Wheels of fortune
MINI ANTHIKAD CHHIBBER
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What if the air is heavy with smoke? What if fuel prices are spiralling? The films, from then to now, have not given up on their obsession for the four-wheeled marvel. What with Fast and Furious zooming in from round the corner
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WELCOME RETURN The Beetle made a triumphant come back in the Walt Disney remake Herbie Fully Loaded
There is a scene in XXX where Vin Diesel's character Xander Cage says: "I want all of that in here." He is referring to a room full of gadgets which he wants put in his car - to soup it up and make it a monster on the road. Diesel and director Rob Cohen had earlier collaborated on the testosterone-fuelled drag-racing movie Fast and Furious. The third edition of the franchise, Tokyo Drift, is coming to the city next month and promises to be a high octane thrill ride set in the crazy coloured world of Japanese drift racing.
Romance with road
Hollywood has long romanced the road. The road movie has been a venerated genre forever. The long and winding road stands for everything from experience to life itself. The road movie typically would have a group of people hitting the road for different reasons and at the end of the trip arriving at the destination wiser for the experience. Road films could also end with the character driving off into the sunset or they would just not make it; ending sliced and diced by any of the many psychopaths that hang around deserted motels. One can argue that the road movie finds its origins in the epic - the Odyssey is the classic blueprint for a road movie.
Hollywood has every kind of road movie from the classic bildungsroman (Easy Rider, Motorcycle Diaries) to the road standing in for unspeakable horror - think of Marion Crane (Psycho) or brothers on the lam - Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney heading for Mexico and freedom in Robert Rodriguez' From Dusk to Dawn till they hit a roadblock in the form of an all-night diner frequented by vampires. Then there are the umpteen slasher flicks from The Hitcher to Jeepers Creepers 2 and even the recent House of Wax.
Nabokov's Lolita, which Stanley Kubrick translated to film, is the ultimate paean to the highway. The wonder boys of the Seventies - Steven Spielberg and George Lucas each made a road film. Lucas made American Graffiti while Spielberg made the highly unsettling Duel where a faceless trucker terrorises a businessman.
America is obsessed with cars and automobiles stand in for everything from status to size - think of the gas guzzling monsters of yore. There are movies like Days of Thunder and Driven set in the world of car racing. Or there are heist films like the execrable Gone in 60 Seconds (what were Nicholas Cage and the gorgeous Angelina Jolie of the bee-stung mouth doing in the film?) or the super feisty Italian Job, where the star is the Mini Cooper - sharply manoeuvring tight little curves with a panache that has one gnashing teeth in envy.
The Herbie films about the Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of its own was all the rage in the 70s and made a return to the big screen last year with little Lindsay Lohan all grown up racing the Beetle. While women usually don't do much in a road film apart provide arm candy, there is the classic women's road film Thelma and Louis. Directed by Ridley Scott, the film features Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis hitting the road to get away from the stultifying lives. Cars and the drive in are also a time to get naughty as Jack and Rose discover in Titanic.
Chases are an integral part of an action film and the best car chases in recent times has to be in Ronin, which features Robert De Niro smartly spinning the wheel of a Mercedes in the streets of Europe and The Transporter which relies more on speed and dexterity rather than great balls of fire.
The cars in James Bond films are as much talked about as the leading man himself. There is the Aston Martin, BMW, the Jaguar, the invisible car and what have you. After Q does the necessary souping up, the car is a veritable battle tank. And talking of customised cars, who can forget the dark knight, Batman's Batmobile? Just for the sheer joy of driving that smooth bit of machinery, one can think of dating people who make strange sartorial choices regarding their underwear!
In Hindi films, since we are not such an automobile obsessed nation, cars do not play such an important role, though there are the chases that end in suitably satisfying clouds of flame. And there are songs sung in speeding cars. But it calls for the king of style, Feroz Khan, to give cars their due. In Apradh, he plays a race-car driver, in Qurbani he plays a biker and Janasheen has son Fardeen taking on the mantle for the need for speed. And who can forget the scene in Qurbani where he trashes a Mercedes for a 50-paisa bet?
In recent times there has been Taarzan the wonder car about a car who avenges itself - what were director duo Abbas Mustan thinking of?
The biker movie Dhoom, all about bikes and babes and what have you was a smash hit and has even spawned a sequel, with little miss plastic Aishwarya Rai prancing about. Milan Lutheria's Taxi No 9211, inspired by Changing Lanes, had Nana Patekar and John Abraham take on the roles of Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson Even though fuel prices are shooting up faster than any nox-fuelled automobile, the romance with combustion engines continues, Alexander Payne's Sideways reveals the road movie is alive and well.
Cinema is all about aspiration and what can be more aspirational than putting pedal to metal especially when we think of our hysterically clogged roads. All speed kings necessarily say Xander's creed before gunning the ignition: "I like anything fast enough to do something stupid in."
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