Earn This

The Descendants won the top honor tonight at the Golden Globes, and it’s threatening to make a legitimate Oscar splash.  Even in a truly horrendous year for mainstream American movies, the potential of this winning Best Picture concerns me as much as The Social Network losing last year did.  I’ll preface this review by saying that, if you happened to be emotionally invested in the subject matter of this movie, that’s great, and you’re probably not going to be swayed by anything I say.  But this movie has too many missteps for me to have been entertained or moved by it.

The best thing about The Descendants?

In The Descendants, George Clooney plays Matt King, a lawyer whose family has lived in Hawaii for generations.  Right away, we learn a) that he has to decide whether to sell off a large parcel of land owned by his family; b) that his wife has just suffered a terrible boating accident that put her into a coma, forcing him to take care of their two daughters; and c) that said wife was cheating on him before she became unresponsive.

Heady stuff, and worthy fodder for a flick.  Unfortunately, it wastes the opportunity.  It’s a small point, but the first problem comes right away, with the opening voice-over.  Seriously, something needs to be done about voice-overs in movies lately.  In Time either believed that its audience was idiotic, or it was just too lazy to convey the characters’ situation without Justin Timberlake explicitly laying it out. (Did Children of Men need opening V.O. to tell us that people no longer had kids?) Similarly, Clooney’s V.O. here does not show, but rather tells us:  ‘This is my wife.  She is hurt.  I have kids.  I need to change.’  This writing is the worst form of laziness.  Inserting exposition into a film while still being entertaining is one of screenwriting’s biggest challenges, something that writers usually spend endless days slaving over, but this is one of the worst cop-outs I’ve seen.  (Note that I’m not saying voice-over should never exist; American Beauty, quite possibly the best script of our lifetime, used it, as did The Shawshank Redemption, Million Dollar Baby, and a host of other great movies.  But not like this.)

The V.O. is a minor flaw, but The Descendants errs, much more critically, by minimizing the conflict in its story—a death knell.  It’s difficult to imagine any scenario in which you want to reduce a film’s conflict.  Here, Matt has to take care of 10-year old daughter Scottie and 17-year old Alex.  The latter makes for the film’s biggest relationship, but, as she tells us, there’s nothing wrong with her.  She does fine in school.  She’s not a drug addict or pregnant.  Her boyfriend is harmless enough.  She cares for her sister.  She does think her dad is a bit of a sap, and drinks occasionally, but so what?  What does Matt need to do with her?  The answer is ‘Not a whole lot,’ and that’s devastating for this movie.

The Descendants acts as though it’s going to imply rebelliousness by providing a boyfriend that Matt doesn’t like, but he’s perfectly fine to her, and the edgiest thing the screenplay can have him do is laugh at an elderly person’s Alzheimer’s.  Nothing against that scene, but, really?  That’s all we’ve got?

Likewise, Matt’s decision about whether to sell his family’s land to developers is not mined for maximum tension and conflict.  At one point, he learns that his wife’s lover would benefit from the proposed sale—a revelation that could have been interesting, could have forced a difficult choice, except that you already assumed he wasn’t going to sell.  Therefore, learning this information makes the decision easier, not harder—and that’s boring.

I also think the story would have greatly benefitted from excising the younger daughter entirely.  Firstly, it would aid from a convenience standpoint, as she’s constantly having to be watched or dealt with while the adults go off and do their thing.  But more importantly, giving Matt just one daughter to reconcile with might have made that relationship sparkle more.  (Recall the expression that a single death is a tragedy, while a million is a statistic.  Focus on specific, individual relationships in order to move people.) Furthermore, the potential dynamic of Matt-Alex-Alex’s boyfriend would have felt imbalanced (that’s a good thing) and would have highlighted the mother’s absence.

Finally, the film suffers from hitting the same emotional beat over…and over…and over again.  Almost all of the best movies take you through a roller-coaster ride of different emotions.  The Descendants projects the same melancholy tone throughout.  Clooney, in a rather wooden performance, walks around with essentially the same expression for two hours.  That dreary music accompanies nearly every scene break.  There’s little to no humor.  No fewer than three people deliver angry monologues to Matt’s bed-ridden wife.  It all blurs together, it all feels the same, and it stops us from truly feeling it.  There’s a reason philosophers say that uninterrupted happiness would cease to satisfy humans after a while.  In cinematic form, any uninterrupted emotion stops resonating.

None of this is to say the movie is awful.  Once we got past the painful voice-over, and I came to grips with the fact that there wasn’t sufficient conflict, I was able to go along with the second half without checking my watch.  The scene where Clooney goes to ask his wife’s friends how much they knew about her affair was well done, and his father-in-law was a strong character.  Wisely, the film builds the anticipation before allowing Clooney to meet his wife’s lover.  And, as mentioned, I know that plenty of people have responded positively to it.  But, in my view, it’s a huge waste of potential.

This is part of my 2011 wrap-up series, A Few of My Favorite Things, in which I discuss what I enjoyed the past year, regardless of when it was released.

#8 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

At the end of last year, I wrote about the first half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when I crowned it my 25th favorite thing of 2011:By design unsatisfying, the seventh Harry Potter movie is still in many ways the best of the series to date.

