Review: Inside Out

by Trevor Kirkendall

★★★★

“Inside Out” shows Pixar in a triumphant return to form. It’s one of the most original and innovative stories to ever come out of the studio, and it couldn’t come a better time. Pixar has had a long history of issuing original content to the cinemas, but after two mediocre sequels there were some questioning if they had lost some of their creative power. Those doubts seem to have been resolved, at least for now, because “Inside Out” could very well be the best film Pixar has ever done.

The concept revolves around those tiny little voices in your head. The film personifies five of the basic human emotions: Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness (voiced by Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, and Phyllis Smith respectively, making this one of the greatest voice casts ever assembled for an animated feature). Each emotion is responsible for bringing out that specific emotion from Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), the 11-year-old girl whose mind they inhabit.

Just like in all of Pixar’s films, all is right with the world until it isn’t. In this case, Riley and her parents move from their Midwestern home to San Francisco. This causes all the memories Riley has to be affected by Sadness, something Joy doesn’t want to see happen. But an accident within the emotions’ headquarters sends Joy and Sadness into the far away regions of Riley’s long-term memory storage leaving them unable to control her emotions. That leaves Fear, Anger, and Disgust to lead the way. With everything falling apart, Joy and Sadness have to race back to headquarters before Riley’s entire personality is altered.

This is a genius premise for a film, and the first logline released by Disney several years ago made it immediately intriguing. Not often do the promises of great ideas turn into great films. Pixar has really made themselves synonymous with quality filmmaking over the years despite a couple missteps along the way. They’ve really outdone themselves with “Inside Out.” It may very well go down as their best film. We’ll need to marinade on that one for a while before handing it that title, but it makes a very strong case.

For my money, Pixar’s finest film is “Up” which was directed by the great Pete Docter who also lends his leadership to “Inside Out.” It’s no wonder both of these films are among the studio’s best. Docter knows how to pull the best emotions out of his scripts as evident by full-grown adults weeping during the opening 10-minutes of “Up.” But here, he literally pulls emotions out of this script and makes them into classic Pixar characters (including the best Pixar character ever: Riley’s imaginary friend Bing Bong voiced by the incomparable Richard Kind). He brings them to life thanks to Pixar’s innate ability to make computer-drawn designs into life-like creations, but mostly because the screenplay is so well written that we’re able to immediately identify with them.

And this is where Docter is able to dig into the most creative corners of his own mind. This isn’t the first movie where Pixar has breathed life into inanimate objects, but it is the first time they’ve had to create characters – and an entire world, for that matter – out of something that does not exist at all. This is something we as filmgoers aren’t privileged to these days: the ability to be taken somewhere you’ve never seen before.

The level of detail in the animation is nothing new for Pixar and shouldn’t come to the surprise of anyone who has seen their movies in the past. Yet, they continue to improve their style with each new film. The film is edited together as if it were a live action film, which brings out a more film-like quality rather than that of a goofy cartoon. Combine that with the need to create an entire world from scratch makes this film much more unique than the studio’s previous efforts. Not just unique from its creative design and animation, but also from the story side since this world has its own set of rules it follows that we must learn. We’re not given to a huge opening sequence of exposition about the rules, but instead pick them up as we go along which makes the film enormously fun.

Without any emotional involvement within the story, “Inside Out” would have still be an enjoyable movie, but Docter didn’t want that to be the case. Apparently, he wanted tug at your heartstrings as hard as he possibly could until you left teardrops on the cinema floor. It’s shouldn’t be a surprise that a movie with emotions would be somewhat emotionally charged, but “Inside Out” is an astoundingly emotional film with a few very powerful sequences.

“Inside Out” is a massive success about the realities of getting older and working through life’s problems. It’s a stunning return to form for Pixar in all departments: story, animation, voices, and most importantly its ability to make you feel something other than just causal entertainment. It’s a film made with much more soul and passion than almost anything else we’ve seen so far this year. This will end up being one of the best films of 2015 without question.

Review: Jurassic World

by Trevor Kirkendall
★½

What made 1993’s “Jurassic Park” such a spectacle was the fact that no one had ever seen anything quite like it. “Jurassic Park” is largely credited with popularizing the move to computers for visual effects work. Nowadays, the practice of using CGI in films has become so widespread that it’s in just about every single Hollywood film whether you realize it or not. It’s not like it’s cheap or easy either. But it’s so commonplace these days that audiences have come to expect something bigger and better every time they see something. “Jurassic World” feels the need to up the ante, and boy is it dreadful.

