Monthly Archives: July 2010

Great Scenes in Movies: Apocalypse Now

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(Click on picture for scene)

I have to preface my comment about Apocalypse Now. I don’t think the film is great. Overall, I think there are many great moments in the film, but the story lacks a roundness to it. The search by Martin Sheen into his heart of darkness to find Kurtz is an entanglement and takes the viewer to many unexpected corners of war imagination, but the film cheapens itself by continuously using cheap symbolism along the way. When Sheen meets new sights, he finds new contradictions about the war: from a surfing loving colonel to a Playboy festival in a war zone or film crews filming actual battles like they were producing a movie, his psyche begins to turn itself into knots to make sense of these abstractions. Contradictions and discouragements are expected to happen throughout the story, but I thought some of the symbolism were cheap ploys that hovered above huge scenes in the films to get you to understand larger points about the war. In an odyssey film like this, symbolism should take a backseat so the story can be felt.

But, I do want to point out one scene. It’s the famous helicopter attack scene in the middle of the film. After journeying through the thick of war, Sheen and his cohorts find an unexpected kind of colonel played by Robert Duvall. He gives orders along the lines of what interest his basic personality. Constantly trying to recreate home life, he talks about surfing and other leisure elements of life. Not only when things are cool and collective amongst soldiers, but also during the frenzy of combat. Acting as narrator, Sheen picks up on this element right away and diagnoses the psyche’s thinking in a bigger element of a war zone like Vietnam. The prognosis makes the temperment understandable to the everyday viewer of the film, but it also dilutes the energy and tone of the story. Getting back on target, the main attack during this correspondence with this unlikely colonel happens during a helicopter attack. It’s a multiple vehicle oriented attack meant to establish permanence in a new location.

The element of change for the invasion is how it plays counter to traditional invasions. The D-Day Invasion was one amongst many during World War II, but it was the grandest and met an expectation of two large forces taking battle against each other. In Apocalypse Now, the helicopter attack is more understated and seems unlikely since it is attuned to an attack on civilians amongst some soldiers. The change of focus is elemental to what guerrilla warfare means, but the film shows the intended scope of what America wanted with the classical music blasting over the loudspeaker in the helicopter. The electricity of the grandness is amazing. Of course, what they are attacking makes it feel different, but the disorderly manner of how the fighting is going about is what makes for chaos in the story. One adjustment for the viewer in seeing bullets sprinkle a small town is that they are already adjusted to the devastation level in the film when it comes to innocents and civilians being killed. In fact, the Vietnam War is what made this common understanding for modern warfare.

Continuing on with the D-Day invasion comparison, by 1979, no attempt on film really rendered the gravity of its devastation. The Longest Day is a whitewash and Sam Peckinpah’s autobiographical treatment (The Big Red One) was still three years away, but even his film did not have the production to be as loud as what was warranted. Steven Spielberg found the amount of destruction necessary to fulfill obligations in Saving Private Ryan, but his action orient-ism also allowed the film to be marked down by effects. Either way, at the time Francis Ford Coppola made  Apocalypse Now, he was aligning the film with other more realistic war films. Since the mass movie audience still had a memory for a time when movies were stale and an Alfred Hitchcock thriller was pushing buttons, the level of realism in a war film aligned itself with an anti war mentality. Throughout the film, there are better moments which objecitify brutality and show the measure of suffering in ending a human life, but the point of this attack is how both the personal merges with the impersonal.

In 1968, when escalation of the Vietnam War happened and Napalm bombings became more frequent, the United States found a cost effective manner to take out large areas of terrain since fighting hidden soldiers became troublesome. Filming a napalm attack on film would be effective, but it would also be short and to the point. The walls of flame would only do so much to enliven the imagination of destruction since the flames would mostly block out visual radar of what was happening. A few scenes in the film show that (even in this sequence), but what this attack does is adaquately dramaticize the idea of a napalm attack. As many soldiers attest today, a comfort level grew with violence during the war. These feelings are spilling out as the soldiers in the helicopter take wind of all the action and swirl the energy of the situation through their nostrils. The moment is thrilling for the audience. It’s harder for us to align the intended senses of the scene today since we all have seen every kind of level of violence in a war film, but I imagine a contradiction and bungle of emotions filled the first viewers of this film as they saw an exciting moment but were able to register the deaths of civilians on the ground. Further complication ensued when some were taking up arms and the colonel played by Robert Duvall was giving instructions to a young soldier about possibility of waves on the coast for surfing sake.

