Review: Toy Story 3 in 3-D

I’m 40 years old this year. “Toy Story” debuted when I was 25, and though I was no longer a kid, that film transported me back to the years when I would let my imagination run wild just like Andy in the movie.

Pixar immediately established itself as what the Disney brand used to be: a guarantee that the movie that followed would be visually impressive, thoroughly entertaining, well-told and family-friendly. They have yet to make a movie that wasn’t a superior film to most anything else made by Hollywood. Half of their films should have been Best Picture contenders if not winners.

“Toy Story 2″ was originally going to be a cheapo straight-to-video, second-rate cash-generator, as the Disney studio has been cranking out for the last two decades. (“Lady and the Tramp 2″? Really?) Pixar wasn’t all that interested in doing sequels…but as the plot came together, they fell in love with the idea, shifted gears and made a sequel that was as good as the original in story and better in terms of visuals.

“Toy Story” was about a child’s natural tendency to lose interest in old toys as new toys debuted, with a side-plot about the kinds of children who do not treasure toys. “Toy Story 2″ carried the theme a little further: that a child’s fascination with toys doesn’t last forever, and is it better to be treasured in a glass case or to be loved intensely for a limited time?

There is a logical flaw in “Toy Story 2″ which I only realized as I re-watched it this week-end. (Don’t worry, it doesn’t wreck the movie: it may be illogical, but the actions are driven by emotions.) The entire misadventure occurs because a damaged toy is being put on the yard sale and Woody tries to rescue it. Of course, rescue it from what? If it sells, won’t the penguin toy be off to a new home with someone who loves it the way it is? Isn’t that better than sitting on a shelf, un-repaired and gathering dust?

It turns out that this question is the entire theme of the third movie: What happens to the toys when the child becomes an adult? Should they be kept in the attic for a possible future generation of kids to play with, if the adult even remembers they’re there? Should they be handed down to someone? Given to a charity toy drive? Kept as an un-playable memento of childhood? Or perhaps, being in a glass case in Tokyo should have been given more consideration? How about winding up in a landfill, only to be dug up by Wall*E 700 years later?

(Spoilers ahead!)

Show »

By the end of this film, I had tears in my eyes. I can only imagine how powerful “Toy Story 3″ would be to someone who was Andy’s age when the original movie came out.

As for the 3-D, I would say skip it…except that the short film “Night and Day” playing before it is a stunning example of what can be done with today’s 3-D techniques. Aside from it, the 3-D does little to enhance the film.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Podcast #6: Avatar and More

Erik and I did a pile of podcasts in January, and it’s taking me a while to edit them. However, I couldn’t let Avatar hit shelves without posting Erik’s thoughts on it and several other films (then in theaters, now on DVD).

Discussed in this podcast:

 

 Avatar and More: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

No flying cars, neither.

So I’m watching “Can’t Buy Me Love“. It’s a 1987 movie from when Seth Green was a little punk.

In it, Patrick Dempsey plays a 17-year-old geek who arranges for a senior class hottie to date him for a month so that the “In Crowd” will consider him to be one of them. As the month wanes, the cheerleader sees him as a real person and begins to fall for him, especially when he takes them out for their last date. As they look through his telescope at the moon, he tells her that when he is his dad’s age there will be people living and working on the moon.

And then it hit me. 1987? His dad is played by Dennis Dugan of The Unidentified Flying Oddball
, who was 41 in 1987. I was a 17-year-old geek myself in 1987, so that math is pretty easy for me to do: Patrick’s character would be turning 41 in 2011.

Are we living on the moon yet? No. We’re even canceling the next generation of space travel.

Oh well, movies never get the future right. “2010: The Year We Make Contact” thought we’d still be locked in a space race with the U.S.S.R., and there are only five more years to invent hoverboards. On the plus side, I think Back to the Future 2 was a bit conservative in thinking the trend among teenagers would be to wear clothing inside outs. Last week, in 5 degree Fahrenheit and blowy Minnesota, I saw a punk walking down the street with his entire boxer shorts showing above his jeans, which he could only be supporting with his thighs. (Idiot.)

No jet-packs, no flying cars, no living on the moon. The only monumental thing to happen since 1987 is they remade “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Podcast #5 is up…and it’s still 2009!

I promised Erik Burnham that I would have all of our older recordings published before the end of 2009… and I have 1/2 hour left to make that promise KEPT. This one’s less than 10 minutes long. Just a brief recording that wasn’t worth throwing out, despite some audio problems, because I relate to Erik an old TV Special that I enjoyed.

