Yet Another "Ending": A Review of Toy Story 4

directed by Josh Cooley
written by Andrew Stanton, Stephanie Folsom, Rashida Jones, Valerie LaPointe, Will McCormack, Martin Hynes, Cooley and John Lasseter

I'll be honest: when I heard this movie was being made, I groaned. Toy Story 3 which came out nine years ago, was the perfect sendoff for these characters, and even just the thought of a follow-up left a bad taste in my mouth. Sure, they had subsequent adventures in short films and TV specials, but these were inoffensive affairs that went down easy, like canapes at a party. It was nice to check in on Woody and the gang every once in a while. While I understood the logic behind a sequel, I did not at all welcome it, and I dare say, having seen the film, that Disney and Pixar have done very little to change my mind.

The movie starts with a flashback; it's been established by Toy Story 3 that Bopeep (Annie Potts) left the group at an undisclosed time between the second and third movie, and Toy Story 4 finally plays that moment out. It's a moment full of regret and heartbreak for Woody the Cowboy (Tom Hanks) in particular as he is forced to choose between his loyalty to Andy and his love for Bopeep, who is about to be given away to a new owner, and we already know how that played out. Moving back to the present after a brief title sequence, we now find Woody and friends at their new home with Bonnie (Madeleine McGraw). It's a period of adjustment for Woody, who is no longer the "head toy" of this group, that distinction belonging to Dolly (Bonnie Hunt). Desperately in search of purpose for a kid who doesn't seem to need him as much as Andy did, Woody finds it when he sees that Bonnie is terrified of going to pre-school. He then stows away in her backpack and, when she gets to school, sneaks a bunch of art supplies onto her desk. As a result, Bonnie makes herself a toy out a spork, pipe cleaner, clay and Popsicle sticks, names him Forky, and instantly falls in love with him. Seeing her attachment to her new toy, Woody takes it on himself to protect him, which becomes more difficult than Woody imagined when Forky comes to life (voiced by Tony Hale) and, in a franchise-first twist, rejects his status as a toy and constantly tries to throw himself in the trash. Thing get even worse when Bonnie's parents decide to take her on a road trip and Forky flings himself from the RV (a shot spoiled in the trailers, so give me a break). In his efforts to save Forky and reunite him with the others, Woody finds himself meeting an unsettling doll named Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks) who has an eye on his voice box, and then meets a most unexpected blast from his past.

I won't dare go into spoiler territory with this review, and to go into my problems with the film involves very heavy spoilers, so I'll limit my comments to Pixar's technique, which is utterly superb. Given that the last time viewers saw Bopeep onscreen was nearly twenty years ago the leaps and bounds in the way in which she is rendered are quite noticeable, even moreso than the improvements made to Helen Parr in last year's The Incredibles 2. Basically, the technical proficiency on display here is beyond reproach; Pixar may not be the innovators they once were (with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse having stolen their thunder at the last Oscars for this very reason) but they are definitely at the very apex in terms of technique.

Bopeep is the highlight here, and Annie Potts really seems to relish her return to this role, which is bigger in this film than it has ever been, and of course Tom Hanks continues to make Woody the most likable animated character in Pixar's entire library. This is primarily their story, as the rest of the original crew are very much relegated to the background, with only Buzz getting the slightest hint of a subplot. New characters get the chance to shine, like Ally Maki as Giggle McDimples, Bopeep's tiny sidekick, Keegan Michael Key's and Jordan Peele's carnival prize toys Ducky and Bunny who have a number of funny scenes, especially their "winner-winner-chicken dinner" routine, and of course Keanu Reeves as Duke Caboom, who steals every scene he's in and, as incredible as this may sound, actually gets his very own character arc. If I'm honest, this movie has a lot of what made the original trilogy as enjoyable as it was.

Why the low score, then? Well, I'll have to go deep into spoiler territory for that elsewhere, but suffice it to say the writers took the characters in a direction that feels like a complete betrayal of everything that the previous films stood for. This kind of cast a pall on everything, to the amazing upgraded graphics, to Randy Newman's score and even the more entertaining performances. In fact, it made Pixar's patented third-act weepy moment that much more infuriating.

This movie is basically the animated version of Jason Bourne, a completely superfluous follow-up to a perfectly-concluded trilogy which is made with considerable technical prowess, but feels narratively bankrupt. In fact, TS4, goes one further; it actually spits on the values espoused by the old trilogy.

6/10

Thank You for Voting with Your Wallets

It seems all the trades like Variety, the Hollywood Reporter and Deadline can talk about now is how Dark Phoenix (also known in some parts of the world as X-Men: Dark Phoenix) crashed and burned at the box-office, bringing the Fox Era X-Men films to an ignominious end (assuming they decide not to release The New Mutants).