There is another commentary. As technology developed, the rise of attacks by machines like planes became more common. As a soldier, John McCain suffered in capture during the Vietnam War, but he has said his role of an air fighter made him feel not like a real soldier. Apocalypse Now began the idea of enjoyment by soldiers for mechanisms of death and every modern war film since has continued the tradition, especially films about the first two Gulf wars with Iraq. Three Kings and Jarhead are commentaries on the everyday soldier. The former has more of a basic plot aligned with it, but the predicaments of their situations started in scenarios of mass contradiction like the ones highlighted in Apocalypse Now. I don’t even feel the need to expel on the style since the mode is realism but the method of insight is to make the elements in the scene more exciting. It’s the perfect marker highlight on where we are now with war films.

Inception’s Possibility

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Well, it was expected to happen so front line commentators like me could be clarified on the science potential of a new film. I questioned the legitimacy of Inception’s dream coercion ideas as something easy to imagine but less likely to be possible now or anytime soon. Maybe I should have withheld commentary on an aspect I didn’t know, but since only Star Trek’s scientific idea of space travel is something related to real science, I was confident this sounded less scientific. In fact, it still does since the film takes very little interest in explaining the technology aspect of how the machine that makes going into someone’s dreams is even possible. Now, the Washington Post has an article on how reading dreams is not only possible, but it can map the beginning of more technology which would utilize someone’s dreams.

Kubrick and Aryan Papers

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Once upon a time, the short novel Wartime Lies by Louis Begley looked like a dream project for Stanley Kubrick. After years of searching for a project that would allow to tackle the Holocaust, this novel breathed near a consistently interesting subject for Kubrick. Like Hitchcock always searched for aspects of voyeurism and images of manufactured women, Kubrick always looked for false impressions of people. From Barry Lyndon being a phony version of a gentleman for his age and Tom Cruise feeling like he was in a dream that he really was not in Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick has always tangled with the illusions of chaos or order. However, there is little illusion in the devastation of the Holocaust. For Kubrick, it was one of the major modern events that had a lot on effect on what it did. When he came upon Wartime Lies, it looked like he found a story that looked to continue his thematic interest, but it didn’t work out.

I’m glad Kubrick didn’t adapt Wartime Lies. It would have become the famous abandoned film Aryan Papers of the early 1990s, but I remember whenever he talked about the Holocaust, he not only talked about the enormity of the event, but he talked about the moral imperative to honor the dead of the Holocaust. The leading example (for Kubrick) was that Schindler’s List wasn’t about the Holocaust because it was about a number of people who lived and not about the millions who died. Wartime Lies not only falls into that same category as Schindler’s List, but it doesn’t even depict life in the ghettos or the camps. It’s about a Jewish woman and son managing to stay steps ahead of Nazi authorities who want to outcast them to the camps. The suspense of the story is how she is always on the fringes of being captured, but finds ways to escape doom. If someone watched the film and had little idea about what the Holocaust was, the event would still remain foggy to them.

Wartime Lies is Kubrickian in that the story is about the idea of the Holocaust. Most of his films are stories that focus on the idea of something devastating happening but never physically manifesting itself the way you expect. Kubrick always inspects the psychological forces around how people perceive a major thing. Wartime Lies is about how a mother and son deal with the threat of the Holocaust but always are able to avoid it. Kubrick believed there was a weight to the Holocaust that had to be depicted and documented to be an honest narrative. It’s why he still refused to endorse Schindler’s List even though it showed a lot of brutality, but Wartime Lies shows far less than Speilberg does and it’s much further removed from the reality of the camp’s devastation. The whole of the novel has Kubrickian elements, but in reality, the novel is the last thing he should have considered adapting.

