Saturday, February 26, 2011

Toy Story 3 (2010)


Oh, to be a kid again. I was 8 when the original Toy Story came out. At the time, Toy Story was a breakthrough in animation. A completely computer generated animated film had rarely if ever been seen before. Now, they're everywhere. Now, you're lucky if you get the chance to see a new traditionally animated film. This is all to say that there's really not much more to be said about animation these days. It looks great, has for a long time. This is the third Toy Story, that we've been given, so again, nothing new about the animation. That leaves, the story. It is here that I see Toy Story 3's biggest issue. Or, it's simply my biggest issue. I have no idea what Toy Story 3 wants to be, and I transfer that confusion onto the movie itself. 


Toy Story 3 kind of picks up where the second one left off, except it's about 10 years later. Andy hasn't played with any of his toys in years. One by one they've been thrown away, sold, or given away. The group of toys in Andy's room has gotten noticeably smaller. Despite all the lessons they've learned during the first two movies however, most of Andy's toys are still constantly worried that they're not wanted and that they're going to be forgotten and/or thrown away. This, of course, would be one of the only real worries a toy could possibly have, that and being given to someone younger than your age recommendation. (More on that later.) Andy's mom tells Andy, who's going off to college, that he has to decide what he wants to do with his toys. He has to decide whether he wants to bring them with him to college, throw them away, donate them to the local daycare, or put them in storage.
 
One thing leads to another; Andy decides to put all the toys but for Woody up into the attic for storage. However, his mom mistakes the black garbage back full of his toys that Andy leaves below the attic, for garbage and brings the bag out. The toys, not realizing that they were in fact destined for the attic, believe that Andy has left them for the garbage, so once Woody rescues them from the garbage man, one of many stressful sequences for the toys, they decide that they'd rather go to Sunnyside day care and be played with all the time.

When the toys find themselves at Sunnyside, they're greeted by a seemingly generous and genial cuddly bear named Lotso. At first, Sunnyside seems like a godsend to the toys. However, they quickly realize that the heavenly environment they're shown isn't where they'll be spending their time. Instead of the 6 and 7 year olds that play rather nicely with their toys, Andy's toys are put in the toddlers section where toys aren't played with, they're tortured and abused. When Buzz goes to talk to Lotso, the cuddly bear is gone, and a fascist dictator is found instead.

The rest of the movie includes nods toward an array of different movie plots from a lot of great movies. An elaborate prison break scene, a touching and painful flashback explaining Lotso's horrible detachment towards owners, and a rather terrifying trip down a garbage incinerator that seemed incredibly out of place for a kids movie. Everything leads up to the toys finding their way back to Andy, and Andy passing on his toys to the next generation in a very touching scene that honestly may have drawn a tear or two from this reviewer.

There's really no saying that this movie wasn't good. It was. Considering that it's all about toys, the movie's ability to elicit anxiety, fear, love, and hatred from the audience is amazing. However, that's not something new we saw that in the first two Toy Stories. What makes many of the original Disney/Pixar cartoon movies so successful was the fact that they of course catered to children while still having subtle hints towards adult humor. You have to keep the parents interested too. Toy Story 3, on the other hand takes this nod for adults and absolutely runs with it. I'd say half of the movie or more was directed more towards the parents and/or the college age students who were kids for the first one. Maybe that's who it was meant for. IF it was, that's unfortunate. The best thing about Toy Story and its sequel, was that they were both first and foremost kids movies. The fact that adults could enjoy them just as the kids was a great addition. It seems that Toy Story 3 will be best enjoyed after you've graduated high school at least.
 
Like I said before, it's most certainly a good movie. If it was a little bit more original, I feel like it could have been a great movie. What happened to keeping your childhood toys to give to your children and your grandchildren? I think they writers missed an opportunity here. Can you imagine a Toy Story 3 where the toys spent the time in the attic? It would be like a less terrifying more interesting Sid's room. Seems like they lost a lot when Andy gave his toys to the little girl. Yes the girl will play with them, but she's not Andy, she's not even related to Andy. The toys should learn to wait, that family is family, and that we trust our family and eventually they will be played with again, by Andy's son/daughter.

Again, it's a good movie. A very good movie. I just think that when you're talking about Toy Story, it should be a great movie. This wasn't a great movie. There was no real human commentary, like there was in the first two. It's not all the time that you get a decent third movie in a trilogy, but it seems Toy Story has done just that.

