If I'm a Movie Driver, Who Am I?

Dudes all think they're Steve McQueen behind the wheel of a car, and nearly all of them are actually Jerry Lewis.

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) April 13, 2017

I see the point, obviously, that Mr. Zoller Seitz is making. And yet, for this blog, it is nevertheless not quite right. Steve McQueen is, well, Steve McQueen and all that. I wish I was Steve McQueen zipping around in that “Thomas Crown” Ferrari but that’s still too fantastical for me. When I climb behind the wheel of a car I do not imagine myself as Steve McQueen because I cannot imagine myself as Steve McQueen because even my admittedly far-out imagination has its limits. No, when I get behind the wheel of a car, I picture myself as Skipp Sudduth in “Ronin.”

That might seem absurd too. If I’m going to picture myself as a driver in “Ronin” should it not be Robert DeNiro, considering he is at the wheel of the most daring and expansive of the film’s myriad car chases, going against traffic, briefly, and managing some sort of derring-do with the aid of the handbrake that is beyond my elementary mechanical expertise to properly explain. But as much as I love DeNiro in “Ronin”, Sudduth’s wonderfully ordinarily named Larry is my preferred automobile pilot. Like, you know how Ryan Gosling in “Drive” said “I drive”? That’s Larry except that Larry doesn’t even need to say “I drive.” He just...drives. He’s there because he drives. Everyone knows this. Plus, in a crew that includes DeNiro, Jean Reno and Natascha McElhone, Skipp Sudduth does not look like nor sound like be belongs. That is totally un-McQueen-ish; that is me.

But then, Skipp Sudduth in “Ronin” is my McQueen for a reason – I could never drive like that. “Something that can shovel a bit,” Sudduth’s character says of the car he needs. That is not what I say to the car salesman when I’m trying to buy a car. So, who am I really behind the wheel of a car? Me, a person who, in the unlikely event of a car chase, would wind up like Ricky Bobby post-comeback, piddling down the track at 26 mph...



Post comeback Ricky, in fact, is an intriguing choice. But even post-comeback Ricky Bobby is still Ricky Bobby, simply buying time until he becomes the requisite phoenix rising from the racetrack ashes. And so I feel uncomfortable going that route, just as I feel uncomfortable pegging myself as, say, Stephanie from “The Naked Gun”, the hapless driving school student who turns the Women Are Terrible Drivers cliche on its head when she unleashes her inner-Popeye Doyle. I could never unleash my inner-Popeye Doyle because I don’t have an inner-Popeye Doyle.

And that’s why maybe as a driver I’m most like Del Griffith in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” for whom driving is less the point than rocking out to “Mess Around” by Ray Charles while driving. I am, after all, not much of a driver, kind of like Del, who ends up going the wrong way in the worst situation possible, but I am really, really good at playing car dashboard piano.



The thing is, however, I don’t even own a car. I haven’t owned a car going on six years now. And I love it, I absolutely adore not owning a car. Becoming car-less was one of the best decisions I ever made even if it also means that the few times I do drive, usually in an unfamiliar rental car, I discover I am a more fearful and worse driver than ever. Who in their right mind would want to be in a car with me? No one! Ask my girlfriend! Ask me, for God’s sake! I don’t want to be in a car with me!

So maybe, in the end, I’m not a driver at all. Maybe I’ve become the guy at the end of “The Pink Panther” in the zebra costume, the one running after the car chase, post-costume party, that is in progress, just trying to catch up.

5 Places In The Movies I Can Smell

A few weeks back I put up a post chronicling five make-believe (kinda) movie locations I would most like to visit and #3 was The Hit Pit of “Million Dollar Baby” fame. I referenced its “disgusting aroma of sweat, gym socks, fresh blood and cheap bleach”, and Alex of And So It Begins concurred in the comments saying (italics his) “You could smell that place.” This, as it must, got me to thinking.

They say, after all, that smell is our most powerful sense. And although film is predominantly a visual medium and does not (as of yet) have a 3D scratch & sniff option, any true blue moviegoer knows there are indisputably times when despite the barrier of the movie screen you can still smell what is happening up there. Yes, you can.

So, what places/images/moments in the movies do I most remember smelling?

5 Places In The Movies I Can Smell

Gone Baby Gone. I remain more partial to Ben Affleck’s directorial debut than his recent Oscar winning “Argo”, and one reason is the immaculate set design (holla, Sharon Seymour & Kyra Friedman Curcio!). And when I say immaculate, what I mean is it immaculately designs dumpy, lived-in, ultra-realistic sets. And there is no set I love more than Helene McCready’s house. Look at that crappy carpet! Just look at it and you can SMELL the crumbs of half-eaten Sno Balls and spilled Miller High Life and un-vacuumed dirt and grime and cigarette smoke all embedded in its fibers. Its distinct aroma in a word? Nasty. Just like Helene.

Twister. Yes, I understand Jan de Bont’s hollow spectacle is not necessarily a film of emotionally affecting visuals. It is mostly CGI tornadoes and CGI cows and a CGI Cary Elwes (I’m fairly certain he was CGI’d in that anyway). But…there is a scene and a shot of which I have admittedly written before that captures – with all due respect and thoughts and prayers to everyone affected by the tragedies in Oklahoma (where the movie is set) – the electricity of a stormy Midwestern afternoon. Bill Paxton stands outside a roadside BBQ joint, gazing at the ominous storm clouds in the distance. And, dear reader, to see those clouds is to smell that rain.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Finicky Neal Page has just taken a shower in the low-rent motel bathroom where he has been forced to spend the night with loutish Del Griffith. Del has already been in the bathroom. Towels, sopped with water, lay everywhere. Water is pooled on the floor. The sink is “like a demilitarized zone.” And though, of course, you can’t see it, the odor of Del Griffith permeates every inch of that room. We all know that smell, don’t we? We have all, terribly, unwillingly, encountered it at one time or another, haven’t we? It’s a damp pungency that makes you shiver just to think about.

Platoon. Privates Taylor, King and Crawford are, unfortunately, relegated to latrine duty. So there they are, in the midst of the Vietnam War, which is pretty much bad enough all on its own, hauling cans of soldier piss away from outhouses and then burning it into oblivion. Ugh. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore loved the smell of napalm in the morning, to be sure, but napalm isn’t the aroma I recall when thinking of war movies – it’s the militaristic urine being carted away by the grunts in “Platoon.”

Once Upon A Time In The West. Put simply, I have never smelled a scene more than the scene near the end of Sergio Leone’s epic masterpiece when Cheyenne (Jason Robards) shows up one final time at the frontier home of Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale) and asks if she made coffee. Which, of course, “this time (she) did.” She pours a bowl of hot water so he can shave. She pours the coffee. The sweat glistens on their faces in the un-air-conditioned Old West. Hot water. Coffee. Sweat. Dust. Fragrantly, it all wafts through the air, mixing together, fashioning an odor so palpable you can literally (which is to say, figuratively) see it ooze from the pores of your TV.

---Now, let's keep it rolling. What places in the movies have you smelled?