This is Wolfwood and you are in the Pantry

on Blu Ray this week

Monsters, Inc. Starring John (Speed Racer) Goodman, and Billy (City Slickers) Crystal.

Up.  Starring Ed (Elf) Asner, and Christopher (Twelve Monkeys) Plummer

And on DVD

Undercover Brother. Starring Eddie (John Q) Griffin and

Chi (“Pushing Daisies”) McBride.

Next week Star Trek and who knows what else will become part of the pantry.

P.S. for those of you who care the Blu Ray releases of Snatch, and Léon

are coming this year.

Until later J.S.Wolfwood

(1)  Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ($42.3 million, $9995 per screen, $293.3 million total):  Well, I’m not claiming it was a bad weekend for the ghettobots, but the big-ticket sequel did slide by 61% this weekend.  It’s tempting to chalk that up to the holiday, but I’m not convinced punching England in the eye was actually to blame, at least not fully.  Likely, that combined with bad reviews, the opening of Ice Age, and the monster opening week to limit the number of people buying tickets this weekend.  It’s still going to make a serious run at $400 million, but for a movie that opened only a hair less impressively than The Dark Knight, which ended up making well over $500 million total … well, all of a sudden, Revenge of the Fallen starts looking a little weaker.  Only a little, but hey, I’ll take what I can get, ’cause that movie sucks three-day nutsack.

(2)  Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs ($41.6 million, $10,171 per screen, $66.7 million total):  I’m gonna classify this one as a mild disappointment.  It managed to make only about as much in its first five days as the previous film in the series, and that’s despite the summer release date and the premium 3D ticket prices.  Sure, the holiday hurt, and the Transformers hurt more.  So what?  I think Fox ought to have been able to get more out of this movie.

(3)  Public Enemies ($25.2 million, $7580 per screen, $40.1 million total):  $40 mil in five days is pretty decent for a gangster movie, but I don’t think it’s much more than decent, and you can thank Johnny Depp for that number.  Whatever he made on this movie, it was probably worth it.  Nobody seems to be raving about the movie, though, so I’m guessing legs aren’t going to be as good as might normally be the case for an older-skewing movie like this one.

(4)  The Proposal ($12.8 million, $4149 per screen, $94.3 million total):  Down only 31% despite the holiday, The Propsal has turned into a significant hit, and as far as date movies go, it’s got a few more weeks before any real competition shows up.  A major success for Disney this summer.

(5)  The Hangover ($11.2 million, $3670 per screen, $205 million total):  Speaking of major successes, this one might be able to make it to $250 million before it’s all said and done.  It might get hurt by Bruno this weekend, though.

(6)  Up ($6.5 million, $2455 per screen, $264.8 million total):  Dropping 50% this weekend, that’s its worst decline so far, but not too shabby considering that Ice Age opened.  It became Pixar’s second-highest-grossing movie, which is awesome (news that is tempered somewhat when you realize that if inflation is considered, it ranks only seventh on the list … although really, that’s still pretty frickin’ good).

(7)  My Sister’s Keeper ($5.7 million, $2221 per screen, $26.5 million total):  Crumbling 53%, that’s not a result conducive to many more weeks in cinemas.

(8)  The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 ($2.5 million, $1328 per screen, $58.5 million total):  For a movie that cost $100 million, this is a fairly pathetic performance.  Can we get Tony Scott to stop making movies now?  Who am I kidding; he’ll probably direct the inevitable Voltron movie and make something even worse than Transformers.

(9)  Year One ($2.3 million, $1037 per screen, $38.3 million total):  Continuing its unimpressive run, I’m pleased that this will be the final week in which I write about this movie.

(10)  Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian ($2 million, $1440 per screen, $167.7 million total):  Ditto.

Next week we get Bruno and I Love You, Beth Cooper.  The Austrian gets about $27 million, and the cheerleader saves neither the world nor the box office, pulling in, oh, I’m a-gonna say $13 million.

