Movies

Toy Story 3 does what the third (and should have been final) installments of the Godfather and Star Wars trilogies couldn't: it put a proper bookend on a longer story. This presumably final visit with the toys that launched Pixar as a feature-film company in 1995 is not quite as good as the first two movies as a caper, but it is the most emotional of the three movies.

With Life taking up the usual Netflix-watching time on Sundays, we let two movies sit far too long, In the Loop and Wendy & Lucy.

It's at least encouraging that comedy writers have moved beyond gross-out humor and funny things being done to people and have begun to let the characters be funny and know they're being funny. Hot Tub Time Machine was a fine movie -- and yes, the '80s were awful; we get it already. But while I was hoping to find a movie that would live up to the comedies of my youth, it may actually have ruined some of them.

Found this thanks to Jim Emerson's Scanners Blog. This "trailer" is far better than most of the movies it mocks.

Finally got around to seeing District 9 this past weekend. It's difficult to describe how moving this movie was without giving away its story. But after the first third of the movie, which was mostly what I expected, it takes such a stark -- and ironically humanistic -- turn that caught me off guard. It's a shame that a movie like Avatar (which was just fine the first time, when it was called Dances With Wolves, and had no need to be remade in 3-D) got so much attention when District 9 was out there.

Avatar not winning Best Picture is a dream come true, but like dreams, the accompanying joy is a fleeting, misty feeling that has nearly dissipated. The Hurt Locker was a historic and flawless, but was it really the Best Picture? What is the definition of a Best Picture anyway?

What might turn out to be the final year of five Best Picture nominees was one of the best arguments for expanding the field. Two quality box office successes -- WALL-E and The Dark Knight were left off the list while the field was made up of movies that earned their nominations based on expectations (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, (Frost/Nixon) or marketing (The Reader) rather than critical reputation (Slumdog Millionaire, Milk). Ten nominees might have changed the winner.

Sometimes everything works out. The best picture won Best Picture; all the acting awards went to strong, risky performances from actors who are outside the Hollywood mainstream -- Daniel Day Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Javier Bardem and Tilda Swinton; Best Original Song went to the sweet ballad from Once rather than any of the trio nominated from Enchanted; Best Original Score went to Atonement, where the music was a nearly breathing character itself; even three of the technical awards went not to the biggest, loudest, brightest action movie of the year, Tranformers, but to a quality thriller in The Bourne Ultimatum, which won both sound awards and editing.

Martin Scorsese tried, tried, tried, tried, tried and tried again before finally winning an Oscar for Best Director and/or Best Picture, and he managed to do it with his first movie in a long time that didn't seem created specifically for that purpose.

Crash is a simplistic, Hollywood pat-on-the-back look at race relations that manages to confirm all the worst stereotypes while at first seeming to contradict them. It's two hours of sometimes interesting performances and cross-pollinating stories that nearly makes you go hmmm at the end, only to forget everything you saw 10 minutes later. It is Robert Altman or P.T. Anderson as done by a freshman high school class in Brentwood. This movie is not the end of the world, it's not the worst movie ever made. It's just in no way the Best Picture and possibly the best proof that in the end, these awards mean nothing.