”Buzz, maybe you can help Tim Allen with his career.”

Plastic Fantastic.

Y’know, I always suspected my toys were coming to life when I wasn’t looking!

In TOY STORY, young Andy’s toys lead lives of noisy desperation come every birthday and Christmas – no one wants to be one-upped by a new addition to the toy box. Led by Cowboy Woody (there’s a BROKEBACK joke just waiting to happen), Mr. Potato Head, Rex the Dinosaur, Ham the piggybank, Bo Peep, Slinky the dog and a smattering of other playthings go about their toyish business of playing checkers, hanging around Andy’s room, and “plastic corrosion awareness meetings,” until Andy’s birthday party, when they gather expectantly around a transistor radio, listening to the reports of their toy soldier troops “in the field” (downstairs watching Andy’s gift-opening), hoping that no gift will be exciting enough to cause Andy to neglect them.

There is. His name is Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger.

Poffy Lightyear

Directed by Pixar mainstay John Lasseter, with the voice talents of Tom Hanks as Woody, Don Rickles, John Ratzenberger (forever Cliff from CHEERS), R. Lee Ermey, Annie Potts, Jim Varney and Tim Allen as Buzz (“To Infinity and Beyond!”), TOY STORY is that rara avis that succeeds on all levels – animation, storyline, character development, messages of friendship and self-realization and, most importantly, entertainment value. The fact this is a cartoon (the “first ever computer-animated feature” – just what DO we call this new wave of 3D cartoons?) is incidental. The slightly dodgy animation of the “real people” is irrelevant; TOY STORY gets the point across with or without technological finesse.

The “Disney Movie” has become synonymous with maudlin messages, redneck fundamentalism, anachronistic family values, boneheaded parents, smart-mouthing youngsters, too-hip-to-be-smart teens and insufferable pets. Though Disney’s tyrannical umbrella overarches this film’s production studio, Pixar Animation, TOY STORY somehow avoided all trace of Disney’s craven hand. It becomes doubly surprising when we consider this is Pixar’s first feature length film after years of experimentation. Right outa the gate and right outa the field.

Sure, there are “messages,” but they are heartfelt, rather than maudlin (Woody tells Buzz during Buzz’s greatest depression that it matters not what Buzz thinks of himself, what makes him important is what his owner, Andy, thinks of him); there are emotional segments, which are truly heartbreaking, rather than cheesy (when Buzz’s escape attempt lands him with a broken arm, proving he is Not A Flying Toy, the lyric, “Clearly I will go sailing no more,” launches a thousand hankies). And the portrayal of Andy’s family is Pixar’s triumphal achievement – boldly contravening Disney’s idée fixé of the 1950’s nuclear family and Norman Rockwell fantasies, one of the many incarnations of a modern family is presented: a single mother with two kids, who are neither geniuses nor monsters, just normal children, happy to visit Pizza Planet and disappointed when favorite toys are lost.

Buzz – who believes he is a real life space ranger on a mission to save the universe – becomes Andy’s favorite toy over Woody. The amusing thing is: though Buzz believes he is real, he still adheres to toy protocol of “playing inert” when humans are in the area. When he mentions saving a toy from Sid, the vicious boy next door, how does he propose to do it while adhering to the inert protocol?

Buzz’s ingenuousness regarding his toy role infuriates Woody to the point of attempted toy-assassination. Through a concatenation of accidents, both he and Buzz become lost and must use teamwork, trust and ingenuity to beat their path back to Andy, which finds them ensconced in scorchingly funny vignettes (Buzz fastening himself in an oversized seatbelt; Buzz and Woody falling in with green, three-eyed alien toys who regard them as gods; Buzz hyperventilating as “Mrs. Nesbitt”). During a climactic rocket ride, the callback line, “This is not flying – this is falling with style,” seals this movie’s greatness.

At least I now have a plausible explanation as to why my toys always got lost: after going about their toy business, they would just go inert anywhere they happened to be, instead of paying attention to their master’s infallible toy filing system….

END

Children Of The Damned.

When Ashton Kutcher is the funniest thing in your movie, it’s time to re-assess everything you hold dear.

CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN is an unworthy, implausible remake of a 1950 film of the same name, with parents Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt unconvincingly helming a hornet’s nest of selfish, ill-mannered, impertinent teen and sub-teen models in an ostensible “family comedy” which illustrates quite conclusively why some animals eat their young.

