Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Toying

Toy Story is a witty, precisely paced picture, a flawless entertainment. It has all your favorite toys packed in one movie. It has the voice of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, two proven actors with a pair of Oscars and several hundred million in boxoffice between them. It has wall-to-wall, state-of-the-art, computer-graphic effects designed to pop your eyes out, if you’re not careful. It has the multimedia might of the Walt Disney conglomerate behind it, for heavy marketing muscle. It’s going to be the biggest hit of the year.

Inside Out 2 (Kelsey Mann, 2024)

Public hair

Aaaand just because it's summer and we're all entitled to a bit of fun, thought I'd drop in and check out how Pixar's doing.

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Toyed are us

Toy Story is a warm, witty, precisely paced entertainment. It has all your favorite toys, featured in one movie. It has the voice of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, two proven actors with a pair of Oscars and several hundred million in boxoffice between them. It has wall-to-wall state-of-the-art computer graphic effects designed to pop your eyes out if you’re not careful. It has the multimedia might of the Walt Disney conglomerate behind it for heavy marketing muscle. It’s going to be the biggest hit of the year. 

Finding Dory (Andrew Stanton)

Frying Dory

And Pixar's sequelitis mania continues with this latest regurgitated raid on their back catalog, in a way an attempt to repair their reputation after the debacle that was The Good Dinosaur.

(Preceding the feature is the Pixar short Piper, a harrowing horror flick featuring the massed deaths of various bivalves, some gruesomely pulled apart)

The Good Dinosaur (Peter Sohn)

A boy and his 'saur

Pixar's The Good Dinosaur is arguably the studio's problem child--in 2009 announced for production, in 2013 director and producer replaced, in June 2015 nearly the entire cast replaced. The movie was released to fairly little fanfare, a few months after Pixar's major production had already been launched and declared a favorite by audience and critics alike (but not by me, alas). 

The picture opens with a joke: an elaborate sequence involving a giant rock being nudged like a billiard ball out of its (unrealistically crowded) asteroid belt, hurtling towards the Earth, flaring up from the heat of atmospheric passage--and whizzing past the planet by a few thousand miles. The sauropods look up and around, curious at what they might have missed. 

Inside Out (Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen, 2015)

Feelings 

Call me perverse, but when folks praise Pete Docter's Inside Out for originality I want to respond: "what originality?" Characters in one's head representing different emotions? Herman's Head's been cited (not especially good); Woody Allen did a skit in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) with Tony Randall as the controlling intelligence, Burt Reynolds his communications officer, and Woody Allen in a white sperm suit, charging forward and yelling 'let's make babies!' ('See you at the ovaries!' went the heroic reply). And it seemed as if every other episode of Spongebob Squarepants has either Plankton or Mr. Krabs sinking deep into Spongebob's skull, where various incarnations of the character worked furiously at fulfilling the brain's many functions. 

Ted; Spider-man; Brave; Savages; To Rome with Love; and an announcement of sorts

Don't see why Seth McFarlane should bother bringing his unfunny Family Guy series to the big screen when he's already done the live-action version. 

I mean--Mark Whalberg as the Peter Griffin character; Mila Kunis as the hot love interest; McFarlane himself, stuffed in fur stained the exact shade of bilirubin, as a combination Stewie Griffin/Brian. So tell me what's the difference?

Oh yeah--about a hundred million dollars. I suppose for that much money you can find someone willing to defecate in public too.

It's not that I object to tasteless comedy; it's that I object to tasteless comedy that's so lazy. McFarlane has basically recycled an episode of Family Guy--where Peter keeps screwing around and having to scramble to make up for it with Lois (and oh, doesn't that basic plotline sound a tad familiar?)--puffed it up to feature-film length, added name actors and a digitally animated stuffed animal for the "wow!" factor. 

Can he direct? Like Paris Hilton can sing. He likes to swing his camera around in an establishing shot as if to say "Look guys! I've got a style!" but when the characters (usually in a two-shot) start talking, all pretensions to being a film are forgotten and the screen snaps shut like a discarded pop-up book. You're left staring at nothing but crude sketches.