7/10

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Jordan Award Winners

Here they are:




Best Makeup:  Alice in Wonderland






Best Visual Effects: Tron: Legacy






Best Costume Design: The Tempest






Best Original Score: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross- The Social Network






Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin - The Social Network







Best Original Screenplay: David Seidler - The King's Speech






Best Animated Picture: Tangled







Best Supporting Actress: Rooney Mara- The Social Network






Best Supporting Actor: Matt Damon- True Grit






Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence - Winter's Bone






Best Actor: James Franco - 127 Hours







Best Director: Joel and Ethan Coen - True Grit







Best Breakthrough Female Performance: Hailee Steinfeld - True Grit 






Best Breakthrough Male Performance: Andrew Garfield - The Social Network






Best Picture:  The Social Network


Saturday, February 5, 2011

The Fighter (2010)


What exactly is a family? For many people it's who you grow up with, those people that live with you. For me, my family is my father, my mother, my sister, my brother, my brother-in-law, and my girlfriend. I know that those people love me. I love those people. They are my family. They won't give me advice that will help them at my expense. This does not seem to be the case in David O. Russel's “The Fighter,” where nearly the entire family is more worried about loyalty and their own self-interest than the well-being of the one member of the family that can possibly help them.

There is nothing really new or groundbreaking about “The Fighter.” The story circles around a pair of brothers. One, a crack addict former boxer, named Dicky (Christian Bale),  who constantly reminds himself and others that he once was good and knocked Sugar Ray Leonard down in a bout. The other a current boxer, Mickey (Mark Wahlberg), who's trying his best to break out and start winning some matches. We also see Dicky and Mickey's mom, Alice (Melissa Leo), who seems to know what's best for everyone. It seems that Dicky and his mom serve as Mickey's manager, and they're really not that good at it. They let Mickey fight a man 20 pounds heavier and Mickey gets his butt kicked.

Mickey meets a smart bartender, Charlene (Amy Adams), who questions the intentions of his brother and mother. She wonders if they have the best for Mickey in mind. Of course, Charlene comes into conflict with Mickey's family rather quickly, and the conflict remains throughout much of the movie. The question that is constantly being asked, is who's looking out for who. Somebody needs to look out for Mickey because he's the one being punched in the face for a living. The problem is, Mickey doesn't seem to want that responsibility either. Whether it's his mom, his brother, or Charlene, somebody seems to take control of Mickey. Why can't Mickey make his own decisions? The movie never really answers that.

Watching the movie, I wonder if living in the family he did, if Mickey was naturally that passive outside of the ring, or if the personalities that he grew up with squelched his own personality. The family is an interesting one, Dicky and Mickey have different fathers, and I think everyone's on positive terms with everyone else. They live in a poor neighborhood so of course they surround whatever opportunity for prosperity they can. It used to be Dicky, he screwed that up. Now it's Mickey. However, Dicky is still family, and here, family comes first. Family always comes first, even before the wellbeing of their prize-fighter. Charlene convinces Mickey that he needs to make a change. He eventually and grudgingly does.

Like I said, this movie doesn't really do anything new. But, it does what it has to to make a rather compelling and interesting movie, if not exciting and original. The movie is based on a true story so there may not be as much room for creativity and originality, but that's ok. The movie is good, not great. The acting is great. Well, the supporting acting is great. Wahlberg kind of has to take a back seat to all the other characters, because well, that's the character he's playing. Each of the other characters has such a strong personality that they require strong performances. The closest to over-the-top acting comes from Bale, and yet, I can't exactly fault him for it, because it seems as though it's exactly how Dicky would act. Mellissa Leo and Amy Adams seem to work very well against each other, because they seem so similar to each other. They both love Mickey, they both think they want and are doing what's best for Mickey. It's just much clearer to the audience that Charlene is right, and mom is wrong.

It's hard to change tradition, especially family tradition. When your entire life is based on family first and loyalty above all, it becomes incredibly difficult to make a decision against the advice of family. Sometimes you have to though. Family is not always right. There has to come a time in every person's life when you start making your own decisions apart from one's family. Otherwise, you can never be your own person. You can never create your own family, and you can never leave home.

Maybe you don't want to leave home. That's ok. But there's a whole world out there, and you'll never see that if you never leave home.

7/10

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Inception (2010)

Honestly, who has never, at one time or another, wished to view their dreams as if they were a movie. The idea of being that much more aware and conscious during a dream seems, at least to me, to be pretty cool. Then again, I have no real idea of the power behind dreams. I understand that in many cases the dreamer has quite a bit of power to change things in their dreams. Then again often times dreams get away from the dreamer and into some pretty weird crap. I've heard it's the subconcious that does a lot of the construction in dreams. The subconcious is buried deep for a reason, it can be pretty messed up. Christopher Nolan's newest film, “Inception” he takes a unique and interesting look at dreams.

