Seven Years in Tibet is one of those films that I kind of knew I’d enjoy but just never got around to watching. There are a couple of reasons, chief among them being the running time. Clocking in at two hours 16 minutes, it’s a pretty hefty commitment and there always seemed to be something else to do.

Not anymore, though, eh? Here are a few thoughts on the film.

The film is based on the “true” experiences of Heinrich Harrer (Brad Pitt, above), a self-centered Austrian mountaineer and his adventures through being taken as a Prisoner of War at the beginning of WWII, escape from the POW camp, and eventual relocation to Tibet and kinship with the young Dalai Lama.

There was a lot of set up in Seven Years in Tibet; more than most films. I’m sure that part of the reason for this is the film’s basis on true events, but the first hour or so of the film dragged quite a bit as we got to know Harrer and other characters. After 30 minutes, I couldn’t help but feel like the director went a bit overboard on the backstory. I only need to be shown that Harrer’s a jerk so many times, you know?

Once the film gets going, though, it hits a nice stride. Harrer’s once-uneasy friendship with fellow mountaineer Peter Aufschnaiter (played by David Thewlis, above with costar Lhakpa Tsamchoe) deepens as the two become settled into their lives in Lhasa and Harrer begins to regret decisions that he’s made. The scenes of them vying for the same woman’s attention are quite touching.

At the same time, a Tibetan politician played by B. D. Wong (It took me forever to figure out where I recognized him from. He plays the psychiatrist on Law & Order: SVU.) befriends the two, and the seed for ultimate betrayal is sown. The plot points there are pretty clearly telegraphed, but we all know how it turns out anyway. Besides, that B-story is only background for the real focus of Seven Years in Tibet.

The centerpiece of the film is Harrer’s friendship with the 14-year-old Dalai Lama (played by Jamyang Jamtsho Wangchuk, pictured above with Brad Pitt). It’s a charming story of the young spiritual leader who needs a friend and the outsider who needs to man up. There’s some nice character development for Harrer, and it was nice to see the fragility of the young man while he struggled with his venerated status.

Overall, Seven Years in Tibet is a good, though somewhat flawed film. Nice direction by Jean-Jacques Annaud, but it could have used a good editor to cut another half hour off the top. Brad Pitt turns in a good performance, but I kind of wish they’d left the tag off the end, instead ending with Harrer’s departure from Tibet. And I wish they’d given him a more period-recognizable haircut rather than the floppy ‘do pictured above.

If not that they could at least have kept him from growing that horrible goatee at the end. Blech. Note to Brad: You’re pretty. Very pretty. Don’t mess it up with bad facial hair.

I found Across the Tracks for $3 at a used DVD store. Clearly this couldn’t be a good movie, because it was, you know, on sale for three bucks. But I like Rick Schroder and I like Brad Pitt, and crappy 90s movies are fun to watch sometimes, so I figured I may as well give it a shot.

The movie was an interesting look at Rick Schroder as he broke away from the child actor thing, and at Brad Pitt before he was BRAD PITT! A serviceable job by both, but nothing worth writing home about.

As for the movie, it’s very After School Special. All the standard plot points and the warm fuzzy ending where Everything Works Out™. The biggest trouble was that it didn’t know who it was about. The first half seemed to be Schroder’s, but somewhere in the middle it switched to Pitt. In the end, it was kind of a mess with a couple decent scenes mixed in.

Marketing-wise, I feel kind of bad for Rick Schroder. Here’s a progression of the VHS/DVD covers. Watch as Rick disappears altogether as Brad becomes more popular.

Anyway, was it worth $3? Eh. Sure.

Ringing endorsement, I know.

I’m not exactly a prude, you know. I like a bawdy joke as much as the next guy, and swearing in a movie doesn’t really scare me off. I’m certainly not one of those “You say the F-word too much” people. The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Clerks, Space Balls, the Naked Gun flicks, they’re all fairly high on my favorite comedies list.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m not opposed to filth humor in movies. I just expect there to be more than filth. Sadly, Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen didn’t take my proclivities into consideration when they made Superbad.

