Word: cabs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Somebody hail Travis Bickle. Sports-car chase scenes must be running out of gas: the humble cab is stealing all the great vehicular roles...
...Jamie Foxx) is the kind of cabdriver we all dream of hailing but never do. His cab is spiffy, and he knows the most efficient route to take us from here to anywhere and, to the minute, the time required for the journey. Besides that, he's polite, helpful and, despite a certain compulsiveness, not without a spiritual side. Trim, lightly bearded Vincent (Tom Cruise) is lucky to find him early on a noirish Los Angeles night...
...hires Max, for $600 off the meter, to drive him from place to place. We quickly suspect (from his elaborately polite, neo-Nietzschean dialogue, if nothing else) that Vincent is no ordinary businessman, a fact that is borne in on Max when the first body slams down on his cab's roof. You may wonder at that point why a hit man who is also a compulsive planner and private person did not rent a car for his errands. But soon you're caught up in Collateral, which is as much a dark, odd couple comedy...
...inconsistencies and does not have quite enough completely compelling incidents to sustain its considerable length. But against these complaints you have to set the linear minimalism of its structure and its blessedly low-tech manner. This is a movie where the cops interrupt the action to pull over the cab for a minor infraction; where, best of all, LOW BATT starts flashing on the cell phone at a crucial moment. In other words, this is a movie that manages somehow to fuse ordinary reality and more or less believable fantasy in a very insinuating way. --By Richard Schickel
Most of Beirut’s cab drivers are from poor areas in Lebanon’s south or Beirut’s southern suburbs. A week before I arrived in Lebanon at the beginning of June, riots broke out in those same suburbs over a new law that prohibited the less expensive diesel fuel in vehicles that carried fewer than 20 passengers. Seeing their profit margins slashed because of outrageous gas prices, drivers and their supporters protested in the streets. The protest then became about something bigger than gasoline: People protested the lack of jobs, the intermittent government services...