→ June 18, 2018
→ By

Incredibles 2.

Incredibles 2 comes almost fifteen years after the first installment’s release, but takes place immediately after the events of the previous film – literally, as we see Mr. Incredible & his family fighting the Underminer (John Ratzenberger making his obligatory appearance), which is how the first movie ended. That sets off a new story that bears a lot of resemblance to the original but flips the script so that Elastigirl is now the superhero out fighting crime, while Mr. Incredible turns into Mr. Mom and has to feed the kids, help Dash with his math homework, navigate Violet’s first foray into dating, and deal with Jack-Jack’s hitherto unknown array of spontaneously-appearing superpowers. It is just as good as the first movie, but without the boost the first movie got from being new. We know all these characters and we know how their world operates. The magic of meeting them all for the first time is now replaced by the comfort of seeing all the familiar faces and places and hearing those same voices (“daaaaahlink”) after so many years away.

The movie forks early on into two subplots that, of course, will rejoin near the end so someone can save the day – and really, if you can’t figure out where all this is going, you haven’t watched a Pixar movie before. Winston Deaver (Bob Odenkirk) is a communications tycoon, something Frozone explains to us in a clumsy aside worthy of an SVU episode, and a longtime fan of superheroes, just as his father was. He and his sister (Catherine Keener) have a plan to make supers legal again by launching a PR campaign around Elastigirl, putting a camera in her uniform and then letting the public see just what good work she’s doing fighting crime. She gets an opportunity to do so in suspiciously short order, saving a brand-new monorail from total disaster, which introduces her to a new villain, the Screenslaver, who says we’re all spending too much time looking at our phones (duh) so he’s going to cause chaos to wake us all up (good luck with that).

* I kept trying to figure out what the pun in his name might be, since its sounds like “winst endeavor” every time anyone says it. Google tells me “winst” is the Dutch word for profit, but of course it’s pronounced “vinst,” and that’s a long way to go for a pun anyway.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Mr. Incredible learns that parenting is hard. Some of the jokes are a little too familiar – yes, I’ve been through the new math versus old math thing, and still think the way my daughter’s school teaches long division is dumb – but most are at least funny, notably the sight gags. But it’s Jack-Jack who steals pretty much every scene he’s in. His numerous superpowers, a few of which were previewed in his fight against Syndrome (who, fortunately, does not magically re-appear in this film) at the end of the first movie, are pretty funny on their own. He also ends up in a fight scene with a tenacious raccoon that is by far the movie’s best sequence, busting out all of his powers and flabbergasting his sleep-deprived father – who, of course, decides not to tell Elastigirl about any of this while she’s out saving the world and trying to convince the public to make supers legal again.

The problem with Incredibles 2, other than the lack of newness – there are some new supers but they’re not that interesting, except maybe Void (Sophia Bush), who needed more to do – is that the villain is meh. You’ll probably figure out who it is fairly quickly, and then you’ll spend the rest of the film trying to figure out the villain’s motivation, which is not terribly convincing, and certainly doesn’t do enough to justify the plan to make supers illegal on a permanent basis. The exposition required to get to that point gives the film its one slow-down moment, and it’s not sufficiently credible to explain everything that the villain has done or is about to do.

The resolution, however, is a blast, literally and figuratively, with Jack-Jack again playing a critical role, as he and the family make use of his powers and his growing ability to control them. Brad Bird, the director and writer of both Incredibles movies, reprises his role as E in another fantastic sequence where she bonds with Jack-Jack (and, of course, makes him a new superhero costume). Even the ending leaves it open so that if they do decide to make this a trilogy, Bird can write the script right from the moment where the family takes off to go stop another crime. It’s very good, almost as good as the first one, but it could have been tighter.

The Pixar short film that airs before this – after the seven trailers, one of which was for Christopher Robin and five of which were for movies you couldn’t pay me to see – was Bao, a twisted, funny, and very sweet story about being a parent and letting go. The first ever Pixar short directed by a woman, Bao gives us a wife who makes exquisite xiao long baozi, the steamed dumplings that look a bit like a Hershey’s kiss in its wrapper – or, as it turns out, a lot like a little head, as one day the woman starts to bite into one of her dumplings only to have it cry out like a baby, sprout arms and legs, and then grow like a child. Eventually, the little bao starts to grow up and become a teenager and then a young adult who brings home a fiancée – blonde, and definitely not Asian – which really pushes mom over the edge. There’s one slightly demented scene in the short, which I thought was hilarious, but the end will have almost any parent in the audience tearing up. I know opinions on Bao are mixed but I think it’s one of their best shorts ever.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ March 3, 2018
→ By

Coco and this year’s animated shorts.

