So I thought I could get out of reviewing this, but here I am a week later still thinking about the movie and realizing that it’s by far the best I’ve seen in a theater this year. That’s not saying much I guess, but it deserves a few words I think and I know some of you individuals will want to commentate in the comments area.

Well shit, I’ve crossed the line already, so while I’m here I guess I’ll take this opportunity to admit that I also enjoyed the dragon movie earlier this year, it was surprisingly good. HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON is the second pretty good cartoon movie I’ve seen from the Dreamworks computer cartooning company (first one was kung fu panda). It looked real nice, had a few laughs and built nicely to an exciting action climax that looked real good in 3-D. But what I liked most about it was that it’s about this kid who becomes friends with a dragon in a culture where everybody hunts dragons. So as a rite of passage they put him in a situation where he’s supposed to kill a dragon, but he doesn’t believe in it. So it’s about a kid who doesn’t believe in something that is acceptable in his culture, and that puts him in a really uncomfortable position. I thought about kids who don’t want to stand for the pledge of allegiance to protest something or who don’t believe in eating meat or things like that. I couldn’t think of another cartoon that dealt with that type of conflict.

When one of my buddies mentioned that the dragon movie was the best movie of the year so far I said, “What? No, come on. I mean it’s pretty good, but best of the year?” And he said, “Well, what do you think is better?” And I said, “uh… hmmm.”

He stumped me. The only one I could think of was UNIVERSAL SOLDIER REGENERATION, which he didn’t think counted because it wasn’t in theaters. So I was stuck admitting that the DRAGON movie might’ve been the best of the year so far unless I was forgetting something. Now TOY STORY 3 runs about ten laps around it, and we must admit we live in an upside down world if all the best films being made are either family friendly computer animation or straight to video Van Damme pictures.

If you’re not familiar with the TOY STORY movies, here is what they are about. Toys are alive when you’re not looking, same as Puppet Master, but one is played by Tom Hanks. There is many different dolls and etc. And you can imagine where it would go from there.

This might be the best trilogy since the original Star Warses. Each chapter is very true to the characters and advances some emotional themes. I like that by part 3 Woody and Lightyear are a solid team. They have a disagreement about what to do but they don’t get mad, they completely support each other and work together, knowing each other’s strengths and how to back each other up. In this one they don’t travel as far as in either of the others (no high speed auto chase or visit to the airport) but it feels way more epic because of the huge amount of detail and the highly populated world it takes place in. The toys move to a daycare where an entire toy society already exists. The daycare toys seem to have it all figured out, they have a hell of a setup there, kind of reminded me of DAY OF THE DEAD somehow.

You probly shouldn’t read this sort-of review unless you’ve seen it. I’m just gonna assume you have and list some thoughts about it and some parts that impressed me into having no choice but to do this write-up.

1. The filmatism of the “caterpillar room” scene is outstanding. As the toddlers pour into the nursery and terrorize the unsuspecting toys you’re thrown in there with them. The “cameras” are put at floor level so you’re looking up at these kids like they’re monsters about to bite your head off. I remember a POV shot from Lightyear’s perspective as his face is used to hammer blocks into slots. It just puts you right into the action, there’s all kinds of fast paced mayhem and you see it, understand it, and feel it. I know I’m a broken record on this point of how bad modern action direction is, but let’s be serious here, THE A-TEAM is one of the more passable recent action movies and it doesn’t have any scenes as visceral as this one about kids smearing snot on toys. I never thought I’d say this, but modern big screen action directors, forget everything you know and study some Pixar cartoons.

2. You thought I was gonna say this first but I saved the good shit for number two: Holy shit that part at the garbage dump is amazing! Here are these toys who we’ve been worrying with for three movies. In part 1 they were afraid of being replaced by new and better toys (or pets). In part 2 they were afraid of being outgrown and forgotten by their owners, or sold in a garage sale or to a collector who just puts them under glass. In this one they’re biting the bullet and facing down the inevitable, that their kid won’t play with them forever and they should be happy being put in the attic or donated to the daycare.