The film starts out with a way cool 1970s-esque title sequence that totally rocked my world. If only they had taken it somewhere other than to fake out the audience in the first scene. I’d've loved some groovy interstitials here and there throughout the movie. It would’ve given the film a bit more of a stylistic identity.

From the title sequence, we go to a porn joke. Then another porn joke. Then a MILF joke followed quickly by dick joke, dick joke, vagina joke, porn joke, blowjob joke, porn joke again . . . You get the point.

Maybe I feel so let down by Superbad because I went into it with such high expectations. As a fan of the late lamented series Arrested Development, I was excited to see Michael Cera working again. One of the greats of his generation, he has terrific comic timing, and from what I’ve seen and heard, he’s darn good with the improv. Here, though, he takes a back seat to Jonah Hill, often playing the straight man.

And I was looking forward to Jonah Hill, too. He had a (very) small part in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and apparently his star has been on the rise since. I’m not sure I buy him as an 18-year-old, but I can get over that. There’s also Seth Rogan and a couple other recognizable faces (Joe Lo Truglio makes a brief but awesome appearance, pictured above if you click the picture), making this a can’t-miss cast.

I wish. Boy do I wish.

Am I just getting old? Could that be it? I’m well outside the demographic, and I was never one of the “Let’s get drunk and screw” kids, so I’m doubly removed. On top of that, Seth (Hill) was so very over-the-top angry all the time, which annoyed me and made me wonder why Evan (Cera) and Jules would even want to be around him in the first place. I think that’s part of the point, but it could’ve been done better.

Another problem was the B-story with McLovin and the two wacky cops (pictured above). There were parts of that story that were funny, but it just kept going until it went past funny to uncomfortably funny to just plain uncomfortable, which I guess is my main problem with the whole movie. There were some funny concepts and funny sequences, but most of the time they kept going after the bit should have ended. It was like a bad episode of Saturday Night Live; they knew they had 90 minutes to fill, and they were going to fill them, funny or not.

It was only made worse by the half-hearted, tacked-on, almost-sentimental ending. What I’m left with is an average film and a below average Judd Apatow film. Then again, I came away from it with a big long list of new slang terms for blowjobs and vaginas.

And once again, the universe achieves balance.

Adapting a book into a film is a tricky business. Stray too far from the source material and you have readers coming at you with torches and pitchforks. Stay too true to the text and you risk having a bad movie; not everything translates, after all. But trying to have it both ways is by far the worst choice. Unfortunately, that’s the choice made when To Kill A Mockingbird was made into a film.

It’s not that there isn’t any good in the film version. To the contrary, some things it does quite well. The problem, I suppose, is that I finished the book less than a week before I saw the film, making it nigh impossible to keep from comparing the two.

What surprises me the most is how much of the film is explicitly about the Robinson trial, while so much of the book isn’t. The gentle changes and seemingly digressive life lessons of the novel can’t be accommodated in a two-hour film, so many of them are excised.

Some of the changes were reasonable and well-considered, such as the deletion of Aunt Alexandra and Miss Rachel and moving the role of Dill’s aunt to Miss Stephanie though I probably would have gotten rid of Dill as well. And painful as it was to lose them, I understand the loss of the trip to Calpurnia’s church, Miss Maudie’s fire, and Christmas at Finch’s Landing. Compressing the entire affair to less than a week makes sense too.

Truth is, I would have probably cut more. As I say, the biggest issue that I have with the film version is that it tries to have it both ways. I would’ve gladly applauded a film that tried to keep the spirit of the novel while creating most of the scenes out of whole cloth.

But in To Kill A Mockingbird, most of the scenes are shown almost verbatim, and that’s a problem. Dialogue that reads well on the page doesn’t always work on the screen, speechifying is more easily hidden when it’s couched within descriptive passages, and some sections, their context removed with other excised scenes, seem out of place and unnecessary. The shooting of the rabid dog comes to mind, as does Scout’s fight on her first day of school.

