I’m snatching a few minutes to write this review as it’s late. It’s about to be late AND hurried. I’m nothing if not professional folks.
Toy Story 3 comes eleven years after the second instalment in what is currently Pixar’s only franchise, although with Cars 2 and Monsters Inc 2, this is about to change. Toy Story 2 is one of the great sequels. It belongs to that rare group of sequels that surpass their originals. Yes Jessie is a bit annoying (culminating in her song that is rip-your-ears-off irritating) but Toy Story 2 does what all great sequels do. It furthers the story and the world, introduces new characters without sidelining the old ones and allows those old characters to grow in new ways, all the while remembering what made the original so successful in the first place that it demanded a sequel at all. Toy Story 3 is very, very good. If this were number two, there would be no need for any qualification. The problem for me is that it covers very similar ground to the second film and, as a result, struggles to justify its existence in a way that is pretty much unheard of for a Pixar film. That probably sounds like a very begrudging criticism, it certainly feels that way typing it. But I simply can’t get away from the nagging feeling that for the first time Pixar are chasing commercial success more than they are striving to make a great film. I will immediately qualify THAT (keep up here folks; this is the Inception of film reviews. And we’re only in level 2 yet.) They DO make a great film. Everything you love about Pixar, warmth, wit, character, story, are all present and accounted for. But Toy Story 3 is the first in a run of sequels and, though it might be very good, the fact that it’s not really covering new ground, or telling a story that is particularly different to the second, gives you a slightly nagging feeling.
The threat posed in Toy Story 2 that their owner Andy will one day grow up and outgrow his toys has come to fruition in number 3. We join the gang trying desperately to get the attention of a teenage Andy who has to start making choices about which of his toys he is going to put into the attic (from the toys’ perspective, the equivalent of a retirement home) which will go to the jumble sale and which will ended up in the dreaded trash bin. Through a series of plot machinations the toys end up at the Sunnyside Day Care facility which at first seems like a haven the toys never dreamed possible but quickly becomes a nightmare they fear they will never escape from. The toys hatch a plan to extricate themselves from their situation as well as create a place for themselves in the world once again.
The best thing about Toy Story 3 is the way it riffs on being a prison film, a kind of Cool Hand Luke meets The Great Escape but for toys. All prison movie clichés are here and are often hilariously adapted for the PG requirements of the genre and the execution of the toys' break out of Sunnyside is the highlight of the film and, for my money, one of the best set pieces in the Pixar canon. Pixar still has the monopoly on walking that fine line between keeping the kids entertained and having enough in there to make the adults laugh too and Toy Story 3 is very, very funny. Michael Keaton as the very metrosexual Ken is the comedy highlight of the film. The discovery of Buzz’s reset button, the omnipresent drumming monkey CCTV monitor and Mr Potato Head having to improvise a body for his eyes, ears and appendages are amongst the other many comedy highlights that had children and adults alike laughing in the screening I saw. Ned Beatty as Lotso, the bear in charge of Sunnyside, does great work and has an interesting back story of his own. The film is surprisingly dark and scary at times and Lotso's right hand man, a weird, creepy as hell baby doll, would not be out of place in a David Lynch dream sequence. Also, the ending of the film finds a nice way to resolve the central dilemma that is sentimental in the right way. Buzz and Woody end up somewhat sidelined and this, for me, is the most telling problem with the film. The characters have nowhere to go now. They simply have to be themselves in a new adventure and while it's very well done (once again the plotting of the film is superb. Seriously, anyone who wants to learn about screenwriting should watch Pixar films for the elegance of their plotting) it doesn't feel like it's enough.
I want to stress again that this is by no means a bad review and, by the way, I think the film is way better than, for example Ratatouille or the much loved Wall-E which is much more problematic story-wise. I think the problem though comes down to ambition and while Wall-E might not work for me, it really is trying to accomplish something interesting. Last year’s Up tried to accomplish something and succeeded, being as it is a nearly flawless film. Judged in those terms, Toy Story 3 is kind of treading water a bit, made worse by the fact that we’re now in a run of sequels. The simple fact is that Pixar films are judged by a higher standard, a standard they set for themselves. Toy Story 3 is smart, laugh out loud funny and a great time at the cinema. It just lacks the X-Factor we’ve come to expect (and probably demand) from the very best of Pixar’s output.
7/10
Oh, and the 3-D adds absolutely nothing!
Thursday 29 July 2010
Tuesday 20 July 2010
Inception Review
I really want to talk about Inception… But it’s important to know as little as possible going in. So here’s what I’m going to do. This review is going to be short and sweet. And then in a couple of weeks I’ll write a few thoughts about the film that will go into some spoilery detail about the story as there really is a lot to talk about.
