Toy Story 3

Pixar's brilliance has been reported to the point of nausea this week with the release of Toy Story 3, which had scored a stunning 100% on Rotten Tomatoes after 139 reviews until two jerks had to go and screw that up (I'm looking at you, Armand White and Cole Smithey).

Having seen the film this morning in IMAX/3D, I'm just going to repeat what everyone else is saying, because it's true:  Pixar is freakin' brilliant, and while it may only be June, it's going to be hard to top Toy Story 3 as the best movie of the year.  It's as hilarious as it is complex right up to its heartbreaking, but perfect ending.

The toys' beloved owner Andy is now a teenager.  He's outgrown most of his old toys (sorry Wheezy and Bo Peep), but a few favorites have lingered in a toybox, where they haven't been played with in years.  With Andy about to leave for college, Woody and the gang prepare themselves to be moved to the attic for storage.  But after a mixup with a garbage bag nearly gets them tossed out with the trash, the toys wind up being donated to a local daycare.

At first, this doesn't seem like a terrible fate.  The toys are desperate to be played with again, and after a tour from the strawberry-scented Lotso-Huggin' Bear, Sunnyside Daycare seems like a post-Andy paradise.  But it turns out that Lotso isn't quite the cuddly friend he appears to be, and they wind up being terrorized in the daycare's toddler room.  Woody, who of course knows that Andy hadn't thrown them out on purpose, stages a daring prison break to save his friends and get everyone home.

The film is a little darker in tone than the first two films.  They both dealt with growing up and being outgrown of, but in this film it's finally happened.  Like Jessie the Cowgirl, Lotso's story is told in a sad flashback, but his story leaves him angry and vengeful, making him an even worse villian than Sid or Stinky Pete ever were.  The final action sequence at a landfill was scary enough that I was amazed it managed to keep the G-rating.

Like I said at the top of the review, I saw it in 3D.  You don't need to.  Like last year's Up, the 3D enchances everything to the point where you kind of forget you're watching a 3D movie after awhile, and it looks fantastic, but I'm thinking its got to be just as good in 2D. 

But it's funny as well, from Buzz Lightyear getting stuck in Spanish mode to scene-stealing moments from Michael Keaton as Ken, all keep you from getting too miserable at any point during the movie. 

A lot has been said about the tearjerker ending, and it is a tearjerker.  There was a lot of sniffling going on in the show I saw this morning.  But it's not a sad ending at all.  I won't go into specifics about it, but it does confirm something we've know all along - that Andy loves these toys as much as we do.

An amazing finale to an incredible trilogy.  Definitely see it.

Theater Review: American Idiot

Yeah, you read that right:  theater review.  Don't worry, we're not trying to turn this place hideously uncool. But at the request of our movie reviewing/reporting wunderkind, Mitch Anderson, we've decided to include an ocassional theater review when something theatrical is actually worth including in this column.  Like a certain punk rock opera by Green Day opening on Broadway this week...so here we go:

Released in 2004, American Idiot was Green Day's first attempt at a rock opera in the style of The Who's Tommy and musicals like West Side Story and Jesus Christ Superstar.  The critically-acclaimed album tells the story of a disenfranchised youth (aka: the "Jesus of Suburbia") trying to find his place in a post-9/11 world. 

The album was a huge success, selling 14 million copies and winning a Grammy for Best Rock Album.  So a stage version was inevitable.  The question was...would they do it justice?

The answer is definitely yes.  The new stage version of American Idiot, which opens on Broadway tonight, is every bit as good as the original album.  In some respects, it's even better.

The story remains the same, with a few added characters to flesh out the story a bit more.  Instead of one Jesus of Suburbia, we now have three:  Johnny, Will, and Tunny.   

These Ritalin-addicted, 7-11 parking lot-dwelling teens are getting ready to escape from their dull suburban town.  Immediately, things do not go as planned:  Will is forced to remain behind when he learns his girlfriend is pregnant, Tunny joins the Marines after being swayed by a slick media campaign and heads off to Iraq, which leaves Johnny to head alone into the city, where he finds a girlfriend (known only as "whatshername")...and a raging heroin addiction (embodied by a punk rocker called "St. Jimmy").  All three are left to find ways to deal with all of their potentially self-destructive paths and learn how to deal with a world that is just always going to be screwed up.

