Toy Story 3
2010. Directed by Lee Unkrich

Am I the only one who found this terrifying? Sure, it’s a cute, nostalgic film with plenty of fun characters, goofy one-liners and exciting cliff-hangers, but the story, which at its core is about eternal existence plagued by constant abandonment, is pretty freaky. The toys are back, but some of them are missing! Woody mourns the loss of Bo-Peep, who has suffered an unnamed fate, and the few remaining toys from Toy Story 1 and 2 lie gathering dust in an old toy chest. Andy is going to college, and who can blame him for growing out of his toy obsession? (He did seem to love those toys a little more than was good for him.) He thinks about giving the toys away, but instead decides to put them in the attic, which is supposed to be a better fate? After a series of mix-ups, the toys find themselves donated to a preschool which turns out to be a prison camp run by bitter, abandoned toys. They face ultimate destruction and narrowly escape into the hands of a new owner. The end. Really? Is this a good resolution? All three of these films have dealt with the hard reality of being a living toy. Eternal life as an object of temporary diversion comes with consequences. The toy’s owners truly are their gods, but these gods abandon them every few years, and they are constantly facing the threat of non-existence found in being thrown away and melted down or being broken beyond repair. Not a happy or hopeful existence. That the toys can cope at all is truly remarkable. I know, I’m over thinking this, but Toy Story 3 deals the most harshly with this reality, and even though it has a “happy ending,” one can’t help but wonder what future horrors await our heroes. The animation, as always with Pixar, is top notch, but it does seem a little over-produced and less charming than the first two films. Also the characters seem less developed and the plot moves a bit too fast for my liking. It’s probably my least favorite of the three, but not a bad film. Apparently Pixar was forced against their will by Disney to make Toy Story 3, so in retrospect they did a good job. It will definitely sell toys, which is all Disney really wants.

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Eraserhead
1976. Directed by David Lynch

As much as I liked the visual and aural qualities of this film, I couldn’t make it all the way through. It reminded me of a recurring series of nightmares I had as a child, in which I would accidentally kill tiny animals in horrible ways. The film starts out utterly surreal, but slowly takes form as a sort of 1984-ish, dystopian drama about a hapless man living in a barren industrial landscape and the hideous baby creature he is forced to care for. This man has strange bride of Frankenstein hair, hallucinates a miniature vaudeville stage in his radiator, and hides a white, claw-like thing in one of his dresser drawers. He begins to dream of killing miniature versions of the deformed creature he is caring for, and this is what made me call it quits. These dreams were more comic than horrifying, but I could tell where they were leading, and I wanted out. Eraserhead was apparently David Lynch’s first feature film, and it is an incredibly nihilistic work. Lynch is a director I’ve heard much about but never watched. If Eraserhead is any gauge of the rest of his work, I might just stay away.

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The Wolfman
2010, directed by Joe Johnston

I’m very fond of werewolves and I’m not sure why. Hollywood has never done a particularly good job at portraying them. Lon Chaney Jr.’s Universal The Wolfman (1941) isn’t a good film. It’s laboriously long with little to thrill over and a rather daft looking werewolf who only makes brief appearances. And Universal’s countless sequels and spin-offs were no better. If anything, it’s the atmosphere of these early films that captured my attention: the foggy sound stages full of black twisty trees, the stark black and white photography, the blinding moonlight and deep shadows, and the melodramatic, trilling music. If the content could have followed the form, these films would have been gothic masterpieces.

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Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen
2009, directed by Michael Bay

Compared to this film, the first Transformers was a masterpiece. It had a discernible plot, characters that actually made sense, and action scenes that progressed somewhat logically. Fallen has none of these. I think Michael Bay’s biggest problem here is the way he films. I get the sense that he was working with a script that originally made sense, but I also get the sense that he just set up a bunch of cameras and had his actors run around screaming random lines, thinking he’d fix the story in post. Characters get knocked out and moments later are back on their feet, they travel from a Washington, DC museum to a California valley plain by walking through a door, and the major characters must run through an endless gauntlet of killer robots while the minor characters simply drive around it. The story is paper thin and could have been told in a ten minute saturday morning cartoon, but Bay manages to drag it into two hours of meaningless chaos. Many robots pummel one another and many soldiers and tanks fire pointless volleys at them for at least a third of the running time. Something that hasn’t changed from part one is the utterly tasteless sexuality. Megan Fox’s character carries herself like a prostitute, but we are supposed to believe she is a sweet and kind girl. The “college” that our hero attends looks more like a creepy nightclub, and a relentless running gag involves animals and robots humping various things, which I believe Bay expects us to find uproariously funny. The man has no taste and no film here, just flashy, disconnected visuals.

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The Man Who Wasn’t There
2001, directed by Joel Coen

This is a very odd film. It has beautifully poetic passages of dialog and wonderful acting, but the plot is bizarre and meandering. I can tell The Coen’s were trying really hard, but the end result is a mess. It’s a noir film, with a classic crime framework, but it’s an anti-noir in its execution. In the film’s world no one is really very bad, everyone makes mistakes and chaos rules fate. For a black and white film, its morality is very grey.

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Can I get a “whoop whoop?!” M. Night Shyamalan is back to his old, good storytelling, great film-making self, and don’t tell me this isn’t a Shyamalan film. Were The Empire Strikes Back and Return of The Jedi not George Lucas films? Sure Shyamalan didn’t direct or write this script, but the film was based on his story and entirely under his oversight, and just like Empire and Jedi, Devil was better off for it.

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