The long and the short of it is that Inception really delivers. It’s an intelligent, exciting, thought provoking film, utterly unique amongst modern Blockbusters. Slightly overlong perhaps and I’m not sure it’s the instant miracle, modern classic, solution to life’s problems some have made out. Also much has been made of Nolan’s slightly cold, distant approach to his stories in the past and many of the reviews have pointed to the warmth and humanity in Dom Cobb’s (Leonardo DiCaprio's) journey in this film. This is actually the weakest stuff for me. Plot wise, story wise and ideas wise it’s absolutely great, but I never really felt anything for the characters and their story.
But Christopher Nolan has demonstrated once again that he is a great film maker with great ideas. His central concept here, entering people’s subconscious through their dreams is great but to put that in the milieu of industrial espionage is a stroke of genius and the film plays like a heist thriller with Cobb assembling his team so that, rather than stealing an idea, they can carry through inception, planting an idea in a person’s mind. We get an opening heist to bring us into the world, the assembling and training of the team, which does go on a little long. But the last hour or so is the heist itself and once this begins it really doesn’t let up. The dream world and its rules have been meticulously thought through and Nolan obeys his own internal logic at all times. The best part of this is how there are different levels of dreaming and what is happening in one level impacts upon the next. The high point of this is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s zero gravity fight in a hotel corridor but that whole last hour, while maybe not being quite as tense as I’d hoped (or for that matter as James Newton Howard’s bombastic score wants you to think it is) is Hollywood at its best and Nolan utterly confident in what he is doing.
This is perhaps the most exciting thing about watching Inception. You get the sense that we are watching a film maker now at the peak of his powers. For all its faults I absolutely love The Dark Knight but much of what is wrong in that film is corrected here. I’ll return to The Dark Knight more often for the atmosphere and action and I’ll return to Inception more often for its ideas. How this film got made is a miracle because, while The Dark Knight is a Summer movie with a brain in its head and some good ideas, Inception is an ideas movie with some action in it released in the Summer.
Don’t misunderstand, there is plenty of action; that last hour is basically one, sustained action set piece. But it’s for its ideas that Inception should be credited. As with every good heist movie, once they start their plan it all goes wrong and watching the way the team improvises is incredibly impressive from a writing perspective. Nolan has set up the rules of the dream world and is now free to bend our expectations of them to provide the team ways out of their problems that are plausible, that never cheat and are utterly compelling.
This review was supposed to be short! Go into Inception prepared to do a little work, pay attention to it, and you’ll be utterly rewarded. And once you’ve seen it, let the debate begin about just what it all means. Inception is fantastic, deserves its hype and is a call to every other studio and film maker in Hollywood that this is what is possible with a large budget. And there is simply no excuse for bad storytelling in any films, including big budget ones. Roll on Batman 3!
8.5/10
The long and the short of it is that Inception really delivers. It’s an intelligent, exciting, thought provoking film, utterly unique amongst modern Blockbusters. Slightly overlong perhaps and I’m not sure it’s the instant miracle, modern classic, solution to life’s problems some have made out. Also much has been made of Nolan’s slightly cold, distant approach to his stories in the past and many of the reviews have pointed to the warmth and humanity in Dom Cobb’s (Leonardo DiCaprio's) journey in this film. This is actually the weakest stuff for me. Plot wise, story wise and ideas wise it’s absolutely great, but I never really felt anything for the characters and their story.
But Christopher Nolan has demonstrated once again that he is a great film maker with great ideas. His central concept here, entering people’s subconscious through their dreams is great but to put that in the milieu of industrial espionage is a stroke of genius and the film plays like a heist thriller with Cobb assembling his team so that, rather than stealing an idea, they can carry through inception, planting an idea in a person’s mind. We get an opening heist to bring us into the world, the assembling and training of the team, which does go on a little long. But the last hour or so is the heist itself and once this begins it really doesn’t let up. The dream world and its rules have been meticulously thought through and Nolan obeys his own internal logic at all times. The best part of this is how there are different levels of dreaming and what is happening in one level impacts upon the next. The high point of this is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s zero gravity fight in a hotel corridor but that whole last hour, while maybe not being quite as tense as I’d hoped (or for that matter as James Newton Howard’s bombastic score wants you to think it is) is Hollywood at its best and Nolan utterly confident in what he is doing.
This is perhaps the most exciting thing about watching Inception. You get the sense that we are watching a film maker now at the peak of his powers. For all its faults I absolutely love The Dark Knight but much of what is wrong in that film is corrected here. I’ll return to The Dark Knight more often for the atmosphere and action and I’ll return to Inception more often for its ideas. How this film got made is a miracle because, while The Dark Knight is a Summer movie with a brain in its head and some good ideas, Inception is an ideas movie with some action in it released in the Summer.