For me, though, the bigger news is that for two weekends in a row, audiences all around the world have given lukewarm to downright cold receptions to limp sequels to big movies such as Godzilla, The Secret Life of Pets, and the aforementioned X-Men series of films, the last entry of which was the much reviled X-Men: Apocalypse. I detested the first of those two films and was disappointed by the third and in truth of the sequels I was only really interested in watching Dark Phoenix, but only out of a desire to close out the Fox X-Men movie series by watching the last one, and not any real interest in the film itself. I figured, though, that they were all destined to make bundles of money no matter what I thought and therefore perpetuate Hollywood's sequel-churning machine. That was how we managed to get five awful Transformers movies, after all.

It is therefore with utmost gratitude that I address the audiences world over for having decisively told Hollywood, "NO."

To all of you: THANK you. Thank you, at least for the moment, for telling those money-grubbing, cocaine-snorting, IP-plundering, suit-wearing zombies trying to pass themselves off as artists to go fuck themselves. Thank you for teaching them that a sequel isn't worth your time or money unless they do it well, and that if they're going to get your hard-earned currency, they had better earn it.

In particular it is with great satisfaction that I take note of the failure of The Secret Life of Pets 2, because of how much I despised the first installment, which is basically a retread of Toy Story with assholes in the lead roles. Illumination Studios has coasted by for years on sub-par products like the Despicable Me sequels and the Minions spin-off often made for a fraction of the money that the likes of Pixar spend on their films. Illuminatio's devil-may-care attitude towards whether or not their films are actually any good has finally come and bitten them on the ass. Sure, considering how frugal the folks at Illumination are, The Secret Life of Pets 2 is still bound to make money at the global box-office (unlike Godzilla: King of Monsters and Dark Phoenix, whose return on investment is not at all guaranteed), but they've surely gotten the message loud and clear that they can't keep on churning out crap and expect to rake in easy billions. It's also a stern lesson global audiences taught the producers of Transformers two years ago when The Last Knight flopped, which, if nothing else, has at least prompted a re-think among Paramount execs on how to make these movies going forward.

I'm not actually averse to sequels. Heck, I have the Jason Bourne trilogy, all four James Bond movies starring Daniel Craig, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, the Toy Story trilogy, the Kung Fu Panda trilogy, and virtually every movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in my collection. So obviously I don't have any problem with sequels. It just irks me when they are painfully obvious cash grabs, without any real effort on the part of the filmmakers to earn that cash. Perhaps my favorite example of this, outside the godawful Transformers films is 2015's Minions, but suffice it to say there are many, many others, and personally, I'm glad that, at least this year, audiences are repeatedly saying "NO" to lousy sequels. We all deserve better, and I'm glad we're finally realizing it instead of handing over our hard-earned wages to these suits, many of whom who wouldn't know decent filmmaking if it kicked them in the shins.

From Development Hell to Going Like Hell!

Today, the Disney-owned 20th Century Fox finally dropped the first trailer for James Mangold's 1960s set motorsport epic Ford vs Ferrari, or the extraordinary story of how the Ford Motor Company, through the efforts of a crack team of engineers and racing car drivers, took on racing giant Ferrari at the most daunting race of them all, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. While I feel the title could have been a tad more creative (like the title of the book "Go Like Hell" which narrated the events on which the film was based), the trailer itself did not disappoint in the slightest.

As I indicated here and here, this is a movie I have been eager to see for a long, long time. It's a film that's changed creative hands so many times in so relatively short a time that I'd begun to wonder if the production was cursed somehow, but seeing the trailer has basically allayed all of my fears.

That a film like this, with its hefty $100 million price tag, even got made given that Hollywood's current obsession is the next big extended/cinematic universe franchise, is honestly nothing short of a miracle. The fact that Fox has been acquired by Disney is icing on the proverbial cake considering that, even though the Mouse House didn't have a hand in making this film, judging by the trailer they've just cut they sure as heck know how to promote this. Right off the bat, they've zeroed in on the David vs. Goliath nature of the story, focusing less on Henry Ford II's obsession with defeating Enzo Ferrari (who humiliated him by offering to sell him his car company, only to pull out at the last minute and do a deal with Fiat instead) and more on the indomitable spirit of legendary racer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and his driver and good friend Ken Miles (Christian Bale). This is the kind of story that puts butts in seats.

Marquee names like Matt Damon and Christian Bale, both Oscar winners, as well as a highly-pedigreed director like James Mangold, who knows his way around both blockbusters and awards fare, have both given this film a shot at commercial success and awards glory, especially given its plum November release date.

Of course, it's too early to predict just what kind of business this film will do, but I for one, am definitely giving these guys my money.

When Compassion Outweighs Convenience: A Review of Quezon's Game

directed by Matthew E. Rosen
written by Janice Y. Perez and Dean Rosen

A few years before German businessman and Nazi party member Oskar Schindler grew a conscience and decided to save several hundred Jews from sure death in the dark days of World War II, the dying president of the Philippine Commonwealth, Manuel L. Quezon, defied his colonial masters in the United States of America to do the unthinkable; he opened the Philippines to over a thousand Jews living in Germany and Austria who would otherwise have been rounded up and placed in Nazi death camps. Quezon's Game, directed by Matthew E. Rosen, is the dramatization of this extraordinary story.