So the film version of To Kill A Mockingbird pales in comparison with the book. The good news is that it’s not all bad. The film works best when it gets completely away from the book. For example, the scene with Jem sitting in the car outside the Robinson’s home was especially moving. Jem sees a young black boy through the window, both of them knowing that they live in different worlds, when Bob Ewell appears outside the car. It’s a moving moment, one that wouldn’t have worked in print, but is perfectly at home here.

Another moving scene is near the beginning of the film, with Atticus tucking Scout into bed. For the first and final time, the children’s mother is mentioned and Scout, too young to remember her, tries to wrap her head around who this woman was. In a move only possible in cinema, the camera pans from the children’s bedroom window to Atticus sitting on the porch listening to Jem dreamily answer Scout’s questions about their dead mother, his wife. Was she nice? Was she pretty? Did she love us? Did we love her?

The climactic scene presented a special challenge to the film crew. In the book, it wasn’t clear during the fight who attacked the children, or who saved them, or whether Jem was dead or alive. But without Scout’s point of view, the scene could have been hamstrung by giving the audience too much information too soon. Pulling the camera in, showing limbs but not their owners, hearing the sounds of the fight without the visual blow-by-blow effectively ramps up the tension and saves the scene. Very well done.

And then there’s Boo. Put simply, the entire film, warts and all, was worth it to see Robert Duvall shrink into the corner in Jem’s bedroom. A caged animal, hair a disheveled shock of white, the sullen face, the sad eyes. Boo on film is exactly Boo in my head, and that doesn’t happen often. Hard to believe that this was Duvall’s first major role on the big screen.

And so the film ends, as does the review. Overall, it’s a good film. Not as good as it could have been, not as good as the book, and not as good as some people say, but good enough that I’ll be seeing it again in a few months.

Let’s talk about The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. (It’s a long title, but that’s okay. It’s appropriate.) I had high hopes for it when I first saw the posters and online clips, and it turns out to be one darn good film.

Usually I follow that up with something negative, but not this time. Director Andrew Dominik made an interesting choice, deciding to lay the cards on the table at the beginning of the film; to tell the audience right out who was killed, when he was killed, how he was killed, and by whom. Rather than spending energy trying to keep the audience guessing about those details, he exposed the characters.

In many ways The Assassination of Jesse James is a character study. As we get to know these men their motives become crystal clear, until the conclusion isn’t just the natural one, it’s the only one that makes sense.

First of all, let’s talk about the good Mr. Pitt. In a role that could have been played as a caricature of a bad guy or a misunderstood good guy, he walked the line between, showing Jesse’s changing moods and complex point of view. Make no mistake, Jesse James was a bad motha, but there was more to him than that. He was a family man, a practical joker. In the end, he was unable to integrate the two opposing personalities.

I’m actually surprised at the maturity of Brad Pitt’s work here. One of the producers for the film, Pitt was clearly passionate about the part, and that passion shines through. The most impressive part, though, is that he was willing to step out of the limelight and give Casey Affleck (below) room to stretch in his portrayal too. And his work in The Assassination of Jesse James is just as impressive as I was told.

Affleck the Younger appears as Bob Ford. This guy’s a little terrifying, of the stalker variety. His voice falters and cracks as his youth and inexperience show themselves. He knows everything about Jesse James, he’s catalogued the ways in which he’s like Jesse James, he’s clipped newspaper articles about Jesse James, and now he’s got himself a spot in the James gang.

The only problem is that the real Jesse James is nowhere near as captivating and amazing and super-cool as the Jesse James in Bob’s head. And that’s where the problems begin. As it becomes clear that the real Jesse doesn’t want to be Bob’s BFF, he becomes slightly and calmly unhinged, agreeing to deliver Jesse James to the government.