Focus groups are quick to finger “obvious” causes for juvenile derailment (video games, violent cartoons, Ozzy Osbourne), yet subversive media of this ilk – insidiously promoting the now-staple Hollywood formula of incompetent-dad-tenaciously-grounded-mom, sending messages of ignorance triumphing over experience, emotions triumphing over pragmatism, and spoiled rotten kids triumphing over their parents – is the real black-milk teat behind every school shooting and heavy metal suicide.

The MPAA trip over their bibles to quash one-second visuals of female nipples, then permit ninety minutes of mental and physical terrorizing of a father by his children (through communal pouting and “precious” antics), forcing him to relinquish the dream job he needed in order to keep these selfsame devil-children wallowing in the opulence they have been spoiled into believing is their inalienable right – all for the petty sake of lost frogs and puppy love and hovel living.

When a child goes bad, truly, it is the parents’ fault – for allowing movies like these to logjam our cinemas under the guise of “inoffensive, family-oriented entertainment”!

…Hmm, I’m hungry for some child.

END

Flat Cat.

Although Bill Murray (who voices Garfield) is truly a real-life simulacrum of the smug, under-enthused comic-strip cat, his intrinsically entertaining “character” was – dare I say it? – Lost In Translation (shout, but don’t hit) somewhere between the vapidity of the script and the orange computer blips representing the eponymous feline in GARFIELD.

Garfield’s master, Jon (Blandness, thy name is Breckin Meyer), is a card-carrying cat owner who is bequeathed a dog, Odie, by his veterinarian (a stunningly one-dimensional Jennifer Love-Hewitt, whose boob job long ago outpaced her talent and credibility), which he accepts unconditionally because he is googly-eyed over her.

Garfield’s eminence is threatened when Odie snuggles indoors with Jon, while he is seemingly forgotten outdoors. Garfield tricks Odie outside, who promptly gets lost and then kidnapped by The Villain (Stephen Tobolowsky). Through cartoonish adversity and plot contrivances which could only be seriously entertained by fourteen year olds (including Garfield staging a Great Escape from an animal shelter and hijacking a train, no less), Odie is rescued and subsequently “befriended” by Garfield; the inane boy gets the tepid girl, the lukewarm Villain gets his comeuppance and everyone lives sappily ever after.

This is not a “bad” movie – it is simply devoid of a soul. The human protagonists who meander around Garfield’s universe inhabit a world where “middle ground” is as wide as Texas; even The Villain seems as sinister as apple pie – gone cold! (Large organ chords!)

I hate Salad Days!

As if to presage the apathetic essence of the whole film, an early scene involves Jon coming home with four lasagnas, entreating Garfield not to eat them all, which Garfield promptly does. Instead of enforcing any kind of retribution/ punishment/ deprivation, or even a stern finger-wagging, milquetoast Jon makes some kind of insensately obvious statement along the lines of, “Did you eat all the lasagnas, Garfield? I told you not to” (exhorted with such impotence that one can’t even visualize inserting an exclamation mark after the sentence), and then they leave for the vet and the next syrupy, substance-less scene.In deeming this movie “for kids,” is it not enough that all emotive impact and any semblance of real human emotion is leached from the script until a bloodless husk remains; must any and all “messages” which concern retributive connotations also be excised to portray a world where nothing is ultimately “wrong” enough to warrant punishment or even concern? How noble to raise our children with the notion that Disobedience has NO REPERCUSSIONS.

The film suffered as a whole with the problem that Garfield was just not “cute.” What drew me to Jim Davis’s hilarious cartoon strip decades ago, was that every character is laughable by their appearance alone. The creators of this computer cat forgot the primo rule regarding cartoon heads: the bigger they are in relation to the character’s body, the cuter the character becomes. Garfield’s head was too small – or rather, his body was too overweight to be comically cute. And by making Nermal (The World’s Cutest Kitten) and Odie (a flummoxed, witless, balloon-animal-bodied puppy) “real-life” animals for the movie, Garfield effectively had no other “cute” entities to play off, and seemed at times misplaced in this world where everything was “real” except him.

Ironically, in this film, even Reality was nowhere near real…

END