“Jurassic World” is so bogged down with backstory on so many different characters that it becomes flat out boring. We have Zach and Gray (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins) who are headed to Jurassic World to spend a week with their aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), a workaholic operations manager at the park. We have the geneticists, lead by Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong, the only holdover from the original), who have cooked up a new dinosaur from scratch. Claire, along with the park’s owner Masrani (Irrfan Khan) believe that kids are bored with regular dinosaurs and need something bigger and scarier to keep people coming back for more. Masrani is worried this new dinosaur, the Indominous Rex, isn’t too happy in the isolated paddock they’ve built for her. He asks Claire to consult with an animal trainer they have on the island named Owen (Chris Pratt) to analyze the paddock.

Owen trains Raptors and has gotten them to trust and respect him. His supervisor Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) is in awe of this ability and wants to explore how far Owen can go with Raptors. But that’ll have to wait since Owen has to deal with the Indominous Rex paddock. But when he gets there, things go all wrong. And it’s not because he and Claire used to have a little fling going.

That’s all in the first act before the inciting incident even comes along. Did you pay for a human drama piece about romance, or a study of putting work before family? Or did you pay to see awesome looking dinosaurs run rampage through a theme park? 

I’m pretty certain a lot of these characters could have been cut down or combined. I’m also certain the romance side of the story could have been thrown out and no one would have missed it. Not once after watching “Jurassic Park” did anyone ever say, “I hope Dr. Grant and Dr. Sadler got together!” The characters in “Jurassic World” are overabundant in numbers, completely misused, and change their personalities for whatever the scene asks of them. This is Screenwriting 101 stuff being thrown out the window. Hell, this is basic story telling skills being tossed out!

Spielberg knew just how to keep a tight reign on his story. He knew you paid to see dinosaurs, so he got them on screen quick but still held out the anticipation for as long as possible. How breathtaking was it when you first saw the brachiosaurus on screen?

But everyone knows what dinosaurs look like on the big screen. So “Jurassic World” is at a disadvantage already. The filmmakers try to compensate by making up a dinosaur out of thin air and add pieces to it as they go along to make it seem like it’s indestructible and invincible. Why approach it like this? Because they can. Remember that memorable quote from the original by Jeff Goldblum? “You were so preoccupied that you could do it, you never stopped to think about if you should do it.” Same applies here. As a matter of fact, that quote could apply to about nine out of 10 studio pictures these days, but that’s a topic for another day.

Director Colin Trevorrow has one other film to his credit and that’s the indie film “Safety Not Guaranteed,” which is actually a very enjoyable film; one I would recommend everyone watch instead of watching “Jurassic World.” Trevorrow’s inexperience with big budget features is painfully obvious from the first scene in the film. There’s a lot of humor sprinkled throughout the film, which he does know how to handle. It’s well placed and well timed even if it’s uncomfortably corny, most of which delivered by his “Safety Not Guaranteed” star Jake Johnson.

Outside of that, Trevorrow has no grasp on the film. There’s no awe and childlike wonderment that accompanied the original. Instead, the first dinosaurs on screen just sort of appear; no fanfare and no awe. All the film's best shot are direct copies of shots Spielberg and cinematography Dean Cundey already crafted in the original. Even the brilliant composer Michael Giacchino is reduced to playing John Williams's famous musical themes at all the big moments. And even though Indominous Rex is the star of the film, she never really fills the screen quite the same way Spielberg’s T-Rex did. There’s no inspiration whatsoever. They're so drunk on nostalgia they forgot to make something new and original. It’s a completely flat film from beginning to the third act when we do get some dino vs. dino moments, which ends up actually being fun. Too little too late though.