Part 2 gives us the payoff of Part 1’s intricate, hard-working set-up. It’s an inherently satisfying film as a stunning conclusion to a saga that’s been 14 years in the works.

A lot has been written about the eighth film. Pretty much everyone loved it. I won’t try and rehash the arguments in favor of the movie that critics have put more eloquently than I could.

Yes, Deathly Hallows Part 2 is wonderfully acted, crafted, and paced. It’s exciting and scary and sad and extremely faithful to the original. These can be said, to a certain extent, of all eight Harry Potter films, which never sunk below “very good” but failed to ever achieve “transcendent.”

But for a moment, I’d like to focus on a single element that has been an underrated key to why Deathly Hallows Part 2 was my favorite movie I saw in 2011 and probably my favorite of the series: The time frame within the story.

Aside from a few opening scenes, Deathly Hallows Part 2 takes place over a continuous timeline of about 24 hours. Compare that to each of the other Harry Potter movies, which all spanned almost exactly a year.

Think especially of Deathly Hallows Part 1. While beautiful and dark and enjoyable, it spans almost an entire year with no conclusion. It’s basically an extended bit of exposition to prepare for the non-stop action of the grand conclusion.

The plot of the Part 1 is, simply, a bit inert, moreso than any half of a Harry Potter story. A lot of the tension comes from the angst Harry and Ron and Hermione feel wandering and waiting for something to happen.

Part 2 is the exact opposite. In fact — ironically — the two halves of Deathly Hallows might be the two most different Harry Potter films in many ways. Part 2 is the brilliant, kinetic payoff that feels completely earned and fully realized because of the buildup we powered through a year earlier.

This capstone also gives us a chance to reflect on a series that has been one of Hollywood’s most successful ever, in terms of box office and in terms of cinematic quality. This is why I suspect it will earn a Best Picture nomination; the Harry Potter films have been continually appreciated (if not adored) by critics, and they end the series with its highest acclaim ever. The Oscars love lifetime achievement awards.

I know I clash with general fan consensus when I say the fifth film was probably my favorite of the series (excluding this film, which is tough to include in the field because it’s so fresh and only half of a story) and the sixth was maybe my least favorite. It’s hard for me to separate the films from their origin material, but Order of the Phoenix refines what made that book one of the best in the series and Half-Blood Prince muddles much of what made that book one of the best.

I’m always hesitant to put my opinions on Harry Potter films into virtual stone. My mind changes all of the time on which iterations of these series I prefer. I’ve only seen the Deathly Hallow movies once each, so my takes on each could change pretty drastically. I’m really looking forward to seeing each one again.

But there’s one thing that’s for sure: Deathly Hallows Part 2 marks the final Harry Potter book or movie that will ever be released (barring some sort of expansion by Rowling). It’s kind of the end of an era for me that’s spanned my most formative years and more than half of my life.

The Harry Potter series helped me discover how stories and characters can help you better understand the complexities of right and wrong. It cultivated a love of storytelling and fantasy and youth-oriented fiction that persists to this day. I owe much to the series and I thank it for an unforgettable decade-plus of fandom that will certainly stretch into a lifetime.

Previously: Bruce Springsteen – Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75

Up next: A terribly named but endlessly addictive history simulator

This is part of my 2011 wrap-up series, A Few of My Favorite Things, in which I discuss what I enjoyed the past year, regardless of when it was released.

#10 Adventureland

Movie, 2009

That Thing You Do is one of my favorite movies of all time. Maybe even my favorite. And it kept popping in to my head as I was watching Adventureland.

It’s not because because the two are especially similar in plot or content. What the two have in common are fantastic control of tone, instantly memorable characters, and a well-told, small-scale story.

Adventureland was marketed as a raunchy teen comedy, which was probably a poor choice and certainly somewhat deceptive. It’s unlike the current breed of most R-rated comedies: The comedy elements are understated, and it has the structure of a character sketch or extended riff rather than a tightly plotted arc.

This has the effect of Adventureland playing more like a John Hughes movie than a Judd Apatow movie, even though it was branded as similar to the latter. It’s the story of a summer stuck at working at a cheap amusement park for the newly-graduated James Brennan.

James’s family falls on a bit of financial hardship and so he has to abandon his planned tour of Europe with his college pals. Instead, he’s stuck manning a games booth at Adventureland, where he gradually gets to know the rest of the people who work there. As he gets involved in their personal lives, things start to get complicated.

I’ll leave my synopsis at that. One of my favorite things about the movie is how it doesn’t follow standard procedure. For example, it’s kind of a romantic comedy, but there’s no “meet cute.” And, after setting up Adventureland as the central location for conflict, the climax takes place entirely away from the theme park.

All of this gives Adventureland an unpredictable, almost natural tone. There isn’t anything particularly special about these people. There’s no magical contrivance driving them together. They’re just a few young adults, equal parts passionate and confused, who bump into and out of each others’ lives.