As for tasteless--don't talk to me about tasteless. When McFarlane goes for a gross-out joke the best he can muster is a turd on the carpet (we don't even get to see how it got there); when the Farrellys go for one the shower wall is spectacularly spray-painted the exact shade of Ted's fur. Give me the Farrellys anytime.

It's more than just boobs-and-poop jokes. The Farrellys are outrageous comedians but (like Ben Stiller, another comic talent I appreciate) they're satirists; they shock and disturb because they're trying to make a point. I don't know what kind of point McFarlane is trying to make--that the '80s was a great decade? I grew up in the '80s; I would rather undergo a colonoscopy. And if someone asks "Then how do you account for--?" and quotes Ted's boxoffice receipts to me, I'll simply respond with P.T. Barnum's one-time remark about suckers. Serves him right, too.

Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-man is a little less than. Andrew Garfield plays the angrier, edgier Peter Parker--and that's part of the problem. There's no real surprise here of a loser nerd type (like Tobey Maguire) suddenly standing up and spurting sticky substances from his wrists, only a James Dean troubled teen already spoiling for a fight.  Garfield is a good actor being typecast where Maguire was a funny running gag good for three movies (almost).

Webb (cute last name, but he's better off doing rom-com) puts the focus on Parker's melodrama, and shoots most of his action at night, the better to hide the digital fudging. Smart move; Raimi was ballsy enough to stage his digital webslinging in daylight (I love the largely orange-tinted view of New York) but then Raimi didn't give a damn (as can be seen in the Evil Dead films and Drag Me to Hell, he wore his cheesy effects proudly on his sleeve). After a while you realize that Webb prefers melodrama; his fight sequences are an incoherent mess of the non-shaky-cam type (What were those cars doing there hanging from the bridge? If Spidey saved them why didn't we see him saving them?). Arguably Webb is heir to the Rob Reiner and Mel Brooks School of Directing, comic filmmakers who can tell a story (and sometimes even coax a good performance from an actor) but haven't a clue how to construct a proper action sequence. When I said it's time to get someone else to direct the fourth Spidey picture I meant a filmmaker.

Talk about needing to get a filmmaker: Brave is reportedly Pixar's first animated feature with a strong female lead. Redheaded princess who kicks serious butt--now where have we seen that before?

Unfortunately Pixar may talk the talk but hasn't learned lesson one about what makes Studio Ghibli films so great. The subtlety of detail; the gorgeous handpainted background art; the use of silence and understatement to add depth and poignancy. The adult level of the storytelling--not adult as in rated R violence (though Ghibli has been there before) but adult as in indirect and unhurried and sophisticated, designed for audiences unafflicted by ADHD (a joke a minute, a chase every other). 

The triplet brothers are wonderful--they deserve an animated short all their own.

Might as well add that amongst Pixar's recent efforts, Brave isn't half as fun as half of Cars 2, the Michael Caine half (maybe not even half); that it tries for too much heart, which, as I mention in the above piece, isn't Pixar's strong suite in my view; that this latest movie is far more ambitious, but there's something to be said about doing something unpretentious; that a middling entertainment like the aforementioned sequel, with nothing more in mind than to amuse and make more money, is more Pixar's speed.

Oliver Stone's Savages is possibly his best work in years--not exactly high praise, but it's really not bad. Violent, funny, sexy, with a careful balancing act that keeps it just this side of being racist (a trio of Californian weed dealers struggling to stay ahead of a Baja drug cartel--what keeps it from stepping over is that everyone is sympathetic and everyone dirty; if they're not, they soon will be).