Is “Jurassic World” a bad movie? Yes, it is sadly. As bad as the other two sequels? No, thanks a few fun moments in the latter half. Still, everyone on the creative and studio side is to blame for its shortcomings. Studio pictures are overrun with too many people concerned with playing to all major demographics across the planet. While “Jurassic Park” may have been targeted to teenage boys, “Jurassic World” will ideally (in the mind’s of executives) grab everybody since they’ve thrown in something everyone can hopefully empathize with. I’m sorry, but if a dinosaur bursts through the trees and starts chasing you, I’m pretty certain running is something everyone can empathize with. The first act of so many movies these days are filled with talk and talk and talk and talk to the point that summer movies are almost unwatchable. What happened to old screenwriting adage “show don’t tell?” I guess Trevorrow skipped that day of class. He and about 90% of all other Hollywood directors need to retake that part of the class again. Either that, or they could screen “Jurassic Park” again so they can remember exactly what a summer movie is supposed to look like.

Review: Insidious Chapter 3

By Trent Crump
 ★★½

 - I saw this on a regular-sized theater screen in 2-D. 

I've thought for almost a full week how to talk about this movie.  Horror movies tend to be hard to review.  What scares one person won't scare another.  Jump scares are enjoyed by some, others hate them and find them to be cheating.  Some people will automatically give horror films low scores, others will give them all high scores based purely on how scary a movie is or how much it made them jump.  To do a review for a film, and to review it based on its merits outside of its genre...  That's hard to do with horror.   However, I will attempt it.

Despite being called Insidious Chapter 3, this film is actually a prequel to the first film in the series.  That means, if you want to go see the movie without having seen the first two, you're in luck.  (However, I wouldn't recommend it.)   This story is about an entirely different family than the other two films.  This girl, Quinn (Stefanie Scott), goes to visit the psychic Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) to try to communicate with her dead mother, whom she thinks is trying to get her attention.  However, Elise has given up contacting the dead, as her husband died and when she tried to contact him, something evil followed her back.  Whenever she tries to contact, it notices her and tries to kill her.  She tells Quinn to stop trying to contact her mother, because when she calls out to the dead, they all can hear her.  This is made evident by the figure she keeps seeing waving to her the next day.  And the knocking on her walls...  The figure by the curtains of her window...  As with most horror films, things get more and more creepier, more physical, more painful, until finally they realize something is terribly wrong and try to fix it.  

 As you can tell, it's not a very original horror film.  In fact, this is the same plot as the first two films in this series.  It's the plot of Poltergeist, both the new and the old one.  Haunting films run on a quite rigid formula, and I suppose if it's not broke, you can try to improve it, but will fail about 80% of the time, and with the low budgets these films normally have, it's easy to make money repeating yourself.  This one was made on $10 million and has already made over 4 times that amount, for example. (3/4 of that in the US.)  It's not even been out a week.  It's a PG-13 horror film that, while not really scary to this reviewer, does have some fantastic visuals and some of the best jump scares out there.  James Wan was the director of the first two films, but he was busy working on Furious 7 while this was filming.  The macabre humor he puts in his films is still here (he produced this, after all), but it's not there as much.  Nor is his fantastic use of odd bright color palettes or the sense of foreboding which he worked so well into The Conjuring two years ago.  It's more effective in its jump scares than other horror films of the type usually are.  It rarely pulls its punches into build-ups without the jump as modern horror is wont to do.

What hold this film together is Lin Shaye.  She was in the other two films and has a career as a character actress going back to the mid-1970s.  In her role here as Elise, she brings the same warmth and power she brought previously, but in this film she's a sad, doubting woman as well.  She's in mourning and can't do her job anymore.  Also back are the comic relief duo from the previous films.  The bloggers/ghosthunters who obviously are in over their heads without Elise.  (They haven't joined her yet in this one, obviously.)  Their slapstick and unprofessionalism are kind of humorous, but it's a bit overdone here and distracts from the spookiness of the film.

The movie as a whole is, in my opinion, about on the level of the second film.  It's got more heart than that one, but the girl being haunted here is an annoying teenage girl and her father is the typical Hollywood single father.  (Clueless, kind of mean, and can't run a household.)  The girl has a younger brother that has about 5 minutes of screen time and nothing to do in the whole movie.  I don't know why his character was included.  In fact, there are quite a few secondary characters in this that disappear for long periods of time and never show up again.  They were introduced, seemingly to have something to do with the plot, but it turns out they were just there to be introduced.  I'm thinking the editing here could have been much better.  Despite its numerous faults, it was worth the one viewing.  If you're a fan of the series, I'd suggest seeing it, if nothing else than to tide you over until the next installment, or at least until James Wan's Conjuring 2 comes out next summer.  Sometimes better than average is good enough.  Hey, it's better than the Poltergeist remake!

