TOY STORY 3
YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND
Toy Story 3
***1/2
Review by Paul Preston
Much like Pixar’s ability to make original movies that rank among the best films every year, they show again that they can generate a sequel better than most franchises as well. It’s wise of Pixar to re-visit “Toy Story” before any of its other features, it has the strongest, most universal themes – friendship and loyalty. In “Toy Story 3”, these themes are put to the greatest test and lead to a very satisfying conclusion.
In the world of “Toy Story 3”, time has advanced exactly as it has in real-world time. It’s fifteen years since Buzz Lightyear first squared off with Sheriff Woody in Andy’s bedroom. Now, Andy is off to college, and the fate of his toys hangs in the balance – put them in the attic where they can live out a peaceful if not entirely fulfilling life, or end up in the trash. When an unexpected third option appears (donation to a day care center), the toys must choose whether to embrace their new life or make the trek back to Andy one last time.
Every time a new Pixar movie comes out, I brace myself for their first failure, but it just doesn’t happen. I make myself emotionally ready for the possibility of a Pixar film being more like a low-rent, pop-culture-filled, constantly-winking product of some lesser animation company, jam-packing it’s roster with expensive, high-profile voice talent to overcompensate for by-the-numbers storytelling. And it just doesn’t happen.
Laughs, adventure, tears, drama, double-crossing, and glorious animation. It’s all here. And despite nods to prison dramas, The Great Escape, Return of the Jedi and more, writer Michael Arndt and director Lee Unkrich wisely return to the basics whenever possible, focusing on the great relationships of the characters, toys holding onto and enjoying each other in the face of an uncertain future.
“Toy Story 3” adds on new characters, and where most franchises would suffer under the weight of too much addition (“Shrek”), the new characters here are expertly drawn and never take the front seat away from Buzz and Woody. There’s Ken, Barbie’s boyfriend, voiced by Michael Keaton, reminding us once again that when he shows up, he’s awesome. But where does he go between high-profile projects? Lotso-Huggin’ Bear, voiced by Ned Beatty, “runs” the day care center with ominous Southern-gentlemanly charm. His back story may be among the darkest things you see in the movies this year, but where the story could tug another heartstring, and feel a little too familiar (like Cowgirl Jesse’s back story of abandonment), instead it’s told with such over-the-top DRAMA, it actually plays out fun.
A special shout-out is deserved for Timothy Dalton, who plays a “classically-trained” toy who, with his friends, treat their relationship with kids as one big acting gig. He plays it so straight, the laughs are huge. Perhaps he deserves a “where you been?” too!
The old characters get into all sorts of mischief, and by now the voice talents are in prime form, especially Tim Allen, whose Buzz Lightyear is as warm as he’s ever been, but a string of mishaps have him barking out “Cool Hand Luke”-type orders and the result is hilarious. John Morris, the voice of Andy in all three films, lends great warmth to Andy, allowing us to like him regardless of what he decides to do with his toys. Apparently growing up with a single mom, Andy turned out OK.
As if just doing a third movie of any franchise wasn’t risky enough, the Pixar team chooses the more precarious route whenever possible, and the payoff is the audience’s to enjoy.
The final moments wrapping up the relationships of all involved moved me more than I expected. For a franchise that is so much fun, the theme of loss is surprisingly prevalent in all three films. Loss of worth, loss of time, loss of friends, these things threaten the toys and Andy at every turn. In the finale of this trilogy, Pixar very deftly handles fate of those characters we love. Andy and the toys have a more mature relationship than most adults in movies today.
Directed by: Lee Unkrich
Release Date: June 18, 2010
Run Time: 103 Minutes
Country: USA
Rated: G
Distributor: Pixar Animation Studios
OFFICIAL TRAILER
The climax and finale of this movie don’t make sense. If you like special effects, there are plenty of them to distract you from the fact that what you’re watching DOESN’T MAKE SENSE. Previous setups get ignored, characters act irrationally, it just doesn’t make any sense and the worst part is that I want to go into detail about how much it fails to follow comprehension, but I’d be invoking spoilers. As a critic, I feel the need to adhere to the don’t-spoil-it mantra, and I feel icky remaining beholden to something that doesn’t make sense.