Adventureland reminded me there can be movies that are both conventionally funny comedies and artistically significant films.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a kudos to the uniformly superb acting in Adventureland. The AV Club’s excellent review covers the standouts. )

Previously: #11 Mount and Blade: Warband

Up next: A retroactively revealing live album

Some Earnthis writers don’t quite have the time to devote to lengthy reviews that we used to, but I’d like to offer some brief thoughts (and not-so-brief thoughts, in Moneyball‘s case) on recent flicks that have been in theaters and may get Oscar play.  A couple thoughts on 2011: it feels like a weak year; and who says the pace of movies keeps increasing?  Drive, Moneyball, and J. Edgar are too slow, and Margin Call and The Ides of March don’t exactly fly by.  All ratings out of four stars:

The Ides of March – 3 stars

A solid, crisp, professional flick that, unlike Moneyball, is consistent in its quality throughout.  Ryan Gosling is an up-and-coming political strategist working a presidential campaign.  After he starts sleeping with an intern who has secrets, and takes meetings with rivals that he probably shouldn’t, he becomes embroiled in trouble.  It’s a relatively hook-free premise, but the film skillfully portrays everything crashing down on Gosling at once, which always makes for an interesting character.  The acting is strong throughout, especially from Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman.  There aren’t enough reversals to make this excellent—although Giamatti’s reaction when Gosling ultimately comes to him was nice—but there’s not much to dislike either.  More Gosling:

Drive – 2.5 stars

An indie-esque movie that couldn’t deliver on its promise, Drive follows a skilled getaway driver (Ryan Gosling) who aids and abets criminals.  It opens with an excellent sequence—after Gosling escapes a nighttime police chase by driving into a parking garage as it’s emptying, I was hooked.  The elevator sequence is also touching.

But the rest is too sparse, too boring, too similar to Gosling’s Blue Valentine in its emptiness.  At some point, explaining/showing so little just becomes a cop-out, and there are numerous exchanges here where the characters need to actually say or do something instead of just looking at each other.  Most movies beat you over the head with their dialogue/theme, but be careful of the other side of that coin; we need something to hold onto.

Margin Call – 3 stars

A strong ‘talky’ movie that, like Ides of March, remains comfortably short of greatness.  Margin Call is a fictitious but plausible behind-the-scenes look at a Wall Street firm on the brink of instigating a large-scale economic disaster.  A strong cast, headed by an excellent Kevin Spacey, does well with dialogue that avoids character-cliches. (One example: CEO Jeremy Irons not dismissing Zachary Quinto’s theories because of the latter’s youth.)

The most obvious room for improvement IMO concerns the lack of debate among the higher-ups with the CEO’s decision.  I kept waiting for another twist or turn, for someone to stand up and float a different idea; Spacey disagrees with Irons, but no one seriously considers any other proposals.  Thus, you understand where this is going about halfway through, but that’s not a fatal flaw.

‘Be first, be smarter, or cheat,’ Irons says.  That’s life, ain’t it?

In Time – 2.75 stars

The definition of a ‘perfectly fine’ movie.  You can see the mechanism turning and feel the beats coming, but it stays enjoyable throughout.  In Time runs with an undoubtedly clever promise, though it would have benefited from having a stronger singular villain.  The sequence culminating in Olivia Wilde’s death is gripping and unusual, although I was slightly disappointed to see it recycled for the ending.  Timberlake is reliably solid as the masculine action star, although he’s probably more interesting as the refined and slightly effeminate type he does in The Social Network and Friends with Benefits.

J. Edgar – 1.5 stars

Sigh.  Leo, I know you like to do only Serious And Important movies, and that’s all well and good, but can we go back to doing ones that are also, you know, interesting?  Granted, 2010’s Shutter Island and Inception spoiled us, but that doesn’t excuse J. Edgar for a grossly clunky script that never finds clarity or a plot.  Numerous scenes lack conflict, the narrative is bloodless and insipid, and the framing device of Hoover narrating his biography is possibly the laziest I can remember, just an excuse for ponderous voice-over and exposition.  To any aspiring writers: the framing device of Slumdog Millionaire is the way to do it.  This is not.

This movie also minimizes its lead charater’s complexity and wimps out on saying much negative about him, by attributing so much to his (supposed) repressed homosexuality.  Compare with The Social Network: not only does that not wuss out on making Zuckerberg a douche, it also doesn’t provide a pop psychology ‘explanation’ for how he is.  In J. Edgar, the actors are good, but stay away.

Moneyball – 3.25 stars

Pop quiz: What do you get when you combine an interesting book that nonetheless felt nothing like a movie, a torturous development process that included a disastrous script draft, and subsequent work by quite possibly the two best screenwriters alive?  The result, amazingly, is a pretty darn good Moneyball movie.

Moneyball almost never happened.  Sony halted the project and fired writer-director Steven Soderbergh after reading where he wanted to go with it, and thank God; I know the man’s had success, but I’m sorry, his draft (you can find it online if you look hard enough) reads more like the output of an inexperienced 18 year-old screenwriter.  Take, for example, the introduction of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) to Peter Brand (Jonah Hill); in the finished film, this comes after the latter has just affected the course of a trade Billy wanted to make with the Cleveland Indians.  That adds context and conflict to the one-on-one meeting.  In Soderbergh’s draft, the very first scene has those two expositioning—I mean, talking—to each other in the most soporific way possible, with such humdinger lines of dialogue as “We’re getting close to a new stadium.” – “Which you need.” – “Which we definitely need.  So let me ask you: Can you work spreadsheets and all that stuff, like Excel?”  That’s so bad, I don’t even know what to say.