It has the density and nuance one only gets from a novel--Stone needs that to anchor his coked-up storytelling drive. What with the fashionable style nowadays being to shoot shaky-cam and cut the footage ADHD fast, Stone slows down his editing to just nervously jagged and hurls the camera along with the confidence and grace of a real veteran. And he's not too flashy; he's not trying to overload our circuitry the way he did in Natural Born Killers. He gives the plot its due, enhancing instead of engulfing the narrative. He gives the finale an odd twist, a variation of the novel, but strangely enough his addition sounds like the more reasonable, more true-to-life one. Man has grown.

Call me perverse, but I enjoyed Woody Allen's To Rome with Love far more than I did his previous endeavor set in Paris. Seems to me with Midnight in Paris he felt that all he had to do was namedrop Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Bunuel and the like, and he has the interest of his audience; here he's using all-fictional characters and he actually has to work a little to entertain us. 


The effort works; perhaps his best idea is Roberto Benigni (Benigni, of all people!) suddenly becoming famous for the sake of being famous. The conceit speaks volumes about our celebrity-obsessed culture (Kim Kardashian and Snooki anyone?), and puts Benigni's sad-sack face to full and even sympathetic use. Allen himself appears onscreen after a long hiatus as an avant-garde opera director, and acquits himself well (the stammer is still funny); Jesse Eisenberg makes for an amusing young Woody surrogate (his stammer impersonation is funny).


And finally, a kind of announcement. Am going to stop writing for Businessworld and stop writing here in this blog at least for a while, to focus on finishing that damn book I promised to finish for the past seven years. 

Doesn't mean I won't put up something once in a while--but it won't be as in-depth, and it won't be regular. Priority is the book right now, and if what I hear from some people is correct, it's about time.

Hopefully I do get to finish it--owe him that much. 


So long for now. 


7/16/12

Cars 2 (John Lasseter, Brad Lewis, 2011)

Wish fulfillment

I thought Cars 2 wasn't bad.

No, really.

I'm aware of the poor-to-lackluster reviews; I'm aware that it's a sequel. To be fair, it's the first film director and Pixar head John Lasseter has directed since the first Cars, some five years ago; before that he'd done Toy Story 2 (See a pattern here, themewise? Look in his psych eval folder, under the heading: "What I Played with As a Kid"). In between he'd been putting out one Tow Mater short after another, when he isn't busy writing and producing and otherwise finessing other pictures in his Pixar empire.

Which is my roundabout way of saying: one shouldn't be too surprised that he'd do a sequel, or that he'd pick this picture to do a sequel instead of the far more popular, far more critically well-received Toy Story series, of which the third installment had received near-ecstatic reviews (pace spoilsport notices like my own). Simply put, Lasseter, for whatever reason has developed a fond attachment for the character, and decided to put him front and center of his new sequel (and first new work in half a decade) without considering what the effect of ninety minutes of Larry the Cable Guy in a rustbucket carapace might have on an audience (not very positive; one might argue that Tow Mater is the digtally animated equivalent of George Lucas' Jar-Jar Binks in his wildly popular Star Wars prequels (insert note of heavy irony here). 

Not that I'm trying to defend the truck--I agree, he grates incessantly, both as an idea for a character and as a character within the story, and the picture as a whole doesn't exactly make my inner child go somersaulting with joy (have to confess none of the Pixar pictures have managed to do that), but hey, as an idea of what Pixar is truly good at and where its gifts truly lie, this is not a bad showcase at all.

I mean: an Aston Martin chase sequence--a homage not just to any chase sequence, but to the famously inventive pursuit-and-elude sequence in Guy Hamilton's Goldfinger (1964)--arguably the best of the James Bond spy movies (truth to tell, Cars 2 pays homage to not one but two Bond pictures--Goldfinger, and Diamonds are Forever, with its oil-rig climax). It helps that Michael Caine voices the aforementioned Aston, that the chase is more cleverly entertaining than any found in the official Bond movies, and that Caine outdoes even the official Bond actor in terms of suavity and style (Yes, I'm looking at you, Daniel Craig--you may make for a nicely rough-hewn Bond, but your directors and worse the movies themselves have barely registered on the pop imagination). 