The 2017 slate of big studio animated movies was rather dismal, which I think is going to lead to an easy win for Coco, the best of the batch by any measure, especially since some of the best indie animated films didn’t even score nominations. Coco (available to rent/buy on amazon or iTunes) is genuinely very good, if not really at Peak Pixar levels; it’s better than the sequels Pixar has churned out recently, like Finding Dory and Monsters U., just not at the standard set by films like Up or WALL-E or the Toy Story trilogy.

(I suppose this disclaimer is barely necessary at this point, but just in case: I work for ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which owns Pixar, which made Coco.)

The protagonist of Coco is not actually Coco, but Miguel, a young Mexican boy who wants nothing more in life than to be a musician, but whose great-great-grandfather left his wife and very young daughter, Coco, to pursue his dreams in music. That has made the family extremely bitter towards music, to the point where Miguel has to hide his records and his homemade guitar from his parents and relatives, especially his grandmother, who is basically Nurse Ratchet in abuelita form.

Of course, he gets caught, runs away, and ends up crossing over the bridge to the netherworld where the mostly-dead spirits of the recently deceased reside in relative luxury … as long as someone alive still remembers them. On the Day of the Dead, the spirits can come back to visit their relatives as long as someone has put up their pictures on their ofrendas. Miguel can get back to the land of the living, but wants to do it in a way that doesn’t require him to surrender his dreams of becoming a musician, which leads him to chase down the man he thinks is his deceased great-great-grandfather, the underworld-famous musician Ernesto de la Cruz. (Spoiler alert: It’s not him, and God help you if you didn’t see that one coming.) So Miguel has to learn some important lessons about family, sing a song or two, and eventually get back to the living while also restoring a lost link to his family’s past.

Coco looks great, as all Pixar movies do, although I think since Brave they’ve kind of run up against a barrier of animation quality – Pixar films have blown me away visually so many times in the past that there isn’t much left for them to impress me with. This film is colorful and bright and very appealing, especially the spirit animals of the netherworld, but it’s also what we’ve come to expect from this studio. The story itself is just so-so, although there are plenty of sight gags and a bunch of references that will sail over younger readers’ heads but entertain the parents. (Bonus points for getting my daughter to ask me who Frida Kahlo was.) The setup never really worked for me – the loving parents who are so hellbent on denying Miguel any kind of music, not just saying he can’t pursue it as a career, but proscribing it as even a hobby. His grandmother destroys his handmade guitar, which just does not gibe at all with the rest of her character; no matter how mad you get, you don’t obliterate something your child made.

The best Pixar movies all have intricate plots that drop threads early in the film only to tie them all back together near the end. There are no throwaways in movies like The Incredibles or Toy Story – every detail ends up mattering in a big way. Not only is it satisfying in the moment to see a script recall something from an hour earlier, but it adds to the feeling that these are deep, three-dimensional films to be considered on par with live-action movies. If anything, most live action films would be lucky to bring scripts of the density and sophistication of great Pixar films. Coco isn’t one of these; there’s a single plot strand, established early and handled linearly, without much more. Even the complex structure of the netherworld where the skeleton-souls reside felt too familiar, with shots of the great hall and the stadium both recalling similar settings from Harry Potter films.

In a better year, with a better slate of nominees, I don’t think Coco would be deserving of the Best Animated Feature Oscar it’s going to win. It’s the best of the five nominees, and it’s hard for any other studio to match the sheer quality of the CG animation that comes from Pixar. If you go against them on animation, it has to be to choose something novel like the hand-painted cels of Loving Vincent or the visual style of The Breadwinner. (Let’s not even talk about The Boss Baby.) Tim Grierson and Will Leitch put this at #14 on their ranking of all 19 Pixar feature films, which amounts to dropping it behind all the good ones and ahead of all the mediocre-or-less ones. I can’t disagree.

* I’ve seen all five Best Animated Short Film nominees just in the last 72 hours, as they were all available somewhere for free: “Garden Party,” “Lou,” and “Negative Space” were all on YouTube, although at the moment two are gone; “Dear Basketball” is on Go90; and “Revolting Rhymes” is on Netflix. Of those, ”Revolting Rhymes” would be my pick, as it’s inventive, looks fantastic, and manages to develop some characters … but it’s also two episodes of about 28 minutes each, which exceeds the category’s length threshold, so I don’t know if voters have to consider just one of the two parts. It’s based on a Roald Dahl book of rhymes where he reworks some classic fairy tales to add some macabre twists and change the endings, all told here by a Big Bad Wolf (voiced by Dominic West). My daughter and I enjoyed it quite a bit, although I think she’d vote for “Lou” instead. That Pixar short brings the items in a school playground lost & found to life to teach the class bully a lesson. It’s cute and sweet and probably gets the nod on animation quality.