There’s one more major character in The Assassination of Jesse James, and he’s Charley Ford, Bob’s older brother. Played by Sam Rockwell (above), Charley doesn’t work just as comic relief, though he was certainly that. I recognized Rockwell from his turn as Stella‘s fake mustache dealer Gary Meadows, so I was ready for all-laughs all-the-time, but not so in this film. Charley is a tragic, almost Shakespearean character as well, using his natural humor to break the tension, becoming darker and darker as the movie progressed.

Art direction was instrumental in the film’s success. Whereas most films are more than happy to move you from one scene to the next with no thought to transition, Dominek set the mood with the fast-motion interstitials showing fields of snow as the sun moved from east to west. He used large, almost graphic elements to shape the mood. One of my favorites was the focus on the spoon in a cup of tea as Jesse learns of Bob Liddil’s capture. The narrator’s voice calmly gives the facts of the case, reducing major developments to dispassionate recitation. Here the first lines of the film set the tone for the next two and a half hours.

He was growing into middle age, and was living then in a bungalow on Woodland Avenue. He installed himself in a rocking chair and smoked a cigar down in the evenings as his wife wiped her pink hands on an apron and reported happily on their two children. His children knew his legs, the sting of his mustache against their cheeks. Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified. He considered himself a Southern loyalist and guerrilla in a Civil War that never ended. He regretted neither his robberies, nor the seventeen murders that he laid claim to. He had seen another summer under in Kansas City, Missouri and on September 5th in the year 1881, he was thirty-four-years-old.

Finally, there’s the music. The score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is somber and cold. Emphasizing the inevitable march to Jesse James’s murder, the music under the interstitials is carried by a slow, steady drumbeat, with simple melody on piano and violin chanting above, leading us to the inevitable slaughter.

Oddly enough, I was almost surprised when the killing happened. I almost expected Robert Ford to drop the gun that Jesse had given him. Maybe Charley would kill his brother to save his friend. Maybe they would just leave Jesse James to live on with his wife and children. That would have been the happy ending.

But as we know, happy endings rarely come true in life.

Here’s an odd little movie. To call it a dark comedy is a bit of an understatement. To Be Or Not To Be starts with Jack Benny playing a Nazi officer getting information from a young boy and getting a visit from Adolf Hitler. Thankfully, there’s a quick reveal and it turns out that he’s a Polish stage actor playing a part. Whew.

To Be Or Not To Be follows actor Joseph Tura (Benny) and his wife Maria as they try to keep a German spy from completing his mission. The rest of the company helps out along with Maria’s admirer, a younger Robert Stack.

I’m not one to say you can’t find humor in tragedy. There are too many shouldn’t-be-funny comedies to believe that. And there are plenty of laughs in To Be Or Not To Be. The problem has to do with when the film was made. In 1942, the German occupation wasn’t a piece of history, it was current news. That makes it a bit harder to laugh about.

The filmmakers had to address the point, so they brought the comedy to a screeching halt when it was time for the actual invasion to happen. There was a good sized section of film spent reflecting on the real-life drama, after which they tried to start the comedy back up. It was necessary, for sure, but it resulted in a disjointed film that felt a little schizophrenic.

The good news is that when it’s in comedy mode, it really is funny. Jack Benny’s comic timing is terrific as always, especially in a scene when he discovers Robert Stack in his bed. It’s a great scene between the two of them, and when Carole Lombard joins them it gets even better as they all argue past each other. It’s almost like they’re online or something.

And the Nazi scenes are surprisingly well done. The contempt is just slathered on. The Nazi officers are shown as ineffectual buffoons for the most part, kind of a precursor to Hogan’s Heroes. At one point Tura impersonates a Nazi (for real this time) and gets curious about what the Nazis think of Josef Tura. It’s classic Jack Benny like this that makes me love him so.