Russell floated an interesting theory about how to interpret the film … one involving Carl dying at an early point in the movie after being court-ordered to vacate his home.  In this reading of the film, everything in the movie beginning with the morning on which Carl and his helium-powered home take flight represents a deathbed fantasy of how the elderly widower wishes his life could play out.

I have to say that I definitely come down on the Fatboy side of this argument in feeling like this particular reading is probably the wrong way to go.  However, Russell makes some good points, and it’s an entertaining discussion no matter which side of the issue one lands on.

What I ended up taking away from the conversation was no small amount of amazement that a summer kiddie movie could spark this type of conversation.  That, and a renewed conviction that Pixar is the best thing going in Hollywood.

Click here to visit Cort and Fatboy’s website.  The podcast in question is the one labelled Thursday, June 11, 2009 (Part II).  The talk about Up begins at about the 28-minute mark, but as always with Cort and Fatboy, the entire show is well worth a listen.

(10)  Cars

Was there any doubt?  Hands down THE worst Pixar movie, this is still better than all but a small handful of the CGI-animated features all the other studios have ever produced.  (In my opinion, of course.)  Kung Fu Panda is better; that’s one.  Um … um … um … hold on a sec, I feel certain there are others … um … um … oooh!  Bolt!  That one’s better.  Um … oh!  Surf’s Up is better, arguably.  Yep, that’s about it.

So for this to be Pixar’s “worst” movie is hardly an insult.

Truth be told, it’s marvelous, with some of the best animation Hollywood has ever produced, and it seems to have an imaginative hold over small children that is perhaps unparalleled.  I guess I can sympathize with some people not liking certain of the vocie actors (Owen Wilson, Larry the Cable Guy, George Carlin, Cheech Marin; all have their detractors), but I like them all, and my goodness, Paul Newman…?  Awesome.

Points off for having the least-inspired music of any Pixar film.  The Randy Newman score is unmemorable, and at least one of the songs — the James Taylor ballad — is nausea-inducingly bad.  A few points returned for use of “Sh-Boom.”

(9)  Up

I think most of the rest of the moviegoing world is a leeeetle more impressed by Up than I was, but don’t take that as an insult against the movie.  It’s an(other) instant classic from the studio.  However, some of the adult content — all of which is exceedingly lovely — feels a bit out of touch with the more fantastical, childish elements.  I mean, really, it’s a little hard to believe that the scene in which Ellie sits in her front yard (eyes closed to the wind, calmly trying to accept the fact that she and Carl can’t have children) exists in the same movie as dogs who pilot fighter planes.

Really, in Up, it’s the sillier elements that feel out of touch with the serious moments.  Weird to say, but it’s true.

However, on their own merits, those silly moments are awfully amusing and satisfying.  My only complaint with Up isn’t much of a complaint: that it doesn’t quite manage to fully work as an entire, complete movie in the way that Pixar’s other movies have.  But who cares?  All of the parts are awesome.

Awesome score by Michael Giacchino, his best to date as of this writing.

(8)  A Bug’s Life

Hilarious, exciting, and beautifully animated, this take-off of Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven had people worried for Pixar prior to its release.  DreamWorks had the similarly-themed Antz in the pipeline at the same time, and rushed it into release several months before Pixar’s film was ready, prompting fears that the showdown between the two would be a serious case of early-bird-gets-the-worm.

Instead, it was a serious case of tortoise-beats-hare; A Bug’s Life got better reviews AND made more money.  It’s also still talked about over a decade later, whereas Antz (an admittedly decent movie), not so much.

A wonderful score by Randy Newman is one of the film’s highlights, and if you don’t love those pill bugs, then go sit in the corner and think about it for a while until you’ve changed your mind.  The voice cast (including Dave Foley, Dennis Leary, and Kevin Spacey) is typically awesome, and those end-credits “bloopers” remain an often-imitated, never-bettered exit plan.