But here they end up facing a fate worse than they had considered before, they are actually garbage. Bad, right? And it gets worse when they’re about to be incinerated. For three movies they’ve worried about abandonment and damage from mean kids but they’ve never even mentioned the possibility of being completely melted down – what I can only assume is actual toy death. That’s kind of a heavy notion for a movie like this, but not nearly as heavy as the fact that they see this fate in front of them, they accept it, and they wordlessly face it down, holding each other’s hands to die together as a family. This is some profound shit.

And then the thing that saves them is, from the perspective of the martians, an intervention from God! We’ve known since part 1 that this was the martian religion. We just didn’t take it seriously.

After seeing this scene I almost believe my own ridiculous prediction that CARS 2 will find some way to make my CARS-hating buddies shed tears over the emotions of an anthropomorphized vehicle.

3. This one didn’t get me like UP did, on account of me being so manly and everything. But the part that came the closest was when Woody was peaking out of the box and saw the mom getting choked up about Andy’s room being empty as he’s ready to go off to college. It’s touching just on the surface level of relating to the mom and the kid, but also it’s touching when you consider what it means to Woody. I think this is the first time he’s realized that people have to say goodbye too. He sees that the mom is sad to see her son grow up, but she has to send him off into the world. He knows that he has to do the same thing.

4. I really like the character Big Baby. He works so perfectly as a dimwitted behemoth henchman in the world of toys. He’s creepy as hell and then he’s lovable at the end. I also like that killer monkey, I think that’s the one that’s gonna haunt the dreams of children across the world, not the incinerator scene. At a young age you probly can’t comprehend all the implications of what’s going on in the incinerator, but you can definitely appreciate the terror of that fuckin monkey clapping his cymbals on your head.
5. Anybody else wonder why these toys got such a problem with Ken being girly? There’s the scene where the bookworm thinks he sees Ken wearing pumps, and he shakes his head in disgust. Later the main characters all seem very uncomfortable with Ken’s feminine handwriting.

Let’s examine this. The toys of TOY STORY have the ability to fall in love. Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head are in love, Buzz seems to have a thing for Jessie, Barbie for Ken, etc. But unlike cars, toys do not reproduce. They’re manufactured by man. The Potato Heads cannot bear children, they can only adopt martians. There’s no reproductive need or instinct, and even if there was, we all know that Barbie and Ken have no genitals to mate with. So there’s no reason for the toys to have genders at all, let alone to have an instinct for male-female pairs. So why are they so uncomfortable with Ken? Is it homophobia?

I think it’s cultural. Gender roles are forced on young people through their toys. In fact, Barbie herself got into some trouble for saying “math is hard” and making girls feel dumb. If anybody is a slave to these archaic ideas it’s toys. Although if my dream of an animated movie about laundry ever comes true I’m sure there will be some real strong differences between the different types of underwear.
* * *

Anyway, great movie. It can’t be denied. It’s great to see people who put so much thought and care into something, especially since that approach seems to have gone out of style.

Seriously live action people, this is not a hollow threat. This is real, this is happening. Already, Brad Bird of the “incredibles” and the cooking rat one has been conscripted to direct MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE: 4 using live humans. And do you have any doubt in your mind that he’ll knock that shit out of the park like one of those steroid monsters they had in baseball until a couple years ago? If you don’t start doing better, the cartoonists will be happy to take over.

[ratings]

Okay, short version first: just go see the fuckin thing. This review is gonna have spoilers in the sense that I’m gonna talk it up, you’re gonna go in expecting this or that based on what I said, it’s gonna get to your analytical mind and might fuck everything up. So don’t read this. Also disregard what I said above about crying, I would never cry, come on man let’s be serious here.

UP is the latest Pixar and somehow tops everything they’ve done before. For all the mediocrity and horribleness going on in our world today, we are lucky to live in the golden age of Pixar. Who knows how long their streak could last, but watching their movies now feels like watching PINOCCHIO and BAMBI and all those coming from the same group of people in a row. It’s just incredible, nobody else can match what they’re doing.

There’s this cliche about movies like SHREK and all the different comedy cartoons that have come since Robin Williams did the Arsenio Hall impression in ALADDIN. They say those are good cartoons because they work on two levels: for the kids it’s a cartoon that moves around in front of them, for the adults there is sophisticated humor such as a reference to a TV show that you know about, and that’s why it’s funny, you have seen that show before or know people who have seen it and told you what it was one time.