Josef Tura: [disguised as Professor Siletsky - speaking about Maria Tura]: Her husband is that great, great Polish actor, Josef Tura. You’ve probably heard of him.
Colonel Ehrhardt: Oh, yes. As a matter of fact I saw him on the stage when I was in Warsaw once before the war.
Josef Tura: Really?
Colonel Ehrhardt: What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland.

While it certainly isn’t my favorite film, To Be Or Not To Be is a fair movie. The performances were reasonably good, and it’s well paced, dramatic section notwithstanding. The comedy is wonderfully done given the constraints, and it never goes so far as to point and laugh at real-life war.

One of the most interesting parts about watching it was seeing little tidbits that marked it as being from that era. The fact that they pronounce the word Nazi differently than we do now fascinates me. It’s something I would never have known if it had been made at a later date, and in the end, that’s what endears the film to me.

When I reviewed [cref 116 Toy Story 2], I wanted to mention this beautiful song, but there just wasn’t room. I’ve found some interesting clips in my research, and decided it deserved its own post.

The song is Jessie’s Story. It’s a marvelously constructed little song called “When She Loved Me” from Randy Newman. Sarah MacLaughlin was the perfect choice to sing the song, and the dialogue between Jessie (Joan Cusack) and Woody (Tom Hanks) was written and played perfectly.

Better than that is the fact that Jessie’s Song is beautifully performed in several translations. The DVD contained Spanish, French, and Portuguese, but when I went online I also found Japanese and Arabic! I don’t know who the performers are but they sing beautifully, don’t they?

Below are videos for five of the languages, starting with the original English, which contains some mild spoilers for the movie. I couldn’t find the French version online. If someone runs across it, drop me a line and I’ll add it.

I collect with vodpod

Since I’m sure there will be people coming in from Google looking for the similarly titled “Jessie’s Song”, I’ve included it too. For those unfamiliar with “Jessie’s Song”, it’s only the most awesome episode in Saved By The Bell history!

That’s right, this is the one where Jessie gets all hopped up on caffeine pills and freaks out. My personal theory is that she actually got them from Screech, who laced the pills with cocaine.

[cref.from 116]

After all the westerns and older classics I’ve been watching lately, I decided it was time to catch a film told from a woman’s point of view. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore seemed to fit the bill pretty well.

Starring Ellen Burstyn and directed by Martin Scorsese, the film follows Alice Hyatt as she learns to fend for herself after her husband’s death. Great pains were taken to show Alice’s transformation from a spiritless, cowed housewife with an annoying son and an abusive husband to a firm, compassionate, in-control woman. With an annoying son. A really, really annoying son.

You can’t have everything, I guess.

It’s an interesting metamorphosis. In the beginning, we meet an Alice afraid of her husband, yet defending him to her best friend and mourning him when he dies suddenly. After the funeral Alice makes the drastic decision to move away and try to restart her singing career, with her son Tommy in tow.

Before long Alice starts a relationship with a young Harvey Keitel. Ellen Burstyn’s scenes with Keitel were simply amazing. You know how good he is at the “scary dude” thing? Well, she’s just as good at the “Oh God don’t kill me please don’t kill me” thing. I read somewhere that she had to go cry for an hour when they got done shooting the scene, and I don’t doubt it for a minute. It’s one of the standout scenes in the film.

Before long, Alice moves again and takes a job at a local diner, meeting and falling in love with local rancher David, played by Kris Kristofferson. After about twenty minutes of scenes in and around the diner, I finally realized why it seemed so familiar. The Linda Lavin show Alice was based on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I never knew that.

The rest of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore deals with her budding independence, how it works with her relationship with David, and how Tommy’s acting out (and his friendship with Jodie Foster) leads to near disaster.

Another good film, worthy of the praise given it. I’m not surprised; the fact that Martin Scorsese directed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a big tipoff to its quality. The framing of the above shot of Alice and Flo (played by Diane Ladd) on a break and sunning themselves is a perfect example of his artistry.