(7  Toy Story

Shocking that the classic Toy Story would be this far down my list, is it?  Stripped of my credibility, am I?  Well, I can live with that, and I stand by my ranking like Joachim stood by Khan even after Kirk blew ‘em all to hell.

Toy Story IS a great movie, there’s no disputing that.  The animation is (still) great, the voiceover work is some of the best animation has ever seen (it remains a signature role for both Tom Hanks and Tim Allen), the Randy Newman songs and score are lovely, the concept is genius, the execution practically flawless.  There is practically nothing bad you can say about this movie, and it single-handedly changed the entire industry.

That’s just how good the next six movies on this list are.

(6)  Ratatouille

Here’s how good Pixar is: they took a movie with a title most people can’t pronounce about a sewer rat who not only spends most of the movie in a kitchen in and around people’s food but BECOMES A GOURMET CHEF and they turned it into a hit.  A BIG hit, at that.  Even in France; hell, especially in France.

What’s next, a charming romance between cockroaches set inside a septic tank?  If Pixar makes it, it stands a decent chance at success.

A great Parisienne score by Michael Giacchino is one of the movie’s many virtues; others include gorgeous animation (particularly the backgrounds), good characters,  and Pixar’s continued refusal to pander by including lowest-common-denominator jokes every ten seconds.

(5)  Toy Story 2

Creating a sequel to a genuine classic is never an easy task, especially when the sequel is mostly unnecessary.  So, of course, leave it to Pixar to make a movie that is not only better than the first, but quite a bit better.  Along with several other 1999 animated releases (such as the classics The Iron Giant and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut), Toy Story 2 was instrumental in convincing the Academy to introduce an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.  After all, there was serious talk of Toy Story 2 receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and if it hadn’t come out during a relatively strong year for movies, it might have happened.

As with all the best sequels, this one doesn’t settle for rehashing the plot of the first film; instead, it takes the themes of the first film and grafts them onto a new story, deepening the meanings that were present initially.  More (most?) importantly, it’s just as entertaining, if not more so, and introduces new characters who fit seamlessly into the mix.  This is all a good omen for Toy Story 3, although the bar is raised so incredibly high that they’ll be forgiven if they can’t quite manage to clear it this time.

(4) WALL*E

Remember the “complaints” I had about Up feeling a bit like two movies that don’t quite mesh together?  Well, a lot of people feel that way about WALL*E, claiming that the silent-film section with WALL*E and EVE is betrayed by the tubbo-humans-in-space resolution.  I can see where they’re coming from.

They’re wrong, of course, as far as I’m concerned.

The whole point of the movie is that WALL*E’s optimism and exuberance and determination are exactly what humanity — not just the ones on the future, but the ones in the present (us, in other words) — needs to avoid ruining the planet.  It’s a heavy topic for a kid’s movie, but who said this was actually a kid’s movie?

Not only is it one of Pixar’s best, it’s one of the best sci-fi movies that’s ever been made.  Some of the animation is so good it’ll make you wonder how it was even possible.  I mean, that CGI Fred Willard looks just like the real thing!

(3)  Monsters, Inc.

With perhaps THE best final shot in movie history (I’ll put it up there against anything, you just bring it right on), Monsters, Inc. was probably marked the moment in time in which Pixar became an entity separate from Disney in the minds of moviegoers.  Toy Story had certainly been primarily seen as a Disney movie, and neither A Bug’s Life nor Toy Story 2 was entirely able to reverse that trend.  By the time Monsters, Inc. left theatres, however, something had changed, and the world has never really looked back.

To think that Shrek got the first Oscar for feature animation instead of this movie makes me want to poo in a box and mail it to someone.  I don’t have Oscar’s address, though, so I might have to settle for sending it to the local newspaper, and I’m just not sure how effective that would be.