I think he found himself at the end of his life and had to find some novel or piece of literature to adapt about the Holocaust. He had a few projects in consideration during the 70s but they fell through, but Christianne Kubrick admits that the event weighed heavily on him and he had to find something, but Wartime Lies just showed him that he was never meant to make a film about the Holocaust. It’s meaningful since many other filmmakers had projects they kept in the fictional category and some they kept for documentaries. Spike Lee proved it recently when he made his epic about the Katrina disaster as a lengthy documentary, but I also think Kubrick had to internalize this project even more and keep the level of his research and knowledge to himself in the end. Even if a documentary can see a subject in a different lense than a feature film, does it not still lose the fullness of scope that Kubrick seems to warrant? In the end, no film probably will be able to capture the breath.

When Stanley Kubrick was offered to make Lord of the Rings in the 1960s with the guidance of the Beatles interest, he declined and alleged the books were unfilmable. Today we know a few advancements can make the task less daunting, but no amount of technology would have been able to guided Kubrick’s heart to making this film. It may be for the best.

The Matrix and Philosophy

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Continuing on with consideration of Christopher Nolan’s new film, Inception, I want to briefly consider a better aspect of a previous film, The Matrix,  by describing its element of philosophy. Both films revolve their windows of human insight within deep and continuous ideas of theoretical play on mankind. If people look at both films and want better drama, they will more likely go to Nolan’s film since it has a patience unbecoming in the Keanu Reeves action flick. It’s an easy acknowledgment, but Inception wants you to consider more things. It wants to make a dramatic play on realms of the subconscious and sleep. Not only is the film a search for DiCaprio’s past emotional trauma, but it is also a treaty on a larger idea – tapping into someone’s dreams and being able to rectify their darkest secrets.

Presentation wise, Inception looks more realistic since it isn’t a cookie cutter story of pure fantasy. The Matrix is about a distant time portal in the future when civilization has been made fully viral and out of our control. Lots of far reaching assumptions have to be made before we can present it as a viable option. However, if you look at the film as a theoretical model, you do get a story that has been constantly debated and argued amongst philosophers and theorists for generations – the idea of civilization as a construct which not only has little “real” going for it, but is simulated to present feelings which are told to us to be real. Every generation, as we grow up, we get new benchmarks about how to hang our self esteem hats on. The Matrix takes advantage of this idea by making a mock action film to show that further de-humanization is occurring with the rise of machinery in our lives which is killing our interpersonal relationships. Human beings do connect today, but it is through software and other devices. If we continuously rely on our devices to communicate, are we only but inhabitants of devices and rely on their qualms?

The Matrix is a straightforward idea that the discussion between our reality and level of humanity can be addressed in a story where humans are no longer humans and machines really do have control over our consciousness. The Matrix also presents all of this with regions where humans can theoretically attain and rule to ascertain their individual purpose, but success comes through consciousness and mot people in the “matrix” cannot let themselves go to be re-born as humans. The potential for psychic harm is too great so they have to remain constructs of their embellished social engineering. This happens in the confines where it is easy to diagnose good and evil and understand how people must disconnect themselves in order to fight the bad forces. Of course, theoretical drama would be more about the distancing one has to do to leave this world. The film shows it in a short clip when Keanu Reeves freaks out and says he does not want to believe what he is being told about his world, but after that, he becomes a willing participant of the revolution and all action elements are exploited.

One critic said it best when he surmised the seriousness of The Matrix by comparing it how something could be translated for the phone book and be equivalent to what is in this film, but as the clip above shows, there is something more to the logic realm of the premise of the film and since the movie is a cultural artifact, I don’t mind the film leveling some understandable theory to the populace. Since theory is grounded on the law of a lot of writers from before, there is a granite casting, but nothing anyone says about The Matrix will make them overlook crucial points by other writers. However, like many things we become interested in, what can start out as a mundane interest, could change and become something serious. The insinuations about the fine details of the film could evaporate in someone’s mind after they got to know these philosophers better. The point would be prudent since a dumb film is what made an engrossing and difficult subject matter more easy to ascertain.