Veteran actor Raymond Bagatsing essays the role of the late President Quezon. Bagatsing, whom I first saw as Stanley Kowalski in a local staging of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire over twenty-three years ago, brings all of the craft he had then (and everything he's picked up along the way since then), to what is arguably the role of a lifetime. He does his level best to portray a President knowing he's on the brink of death and desperate to seal his own legacy as the one person who would do the right thing when no one else would. Judging by Quezon's old archival footage, Bagatsing apparently takes real effort to capture Quezon's speech inflections as Daniel Day Lewis tried to recreate what historians believed to be Abraham Lincoln's actual voice in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, but his performance goes well beyond mere mimicry as he strives to embody both Quezon's despair and yet his unflinching resolve in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. He receives able support from veteran Filipino actors Rachel Alejandro who plays his devoted wife Aurora and Audie Gemora who plays Quezon's Vice President, Sergio Osmena, in a nicely-nuanced turn that captures the difficulty of balancing interests that all politicians have to make.

Far more uneven, unfortunately, are the key supporting roles played by various Caucasian actors, including, most prominently, Billy Ray Gallion (of Lost fame) as Alex Frieder, a prominent American Jew who first brings the attention of the imminent need to evacuate Jews to Quezon's attention, James Paoleli as High Commissioner to the Philippines Paul McNutt, and David Bianco as then Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower. Of the three of them, Gallion is the most consistent, followed by Bianco and finally Paoleli. It feels halting at times; there are scenes in which this ensemble recites their lines as if their acting in a 1930s movie as opposed to a movie set in the 1930s and even though the script itself rarely falters (and I will discuss that later), the actors often do. Due to a sparse IMDB page, I can't remember the names of the other actors who played Americans, (with the exception of stage veteran Miguel Faustmann who played General Douglas MacArthur and nonetheless managed to chew the scenery in the fleeting moments he was onscreen), but it's just as well because I don't have flattering things to say about any of them, such as the actor who plays the bigoted American official named Cartwright, who plays the part a bit too broadly, or the guy who plays Alex Frieder's brother Herb. Also the less said about the actor who plays a Nazi, the better, but suffice it to say they couldn't have done any worse had they replaced him with a cartoon character. There are a few other infuriating bit actors, like the actress who plays the slinky proprietress of a hotel who also doubles as a lounge singer, but their exposure is mercifully short.

It's actually a shame that the acting falters, especially when it comes to the smaller but nonetheless pivotal roles, because otherwise the script, written by Dean Rosen and Janice Y. Perez, is incredibly tight, with dialogue that never feels overwrought or melodramatic, and quite effectively ratchets up the urgency of the situation with nothing more than words and a few foreboding musical notes. It's fortunate that the lead actors, particularly Bagatsing, Gallion and Bianco, hold the line, even when Paoleli fumbles ever so slightly. Personally, I most enjoyed the scenes between Bagatsing and Gemora, who spoke in a mix of English and Tagalog, as it really seemed like the sort of dialogue in which statesmen would engage, and it's made all the better for the fact that both the script and Gemora portray Osmena as a conflicted man, one who wants to do the right thing in his heart but who also tries to be realistic about what he can achieve. One flaw of the script, actually, is how it tends to lionize Quezon, papering over what are no doubt his many flaws as both a statesman and a human being, even as it makes oblique reference to them, but it's an omission I can forgive, given the story imperatives.

One thing I can't forgive, however, is the godawful music score, also composed by Dean Rosen, which is equal parts anachronistic (with what sounds like an abundance of synthesized music), and overbearing as it plays long and loud in scenes that don't really require it. Also, I just didn't really think it was very good. I get that this was a low-budget film, and it shows on many, many occasions, and that there wasn't any money to hire a 100-piece orchestra or something like that, but even though I'm not a composer or a musician, I respectfully suggest that for a movie like this, a handful of musicians, led by a soloist on piano, violin or even guitar would have been far more effective than this mess of a music score. I mean, I'm almost certain that the one piece of music people remember more than any other from the similarly-themed Schindler's List was Itzhak Perlman's superlative violin solo playing the film's mournful theme. I'm fairly shocked this isn't a lesson the filmmakers took to heart when making this.

So, as much as I liked this movie's ultimate message, its script and the performances by its main players, I still couldn't quite come to terms with how rough around the edges it felt. Compared to the two period films released by Jerrold Tarog over the last few years, namely the now iconic Heneral Luna and the lesser, but nonetheless highly-competent Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral, Quezon's Game has moments in which it feels downright amateurish in its execution. While I imagine that budget constraints might have played some part in compromising the quality of the finished product, I do feel there's something missing from Rosen's craft regardless of how much or how little money the filmmakers had in their coffers for this film.

Still, I can't deny that he extracted some extraordinary performances from his main actors which basically transcend many, if not most of this film's other artistic shortcomings. That, and the script, really make this movie worth watching. There may be some utterances of harsh language here and there, but this film is still worth showing to Filipino students and other young people, if only to show them the kind of thing that true statesmen are capable of doing.

7.5/10