Aided once again by an excellent Randy Newman score, this movie has everything: laughs, thrills, even a couple of very mild scares.  The chase inside the door factory remains one of the best action set pieces ever committed to film; it’s good enough that you can imagine Spielberg and Cameron nodding their heads in appreciation.

(2)  Finding Nemo

Pixar’s biggest hit, this undersea tale hits all the right notes on every count: Thomas Newman’s score is a classic, the voice cast is terrific (especially Albert Brooks and Ellen Degeneres), the colors are vibrant as vibrant can be without being in a movie titled Speed Racer, the story is exciting and touching and sentimental without being gooey.

The mind shudders to think how many times the word “mine!” has been blurted out by the people who have seen this movie.

Pixar might have lost the first Oscar for Best Animated Feature, but they won on their second nomination, with this movie … and they’ve only lost one since.

(1)  The Incredibles

It may be my inherent love of superhero movies coming through, but I do think this is marginally the best movie Pixar has yet made.  (Although really, any one of my top seven is a strong contender.)

This was the first time Pixar had really tried to tackle animating humans as their primary characters, and there was every possiblity that it might end up not working.  Well, so much for that fear.

The Incredibles remains the best superhero (or comic-book-inspired, if you’d prefer that designation) film ever made.  And yes, I am including The Dark Knight, which is a great, great movie; this one is better.  The superhero action makes a great argument for the future of an entirely CGI-based film industry.  It’ll never happen, and probably shouldn’t, but if Pixar and other similarly talented companies were running the show, and they could come up with action movies as good as this one, I’d be all for it.  (And both Up and WALL*E prove that animation is perfectly capable of delivering drama as well as “real” movies.)

Sure, certain elements of The Incredibles seem to be cribbed from Marvel’s Fantastic Four and from DC’s Watchmen, but that’s okay.  Because in postmodernism, that sort of thing is not only acceptable, it’s encouraged.  And make no mistake about it: though it’s also quite traditional in its plotting, this is very much a postmodernist, deconstructionist take on superheroes.  The fact that kids seem to have either picked up on that and accepted it or just sailed right over it without a bump speaks awfully well of Brad Bird.

Bird also lays down some excellent refferences to the supervillainy of the more cartoonish James Bond movies (!), and he does it better than all of them do it.

The movie also benefits tremendously from an awesome score by Michael Giacchino, who here provides the best John Barry score John Barry never wrote.

Where is my sequel?

Final Thoughts

Pixar is truly on a streak unlike any other in cinematic history.  I’m well aware that not every viewer loves each of their movies, but plenty of viewers — and critics alike — do love each of them, and each movie has extremely ardent admirers of all ages; there is no other filmmaking entity out there that has put together that type of track record.

Perhaps most importantly, Pixar is making films that are bound to last from one generation to the next, making film lovers out of millions of children every year.

There’s no telling how much longer this streak can continue, but it certainly shows no signs of ending any time soon, and every film fan should be very grateful for that.

Spoilers!

You just know that sooner or later, Pixar is going to put out an inferior product.  Yeah, sure, I know … some of you are saying “they already did, it was called Cars!”

Well, you’d be wrong about that.

And you’d also probably be wrong to think that Pixar is EVER going to put out an inferior product.  Because if Up isn’t it, it’s probably never going to happen.

This is a movie that really shouldn’t work at all: it’s kinda like a mix of Crystal Skull-style cartoon action set pieces with Benjamin Button-style pathos, but better than both put together.  Sounds crazy, right?  Right you are.  And did I mention the talking dogs that fly fighter planes?  That sounds like a recipe for disaster, but instead, it’s yet another classic from the folks at Pixar.

The movie begins with what is possibly the best sequence in the company’s history (which is saying something): young Carl Fredricksen, a fan of noted adventurer C.W. Muntz, meets Ellie, a fire-haired ball of energy who shares his interest in Muntz and his tales of Paradise Falls; they grow up, fall in love, get married, learn they can’t have children, grow old, and death does them part.  This opening segment is utterly involving; I’m tempted to call it perfect, and probably would if I believed perfection was possible (it isn’t).  Mostly played out via montage and free of dialogue, the sequence could have been maudlin and cloying; instead, it’s a better piece of romantic drama (and tragedy) than 99 out of 100 tragic romantic dramas would be capable of achieving.