It’s damn brave to do such an extreme closeup with such inconsequential dialogue. It easily could have come off ho-hum, but Scorsese made a potentially throw-away scene into one of the more important of the film. Here he showed not just the easy friendship between the two ladies, but also Alice’s comfort in her own skin.

It’s a good image. One that people need to see, both then and now. Ellen Burstyn has long been a reliable player, and her ability is evident here. Her Alice, by the end of the film, finally becomes someone we hope to recognize from within our own selves. Never a bad message, but rarely is it told with such elegance.

You know, The Sting is one of those films that I’ve never given much thought to watching. I always assumed it was a good film, but didn’t feel any motivation to watch it. It came out at an awkward time; when VCRs became popular a decade after the film was released, it was too recent to be considered a classic but too old to be rushed out to the video store shelves.

When I realized that seven months into this thing I still haven’t taken a look at any films from the 1970s, I decided to pull this one out first. Boy am I glad I did. It really is a great movie.

First of all, take a look at the picture above. But for the generation gap, I’d swear Robert Redford and Brad Pitt were brothers. Redford plays the part of Johnny Hooker, a young grifter in the depression-era seedier side of Joliet, Illinois. When his partner leaves, Hooker heads for Chicago where he’s taken under the wing of Henry Gondorff, an older con-artist who hasn’t had a good sting in a long time. Amid crosses, double crosses, and triple crosses, Gondorff manages to lead a band of swindlers in conning mob boss Doyle Lonnegan.

The art direction on The Sting leaves no doubt that we’re in 1936. From the title cards between acts to the drab interior sets and streets lined with winos to the old piano rags of Scott Joplin on the brilliantly sparse soundtrack, we know we’re seeing the underbelly of a world that’s seen better days. And that helps dispel any moral questions before they’re asked and allows us to watch as our heroes make a living by stealing from others. There’s never any doubt that what they’re doing is reasonable and just, especially since they tend to take from other crooks.

Paul Newman’s Gondorff has a couple things going for him. First of all, he’s got those piercing blue eyes and a confidence in his swagger that fits him just so. He also gets all the good lines. Gondorff’s been around the block a few times, and it’s clear that while he may have fallen on hard times, he’s still got what it takes to pull this off. Surrounding himself with a veritable legion of associates in a complex plan, he plays his mark like a fiddle.

The poker game is an amazing showcase of close-quarters comedy. Newman’s just stellar, making the whole situation so deliciously uncomfortable. Then as the stakes get higher and higher, the comedy slowly fades while the drama is turned up to eleven. George Roy Hill won an Academy Award for directing The Sting, and quite deservedly. I’m leaving out buckets and buckets of plot because I don’t have room for all of it, but the film never felt too weighed down by the number of plotlines or players.

Speaking of the number of players, this film is a prime example of pitch-perfect casting. There are so many recognizable faces, but there’s no stunt casting. Each actor suits his part perfectly. Ray Walston is the only choice for a race announcer. No one else (nevermind The Sting II) could play Lonnegan the way Robert Shaw did. Eileen Brennan was a fabulous choice for the sultry vixen, bringing a guarded femininity to this otherwise masculine cast.

The Sting is definitely a film I’ll be watching again. I do wish I’d been able to rent a better print. The one I got was a messy full-screen DVD from 1998. I’m seeing reports that the film may have been shown in 4:3 in a conscious decision to make it look like old movie, but then I see that newer restored HD versions of the film are made in 1.85:1.

Hrm. I’ll have to find out which one’s true before I watch it again.

Season 3, Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington

Season 9, The City Of New York Vs. Homer Simpson

Generally speaking, I don’t like sequels. Most sequels seem to be made to squeeze another ten bucks out of the movie goer, and that annoys me. So when Toy Story 2 came out in 1999 I stayed clear. I’d liked Toy Story quite a bit and I didn’t want to taint the memory of a good film with a sub-par sequel.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that Toy Story 2 is one of the extremely rare sequels that is actually better than the original.