The performances aren’t good, either, and fail to save the film. Jake Gyllenhaal has beefed himself up to play an action hero (I already thought he was beefed up for “Jarhead”, a much more worthy film to get ripped for). My history with Jake is spotty. When he first came on the scene, he bored me to tears in movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Moonlight Mile”. It seemed, however, that he was turning things around with “Jarhead” and “Brokeback Mountain”. Alas, the pendulum has swung here, too, and poor Jake just looks lost as the hero/warrior type. He stumbles his large frame around the desert with no real charm and no chemistry with Gemma Arterton.
As everyone knows, the heart of the movie is the cat-and-mouse chess match of wits between Clarice and Hannibal Lecter. It’s interesting, in fact, how Lecter is largely recalled as the “bad guy” of this film, rather than Buffalo Bill. That speaks, of course, to both how well his character is written, and how wonderfully embodied he is by Anthony Hopkins. But it also leaves one to wonder – why ISN’T Buffalo Bill more memorable? This is, after all, a guy who keeps women imprisoned in a dungeon, starves them, and flays them alive – certainly acts as horrific as those attributed to Lecter. And for all that, what do we really remember about this guy? Next to nothing, save for him dancing in front of the mirror with his willie tucked between his legs. It seems to me that the film tossed away an opportunity to deliver us TWO of the creepiest movie monsters of all time, and it settled for just one. 
That’s right – Lecter’s escape is an absolute waste of time in story terms; it serves as a show-off moment for everyone involved at the expense of moving the film forward. It serves no purpose in the larger picture because Lecter himself plays no role in the rest of the plot. This is a problem for a character of his stature. His character SHOULD play a role in how the film turns out – he’s too important not to – and I know how it could have been accomplished.
All at once, the lights flip on (we don’t know how), she sees Gumb with a gun pointed at her and she shoots. Gets him! As she’s busy handcuffing him and removing his gun, checking his wounds, etc. the camera does a slow pan around the room, then through the hallway, past the pit where the girl is screaming, up. . . up. . . up to the very top of the stairs, where a man’s hand rests upon the light switch. Pull back to see it is Lecter. He smirks knowingly to himself, makes a small flourish while putting on his panama hat, then closes the door and leaves. The rest of the movie – including the final phone conversation between Lecter and Clarice – plays out exactly the same.
Now, as to how to establish he was there in the first place, and as to how he would know just the right MOMENT to flip that switch, let’s do some backtracking: Earlier in the sequence, have some establishing shots of Clarice walking around the town, being spied upon through the inside of a car, whose owner we never see. At first, we think it might be Gumb (although the smarter of us also ask, “Hey – Clarice isn’t big and fat like the other girls he goes after, so why would he be interested in her? Unless it’s someone else. . .”). The concluding event in the basement would establish that it had been LECTER, all along, who had been tailing Clarice – acting as a creepy sort of guardian angel. This would break no rules, as it’s clearly understood Lecter knows who Bill really is, and so of course would know the right town to go to. The perfect-ness of the timing in the actual switching on of the light is a thriller conceit that we would buy if everything else was in place. (After all, the way the sequence actually DOES end, with Clarice hearing Bill’s gun cocking, is a bit of hokum in and of itself.)
When we think of “The A-Team”, we think of pitied fools, crazy Murdock, and Hannibal’s love of plans coming together. It’s all there and more because the writers, director Joe Carnahan (“Narc”), and Producers Ridley and Tony Scott (?!?!) have delivered a movie that hones in on an essence of “The A-Team” that a lot of us may have forgotten. They are an impossible missions team, and the “plans” so haphazardly thrown out in the show’s catchphrase are what the movie zeroes in on as it’s entire concept, the script constantly creates impossible situations that require a masterful plan to get out of, and a montage that includes a blowtorch being lit to put that plan into action. In this way, “The A-Team” is an incredibly successful adaptation. It’s as if the creators saw the thrilling and elaborate Hong Kong kidnap sequence from “The Dark Knight” and said: “let’s try and pull that off seven or eight times.”
Aside from nailing the various physical action tropes of “The A-Team”, the movie also hits all the trademarks of the four 80′s TV icon characters. Hannibal and Face are much more alive than they were in the TV show as the basis of their characters (Mr. In Charge and Mr. Smooth) intersect more with the plot than B.A. and Murdock (Mr. Mean and Mr. Unpredictable) who play support and don’t get much quality interaction. But all four are a dream cast for the big, big, big childhood A-Team fan that’s writing this.