I don’t even have any Amazon links for this one, because sadly enough, it was never released on video.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Podcast #4: Chatting about Movies and Star Trek

This started out as a test of my new equipment to see if the sound quality improved (it did). Unfortunately, you should not get two guys with extensive video store clerking experience chatting about random movies. We talked for about 50 minutes! We learn that Erik pronounces “bio-pic” without the hyphen. I tend to be vocabulary-challenged and say “like”, “um” and “you know” way too much. I prepare for an MST3K version of Star Trek, and my brother ruins “Fellowship of the Ring” forever. Also, who wants us to do a list of “Great movies you may not have seen?” (Erik talks over my sarcastic line, “Have you ever heard of The Princess Bride?” Could have been a gem. Oh well.)

Recorded June 30th. I had to laugh when I heard what I say at 55:05.

 

 Chatting About Movies and Star Trek: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Read the rest of this entry »

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Phantom Menace epic review (or epic fail?)

This one is especially filled with obscenities, so please be doubly-warned before pressing play.

But really…if you like funny reviews, you need to see this! It’s hilarious, and yet it makes some hard points…such as:
WHO was the main character of the Phantom Menace?

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

RedLetterMedia’s ST: Nemesis review (hilarious!)

I know I didn’t like Star Trek: Nemesis, but this really helps bring to light that I only thought of half the reasons it sucked.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

RedLetterMedia’s Generations Review

I haven’t posted in a while. To make up for it, here are a ton of reviews on YouTube that I found. These are hilarious and insightful, culminating in a wonderful takedown of Phantom Menace.

PLEASE NOTE: A lot of these have language that is NSFW.

Let’s start with his review of Star Trek: Generations:

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

A few more thoughts about G.I. Joe

These thoughts regarding G.I. Joe contain spoilers, so I’m hiding them after this break.

• Read the rest of this entry »

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

REVIEW: Cobra assaults civilization; “G.I. Joe” assaults senses

One of the highlights of the film is a sequence where our heroes pursue terrorists who are threatening to destroy Paris with a W.M.D. Guns blazing, they take out the terrorists but not without many casualties. While Paris and millions are saved, the Eiffel Tower is destroyed and it is a Pyrrhic victory.

But enough about Team America: World Police.  We’re here to talk about G.I. Joe, which is very similar except that the acting isn’t as good.

First, I will start with the best surprise about G.I. Joe: it wasn’t as bad as I feared it would be when they first announced that G.I. Joe would be an international force headquartered in Belgium. Unless I missed it, and in this cacophonous film that is certainly possible, Belgium is never mentioned, nor the new acronym for the organization.   This film’s production has been as tumultuous as the many aborted attempts at bringing Superman back to the big screen.  Hard to believe that the film now subtitled “The Rise of Cobra” once had a script where Cobra didn’t appear at all since the creators thought it was a dumb organization.

To its credit…and also its detriment… G.I. Joe is for the most part a live action version of what we got in the cartoon show.  Swarms of one-person vehicles firing blasts at other vehicles.   A villain with a campy voice whose motivations don’t make a lick of sense.  And two organizations seemingly drowning in money for headquarters, equipment, ships, planes and weapons.

Summaries of the plot can be found everywhere, so I’m not going to bother beyond what’s necessary.  Christopher Eccleston plays Destr- er, McCullen, a weapons manufacturer who has invented nanites that can tear down anything.  He built the technology with NATO funds, which is why he has to steal them back from NATO forces.  Of course, he also has a subterranean complex the size of Wichita, so he doesn’t appear to be hurting for money.  His is the most complex character in the film, since he wants to take over the world (boo!)  and take revenge on the French (that’s fine).

Dennis Quaid commands the screen in a thankless role.  As macho as he comes across, his part is still the equivalent of Basil Exposition’s in the Austin Powers films and he probably filmed them in a couple of hours.

Sienna Miller turns out to be a very good actress, much more than just a pretty butt that is highlighted in all the posters, and there are other excellent actors in this film, but with this script there is not much for them to do to give their characters more depth.

The action in this movie is non-stop, probably so that the audience doesn’t have time to reflect on the wisdom of the plot.  The editing makes Michael Bay’s Transformers look like a Benji movie.