I say this in praise of the film. For the last two days and some research, I have also wondered if the potential here is for Inception as well. I don’t see the connection. The technology isn’t there and on a theoretical model, the opinion is too diverse on how deep down someone’s subconscious can go. There have been some work on varying levels of sleep, dreaming and consciousness, but the major point about Inception is that DiCaprio has to go through a personal journey in his mind to be able to get to his guilt factor. Freud and other psycho-analysts focus on these things to some level, but the filmmakers do not map out the terrain of the issue like the Matrix. The dumb Reeves film actually covers many points of interest in the discussion of reality and imaginary. The problem with Inception is that the film talks mostly about the in’s and out’s of the possible technology and what the rules are when you play with it. For me, this is the most boring thing in the world since it isn’t a scientific possibility anytime soon. The film would have been better served if it focused more on the theoretical possibilities of consciousness.

Edelstein on Inception

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Compliments to David Edelstein for his provoking review of Inception. The juxtaposition of his opinion is negative so you think I may be rooting for his review for cheerleader sake, but dissenting reviews against the majority opinion are necessary. Edelstein just makes his review more enduring since I found myself agreeing with many of his points. For the record, I read his review after I wrote my initial one, but I think we come together on a few critical points.

Inception (1st Viewing)

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The Notes Before the Review

Considering I still held my head in contemplative thinking twenty minutes after my screening, allow my thoughts here to be initial and possibly under developed. Unlike The Dark Knight, the plot of Inception tries to leave a good deal of the plot and themes up in the air. Some can call this ambiguous storytelling, theoretical play on imagination, or a whole host of other things. Either way, there are no one minute cram sessions with Inception to really understand everything that is going on. It’s also the film which I think will grow by leaps and bounds of what internet viewers can help symbolize in theory investigation over what is purposely missing in the plot. I have to stomach all ambitions of a regular review by generally dissenting against the film in wake of no convincing idea of what can explain the things about the movie which I am taking to be faults.

Either way, here I go. What looks like a larger mind puzzler of a movie does not seem to be a huge maze at all. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a thief of people’s thoughts. By means of a device and extensive training, he can get into the dreams of people and learn about their hidden thoughts in the same way people steal large amounts of cash – by breaking into physical confines and stealing documents that have the thoughts written on them. In other ways, he can talk with the conscious dreamer and make them make believe aspects of their lives which may or may not be true. He can influence lives and take the degrees of dreaming to levels which make people unaware of what is real and not real. Only do little test things help to keep people sturdy on what is reality. For DiCaprio’s character, it is the spinning of an object on a table. When constantly in motion, the dream is still ongoing, but when it stops, the person is back in reality.

In the basic story, DiCaprio gets together a team to do one last job. If the job can be done, a way can be found to get DiCaprio back to his past. Since his wife is dead and his children are isolated from visitation due to DiCaprio being a fugitive, he lives in exile and only visits his past in his personal dreams. Apparently, he has set up his best and worst memories of his wife to be a vault in his mind. When they were together, they grew to love each other over the course of fifty years in their dreams alone. The technology to make an existence out of your dreams was available then so the couple used it to create an alternate reality where they could make the world they wanted to live in. It’s when DiCaprio tried to get out and coerce his wife by artificially planting an idea in her mind to make her want to leave, did she become unglued with all of reality and eventually kill herself. Even though he tried his best to explain to her what was and wasn’t reality, she took the lead to end her life since she thought reality was just another dream. Her best memories were in another world so she wanted to go back there. She believed that is where their children really were.

