20 years later, Pixar still king

Posted on June 25, 2015 by reelentropy

Amy Poehler is joy. This statement is now validated by Pixar casting directors Natalie Lyon and Kevin Reher. Photos courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

With DreamWorks churning out several movies per year and other studios like Blue Sky and Reel FX trying to step on the action, Inside Out proves, once again, that nobody jerks tears like Pixar.

The film takes place mostly in the head of Riley Anderson (Kaitlyn Dias). Anderson is run by five principle emotions — Joy (Amy Poehler), Anger (Lewis Black), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Fear (Bill Hader). These personified, color-coded feelings, mostly Joy, govern Anderson’s day-to-day responses and short-term memory. But during a schism over how to respond to a new school in San Francisco, Joy and Sadness are sucked into long-term memory after Anderson’s core memories, which create and power aspects of her personality. Joy attempts to navigate the labyrinth of Anderson’s long-term memory with the all-important core memories in tow, while at the same time reigning in Sadness, who is hell-bent on turning every memory she can get her hands on bitter. With her personality compromised and rage, terror and repulsion all she’s capable of feeling, Anderson spirals quickly into a deep depression.

The studio that brought to life worlds populated by toys and monsters has done it again, bringing viewers into yet another immersive, imaginative world that is at once completely familiar and wholly alien. Joy and Sadness explore Anderson’s imagination, her particle-collider enclosure for abstract thought and her cavernous dungeon of a subconscious, guiding viewers through the nuances of her character. As ever, viewers will leave the theater wondering at the rich world they just spent two hours in.

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A brief update on how well Jurassic World is doing

Posted on June 23, 2015 by reelentropy
dinosaurwhisperer

Photo courtesy Universal Pictures.

After Disney Pixar released Inside Out to $90.4 million, good for no. 2 at the domestic box office to Jurassic World’s second weekend, there’s been a lot of noise about how well the box office in general is suddenly doing after some quiet weekends to start the summer, and we need to take a second and be clear about something:

The box office is not what’s doing well. Jurassic World is what’s doing well.

I don’t think people are really appreciating exactly how much better this movie is doing than everything else, so we’re going to go through the top 20 moneymakers of the year so far and highlight a few breakpoints*.

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A less chaotic state: 2005’s Batman Begins

Posted on June 15, 2015 by reelentropy

Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Batman Begins is 10 years old today. Take a moment and let that sink in.

Batman Begins is simultaneously the extraneous sequel that was always going to get made and the crazy wet dream movie that should never have been produced. Before the modern era of mass-produced superhero movies, Batman was the second guy through the wall in 1989, behind the 1970s Superman movies. The first movie, an extraordinarily Tim Burton film, was followed by three sequels between ’89 and 1997, each one more Tim Burton than the last, despite Burton himself leaving the franchise after the second installment. This movie series coincided with a meteoric rise in Batman’s popularity outside of comic strips, with the acclaimed and instantly iconic Batman: The Animated Series TV show running 1992-95. The series was so popular, production was rebooted for two more years from 1997-99, and it gave rise to the just as acclaimed Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond and Justice League TV shows.

The fourth film, Batman & Robin, is still considered the worst superhero movie ever made by a wide margin, and despite taking in $238 million, Warner Bros. nixed the next movie in the series, Batman Triumphant, and took it back to the drawing board. Thus began several years of rejected proposals by filmmakers such as Darren Aronofsky and Joss Whedon before Warner Bros. realized what they wanted and hired Christopher Nolan and David Goyer to write the script.

The film threw out everything from the earlier Batman movies and started with a completely fresh take on the character and his environment. There was an all-star cast that included living legends Gary Oldman and Michael Caine, there was a director coming off of breakthrough hit psychological thrillers Memento and Insomnia — Where the series of movies had descended into camp that would make Adam West blush, this reboot was being treated like an actual movie that was expected to be well-received and remembered beyond its theatrical run, instead of just a cashgrab.

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Jurassic World just OK

Posted on June 14, 2015 by reelentropy

UPDATE: Jurassic World did it again, with Sunday estimates being a little too low. The actuals are in, and the movie squeezed out $208 million domestic, passing The Avengers for the best domestic opening weekend of all time.

I once forgot to feed my raptors for five weeks. I didn’t actually sell my last motorbike, I just forgot where I parked it. I don’t know how a mosquito could get caught in amber, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask. Photos courtesy Universal Pictures.

Early estimates had Jurassic World opening at an impressive $125 million. Then, the movie had an even larger than expected Thursday and that estimate became $155 million. Then $171-180 million. Then $190-200 million. The final count is $204.6 million, just shy of The Avengers’ all-time record $207.4 million opening from 2012. For context, the previous record opening for June was 2013’s putrid but hotly anticipated Man of Steel with just $116 million.

All those numbers are domestic. At the international box office it looks up at nothing, with a $511 million opening worldwide. The worldwide opening record holder going into the weekend was part 2 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at just $483 million.

The marketing effort that went into this is a subject for a different article. The only question here is whether or not the movie was itself is any good, and the answer is, “meh.”

The film has many characters in common with the original Jurassic Park, following two wide-eyed little kids, Zach and Gary Mitchell (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins), who are relatives of the manager, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), on their trip through the park, which all goes wrong when a massive carnivore breaks lose. This time around, however, that carnivore is the indominus rex, a genetically altered hybrid of the tyrannosaurus, and the park is open and filled to the brim with screaming civilians. The stealthy and highly intelligent creature immediately begins a rampage across the park, killing everything in its path. Raptor handler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) escorts Dearing through the restricted zone, where the first part of the movie takes place, to find her nephews, and then leads the charge to capture the indominus. They are surrounded by many secondary characters — park owner Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), evil geneticist Henry Wu (B.D. Wong), park tech operator and dinophile Lowerly Cruthers (Jake Johnson) and Vic Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio), who is pressuring Grady to militarize the park’s raptors. Their functions are exclusively to proselytize about the role of dinosaurs in modern society.

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Dying Girl wants to be more than a dumb high school movie, isn’t

Posted on June 11, 2015 by reelentropy

Gaines talks about how the cafeteria is a literal territorial warzone, because that’s not a joke that’s been made a million times. Photos courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.

I’ve never met Me and Earl and the Dying Girl director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, but I kind of want to punch him in the face.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is the movie version of that one hipster friend who totally swears he isn’t a hipster, a movie so obsessed, so up its own ass with cliches and references and desperate attempts to convince viewers that it’s cool that it becomes less of a movie and more of an advertisement for the movie it wants you to think that it is.

The movie follows Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann) through his senior year of high school, during which he befriends Rachel Kushner (Olivia Cooke), who is diagnosed with leukemia at the movie’s start. Through their friendship, Gaines is drawn from his private world of actively avoiding high school cliches and amateur moviemaking with Earl (Ronald Cyler II) and into a real life-and-death story about nagging parents, the importance of college applications and the true meaning of friendship.

Pretty much everything about this movie behaves as if it doesn’t have the problems that it has.

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