This time around, Woody finds out that he was the star of a 1950s kids show after Al from Al’s Toy Barn kidnaps him (it’s a little complicated) to complete his collection. Buzz and the gang set off on a daring rescue across town, through a busy street, and on an adventure through a toy store (Al’s Toy Barn) before narrowly escaping the clutches of the Evil Emperor Zurg.

Meanwhile, Woody meets the rest of Woody’s Roundup Gang (Stinky Pete the Prospector, Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl, and his faithful horse Bullseye) and contemplates his fate as Al prepares to sell the whole set to a museum in Japan. Woody was already feeling rejected after Andy couldn’t take him to Cowboy Camp because of a rotator cuff injury. Now he faces the prospect of living rest of his life under glass.

There are lots of good laughs in Toy Story 2, but like most (all?) Pixar films, there’s a solid story woven between the jokes that elevates the entire film. From the beginning, Woody is unsure of his role in Andy’s life. After being “shelved” by Andy’s mom, he fears that it’s all over, that his best friend has left him behind.

It’s a brilliant story for the toys to play out; brilliant because it doesn’t take any mental gymnastics for the toys to worry about the issue, and because it’s something that the kids and the adults in the audience have all gone through. I’m sure parents identify strongly with this, but I think it has a broader range than that. Rejection, real or imagined, worries all of us. We experience it on the day we’re born and we experience it (in some form or another) until the day we die.

It’s weird when someone you know starts to get successful. You’re so happy for them and even proud that other people are finding out what you already knew. But then…well, the relationship (even if it’s just chatting every once in a while) starts changing. Their circle of friends grows and you stay the same; not better or worse necessarily, but the same as you were before they started getting successful.

So they’re talking to their new and possibly more successful friends, or maybe just people they have more in common with, which is completely reasonable. That’s the kicker in all of this; nobody’s doing anything wrong, but even still you can get kind of left behind sometimes. Heck, if you don’t react to their work or their family (or whatever they’re successful in) with as much enthusiasm as the new crew does, but the same amount as you did before, sometimes they can perceive that you have a problem with them.

I’m getting melancholy just writing this, but it’s a real issue that people have to face. Through Woody and Jessie, especially Jessie, the issue is explored in a kid-friendly way. I say ‘especially Jessie’ because one of the best, most powerful moments in the movie was hers. The song in which we find out about Jessie’s Real Special Kid punched a hole right through all the walls that I’ve built up around the issue and made me cry.

There, I said it. I cried like a BABY. A TINY LITTLE CRYING BABY. And unless you have a cold, cruel heart of stone, you’ll cry too.

All right, enough of that sentimental junk. Let’s move on to something else. Toy Story 2 is a riot. While the A story plays out with the Roundup Gang, Buzz Lightyear leads his own gang on a mission to rescue their friend. And what a gang it is. Just the thought of getting Tim Allen, Jim Varney, John Ratzenberger, Wallace Shawn, and Don Rickles (DON! FREAKING! RICKLES!) to voice these characters just had to make the folks at Pixar giggle with delight. The five of them were a great comedic team every time they were on the screen.

Buzz’s B story takes an almost-dramatic turn when he meets not only a whole wall of Buzz Lightyear toys, but his arch-nemesis the Evil Emperor Zurg to boot. There’s some pretty funny stuff along the way, including a guided tour of the toy store by none other than Tour Guide Barbie. The placement of the funny certainly wasn’t accidental. With Woody’s story getting downright heartbreaking, the audience needed something to give them a breather from time to time.

Anyway, I’ve prattled on long enough. Everything turned out all right in the end (mostly) and they all (mostly) lived happily ever after. Mostly.

Toy Story 2 continues to be another huge success for Pixar and Disney, both financially and creatively.There’s talk of another sequel, and while it’s still at least a couple years away, I have some of the same apprehensions as I did with this one. Hopefully Pixar won’t let me down. They do have a pretty good track record after all.

Until next time, insert your own witty tag line here! Hit it Wheezy!