Reviews for 2010
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Directed by Peter Hanson.
Rating: 6/10
Tales from the Script allows the beleaguered screenwriters of Hollywood to tell their war stories. After listening to them, one can't help concluding that they haven't chosen an ideal career. Yet perhaps what's most surprising about this is how unsurprising it is to anyone paying attention to popular depictions of screenwriters. Tales from the Script consists of pieces of interviews with over 40 scribes talking about their trade in Hollywood, assembled into thematic "chapters," such as how to pitch your screenplay, how they sold their first ones, what's it like to work with producers, etc. It's ironic how each of those chapters is preceeded by a movie clip usually featuring a screenwriter character taking some form of abuse. In other words, we've already been trained to understand about these fellows being the lowest on the Hollywood totem pole; all this documentary does is feature actual writers spelling this situation out explicitly (one of them, for instance, uses the "totem pole" metaphor, only he amends it to say the writers are the part of the pole that sticks into the ground).
The movie is presented as straightforward as possible, with no frills: each interview uses a single stationary camera focused on the subject talking. The approach seems understandable -- why dress anything up when the stories themselves are the main deal? But at the same time, it's not very exciting, and frankly nothing appears here that couldn't have been read (incidentally, the movie acts as a companion piece to the book of the same name; both film and book were written by Paul Robert Herman and Peter Hanson; Hanson also acted as director). However, the stories themselves come across as entertaining, even if they are limited specifically to the experience of breaking into Hollywood -- there really isn't much in the way of, say, the independent filmmaking path here. Tales from the Script works best as a primer for would-be screenwriters (and the interviewed subjects are actually quite aware that this group is most likely their main audience) and primarily gets across the message that the job is tough and not at all glamourous. In fact, I wonder if the movie serves more as practical discouragement, working off the idea that would-be writers are mostly deluded and starry-eyed, and what this movie can do is hammer in the reality, reinforcing with real-life stories what the other movies have shown about how unappreciated screenwriters are. (added 4/23/2010; edited version featured at ReelTalk Movie Reviews)
Directed by Michel Gondry.
Rating: 6/10
Imagine a filmmaker decides to make a documentary about one of his normal relatives, and you might get The Thorn in the Heart. The filmmaker in this case happens to be Michel Gondry, not known for making conventional films, but this seems like an odd project even for him. The movie is about his aunt, Suzette Gondry, her path in life and her family. Now retired, Suzette was a teacher constantly on the move, thus allowing her to teach in many schools throughout rural France. But she also has a strained relationship with her son, Jean-Yves, which reached a critical point when her husband passed away years and years ago. The subject contains an inherent level of fascination, if only because if you picked any person and dug into their lives, there are bound to be interesting dramatic nuggets to find. Still, however interesting Suzette's life may be, Michel Gondry doesn't locate anything larger than life, or anything that might appear particularly relevant to his audience; we can recognize the portrait for its intimacy and appreciation of the challenges of a life lived, but it doesn't have any other real pull. Gondry also doesn't apply much of his trademark homemade visual trickery -- for the most part, the documentary is shot rather normally, interspersed with some home movie clips, and once in a while we glimpse that love of creativity Gondry usually loves to display (a scene with children wearing "invisible" clothes; a scene showing the assembly and running of a makeshift outdoor movie theater; and a scene with the family watching and commenting on some pre-edited footage). The lingering question, perhaps, is why was this film made? The answer may be as simple as Gondry deciding it was a project that interested him very personally, and he had the resources to pursue it, which is probably enough. However, for the rest of us, The Thorn in the Heart might remain mainly a curiosity. (added 8/22/2010; edited version featured at ReelTalk Movie Reviews)
Starring the voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Don Rickles, Michael Keaton, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger.
Directed by Lee Unkrich.
Rating: 10/10
The first Toy Story addressed identity -- understanding your role in life, the strength of your place in it, and accepting it. Toy Story 2 addressed obsolescence -- knowing that your role will one day run its course, but choosing to embrace it anyway. So naturally Toy Story 3 is about that end -- reaching it, and having a very primal reaction when it's finally upon you, no matter how much you had prepared for it. It's about letting go, or to put it more bluntly, death.
What's that, you say? This is too dark a subject for one of the delightful Toy Story movies? Well, that's really the beauty of it. Toy Story 3 is indeed delightful. On the surface, you have everything you could ask for from the possibly final entry in the series -- another adventure with Woody (voice of Tom Hanks) the pullstring cowboy and Buzz Lightyear (voice of Tim Allen) the space ranger action figure. There's plenty of comedy, lots of new characters, movie references galore, and moments of suspense in action set pieces, all delievered with amazing computer animation, glorious color, and in 3-D, if you choose to see it that way (I did not -- I'm already tired of 3-D). If you go in expecting just that good time, you will get exactly that.