Well, UP blows that shit out of the water by really truly hitting at what kids want and what adults want at the same time, and not by appealing to the lowest common denominator or the easiest jokes. No, this is a fantasy adventure comedy with some great action sequences, some colorful creatures, easily the most laughs of any Pixar movie and yet also it hits on profound emotional life issues much more effectively than most serious adult dramas and what not.

Also it’s Pixar’s version of GRAN TORINO: grouchy old man loses his wife, stubbornly stays in his old house in a rapidly changing neighborhood, reluctantly befriends young Asian neighbor, they help each other to learn life lessons. There is less shooting and racism, though, and more flying.

Hopefully you’ve already seen it so I’m not gonna give anything away, but holy shit, I was crying in the first ten minutes of this god damn movie. I was crying before it even truly got sad. In the dialogue-free montage through decades of Karl and Ellie’s life together you see so much happiness, so much struggle, so much dreaming and almost but not quite achieving. And more than almost any movie it seems to capture the feeling of a real loving relationship and because time is moving so fast it becomes sad because you know at this rate their life together is fleeting. It hits you because you’re sad for what happens to these fictional characters, but also because it makes you think about your own life and where you are on achieving your dreams or finding happiness, about whether you have enough time or if you fucked up and got too off course.

In this one sequence it tells you in images so much about the way people want to do things with their lives, but don’t always get to. About how important that dream is not only to the person but to the person who loves them. You see how Karl wants more than anything to see Ellie get what she wants. You see how they fall into a routine and time passes and they fear that maybe they haven’t really done what they wanted to with their time together, that they’ve wasted their lives and lost sight of what was once important to them, and maybe still should be, but they don’t really know.

It has so many deeply relatable things for adults that I end up with tears rolling down my cheek like I got pepper sprayed. I look to my left, the gal next to me is worse than me. To my right I hear somebody blowing snot. Then somewhere to the left. The kids are all laughing at the jokes and the adults are all crying. So fuck you SHREK and your “ha ha, the donkey said a line from the theme song from THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, they threw that one in for the adults.”

I mean this is the most emotional thing I have seen in a cartoon so far that does not involve the bombing of Hiroshima. If the first ten minutes of UP was Andrew “Dice” Clay it would say, “Jesse the Cowgirl montage in TOY STORY 2? I fucked it.”

It really does work on multiple levels at the same time. Like the early scenes where construction is going on around his house. In the story it’s an excuse for why he has to fly away with his house. But emotionally it’s about the feeling of getting older and the world changing around you and stubbornly wanting to stand your ground. Or toward the end when he dumps all the furniture and things out of his house. Story-wise of course he has to make the house lighter in order for it to fly. But an adult can’t help but also see that he’s casting off all the shit he’s accumulated over the years. Earlier all that stuff was important to him because it reminded him of his wife, but now he realizes it’s just stuff, it’s not the objects that are important but the actual experiences.

(dude, Fight Club.)

You know what? I bet this is the first time in cinematic history that a 3-D movie makes people cry. I mean there might’ve been some teary-eyed emotional moments in JAWS 3-D or COMIN’ AT YA, but not full on tears. This brings up alot of questions about the technology, is it a problem to have salty deposits on the lenses, does it break the illusion for somebody to have to take off the glasses to wipe away their eyes, etc.

(By the way, the 3-D looks great and brings you even more into the detailed Pixar world, but I don’t think it’s necessary. If you don’t have one of those theaters near you or don’t want to spend the extra couple bucks don’t worry about it, see the movie in regular-D.)

I said, and still believe, that WALL-E is a masterpiece. Its one flaw is that the first section is such a perfect, jawdropping and completely unique masterwork of filmatic imagery that the rest of the movie, by being merely superb, is kind of a letdown to some people. This one does not have that minor structural problem. It’s front-loaded with that emotion but it’s perfect because then you know why this matters. It makes a dude pulling a house across a cliff seem like the most important thing in the world, because we have watched his whole life before that and we know what it means to him. You laugh and have a fun time with his relationship with his young neighbor Russell (as well as a dog and a bird) and some crazy death defying shenanigans and what not, but it’s all anchored in this ritualistic quest to fulfill his wife’s dream for her posthumously. It’s about his relationship with his dead wife. I thought I was fine with that, I thought I was a man again, then that last image snuck up on me and got me crying like a bitch again. So perfect.