As the story progresses, slowly but surely these tragic events are learned. The film starts with a developed idea of the science and slowly goes back into DiCaprio’s past. The audience gets to know the shorthand visions he sees everywhere. The rest of his team does not understand how they are starting to effect all of his work and so occasionally problems will happen in missions which are a result of DiCaprio’s unresolved problems. The thought process in the film is that your subconscious has feelings and acts out against your free will so when you are doing things in the dream world, the best idea is to do it with clarity of mind. Through hard ways, the team has to go through a lot danger and risk to get DiCaprio to finally face the demon part of his subconscious – his imprisoned wife. She is dead in mind and body, but he hangs onto her in his imagination. He treats the imaginary version of her as an equal. He converses and romanticizes her even though everything she is saying is what his subconscious is telling him back. The duality of his personality and grief is the other player in this romance. The final resolution is when he realizes this and tells her ghost that she is not the woman he loved and he has no use for her. She looks devastated (meaning, his ego and self esteem is hurt) but he still finds the grit to move on.

This is not a horrible concept. It’s science fiction flimsy which means a lot of things have to be generally accepted, but the film has an awkward way of going about it. Comparison wise, there is way to say how it is like the Matrix and how it better goes about characterization a lot better, but the film takes tip-toe steps to really map out the basic picture of DiCaprio’s past crisis. It could be me, but the end point should not be the revelation of how he compromised her feelings to make her want inadvertently end her life and his need for power over the mind is what crushed him in the end. The coming to grip with his guilt is the emotional center of the film, but the movie constantly asks you to consider other abstractions. It asks you to consider what is reality and whether or not he grew old and everything we see is just a dream back into his past? A brief clip shows an old couple walking together so are dreams a way of finding the fountain of youth? Does DiCaprio really find reality and salvation in the end or is that too a dream? The film ends on the suggestion of a possibility, but what is there to really consider? Even if it’s still a dream, the audience has little idea of what the dream entails or how it is different than anything or what has changed with DiCaprio. If the wife (Marion Cotillard) is correct and she found the way to be with her children, the film does not give much weight to her situation to consider. She seems to be in his memory and if they really did age together to retirement age, the only picture of that reality is a short clip.

Toward the end, the film starts to get voracious with its options. The references to different things build up and make the audience consider more possibilities, but the reason these hang on ideas feel scant or underdeveloped is because the depth of the drama and the action is dedicated to the elaborate plot of inception itself. There is a lot of detail that goes into the taking of someone’s thoughts from their dreams and the discussion about it. Finally, when things pick up, chase sequences and action scenes go on for extended period of times. The active dramatics look mellow compared to the sillier action movies, but the mapping out of the sequences is still far too extensive. Too many intricacies of the story are dependent on generalizations of science fiction reality where anything and everything is up to the generalized imagination. It’s cool to see worlds fold up on each other, but the effect wears off quickly. It is also cool to see action scenes on different levels of dreaming and involve characters in different ways, but again, it’s a novelty idea. The gist of the action is still about the usual chases and other things. The biggest impact is still a car colliding into water. The slowness of the moment just seems to be halted more.

My argument isn’t against action. I just think the film would have been better served if it did more to base everything from DiCaprio’s emotional history. At the very end, we see how a train colliding through a street is due to DiCaprio’s memory of an event with his wife. We also understand that other assailants who are after him and others is due to his emotional problems, but these are too generalized. The only specific thing is how his wife is a consistent assassin of his aspirations by killing off necessary people. What the film could have done is give the audience an education about how life with his wife was and begin to destruct everything until it evolved into an action film. The breaking down of reality could mean for some tricky situations and definitely some action moments considering DiCaprio’s occupation, but the story does not imagine the concept that way. I guess I have say the concept is limited. The film makes things too generalized where answers about what happens can be easily explained later on.

Another element which did not help me with the story is how the film harped on the idea of his lost love as meaningful before it became meaningful to the story. In the film, DiCaprio says inception can only work when you plant a simple idea in someone and let it naturally grow. While watching the movie, I didn’t find the relationship angle grow at all. I felt like I was told to believe in it from the beginning and had to make due with whatever things I just wasn’t feeling in their story angle. Since this is a large theme, it could have been better honored, but it also meant re-doing a lot of the design of the film so there is no easy answer, but I consider my suggestion of making the relationship better to be a good idea. Basically, Ellen Page is the main protagonist with how we follow her, but she isn’t a character in the three dimensional sense. She is a voyeur into DiCaprio’s emotions but I think a straightforward story without her and focusing on just him would have sufficed.

