Used Cars (1980)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
When the owner of a struggling used car lot is killed, it's up to the lot's hot-shot salesman to save the property from falling into the hands of the owner's ruthless brother and used-car rival.
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What critics compared Used Cars to
This being Zemeckis, there are discrete moments that dazzle--not so much visually as conceptually, thus harking back to his Used Cars days.
Flight marks director Robert Zemeckis’ first foray (and second ever) into the R-rated landscape since 1980’s hilarious and underrated Used Cars .
Porn! Zemeckis’ last R-rated movie was Used Cars and what was that for, language?
The joke is not that Jerry is Machiavellian (like Kurt Russell in Used Cars ), but that he’s such a worm even when he’s pulling a fast one.
Does the probable success of "Big Fish" (which has been touted for months as potential Oscar bait) mean that the Tim Burton who gave us such anarchistic gems as "Beetlejuice" and "Mars Attacks!" (which is still one of the funniest and most underrated films of the 1990s) is going to go the way of Robert Zemeckis-another director who abandoned the zany absurdist attitude that he developed in such films as"Used Cars" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" after scoring an Oscar for "Forrest Gump" to make blander films like "Contact" or "Cast Away"?
From Used Cars to Back to the Future to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, his unbounded creativity and his insistence on quirky stories with blockbuster budgets has made him a bit of a Filmsnobs icon.And two of his best films - Forrest Gump and Cast Away - were collaborations with another Filmsnobs icon, Tom Hanks.
Once a promising filmmaker, Zemeckis worked his way from small comedies like I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) and Used Cars (1980) to superbly crafted Hollywood entertainments like Romancing the Stone (1984), Back to the Future (1985) and the amazingly brilliant Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) -- a film worthy of Spielberg himself.
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At its most predictable, "Cast Away" is exactly the movie you'd expect the post-"Forrest Gump" Robert Zemeckis to make (and a movie far, far removed from the delectable nastiness of his 1980 "Used Cars" or his 1992 "Death Becomes Her").
Sure, he had some minor success with the Beatles-themed I Want to Hold Your Hand, and his Used Cars was a critically-acclaimed cult comedy.
The earlier Zemeckis/Gale/Spielberg movies, like "Used Cars," were noisy but they were at least sassy and offhand, with a pleasant, bargain-basement air.
They love the crassness, obviousness, and manic energy of old TV, and it gives their work (Used Cars, the screenplay of Spielberg's 1941) a uniquely American zip and vulgarity, like the best early-60s rock.
Zemeckis and Gale, the gifted satirists who collaborated on "Used Cars," have cannily chosen the time periods in "Back to the Future," which are funny as much for their similarities (political and materalistic) as their contrasts (music, fashions, language).
The script was turned down by everybody in Hollywood and the creative duo behind the wheel, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, hadn't set the box office on fire with their previous collaboration, Used Cars.
Robert Zemeckis met with such tremendous success in helming the likes of Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump that it's often easy to overlook the two gems he directed and co-wrote (with Bob Gale) at the beginning of his career.