Movie Review: Toy Story 3

“No toy gets left behind.”

So why is it that a story about a collection of dated toys is just about the most ‘human’ movie I have seen all year? Toy Story 3 has everything – laughter by the bucket loads, action, suspense and tear-jerking drama. More than all of that, Toy Story 3 succeeds in telling a great human story. It speaks to situations we all face at least once in our lives – how extremely difficult it is to move on and let go but also how ultimately liberating and life-giving that process can be.

The first Toy Story appeared on the scene in 1995 and the second just four years later. Not in Pixar’s wildest dreams could they have guessed how well it would catch on. Initially people were skeptical regarding the new computer generated animation techniques that were used, and also about the basic idea behind it. After all, it was a movie about toys - plastic, inanimate objects that somehow came to life when no one was watching. Yet, both the original and the sequel were funny, engaging, and so surprisingly ‘real’ that they became a cultural phenomenon for a whole generation of children and their parents. Toy Story 3 manages to pick up where the first two left off in terms of sheer quality story-telling and then even raises the bar a little further.

Toy Story 3 begins years after the toys last adventure. Andy, their owner, has grown up and is about to leave home for college. Woody, Buzz and the gang (minus a few who have fallen away over the years) just don’t get played with anymore. The loss of those friends has affected them but their loyalty to Andy remains undimmed. As Toy Story 2 made clear at its conclusion, the toys were well aware that the ‘good times’ of Andy’s youth were temporary, and that at some point they would become obsolete. That point is where Toy Story 3 picks up the story – the future of these much-loved toys is very unclear: Would they be stored away in a dusty attic, or would they be thrown away?

Through a series of mishaps, the gang end up being donated to Sunnyside daycare where they meet a whole host of new toys. Initially, Sunnyside seems like Toy Heaven: a place where children love and play with toys daily and even when they grow up, other children arrive to take their place. However, Sunnyside has a sinister underbelly because it is run by a bitter and twisted toy bear named Lotso who harshly enforces a rule that all new toys stay in the toddler room where they are mistreated day after day. Woody, Buzz and the others decide they must get back to Andy at all costs, which leads to a humorous and yet suspenseful prison-break scene.

Toy Story 3 is superbly made at all levels, but perhaps most outstanding is the script and voiceover acting. Tim Allen and Tom Hanks reappear and once again deliver the goods in the lead roles, while Michael Keaton appears for the first time in the role of the extremely ‘metro male’ Ken and is hilarious from beginning to end. The toys are decidedly retro compared to modern day versions, but this only serves to reinforce the movies timeless messages of integrity, loyalty and sacrificial friendship.

Yet, perhaps most powerful is the emotional punch of the movie. It captures real human moments on several different levels – Andy is leaving home because he is grown up and we are given insight into his mother’s sadness as well as the toys. An era has ended and everyone is struggling to let go. What is so emotionally compelling about these toys is that their greatest desire is to be played with (this is what they have been made for after all), yet their loyalty to Andy means they struggle to let go of him. The last 15-20 minutes of the movie contains several scenes of powerful human drama (yes, I know, played out by toys) that are extremely touching and moving. Ultimately, these scenes are a reminder to us all of the importance of making the most of every moment, and also of how to graciously negotiate life-changing moments that involve letting go and moving on “to infinity and beyond”.

Pixar have brought us back to the world of Woody and Buzz for one final adventurous romp that is hilarious, endearing, and an altogether fitting conclusion to the “Toy Story” universe. Four (and a half) stars out of Five!

Movie Review: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

This is a movie made famous because its star, Heath Ledger, died tragically mid-shoot. One is tempted to blame its fractured storytelling on his death, but director Terry Gilliam has already built a reputation for himself of sumptuous visual delights unequally yoked with weak narratives and failed emotional connections. In ‘The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus’ he only serves to prove why this reputation is so fully deserved.

Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) trundles around in a massive caravan filled with contraptions with his beautiful daughter (Lily Cole), a dwarf (Verne Troyer) and a hanger-on (Andrew Garfield). Like Parnassus himself, the caravan has seen better days and they struggle to gain audiences for their ‘carnival’ show – which is a magic mirror that can actually transport people to fantastic realms.

