A car for all seasons

With Hot August Nights hitting our area, I got to thinking about cars. I got to thinking about vintage cars and how a whole bunch of those suckers stuffed into one relatively small city tends to piss me off. I then began thinking about getting the hell out of town as a means of avoiding the traffic and general mayhem caused by those cars and their owners, who seem to think they own the roadways of Reno for a week because their damned automobiles were born before I was.

Then, because I write about movies and should not be sounding off against beloved local events the appeal of which escapes me, I started thinking about movie cars. Here is a list of cars and some situations involving cars that have made an impression on me over the years.

BEST FLYING CAR
Some would say Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Others might point out Harry Potter’s flying mobile in last year’s Chamber of Secrets. Sci-fi buffs might put forth Harrison Ford’s flying police car in Blade Runner. My pick: the ’69 Chevrolet Malibu in Repo Man, piloted by Harry Dean Stanton, with a confused Emilio Estevez as his passenger and a bunch of aliens in the trunk.

BEST POSSESSED-KILLER CAR
No contest. It’s the 1958 Plymouth Fury posing as a killing machine in John Carpenter’s Christine. While the film doesn’t go into detail about the “soul” of Christine, the car is indeed possessed by its original owner in Stephen King’s novel, so I believe it’s possessed in the movie. Writing about Christine brings to mind 1977’s The Car, wherein James Brolin embarrasses himself as a guy running away from a possessed “modified” early-’70s Lincoln Mark III. You know that car is possessed because there’s a face screaming in the fireball when it blows up at the movie’s end. Jesus, why do I remember this garbage? All memories of trigonometry are gone, but I remember details of possessed-car explosions. Very sad.

MOST HEART-WRENCHING BREAKUP IN A CAR
Nothing compares to the emotional devastation achieved when Ione Skye gives John Cusack a pen in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything. After he’s been dumped, Cusack’s friends point out, while drinking beer at the AM/PM, that he was mercilessly “dissed in the Malibu!”

BEST TIME-TRAVELING CAR
The most famous would be Back to the Future’s ’81 De Lorean in which Michael J. Fox almost makes out with his mother. But the all-time best time-traveling car has to be the 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 driven by Bruce Campbell’s Ash in the Evil Dead films. While not equipped for time travel, it does indeed travel through time at the end of Evil Dead 2, where it’s sucked into a time vortex and falls from the sky into medieval times. OK, that’s a bit of a grope.

BEST WEIRD-CAR MOMENT IN A DAVID LYNCH FILM
Lynch has always made good, strange use of the automobile. Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern drive a 1950s Thunderbird in the thoroughly weird Wild at Heart, a film that has a morbid curiosity with car and motorcycle accidents. Justin Theroux, in a tribute to Jack Nicholson’s car-bashing incident, demonstrates fine form when he takes a golf club to a limo in Mulholland Drive. The finest weird-car moment in a Lynch film goes to Robert Loggia’s hilariously terrifying road rage incident in Lost Highway.

BEST DEATH TRAP AUTO
The tan Ford V-8 in which Bonnie and Clyde (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the movie) meet their demise is most memorable. The pimp-mobile that Denzel Washington commandeers when the Russian mafia fill him full of lead in Training Day, and James Caan’s bloody death at a tollbooth while driving to kill his sister’s hubby in The Godfather also qualify. As for car explosions, Robert De Niro getting blown up (but not actually dying) in Casino is very cool, even if the movie is Scorsese’s worst.

If a poll were taken, the winner in this category would probably be the blue ’66 Thunderbird convertible that propelled Thelma and Louise to certain death. The film ended with the car in mid-air accompanied by triumphant, inspirational music … a strange thing considering our heroes were just seconds away from fiery, bone-crushing death.

BEST KILLING OF DAD’S CAR
Cameron (Alan Ruck) kicking the crap out of his father’s red and restored 1961 Ferrari 250 GT in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a classic killing of a dad’s car. Special mention goes to Tom Cruise’s character sending his father’s Porsche 928 into the drink in Risky Business. (Note: This doesn’t qualify as a complete car death, as the Porsche was subsequently repaired thanks to all that hooker money.)

BEST TRAFFIC JAM
Michael Douglas losing it in a jam at the beginning of Falling Down hopefully won’t qualify as inspiration for folks stuck on Victorian Avenue during Hot August Nights. Aliens zapping a line of jammed cars in Sparks as they did to New Yorkers in Independence Day would be far more entertaining.

BEST CAR CHASE
The French Connection was thrilling, as was Ronin. But the all-time best car chases when it comes to ingenuity, destruction and mayhem occur in John Landis’ The Blues Brothers. Among the glorious destruction: Jake and Elwood’s drive through a shopping mall.

BEST USE OF A WRECKED CAR TO BEAT A RIVAL SCHOOL’S FOOTBALL TEAM
There are so many to choose from, but the winner has to be the ’79 Camaro Z28 Sean Penn totals in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Faced with certain death at the hands of the car’s owner and star football player (Forest Whitaker), Penn paints anti-Ridgemont High graffiti on the wreck before a big game, enraging Whitaker, who proceeds to pummel the opposing football team. Way to go Spicoli!

BEST TAXICAB
One of cinema’s most memorable vehicles is Travis Bickle’s (Robert De Niro) yellow cab in Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. A highly qualified runner-up is the flying cab Bruce Willis pilots in The Fifth Element when Milla Jovovich plops into his back seat.

BEST CAR DROWNING
Norman Bates dumping Marion Crane’s car into the swamp in Psycho is certainly a good one. The aforementioned Porsche going into the lake in Risky Business also comes to mind. (Note: As mentioned before, the vehicle was eventually saved by all that hooker money, so it is, once again, disqualified.)

Forget them. The winner is Bob and Doug McKenzie’s beater van going into the harbor in Strange Brew. The van drowns, but Bob and Doug’s lives are spared after sucking the bubbles out of a beer bottle. Their characters have lived on to become a pair of moose in Disney’s next animated film (regrettably, I’m not kidding).

OTHER FABULOUS CARS
On a final note, here are a few more of my all-time-favorite movie cars: the Batmobile from Tim Burton’s original Batman (not the spazzy ones from the Schumacher debacles); the convertible driven by Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; the vintage beauties driven by Ron Howard and Harrison Ford in American Graffiti; and Walter Matthau’s beater convertible in The Bad News Bears.

OK, in all honesty, the above paragraph is for our production department (they have to find some car pictures to fill the space, and it gives them a few more choices). As for me, I could care less about cars. All I want is for them to get me from A to B, provide kick-ass air conditioning and to possess a decent CD player.