Toy Story 2

eyeris.blogspot.com

What fine story-telling.  The narrative starts languorously , but the fun builds and builds.  Two things that particularly interested me: one is the way the movie uses what I think is an ancient Greek idea, that character is fate.  We don't get to choose our character, and our character causes us to act in certain ways.  The toys in the movie have their character dictated to them by their inventors.  Buzz Lightyear can't help but be brave, focused, and loyal--he was designed to be imagined as having these qualities, so he does.  When circumstances arise that test those qualities, life gets interesting.  The part that this character-is-fate idea comes through most clearly is in the toy store.  When they come around the corner and encounter the Barbies having a beach-party,--this coming right after encountering the officious Buzz Lightyear dolls--the effect is hilarious, as is the the Barbie tour-guide.
The other is the Toys' metaphysics: they're already perfectly "real," as real as human have an unwritten but stern code that requires them to keep hidden from human beings their realness.  But they don't consider see themselves as being real.  The only time they feel real, or as close to real as they will ever feel, is when a child who loves them plays with them, imagining that they are real.  The Toys love this feeling of real-ness; life is not worth living without being loved by a human child.  Woody has the opportunity to be put on display in a museum, thereby gaining relative immortality and the admiration or even admiration of many, many children, not just one.  But he realizes that such a life would be hollow.
Perhaps I should see Wall-E again, because despite reviewers finding it so admirable, I found it tedious.  It seems to me that neither Wall-E nor the female lead have much personality; they're too successfully robot-like.  Their lack of personality makes them dull.  Woody and the rest of the Toys have tremendous amounts of personality.  They're never much more than two-dimensional, but they still have characters that they energetically express.

Carrie

allmoviephoto.com

Stephen King, based on the few things of his I’ve read, doesn’t worry about anything except the straightforward story he’s straightforwardly telling.  He’s so single-minded that his work has integrity of a kind, and a fear-causing chemical ripples off his sentences.  His premise is that evil exists and has a complex character, worth exploring, not philosophically, but narratively.  The Nancy Allen character is completely, unironically, directly, energetically evil, and entertaining as such; the Amy Irving character, her best friend, isn’t as completely evil, but she’s as evil or moreso, because her evil is more twisted up, she’s a better liar, she’s colder-hearted.  DePalma’s direction is thrillingly operatic, so urgent yet patient that the movie isn’t very scary, yet is enthralling.  He mixes together evil and eroticism with a relentlessly unified, yet hard to pin down vision of things.  Amy Irving is presented as not evilly-beautiful, but as really beautiful.  He turns Sissy Spacek into the most innocent, vulnerable sex object there could ever be (given that children younger than Spacek’s character can’t be turned into sex objects without alarms going off in the viewers’ heads).  Spacek’s acting is powerful.

Up in the Air

www.killahbees.com

Very funny dialogue, plot twists.  I was going to put this in the unusual romantic comedy category until one of the twists.  Is the ending too obscure?  The social consciousness-aspect of the movie, the idea of putting faces on the unemployment statistics, the critique of capitalism's ruthlessness might be too manipulative, aesthetically speaking, but the movie is a grab bag of elements of different genres, and the grab-bag-ness gives it some of its aesthetic edge.

La Strada

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/dvdreview/lastrada.htm

At first it seemed too simple, too lacking in ironic perspective, but Fellini knew what he was doing.  As soon as the Fool, with his sense of life and of fun, enters, the movie gets deeper and deeper, almost by the gesture.  Gelsomina, who before seemed like a three-quarter wit, turns out to be someone who just needed a good teacher.  We ache for her to go off with the Fool, then to stay with the circus, then to stay with the nuns.  But she has figured out how to love Zampano in a deep way.  Posthumously, she succeeds in changing him from monster to someone capable of sorrow and anguish over his own monstrousness.  That sorrow is all he needs, as Dante, Fellini's fellow Italian-Catholic, teaches us, to go from hell to purgatory; to feel sorrow is to no longer be in the grasp of evil, psychologically speaking.  After Zampano leaves Gelsomina behind, I wonder why the movie is continuing--who cares about Zampano, the monster?  By the end, we know why the movie continued.  Gelsomina has redeemed Zampano by her own example of grieving, by her loving him, and by her dying the way, Zampano learns, she has died.