Parnassus looks old and beat up in the movie but it appears he has been living far longer than anyone could give him credit for. A thousand years ago he won a bet against the devil (Tom Waits) and won immortality. It appears he now believes the devil lost the bet on purpose because his immortality seems more of a curse when he meets his one true love. So he trades it all in for youth and a normal aging process with Mr. Nick (the devil) but only if he promises his daughter’s soul to the Mr. Nick when he she reaches 16.

Now with barely three days to go before the devil arrives to collect, Parnassus is desperately trying to think of ways to save her. This is when we run into Tony Shepherd (Heath Ledger), an amnesiac with a murky past who they find hanging from a bridge. The scenes Ledger failed to complete because of his untimely death are filled by three famous friends of his in Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. The change of his appearance in certain scenes is neatly worked into the story. Tony is rescued and quickly becomes an invaluable member of their troupe, thinking of ways to modernise the show and make it more appealing to people. This becomes especially important when the devil agrees to yet another deal with Parnassus. If he manages to collect five souls before the devil can, his daughter will go free.

The story never becomes any clearer than that. We never quite understand why and how souls are collected through the mirror, or why and how Parnassus does not make better use of his amazing power to bring people’s imaginations to life. We also never are able to connect with any of the characters because they seem as confused by the jumbled story line as we are. The rush of stimulating images and CGI vistas only serve to further distract from what could have been an absorbing and meaningful morality tale.

This is the films major weakness because for an avowed morality tale, you certainly don’t walk away with any solid moral lesson. In the words of Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes: “Live and DON’T learn, that’s us.” And that certainly seems true of Parnassus and the rest of his sorry crew. Life seems so dreary in this movie that it hardly seems worth living, unless it is in the realm of your own imagination. And perhaps that is how the director Gilliam feels about life but it hardly seems worthy of 2 hours worth of moralizing. Don’t make deals with the devil is perhaps another lesson the movie tries to teach, but this lesson doesn’t have any real depth to it because quite frankly, only someone who is seriously stupid would make deals with this particular devil. In other words, the temptations are so surreal that they just cannot be connected to real life events. By experience of my own life mistakes, evil works so much more subtly and inwardly – it is hardly ever as obvious as the difference between two black and white choices. If Gilliam put as much thought into story depth and character development as he does wild and fantastic visuals, then the overall product would be a whole lot more enjoyable.

Be warned that the movie fully earns its PG13 rating with strong language and a fair amount of sexual content. Two out of five for ‘The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus’.

Movie Review: The Killers

The Killers asks a lot of its audience. Unfortunately, none of these big asks are in any way or form in the intellectual or emotional arenas. No, the kinds of things asked of us are more the ‘suspend all credible belief’ and ‘let’s charge you money while we waste your time’ departments. If you can let go of the need to be treated as a functional grown-up you will really like this movie. Otherwise, it is nothing more than confetti and candyfloss.

A basic plot synopsis will prove my point. A boy (Ashton Kutcher) who just happens to be an international superspy (yes, we are still talking about Kutcher) meets a girl (Katherine Heigl) who just happens to be a boring, stay-at-home control freak. They fall in love and the boy, tiring of murdering others in the name of national profit, decides to turn his back on superspy-dom and become a designer. Well, of course, that’s what superspies do when they retire.

Three years later, Kutcher is somehow outed resulting in a bounty price placed on his head and what follows is a very poor man’s version of Mr. and Mrs Smith – very poor and very unfunny. There are plenty of fistfights, gun battles and car chases with all of the above convincingly won by the boy (yes, I am still talking about Kutcher). In between they find time for enough sexual innuendo type jokes to amuse a whole class of thirteen year olds, and also to fight like cats and dogs. In fairness, the tension between the couple in the movie is at least somewhat realistic. That’s how couples often treat each other in moments of stress, and it is a good reminder how we can fight over ridiculous things while missing what is really troubling us.

Anyhow, plenty of people are violently slain and the movie ties up at the end with more holes than your average golf course. Somehow, the wild car chases though peaceful suburbs, the shootouts in public places, and the mounting count of dead bodies are not noticed by anyone in authority. No questions asked. Even more bizarrely, at the end you are not quite sure whether the assassins after Kutcher are actually government employees, meaning that seriously, someone should be in trouble for killing them all.