The story follows Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a corporate spy who, along with his partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt),  steals valuable information from the very minds of the information holders. The movie starts out with Cobb and Arthur  rather successfully stealing information from a Japanese business man, Saito (Ken Watanabe).  Saito turns out to have been testing the pair and seeing if they are skilled enough to complete a reportedly impossible task called “inception.” Instead of finding and taking information out of someone's dreams, inception requires the placing of an idea or information in the person's mind and have them take it as their own. This is a very difficult task.
To do this Cobb and Arthur need to recruit a team including a forger (Tom Hardy), a sleep drug expert (Dileep Rao), and an architect (Ellen Page), someone to actually build the worlds in which they will be going through. The target of the job is a man (Cillian Murphy) who's recently inherited his father's huge corporation. There's a lot of explanation and exposition that I'm going to leave out of here. Needless to say, it's complicated but simple for those who know what's going on, namely the people in the movie, and maybe Christopher Nolan. If you haven't seen this movie yet, go see it. You won't get any more of the story from me.  Suffice it to say that Cobb's got some baggage (Marion Cotillard), and when you're going into dreams, baggage can be very dangerous. The story's really not the driving force of the movie.

The driving force of the movie is the visual aspect. The idea of having the majority of a movie taking place within a dreamscape demands some spectacular visuals, and “Inception” does not disappoint. One of the main aspects of this movie is that the settings are created. That is why Cobb recruits architecture students. Nowhere else can someone build exactly what they draw on a page or think of in a daydream. This movie boasts a city that turns in on itself. Whole cities slowly falling into the see. One of the greatest scenes of visual effects was done without computer generated images. Christopher Nolan thinks big with his movies and bigger every time. This movie is a spectacle to watch.

The only real problems with this movie is how dishonestly it looks at dreams. Like I said, the subconcious is a crazy and messed up place, yet in the movie the most dangerous thing is a crazy wife and thoughts with machine guns. Yes, Cobb's memories often make their way into the dreams he's working in, however, I feel that a movie that truly wants to look at the power of dreams needs to give those who mess with them a lot less control. Dreams are crazy, dangerous, and oftentimes scary places. We see no terror in this movie. The dreams in “Inception” do not seem to be anything like a normal person's dreams. The concept of dreams here are more likely for architects than anything else. That being said, that is a small problem and does not take too much away from the movie.

8/10

The Blind Side (2009)


“The Blind Side” was without a doubt the runaway hit of 2009. It came out of nowhere and it would appear that everyone went to go see it, many people saw it twice. Directed by John Lee Hancock, “The Blind Side” is adapted from the book by Michael Lewis. Nominated for a number of Academy Awards including Best Picture. I guess I understood why it was so popular. On the surface it's a feel-good movie that seems to hit all the right notes. I wanted to hate the movie when I saw it. In fact, I was excited to write a bad review of it. While I watched it I couldn't help but like the movie. However, I quickly realized that what I liked about it was actually a veneer. Like the fake town in “Blazing Saddles” it looks good at first glance, but there's not substance, no backbone to it. It's lacking.

The movie follows Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a homeless teenager who grew up in the Memphis projects who just happens to be black and huge. Asked by a friend's father to help enroll Michael at the local private Christian school, football coach Cotton (Ray McKinnon) takes one look at the boy and agrees. It doesn't take long for Michael to realize that he doesn't belong there, and he's most certainly not comfortable there. Plus, he's still homeless. Enter Leigh Ann Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), who sees Michael walking home in the rain at night. She tells her husband (Tim McGraw) to pick him up, and they, along with their two kids Collins (Lily Collins) and S.J. (Jae Head) bring Michael home with them, at first just for the night. Eventually it becomes a permanent thing as the Tuohy's adopt Michael.

They hire a tutor (Kathy Bates) to help Michael with his studies, and Mrs. Tuohy even takes over coaching him in football once or twice. Michael turns out to be an excellent football player for the high school and soon everybody likes Michael. Michael eventually gets so good at football that he can pretty much choose wherever he wants to go to college for free. Of course he chooses the Tuohy's alma mater which is also his tutor's alma mater. The only real conflict in this movie comes towards the end when the Tuohy's are investigated for inappropriate recruiting, and for an hour or two Michael wonders if the Tuohy's actually love him or not. Mrs. Tuohy comes back and reassures him they do. Everything is wrapped up nicely and Michael goes to college and is eventually drafted into the NFL.