Pixar, I don’t know if you guys have seen TYSON or not. But maybe it’s time to hang it up. I don’t see how you can top this one. In conclusion, Pixar, did it ever occur to you that maybe some people want to retain their emotional fluids, and not have them just leak out in public? Thumbs down.

[ratings]

I’m no cartoon fetishist, but I’m not blind. Pixar is America’s most consistently great studio, and on first glance this is probaly the best they’ve done so far. You never thought you’d see something like WALT DISNEY’S 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY, but that’s what the first act of this feels like. This movie is deep. There is a poetically tragic beauty to it that has never been captured in any cartoon all the way from PINOCCHIO to BARBIE’S FAIRY MERMAID CASTLE 2 or even (arguably) OSMOSIS JONES.

Here is this godforsaken shitpile of a planet, literally covered in garbage, the sky brown with garbage dust, a ring of space litter surrounding the atmosphere. Humans left this place behind 700 years ago, and the only things still moving around are one cockroach and the one remaining robot that was left behind to clean up the garbage.

So there WALL-E is picking up garbage, crushing it into cubes, and building structures out of them. I’m not sure whether this is what he was programmed to do, or whether he is using his crushing/stacking job to create art, but either one is interesting. He’s been doing this for 700 years and had to cannibalize all the other dead WALL-E’s to survive, so either he’s Will Smith in I AM LEGEND, finding his way in an abandoned world, or he’s the robot at the end of A.I., missing his mommy thousands of years after humans have gone extinct. Cleaning up garbage is what he was built for, so maybe he doesn’t know that nobody needs him to do it anymore.

At any rate he has no idea that the planet is a shithole, this is just what he was built to do. To him garbage might as well be oxygen. But he does have these little quirks that are most likely not part of his programming. He finds things in the garbage that amuse him, and adds them to a collection. He especially likes the movie HELLO DOLLY which he found on a beat up VHS tape that he converts to digital, runs on an iPod and watches through a giant magnifier. One society’s garbage is another machine’s individuality.

So here is a world with no humans, no life at all except for one roach and one tiny sprout. A dead world. The planetary equivalent of an apartment somebody gets kicked out of and they don’t clean anything, they just leave all the shit they don’t want or can’t carry piled on the filthy carpet. And yet there’s still humanity there! The garbage that lives in the garbage has a spark of humanity. It’s a dystopia but it ultimately has an optimistic view of humanity. If that rose could grow from a crack in the concrete like Tupac talked about then why couldn’t an obsolete keep the concept of love alive? Humanity will prevail.

Somebody pointed out to me that if Pixar puts out a movie like CARS that’s amazing in alot of ways but not as appealing as a TOY STORY or something then everybody gets mad and says they lost it. But if the other companies put out something like KUNG FU PANDA people bend over backwards to compliment it just for being watchable and mildly amusing. It’s easy to imagine a KUNG FU PANDA type non-Pixar movie that would have some of the later human parts of this movie in it, and people would go nuts for it. Once you get to the animated humans in this movie there’s some broad satire about rampant consumerism and laziness. People are so obsessed with their computer screens they forget there is anything else to look at. They don’t know about the other people around them. They’re so fat they can’t stand up and their bones have disappeared. The babies are all corralled together and they leave it to your imagination how exactly mating works in this world, but you know whatever it is it’s some fucked up shit. In a Brand X Animation Studio movie all this would seem shockingly subversive. That would be the part that people always talked about and what made it a decent movie. In WALL-E though it’s easily the weakest part of the movie!

