts with, that history. To put it kindly, modern art is a continuation of the dialogue between artist and critic in an era where all of the technical problems of perspective, representation, and accuracy have long been solved. To put it less than kindly, modern art is a tiresome insider’s joke where you pay handsomely to be in on the gag.

To some degree, this is a natural consequence of any mature art form, whether it is painting, rock music, or motion pictures. All of the original ideas have long since been discovered and comprehensively realized in film, so any new movie has to make a choice: Do you approach your chosen genre wholeheartedly and with a craftsman’s intent, like Michael Mann did in “Heat,” or do you spend the whole time winking at the audience, as Matthew Vaughn does in “Kingsman”? In other words, do you create art, or do you create modern art?

In the case of “Baby Driver,” I suspect that the viewer’s opinion on this matter will depend almost entirely on his (or her) age.

This post started, as some of mine do, with a question about cars from my brother Jeff.

He texted me from Jerusalem, Israel, wanting to know whether the Porsche in a 1981 movie titled “The Last Chase,” starring Lee Majors, was a real Porsche or a replica.

Not knowing anything about the movie, I told him it was likely to be a real 911, since they weren’t that expensive then, so nobody would have bothered making a replica. He texted back that it wasn’t a 911, but something that looked “more like a Chaparral.”

Intrigued, I did an image search and he’s correct. While it’s easy to tell a Porsche 917 from one of Jim Hall’s racers, the 917 in The Last Chase does indeed look more like a Chaparral than like Porsche’s iconic 911 road car.

My brother’s question answered, I proceeded to watch the film, which is posted in its entirety on YouTube (you can watch it below the jump).

My next thought: how did I not know about this movie?

Some might tell you that Cheech & Chong’s 1978 movie, Up In Smoke, was about Malaise Era drug culture, or Los Angeles, or California punk rock, but in fact it is one of the greatest car movies in cinematic history. For this reason, I have used my Svengali-like powers to convince the management of the Denver Alamo Drafthouse theater to include this fine automotive film as part of the Murilee Martin Presents series. Yes, on Monday, which just happens to be April 20, we’ll roll Up In Smoke starting at 7:30 PM.

Because the power of the Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand™ is so extreme, the Alamo Drafthouse Theater in Denver has fallen under my spell and allowed me to select and introduce four car films, to be shown each Monday during their “Alamo Takes the Wheel” month of April (actually, it was the endorsement of Repo Man director Alex Cox, who teaches at the University of Colorado, that convinced the Alamo management that this idea wasn’t completely stupid). The first of those films is the amazing Duel, an all-time-great Malaise Era car movie that shouldn’t need any introduction for TTAC readers.

Let’s face it, most of what you read at car related sites, just like you do at sites for other interests, industries and hobbies, talks about the same usual topics. In the case of car enthusiast sites, the same cars, the same commercials, the same companies. Maybe that’s why it’s exciting when I’m ranging far afield of the automotive realm on the web and I come across something that I’m pretty sure will be of interest to TTAC readers and it also happens to be something that you probably haven’t seen anyplace else. In this case I was doing my rounds of some of the non-automotive sites I link to from Cars In Depth and I came across a brand new short dramatic film called The Sunday Morning Drive about a beautiful woman in a 430 horsepower Audi R8 racing more than 3 dozen sportbikes up a winding and treacherous 14 mile stretch of California’s Pacific Coast Highway.

Was I correct about it being of interest to you?

Before the Clint Eastwood film (but after the cheezoid TV show), the most well-known Ford Gran Torino in cinema history was the beater ’73 sedan driven by Jeff Bridges’ character in The Big Lebowski. This film, which took quite a while to go from box-office dud to sacred document of the Lebowski Jihad, was released in 1998 and was set in late 1990 or early 1991 (a period during which I was also in Southern California and living a fairly Dude-ish lifestyle myself). The choice of a ’73 Gran Torino by the Coen Brothers makes some interesting statements for those who obsess about movie cars, and Monday is always the best day to discuss such things.

You have to hand it to Lego: years after the patents on their plastic interlocking bricks expired, the company has become expert in parting kids of all ages from their cash. The Lego Movie, a concept that would have boggled the mind of any child of the ’80s, is a certified blockbuster. The Lego Harry Potter and Lego Star Wars video games – that’s a game of a toy of a movie, if you’re counting – are best-sellers across multiple platforms.

Now there’s this, an assemblage of beige-overalled 1980s misfits rendered in blocky, multi-part format, ready to do battle with spectres while making off-the-cuff quips. Talk about shut up and take my money: the Lego Ghostbusters set is relatively affordable, at just under fifty bucks, and is everything you were hoping for. By June, thousands of them should be parked proudly on the desks of all kinds of dudes who are far too old for this sort of thing. I’ve already cleared a space on mine.

The centrepiece of the set, aside from minifig versions of Venkman, Stantz, Zeddemore, and Spengler, is the gloriously recreated Ectomobile – Ecto 1. Thirty years ago this year, the white and red original burst on-screen, sirens blaring.

As a fit for the role, the Cadillac might have been an even better casting choice than Bill Murray as Venkman. When there’s something strange in your neighbourhood, you know who you’re gonna call.

This year, two documentaries concerning serial automotive entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin have been released. Coincidentally, both of them were the products of sons whose fathers were part of the story they were telling. First, after four years of sitting completed, in the can so to speak, The Entrepreneur, filmed and directed by Bricklin’s son Jonathan, with an executive producer’s credit to Supersize Me‘s Morgan Spurlock, was finally released this past summer for public viewing.

You may have heard that there’s a movie about car racing coming out. For dramatic tension it’s based on the real life story of two drivers, competing when the sport was very dangerous, whose relationship went from rivalry to respect to a deep friendship. Actually, there are two movies like that coming out. You’re probably more familiar with director Ron Howard’s $100 million F1 epic, Rush, which opens on Sept. 20th and centers on the competition between Niki Lauda and the late James Hunt. Made for about one tenth of that, and opening Sept. 9th is Snake and Mongoo$e, about drag racers Don Prudhomme and Tom McEwen. Snake and Mongoo$e had its worldwide premiere last weekend in conjunction with Reno’s Hot August Nights cruise festivities that included a Barrett-Jackson car auction. With a million and a half car lovers congregating this weekend on Woodward for the Dream Cruise, the producers decided to have a Detroit premiere as well, and the film will be screened at the Palladium in Birmingham all weekend long.

Today marks the fourth anniversary of Russ Meyer’s death. Meyer, nicknamed “King Leer,” was a natural born freak from Oakland who worked as a cameraman in the European theater during WWII, became one of the earliest Playboy photographers, and created Mudhoney, Motor Psycho and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, along with 24 other bizarre films. Russ Meyer was also a prominent car-guy and boobie festishist, which brings us to our point . . .

This weekend I got a chance to watch Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, which is probably Meyer’s best known work, and reportedly one of Quentin Tarantino’s next projects. Tera Patrick may star in the new version, which would be the most perfect casting since Milos Forman cast Courtney Love as a junkie. I had only seen this movie at times when I was practically dead from alcohol consumption and thus only remembered images and feelings, like trying to remember a dream. This time, I would only watch it while Rather Drunk, the kind where you can still get served if you’re in a strange bar, but it makes the server a bit nervous.