Firefly

http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2009/11/25/best-science-fiction-movies-of-the-last-decade-2000-2009/

Firefly sometimes traffics in ideas, and sometimes doesn't; it sometimes feels more like a western than science-fiction show.  But its world is believable, its characters irresistible.  The production values, despite what look like a limited budget, are excellent.  Josh Whedon is a student of finding different ways to keep narrative pulse throbbing.  It's just pop--that is, it doesn't hold out the possibility of getting a sophisticated viewer to see the world differently than he or she did before-- but it's pop with a commitment to being as excellent as it can be as story-telling.  Comparing it with the original Star Trek creates an example of how an understanding of how much audiences can process has increased.

The image above is from the movie/after the fact pilot, not the show; actual stills from the show didn't come up on my google image search.

Star Trek

laughingsquid.com

A reference in a book I was reading to Star Trek (and the author meant the original show, I believe) as a very philosphical show, so I ordered the first season.  The first episode (as far as I could tell; the menu was hard to interpret) was certainly idea oriented, being about a member of the crew who, because of an encounter with a mysterious force-field plus a knack for ESP, begins to grow in mental abilities at an exponential rate.  The show becomes a variation on the Frankenstein theme.  So far so good.  The production values, the lack of faith in peoples' minds to move quickly, the felt need to laboriously make each of its narrative points, all were astonishing.  And the sexism--I am against holding previous world-views that were shared by large parts of that previous culture anachronistically against a work of art--but the sexism was too laughable.

The Duchess of Langeais

http://pics.livejournal.com/glvalentine/pic/0001tx1w

At the very first, things seem too stagey and arty; then it was gripping, a modern-day version of La Princesse de Cleves, as cerebral as it was romantic and passionate.  I'm hung up, though, about one thing: at perhaps the crucial moment in the movie, Antoinette swings over from resisting Mariveau to being hopelessly in love with him.  The change comes when he forcibly, outrageously, cruelly takes control of her--not raping her, but worse, in a way.  His psychology is consistent enough, but why the hell this move on his part shoul make her love him--it seems unrealistic to me.  Maybe in the nineteenth century, in Balzac's world, people acted this way?  But the movie rests on the heroines's intelligence, pride, dignity, and sense of irony.  Having this crucial plot corner-turn being so unsatisfying was unsatisfying.  An unusual, brilliant movie.

Glengarry Glen Ross

http://www.gamespot.com

There's something either sadistic or masochistic about the script/story; it's Johnny-one-note-ish; it's quite unrealistic; it looks to be half-way between a film of a play and an actual movie.  But the acting is so wonderful, from so many characters, that it seems unforgettable (probably is unforgettable, but how can I know yet).  Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino stand out but only because they have the most complex and most sympathetic roles.  And the acting couldn't be great if the lines didn't have plenty of drama.

District 9

http://www.smcm.edu/studentevents/2009/index.html

What I had read, both before and after viewing the small part I watched, told me I should persist beyond the beginning, but I couldn't get myself too.  So jangling, discordant, so interested in reveling in the ugly.

Juliet of the Spirits

http://nurse-marbles.livejournal.com/61349.html

This seems like a remake of La Dolce Vita, in which the main character is in semi-crisis because his/her life is incoherent; experiences a crisis (Marcello's philosopher friend kills himself and his children, Guilietta discovers her husband's adultery and goes mad); and then responds to the crisis (Marcello by running from it and leading an existence more dissolute and humiliating than before, Guilietta by imaginatively freeing herself, at least to a degree; she unties the hands of the child-version of herself, and says goodbye peacefully enough to the spirit of her grandfather).  The idea that it's a tired recycling of images and themes (cf. Ebert) seems to me wrong, although I haven't seen 81/2, which preceded it, in decades.  It certainly has a structure, in which the elements of her incoherent life keep haunting her, such that the fantasy and the relatively real scenes are counterweights to each other.  Guilietta Masini has much quiet dignity, and her lack of sexiness, her lack of joie de vivre, give the movie gravitas: she's not just another part of the auteur's erotic phantasmagoria.  Certainly the movie takes patience, as its narrative pulse is not prominent.