I would say that’s the movie’s one weakness, and something weird about it. The second part of the movie is the type of excellence we’ve come to expect from those Hawaiian shirt wearing nerds. But the first part is something even better, it transcends the normal Pixar movie. I bought into that world so much that it was not animation in my head, it was the real world, so once you got to animated humans it was a bit jarring. But still pretty damn good. Alot of this part seemed deep to me too, like the way Wall-E accidentally inspires a robot revolution, the misfits in the repair shop decide to stop following their directives and provide the much needed chaos within a rigid system to literally save the world. When a cleaning robot becomes confused about whether to follow the laser he’s programmed to follow or the mud tracks he’s programmed to clean up it’s a funny visual joke that gently destroys the notion of being able to get through life just by following the rules. Sorry, Forrest Gump.

(isn’t it funny when a reviewer bitterly attacks some other movie out of the blue and you think “where the fuck did THAT come from?” I thought I would throw one of those in there.)

It’s cool because there’s no bad guys really, there’s just machines that are programmed to do something we disagree with. The course of humanity is decided by this mistake somebody made 700 years ago. In a world of rules, only one machine, his girlfriend and a fatass can change the course of history forever.

Obviously the story is saying something about consumerism and the environment, but it never seems preachy because the characters themselves don’t even know about it. The captain of the ship does figure out that it’s bad and try to do something about it (”I don’t want to survive, I want to LIVE!”), but the main characters WALL-E and EVE actually never know that there’s anything wrong with the world or that they need to do anything. They’re too busy falling in love. Please note that computer animated humans kissing in FINAL FANTASY was terrifying, but two buckets of bolts romancing each other in this one is heartwarming.

I got no doubt in my mind that this will still be considered a classic when we’re all dead. Its biggest flaw is to end up merely EXCELLENT when it starts out TRANSCENDENTLY BEAUTIFUL. It’s true, I would be happy to watch 2 1/2 hours of this robot sifting through garbage, and there is a certain poetry that comes from the absence of the humans. But at the same time it’s inevitable that he’s gonna see where he comes from, meet his maker. It’s like in a mystery movie there is an indefinable feeling that comes from not knowing what the answer is, and you’re always gonna lose a little something when the mystery is solved at the end. But hopefully it will come together well, and in this case it does.

Shit, I’ll take WALL-E warts and all. And these are some small warts. This is one of the all time great robot love stories, way better than HEARTBEEPS.

[ratings]

These cars have not only created a civilization, but their civilization has been around long enough that the good old days are gone. The story is about Lightning McQueen, who is apparently not named after Steve McQueen despite his brave service to the cause of cars in LE MANS and BULLITT. Thanks alot, assholes. Lightning is a hotshot race car, basically a NASCAR star without a driver. Because he’s a stubborn egotistical asswipe of a car he fucks up and blows his huge lead making the big race a three way tie. One of the other racers is played by Michael Keaton but he looks like the Burt Reynolds of cars. Anyway Lightning has to go to California for another race and because he’s a celebrity he doesn’t even bother to drive there himself, he goes inside his friend, a Mack truck played by Cliff from Cheers. Basically, he is inside his friend’s ass, but you can’t completely blame him because the inside of his friend’s ass looks like some kind of luxury apartment.

But then Lightning gets lost and ends up stranded in a small town along Route 66 where he learns valuable car lessons and helps revive a dying way of car life, etc.

This movie maybe isn’t quite as effective as the other movies by these TOY STORY people, but it does work. And part of the appeal is the incredible attention to detail, even in the filmatism. For the parts about car races they take on the frinetic tics of sports broadcasting, with flashy camera moves and onscreen graphics and with car commentators and corporate sponsors. There is an entire audience of thousands of cars. Then when it gets out on the road it slows down and there is actual atmosphere. Somehow they really capture the feel of driving out on the highway at night. And when they get to the town, I think it’s called Radiator Springs, there are these quiet establishing shots with a yellow traffic light slightly buzzing as it blinks on and off. Even the sound effects are perfect. They had to figure out the sound of tires rolling around as cars “walk” along having a conversation.

And the computery animation is far beyond what we’ve seen before – the different kinds of lighting, the reflective (or rusty) surfaces of the cars. And the world around them looks like reality. I mean, there were previews for 4 or 5 other computer animated movies before the movie, all of them about talking animals, but not cars. Animation-wise, CARS looks like it’s about 10 years ahead of those other ones.