Unlike the cartoon with the ubiquitous parachutes, here people die in large numbers.  To avoid an R rating, no result of any gunshot is ever shown.  People scream and then the camera immediately cuts to something else.  The video game-style loss of life reaches the height of ridiculousness in a sequence that puts the Matrix to shame. Two Joes in accelerator suits are running through the city streets of Paris chasing after a Cobra Hummer that begins chucking mini-vans full of people at them.  Duke and Ripcord dodge the vehicles and keep on running with nary a thought towards the families that are getting squished.  They might as well be hopping over barrels hocked at them by a giant ape.  Focusing on the civilians for even a few seconds might help to put the stakes into perspective, but would probably get in the way of the adrenaline rush.

The frantic, rapid, constant camera cuts may be fine for this current ADHD generation of teens… and I add that qualification only because my niece says the action in Transformers wasn’t hard to follow at all, so she may have some kind of Wally West perception thing going on… but I found the movie to be a headache waiting to happen.

When the movie ended, the credits rolled and the soundtrack cranked up to some really horrible boom boom rap song, I thought it was the appropriate ending to a mediocre film that made my eyeballs bleed.  Actually, the perfect ending would still have been an instrumental version of the “A Real American Hero, G.I. Joe is There” theme song, but I knew the film-makers had avoided it.  For a second, I thought about toughing it out through the whole credits just to see if there might be a silly PSA where Ripcord saves a kid from a construction site or something, but I gave up.

Look, you all know my politics.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe, despite the ample evidence that American films with a “rah-rah go America” attitude do just fine in overseas sales, maybe this film would have been dismally wounded in sales as every critic east of the Seinne would have been making comparisons between G.I. Joe and America’s military arrogance, etc.  All I know is that the oh-so-obvious attempts to distance this property from America gave this thing a stinking odor that it did not need to have…and the many ways it stinks in addition to that did not help.

It’s sometimes hard to believe that “The Mummy”, a pretty good action film that is rock-solid entertaining, is still Stephen Sommers’ best film.   Is there no greatness in him?  Can’t he try to do something with just a little more maturity than that of a 9-year-old playing Hungry Hungry Hippos?

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Batman Movies, part 2

Our second podcast is finally here, sponsored by TooManyLongboxes.com. In honor of the 20th anniversary of Mr. Mom playing Batman, Erik Burnham and I review the Batman movies directed by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher.

 

 Monitor Duty Podcast 2 -- Batman movies part 2 [34:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

My review of UP

Well, I just came back from seeing it, and to be honest, judging from the first trailer , I didn’t have high expectations. I remember when seein g it originally, I thought, ookay, flying house and an old man, so where’s the story potential? Even the title ‘UP’ sounded lame.

I’m just glad to be proven wrong.

SPOILER ALERTS

The story follows Carl Fredricson, who, when he was a young boy, dreams of going on adventures in a lost land somewhere in South America with his friend, and future wife, Ellie. After many years setting up their dream home, and trying to make their dreams come true, however, Ellie unfortunately passes away. This is all covered in the first 15 minutes of the film, through a series of clever montages, as we see the couple date, get married, build a live, and suffer misfortunes.
I can honestly say that no one can go through this part without shedding tears. I can also say that while shedding said tears, it is difficuly to dry one’s eyes while wearing regular and 3D glasses, but I digress…
Carl, in the present day, is in the process of being evicted to a retirement community against his will. To make things worse, he is being annoyed by Russel, an 8 year old scout trying to earn an elderly badge (ah, the scouting days). On the day he’s to be sent to the home, Carl had managed to inflate thousands of baloons, and make modifications to his house, to float away in the sky, to keep his promise to Ellie.
Unfortunately, Russel stows away, and hilarity ensues.

All in all it was a great film. Not as dynamic as The Incredibles, but it really doesn’t need to be. Ed Asner’s portrayal of Carl is on the ball, and Russel, along with the inevitable animal sidekicks, provide wonderful comic relief.

‘UP’ date:
A truly touching story…

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Capsule movie review – Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

It is a sign of a great movie that I love it despite the massive hippie-ness that infests the plot.

Star Trek IV is a great movie. If they needed to go back in time to fight Gorn Marines to save San Fransisco hippies to insure the future… it really wouldn’t change the fact that what makes the movie awesome isn’t the whales/macguffins, but the characterization, the dialogue (and the score). Read the rest of this entry »

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Movie Review: Oliver Stone’s “W.”

I just saw Oliver Stone’s biopic of President George W. Bush, “W.”

I am a Democrat and proudly liberal. I did not vote for Bush, did not like Bush, did not agree with his worldview, his policies both foreign and domestic, or his actions. I furthermore do not think he was a particularly good President.