L.A. Story

http://www.filmbender.com/steve-martin/

This has problems: Victoria Tennant often looks as if she weren't part of the movie; it makes jokes for the sake of the jokes more than for the sake of the whole.  But I loved it, because Steve Martin draws my empathy powerfully, because it's very funny, and witty too, and because it satirizes Los Angeles intensely yet in a civilized, good-humored way.  It's highly reminiscent of the delightful All of Me.  Its overlap with some Woody Allen movies is large.  Its references to other movies are many; its introductory footage is an homage/parody of the beginning of La Dolce Vita.

An Education

http://nickhornby.campaignserver.co.uk/?cat=5

This movie felt like too naked a depiction of an older man's desire for/seduction of/sexual fantasy concerning a sexual relationship with an underage girl, and as such felt creepy.  The fact that the seducing older man is depicted as unscrupulous and creepy as the movie goes on does not make the movie any more comfortable to watch.  Moment by moment, it was satisfying to watch, and Carey Mulligan as the seduced is amazing, but increasing creepiness led me to stop watching.  Yet works of art can be about pedophilia and still be satisfying works of art: Nabokov's Lolita and Kubrick's movie version of same; or Love Invents Us, the novel by Amy Bloom. Darn. An Education might have had a moral center, but up to the point I watched, it didn't.

Bright Star

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2009/09/24/f-bright-star-review.html

I would almost have labeled this great, because of its unusual, brave, and successful attempt to make a movie about great poetry.  Maybe, however, it's just very good, the acting especially.

The King and I

http://www.evspa.org/king_and_i.asp

You've got to love musical theater to love this, and you have to be willing to be compassionate towards past generations' ideas as what was politically correct or not; given these conditions, this movie is pleasure-packed, moment by moment.  Its songs out of context can seem thin.  In context, they are mostly rich an delightful.  The movie is all about equality v. monarchy and women's rights, and as is more politically progressive than many superficially more PC films made now.  The visuals are so splendid they could almost take away from the story telling, but they don't quite.  They just give pleasure and more pleasure.  Acting award to both principles, Brynner and Kerr.

To Catch a Thief

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReview/tocatchathief.htm

The visuals have a pronounced role--there is so much driving along the edges of cliffs that one can't relax.  Grace Kelly's hostility/attraction toward Cary Grant gives a true sense of conflict and tension--this is how to treat the elder Grant (Audrey Hepburn could never be this lethal).  The fact that Grace Kelly is a major good guy is part of the chemistry--who is the bad guy, and how nice v. bitchy is he or she?  Very satisfying.  The fact that Kelly is such a goddess, visually speaking, is part of the unusual fun. Her designer outfits almost cross the line into taking attention away from other aspects of the movie, but not quite.

THX 1138

http://www.benjaminharlow.com/alloftheabove/archives/827

Somewhat tedious, somewhat slow, slightly prurient, a somewhat prone to falling between the stools of high art and pop (that chase scene), but at the same time visually and technically adventurous to a thrilling degree, and committed enough to ideas to give the movie much substance.

Enchanted

http://unebellefille.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/2007_enchanted_035.jpg

A weird movie to categorize and describe--is it cute, is it campy, is it corny?  Yes to all three, and yet there's an intelligence at work, Amy Adams is riveting, and some of the scenes are delightfully so over the top and funny, especially when there's music and dance involved, that I felt I was in the presence of something unusual and valuable. The references to other Disney pop art movies added the spice of post-modernism in a way that could have been tedious but instead was very fun and amounted to a tour de force of an unusual kind.

12 Monkeys

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare11/12monkeys.htm

Acting award to Brad Pitt; Bruce Willis may be a little too Johnny-one-note.  This is sustained mind-bender-as-thriller-mystery, and is like AI that way.  It's in the genre of loving gloss on another movie (La Jetee).  Its tautness is excellent.  Its ending is intentionally ambiguous and, I can't help but think, a cop out.

Mean Streets

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare5/meanstreets.htm

Scorsese does like his acting intense.  The relative ordinariness of the conflict--things are plenty intense, gritty, and dark, but it doesn't feel as if we're on the edge of some kind of emotional apocalypse, as it does in Raging Bull and Taxi Driver--makes me like this movie more than the latter two, even if that sense of emotional apocalypse is what makes them distinctive.

A Night at the Opera

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReviews19/marx_brothers_boxset.htm

A bit less anarchic, a bit more conventional, in that there's a conventional good guy, and the good guy-bad guy convention is taken more seriously than it is in Duck Soup.  As such it's not as dizzyingly surprising as the latter.  It's still a pretty subversive comedy.