“Negative Space” is a stop-motion piece from Germany about a young man who is remembering how his father taught him his rather scientific method of packing a suitcase to maximize use of the space therein. It’s just five minutes, and there’s a twist that I think you’ll probably see coming. “Garden Party” also has a twist, and the animation of various tropical frogs taking over an apparently abandoned mansion is cool … but there isn’t really a story here.

And then there’s “Dear Basketball,” which I’m worried will win because it involves Kobe Bryant, even though it is clearly the worst of the five. Bryant penned a letter essentially thanking basketball for the huge, positive influence it has had on his life, which is fine, but not munch of a story. The animation looks like charcoal drawings, which is appealing, but ultimately there is just no there here. If it’s not pointless, the point isn’t very sharp. And that’s without considering the fact that Bryant was accused of rape and chose to pay his accuser to make the charges go away – not someone the Academy should want on its stage anyway, not this year of all years. If this were a truly great short film, maybe there’d be an argument for honoring it anyway, but it’s just not.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 22, 2015
→ By

Inside Out.

Pixar’s latest movie, Inside Out, lived up to all of the hype and praise it’s received so far, a visually stunning film that hits all of the bittersweet notes that have made Pixar’s best films – especially WALL-E and the Toy Story trilogy – masterpieces not just of animation but of cinema. It’s also, in many ways, one of Pixar’s riskiest ideas, thanks to one of its least conventional plots yet, making the ultimate success of the film even more remarkable. (Full, if obvious, disclosure: Disney owns Pixar and ESPN.)

Inside Out is a metaphysical coming-of-age story that manages to encapsulate a buddy comedy, a psychological thriller, and an Arthur Clarke-style sci-fi story all set inside of the head of eleven-year-old Riley Anderson, whose family has just removed her from her idyllic life in Minnesota so her father can work for a startup in San Francisco. Riley’s personality is determined by a pastel-colored world run primarily by five emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear, each voiced and drawn in distinctive fashion (and helpfully color-coded). Riley’s memories each bear one of those five colors, although we learn early on that Sadness (Phyllis Smith) can turn any memory blue (her color) with a touch, a sort of King Midas meets The Old Guitarist-era Picasso. When Joy and Sadness are inadvertently tossed from Headquarters, where the five emotions live and work, along with Riley’s core memories, her whole personality starts to crumble into depression and negativity. Joy and Sadness have to try to find their way back from the archives of Long-Term Memory while the other three emotions try without success to steer the ship.

The five emotionsJoy, voiced by Amy Poehler, is in essence a yellow-skinned, blue-haired, fuzzy Leslie Knope, full of enthusiasm and as much of a leader as the quintet of emotions can have; she was there first, Sadness second, and there’s an uneasy (but not antagonistic) relationship between the two. Their pairing in exile isn’t an accidental bit of plotting, as the film needs the two to play off of each other, even when they run into Riley’s largely-forgotten imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind) and end up in a series of misadventures as they try to get back to headquarters. (My favorite: their trip through abstract thought, where the three are transformed into cubist images, then deconstructed.) Some of the resolutions are a little obvious – Pixar writers have always taken the maxim of Chekhov’s gun very seriously – but the three writers do an excellent job of managing three disparate plot strands: the Joy/Sadness journey, the three knuckleheads still in HQ, and Riley’s real-world interactions with her befuddled (but never distant or cliched) parents.

The Joy/Sadness adventure – and that’s what it is, a buddy comedy with serious consequences for the other storylines – is the primary plot thread of the movie, and the relationship between the two characters, matched in Poehler’s and Smith’s voicing, is more oil/water than acid/base: Sadness doesn’t want to bring anyone down, but she can’t help it, while Joy remains indefatigable in the face of unfathomable odds. Sadness wants to be more like Joy, while Joy looks on Sadness as a well-meaning nuisance, so you can see who’s going to learn what lesson in the end. It’s how we get there that makes most Pixar movies such memorable experiences for the viewer – if you have a kid, you’ll probably get a little weepy, as I did at a few points during Inside Out – and such great art. The ending is happy, happier than, say, Toy Story 3, but it’s yellow with a few spots of blue.

