Cars 2

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At the very least, Cars 2 ends the pesky debate waged by Pixar addicts about which of the animation studio's 12 feature films deserves the undesirable "worst" tag.

Prior to this summer, passionate Pixar factions passed time making the case againstRatatouille, Up, WALL-E (blasphemy!) and, in most instances, the original Cars. But all four look like Toy Story -- or either of its glorious sequels -- when compared to Cars 2, a heartless, convoluted, and boring effort that's every bit as flat as its predecessors were alive.


Nobody bats a thousand, and a substandard Pixar release was inevitable, but the disappointment of seeing the studio miss by such a wide margin still stings. How could the same storytellers responsible for 11 near-flawless animated features be comfortable releasing such a rudimentary, pandering, and humdrum cartoon?

While each entry to Pixar's oeuvre appealed to entire families, Cars 2 is the first feature strictly made for boys aged seven and under. Whereas John Lasseter's original Cars triggered an unexpected merchandising boom, this sequel appears to exist to keep the momentum -- and the money -- flowing.

The story (co-directed by Brad Lewis) pays loving homage to the double-agent James Bond adventures of the late 1960s and early '70s, with dim-witted dump truck Tow Mater (sheepishly voiced once again by Larry the Cable Guy) being mistaken for an American spy by crafty British roadster Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and the cleverly named Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer). Mater's "mission," such as it is, transports him from Radiator Springs to Italy, Japan, Paris and London, where he simultaneously helps best friend Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) compete in a World Grand Prix while attempting to stop an international crime syndicate trying to scare the world's car population off of foreign oil by exploding engines that use an alternative fuel source called Allinol that ...

Oh, never mind. Your kids won't care to keep up with the sloppy screenplay (an outright disaster by Pixar's standards), while most parents will check out once they realize that the sequel doesn't have one quarter of the heart its original brought to the table.

In the wake of Cars' success, Disney and Pixar extended the brand by producing short films with Mater in the lead. By shifting its focus away from McQueen, Cars 2 feels like one of those -- either Mater and the Ghost Light or Mater's Tall Tales -- stretched to dangerously thin extremes to try and fill a feature's length. Wilson's loveably self-centered racecar takes a back seat for the sequel's conventional (and confusing) spy spoof. The races themselves are tedious and poorly staged, with the last one -- a crucial sprint through London's streets -- neglecting to even tell us who wins.

Lasseter's legitimate passion for automobiles, for the sheer act of driving, has been scrubbed away from the sequel in favor of routine spy games. Imagine erasing the Andy and Bonnie moments from Lee Unkrich's emotionally rich Toy Story 3 so that the prison-movie spoof could be expanded and you'll get a sense of where Cars 2 went wrong. That being said, it was the gun-toting, explosion-popping spy elements that most appealed to my 7-year-old son, proving once again that Lasseter and crew aimed squarely at a young, male-brain audience.

But with its previous 11 films, Pixar educated mainstream audiences on the difference between sophisticated animated features and simple cartoons, and taught them to demand better. Which just means more people than usual now will be able to spot Cars 2 as the simplistic cartoon that it is, on par with (and actually below the standard of) most of the kid-centered entertainment families can find on Cartoon Network, Sprout, Nick Jr. or The Disney Channel. And with rival studios revving up their own animated efforts, this is a bad time for Pixar to be shifting into neutral or, worse, setting the "vehicle" to cruise control.

It's way too soon to tell if Cars 2 is a one-off misstep or the start of a creative slide similar to the one that submerged Walt Disney's animation house at the turn of the century, producing a string of duds that included Treasure Planet and Chicken Little. But if the pending Monsters Inc. prequel, Monsters University, shifts its focus to tell its story solely through Billy Crystal's obnoxious Mike Wazowski, I'll be looking for one of Sully's magic closet doors so I can dive through and escape another unfortunate Pixar nightmare.

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the

 Earth Liberation Front

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If you were looking for the least usual suspect to be hauled in as part of a terrorism case, then Daniel McGowan would be a good fit. An average-looking kid from Queens, the son of a cop, who worked in public-relations and environmental cause offices, McGowan was arrested in 2005 for being part of the Earth Liberation Front. A radical environmental activist group, ELF had been labeled domestic terrorists by the government and more vividly branded "eco-terrorists" by the media.  Co-directors Marshall Curry (Street Fight) and Sam Cullman come to this fascinating story via a personal route - Curry's wife was McGowan's employer when he was arrested - but handle it all in an impressively judicious manner.


Unlike the great majority of environmentally-themed documentaries, If a Tree Falls comes at its subject from a personal and criminological perspective - this is as much a law-and-order story as it is one about the fight over environmental issues. The filmmakers want to describe McGowan's journey from well-balanced kid from Queens to environmental saboteur but almost more importantly to use him as a way of putting the whole micro-movement under a microscope. The story of how a muscular anti-logging campaign devolved into sectarian turmoil that shot off radicalized cells like burning cinders is ultimately what drives the film and makes it so rewarding.


When the film begins, McGowan is virtually imprisoned in a Manhattan apartment, an ankle bracelet keeping him there until the authorities determine his fate. He walks viewers through a snapshot of his exceedingly normal upbringing (narration interjected only when necessary) before leading them into his involvement in environmental campaigns of the early-and-mid 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. The filmmakers then rope in other parties, from fellow activists who did a better job at staying out of the law's way, to prosecutors and cops who ultimately brought the ELF down. Together they graph how a number of confrontations in and around Eugene, Oregon in 1996 and 1997, which saw police indiscriminately pepper-spraying and beating down marchers, convinced a number of those protestors that stronger actions were necessary.


Not long after, a carefully calibrated campaign of arson was ignited. Ranger stations, lumber company buildings, offices of professors researching genetically modified tree strains, the targets were widely dispersed. The perpetrators, which included McGowan and a knot of other disaffected activists, left no clues behind, as one of the more genial investigators acknowledges, in the tone of the cop who appreciates occasionally having competent adversaries. Though tactically deft, the ELF's motives seem transparently ill-considered. Having abandoned the way of peaceful protest (even though one famous 1995 action detailed here impressively held off logging in Oregon's Warner Creek area for a year), the ELF members come off as less true believers than impatient adolescents, seduced by the romance of stealth guerrilla actions. Protestations that their actions were planned as being nonviolent appear naïve at best, discounting the possibility that one of their bombs (planted when they believed nobody would be around) could have gone off later than intended.


If the film has a failing, it's only in the relatively uninteresting observations of most of the ELF members themselves. It's very likely that most of them were too nervous to go into much soul-searching detail on-camera, given the weight of charges laid on them. McGowan is particularly guarded in his interviews, and unwilling to delve deeply into any of his or his compatriots' motivations. Given this lack of insight or thoughtfulness, when some complain later about being branded eco-terrorists (which could lead to multiple life sentences), it will prove difficult for even the most environmentally conscious viewer to have much sympathy with their plight. After all, those viewers were more likely to be the ones out doing the long, boring scut work that such movements require to accomplish even the most minor social change, instead of playing with bombs in the woods.