Tag: movies

Movie review: Toy Story 4 (Pixar)

a fine coda

Toy Story 4I saw Toy Story 4 in a movie theater, the Spectrum 8 in Albany. Every Toy Story I’ve seen at a cinema. Since the first two movies came out in 1995 and 1999, respectively, pre-parenthood, it was my own volition in seeing them.

The third film I saw with my wife but without my daughter in 2010. Since my wife and daughter saw #4 without me, I saw it by myself.

Woody (Tom Hanks) and the rest of the toys are on a road trip with Bonnie (Madeleine McGraw) and her parents (Jay Hernandez, Lori Alan), just before Bonnie enters kindergarten. The toys’ primary task is keeping track of the new character named Forky (Tony Hale), who has issues.

Woody unexpectedly runs into his long-lost friend Bo Peep (Annie Potts), now a “lost” toy. They have philosophical differences when it comes to what the role of a toy should be. Bo, despite her porcelain construction, is impressive.

Ultimately, Woody, Bo, and some new friends such as Ducky (Keegan-Michael Key) and Bunny (Jordan Peele), have a mission. They have to sneak into the antique store run by Margaret (June Squibb), a place Bo knows too well. It’s not just the old-school doll Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks), but her friends, all of whom are creepy identical ventriloquist dummies named Benson.

There is a lot of insecurities revealed in Toy Story 4, including from daredevil Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves). It can be difficult to find your place in the world, even if you’re a doll.

This is a fine coda to the franchise. Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and Jessie (Joan Cusack) had smaller but vital roles in the narrative. I LOLed at a scene involving dependence on GPS.

Toy Story 4 received a 98% positive rating in Rotten Tomatoes. Matthew Norman of the London Evening Standard wrote: “The legislation it flouts is the law of diminishing returns which governs movies with numbers after their names.”

Disney Removes ‘Toy Story 2’ Scene That Recalled Hollywood Casting Couch Abuse.

Movie review: The Biggest Little Farm

the farmers are not alone?

biggest little farmMy wife and I had been seeing the trailer for The Biggest Little Farm at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany for months. It is an “environmental advocacy documentary with a satisfying side dish of hope for the future.”

The premise is that, in part as a promise to their dog Todd (seriously), John and Molly Chester left their city lives. They found themselves owning a fairly arid piece of land about 200 miles from Los Angeles that they were going to farm, despite an enormous dearth of experience.

In the beginning, they did have an agricultural guru to help them figure out how to start to create a diverse ecosystem. Each year was a series of successes – fruit trees! – and frustrations – birds eating the fruit on the trees?!

There are a lot of interesting characters, most of them non-human: the various birds and the snakes and the coyotes, Emma the pig and her BFF Greasy the rooster, to name a few? Do we need ALL of them or are some of them merely predators?

Slowly, after a number of years, it appeared that perhaps the promise that the farmers are not alone in cultivating the land was kicking in. Will the farm withstand the notorious southern California droughts, flooding and fires?

Some of the critics (90% positive on Rotten Tomatoes) thought that the filmmakers, John Chester and Mark Monroe – kept back some of facts from the narrative. Surely, the more grisly aspects were explained rather than shown. If it’s a little infomercially at the end, it was earned.

I suppose I left the theater a bit annoyed, but not at the film. Much of the concepts the Chesters were using I remember reading about it elementary school, MANY years ago. How did we end up with farm after farm with a single crop, year after year?

This, of course, eventually meant that unnatural, expensive and patentable fertilizers were developed to “fix” the land when all one really needed was biodiversity and and a bit of faith.

Movie review- NTL: All About Eve (2019)

A remarkable blurring of the lines between cinema and theatre

All oabout EveMy wife suggested that we go see All About Eve at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady. I had heard of the Bette Davis/Anne Baxter film from 1950, of course, but I had never seen it.

No, she meant the new National Theater Live version “performed in the Noël Coward theatre and is an adaptation from the well-known film.” It played twice at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, but we had missed it.

The production stars Gillian Anderson, best known from the television show The X-Files, as Margo Channing, an accomplished, but temperamental stage actress. Lily James (Downton Abbey, title role in 2015’s Cinderella) is Eve Harrington, a huge Margo fan with a “melancholy life story.”

Having read the description of the 1950 film, this story stays true to the source material, but the technology has made it much more than a filmed version of a play.

“Spending ages trying to get the rights, writer/director Ivo van Hove proves that it was worth the wait, with a remarkable blurring of the lines between cinema and theatre (all backed by PJ Harvey’s simmering score.)”

His search for the rights to “The Wisdom of Eve”, the short story by Mary Orr, from which writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz adapted the earlier screenplay, is described in the short piece prior to the action.

“Separating the stage layout into several sets, Hove attaches a large protector screen to the back of the set, and films (in real-time) private exchanges between characters in corridors, which are shown at the same time as with on-stage events (such as around a dining table) continue to unfold.”

This was an astonishingly effective technique. Sometimes, the main action was on the screen as the folks on the stage waited. One also got to see Margo, or Eve’s, full face, as they looked into the mirror.