Thankfully, the final credited writers (Aaron Sorkin, Steve Zaillian) boast a joint catalogue that includes Schlinder’s List, A Few Good Men, The American President, Searching for Bobby Fischer, The Social Network, A Civil Action, “The West Wing,” Awakenings, and many other successes.  Though by all accounts Sorkin and Zaillian worked mostly independently of each other, they were able to cobble together a cohesive and often moving story out of this mess. 

Note how they impart more in a couple heartbeats than Soderbergh did in entire scenes.  Nothing in his script conveyed the  sabermetric philosophy as efficiently as “Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players; your goal should be to buy wins, and to buy wins, you need to buy runs.”  In Soderbergh’s script, when catcher Scott Hatteberg wonders about the fans’ reaction to him playing first base, Beane replies with “The fans run my ballclub?”  In the finished product, the reply is “Yeah, maybe we can try one of them out too.”  Less amateurish, more revealing, and funnier.

Brand’s first scene in the boardroom full of scouts is a masterclass of writing for multiple viewpoints, and Moneyball also succeeds in humanizing Beane’s character, largely through the effective subplot with his daughter (almost entirely absent in Soderbergh’s draft).  The last post-script is perfect, several lines are laugh-out-loud funny, and you feel something when Beane declares that their work will be discredited if the A’s don’t win it all.  The movie is warmer than you’d expect.

Yet…it’s tantalizingly frustrating too.  After a few viewings, the disjointed way that this script came together becomes evident.  The beginning and ending both drag, and the whole thing wouldn’t have lost much at 15 minutes shorter.  A few scenes don’t begin as late as they should or end as early as they should, and others (like Beane’s early meeting with the Cleveland brass) feel off.  There’s no Sorkin-esque rapid-fire dialogue, and that’s fine in and of itself, but the tone needs a few jolts of intensity.  But ultimately, I can’t be too harsh, because adapting that book would have been extraordinarily difficult.  The writers, and actors, did a solid job, and that’s commendable.

In the past I have analyzed and criticized the Annie Awards. Here is an update on the situation.

Hey, I guess someone out there is listening to me*!

Less than a month after I discussed the flawed voting structure, ASIFA-Hollywood elected a new president and vice president. The outgoing president — Antran Manoogian, who, though his name sounds like he should be, is not an alien — had held the position for more than 20 years. But the recent controversy with the Annie Awards must have caused him to lose support, as animation historians and guru Frank Gladstone took the new position.

The new vice president is Jerry Beck, who is kind of a big deal in the animation history circle. His Animated Movie Guide is the #1 most useful (and fun to read) animation reference in my library. Along with numerous other achievements and contributions to the bibliography of animation history, he also writes for the unsurpassed Cartoon Brew blog.

I don’t know much about Gladstone, but his credentials check out. He and Beck will likely do great things at the head of the association. Most importantly, they’ve promised to reform Annie voting, so the preimier animation awards platform will see a return to respectability.

*yes, I’m 100% certain it was me they heard, not common sense or the dozens of other writers who called out the awards

In the past I have praised the Annie Awards for providing a lens into the most important animated features from each year of the past couple decades. The largest mark against the awards came in 2008, when Kung-Fu Panda won Film of the Year against Wall-E, which was by far the most recognized and important animated movie of the year — and one of the most heralded of all time, for that matter.

My previous article alleges no clear culprit behind what was pretty objectively a poor selection. This year, it happened again: How to Train Your Dragon topped Toy Story 3. Now, I love HTTYD more than most, but Toy Story 3 is — by every important metric — the superior, more important film.

So what’s the story? It’s no coincidence the same studio released Kung-Fu Panda and HTTYD, and that studio didn’t have a film nominated in 2009 — the only year of the past three a non-Dreamworks film didn’t win. That’s right — Dreamworks used some sneaky tactics to win the awards.

Essentially, Jeffrey Katzenberg — chief overlord of Dreamworks and perhaps the most fascinating man in the history of animated film, though that’s a post for another day — saw a way to exploit the award selection system the Annie use. Basically, anyone who is a professional animator can buy a membership in ASIFA-Hollywood, the organization that votes for the Annie winners. (Fun trivia: ASIFA stands for Association Internationale du Film d’Animation, which is why everyone just calls them ASIFA.) Katzenberg pays for a membership for every one of his animators. Other studios do not; it’s up to the people who work there to decide whether or not to enroll.

So, surprise, the DreamWorks employees tend to vote for the films produced by the studio who employs them and pays for their membership. I don’t blame them. The limited oversight by the ASIFA has no real checks to prevent these types of shenanigans. Again, it’s not overt cheating — you can defend Katzenberg, in that he didn’t break any rules and didn’t (publicly) encourage DrewamWorks employees to vote as homers — but it also kind of is.