These thoughts came with my first viewing. I want to see it again so I may be amending some comments, but I’m sure I will be adding on. More later….

A Suspected Fallacy

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An Argument Against The End of The Usual Suspects

Released in 1995 and already a cornerstone of American cinema, The Usual Suspects is a challenge to Howard Hawks idea that all a film needs is three great moments to be, itself, great. All the Bryan Singer film has is one collected moment of acknowledged greatness. It is the ending. After two hours of crime storytelling that chronicles the hustle of gangsters who have been brought together by a mysterious figure, the end pulls the rug out on every supposed idea we have about the plot. Going into the story, all the characters are hired under mysterious circumstances. Uncomfortable with the uniqueness of their job, they wonder aloud about their purpose is (like what they are stealing and what does it entail?) and who their backer is. They do not even immediately know what they have to steal. All they are given is tasks and assignments to follow.

The curiosity about the work builds as the legend of Keyser Soze takes fruition. He is the backer and the mark of legend. As every occupation has its own legends, the crime world in this area of the world has Soze. He is timeless and invincible and driven by demons that no dares to combat. The story of the planned crime is first person. A leftover thug involved is talking to a police detective and relaying events of what went down. The authorial narrative of the story is the perfect way to build the story of the film around the idea of myth and legend. The detective mixes his own ideas of this figment criminal and the audience drowns itself in his curiosity and problem solving tactics. We also get the criminal’s objective, but their tales are shortened to small interpersonal dramas. They each have their own purpose to the unraveling of the perfect crime. Keyser Soze himself is a subplot, but the kind that umbrella’s over the entire film and wraps up everything the audience wants to know. Even though there is a definite thing the gang is looking to steal, it is Soze who is the real Macguffin in the film.

To quickly explain the ending, the suspected thug is done talking to the detective. Both sides seem content in understanding that the riddle of Keyser Soze will remain one and he is likely now underground after all the other criminals have met their fate. However, as he is leaving, the detective starts to put together minor details of the conversation back into his mind. Small things start to register with him on other levels. He begins to notice places and generic names were falsified since he starts to realize they are the names of different things in his office. Starting to connect a few dots, everything comes together. In the span of the seconds, the whole conversation relays back in his mind and he is tripping over the revelation. As he is trying to put his body into motion to stop the man from leaving the police department, a sketch comes through via fax to confirm the unlikely criminal sitting in the office the entire time is really Keyser Soze.  A witness survived an encounter with him and was able to tell sketch artists a real physical description. The problem is that it’s all too late and when the detective gets down to the ground level of the police department, he sees no one is around. Walking around outside, Soze has vanished.

The revelation is startling since the criminal is a cripple who carries half of his body with a limp. Played by Kevin Spacey, he looks like the antithesis of a master criminal. He is the center of the story since he tells the audience everything, but other criminals have other levels of interest and intrigue. Still, it makes sense that he would be behind everything since he is the one controlling the discussion about Soze, but as the audience follows along with the detective’s realization by watching Spacey walk outside the police department and slowly remove the limp in his walk to show a confident and casual stride. With both the detective’s thoughts and Spacey walking, there is a multi-leveled revelation of the big reveal. One way that the ending is satisfying is because it cuts across numerous levels of the story. Usually when these endings happen, they try to be huge reveals but leave many fragments of the story behind. The Usual Suspects compliments aspects of the whole film with its ending.

