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.