The other actors were fine as well. I couldn’t help note that the 2019 version had a cast far more diverse than the origin film.

If All About Eve comes to a theater near you, I highly recommend that you go see it!

1st movie that I… (SamuraiFrog flashback)

Depends what you consider screwball, I suppose.

This is weird. I was trying to figure out what I had in draft for my blog, nearly 300 posts. I discovered this one from 2011 (!), and I can’t see that I ever published it. From SamuraiFrog, and only one answer has changed:

1st Dracula Movie: Not sure – it would have been on TV one Saturday afternoon, but I believe it was the Bela Lugosi version.

1st Disney Movie: 101 Dalmatians, which features a character named Roger.

1st movie I saw without my parents: The first movie I ever saw alone, without my parents or friends or anyone, was a double feature of a Francis the Talking Mule picture and something called The Leech Woman, a movie that absolutely terrified me, as I’ve noted.


1st movie I had to stand in a long line for: Quite possibly the original Star Wars movie. But even a longer line for Pretty Woman.

1st movie I saw with a girl: I really can’t remember. I know I saw The Great White Hope with my high school girlfriend, but her father came along. It might have been Catch-22.

1st James Bond movie: Certainly on TV, probably Goldfinger.

1st adult date movie: I’ll say Rosemary’s Baby, my freshman year in college.

1st X-Rated film: It was either Midnight Cowboy or A Clockwork Orange, depending on whether the former had been edited down to R.

1st Marx Brothers film: Duck Soup.

1st movie on videotape: Annie Hall or Being There.

1st animated feature film: Again, 101 spotty dogs.

1st favorite film star: Sophia Loren, before I ever saw her in anything.

1st film star I got an autograph from: If I ever have, I don’t recall.

1st film star I saw in person: Jack Nicholson, hanging out backstage with Mike Tyson after an Anita Baker concert at the Palace Theatre in Albany c 1989.

1st WC Fields film: I saw several in my youth, but they tended to run into each other in my memory.

1st M-rated film: The Night They Raided Minsky’s. M, BTW, became PG.

1st R-rated film: Catch-22. It traumatized me for a while.

1st movie on DVD: I had so few movies on DVD in 2011. TV shows, yes. My wife bought me West Side Story. I bought her Whale Rider and Dreamgirls. The only one I bought for me was a 2-pack of the first two Spider-Man movies, which I got from a library sale in 2010.

1st blaxpoitation film: Have I ever seen one?

1st martial arts film: I’ve seen a couple on local TV but I never knew the name of any of them.

1st screwball comedy: Depends what you consider screwball, I suppose. Is Adam’s Rib a screwball comedy? I guess I’ll say The Philadelphia Story.

1st Cary Grant film: The Philadelphia Story.

1st Clint Eastwood film: probably Every Which Way But Loose.

1st favorite actress: Barbara (Seagull) Hershey.

1st favorite movie song: “Cruella de Ville” from 101 canines.

1st favorite movie cowboy: Roy Rogers, though I knew him more from TV.

Favorite stars in television and movies

Who is your favorite friend that you met in 1977 at a Halloween party in New Paltz?

Cate BlanchettThe evil Tom the Mayor, who I know from FantaCo wants to know: Who is your all-time favorite Movie Star, Male and Female, one only apiece? Also Favorite TV Stars, same rule, one apiece.

First off, the line between television and film has blurred tremendously. You find performers easily bouncing between the two media. But OK.

Movie star (male): after considering Mark Ruffalo and George Clooney, I ended up with Denzel Washington. He’s the actor who I’ve seen both early on and relatively recently: Cry Freedom (1987), Glory (1989); Mississippi Masala (1991); Malcolm X (1992); Philadelphia (1993); The Pelican Brief (1993); Crimson Tide (1995).

Also, Devil in a Blue Dress (1995); The Preacher’s Wife (1995); The Hurricane (1999); Remember the Titans (2000); The Manchurian Candidate (2004); Unstoppable (2010); and Fences (2016). There were two or three others I might have caught if I had had the time.

Movie star (female): ignoring Streep, for cause: Cate Blanchett, who often disappears into her roles. I’ve seen her in Oscar and Lucinda (1997); Elizabeth (1998); The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999); The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001); The Shipping News (2001); Notes on a Scandal (2006); Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007); Blue Jasmine (2013); Cinderella (2015); Carol (2015); and Ocean’s Eight (2018).

TV star (male): the late James Garner, who played two iconic roles, Bret Maverick in the western Maverick, and private detective Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files. He also became the father figure in 8 Simple Rules after John Ritter died and lasted longer – a couple seasons – than any show losing its protagonist normally would.

TV star (female): excluding Betty White, I’ll go with the late Mary Tyler Moore, who was Laura Petrie in the Dick Van Dyke Show, a series I have on DVD. Then she was Mary Richards on her eponymously-named show.

Huh, I answered a similar question almost nine years ago.

Another question, this from Judy: Who is your favorite friend that you met in 1977 at a Halloween party in New Paltz?

That was a REALLY long time ago. You don’t expect me to remember that far back, do you?

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