My problem with the ending is that it isn’t a reveal. When the film debuted, an advertisement in a magazine for the film quoted a critic who said if you were able to guess the ending, there was a top place at the FBI waiting for you. To predict the ending meant you were observant like an FBI officer and noticing everything about your surroundings, but the film does not give you a chance to really show you underneath the detective’s coffee cup or various pictures on his wall. In fact, the film consistently keeps the small details of his office in an unclear background. Of course, all the clues are right there for the detective to see and have a memory for, but the film does not make his office a thorough environment for this level of observation. The film talks the tonal objective of time and space to make you consider anything outside the elemental drama of what the characters say and do. The audience is following an intricate story with varying details about many characters, but those details are not necessary because they do not lead anywhere. Certain things are explained in the end which change some of the stories, but the stories themselves do not really play into configuring the end. All you get is that the most unlikely character is exactly who you did not expect him to be.

So, the ending is a creation of an end. It’s a better short film by itself than anything else. The music makes the reveal more dramatic in generic ways, but nothing about the end really meshes with what has been shown previously. There is no continuation and if I am going to compliment the filmmakers, I will do so in the small terms of a cute idea for a thrilling moment. The limited attraction is what makes the idea lose all the cohesive elements it needs.

The Master to Shoot Next Month

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Courtesy of the best Paul Thomas Anderson website, Cigs and Red Vines, comes exclusive information that his next film, The Master, will begin shooting next month. This is after various news reports suggested the fate of the project was up in the air, but credit goes out to this website for actually tracking down PTA himself to get the actual word on what is up. In case anyone wants more information on the work, a script review can be found here.

Toy Story 3

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It is a little weird that Pixar just did a sequel for the Toy Story series since the last one came in 1999. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps will prove there is no timetable for how long a sequel takes to make, but the changes that have happened with Pixar since the 19990s seem to be enormous. No longer is the company the slightly more creative and comedic branch of the Disney animated corporation. When the original Toy Story was made in 1995, it got a lot of good press, but remember, it was Disney’s 1992 film, Beauty and the Beast, which got an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Respectable American animation was still a debate. Then Dreamworks challenged Pixar by taking on their A Bug’s Life with Antz in 1998 and I don’t think there was that much difference between the movies.

Considering the press and success of the new Toy Story movie, it’s obvious people still remember the series. The story structure of the series is classical so Pixar updates the vehicle with some changes in tone and approach. As the humans around the toys get older and grow out of playing with them, the toys are forced to look beyond the initial interest of their personalities. The film makes this relevant on the level that the toys are always discovering new things about life and the ways of humans as they go from one escapade to another. Only Woody seems to have a clear minded grip on different situations, but even he is surprised by some new things outside the confines of Andy’s comfortable room. Then there is the fact that the majority of the story is set outside Andy’s room and is about the toys’ transition from the comfort of their owner to new settings.

The loss of innocence is an easy and repeated theme for animated movies. As the 1994 Alex Proyas film, The Crow, once said, “Childhood ends when you know when you’re going to die.” Death isn’t the staple subject, but the loss of aspects of someone’s childhood is consistently investigated. All Toy Story changes is the focus by seeing it through the eyes of living toys. Their individual charms and non-knowledge of common human things make them good fodder for comedy. The talent of the writers for emotional scenarios to fill in between the action and comedy is what is the elastic glue for the stories to work. However, from children’s literature to other animated movies, the reversal of general human situations (especially the experiences of children) into ones for living objects or talking animals is normal.

Like I have said before, the major innovation of Pixar over the last 10 years has been the development of major movie structures in their animated movies. The allusions to Buster Keaton in Up and Charlie Chaplin in Wall E is more than personality overlaps within the characters. Yet, Toy Story 3 is a classical run-of-the-mill story development. The story has a classical point A to B objective. The only alteration is when the story starts to chronicle back to the experiences of one of the sinister toys in the story to explain how he came to be evil. The flashback allows Pixar to play with some montage and scenario, but nothing as developed or elaborate as in Up. In fact, from recent Tim Burton movies to other animated movies, the packaged explanation of an evil character is now a scapegoat. The moralization has to be convenient to keep the logic useful for children. Since no animated film will go near the fray of pain like exhibited in some Miyazaki movies, they have to make things understandable. Yes, Up has a similar flashback to explain its main villain, but the flashback in that film is not the only elaboration of the story. In Toy Story 3, it is. The only moment of individual distinction which stood out to me is the final scene when Andy is handing off his toys to a little girl so she continue his tradition. The quality of observation is beyond what most animated movies can summon.

