Push the button, Max.
This big-budget, globe-trotting comedy is almost exactly as old as I am and I’ve always held a warm place in my affections for it. It’s not quiet or subtle, but it is spirited, like a Clydesdale that thinks it’s a quarter horse.
Hey… they’re just using the same actor over and over. What kind of cut-rate production is this?
So how does Pixar keep hitting these animated features out of the park? The Shrek franchise may have had warning track power and the original Ice Age was a sharp single up the middle, but Pixar keeps smacking them into the stratosphere like Barry Bonds in a ‘roid rage. And why I am using so many baseball metaphors for a racing movie?
As it stands now, Girard is sitting on the pole, which is of course a statement of fact and in no way a comment on his sexual orientation.
Let me say up front: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is a better NASCAR movie than Days of Thunder. Of course, that’s like having better fashion sense than Britney Spears does these days. In absolute terms, this is a big, loud and very dumb Will Ferrell comedy. It’s also funnier than a loud fart at a church social. You know you shouldn’t laugh, but you do.
There is no terrible way to win. There is only winning.
Back in the 1960s, there was a particular genre of movies comprised of big budget epics with large international casts. Their sudsy stories usually centered on some larger-than-life subject. Another prime example would Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain. This film shares a lot of DNA with the later war epic. Both films work best when focusing more on the machines than the people inside them. When Grand Prix is in its element, using director John Frankenheimer’s car mounted cameras on the real circuits of the Formula One racing season, the film is exciting and visually spectacular. When the characters get out of their cars, strip off their racing suits and start talking to each other, the film runs into trouble.
This isn’t just a thousand to one shot. This is a professional bloodsport. And it can happen to you. And then it can happen to you again.
The 24-hour race at Le Mans every June is still considered one of the ultimate tests of driver, crews and cars, but in 1970, when this film was made, it was even more so. This was before many of the safety features drivers now take for granted and when the cars were insanely powerful and fast. The Mulsanne straight was still more than two miles of flat-out, unbroken driving, with cars reaching over 230 mph before braking for the next curve.
Steve McQueen didn’t write, direct or produce this film, but it was still in every way his baby. He wanted to make the ultimate racing film. When not acting, McQueen raced cars and motorcycles for real, much to the horror of the studio executives who coveted the box office he brought in. McQueen was no dilettante, either. He was a serious driver who was competetive in virtually everything he raced and was well respected by his fellow racers. To them, he was just one of the guys who also did some acting on the side.