Pixar noticed this and decided to publicly boycott the Annie Awards. A cynic might argue that they chose this strategy simply because they have smaller numbers and can’t counter Katzenberg’s tactics. A Pixarphile would praise their devotion to integrity. I fall in the latter camp.

The result is that Annies have become something of a joke. It’s a shame; animation deserves a good awards platform. Buzz around the web sites I read is that the ASIFA is going to do something about it. Until then: we Pixar fanboys one more reason to mock DreamWorks (related)!

EDIT: Redemption?

Rating: 4 stars (out of 4)

The Social Network’s top comparison among critics has been the beloved Citizen Kane, as both chronicle the rise and fall of a young, ambitious individual who shapes a new technological medium to his advantage.  After 4 viewings of the former (plus many more of certain scenes), endless reading of reviews, and discussions with friends, I’ve realized another crucial similarity.

Kane’s greatness, so goes the narrative, becomes more apparent the more you know about movies; its praised cinematography isn’t the sort of thing that captivates casual fans.  Likewise, Network seems to me a movie that looks better the more thoroughly you examine its craft.  The timing of the scenes, the way they flow together, the way endings seamlessly become the next appropriate beginning, the way certain lines of dialogue come back to relevance minutes or scenes later, the utter lack of meaningless moments and utter pervasiveness of conflict—it exhibits the peerless level of craft to which screenwriters aspire.

This says little about the emotion the story elicits, which I point out because the only blemish I’ve heard anyone pin on Network is that it’s a little cold.  To an extent, I wouldn’t disagree with that, though I can adore ‘cold’ movies (Closer, anyone?).  But I think there’s plenty of emotional resonance, and, more importantly, the level of craft demonstrated by the screenplay thrills geeks like me.

What’s most remarkable to me about Facebook is not the extent of its ubiquity within modern society—it’s how fast that happened.  The site launched in 2004; within all of 2 years, no self-respecting student could avoid having an account, and after 2 more years, that category had pretty much expanded to everyone too young to be elected president.  Thus it should be no surprise that, 6 years later, there already exists a book and, now, a movie chronicling the site’s rise.

21^st century communicators owe a great deal to Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), the anti-hero of this film who created the site, albeit possibly with help from other people whom he did not credit and compensate.  A Harvard undergraduate in 2003, he channeled his utter inability to carry on a compassionate conversation into a creationist rage that became Facebook.  Problems arose, however, from his interactions with a couple of silver-spoon twins (both played by Armie Hammer) who claimed he stole their idea and with his best friend Eduardo (Andrew Garfield), who donated initial start-up cash and then was gradually phased out of the site’s ownership.

The Social Network, thus, intersperses the story of the site’s development with depositions being taken in two separate lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg, one by Eduardo and one by the twins, a brilliant structural choice that not only provides incredible forward momentum but also allows for moments of penetrating drama.  This is a ferociously entertaining rush through scenes laced with conflict, characters who understand themselves better than they do others, and ideas disseminated, dismantled, and disavowed.

Aaron Sorkin’s script, which pointedly, poignantly captures contradictions of the modern era, begins in mid-sprint, unspooling a delicious opening scene that makes you wonder why so many movies open in such a drab fashion.  Zuckerberg and his then-girlfriend (Rooney Mara) talk a mile-a-minute, West-Wing-for-college-students-style, and if that description titillates you half as much as it does me, see this movie.  Those first five minutes introduce the powerful irony the film pushes—the greatest cultural marker of the past generation (if not longer) springing from the mind of someone who “doesn’t have three friends to rub together.”  Network has the guts to let you dislike its protagonist right away.

Maybe it’s because Sorkin has never apologized for catering to a smarter audience than most Hollywood writers, but The Social Network doesn’t succumb to the typical Hollywood convention of deriding smart kids.  With the contrasting shots of Zuckerberg frantically typing on his computer as Harvard revelers party around him, it’s not making fun of his aptitude; in fact, it’s admiring both his brains and the perseverance with which he carries out his pet project.  Of course, it relishes the other side of him too—the less noble one.

Speaking of something less than noble, the other key player, providing a boost of energy halfway through, is Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), who founded Napster, made nothing on it, and then grabbed hold of Zuckerberg’s ride.  A smart playboy, Sean manages to impress Mark with his acumen, even though the latter wants no trappings of success.  Some of his scenes—at a fancy dinner, and upstairs at a club—feature writing so sharp, dialogue so propulsive in service of both character and plot, that I had to lean forward in my chair as though I was awaiting the revelation of the villain in a suspense thriller.  Sorkin’s dialogue overflows with conflict and tension, and that, combined with his characters’ eloquence, commands your attention.

By this point, Sorkin—whose resume is getting a little absurd—has mastered all of the tricks at the disposal of screenwriters.  This tops A Few Good Men and The American President as his best movie, all of which ignores his contributions to TV—the decent Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (which, despite its critics, was about 90% of a great show), and, ahem, four seasons of The West Wing.

