INSIDE OUT: Sweet Emotions

Twenty years ago Pixar Animation Studios revolutionized cinema with the first full length completely computer-generated film. Two decades later and Pixar is still one of the most consistently groundbreaking studios in the business. Inside Out provided a great opportunity for Pixar to reinvent itself in the wake of a slough of mediocrity.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Directors: Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen (co-director)

Writers: Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley

Cast: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Richard Kind, Kaitlyn Dias, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan

Runtime: 94 mins.

2015

A scientist believes if you pick a lie to pieces, the pieces are the truth!

-Eugene O'Neill

The idea that your body is one whole and complete object is a lie. The idea that you govern yourself by a unified rational consciousness is a lie. The idea that you are in control is a lie. Inside Out picks this lie to pieces and represents the pieces anthropomorphically. They are Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and any number of other little blobby brain workers skittering through your mind. The five primary emotions live out their lives in the control center (Headquarters). They are literally in control.

Pixar's latest film feels like a discovery. There's a whole world inside of us--more than that, a whole social system. That system is responsible for all the functions of the brain (emotions, dreams, memories, abstract thought...), and when the system is broken, the person is broken. This is the world of Inside Out, where the stakes are of the utmost magnitude: a little girl's happiness.

LEFT BEHIND: An Open Letter

Director: Vic Armstrong
Writers: Paul Lalonde, John Patus
Cast: Nicolas Cage
Runtime: 110 mins.
2014

Dear Nicolas Cage,

I write to you as a longtime examiner of your livelihood. I currently hold the unique position of one who has seen your most recent attempt to shrug off crushing debt, Left Behind. I found it mostly to be a movie. That being said, I have a few questions that I believe you, and only you, Nicolas Cage, can answer.

I want to start with something real. Are you a religious man? I know that you were raised Catholic and that you staunchly refuse to comment upon your faith in interviews. I know your brother is a Christian pastor. But what about you? In interviews you suggest that taking this role was not just about the money, that you connected with the script and its themes. If that is really true, why do you sleepwalk through this movie like it's a PSA for fire safety? You're more invested in this library poster.

JURASSIC WORLD: Incoherentus Rex

Director: Colin Trevorrow
Writers: Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Colin Trevorrow, Derek Connolly
Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D'Onofrio, Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson, Irrfan Khan, BD Wong
Runtime: 124 mins.
2015

Other reviews in this series:

Jurassic Park
The Lost World
Jurassic Park III

This week I've been posting reviews of the Jurassic series and refining my theory that the unifying theme of the franchise is that each movie functions as a metacommentary on its own existence. Not only has this been a fun discovery, it has also pushed me towards a deeper (or at least more forgiving) perspective on the sequels.

Jurassic World continues the cursorily self-aware tradition of the previous films. In this sequel, appearing twenty-two years after the original and fourteen years after the last entry, the theme park is finally open. Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is running a tight ship. She's calculating, efficient, and has to deal with her two nephews for the weekend! She abandons them though.

Attendance numbers spike whenever the genetics team, led by Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong), cook up a new attraction, so they've created the biggest baddie of them all, Indominus Rex. To nobody's surprise but the characters', the Indominus Rex escapes and begins wreaking dramatically pertinent havoc on the park. It's up to Owen (Chris Pratt) and his raptor buddies to save the day.

JURASSIC PARK III: Cheerful Disrespect

Director: Joe Johnston
Writers: Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor
Cast: Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Tea Leoni, Alessandro Nivola, Mark Harelik, Laura Dern
Runtime: 92 mins.
2001

Other reviews in this series:

Jurassic Park
The Lost World
Jurassic World

Having not seen the movie in years, I fully expected Jurassic Park III to be the low point of the franchise. After all, this is the first Jurassic Park film not directed by the legendary Steven Spielberg. How could it possibly stack up?

Imagine my surprise when I had a blast with Jurassic Park III. It's streamlined and willfully stupid--the perfect antidote for The Lost World's cynical gloom. Not only that, but the film fits beautifully with my ongoing theory about the franchise's self-awareness.

THE LOST WORLD: Metasequelitis

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: David Koepp
Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Arliss Howard, Vince Vaughn, Richard Schiff, Vanessa Lee Chester, Richard Attenborough
Runtime: 129 mins.
1997

Other reviews in this series:

Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park III
Jurassic World

It was as if Spielberg threw up his arms and yelled, "Alright, you want more dinosaurs? YOU'RE GETTING MORE GODDAMNED DINOSAURS."