So I think whether or not you should see this movie all depends on whether the premise freaks you out in a good way or a bad way. It’s cuter than POLAR EXPRESS but in some ways weirder. I mean a world of cars? It’s kind of a freaky premise and it brings up questions here and there, questions that are not answered in the movie. I mean the main thing I wondered was how do cars reproduce? Do they mate, or do they just build other cars? They gotta reproduce somehow because the founder of the town is an antique Henry Ford type deal (you see him in statue form) so there are definitely generations of cars. And thank God, because we want car society to go on bravely into the future.

If cars have parents, do they look like their parents? Or is it just kind of random? Could a bus screw an ice cream truck and pop out a Lightning McQueen? If Lightning and his Porsche girlfriend have a baby what will it look like, half race car and half Porsche? Do they start out small, and if so, why didn’t we see any baby cars like that in the movie?

And if you think about it it gets deeper than that because you have to wonder, is a race car born a race car or does he make a lifestyle choice and then grow into a race car? I guess he’s probaly born that way but what if he doesn’t like to race? Doesn’t being born a certain type of car seem like sort of a curse? Isn’t there something inherently depressing about a world where your entire way of life is predetermined upon birth? What if Mater (played by unfunny fake redneck “Larry the Cable Guy”) didn’t WANT to fucking tow cars? What if he wanted to be a fire truck? Too bad, he’s a tow truck, he’s fucked.
Unless maybe he could get customized, but I don’t know what car society’s view is of that sort of thing. If a ride gets pimped, is that the same as plastic surgery, or is it a natural process? Does it mean you’re a sellout, or an individualist?

I know your job isn’t your whole life, a tow truck can have hobbies outside of towing. But work definitely seems important to these cars. Most of them seem to own their own businesses. They definitely have a whole car economy going, I’m just not sure how it works exactly. We know they sell tires and gas to each other, and money is mentioned. But we never see any money. If they really have money, where do they keep it, in their glove compartments? Does the money have a picture of a car on it? How do they hold it with those big round tires? Obviously they don’t have debit cards, ’cause how the fuck are they gonna type in their PIN numbers?

You know what would really suck? Being a train. There’s a living train in this movie. I hope that guy can get off the tracks, otherwise he’s got the rawest deal of anybody. Being a train must be like knowing for sure you’re gonna work for KFC for the rest of your life.

You have to wonder how exactly this civilization is gonna progress. They don’t like to drive everywhere themselves, but other than that one truck’s ass they don’t seem to have any other form of transportation. Maybe the train’s ass, but I’m not sure if he’s hollow. In the future will cars begin to build other cars to drive in? They already built a road-fixing machine, so clearly it’s not out of the question for cars to build and operate machines. Would living cars driving inanimate cars cause an ethics debate? Or would it just be creepy?

Where does their gas come from? Does it come from dinosaur fossils like ours did? What type of cars were the dinosaurs of car world? What does a car fossil look like? Are their chassis on display in museums?

Have cars gone to space yet? I guess there must be living space shuttles. Will they ever discover life on other planets, and if so will the life be cars? Maybe just microscopic spore cars on Mars?

Because the founder of the town is no longer there, we know that cars can die. But do they die of old age or do they only die in wrecks? Do they feel pain? How far can a mechanic ethically go in saving an ailing car? How many parts can be replaced before a car is no longer himself? In other words, what part holds a car’s soul?

And hell, as long as we’re talking about the car soul we might as well hit on religion. Is there such a thing in car world? An all powerful being who built the cars? Is there a car Jesus? Maybe the Tucker Torpedo? Are there different religions and hell, do they have wars? I guess there must be tanks off somewhere fighting wars. So it’s kind of like our army, there’s a whole class doomed to military service and all the Suburbans and Volvos and everybody get to stay home and not worry about it.

I’m assuming there’s war in car world because I’m assuming there’s religion and if there’s car religion there’s car war. But when will it end? How can you have peace when you have members of your society born as tanks and bomber jets and shit? Isn’t it kind of a self fulfilling prophecy? And if you stop war, isn’t it unfair to these individuals, to erase their whole purpose in life? They were born that way. Who are we to judge what they do?

Other than those few questions everything is pretty much answered, not a bad talking car movie at all, I would recommend it.