Now anyone thinking this is American Idiot: The Musical with a bunch of cheesy dance numbers and sung by people who have no idea what rock music is, relax.  This is American Idiot as was it was intended:  loud as hell with an amazing cast that sings the crap out every song.  Green Day was completely involved in the production, and even invited the cast to perform with them at the Grammys this year, where they performed a killer version of "21 Guns."  The album is presented on stage in its entirety, as well as several B-sides from the original album, and a few tracks from their newest album, 21st Century Breakdown. 

The show was directed by Michael Mayer, who also directed Broadway's last rock musical, Spring Awakening, and stars that show's Tony winner, John Gallagher Jr., as Johnny, who I think is well on his way to his second Tony win.  Not only does he have a great voice, but during songs like "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and "Wake Me Up When September Ends, he plays the guitar as well.  

The rest of the cast, including Rebecca Naomi Jones as Whatshername (who sings an outrageous version of "Letterbomb"), Michael Esper and Stark Sands as Will and Tunny, and Mary Faber as Heather (Will's pregnant girlfriend) are all fantastic.  Tony Vincent is great as a crazed St. Jimmy, and Christina Sanjous has an amazing scene with Stark Sands which has both of them flying (yes, flying) around the stage while singing "Extraordinary Girl."  How they managed to stay in tune while being flown around the stage on wires, I will never know.

The staging is wild - the walls are covered with flatscreens that blast clips from the news and random TV shows, there's a scaffolding that gets rolled around like a bus for "Holiday" while a projected highway flies by in the background, and there's a 'shock and awe' Iraq battle scene.  You're just bombarded by images as soon as the curtain goes up.  The band is on stage for the entire show, which is awesome, and definitely stick around for the curtain calls - there's a surprise encore song that the audience went crazy for the night I saw it.

As a fan of the album, I thought the show was fantastic.  It's a real rock musical.  I thought it was an even better adaptation than The Who's Tommy was back in the early 90s, and I saw that show 4 times when it was on Broadway.  I'm a big fan of rock musicals like Hair, Rent, and Spring Awakening - and this show was just as good as any of those.  This show could have gone wrong in a whole lot of ways, but thankfully it succeeded in a whole lot of ways instead. 

I wasn't sure I needed the cast album (which also releases today), since the Green Day version is usually in constant rotation on my ipod, but after seeing the show, I'll definitely be getting it.  In fact, I saw quite a few people checking the theater's souvenir stand to see if they had early copies available (they didn't).  Hopefully that bodes well for a good long run on Broadway, it certainly deserves it.

American Idiot officially opens tonight on Broadway at the St. James Theatre.  However, if you're nowhere near New York and want to see what the show looks like, check out this clip of the opening number from the soundcheck fans were invited to see just before previews started (and fair warning - like the album, it contains some R-rated language):

 Not a bad way to end our first theater review.  Awesome show!

Date Night

Steve Carell and Tina Fey are a major part of one of my favorite hours of TV every week (The Office and 30 Rock, of course), so the idea of both of them teaming up for a romantic comedy action film sounded like a great idea.  And for the most part, it was.  In Date Night, they were as funny as they are on their respective TV shows without being too over-the-top, and both were completely convincing as a couple whose night on the town takes a series of very unexpected turns.

Phil and Claire Foster are a happily married couple from the New Jersey suburbs who just need a break.  Between their busy jobs, their two kids (who leap into their bed wanting breakfast at 5am), and their hectic schedules, they have practically no time to themselves.  Even their weekly 'date nights' are usually at the same restaurant with the same meal every time.

