Toy Story 3 (DVD/Blu-Ray) -- Dir. Lee Unkrich. Starring Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack.
The third and presumably final entry in the Toy Story series ensures that Pixar's feature film record remains flawless--unless you count that one kind of lame movie about the talking cars.
The story follows logically from where Toy Story 2 left off. The toys' owner, Andy (voiced by a grown-up version of the kid from the original), is now 17 and heading off to college. The few toys he has kept are torn between staying loyal or letting go: being boxed up and forgotten or moving on to new owners. Woody (Tom Hanks) and his friends disagree on how to proceed, and since the other toys somehow still haven't learned to trust him, another adventure ensues.
Toy Story 3 is every bit as polished as a movie with months of writing, design, storyboarding, and rendering time behind each individual frame ought to be. There isn't a wasted motion or line of dialogue to be found here. The most unassuming jokes in the first act turn out to be subtle setups for major plot developments later on, which in turn call back to events from two movies ago.
Despite a trim 103-minute running time, there is enough material here to fill five lesser films: good news for those of you with children who will be watching it every day for the next three years.
Finding things to criticize takes some digging, but I'm always up for a bit of dirty work. Those who remember the second movie may find the beats of this story a little too familiar. In particular, the new villain is very reminiscent of Pete the Prospector.
It could also be pointed out that the third film is somewhat less character-driven than the past two. That doesn't mean the characters are weak--just that after two movies there isn't much new to say about them.
It may not be the best entry in the trilogy, but when you're talking about the best franchise of what may well be the best studio in the world, that's not something to complain about. It's a worthy end to the story.
Rated G for aggressively bright colors.
4.5 out of 5
Centurion (DVD/Blu-Ray) -- Dir. Neil Marshall. Starring Michael Fassbender, Olga Kurylenko, Dominic West.
A surprisingly good action/chase film in the spirit of Apocalypto but without the spectacle or the well-developed characters.
If you've never heard of Centurion, that's because it's a British production that never saw widespread release out here in the colonies. Which is a bit of a shame, because it's as good or better than most high-budget historical epics of recent years.
Centurion is the story of a really inept Roman legion that keeps getting itself wiped out by the Picts in second-century Scotland. After learning a valuable lesson about not trusting scary-looking women who like to stab things, the few survivors decide to provoke the enemy army and get themselves chased across the countryside.
The movie has a no-name cast, with the possible exception of Dominic West (McNulty from The Wire). He basically plays a hairier, more violent version of McNulty with an army under his command, which is pretty close to the best thing ever as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, he doesn't stick around very long.
The lack of a Hollywood budget shows up mostly in the size of the cast rather than the quality. Roman legions are thought to have been kind of big, but we never seem to see more than 20 of them at a time. Maybe that's why they keep getting defeated.
Neither the Picts nor the Romans are portrayed as heroes in this film, which means our sympathies have to lie with the individual characters. The movie falls a bit short here; with the exception of General McNulty, they all have pretty muted personalities, and the heroes are separated from the villains mostly by the way they usually wait to be attacked before chopping off the other guy's face.
Did I mention the face-chopping? Because that happens a lot.
Rated R for depictions of Scottish separatist movement (head from torso).
3.5 out of 5