Critics claim the movie lacks heart, and what heart it does have is found in the storyline of the least appealing character--the aforementioned tow truck--but I say: what's the big deal? In my book, Pixar's biggest problem is heart: the studio doesn't know how to do it properly, sometimes resorts to lifting techniques from Lasseter's idol Hayao Miyazaki--often with all the tact and skill of a ten-ton truck. 

I won't bother citing specific sequences--I've done that before. I won't bother citing specific titles I find superior to anything Pixar has done; I won't even name certain themes and acts and subject matter Pixar seems too faint of heart to even dare entertain, much less animate. That's an old game, and far too easy to win. I'll just say this: when Pixar strives to merely entertain, to provoke a laugh and do a clever chase sequence and juggle a complicated (kind of) plot in the air and not much more, it actually does better than when it tries to imitate its betters and falls flat on its face. 

Didn't like Cars 2? Sick of all the endless ads for McQueen and Mater marketing and merchandise and the like? I'd recommend not complaining too much, even if you probably will: this in my book is more Pixar's speed--represents the studio at its unpretentious best, or at least most honest. 

7.19.11

Tangled (Nathan Greno and Byron Howard)

Hero and sidekick's reaction to one particularly intense preview screening

Princess Pixar

Disney was always known for its 'princess' movies--y'know, tamed birds singing accompaniment to a warbling virgin in Snow White (1937), helpful mice stitching together a makeshift (if modestly stylish) gown for domestic-helper heroine in Cinderella (1950).

Easily my favorite is Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959) which took the studio some eight years to develop, five for the animation alone. It featured grand-scale music by Tchaikovsky; stunning Medieval- and Gothic-inspired artwork by Eyvind Earle; a suitably princess-y princess (sweet, not a little dull) that might have been turned out from the same plastic mold as Barbie; and, most impressive of all, a magnificently malevolent villainess named Maleficent.

Despicable Me (Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud)

Superbad

Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud's Despicable Me (2010) walks the delicate line between standard-issue computer-animated 3-D kiddie-caper flick and, well, yet another variation on George Eliot's classic Silas Marner (that old chestnut about a miser whose cold heart is thawed by a golden-haired orphan), neither element exactly the freshest or most exciting, and--whaddaya know?--it works.

Hard to say why; villainous protagonists seem to be enjoying some kind of mini-fad nowadays, which probably helps. Shrek was the adventures of a putative villain--an ogre with a heart of gold he insists on hiding beneath layers of sensitive, sulfurous onionskin--and the franchise is well into its fourth installment (not critically well-received, but I liked it just the same). Cartoon Network has League of Super-Evil; Robert Zemeckis did yet another version of A Christmas Carol (one must remember that Scrooge is a probable model for Eliot's miser). Coming is Dreamworks' Megamind, a Superman parody about two aliens who land on Earth and battle each other (this time it's the Lex Luthor-like figure that gets top billing).

So--there is an interest in bad guys; to be fair, there has always been an interest in bad guys. I love seeing Daleks in British uniform, serving up tea; I love it when Klingons claim "you should read Macbeth in the original Klingon!" I love it when Darth Vader stretches an arm to shattered, one-handed Luke Skywalker and growls "Join me!" (it's the only Star Wars film--the only single work to come out of George Lucas' epically self-deluded mind--that I can actually respect, even love). Truth to tell, my taste in villains tend to the grim and irredeemable ("You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything." "Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?"). But I can appreciate the lovable villains: bad guys with a human side just waiting to be discovered, feeling an unspoken need for a hug and a kiss, for a signal--a sign of any kind--that it's all right for them to come over and join the winning side.