There’s not a single solitary moment here that’s unnecessary—something that, when you think about it, very few films can say.  Sorkin manipulates the audience so subtly, so craftily, so enjoyably that not only do you never see it coming, but you simply shake your head in admiration after he does.  The ability to, say, make a line like “And the water under the Golden Gate is freezing cold” hit us where it hurts does not reside in most people.  Sean’s explanation to Mark of the man who founded Victoria’s Secret combines a capitalistic rags-to-riches fable with a cautionary tale, and it illustrates some of the differences between those two and Eduardo.  And Zuckerberg’s follow-up question, regarding Sean’s first love interest, illustrates the differences between those two, and foreshadows the devastating final shot of the film.

By that moment, you’ll be surprised at how well Parker has been fleshed out, a trait that Sorkin shares with all his characters.  Note the way he defines Harvard’s president three-dimensionally in about 5 minutes, or how Mark ‘interviews’ candidates for internships.  It’s telling that, when Mark lets down Eduardo at one point, he doesn’t apologize—though you can sense he’s thinking about it—but instead re-directs him to the company’s latest innovations.  Much of the dialogue effectively conveys the conflicting sense that A Beautiful Mind did about its protagonist—were all of his insults cruel, or did he just not always know what to say in everyday conversations?

Network, too, is a phenomenally acted film, from the ancillary characters (especially Hammer as both twins) all the way up; all three protagonists deserved Oscar nominations and/or wins (deserving, of course, not always translating to “receiving”).  Eisenberg is viciously good, especially at capturing the disturbing aspects of Zuckerberg’s personality.  Timberlake makes Sean seductive, resilient, and dependent, teeming with vigor and liveliness, every word dripping with conviction.  Garfield, excellent in Never Let Me Go, gives a performance that shines through on repeated viewings.  Though viewers may disagree over the details of who deserved what, Eduardo is the most sympathetic character, and Garfield paints his devotion to Mark without relying on corniness.  His reaction scene to getting all but written out of the company should have gotten him the Oscar nomination alone.

Despite the subject matter, director David Fincher wisely does not beat you over the head with his movie’s modernity.  No significance is played by text messaging or video sharing or Skyping, and the colors seem dried out of most scenes, especially the Harvard ones: it all looks like they could be sitting in 1980s dorms, and that’s critical for emphasizing Zuckerberg’s alienation from the society around him.  The movie gets all the small details right, too, in particular the fantastic score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross–ominous and haunting, as though things are breaking all around it (which they are).  And the scene (pictured above) at the club, with pounding music, where you sort of have to strain to hear the words, but can still grasp everything, is a masterwork of sonics–and, I think, says something about the way a lot of people live today.

“I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth,” Sorkin recently said regarding his work here.  “I want it to be to storytelling.”  That sums up my thoughts exactly—I don’t go to movies for history lessons; I go for drama and entertainment, and The Social Network has both in spades.  It has them, above all, in its characters, who are all striving for something out of their reach.  Sean wants to get on board with something again.  Eduardo wants the approval of his father and his friend.  And Mark wants, not money or products or fame, but recognition as well, but only from the one person, out of millions, who won’t give it to him.

Over in that house is a kid who thinks you’re the greatest, and it’s not because you’re a space ranger, pal. It’s because you’re a toy. You are his toy! – Woody

Rating: 4 stars (out of 4)

The success of Toy Story was almost unprecedented: Critics made it the fourth best-reviewed film of all time. Viewers flocked to the theater; no film sold more tickets in the US in 1995. Its maker, a little-known rendering company called Pixar, catapulted to stardom. Disney earned its biggest hit ever not made by the Walt Disney Animation Studio.

Oh, and it was the first computer-animated feature, ever. A few films — including Disney’s own The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast — previously mixed in some computer-generated imagery (CGI) as special effects. Plenty of commercials and theatrical shorts had been created entirely with electrons, but never a full-length film.

(And yet, the success of Toy Story was still only “almost unprecedented.” Exactly one film innovated so profoundly and successfully before it: 1937′s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first hand-drawn animated film ever.)

Pixar’s strange history as a computer hardware and software company — documented in the engaging The Pixar Touch by David A. Price — suggests that Toy Story could easily have come out as little more than a technical exercise. With all of the effort involved in creating a 80-minute computer graphic, little details like plot, characters, and script could have been lost in the mix.

That’s what makes the most staggering success of Toy Story – its pure, giddy, rich, poignant storytelling — one of the great, unlikely Hollywood victories of all time. Simply, Toy Story is nearly a masterpiece, one of the best films of its decade, and one of the best animated films ever.

It all starts with the premise, which is simple on the surface but cuts deep. Toys come to life when their owners are away. They have their own little world, organized like a small community. They worry mostly about typical things: love, wellbeing, friendship, safety. Their deepest desire is to be played with by their owners. This undercurrent of longing — to be played with and valued — allows the Toy Story series to embody all sorts of existential metaphor.

There’s also a powerful contradiction contained in the premise: the toys can’t (or don’t — more on this later) move or express anything when humans are around, even though entertaining humans is their life calling. This paradox drives much of the film’s suspense and thematic depth.