I say all of this while really liking the movie. As I was watching it, I kept thinking about Over the Hedge. Released a few years prior, the movie is pretty much standard fare for animated movies. The only exception is that it is continuously entertaining and clever throughout. The enjoyment factor of the entertainment is what makes the packaged emotional moments feel more endearing and heartfelt than what they may be on paper. There is a reason animated movies seem to be able to do this with a little more consistency than Hollywood live action movies. Jeffrey Katzenburg was on the Charlie Rose Show recently and explained how the movie business was having difficulty trying to find a good way to make memorable movies. DVD sales are down and the recycling of ideas seems to be non-stop, but animated movies have to develop for years before they can be made. More writers and artists have a chance to look at the development of the movie and add elements of their personality to it. In the 1930s, Hollywood hired out every major writer to live in apartments in Hollywood for extended periods of time. The community environment allowed for writers to see everything that everyone was working on. Today, it’s lucky if a team of writers can develop something over the course of years, but final development really comes when a select number decide to fully take on something and make it their own.

The effect of watching Toy Story 3 is the effect of watching a movie that seems to have enough smart and inviting personalities put into one movie and constantly showing itself throughout the film. The movie does not have a single personality in that it wants to be about a certain theme over other things. A story exists, but the movie is comfortable referencing anything it can get its hands on. Since Hollywood seems to be out of ideas with making the dramatic exciting and entertaining, maybe the new animated tradition of story and character development is the way to go to make memorable entertainment. I didn’t find Toy Story 3 to be in the same class of its better movies, but I am happy I saw it and happily honor the experience as one only Pixar can give me.

Short Quip: Kauffmann on Ozu

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With my marvel over other arts, here is Stanley Kauffmann reviewing the re-issue of Ozu’s I Was Born, But…, by cross aligning an old critical point to Ozu’s greater film aesthetic.

“The poet and dance critic Edwin Denby said often that what he prized most in ballet was stillness, which I take to mean the recovery through motion of a resident serenity, an apprehension behind the dancing of a quiet pure existence. This view relates to Ozu. The best among his films, Tokyo Story, has a certain stillness behind all that we see and hear, a hushed apprehension of human mystery.”

…I love the idea, but it only goes so far. Tokyo Story is said to have been made from the compositional point of view of someone praying. It is why the film stays stationery in a consistent manner throughout the film. The position is a callback to a million modes of cultural investigation over the religious and social norms in Japan at the time. Since the film is generational look at Japan from the vista view of traveling grandparents, the film mixes articles of spiritual, social, and inter-personal. What makes the idea even more appropriate for Shintoism (the national religion of Japan) is that it is like Buddhism and that it is a discipline of behavior and meditation than just belief. I know of many Western religious films, but none are conditioned to a specific structural vision like Eastern religious films are. Looking at a Buddhist (a similar religion to Shintoism) film like Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…Spring, it is more about a methodical approach dictating how people live their lives.

If a distinction can be made, I think Western religions are more about revelation and the spiritual quest inside. Revelation holds firm while life tries to balance itself out amid all the chaos of temptation and sin. Day-to-day lifestyle is important, but belief is more important so the films, books, and other works of art have a continuously changing flux of order in their vision of sight-line. Eastern religions also have people face temptations, but the general motion is always in the background. It is about how people center themselves amidst all the chaos. In case more clarity is necessary, the importance in Christianity is being able to get to the finish line of life with belief fully in tact while Eastern religions believe in predicating your every life to a new philosophy and seeing the mud turn to granite slowly over time. This important difference is one reason why the composition in Eastern religious films are generally stunted to a kind of perspective, but Kauffmann points out how a vision of human life can also be considered hospitable in the comfort zone of a unique art like ballet.