Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Cars - The Must-See Movie of the Summer?

Filed under
Reviews

Cars, the new animated feature from Disney/Pixar is cleaning up at the box office. The largest grosser of the summer... year so far is sure to see the first weekend numbers double before it's over.

I, and everyone else in my family, saw Cars this weekend and it delighted the young and amused the adults. It's wonderful.

This is the story of Lightning McQueen, a self-absorbed, a bit egotistical, nascar-style racing rookie. After the "Piston-Cup" deciding race, 3 cars tied for the win - an unprecedented occurrence that triggers a "run-off" or tie-breaker race across the country.

As the Legend, Runner-up, and the Rookie take off to make their date with destiny, our hero Lightning finds himself lost in a world of self-discovery and life-changing encounters.

I love the casting. Owen Wilson is a very likeable character actor. Self-effacing, yet a bit cocky, this actor always brings a likeable vulnerability to his portrayals. This quality brings the animated character a full 3-dimensional aspect with which even the least of Nascar fans can related. He learns the value of friendship over fame, feelings over success, and perhaps even love over everything. Owen Wilson makes one forget they are watching animation.

Veteran Paul Newman plays the older once-champion who finds himself in position of mentor. His character grows too as he learns a few life-lessions from the hero in return. Paul Newman is the ultimate professional and could make audiences cry in a completely dark theater. What more can you say? "Paul Newman" says it all.

Bonnie Hunt is another actor that no one can find a reason not to like. A veteran herself of many family pictures, she is the ultimate "mother next door." She does another excellent job of portraying the love interest in this movie. Played with sensitivity yet self-assured confidence, her character was probably touching the hearts of men and boys everywhere.

Micheal Keaton plays Chick Hicks, the over-confident and slightly morally challenged "win-at-all-costs" runner-up. He's been chasing the Legend's tailfin his whole career and hoped this year would bring the Piston Cup to his mantle. Micheal Keaton is one of those actors that can play the good guy or the bad guy in an equally impressive manner. He wasn't given the opportunity/screen-time to really evolve his character, yet it was a completely enjoyable portrayal.

Of course the main "Star" of this movie is the world created by those talented animators at Pixar. The whole world is created around and includes only cars. Every character and extra is a car. Even the buzzing flies are tiny cars. It's an absorbing and believeable world. ...believe it or not.

Other big names to grace the screen are Cheech Marin as Ramon, George Carlin, Richard Petty as The King and Lynda Petty as Mrs. The King, Tony Shalhoub, Mario Andretti, Dale Earnhardt Jr, Bob Costas as announcer Bob Cutlass, John Ratzenberger, Jay Leno, and Edie McClurg.

This is one movie that's worth the price of admission, waiting long lines, and crackling on sticky floors. It's just a fun feel-good movie for adults and pure entertainment with a moral for youngsters. The only drawback is the commercialization-overload found in stores these days. I think that detracts from the quality and enjoyability of these features as it makes one wonder if the only goal is making some more billions. The quality of the picture tends to make one forget as you watch and almost convince you that the main goal was entertainment and craft.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Cars

Despite all the hype surrounding it, I liked and enjoyed it too.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.