All that being said: the man deserved so much better than this film.
Read the rest of this entry »

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Watchmen: First thoughts review

I’m sure I can put together a lengthier, more thoughtful review when I’ve had time to reflect on it, but this is my initial take after leaving the theater:

The special effects are great…

…and that about says it all when it comes to Hollywood’s adaptation of a book that is mostly conversations.

Spoilers ahead; I’m assuming you’ve read the original.

Read the rest of this entry »

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Batman Movies, part 1

Our first podcast, sponsored by TooManyLongboxes.com. Erik Burnham and I discuss the Batman movies from the serials to the Adam West era. This was an experiment and the sound is a bit mediocre. My apologies to Erik that this took over a month to edit and post. The next one, needless to say, will be better.

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Discussed:

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Review: “X-Files: I Want To Believe”

Perhaps, had I caught the new X-Files movie after a long drought of no entertainment, I may have liked it. Maybe. The fact that a few days ago I dragged out my dust-covered “Season Two” box set couldn’t have helped. To make things worse, earlier today we got to one of the best episodes ever: “Humbug”, featuring Vincent Schiavelli. A hilariously creepy episode, there is nary a wasted moment, and almost every line is witty and well-structured.

This X-Files movie has a number of things against it. The biggest is that the series jumped the shark long before it had an episode called “Jump The Shark” (the one where the Lone Gunmen get killed off). Chris Carter wanted to end the show when it felt right to do so, but it was one of the only hits on the Fox Network and so the show limped along. Mulder left, John Dogget was Scully’s new partner, Scully was now the believer in phenomena, the mythology got over-wrought and made no sense, Scully fell in love with Mulder and had his baby, the Lone Gunmen were killed off, and Mulder went into hiding from the F.B.I. and Scully quit.

The entire setup that made the X-Files the X-Files is ruined. Neither of them are F.B.I. agents and they don’t have a file cabinet full of spookiness to investigate! There’s no Cigarette Smoking Man, no Lone Gunmen, no abducted sister. How do you make a movie that follows this?

The answer is: You don’t make a movie. Unfortunately, they made one. Good thing for them, they didn’t blow a lot of money doing it.

In this new movie, Mulder and Scully are living together and Scully is a doctor for a Catholic hospital. The F.B.I. is trying to find a kidnapped agent with the help of a psychic, and they call Mulder in to assist in determining whether the psychic is on the level or is sending them on a wild goose chase.

On the plus side, this movie does what the first film, “Fight the Future,” should have done: a movie-length, movie-production values version of their better stand-alone mystery episodes instead of an installment in their on-going complex alien mythology.

Sadly, this is not one of the better episodes. It’s very boring, much of it feels like it’s been done before, there isn’t really anything mysterious and the only exciting scene is a standard foot-chase in the middle of a street with cars braking suddenly. Much of the movie is about Scully having a crisis of faith (what, again?). Meanwhile, Scully and Mulder’s relationship is terribly ambiguous…and unconvincing. These two are absolutely not in love. What have they been doing all these years, anyway? I can understand their not getting married due to Mulder being a fugitive, but they don’t act like anyone I know in a relationship. It’s as if they’ve been together for seven years but not talking about anything that would bring them closer as people. They’re more like roommates who’ve had a kid together. Their kissing scenes are downright awkward. (Remember when the BIG thing about “Fight the Future” was that Mulder and Scully might kiss?)

The movie really is hurt by the slavish devotion to continuing the changes from the end of the series. It should have found a better way to put Mulder and Scully back into their old roles, if only because most of the people in the audience will not have watched the lousy Mulder-less years and may be baffled.

Don’t bother. Go watch the box sets of the early years.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

28 Very Weaks Later

Spoiler Warning for 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later

I watched 28 Weeks Later tonight, hoping that it would surpass the original. Unfortunately, it suffered for the same reason that the original was ultimately unsatisfying. Both are great “zombie outbreak” films that are weakened by a deep hostility towards the military.

The original is a superior piece of work for 2/3rds of the film. Indeed, there is a dramatic cut-off point when the father of the teen-aged girl is infected, and the screen goes black. Then, struggling for an ending, it takes a jarring turn: the military camp that was to be the salvation of the survivors is being run by a sicko and he plans to conscript the females as sex slaves for his brutish troops.

The movie is struggling for an ending because the (probable) original ending was completely different, as revealed in the DVD extras. 28 Days Later was supposed to end with the male lead, Jim (Cillian Murphy) volunteering for an experiment that would restore the father’s sanity at the cost of becoming an “Infected” himself, and the movie ends as it began with him incapacitated in a bed and watching horrors on video screens like the monkey in the lab experiment. Unfortunately, this ending seemed absurd, given that a drop of infected blood can contaminate a person, so they came up with the military camp ending.