You listening, Benjamin Button?  This is how that sort of thing is done.

I can sympathize with the people who are going to make the claim that the movie is all downhill from that point.  They aren’t entirely incorrect, if you look at the film from a certain point of view.  The opening sequence is a masterpiece of realism (whimsical realism, granted, but realism nonetheless), and the rest of the movie takes some strange, if amusing, turns into silliness and escapism.  The opening is so grounded, so emotionally charged, that you can imagine even the hardened hearts at Cannes having to dab at their eyes with their ascots.  How they took to the spectacle of talking dogs, giant birds, and a house that flies to South America using scores of helium balloons … well, I wouldn’t be surprised if they felt a little bit betrayed by it all, having been temporarily lulled into forgetting that they were watching a “mere” cartoon.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if parents and their children felt a little bit betrayed by the opening sequence, but were enraptured by the rest of the film.

And if this movie has a problem, I think that’s it.  As great a movie as I think it is, I also think that its two wildly divergent tones are going to fail to gel for a lot of people.  To a lesser extent, WALL*E had the same “problem”; all movies should be so unlucky as to have that problem, but audiences didn’t embrace WALL*E quite as fervently as critics embraced it, and I suspect the same thing will happen on a larger scale with Up.

For me, though, it all fits together relatively well, with the movie’s overriding tone and theme being one of acceptance, optimism, and rejuvenation; the sillier elements are silly, it’s true, but they are there to keep the whole thing from becoming too dark and heavy to stay afloat, and as such, they are probably essential.  It’s all neatly summarized by the central image the marketing has been employing: a house being held aloft by balloons.

It’s a rich image on its own accord, and it’s even richer once you know what the house actually represents: it represents love, and not just any old love, but a very specific love, the love between Carl and his deceased wife.  It represents the existence of their love (which, apparently, flourished for decades), which can never truly die; it also represents the nonexistence of their love, which, in some regards, died with Ellie and can never return in a literal sense; and it also represents the rejuvenation of that love through both Carl’s attempts to fulfill their childhood desires and Ellie’s posthumous advice to Carl to find “a new adventure.”

That love, in essence, is what the entire movie is about.  It is THE motivating force behind every single action Carl takes, and Carl’s obsession with honoring that love is mirrored in some way by all of the film’s other major characters: Russell is obsessed with getting his final merit badge so that he can earn his father’s love; “Kevin” (a rare species of bird) is obsessed with getting back to her children and feeding them; Dug the dog is obsessed first by capturing Kevin, and then by helping Carl, because he is trying to please his masters.  Even C.W. Muntz, who turns out to be a villain, is obsessed with capturing Kevin so that he can return to society and re-earn their love, which he feels he has long since lost.

Running underneath all of this is a slam-dunk of a score by Michael Giacchino, who turns in his second great score of May 2009 (Star Trek was the other) and his third great score for Pixar (he also composed The Incredibles and Ratatouille).  Giacchino’s work here is based on one theme: a love theme for Carl and Ellie, which works wonders during the opening sequence as a piano piece and reappears throughout the film, sometimes in the same sad-piano guise, but sometimes reorchestrated into action music.  Over the opening credits, it turns into a breezy jazz version.  This is the type of thing John Williams once did (and still occasionally does when he comes out of retirement) with seeming effortlessness, and if Giacchino continues to do work this impressive, then we may have a new heir apparent for the title of Best Working Film Composer.