Review: San Andreas

by Trent Crump
★★

- I saw this on a regular-sized theater screen in 2-D.

There have been two big booms of disaster films in cinema history.  One lasted the whole of the 1970s and the other lasted through the last half of the 1990s.  Where the 1970s ones such as The Poseidon Adventure, the Airport films, Earthquake, The Swarm, etc. focused on big Hollywood stars both of the classic golden era and new trying to survive, the 1990s ones were about singular family units trying to survive or scientists trying to survive after their warnings go unheeded.  It's commonly suggested that the 1970s disaster films were better, as they had good, proven actors, and a lot of them.  This allowed the films to have the excitement of watching things get destroyed, not letting the audience know who was going to die and when because all the actors were big names, and allowed us to have some believable character development too.  The 1990s films were all due to the fact that with advancements in special effects, we could more convincingly and cheaply destroy things.  Sadly, San Andreas is more in the vein of a 1990s disaster film than a 1970s one.

San Andreas stars Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson as Ray, a Los Angeles city search and rescue helicopter pilot.  He's good at what he does.  However, his family had a tragedy some time ago, and he's chosen not to deal with it.  This makes his wife leave him and she's now moving in with a really rich dude and serving him divorce papers.  The rich guy, Daniel Riddick, a building designer, seems like a good enough guy.  Seriously, the characters are so thin, this is about all I can say about him.  Meanwhile, Ray is supposed to take his daughter to college, but alas, an earthquake strikes the Hoover Dam area, ruining the dam and sending lots and lots of water rushing into the area.  Present at the dam was a Cal Tech scientist named Lawrence, played by Paul Giamatti, who is working on earthquake predictions.   The data he gets there shows him that this quake was not going to be the last.  There will be more, they will be bigger, and there's nothing they can do to stop it.  And in no time at all, an earthquake hits Los Angeles.  Right as Ray is told to take his chopper and help Nevadans, he turns tail and goes to rescue his wife with city equipment.  (The whole movie I just kept thinking, "Guy is gonna get so sued by the city.  Probably gonna get many years in jail.  This is unethical.")  Oh, there's also a British guy (Hugo Johnstone-Burk) and his little brother, Ollie (Art Parkinson, the kid that played Rickon Stark in Game of Thrones.) who meet up with Ray's daughter Blake (Alexandra Deddario) and become her entourage once the initial LA quake hits.  I guess they're there for comic relief and child-in-danger suspense?  From there on what story we have becomes pretty unimportant as the movie shifts to as much destruction and mayhem as possible.  I personally did not mind that as I was expecting nothing else, but destruction does not a well crafted movie make.  However, this means that some characters that are set up early on just disappear without a word and don't really come back into the story.

The movie is directed by Brad Peyton, who before this did only two movies, both aimed at the grade school crowd.  Cats & Dogs 2: Revenge of Kitty Galore and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, the latter of which he also worked with Dwayne Johnson on.   This is not a great resume, but it's not horrible either.  It just shows that he's competent with special effects films, and he doesn't pick the best scripts.  The script was a bit surprising though, coming from Carlton Cuse, writer of such televison as Adventures of Brisco County Jr., Bates Motel, Lost, and Nash Bridges.  He knows how to write, but this is not his best work. 

Yes, there is a tsunami too.

The earthquake scenes are some of the best put to film.  Granted, we haven't really had a big budget film about an earthquake probably since the last 1/3 of Superman in 1978.  It's pretty awe-inspiring to watch.  For a PG-13 film, it was pretty graphic in a deceptive way.  Someone gets smooshed and the camera would turn away right as you'd expect to see something really graphic.  For once, graphics were no problem at all, and in fact, they made the movie, such as it is.

So if you want little more than wanton destruction and people falling from buildings or buildings falling on them, this movie is a good bet for you.  It's what I wanted, and I got it.  But if you want believability, good characters, or even good acting, look elsewhere.  The family storyline is cliched and the dialogue/delivery is cheesy as it gets.  I'd say it's about on the level of Twister when it comes to disaster films.  However, it's not as memorable, and it doesn't have Bill Paxton or Cary Elwes, which is a shame.  No, instead we get a Kylie Minogue cameo.  Yay us?