The great achievement of Inside Out‘s plot isn’t the ending, or the adventure in Long-Term Memory, but the fact that the film works so beautifully without an antagonist. There’s no villain, no Big Foozle, no evil queen, hell, there’s no princesses (not that I’m anti-princess but a change of pace is always welcome). Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust are not set in opposition to Joy, but are depicted as essential elements of human personality. We don’t get the Dragon of Solitude or the Alienation Wraith; when Riley’s emotions have to fight their way back, they’re fighting something fundamental, not an artificial plot-contrivance bad guy whom they have to kill to get to their goal. Inside Out‘s tension is built around time, not threat, yet the film never drags for the lack of a foil for our twin heroines.

Inside Out is full of Easter eggs, as most Pixar flicks are; I only caught a few of them, including the music in the nightmare, the Chinatown reference, and the homage to Steve Jobs’ “reality distortion field.” I didn’t realize the two jellybean-like things guarding the subconscious were actually voiced by Frank Oz and Dave Goelz, longtime Muppet performers. There are apparently several I missed in the classroom scene, although I’m not sure I would have caught any without a remote control in my hand to pause it.

I’m kind of bummed that my daughter is too old for the Inside Out Box of Mixed Emotions, five books, one per emotion, aimed at 3- to 5-year-olds. It looks like Driven by Emotions is more age-appropriate; I’ll report back if we read that one.

Lava, the short animated feature that preceded Inside Out, is a cute but insubstantial love story, remarkable mostly for the quality of its animation (especially the landscapes on the sides of the two volcanoes) and the film’s song, which reminded me of the late native Hawai’an singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. Known as Israel K., his cover of “Over the Rainbow” is the only version of that song I can stand, and Lava‘s main voice-over actor, Kuana Torres Kahele, even sings in a similar fashion to Israel K.’s style.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ July 1, 2013
→ By

Monsters University.

My report on Saturday night’s doubleheader in Wilmington, featuring Kyle Zimmer, A.J. Cole, and Robbie Ray, is up for Insiders now. I should be at Bowie on Tuesday night to see Eduardo Rodriguez, weather permitting.

Monsters, Inc. is one of my favorite Pixar films because it’s appropriate for kids (as all Pixar films are) but is in so many ways a mature, adult film. The issues involved are real, the perceived threat to the main characters is serious (even though we know it’ll work out), the humor is sophisticated, and the animation is superb. I had a feeling heading into Monsters University that it wouldn’t live up to its predecessor, and it didn’t – this prequel is more of a children’s movie than the typical Pixar film, lacking a strong antagonist and missing much of the trademark sharp humor of Pixar movies, although it was still fun to watch and beautifully rendered.

Monsters University is almost a bromance, telling us the story of how the two stars of Monsters, Inc., Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and Sully (John Goodman) first met while students – and rivals – in their college’s Scare Program. Aside from a brief and somewhat hackneyed intro with Mike as a young monster, we spend nearly the entire movie watching just a few days of action on campus, learning that Mike was the studious worker while Sully was the gifted son of a famous scarer. (Sully was the five-tool athlete here, while Mike had heart and grit and no natural talent.) We get cameos by Randy Boggs (Steve Buscemi) and other familiar faces from the first film, but the bulk of the activity from characters beyond Mike and Sully comes from new monsters and voices, including the fraternity the two join – Oozma Kappa – to try to win back their places in the Scare Program after a petty fight gets them both kicked out right before a critical final exam.

From there, we get a traditional underdogs narrative with a strong dose of teamwork, where Mike and Sully have to work together to train their misfit brothers, none of whom could scare a panphobe, to win the competition that will get them all back into the Scare Program. As you’d expect, each of the misfits finds some special talent or skill that comes in handy right at the moment when they need the help most. It’s well-executed, especially the parts with the five-eyed gelatinous Scott “Squishy” Squibbles, but aside from one plot element – the Big Twist that leads from the first, false climax to the film’s real resolution – it’s all rather expected. And with no true villain, the tension never gets very high; even Dean Hardscrabble, voiced by the always wonderful Helen Mirren, isn’t so evil or even mean, just strict and demanding. That lack of any character with actual intent to harm the protagonists means it’s appropriate for younger audiences than the typical Pixar film, but there’s less here for the parents, less humor – just a lot of good sight gags involving monster malleability – and less story.

