Question your assumptions: Toy Story 2

So the first two times I've written posts under this banner, I've considered movies one might think of as sacred cows -- classics whose value is almost unquestioned. I revisited The Graduate and Rosemary's Baby the first two times I questioned my assumptions, four months apart from each other. Randomly, another four months later, I'm doing the series again.

This time, I'm doing things a bit differently by focusing on something much more recent, though still from last century. As with the other two, though, there are a set of clear assumptions I am grappling with, and it's still been long enough since I've seen it that I knew a new viewing would answer some of my questions.

I hadn't seen Toy Story 2 in something like 15 years. My #2 movie of 1999, it was one of those I saw in the theater and then saw on video almost as soon as it was available. I may have even seen it twice on video, possibly as recently as 2001 or 2002. Since then, though, nothing. On the contrary, I'm quite familiar with Toy Story, having received it on BluRay as a gift. That means its total viewings outnumber Toy Story 2 something like 8-2.

In those 13 to 15 years, I've gone from being uncertain if I could distinguish a meaningful difference in the quality of Toy Story and Toy Story 2, both five-star movies, to pretty clearly preferring Toy Story. The best example of that is my Flickchart rankings, which have Toy Story all the way up at #6 overall, and Toy Story 2 as "only" 118th. Further stimulating this consideration of Toy Story 2 was having caught part of Toy Story 3 last weekend when our family was away for the weekend with three other families. The kids were all watching Toy Story 3, and I got to sit in on the emotional ending. It was all I could do not to bust out crying, something that would have been hard to explain to a bunch of five- and ten-year-olds. I started to wonder if Toy Story 3 weren't better than I thought it was -- perhaps even challenging the quality of Toy Story 2.

(Favorite moment from the viewing, though: When the characters survive their close scrape with the incinerator at the end, my son looked up at me with a look of earnest glee and said "They made it!" The others sitting with him, all older, were nonplussed -- or at least were not similarly vocal. I will treasure the time that my son responds to happy endings totally without cynicism or skepticism.)

So when a BluRay of Toy Story 2 popped up at the library last week on a visit with my sons, I gobbled it up. I thought my older son would be especially ripe for a viewing, having just so enjoyed the next chapter in the saga. (And not really getting that he missed a part in the middle.)

I didn't know if I'd actually get to watch it with him, but the opportunity arose on Sunday morning, when he started the day by vomiting on the carpet. Now that he was officially sick, all kinds of previously inexcusable activities were now on the table -- like him getting to watch TV for most of the day, and me getting to plop down with him for the length of a whole movie. (The fact that he threw up twice more during the day removed any question of whether he was truly sick.)

Toy Story 2 is still a great movie, but there are in fact certain things that bothered me during this view, ranging from the minor to the major. I'll list them in no particular order:

1) The writing is not as casually sharp as it is in the first movie. One of the things that makes Toy Story such a pleasure is that its dialogue is almost exhaustingly clever. You don't truly become exhausted by it, of course, but it's densely packed with double entendres and other witty turns of phrase, without ever once feeling overwritten. Toy Story 2 does not feel overwritten either, but a lot of the incidental cleverness is lost, I noticed.

2) The villain -- Al of Al's Toy Barn, voiced by Wayne Knight -- would never fall asleep with an entirely full bowl of cheesy poofs on his chest. They make him out to be so repulsive and corpulent that he would have had to down at least half that thing, especially to get that quantity of artificial cheese topping on his fingers. It's a smart set piece that Woody needs to walk through the fallen snacks like a minefield in his attempt to keep Al from awakening, but I got stuck on the notion of just how many cheesy poofs escaped a fate in Al's stomach. (Remember, I didn't say all my complaints with Toy Story 2 were major ones.)

3) The exact rarity and value of Woody and his pals as toys seemed exaggerated. I'm no rare toy aficionado, but I have to assume that a museum in Japan would have other ways of acquiring a Woody's Roundup Gang without relying on an American toy store owner finally getting his hands on a Woody to complete the set. Also, was this deal perpetually in place, pending the finding of the Woody, so that Al only has to call up the Japanese once he's finally succeeded in his mission? Which happens without any premeditation, during a random Saturday morning yard sale? And even if this Japanese museum is as obsessed with this acquisition as they appear to be, how much could they possibly be paying Al? A couple grand at most? Surely not enough for Al to fly the toys to Japan himself, as if this cost would immediately become a drop in the bucket of the wealth that would soon be his. But perhaps the strangest moment in this transaction involves Al thinking he's gotten the upper hand and requesting that they "add a zero" to the end of what they plan to pay him. So suddenly he thinks the rare toys may be able to sell for ten times an amount he already thought was going to change his standard of living?