But for me, the greatest strength of the Pixar films has been what rumbles just beneath their glossy shells. And still I wasn't prepared for the gravity presented in Toy Story 3. While on a story track similar to that of Toy Story 2 -- toys faced with their version of mortality try to take actions against that inevitability -- the third movie feels much more urgent because they no longer have the few more years of their owner Andy's childhood to cushion them. Now, the end has come -- Andy is about to go to college, and the gang we've come to know and love have had their numbers thinned, and the remaining core of the group had been stuffed in a toybox for presumably years. Now Andy's mother has asked him to do one of three things with them -- store them in the attic, donate them to the local daycare center, or throw them away.
Except for Woody, the toys have real reason to believe that they're being tossed to the curb, so they manage to stow away in the donations box to be taken to the daycare. At this point, you really feel the fright -- that the end is impending, and now they will do anything to curtail it. Woody claims that Andy planned to stow them in the attic as they had initially expected, but they no longer believe it, so panicked are they. Here it may not be presumptuous of me to say this has echoes of Ingmar Bergman, and how starkly he depicted the effects of anticipating the finality of death.
The daycare center turns out to be some kind of purgatory -- toys go there and, as the leader of the daycare toys, cuddly teddy bear Lotso (voice of Ned Beatty), claims, they will always be played with, since new kids always replace the ones who grow older. This proves to be a double-edged sword, since initially the kids that play with the newly arrived toys are toddlers who mash and mangle their playthings. Purgatory gives way to a glimpse of hell, when it turns out the ruling toys there have instigated what amounts to a prison system. So naturally, our heroic gang must find a way to break out, giving us the makings of a prison-escape movie, which leads to a climax that builds up to what I would call the thematic key of the movie. Without trying to spoil anything, I will say the gang does indeed face hell, and understands what their final fate must be. The film's ending could appropirately be described as divine -- from what delivers them directly from danger to their next phase, which amounts to a rebirth. And at the end, you may shed tears, unashamedly.
Myself, I felt the weight of life. Toy Story 3 addresses the final phase of the path of life through the allegory of the lives of toys, of all things. It's such a deep wrap-up that it makes the previous two movies feel like episodes, while this movie feels like the summation. It lifts the perspective from the local one of Andy's toys to the much bigger picture that all toys -- all beings -- walk similar paths and must one day face their fates. It is indeed the darkest of the three movies, and it makes me very happy to know that the team at Pixar didn't back down from the corner they knew they were writing themselves into. What started out as a cute idea -- toys have secret lives of their own in which their purpose is to bring happiness to the kids who play with them -- became extrapolated to its natural endpoint, i.e., the toys' usefulness ends when the kids outgrow them. There really isn't a happily ever after for them, but, like all of us, they put off the thoughts of the far future and invest in the present. And then one day, that far future is here, and where do they go? How do they react?
It's worth noting that the message re-emphasized is the one of friendship, of sticking together. This time, though, the relativity of that good weighed against what's out there past infinity and beyond is huge. It really gets across the idea that the little doses of love are our best and only arms against the idea of impermanence.
Please don't get me wrong -- as I've said, Toy Story 3 is masterfully constructed to be a crowdpleasing riot of a movie, one that doesn't require deeper inspection in order to receive a full dose of satisfaction and smiles from it. It doesn't do anything too unpredictable in terms of plot and plot devices -- in fact, one might cite this as its main weakness, that these elements are actually too predictable. But the folks at Pixar know exactly what they're doing, because those deeper themes are there, and they greatly outweigh the weaknesses of any mechanical elements. Look past the comedy, and the gravity and the truths are there. Boy, are they there.
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(SPOILER: Read only if you've already seen this movie. I just want to talk about a personal way I interpreted the end of Toy Story 3. For all intents and purposes, by the time the toys reach the furnace and hold hands to accept what's coming, they've essentially died. What happens next? A literal deus ex machina rescues them -- "the claw" -- and when you think about the origins of the term deus ex machina, it makes perfect sense [not to mention the Pizza Planet alien toys have always referred to the claw as some kind of deity]. By this point, the toys have completed their Divine Comedy-like journey, having visited Inferno and Purgatory, and now receiving a Paradise-like afterlife, where they start anew with a new owner. Or, perhaps more appropriately, this is a reincarnation. And at first glance, it's a happy ending. But all you have to do is think a little further and understand that this cycle will repeat again, not just for this group of toys, but for all the toys out there -- and for all of us. And what we see from them is that one day they will get to the end, but they'll squeeze every minute getting there. A delicately happy tragedy, the Toy Story series has matured into a masterpiece.) (added 6/23/2010; edited version featured at ReelTalk Movie Reviews)
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©Jeffrey Chen, 2010
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