That's what Scrooge--and Marner--represent; that's what Gru (Steve Carell) represents as well, basically. The pull of sentiment, of giving in to the story's gooey heart, is counterbalanced by Yarrow Cheney's witty production design details (Gru has his orphans sleep in dismantled bomb casings; Vector's living room furniture sits atop a gigantic shark tank; Gru's land vehicle looks as if an X-1 rocket plane had mated with a clothes iron; and the Bank of Evil (the financial institution of choice for cash-strapped supervillains) is "formerly known as Lehman Brothers"). There's a Spy vs. Spy feel to Gru's battles with Vector (Jason Segel) and like Prohias' strip, a sense of escalating inventiveness to the ways in which they outwit each other's gadgets (another influence is possibly Chuck Jones' classic animated short Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 Century). Best gadget of all are the minions, a multilimbed, multiheaded mass of miraculously individualized yellow creatures Gru had enlisted (Bred? Created? One wonders) to do his bidding, and who speak a particularized working language of their own (not a fan of toy tie-ins as a rule, but for this picture there is an app you can download that will translate what the minions are saying).

I rarely care about voice performances in an animated picture, but Carrell's voice coming out of Gru helps his character no end--that loopy intonation with the Borscht Belt accent gives you just the right self-pitying, self-obsessed tone of an unappreciated supergenius. I especially like the moment when he has to read a children's book to the kids, and his asides drip with contempt ("This is literature? A two-year-old could have written this")--no need for fancy digital effects to make the moment funny.

Hard to say why and I don't expect anyone to agree with me on this, but I much prefer this to Pixar's more elaborate efforts, the latest Toy Story included. Why? Why, because it does what it sets out to do, and sets out to do what it can do well. Pixar has always harbored this love for Miyazaki films (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo) that you see practically in every frame; in an attempt to imitate Miyazaki they have pushed nuance and character as far as possible in an American animated feature and as an unintended consequence shown the limitations--their pictures feel precious and not a little sticky, out not just to entertain but wring tears. The opening sequences of everything from Wall-E to Up seem designed to leap out of the screen, straddle your neck with musclebound thighs, and squeeze till the juice starts squirting.

I dislike that; I dislike being coerced to do--or feel--anything in a movie. Pixar hasn't learned Miyazaki's most basic trick--to tell a story honestly, in as unsentimental and straightforward a way as possible, so that you're blindsided into being moved.

Ironically, Coffin and Renaud seem to have realized what it is American animation excels at most: humor, plain and simple. Coffin in an interview cites the usual suspects as influences (Pixar, of course), but along with Renaud mention a crucial name: Blake Edwards. That most American of comic directors betrays his fingerprints throughout the picture--the gags explode with perfect comic timing, add to the characterization, are borderline sadistic (there's a gentleness to Pixar, I might add, that I find very hard to take seriously) and endlessly inventive. With no great need to create a great film or tell a heartbreaking story, the filmmakers are left free to make the picture as funny as they want it to be--selling the Silas Marner storyline far more effectively than if they had done otherwise, and concentrated on the pathos. Excellent fun.

First published in Businessworld, 9.2.10

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010)

Kiddie gloves

(WARNING: STORY DISCUSSED IN CLOSE DETAIL)

(Just in time for Father's Day, a little skit about Toy Story 3.

Scene: Dad and son, coming out of the multiplex)

D: So?

S: Huh?

D: So how'd you like the movie?

S: It's okay.

D: It's okay? What do you mean?

S: I mean 'it's okay.' It didn't suck. What do you want me to say?

Up (Peter Docter, Bob Peterson, 2009)

Down

I. To dream the impossible

Far as I can see Pixar’s Up (Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, 2009) is very in with critics (Liza Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly says it’s a “lovely, thoughtful and, yes, uplifting adventure;” Richard Corliss of Time Magazine calls it Pixar’s “most deeply emotional and affecting work;” heavyweight film critic Roger Ebert declares it “another masterwork from Pixar, which is leading the charge in modern animation”), and most audiences too ($288 million in US boxoffice receipts as of this writing, with another hundred million in foreign receipts--cream off the top, in effect). There’s no reason to believe Filipinos, who can barely resist lovely, thoughtful, deeply emotional and affecting masterworks of uplift (that at the same time lead animated charges), will not respond to the picture.