Among the key triumphs for the film is its multi-dimensional characters. Most memorable are the odd couple at the heart of the film: Woody and Buzz Lightyear. Woody starts the film Andy’s favorite toy, a position that commands respect among his fellow toys. Fortunately, he’s a good leader and he organizes the toys into a productive community. As two stressful events — moving day and the dreaded birthday, when old toys are replaced with new gizmos — approach, Woody does his best to keep Andy’s toys calm and prepared for any disaster.

With Woody’s power and responsibility has come an inflated self-importance. He relishes in the role as favorite toy and leader. Admittedly, it’s an important role: Without him, it seems, there would be no order within the toys’ community and no hero for Andy’s elaborate, imagined adventures. The other members of the toy community mock Woody’s seriousness a bit, but seem to respect his authority.

Woody is voiced brilliantly by Tom Hanks, who infuses the protagonist with humanity and comedy. His inflection and energy turn some plain lines into classics, especially one of cinema’s great rants: “You are a toy! You aren’t the real Buzz Lightyear! You’re an action figure. Y0u are a child’s plaything!”

Equally memorable is Buzz Lightyear. Woody had spent the morning before the birthday party comforting his fellow toys that they wouldn’t be replaced, but Woody himself turns out to be the one in danger. Buzz Lightyear knocks Woody off the bed and off the top of the toy totem pole. All of the toys immediately embrace him as the new, cool toy and leader. Even Woody’s beloved Bo Peep admits that Buzz has “more gadgets on him than a Swiss Army knife.”

Yet Buzz has a self-delusion that surpasses Woody’s, and it’s this confusion that drives the film: He doesn’t realize that he’s a toy. He thinks he’s really a space captain. As Rober Ebert put it, “Buzz is the most endearing toy in the movie, because he’s not in on the joke.”

Throughout the first half of the movie, Buzz operates as if he’s temporarily crashed on an alien world and has to repair his cardboard box space ship. This leads to some of the funniest moments in the film, when Buzz makes off-handed observations in a militaristic, formal tone. “I don’t believe that man’s ever been to medical school,” he remarks when toy-abuser Sid plays the part of a toy surgeon.

Because of Buzz’s persistence to his world view, his transformation is quite poignant. His belief that he’s the Buzz Lightyear comes crashing down, quite literally. Woody is forced to make a change in his self-outlook by the end of the film, but it’s nothing compared to the complete identity crisis Buzz goes through.

Credit voice actor Tim Allen for capturing these complexities. Billy Crystal was initially desired for the role, but he turned down the role, so Allen was offered the gig. Crystal’s rejection was ultimately a fortuitous twist to the film. Allen’s everyman, blue collar take on Buzz allows the character to remain relatable. Crystal’s detached, high-pitched voice (later utilized to great effect in Monsters Inc.) could have pushed Buzz into an unlikeable character.

As brilliantly-conceived as Buzz and Woody are on their own, the real magic happens when the two are together, which is the better part of the movie. Both are completely confident of their place in the world, and so the first half of the movie is loaded with great scenes where each thinks the other is the craziest toy alive.

This comes to a head in the aforementioned scene at the gas station. Buzz tries to escape to get in touch with Star Command to defeat the Emperor Zerg, while Woody just wants to get back home in time for moving day. “You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity,” says Buzz. It’s a remark that seems woefully ironic at first, but grows more true the more you think about it: Woody had forgotten that his role as a toy was the be there for Andy, not fulfill his own self-image as a leader and hero.

After Buzz’s delusion collapses along with his self-meaning, Woody helps him infuse a new meaning. In one of the more brilliant scenes of the film, Woody and Buzz’s flawed world views intersect: Woody, to escape his plastic cage, has to admit that he’s not inherently “better” than Buzz or any other toy, even if he fancies himself important. Buzz, with the help of a Woody pep talk, sees that their is a certain value and duty in being a toy. His radio may be a sticker, but the “Andy” scrawled on his foot is truly a badge of honor and responsibility.

This turning point kicks the film into its third act, which finally sees Buzz and Woody working together in a radical shift from the first two acts. Fortunately, the two cooperating is nearly as entertaining the two clashing, particularly in the climax. My favorite moment of the movie is when the two re-use an earlier exchange in an entirely different light: “This isn’t flying, this falling… with style.”

While many of the aforementioned scenes rank among the movie’s many superior moments, I also want to commend the opening of the film. So much of what makes Toy Story great — the respect of imagination, the honoring of the sacred bond between child and toy, the thrilling use of CGI to create perspectives and worlds that move — are summarized in those first five minutes. Plus, there’s the music, the brilliant combination of score and original songs by Randy Newman, epitomized by “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”

“You’ve Got a Friend in Me” has since become a standard. The simple, catchy tune works a basic expression of love as well as an embodiment of the core themes of the Toy Story series. Particularly seeing the later films’ use of the song, it’s hard not to marvel at how well the song captures so much at the heart of Pixar’s films.

Newman also contributes two other original songs to Toy Story, “Strange Things” and “I Will Go Sailing No More,” the former of which works better than the latter. Though I love the scene where Buzz learns the truth about his toyhood, the song adds an extra layer that was not necessary. The scene would have probably been more effective with a simple score.

Aside from that, the music in Toy Story is exceptional. Newman’s score resonated so strongly that he has been brought on for five more Pixar scores.  Toy Story 3 holds his best work, but Toy Story is no slouch, particularly during the climax.