I’ve been talking too much about how Serious and Important this movie is, and I’m not wrong, but I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t talk about how funny the movie is.  There isn’t nearly as much “lookit the funny old man” humor as you might expect; there’s a little, but mostly, the film gets its yuks from strange plot developments.  One of the best comes when Carl has a daydream about dropping Russell to the city streets below; what a strange moment for a kid’s movie!  Another laugh comes from Carl as a child falling through a hole in the floor and breaking his arm.  Haw-haw!

The strangest development of all, of course, comes when the talking dogs are introduced.  To be fair, they don’t actually talk; no, they wear collars that somehow translate their thoughts into human speech.  This is just as weird as it sounds.

And yet, Pixar is able to keep it grounded by giving the dogs personalities and actions which will be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever owned a dog.  Dug may have a talking collar, but when he sees — or thinks he sees — a squirrel, he’s instantly distracted.  (One of my favorite bits in the movie is when Dug decides to tell Carl and Russell a joke.  It goes something like this: “A squirrel walks up to a tree and says it is winter and I have not gathered any nuts and now I am dead.  It is a funny joke because the squirrel gets dead.”  If you don’t laugh at Dug’s delivery of this joke, then fuck you; you don’t deserve to laugh.)

All of the dogs move like real dogs, and except for the cartoon-faced Dug, they all look like real dogs; if you told me Marley in Marley and Me was a CGI creation by Pixar, I’d probably believe you.  This extreme attention to detail reminds me of the kinds of things Disney animation under Walt himself accomplished in movies like Snow White and Dumbo and (especially) Bambi; the animals were cartoons, yes, and sometimes cartoonish, but they were also real.  That mix of reality and unreality is something animation can do that no other art form can; and Pixar, as a company, is a master at it.  This is how it is able to get away with having dogs serve wine and fly fighter planes.

And when the dogs-flying-fighter-planes sequence (they steer and fire by biting rubber squeeze toys!) is brought to an end by Russell hollering “squirrel!” and pointing at the ground, well, somehow, I believe it would work that way.

Every moment of such silliness is earned, both by virtue of it being funny in its own right, and by the presence of some serious moment to balance things out.  The dogs might have parachutes strapped to their backs (hilarious!), but when C.W. Muntz falls out of Carl’s floating house, he falls to his death.  That’s how this movie goes; it’s a constant high-wire act, and Pixar (under the capable direction of Pete Docter and Bob Petersen, both of whom also wrote the movie) makes it to the other side with barely a hitch.

Like all of Pixar’s movies, this is is jam-packed with details, but I think I’ve written enough about the movie for now.  It’s eminently enjoyable, and while I’m not convinced it’s going to be received as rapturously as, say, Finding Nemo or The Incredibles, I think it’s safe to say that Pixar is now officially ten-for-ten.  At what point do we have to start looking through the history books to find out if ANY company in the entire history of cinema has managed to make ten consecutive movies as good great as Pixar’s first ten?  I think that moment may have come.  I can’t think of a single director who managed it; I can’t think of a single star who managed it, either.  And studios…?  Don’t make me laugh.

I don’t think it’s going too far out on a limb to suggest that Pixar’s ten-film stretch might be the most significant string of successes in film history.  If I’m wrong, then by all means, point me toward the truth; because I promise you, I’d LOVE to see the string of movies better than this one has been.

Before I go, I’d like to offer up a few parting words of praise for Partly Cloudy, the short which runs before Up.  It’s yet another classic Pixar short (throw all the short fimls into the mix and Pixar’s streak becomes even more daunting), and it actually deepens the feature that follows it.  Set in the sky, where the clouds fashion babies out of thin air and hand them over for delivery to an army of storks, Partly Cloudy is, simply, awesome.  There’s more that could be said about it, but really, what would the point be?

Oscar, you’d better be paying attention this year come Best Animated Short time.

For the real answer, check out Ain’t-It-Cool’s story on Partly Cloudy, Pixar’s new short film.

Remy at Chef's de France

Remy originally made his animatronic appearance last year at Disneyland Paris.  He is due to leave Epcot in mid-September.

More pictures here

and video here