Too much Sugar Rush

I finally got in my second viewing of Wreck-It Ralph this past weekend. Though I had been meaning to rewatch it since it first came out, it was actually my son who was responsible for putting it on the docket. W-I R was one of three movies he independently picked off the shelves and brought back to me at the library on Saturday.

My wife thought I'd picked it out -- knowing that she hadn't seen it -- but I had to give credit to him. That's me, pathologically rejecting credit when credit would be easy enough to accept without deceiving anyone. Besides, I'm trying to stick to a movie diet, and putting a new one on the schedule for a week that had already filled up would be breaking my own rules.

So she and I watched it on Saturday night, and I'm sorry to say, I reached a conclusion that some people had reached when they first saw it:

Too much Sugar Rush.

If you don't remember, or heaven forbid, haven't seen Wreck-It Ralph, Sugar Rush is the name of the video game where the characters spend the last two-thirds of the movie. It's a perfect riff on the modern Japanese sensibilities of video games, featuring a go-kart race between cars made of peppermint and cookies, watched by candy corns in the stands, racing past ponds of chocolate and hills of frosting. It's a big burst of color and a huge injection of pure imagination.

And, it gets old. Kind of like being trapped inside a kaleidoscope long past the point where you get a headache.

At least, that's what I've determined must be the reason I didn't like my #4 movie of 2012 nearly as much on second viewing.

When I first watched Wreck-It Ralph, the movie's delicious conceit and the ways they establish the larger world so enveloped me, Ralph probably could have been stuck in Pong for the last hour and I wouldn't have cared. That's how much I was in this movie's spell.

I heard a few people at the time say "I wish they'd gone to more games, but I still liked it." I generally dismissed those comments. Wreck-It Ralph was pretty much perfect, in my opinion.

This time, though, I felt that same wish. What would Ralph have done inside Galaga? Or Golden Tee? Or Dance Dance Revolution?

I realize that Wreck-It Ralph actually has a similar structure to Up, a movie whose problems presented themselves to me more immediately (though also one I have come to appreciate more on multiple viewings). As with Wreck-It Ralph, I loved the setup of Up -- I was completely under its spell. But Carl and Russell end up spending very little time actually flying in Carl's house. It was when I realized that the last hour-plus of Up was going to involve dragging Carl's house around on their backs while doing unrelated things with dogs and rare birds that I started to question whether they were making the best use of the concept.

Watching Wreck-It Ralph this time around, the time spent in Sugar Rush felt eternal. Look, the writing moves things along at a good pace and there's definitely enough for the characters to do, but I was dying for a change of scenery by the end. It was Carl flying his house like the world's largest kite all over again.

Well, if Up needed to come up a few pegs on my appreciation scale, I'm sure Wreck-It Ralph could afford to come down a few pegs. My #4 ranking now seems pretty high praise, especially when I saw nearly 120 movies by my deadline, and when few other critics even found a spot for it at the bottom of their top ten.

The thing I find troubling me most in this reassessment of the movie, however, is that it changes something essential in the way I have been viewing Disney's recent renaissance. I have been building a case for Disney's dominance based on the greatness of Tangled (a greatness that still holds up after four viewings) followed by the slightly lesser greatness of Wreck-It Ralph. Now those assumptions have been dealt two blows in a month's time. First, Frozen was only a 3.5-star movie (I'd given the previous two 4.5 stars, though Tangled actually deserves 5). Then, Wreck-It Ralph came back down to earth a bit on my second viewing.

I don't know that it matters that Tangled is now more of a standalone great. I mean, I have no special incentive to have Disney up on a pedestal. However, I'd definitely taken sides in the ongoing war between Disney and Dreamworks, and felt it was important to continue to acknowledge Disney as the superior combatant.

And I do still feel that way, especially having just seen and been charmed by Disney's animated feature immediately preceding Tangled: Bolt (review coming later this week). I just don't feel it quite as much.

I guess the real loss here is not Disney stepping off a pedestal, but Wreck-It Ralph doing so. I loved loving Wreck-It Ralph, and it sucks that I now only have to really like it. That's the danger of watching movies a second time.

At the same time, I would never counsel a viewer to stop at one viewing for fear of spoiling -- or wrecking -- something great. If it really is great, it'll stand up to multiple viewings, and you should gradually love it more with each one.

Dreamworks' inadvertent rival pimping

This is the story of how my son's interest in watching Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit always ends in a viewing of Toy Story.

My son is allowed to watch as much as two hours worth of TV when he wakes up on weekend mornings. Scoff all you want, fellow parents. Deep down, you know you treasure those two hours as an invaluable time to do things around the house. (Even if the things you're doing are not very meritorious, such as updating your blog.)

So each morning after I get him up, we go through an often-circuitous rigmarole about what he wants to watch. This process is complicated by the fact that he sometimes doesn't know the name of the thing he wants to watch. Often I use our Recently Watched section of Netflix streaming as a major crutch, and many mornings, we fill these two hours by stringing together a number of half-hour shows.

However, a feature also does the trick of getting us most of the way there. This is where it gets a little tricky. When he's requesting Cars, does he want to watch so-called "Fin Cars" ("Different Cars"), a series of tall tales told by Mater, which runs 36 minutes? Or is he talking about the two-hour feature, which we just bought about a month ago?

Another area of ambiguity relates to Wallace & Gromit. The short films (A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave) used to be available for streaming in a package. I don't think they are anymore, so when W&G get requested nowadays -- as they did this morning -- I put in our DVD of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

And then usually take it right out again.