4) The toys are capable of too much in this movie. The adventure in Toy Story had the benefit of being life-sized, or perhaps I should say toy-sized -- going outside the house into the neighbor's yard and down to the local pizza restaurant was astounding enough. Needing to up the ante for the sequel, though, the writers had the toys not only get down to the local toy store (that's fine, I buy that an Etch-a-Sketch map copied from an ad on TV could help them accomplish this), but they also drive a car to the airport. Even allowing for the possibility that a team of intelligent toys could manipulate the controls of a car in the exact unison necessary to pilot the thing, how could they then steer it down busy streets and all the way to an airport, following another car quickly disappearing on the horizon? Even stranger may be the explanation about how they got back to Andy's house, which occurs entirely off-screen and is explained only be showing one of those luggage trains parked in the yard across the street. The return from the airport alone, after the primary conflict has been resolved, should have been a harrowing adventure that got all of them killed.

I'll stop at four complaints because look, this is still a Toy Story movie and it's still wonderful. I just might knock my five-star rating down to 4.75 stars ... and my #118 ranking on Flickchart down to 150-175.

How does it stack up with Toy Story 3? I guess I'll need a proper second viewing of that to say for sure.

Join me again next time -- maybe four months from now, maybe sooner -- for another exciting episode of Question Your Assumptions.

The inevitability of excess

I was all set to write a piece this Friday about how Iron Man 2 appeared to be following the dispiriting "bigger, more, but not better" trend of Hollywood sequels.

But sometimes in the blogging world, with all the reading we do, we come across the work of another blogger who has already taken that same perspective, and taken it more eloquently and succinctly than we would have ourselves. So I'd like to refer you to the work of my esteemed colleague Daddy Geek Boy on the topic. It's a good write-up, and you can find it here.

I'll still write about Iron Man 2, but I thought I'd take a slightly different approach, ask a slightly different question. Namely, is it possible for a sequel not to succumb to the sin of excess? Is it possible for a sequel not to have double the good guys, double the bad guys, double the explosions, and in some cases, double the babes?

It's easy to think of examples where they indulged themselves, and it's very easy to think of dozens, if not hundreds, of bad sequels. But this morning I want to consider the good sequels, and see if they were able to avoid this pitfall. Even The Dark Knight, which I won't write about again because I just wrote about yesterday (albeit in purely semantic terms), couldn't resist the urge to add a second villain, even with the first villain as dynamic and dominant as Heath Ledger's Joker.

So I'm examining five of my favorite sequels of all time, ones that I liked better than the original in some cases. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm leaving out series where the first film was always planned as part of a larger story, where future installments of the story were already written (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) or envisioned by the creator (Star Wars).

Granted, most creative talents will tell you that they always envisioned their movies as multi-part stories, which is probably true to the extent that it makes sense to mentally blueprint a franchise if you think your movie is marketable. (Plus, most creative types are dreamers, and are overly optimistic/delusional about the quality of their own ideas.) But most sequels came into being because the first movie was good. If it hadn't been good, we simply wouldn't have cared about "the rest of the story" that existed purely in the writer's head.

So without any further ado, here are five excellent sequels, listed in no particular order. Let's hold them up to the light and see how they did.

1) Superman II (1980, Richard Lester). This is by far my favorite Superman movie, which has everything to do with relegating Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) to the role of comic relief, and replacing him with not one, not two, but three new villains. The plot itself is bigger as well. Although it could be argued that reversing the rotation of the earth to turn back time is a pretty big deal, I'd say that having the world taken over by the three Krypton refugees and willingly giving up his super powers qualify as more earth-shattering, as it were, for Superman.

Why it works: Three supervillains might ordinarily spin your head like a bad Joel Schumacher Batman movie, but since they essentially operate as one character in terms of their function in the narrative, the movie feels clean and focused. Plus, Terrence Stamp gives what I would argue is one of the great villain performances of all time as General Zod.

2) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, James Cameron). I don't mean to blaspheme, but this is another case of me liking the sequel better than the original. The T-1000 was like nothing I had ever seen before -- in fact, the rush of excitement I got from Cameron's digital innovations with this character was much greater than what I got watching Avatar. Still, when you break it down to its elements, the movie does have two terminators, and it adds a squeaky-voiced Edward Furlong as the young John Connor.

Why it works: Although there are two terminators, they are not both the hero or both the villain, so the mano-a-mano dynamics of the original are still in place, shifted from Arnold Schwarzenegger's terminator against Linda Hamilton to Robert Patrick's T-1000 against Schwarzenegger. And John Connor essentially replaces Kyle Reese from the original. The net gain is really only one character.

3) Toy Story 2 (1999, John Lasseter). Officially, I like Toy Story better than Toy Story 2, but it's so close that Toy Story 2 has to be considered, hands down, one of the best sequels of all time. True enough, though, there are both more heroes and more villains. Added to the characters we love are a second Buzz Lightyear and Jessie the Cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack), and there are three characters who share the villain role: the evil toy collector (voiced by Wayne Knight), the evil collectible prospector toy Stinky Pete (voiced by Kelsey Grammer), and, well, The Evil Emperor Zurg, come to life in toy form (voiced by future Pixar director Andrew Stanton, to the extent that the character has any real dialogue). The adventure is slightly bigger as well, as it involves more trips out of the house.

Why it works: Pixar has an instinct for narrative structure that is unmatched in the industry. The writers are smart enough to dole out enough lines to the minor characters so that they all feel involved, so that the extra new characters don't push them into irrelevance. I expect Toy Story 3 to be similarly successful with this narrative balancing act.

4) X2: X-Men United (2003, Bryan Singer). This one's going to be a bit more difficult for me, because although I know I like the X-Men sequel better than the original, I have a hard time quantifying why. I can tell you that there are more heroes and villains than the first. The heroic additions include Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), who walks the line between hero and villain, and the villains pile on with Lady Deathstrike (Kelly Hu) and William Stryker (Brian Cox), in addition to the usual stable featuring Magneto, Mystique, etc. This film also does what a lot of second movies gain the confidence to do: kill off one of the beloved stars of the first movie, if only temporarily, in Jean Gray (Famke Janssen).

Why it works: X2 is more like the typical superhero sequel than any other movie on this list, which makes sense since only one of the other movies is actually a superhero movie. But it works because the multiplicity of characters actually helped shove at least one character that I did not particularly like, James Marsden's Cyclops, into a corner. Thankfully, Cyclops has little more than a cameo in this movie.

5) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, Nicholas Meyer). And here's a sequel that is really, truly different. Star Trek II is a brilliant movie, but it doesn't feel like a sequel at all. Even though it deals with the Genesis device, which can create a whole planet from scratch, and the (temporary) death of Spock, who comes back to life in the next movie during a rapid re-growth on the new planet, Star Trek II feels intimate more than grandiose. There are a lot of quiet moments in which the characters discuss their mortality, and the hero and the villain never once see each other in the flesh.

Why it works: The impression created by Star Trek II has everything to do with the impression created -- or not created -- by Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The first Star Trek was a total dud -- I remember feeling a profound sense of disappointment and wondering if there was any hope for the series. If it weren't for Star Trek II, there surely wouldn't have been. We have Star Trek II to thank for all the other Star Trek movies, even the reboot we got last year -- which, if it weren't for Star Trek II, might have been attempted in the 1990s and starred someone like David Caruso. So Star Trek II is a lot more like a first movie than a second movie in that sense, though when you think about it, the whole Star Trek series has kind of assumed a serial quality, as traditionally defined -- each chapter doesn't really need to be bigger and better, it just needs to follow the characters to the next chapter in their lives. I think I'm starting to ramble here.

So is there anything we can take from all this to apply to Iron Man 2? I guess what I personally take from it is that I shouldn't perceive its "bigger, more" approach as creatively bankrupt -- not automatically, anyway. Even the best sequels have to provide more things to look at, more places to turn your attention, and in all likelihood, more minutes of celluloid. That in itself is not a guaranteed recipe for failure, and in fact, it maybe inevitable.

Obnoxious lines like Tony Stark yelling "You complete me!" to Pepper Potts after he jumps out of the plane to retrieve his helmet ... well, that may be cause for worry.