The best thing Monsters University offers is the smarmy, condescending performance by Nathan Fillion as the big, scary head of the cool-monsters fraternity RΩR, who puts Mike down at every opportunity with a classic “I can barely put forth the energy to patronize you” tone. I’m a longtime Fillion fan, dating back to Firefly, and will subject myself to Castle when my wife watches it, just to watch Fillion crack wise a few times. (It’s not a good show by any definition, and Castle Minus Castle would probably be the worst 44 minutes on television.) But Fillion doesn’t get enough good lines, making more happen with his delivery than with his actual phrasing, with the few good one-liners going to his yes-man sidekick, the one-eyed Chet Alexander (voiced by SNL castmember Bobby Moynihan). Whether you think Billy Crystal is funny as a comedian or actor, he was funny in Monsters, Inc. because he took good material and played it up. Here, he doesn’t get the same kind of lines, and there’s little he can do to make them funnier, and John Goodman’s Sully is almost entirely a straight man, although his character benefits from the strongest development, going from spoiled legacy student to top-tier scarer and, of course, a good friend.

I’d take a child of just about any age to see Monsters University, unless s/he was especially prone to nightmares or bad dreams, which is the closest this film comes to producing any actually scary content. It’s lighthearted and sweet, without the emotional depth or breadth of a good Pixar film, which means a lot less explaining after the fact but also gives the film a superficial quality that wasn’t present in Monsters, Inc. It’s worth seeing for the family, and the preceding short film, The Blue Umbrella, is cute, but can’t touch Pixar classics like The Incredibles or the Toy Story trilogy.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 15, 2012
→ By

Brave.

Brave is by far the most beautiful animated film I have ever seen, with details so clear and so lifelike that the movie exceeded any expectations I had for how realistic computer-generated images could be. It features a strong female protagonist, something I appreciate as the father of a six-year-old princess-obsessed daughter, and a stirring score primarily written by Scottish composer Patrick Doyle, with two songs performed by Scottish singer Julie Fowlis. Unfortunately, the story is a lot less nuanced than previous entries in the Pixar canon, with a more predictable plot and none of the secondary storylines we’ve come to expect from a studio that has produced so many masterpieces.

The warrior princess at the heart of Brave, Merida (voiced by, who else, Kelly Macdonald), is being groomed for eventual betrothal to one of three princes from allied clans in the Scottish highlands, yet has no interest in an arranged marriage or any fate written for her by her domineering mother, Elinor (Emma Thompson). Her father, King Fergus (Billy Connolly), is happy to encourage her tomboyish habits, giving her a bow and arrow for a birthday present and making fun of her would-be suitors with her, yet defers to his wife on all matters of import. Merida runs away after a blowout quarrel with her mother over her refusal to accept any of the princes, ending up in a witch’s cottage in the forest, which, naturally, leads to a spell that goes awry, the effects of which Merida must spend the remainder of the film trying to undo.

The animation of Merida’s unruly, curly, red hair is an absolute marvel, both an obvious symbol of her fiery independent spirit and a chance for Pixar’s animators to show off their tricks, which are even more impressive now than they were in Ratatouille, perhaps my least favorite Pixar film but which featured remarkable animation of Colette’s hair. Pixar re-wrote its animation system for the first time in 25 years to allow for more realistic depictions of human characters, and it shows all over this film, even in the depiction of the fur on the two ursine characters and in breathtaking panomaric shots of the highland forests, cliffs, and waterfalls. It is a new high-water mark for computer animation in the movies.

While my daughter enjoyed the movie tremendously, adults will likely find it a little too predictable, and the resolution relied on what was, for Pixar at least, an abnormal amount of just straight-on physical combat between man and bear and eventually between the two bears themselves. The mother-daughter bonding that occurs after the spell takes hold is poignant without becoming too sentimental, with the usual Pixar message of the need for characters who disagree to open their minds and work together. Merida’s three younger brothers, mischievous triplets who are too young to speak but are old enough to understand and use simple machines, steal most of the scenes in which they appear and seem tailor-made for future appearances in Pixar shorts, if not in a film of their own. Yet they don’t have any sort of story, appearing as comic relief and to help Merida and her mother try to break the spell. I also thought the film had less of Pixar’s trademark humor, relying on more obvious sight gags and even some mild bathroom humor to fill that gap.

However, I know I’m holding Pixar to an impossibly high standard – one they set through their first eleven films. (I still haven’t seen Cars 2.) No studio has been so good for so long and it may be unfair to expect every one of their films to be as good as The Incredibles or Up. Brave is an excellent movie by industry standards and my daughter loved it, not least because it has such a strong female lead. It just didn’t quite meet my very high expectations.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,