Today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe is a supposed movie star car, allegedly having appeared in the film Looper. With no paperwork to back up that provenance, its up to you to determine if it’s worth the price of admission.
Wow, I am shocked that, even at fifteen grand, yesterday’s wonderfully weird 1994 Citroën XM came away with a 75% Crack Pipe loss. With its rarity, diesel mill, stickity shift and amazing Frenchness, I figured it would have been deemed well worth that much. Talk about a plot twist.
The plot of today’s contest is far simpler, although its protagonist might very well fear buying this first generation MX5 on the off-hand chance of running into their older self somewhere down the road.
That’s because this car is claimed to be the one used in the Joseph Gordon Levitt/Bruce Willis actioner, Looper. If perchance you haven’t seen the movie, then you might want to skip right to the vote because I don’t want to spoil it for you.
Are they gone? Good.
Now, Looper was a fun flick, even if infuriatingly rife with plot holes and JGL’s creepy facial prosthetics to make him look like old man Willis. But, in my mind the two best things about the movie were Piper Perabo being all kinds of undressed, and Emily Blunt playing a farmer.
Throughout her scenes toting a shotgun and being hipster hick I kept hoping she would drop into her acerbic british Devil Wears Prada character and tell Levitt you need to get off my property immediately because I have to eat a cube of cheese before I faint.
Oh yeah, and Looper also features a Gen-1 Miata, owned in the flick by the soon to be extremity-less Paul Dano character JGL. This is supposedly that car. What makes it so? Well, there's the seller’s word. Of course as George Costanza knows, that and bitten pencil won’t get you Jon Voight’s Le Baron. (Ooh, another spoiler!)
The ad shows the car looking much as did the one in the movie, with the same red paint and plus-size alloys. The seller also claims that the seats have been lowered to accommodate filming. That’s a bit of an eyebrow raiser as, if you’ve ever sat in an MX5 you’ll know that the stock distance between your butt and the road doesn’t offer much room for adjustment.
In addition to its purported celebrity, this Miata is additionally. . . a Miata. And I mean, who doesn’t love that? These are the automotive equivalent of bacon and oral sex, almost universally loved and desired. Add to that the claimed new top, and maintenance items - battery, filters, and whatnot - and it’s kind of a no-brainer that it would be attractive to a wide audience. The thing of it is, a 160,000 mile pop-up light MX5 in decent shape is usually a couple grand car, son't you think? That's of course unless it’s been messed with, which can pendulum the price either way depending on what’s been done to it.
This one has an asking price of $4,500, and the seller avers to that being low owing to the fact that he has no proof of its movie stardom. What’s your take on $4,500 for this possible cinema star? Does the Looper connection make that price the ultimate martini shot? Or, is that price still big, and it’s the pictures that have gotten small?
You decide!
San Fernando Valley Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.
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