Toy Story shines in the details as much as it does the sturdy framework of the story. The side characters — from the loyal Slinky Dog to Spud the maniacal hound to Hamm the gearhead — are all given distinct personalities and animated with an astonishing amount of humanity and personality. Rex the cowardly dinosaur sticks out as particularly funny, but it’s hard to crown anyone other than the little green aliens as the most memorable secondary characters of the film. I guess all space toys have trouble with their grips on reality (including Zerg from Toy Story 2).

There are so many inspired small touches of artistry — reflections on the glass of Buzz’s helmet, messages on the Spell ‘n’ Speak, throwaway one-liners, quick and creative establishing shots that would have been impossible in hand-drawn animation — that I’m willing to forgive the movie’s few flaws that come out after close watching, particularly on the technical side. It’s really incredible how little of the film suffers from technical issues (credit the brilliant direction of Lasseter and others for hiding most flaws) but it makes the few poorly-rendered animations of humans and dogs all the more glaring.

I also found the storyline of Sid’s toys a little bit less engaging than the rest of the story. While I enjoy the idea of a toy hell at Sid’s house, the interaction with his deformed toy experiments is nearly too on-the-nose for the rest of the story which maintained a subtle and understated thematic backbone. The “don’t judge a toy before you really know him” message is a bit excessive even if it plays nicely into the growth of Woody.

The semantics of the toy/human relationship are also a bit fudged here. This film seems to indicate that toys choose not to speak and interact with humans. After all, Woody does come alive (*) in front of a person for a brief second in Sid’s final scene. This seems at odds, though, with other basic properties of the human-toy world division as shown. The notion that toys can’t be seen “alive” by humans for metaphysical reasons, not by choice, seems to be the ultimate explanation in the other chapters of the trilogy and is one that seems to fit the logic of the world a bit better.

(*) Before he comes alive in front of Sid, Woody mentions that they’re going to have to “break a few rules.”

My last complaint is the closing scene of the film. I’ve never been a fan of movies that end on a punchline, and so the joke final line and shot end the affair on a down note compared to a film that’s otherwise so universally strong. It’s a flimsy complaint, but these are the types of nits you pick when a film is so close to perfect.

These complaints aren’t enough to tarnish in any meaningful way the giddy excellence of Toy Story. Sixteen years later, the original still packs a tremendous punch and tells a story worth experiencing again and again. It may not tackle big ideas as ambitiously as later Pixar films, including the later parts of the Toy Story series. But, scene-by-scene, it’s perhaps the strongest film the studio has produced. There’s not a minute in these 81 that fail to soar to infinity and beyond.

A few other thoughts:

• One underrated element of Toy Story is the variety of faces that Woody makes. Had his faces failed to be effectively expressive, the film would have greatly suffered.
• There’s a bit too much emphasis on Mr. Potato Head here: too many gags that involve his face falling apart and perhaps too much of his bitter skepticism.
• Toy Story has a few silly, throwaway gags from characters or beats we never see again: The shark who steals Woody’s hat, Buzz’s experience as Mrs. Nesbitt, and a few others.

On February 3, 1986, Pixar became an independent company by LucasArts selling the organization to Steve Jobs. (Little known fact: Jobs’ first billion actually came from Pixar, not from Apple.)

Pixar spent its first decade exclusively releasing shorts before it partnered with Disney to bring you Toy Story in 1995. The rest, as they say, is history.

To celebrate their milestone — and, mostly, just because I want to — I’ve been revisiting Pixar’s films and shorts and have a few features and reviews in the oven.

In the mean time, you can read my mini-reviews of Pixar’s first ten films in the retrospective I wrote. Or, you can read The Onion’s hilarious, profane column by fake John Lasseter.

Rating: Two and a half stars (out of four)

It’s hard to imagine what it must have felt like to be there in August 1939. When Dorothy first left the flat, gray landscapes of Kansas and stepped into the vibrant land of The Wizard of Oz, theater audiences went with her, and they discovered a world unlike anything they’d seen on a screen before. Talkies were commonplace by then, and even three-process Technicolor had seen its fair share of use, but the effort that went into realizing the full potential of both resulted in an Oz that must have felt astonishingly real, and above all, new.

In the way that it showcased the potential of new filmmaking technology, 1982’s Tron followed in Oz’s footsteps – and the similarities don’t end there. The Master Control Program serves as both the tornado and the Wicked Witch – an incomprehensibly powerful destructive force that pulls the protagonist into a novel realm, and which the protagonist must eventually defeat to return home. Like Dorothy, Flynn finds himself lauded as a hero, but must travel across the dangerous but engaging new world, making friends along the way that look like his friends back home. Hell, they both even have to contend with The Great and Powerful Giant Floating Head.

So why has The Wizard of Oz stood the test of time, while Tron remains a footnote? Why is it that cinemaphiles and casual viewers alike recall one film with fondness, while the other is most often remembered as “that one level from Kingdom Hearts – or was it Kingdom Hearts 2?” And in light of that disparity, why make a Tron: Legacy at all?

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