[ratings]

Well I guess you can tell that I’ve been out of the picture for a while because i never heard of this other toy story and here i thought this was going to be the new Richard Pryor. To be honest I promised some dudes over on alt.horror I was gonna review the End of Days this week, but I’m afraid I let them down. Arnold (who by the way I strongly suspect is a kraut despite his front as an all american restaranteur type dude) probably lifts weights as much as a lot of the guys inside. However what Richard has is a quick wit and ability to transform himself into a thousand characters, even animals or inanimated objects (he could have easily played an etchasketch or yoyo in this movie, and convincing as hell too). This is a funny motherfucker with some great fucking stories and even is attempting to go clean for quite a few years. In my new positive life it is this type of intelligent talents that I must value over the muscles. Arnold unfortunately is not a funny motherfucker judging by the 15 minutes of Jingle All of the Way I watched on tv tonight. That is got to be one of the worst executed pieces of comedy i have EVER fucking seen, even if you count the web sight Rob and Marge’s Laugh Central. Sorry arnold. Read a book.

Well as you probaly know by now if you’ve seen toy story 2, richard pryor isn’t in it at all. What this is is a VERY fucking strange story where the toys such as a cowboy doll and a spaceman named Buzz Lightyear come to life when your not looking. There is a fat dude who steals the cowboy doll. This is a dude who collects cowboys and when he gets all of them he’s going to sell them to a museum. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with this motherfucker he collects all this stuff and as far as I can tell doesn’t even like cowboys. He doesn’t have any cowboy toys in his house that he plans to keep and he doesn’t even wear boots or own a horse. In my opinion this is the same type of dude who runs the movie studios today, who likes money but not movies but maybe got fired from the bank or the US mint or wherever people who have a passion for money work. So he controls the movie studio from a little different perspective than any normal person with a beating heart who loves and enjoys the Cinema artform.

Well I believe they had these cowboy dolls when I was a teenager but I sure never knew they had this kind of emotional struggle going on. It turns out all toys must face the fact that their owners will soon grow out of them, and they spend a lot of time brooding about this. There are many opinions within the cowboy community – do you stay in a box, in a museum, at least being looked at? Or do you get played with by a kid, almost feeling alive, but then get your arm torn off and sent to goodwill?

Now there are a lot of movies already made about the killer dolls. I like one called Dolls which is about the punk rockers and everything that stay at an old couple’s house during a storm and get killed by dolls. Trilogy of terror is a scary one with a scary doll and Magic is about a creepy ass ventriloquist dummy. Then theres puppetmasters, which is basically the same type of thing except there are many different episodes including cowboys, mummies, nazi germany and not to mention Decapitron. To be frankly honest I haven’t seen these movies but I’ve read the boxes. Apparently a box of little toys has become a gang of little terrors. However as a legitimate critic of the Cinema I will not tell you my opinion on this series until I have seen a few scenes from each.

Then of course there are the most popular, the Chucky pictures which unfortunately most critics will probaly compare this to. In my opinion we’re talking applets and cotlets here, because this is the ONLY of the toy movies that thought to make an action adventure drama about these dolls instead of a horror. I love a good horror but for once, let’s see some positive dolls who do not poke out eyeballs but do perform elevator stunts as an homage to Bruce Willis’s Die Hard (1988).

Now I gotta be honest, I probaly would’ve liked this motherfucker even better if Richard was in it, but hey don’t look a dead horse in the mouth jack. Also the cowgirl is kind of hot for a toy so I’m not complainin man.

If there’s not a new chucky picture coming out soon, or even if there is, I would recommend this as one of the better killer doll movies, despite its non violent gimmick.

Thanks guys

–Vern

P.S. In the spirit of the season I’m going to be posting some new essays this week, about some of my favorite christmas movies. I don’t want to give anything away but they all star Bruce Willis as John fucking McClane. Keep a look out bud

THIS JUST IN: “Comedian Richard Pryor guest stars on NORM this Wednesday night at 9:30, on ABC, playing a man in a wheelchair accused of attacking his nurses.” I didn’t know about this when I Wrote the column but I believe Disney and ABC are both owned by the same company, so as somebody that’s been around the block a few times I wouldn’t be surprised if they timed it this way on purpose for ratings.

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