I called Jurassic Park a metapromotional movie, and if that is the case, then The Lost World is certainly a self-reflexive sequel about sequels. The movie begins with John Hammond (an increasingly feeble Richard Attenborough) explaining to a cynical cranky Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) that Isla Nublar is not the only island with dinosaurs on it. There's another one called Isla Sorna, and the dinos there are flourishing in the wild. Having given up on his capitalist aspirations, Hammond simply wants Malcolm for a team intended to observe and document the animals in the wild: a team that includes photojournalist Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn), weapons expert Eddie Carr (Richard Schiff), and paleontologist Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), who happens to be Malcolm's girlfriend... and also happens to be on the island already, without his knowledge. So he is strongarmed into returning to his worst nightmare.

Once the team arrives on the island, they find they are not alone. Nefarious corporation InGen has sent an enormous squad--led by big game hunter Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite) and prissy businessman Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard)--to pillage the island, capture dinosaurs, and transport them to San Diego. This plays out as an extended action sequence that involves many jeeps, many fancy guns, and many species of dinosaur being brutalized as our heroes watch through binoculars from an outcropping. The heroes function as an audience stand-in for the scene, watching the perverse spectacle play out in front of them with stricken looks on their faces. In this moment, Spielberg's metacommentary couldn't be clearer: You wanted a sequel because you loved the wonder and majesty of Jurassic Park, but the serialization of a self-contained story can only violate the wonder of the original. The spectacle is captured and caged by greedy capitalists, all for the benefit of a viewing audience.

JURASSIC PARK: A Paradigm Shift

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Michael Crichton, David Koepp
Cast: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Samuel L. Jackson, Bob Peck, Martin Ferrero, Joseph Mazzello, Ariana Richards, Wayne Knight
Runtime: 127 mins.
1993

Other reviews in this series:

The Lost World
Jurassic Park III
Jurassic World

I must admit upfront, it would be impossible for me to craft anything close to an objective review of Jurassic Park. Released in 1993 (my birth year), this is on the short list of films that have been omnipresent in my life, having grown up with an older brother who worshiped Crichton and Spielberg both. I must have seen it dozens of times, and when a piece of art saturates your childhood, you can't help but sink into every piece of dialogue and camera shot as if it represents how the movie inevitably must be.

All that is to say, I love Jurassic Park with all my heart, but I have a poor idea of exactly how proficient the movie is. Part of that is me, but stepping back to take a look at the film's history makes one realize just how much of that has to do with Spielberg's artistry, both within and without of the film itself.

STARRY EYES: Constellation Frustration

Directors: Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Writers: Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Cast: Alex Essoe, Amanda Fuller, Noah Segan, Fabianne Therese, Pat Healy, Maria Olsen
Runtime: 98 mins.
2014

As you can see above, the DVD cover for Starry Eyes features a young dehydrated woman with her head tilted at a strange angle. She's probably looking up at that bizarrely generous pullquote from Time. "Did you see the same movie I did, Michael Roffman?" she asks. "Or maybe it's that you've never seen any of Lynch or Cronenberg's work." After all, those are two directors known more than anything for their uncanny weirdness, their ability to make us squint and squeam and walk away feeling gross, but also feeling like we'd just witnessed something totally unique.

The Starry Eyes DVD cover literally features a woman with stars on her eyes. That's pretty on the nose for a movie about eyes.

The central beat-you-over-the-heady metaphor gets even worse when you start watching the movie. Our protagonist is this girl Sarah (Alex Essoe), and she wants to be a star (!), but hasn't managed to land a breakthrough role. So instead of living the la-la land dream, she's stuck working at a lousy restaurant called Big Taters (essentially Hooters but potato-themed) and hanging around with a group of lousy millennials who just want to hang around at the poolside and party in dumb ways. But when a mysterious production company called Astraeus (!) Pictures (which means "starry surprise" in Greek or something like that) posts an ad seeking a young actress full of life and eager to give herself to the production of a film called The Silver Scream (!), she feels she has found her breakthrough role. Unfortunately, the casting process requires more of Sarah than she may be willing to give... such as her immortal soul (!).