At least with “Clockwork”, Stan still retained the power to provoke (he lost even that right after this release) – but he goes about it all wrong, and to extremely dubious ends. I should say upfront that I read the book (by Anthony Burgess) first, and it had a profound effect on me. The first part – which chronicles Alex and the violent, pillaging activities of he and his ‘droogs’ – filled me with such revulsion and hatred, that I took sadistic glee in seeing the ‘reformed’, post-Ludovico Alex get his nasty comeuppance in the second half of the book. However, when the story took its final twist at the end by giving Alex his ‘freedom’ back, I was furious. Here’s a guy who (the narrative makes clear) has learned no lessons or morals from his predicament – who feels no remorse, and will doubtless return to a life of ‘ultraviolence’ as soon as he gets the chance; I was rooting for him to remain a robotic pawn of the state. The book’s fundamental challenge lies just in this: convincing (or at least presenting powerfully to) the reader that even brutes and reprobates such as Alex deserve the dignity of free will, and that there can be no justification for revoking that. (The challenge is, indeed, open-ended – inasmuch as I’m not entirely convinced; after all, isn’t prison a revocation of someone’s ‘free will’, too? Isn’t any form of punishment? But at least the book’s presentation makes it an idea worth wrestling with.)
As such, Kubrick upsets the entire balance of the piece (at least as Burgess envisioned it). We get no sense of Alex’s crimes against humanity – because, in fact, there’s no ‘humanity’ here: only the kind of ciphers and waxwork grotesqueries that would become Kubrick’s definition of ‘character’ for the remainder of his career. Perhaps that’s his point, after all (no doubt it is): that, in fact, under a bogus sense of decorum, society consists of nothing but droning, annoying hypocrites, and there’s no use in spilling a tear for any single one of them. But when you are watching a woman being violently raped and made to feel nothing for her, through a clinical presentation of the act as well as a directorial emphasis upon the playfulness and mischievousness of the perpetrators (the famous “singin’ in the rain” parody), then something rather sick and insidious is going on. 
Soon, though, he is found by Aaron Green (Jonah Hill), a rotund young music industry gopher who has been dispatched to shepherd Aldous from London to L.A. for a large anniversary concert meant to celebrate Aldous’s legacy. Aaron is the anti-Aldous; green and eager and unattractive (except to his girlfriend). Aaron idolizes the British rocker, and relishes the opportunity that his boss Sergio (Sean Combs/Diddy) has granted him. A recent domestic spat with his girlfriend has left Aaron somewhat adrift himself, and the stage is set for hijinks and lojinks between the ca-razy rocker and the na-ormal industry suit in their quest to deliver Aldous himself to the Greek Theater.
While certainly not as nuanced a depiction as some rock movies (“Almost Famous”, “Walk The Line”), “Get Him To The Greek” manages a certain amount of depth without compromising the laughs. Jonah Hill, playing the normal-guy who doesn’t constantly use profanity, as opposed to the normal guy who uses lots of profanity (his two characters to date), is the right foil for Brand’s Aldous. Hill subs for the audience in the film, puking and careening his way through the rockstar world, concerned that the boss will have his head for his irresponsibility. Diddy is well-cast as Sergio, a man seemingly driven into straight-faced yet hollering insanity by the music business itself and, one gets the idea, individuals like Aldous. Diddy is not much of an actor, but a role like this is right in his wheelhouse, and he delivers.
The newest character is a good one: Rumpelstiltskin, wonderfully and weasely voiced by Walt Dohrn. Rumpelstiltskin creates contracts granting wishes, but always wants part of the deal to include him gaining ultimate power over the kingdom. The other character is The Pied Piper, who has no dialogue, but does Rumpelstiltskin’s bidding using his flute.
The movie manages to give us Shrek making a bad decision at the beginning of the film (wishing he didn’t have a family), but somehow getting us to root for him soon after. And it’s FUN to root for Shrek again. All that King Arthur stuff just got in the way in the last film. Wanting Shrek and Fiona together again is enough. 
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Capsule reviews include "The Ghost Writer" and "The Lovely Bones". Quick plot, quick opinion and we're out.