I get what this movie is trying to be. I mean it IS based on a true story. There really was a young homeless black boy named Michael Oher that was housed and later adopted by a wealthy, Christian white family. All of this happened. However, this movie tells a story that is supposed to be redemptive and give us hope. This is where, after really looking at the movie, I disconnect. Yes, this movie has a happy ending. That does not mean it is redemptive. For a story to be redemptive, there has to be despair.

If the movie is about Michael, then there is only a modicum of despair. Yes, we see that he is homeless, although he doesn't seem unhappy about it, he's not being abused, he's obviously not starving. We also see where he came from and where is mom is living. It was a bad place, and if he had still lived there it would have been a very different life for Michael. That isn't despair. He had already left the projects. However, I do not think this movie is about Michael.

No, this movie is about Leigh Ann Tuohy. In this respect we see absolutely no despair. There was not a single moment where we see Mrs. Tuohy as anything but saintly. There is no real change in Mrs. Tuohy. It's interesting, in the movie there is an exchange between Mrs. Tuohy and one of her society friends where they tell her that she's changing that boys life. To which she, of course responds, “No, he's changed mine.” No he hasn't. From the very beginning she wanted to help him. We never see what she was like before. We never see any change.

A movie where nothing changes and it's only a happy ending is not a redemptive movie. It's a happy movie. We see no real struggle, no despair, no depravity in any of our characters. It would seem, nobody in this movie required redemption, and if that's the case, why watch it. Unfortunately, I think many people will watch this because they feel like by watching it and enjoying it, they're doing something good. In this regard this movie can be dangerous., especially considering the very shallow use of Christianity in the movie.

Again, I enjoyed this movie. It's nearly impossible not to. However, not all that glitters is gold. “The Blind Side” is not gold.


5/10

Gulliver's Travels (2010)


Jonathan Swift was and is still one of the most biting, brilliant, and widely read satirist the English language has ever known.  Gulliver's Travels, widely regarded as Swift's masterpiece, at once satirizes European government, differences in religion, the corruptibility of man, and the battle between ancients and moderns. He does this while maintaining an exciting and incredibly interesting travel-story. Rob Letterman's “Gulliver's Travels” starring Jack Black is a far cry from Swift. So far in fact, I don't remember seeing his name credited in the end credits. I see it there on IMDb although not without clicking past the main page. This should definitely had a different title. This is an incredibly loose adaptation if an adaptation it is.

The story follows Lemuel Gulliver (Black), a slacker 30-something that still works in the mail room of a NYC newspaper. He has a desperate crush on the Travel editor Darcy (Amanda Peet). After he is passed up for a promotion by someone there only a day, Lemuel decides to talk to Darcy and, after lying about his travel experiences takes on an assignment to write about a trip to the Bermuda triangle. Nothing really unexpected happens when he does make it to the triangle, at least nothing unexpected for a movie that includes the Bermuda Triangle. Lemuel and his boat are swept into a huge water cyclone and transported to what appears to be another world. Washing up on the shore he is surprised and slightly terrified to realize he's the prisoner of an army of very tiny people: Lilliputians. Discovering a society like Lilliput is a big deal. Swift's Lemuel was an academic. Black's Lemuel is an idiot. You can imagine what a Lemuel like Jack Black might do in a situation like this. Pretty much what you'd expect is what happens.

I usually write more of a synopsis of the movies that I review. However, I honestly feel like I'm betraying my English major writing any more about the story of this rape of literature. True, there are funny moments in the movie, however they are few and far between. Gulliver's Travels is an excellent story because of the meaning behind the adventures. There is so much that Swift says between the words in his stories that to adequately adapt it into film would require a subtle and intelligent touch, neither of which are apparent in this film.

Whenever I watch a movie based off of a book, I try my very hardest to separate the book from the movie and look at the movie on its own terms. With that in mind, “Gulliver's Travels” is boring, childish, and predictable. The fact that they use such a source as Swift only highlights the childishness. Any kind of smart satirical comment on anything would have been a positive addition to the movie Unless the movie itself is a comment on the direction Hollywood is taking by rummaging through classics both in literature and film, there is little to redeem this movie. I like Jason Segel and Emily Blunt, and I hope this movie does little to hurt their career.

The only hope I have for this movie is that someone might want to read Swift's original after watching it. However, I have little hope for that. Unfortunately it is slightly entertaining, and I wasn't entirely depressed that I had seen it, however, there are a LOT of better movies out there to see. Also, if you want to see a good adaptation of Gulliver, check out the 1996 miniseries starring Ted Danson.


3/10