Review: Tomorrowland

by Trevor Kirkendall
★★½

Brad Bird is a filmmaker who has earned my respect by crafting such original content in the world of animated films such as “The Iron Giant,” “The Incredibles,” and “Ratatouille.” He stepped into live action features with enormously impressive franchise installment “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.” I can’t think of too many filmmakers who have hit it out of the park with their first four feature films like Bird had done. This is why I had such high expectations for his latest film “Tomorrowland.” There’s no way a film directed by Bird that looked this magical could possibly be bad, right? But it was indeed good. Unfortunately, that’s the only adjective I can describe it as: good. Quite a bland and unimpressive word choice, right? Well, it is a little bland and not overly original, but it’s not a bad film. It’s just good.

Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) is an optimistic high school kid who doesn’t buy into all the doomsday scenarios (polar ice caps melting, upcoming nuclear holocausts, etc.) her teachers feed her on a daily basis. She thinks that if we act on it as a whole, we can stop these things from happening. She believes this so much that she doesn’t want to see NASA dismantle all their launch platforms, forcing the end of space exploration and having her father (Tim McGraw) lose his job. She breaks in to the launch facilities nightly in order to sabotage the cranes taking it apart. But then she’s caught and arrested.

Once she’s bailed out, she’s handed back her personal belongings including a weird looking pin. When she touches it, she’s magically transported to a fantastic futuristic looking world that she can’t get enough of. However, the pin’s abilities soon wear off, so she goes in search of where this mysterious pin came from. Her search leads her a young girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) who is from Tomorrowland, the mystical place Casey has seen. Athena urges Casey to find a man named Frank Walker (George Clooney) who was once kicked out. Together, the three must work together to get back to Tomorrowland in order to save it, and quite possibly the world at the same time.

That’s pretty vague, but I don’t want to ruin whatever surprise you might find here. “Tomorrowland” is a pretty fun movie, in a 1970s/80s Spielbergian sci-fi kind of way. Bird’s influence from Spielberg is on full display here. You’re taken to place that doesn’t exist in this world, and that’s something that’s always fun about going to the movies. There’s that certain childlike wonderment that Spielberg has always been known for. Although Casey is a bit older than Elliot was in “E.T.,” the two share similar qualities in their desire to know more about the unknown.

But this is the part where “Tomorrowland” fails to capitalize on a fantastic opportunity. Casey only catches a glimpse of Tomorrowland and then spends the remainder of the film trying to get back. So you end up spending most of this film – that looks to be very spectacular in terms of its vision and ambition – in our own world. Not that that’s a bad thing necessarily, but it’s probably not what you’re expecting to see. In 130 minutes of run time, it takes almost 60 for Clooney’s character to really appear, and even more time to get the excitement going. Sure, it has exciting moments running up to a climax, but there’s far too much set up happening here.

Bird would rather spend his time setting up the theme to his movie rather than actually wowing us with the visual aspect and an even move memorable story. I appreciate the story, of course, but there seems to be too much dedication on the exposition here. That entire plot pays off in the end, but in a slightly disappointing fashion: “Tomorrowland” uses all that plot and all that backstory to load up a 10-ton hammer of a theme and smack you right in the face with it. There’s absolutely no subtlety in the message this film is trying to get across to its audience. It’s the type of message I remember hearing all my teachers in elementary school try to convey every Earth Day. Which makes sense, since this film is probably geared toward a young crowd.

But I can’t appreciate the theme of the film when it’s delivered in such an obvious way where it almost assumes the audience isn’t smart enough to see what the movie is trying to say. The film could have used a little trimming of the exposition and this theme still could have some across just fine. I don’t have an issue with the stance the film is trying to take, but it’s just too much and delivered in a very heavy-handed fashion.

Again I’ll say that Brad Bird is a filmmaker who has earned enough respect over his career for me to take notice of whatever movie he’s releasing. I just have such a hard time with this one because of how obvious it is that Disney is trying to nonchalantly sneak in a social message here. I can’t see that being Bird’s idea because he’s never shown that side in any of his other work. But that aside, “Tomorrowland” is still a very fun movie; it just takes a little bit of time to get going. I expected more from it, but what we get is still a film that has a lot to enjoy. Kids should like, and it’s easy to follow and understand. It just won’t be as memorable as some of Bird’s other work. I’ll probably have forgotten about it by this time next week.