Tom Selleck is in the movie which is the only reason I went to see it, but even he is not enough to save the day and I am a HUGE Mangum P.I fan (ah, the days when we had credible action heroes).Let me save you time and money and urge you to go see something else. Neither Kutcher nor Heigl have the talent or charisma to pull this one out of the bag. They look good but that’s about all.

One star out of five. Enough said? Move along here people, nothing to see.

Movie Review: The Green Zone

A couple of weeks ago I promised myself that I would never, ever review another American war movie. That was before I realised that my choices for this week would be limited between ‘Sex and the City 2’, ‘The Prince of Persia’, and ‘The Green Zone.’ Hence, the Green Zone! Yes, another American war movie with a message intertwined in the overall cathartic ‘help America let go of our guilt’ process, and yet still, sadly, infinitely preferable to a couple of hours in the company of the Sex and the City girls.

The Green Zone plays as a thriller-type action movie with a documentary message. The director of two of the Bourne movies, Paul Greengrass, is reunited with his main lead from those two movies, Matt Damon, and together they deliver action and thrills worthy of the Bourne trilogy. Damon’s character – Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller – is not exactly another Jason Bourne since he actually gets beaten up in a fight, but he is pretty darn close. Miller is in charge of a WMD unit that is sent into combat situations to seek out the infamous ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which Bush and Blair had used as justification for the war in Iraq. Miller becomes increasingly disturbed when intelligence reports lead them to ‘WMD’ sites that have clearly never been used to store weapons of any sort (unless one counts pigeon poop as a weapon). Since his squad are taking great personal risks in these searches, he begins to question both the reports and his superiors. Although he is told to back off, his suspicions only grow as he meets up with a grizzled CIA operative, Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), and a New York journalist Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) who are also questioning whether the existence of the WMD’s.

Miller’s dissatisfaction sets him up against a U.S. intelligence agent named Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) who is backed by his own personal team of special-forces operatives. Despite considerable opposition from his own side, Miller discovers that the ‘Jack of Clubs’, a high-ranking general under Saddam Hussein by the name of Gen. Al Rawi (Igal Naor), might hold the secret to the reality of the WMD’s, and in competition with Poundstone, Miller begins a desperate search to track the General down. Miller is further supported by an ‘insider’, a local Iraqi man by the name of Freddy (Khalid Abdalla), who is a true-blue ‘good guy’ and is desperate to do the best thing for his homeland.

The Green Zone is shot in what has become known as the ‘queasy-cam’ style, basically lots of quick cuts between hand-held ground level shots with gritty ‘home-cam’ textures. It is known as the ‘queasy-cam’ because it normally leaves viewers feeling a little sea sick, but in my opinion it was used in such a manner that really worked for this particular movie. You felt close the soldiers in the hectic fire-fights, you experienced their own confusion and also the necessity of being highly-trained just to survive. As a thriller action-movie, The Green Zone is more than entertaining. Although, some difficult-to-believe plot leaps means that the second half of the movie is not as good as the first.

However, The Green Zone also has a firm, documentary-style message. It argues, as many have, that the U.S. made a fatal mistake in dissolving the Iraqi army and thereby marginalising them. Many believe that because the army had no great affection for Saddam, they might well have played an effective stabilising role, instead of being left on the outside, armed and frustrated. This point is impossible to prove, but nevertheless still pertinent.

Secondly, The Green Zone asserts what almost every nation other than the States now sees as fact, that the WMD’s were fabricated by U.S. intelligence to back up their desire to invade Iraq. In my own honest opinion, if this world was a just place, then both George W. Bush and Tony Blair would be facing trials in the War Court to prove their innocence or guilt in this regard. What I did not really enjoy about The Green Zone’s message was that it rewrote history a little, and fabricated events in a kind of ‘we-wish-this-had-really-happened’ kind of way. In this sense, it comes across as more than a little naive and wishy-washy.

All in all, The Green Zone does not excel as a thriller nor is its docu-message absolutely compelling, but it still comes across as a solid and enjoyable package. Somehow it manages to combine the two contrasting styles fairly effectively, and I would recommend it way above other recent war movies such as ‘The Messenger’.

3 stars out of 5 for The Green Zone.