Philippine Customs lifts taxes on imported books; "Up;" "A Woman Cut in Two;" "Sunshine"

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo lifts taxes on imported book

Some thoughts on this whole brouhaha:

1) Shouldn't have happened in the first place. I understand the government scrabbling to find ways to earn revenue, but if it had encouraged in itself and in the country a culture that valued education and literacy, then a tax on books would have been unthinkable. As is, one wonders what other unpleasant elements are to be found in its mindset.

2) Let this be an object lesson: vigilance, always vigilance. One needs to watch little encroachments on freedom like these. It would have been all too easy to just shrug one's shoulders and say: "So it goes."

3) If the government is still desperate for cash, couldn't they keep the tax on Twilight?

Peter Doctor and Bob Peterson's Up (2009) is pretty much standard-issue Pixar. You have your crusty old man being taught a lesson by a dewy young boy; you have your dreams (in this case, a house beside a waterfall falling from a plateau straight out of Willis O'Brien's The Lost World (1925)) being pursued no matter what the cost--either the film encourages this pursuit, or urges the hero to abandon his dream for a more achievable goal (in this case, returning an avian mother to her children). Along the way Doctor and Peterson openly celebrate their inspirations--not just O'Brien, but Hayao Miyazaki, particularly his Laputa, Castle in the Sky (1986) and many flying sequences in various pictures (Miyazaki, as his fans know, is a master of the aerial flight sequence).

This is a cartoon, of course. We aren't asked to wonder why the hero manages, seemingly overnight, to conceal thousands of balloons in his house (Where did he get the money? Why are they strong enough to lift the house, with what looks like common string? (Wired.com has something to say about this)? Why haven't they lifted the building even before they're released from his attic?). We aren't asked to wonder how he manages to construct not just sails for forward propulsion but a mechanism for steering said sails. We aren't asked to wonder how a long-lost explorer manages to amass so many dogs, and how they managed to develop an obsession for squirrels (in South America, no less).

Too sentimental for my taste, though I'm sure this will be a big hit for people who still believe animation is strictly for the kiddies. For my money the year's best animated feature to date is Henry Selik's Coraline, from the novel by Neil Gaiman, which admits to the possibility that childhood isn't just full of wonders, but terrors as well.

Claude Chabrol's La fille coupee en deux (A Girl Cut in Two, 2007) invites, as usual, comparisons to Hitchcock, but from where I'm sitting the most distinctive quality the two share, at least at this stage in Chabrol's career, is elegance in storytelling, elegance in all elements of storytelling, from characterization to dialogue to mis-en-scene to soundtrack (the opening credits roll to the strains of Puccini's Turandot, the plot of which suggests interesting sidelights to the plot of Chabrol's film). Even the title works overtime to raise questions in the viewer's mind--just why is the eponymous girl (local TV weather girl Gabrielle, played by Ludivine Sagnier) cut in two? Because she's of two minds? Because she's desired by two men? Because a whirling blade literally cuts her in two?

One often thinks when thinking of Hitchcock of visual challenges solved with brilliantly, sometimes breathtakingly elegant solutions (the problems of confined space in Lifeboat or Rope or Rear Window; of a shower-stall murder in Psycho; of wide-open spaces and sustaining tension through a cross-country odyssey in North by Northwest). Chabrol in this case solves one kind of challenge: the suggestion of perverse sexual appetites with the least amount of fuss (a head sinks below a table; a girl crawls on all fours in shadow; a private club is visited, and one member asks another a pointed question: "does she know what goes on here?").The story is loosely based on the killing of architect Stanford White by Harry K. Thaw, for a long-ago affair White had with Thaw's wife Evelyn Nesbit, updated with a bit of class rivalry.