Don’t misunderstand, there is plenty of action; that last hour is basically one, sustained action set piece. But it’s for its ideas that Inception should be credited. As with every good heist movie, once they start their plan it all goes wrong and watching the way the team improvises is incredibly impressive from a writing perspective. Nolan has set up the rules of the dream world and is now free to bend our expectations of them to provide the team ways out of their problems that are plausible, that never cheat and are utterly compelling.
This review was supposed to be short! Go into Inception prepared to do a little work, pay attention to it, and you’ll be utterly rewarded. And once you’ve seen it, let the debate begin about just what it all means. Inception is fantastic, deserves its hype and is a call to every other studio and film maker in Hollywood that this is what is possible with a large budget. And there is simply no excuse for bad storytelling in any films, including big budget ones. Roll on Batman 3!
8.5/10
Wednesday 14 July 2010
Predators Review
20th Century Fox really have the bargain basement blockbuster honed to a fine art. This Summer however they’re struggling to turn a decent profit with The A Team and in particularly Knight And Day underperforming at the US Box Office. With Predators, they have a July release with an apparent budget of $40 million. With the average cost of a Summer movie these days being $200 million (that’s just production costs, it doesn’t include marketing and distribution) $40 million is a bargain, right? I am no advocate of the idea that with large amounts of money automatically comes interesting results. Most of the mega-budget movies are pretty terrible these days if you ask me. But what’s happening currently at Fox seems to be a lack of ambition that is typified in the small scale nature of projects released in a large scale season. Enter Predators.
Predators is that kind of film where you walk out and say, “Well it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be” and this seems to be where Fox is happy to pitch their films. Predators isn’t as bad as you’d think it would be but that doesn’t mean it’s good. It doesn’t even make it okay. I sat there throughout its running time, not angry, not irritated but not excited or even interested either. Predators is basically a retread of the original except that instead of being on Earth, the jungle is on the Predator’s home planet, the group of walking corpses isn’t a coherent unit as it was in the first film but is instead a rag-tag group of the world’s best killers (or “predators” if you will) from a range of backgrounds and countries and… Nope, I think that’s it for differences. Oh, the CGI predator dogs… Which are excellent. Really, really excellent.
Boxes are ticked, enormous weapons fired and spines are torn from bodies. Adrien Brody lowers his voice and makes it husky to let us know he’s a credible action star and Laurence Fishburne turns up as a kind of Colonel Kurtz meets Ogilvy from War of the Worlds which is one of the more fun things in the film. Many of the effects are done practically which is admittedly refreshing, the Predators still feeling like guys in suits which is by no means a criticism. The film is presumably a low budget attempt to resuscitate a franchise that basically flatlined after the first film, a kind of Predators Begins. But what it lacks in budget it really needs to make up for in story, imagination and inventive action scenes. There is nothing remotely fresh, original or even interesting in most of Predators. It’s just…there. Inoffensively there.
Enough messing around 2010. It’s time for Inception. Don’t let me down!
5/10
Predators is that kind of film where you walk out and say, “Well it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be” and this seems to be where Fox is happy to pitch their films. Predators isn’t as bad as you’d think it would be but that doesn’t mean it’s good. It doesn’t even make it okay. I sat there throughout its running time, not angry, not irritated but not excited or even interested either. Predators is basically a retread of the original except that instead of being on Earth, the jungle is on the Predator’s home planet, the group of walking corpses isn’t a coherent unit as it was in the first film but is instead a rag-tag group of the world’s best killers (or “predators” if you will) from a range of backgrounds and countries and… Nope, I think that’s it for differences. Oh, the CGI predator dogs… Which are excellent. Really, really excellent.
Boxes are ticked, enormous weapons fired and spines are torn from bodies. Adrien Brody lowers his voice and makes it husky to let us know he’s a credible action star and Laurence Fishburne turns up as a kind of Colonel Kurtz meets Ogilvy from War of the Worlds which is one of the more fun things in the film. Many of the effects are done practically which is admittedly refreshing, the Predators still feeling like guys in suits which is by no means a criticism. The film is presumably a low budget attempt to resuscitate a franchise that basically flatlined after the first film, a kind of Predators Begins. But what it lacks in budget it really needs to make up for in story, imagination and inventive action scenes. There is nothing remotely fresh, original or even interesting in most of Predators. It’s just…there. Inoffensively there.
Enough messing around 2010. It’s time for Inception. Don’t let me down!
5/10
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)