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD - Furiouser and Furiouser

Director: George Miller
Writers: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nick Lathouris
Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton
Runtime: 120 mins.
2015

The current age of Hollywood has been defined by the resuscitation of long dead intellectual properties. Film producers have been picking through the elephants' graveyard of defunct franchises in an effort to find bankable properties that have preexisting brand recognition. The idea is that if we recognize a string of words in the title of a new product as something familiar that existed ten or twenty or thirty years ago, that's free advertising. It's treading water. It's safe.

So we've been given the dubious gifts of humongous updated versions of Robocop, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Trek, and The Evil Dead. Coming down the pipeline are new Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, Terminator, and even National Lampoon: Vacation updates. Not to mention the impending annual release of Star Wars film after Star Wars film.

These safe choice reboots elicit little more than a shrug from folks with the slightest degree of better judgment. Dipping into the pool of nostalgia just because it is relatively risk-free never produces anything worthwhile. The businessmen at the top do this because the built-in fanbases will bring in enough $$$ to turn a profit on these films regardless of quality. They aren't passion projects. They're where passion goes to die.

I can't wait for the Full House reboot.

But what about reboots that see the original creators return to the franchises they birthed decades ago? Surely there is some merit in this, surely the passion can be rekindled? Unfortunately we have seen this a few times, and we have let ourselves be excited, only to have the rug pulled from under us. George Lucas returns to Star Wars in 1999. Steven Spielberg returns to Indiana Jones in 2008. Ridley Scott returns to Alien in 2012. Crushing disappointment after crushing disappointment after crushing disappointment.

Everything mentioned above is what Mad Max: Fury Road is not. Now let me tell you what Mad Max: Fury Road is.

EX MACHINA: Artificial Insemination

Director: Alex Garland
Writer: Alex Garland
Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander
Runtime: 108 mins.
2015

It's hard to know what to call Ex Machina. Sci-fi, of course, that goes without saying. It's about a young programmer named Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) who wins a mysterious contest that lets him spend a week with his reclusive boss Nathan (Oscar Isaac), only to discover that the purpose of his visit is to test Nathan's brilliant AI creation Ava (Alicia Vikander), to see whether she passes Nathan's version of the Turing Test. That's prime sci-fi material. But beyond that? Beyond that it gets messy.

Sometimes Ex Machina feels like a drama, a philosophical film of ideas. Sometimes it feels like a romance. Sometimes a coming of age story. Sometimes suspense, or even horror. The film's toe-dipping in all these different genres tends to correspond with revelation of information--how much we understand about the situation, plot, and characters at any given moment. I just said the movie "gets messy," but perhaps I should have chosen a different phrase, because Ex Machina is a masterclass of tight narrative and tonal control. It doesn't feel like a romance sometimes and horror other times because the storytelling is slapdash or undisciplined. The dipping in and out of genres is part of writer/director Alex Garland's master plan to jerk us around until we're forced to realize nasty things about ourselves and our assumptions that we should have already known. Ex Machina is an exercise in empathy that troubles us to our core.

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON - Growing Pains

Director: Joss Whedon
Writer: Joss Whedon
Cast: Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, James Spader, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Paul Bettany, Samuel L. Jackson, Don Cheadle, Cobie Smulders, Anthony Mackie, Andy Serkis
Runtime: 141 mins.
2015

The Avengers: Age of Ultron is immediately different than its predecessor: it opens with a bang and a crackle. Scene 1 has the Avengers careening through a snowy wood, laying the ever-loving beatdown on a host of HYDRA thugs. Far more engaging than the dank exploding bunker opening of The Avengers, Age of Ultron shows the group at the height of camaraderie and teamwork. We see definitively that the Avengers are back. For now.

So begins the first of many comparisons between this game-changing series' first and second installments. The comparisons are unavoidable, occasionally unflattering, and often enlightening. Age of Ultron is a movie about growing pains. It's droopier, gloopier, stuffier, and a great deal more complex than the original. So if you're looking for more of the same thrills of discovery and wonder, you might be disappointed. Rightly so. Not everything can be a beginning, and the honeymoon phase has to end sometime. Joss Whedon seems to know this better than anyone, and gives us an Age of Ultron that has a handful of flaws, numerous successes, and never stops challenging the viewer.

Which is better? Everyone will benefit if we put that question to bed right now. Age of Ultron is a step forward in development, which means change has to happen, and change can be hard. But that doesn't mean fresh newborns are inherently better than awkward adolescents.