Central to the film is the mystery of Gabrielle: is she corrupted innocent or cruel sadist? Middle-class victim or social-climbing instigator? In Turandot, the two main female characters are the eponymous princess and the slave girl, Liu, and Gabrielle seems to embody qualities of both women--she is by turns loyal and loving to her elderly lover, cruel and distant to her young husband. By combining the two in one woman, does Chabrol make his heroine more or less convincing, more or less complex--both, maybe? Sagnier plays her as a cool blonde in the best Hitchcockian tradition (I have to take back I suppose what I said earlier about Chabrol's resemblance or lack of to Hitchcock). Towards the end she's revealed as more innocent and less guileful than she seems--or is she instead completely at the mercy of her own inner demons? She's the lure, the McGuffin, the enigma that draws both men--and herself--to their irrevocably entangled dooms.

Danny Boyle's Sunshine (2007) for the first hour manages to make you forget all the scientific inaccuracies it so blatantly presented. Boyle wears his influences on his sleeve: the heavy-breathing spacemen and extra-vehicular activity (EVA) from Kubrick's 2001, including one sequence involving explosive decompression (silly it seems to worry about freezing in outer space when the human body loses its heat so slowly); the dripping water and marauding predator in Scott's Alien (1979); the haunted space station in Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972).

Hard to take this wannabe science-fictional philosophical treatise seriously, when it doesn't do its homework. The sun is dying, but no mention is made of the fact that its death occurs some five billion years too early (in the DVD commentary physicist and film advisor Brian Cox mentions the possibility of the sun capturing a Q-ball, dark matter in a specific supersymmetric form--though reportedly the sun isn't dense enough to capture so massive an object). The story's set fifty years into the future but already we have artificial gravity, with no explanation how this miracle comes about.

In one of the deleted scenes they did mention that their payload, a 'stellar bomb' meant to rekindle the sun's nuclear fusion processes, has the mass of the moon compressed into the size of a football field--but this raises more questions than it answers. Why, if the payload generates enough gravity to create one-gee conditions throughout the ship, can people walk on its surface without being crushed (the gravity on the surface would be greatest, less so for objects further away)? Why, if the payload generates gravity, does weight turn on and off like a light switch in the airlock? Why if the payload generates gravity do men in spacesuits float around when stepping outside the ship?

All this can pretty much be forgiven if Boyle had given us a reasonably plausible drama, but late in the game Boyle introduces an incredibly silly supervillain with heavily scarred skin that we see mostly through a distorting lens. The lens gimmick is a terrible idea; Boyle's action sequences are never the most coherent, but the addition of a lens only makes the action even less so. Worse is the gobbledygook that comes out of the villain's well-roasted lips--"When he chooses for us to die, it is not our place to challenge God." The man is crazy, the laziest excuse for villainy in all of storytelling (he's nuts, ergo he's capable of anything). For all the sunlight in Boyle's picture he does little to illuminate human nature through his villain, or through the conflicts his villain creates.

Wall.E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)

Waah!

Perhaps the best portion of Andrew Stanton's Wall.E (2008) is the largely wordless first forty minutes, when the filmmakers crib from the best of Chaplin (particularly his City Lights (1931)) to depict the eponymous trash compactor's goofball infatuation with Eve, the sleek 'droid sent to Earth on a classified mission (might as well note here that the 'droid's flying sequence seems inspired by similar sequences from Hayao Miyazaki's great Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, 1984)). Stanton manages to create a remarkable junkyard world of rusted metal and scrapped items, and his main character (much as Chaplin or Fred Astaire did decades before) turns each artifact of pop culture (funny how much of it comes from '80s America) into an object of mystery, inventive comedy, and ultimately, wonderment.

Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008); Wall.E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)

Perhaps the best part of Andrew Stanton's Wall.E (2008) is the largely wordless first forty minutes depicting the robot's goofball infatuation with Eve, the sleek 'droid sent to Earth on a classified mission. Stanton manages to creat a remarkable junkyard world of rusted metal and scrapped items, and his main character (much as Chaplin or Fred Astaire did decades before) turns each sample of pop culture into an object of mystery, inventive comedy, wonderment (funny how much of it comes from '80s America (even the recording of The Music Man (1962) is replayed in the form of a VHS tape)).