So when they learn that two of their friends are getting divorced for mostly the same reason, they decide to shake their date night up a bit.  They get dressed up and head into New York for dinner at an expensive and impossible-to-get-into seafood restaurant.  When they can't get a table, they decide to throw caution to the wind even further and pretend to be the Tripplehorns, a party-of-two who appeared to be no shows for their reservation.

And that's where it all goes to hell.  It turns out the real Tripplehorns have gotten themselves into trouble with the mafia, and before the Fosters have finished dinner, the local goons show up to collect a mysterious flash drive that they don't have.  Now a panicked Phil and Claire must spend the rest of the night evading dangerous mobsters and crooked cops so they can track down the actual Tripplehorns (with the help of a perpetually shirtless Mark Wahlberg) find this flash drive, and get home.  Normal life suddenly never looked better.

Date Night definitely has shades of Adventures in Babysitting.  You've got the normal people from the suburbs up against the dangerous characters of the city having lots of misadventures along the way, and all of the characters you are rooting for learn some valuble lessons along the way.  In this case, learning that as a couple you work as a team, no matter how crazy life gets.

The funniest parts of the film are definitely the back-and-forth between Fey and Carell.  Their spastic reactions to everything that goes wrong makes you wonder how many times they went off-script and just how many takes it took to finish a scene.  (the blooper reel shown during the end credits suggests it took quite a few)

I didn't think the movie as a whole was side-splittingly funny, and it was a bit predictable, but it was very enjoyable and it even had a pretty impressive car chase scene.  I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for just a fun night at the movies.   

How To Train Your Dragon

I have to admit, I'm not always the biggest fan of the Dreamworks animated films.  I loved the first two Shrek films, but for the most part their animated movies as a whole seem way too obsessed with pop-culture references that become dated quickly and never seem to reach the storytelling highs that the Pixar films do.

When I first saw the trailers for How to Train Your Dragon, I assumed this would be another lackluster Dreamworks effort.  But wow, I am so glad to be wrong.  This movie is easily their best animated film and the best movie I've seen so far this year.  Granted, it's only April, but still...it's a good start.

Loosely based on the 2003 novel of the same name, How to Train Your Dragon is the story of Hiccup, a gawky, accident-prone teenager from a mythical Viking village (where all of the adults speak with Scottish accents and the kids speak with American accents for some reason) that is constantly under attack by all kinds of vicious dragons who torch homes and steal sheep on a regular basis.

While Hiccup is supposed to be learning how to be a dragon-slayer, he instead winds up befriending a dragon he shoots down, who he names "Toothless."  Toothless is a Night Fury dragon, supposedly the most elusive and terrifying dragon of them all.  But once they get to know each other, it turns out Toothless is actually kind of sweet...in a dangerous pet kind of way, and they go on to develop a sort of ET/Elliot-type friendship, much to the chagrin of his fellow classmates and especially his warrior-hero father, who's leading an army to destroy the rest of the dragons.  Needless to say, convincing everyone that dragons aren't so bad after all will prove to be as difficult as it sounds.

The 3D in this film was amazing.  Unlike Alice in Wonderland, which was converted from 2D to 3D and didn't necessarily need it, this was actually filmed for 3D and it looked as good as anything in Avatar.  The flying scenes alone make the movie worth shelling out the extra cash for the IMAX version, and the battle sequence at the end was equally impressive.

How to Train Your Dragon also benefits from a terrific voice cast, including Jay Baruchel (as Hiccup), Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, and America Ferrara.  We even get a mini-Superbad reunion with Jonah Hill and Christopher Mintz-Plasse voicing two of Hiccup's classmates.

I've never read the book, so I don't know if it's a good adaptation...but I can't say enough good things about the movie.  It was Pixar-good.  I loved that they got through it without a single pop-culture reference, and that it had an excellent story.  It also had what was probably one of the best dragon battle scenes I've ever seen.

Unfortunately, the movie opened to a lukewarm response at the box office last weekend (the sudden rise in 3D ticket prices certainly didn't help it), and the release of Clash of the Titans in 3D won't be doing it any favors this upcoming weekend.

But if you do get the chance - see this movie!  At the IMAX if you can.  It's incredibly good.