I don’t think the hostility towards the British armed forces is even intentional. As a tacked-on ending, it can’t have been the overall message that the director and writer were intending to send from the beginning. Rather, my suspicion is that it reflects the general view of the military held by the writer and the director.

Even if you can justify it to yourself as “that was just the case of one group of troops cut off from civilization, having spent a month shooting thousands of infected civilians until they don’t remember their old ethics”, the sequel is worse.

In 28 Weeks Later, an American Army General makes a tough decision to allow his troops to begin firing on a crowd because containment of the outbreak is top priority and trying to tell who is infected in the distance, in the dark, in the midst of a screaming mob makes smart determinations difficult. Okay, that’s understandable, if harsh. But then they go overboard with a “kill everything that moves” rule that insists on killing everyone even if you can be entirely certain they are not Infected. It gets so bad that at one point helicopters are shooting at a moving vehicle, as if one of these zombies could be driving!

The military exists to protect the populace. Most members of the military go to great lengths to save lives and would gladly give their own to protect others. Seeing them portrayed as uncaring thugs gets my hackles up.

In any case, it’s not a great movie. All too often, I am baffled at the poor planning in case of an outbreak. I realize that logical security measures would make it tough to get the movie going, but we’re talking about a film where the outbreak happens because the locked civilian shelter has an unlocked back door.

More fundamentally, why do the infected not attack other infected? If there’s no brain-eating involved, as there would in a zombie movie, but instead the infected are simply overcome with fury, what makes them discount getting angry at other Infected? And if you were enraged all the time, wouldn’t you burn out pretty quickly via high blood pressure?

And can you really survive an attack of liquid fire (napalm or similar) by going around a corner of a building?

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Eerie coincidence that happened to me

If I’m going to be spending some hours in the kitchen doing dishes or making meals, I will often grab a movie or two from my library to pop in the DVD player. (I have a small set on the counter, natch.)

By sheer happenstance, I grabbed “The Rookie” and “October Sky”.

The Rookie is a good film. Standard sports fare, heightened by Dennis Quaid’s performance, about a man whose dreams of playing baseball professionally were ended by an injury…but who finds himself at 40 able to throw a ball better than ever before. (One of the better lines: “Now, if I call the office and tell ‘em I got a guy here almost twice these kids’ age, I’m gonna get laughed at. But, if I don’t call in a 98-mile-an-hour fastball, I’m gonna get fired!”) I hadn’t seen this in a while, so I popped it in.

Next, October Sky. Rookie’s good, but October Sky is simply an unappreciated masterpiece. Almost operatic in its themes, telling the tale of a miner’s son who would rather explore outer space than descend into the Earth to grub for coal, the film remains a feather in Joe Johnston’s cap. I have yet to watch it without choking up at the end. In a better world, this would be the kind of film that gets Oscars instead of “American Beauty.” If you have not seen this, you’d better buy it right now or I will find you.

Now, I grabbed these movies at random, just trying to find a DVD that I don’t have memorized. But I noticed something:

Both movies are about chasing after your dreams.
Both movies are about kids trying to escape the confines of their go-nowhere hometowns.
Both movies have protagonists who have a strained relationship with a grumpy, work-obsessed dad.
Both movies have the dads give some appreciation at the end.
Both movies have high schools where the sports team is called The Owls.

Weird.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Pinup queen Bettie Page dies at 85

The beautiful Bettie Page has left us.

Bettie’s very sad life was retold in a marvelous film called “The Notorious Bettie Page”. Gretchen Mol is stunning in her ability to recapture the Bettie Page smile. The movie shows how Bettie, plagued by a lifetime of abuse and rape, is able to somehow retain a positive attitude about her career, life and God. (Granted, it does this by ending the story before she was placed in a sanitarium.)

The film contrasts well with “Auto Focus,” the biopic about the downfall and death of Bob Crane. The tale of how a whitebread, Republican, family man with a secret yen for nudie mags became an adulterous, swinging amateur pornographer is disturbing… and quite a shock for the Hogan’s Heroes fans who don’t know just how sadly porn-addicted he became. What’s also surprising: I didn’t know you could make a movie so focused on sex and have it come across as not at all titillating. in a way, it reflects Crane’s mental state: sex isn’t about fun anymore, it’s just an addiction.

Oh: If you ever DO make these a double-feature…watch the Bettie Page movie last. You’ll sleep better.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...