See, something about seeing the Dreamworks logo come up makes my son want to watch Toy Story instead.

I had no idea what it was until this morning, when the phenomenon happened again.

"Ina watch Toy Story," he said in that tone of voice that's almost a whine, but not quite, as those balloons float up into the clouds, and the boy starts fishing on that crescent moon.

This morning I tried to take note of what is causing this association in my son, and it occurred to me pretty quickly once the Toy Story BluRay had gone in.

See, the opening screen of the BluRay, where they ask you your preferred language for the disc options, is Andy's wallpaper -- which happens to be a big screen of blue broken up by regular intervals of clouds.

Bingo.

You know, Dreamworks' is probably screwed no matter what it does. I'm kind of surprised the Dreamworks logo doesn't make my son want to watch a different Pixar movie, Up, which we also own. After all, the logo prominently features balloons as well.

Then again, it's very unlikely that my son knows the title Up. It's a bit abstract for a child. When he does request it -- which is rare -- I believe he refers to it as "Balloons." Or "buyoons," which is how he pronounces it. (My son is learning Spanish at daycare, and may have heard that word spoken with the Spanish convention of turning double L's into a Y sound.)

Of course, if we're talking patterns, here's another predictable one that also relates to my son changing his viewing preferences based on a visual trigger:

Once he's set up with his viewing option, I like to set myself up with my laptop at our kitchen table, which looks in on the living room where he's watching his shows. If I can see him, he can see me, and my laptop immediately reminds him of his absolute favorite viewing option:

"Diggers."

"Daddy, ina watch diggers," he says/whines.

See, before we showed him any TV, we allowed him to watch construction equipment ("diggers") on youtube on my computer. In time, "diggers" came to refer to anything watched on the internet on daddy's computer -- trains, helicopters, even shows on potty training. Although TV is now an option for him and has been for almost a year, "diggers" has never been fully supplanted.

And more often than not, when I've got my computer out, my son will slink over and try to start climbing up on my knee, and begin full-on whining if he is even remotely denied.

So here's another skill parents have gotten down: adaptation. Now, I bring my work computer home every weekend, so he can watch diggers on my work computer, while I use this one to write this post, the one I'm finishing right about ...

... now.

The era of partial viewings

My son turned two on Saturday.

Before the day was out, he had seen both Up and Toy Story.

Parts of them, anyway.

In his two years of existence, we've had a strict rule not to introduce him to TV. That doesn't mean we'd make sure the TV was off if he were in the room. We just made sure that whatever was on TV didn't interest him. Baseball has been my programming of choice in that regard. It doesn't interest my wife, either -- two birds with one stone.

But we always knew that when he turned two, we would slowly introduce him to the kind of programming where he was the intended demographic. I decided to take that literally by showing him Up on the morning of his second birthday, even though he technically didn't turn two until 9:35 a.m.

Why Up? I have no great love for it. I appreciate it more upon every viewing (this would be my third), but I still consider it to be in the lower half of Pixar's movies. We only own it at all because my sister gave it to me as a Christmas present that year. Loved the idea of trying to get me DVDs she thought I'd like, and though she scored only a minor hit with this one, she scored a major one with Inglourious Basterds.

I considered showing him Inglourious Basterds, thinking he might really get something out of the scene where Eli Roth cracks open that Nazi's head with a baseball bat. But Up was the movie of choice, because my son had taken it off the shelf a couple times and given a long look at Kevin, the colorful bird sought out by Charles F. Muntz come hell or high water. (As I've always said -- just go back to society and show everyone you've invented a collar that translates the thoughts of dogs into speech. Much more impressive than proving the existence of an elusive bird.)

"Duck!" my son proclaimed upon looking at Kevin. In his world, all birds that look even vaguely like a duck, are a duck. (He loves dogs even more than ducks, but the satellite dish around Doug's head may have kept my son from identifying Doug as a canine.)

So I decided to show him the movie with the duck in it for his birthday.

Of course, the duck doesn't come into the movie until 30 minutes in. So I had to ask myself: Do I show him Up from the beginning, or from 30 minutes in?

But the question was really this: Am I showing him Up for him, or for me?

You see, if you know me, and if you read this post way back in 2009, you know that I don't really love watching parts of movies. This wasn't always the case. But when I started keeping track not only of the new movies I watched, but also of the favorites I revisited, everything started to "count." Strict adherence to lists has a way of doing that. Since I didn't want to face the dilemma of whether watching 25 minutes of a movie means that it "counted" as a viewing, I decided to just stop catching bits of movies here and there. I'll either watch all of it or watch none of it.

See, that kind of absolutism is not possible with children. And I ought to resign myself to it sooner rather than later. My friends who have older children have seen parts of some Pixar movies in the multiple dozens of times. I imagine I soon will be that guy, too.

Soon, but not yet.

Terminal completist that I am, I showed him Up from the beginning.

And was amazed at his apparent capacity for absorbing the movie. He sat there, sucking his fingers, staring raptly at the screen, long past the point I dared hope he'd do so. Those first 30 minutes, until Kevin makes his entrance, are pretty adult-oriented, all told. Yeah, you get a little bit of young Carl and young Ellie, but then you get a montage of their life together and old Carl's cantankerous interactions with various city officials. It would be easy for a child of four, let alone two, to lose his focus during that part.

And so I breathed a sigh of relief when Carl unveils the massive bunch of balloons that will carry him to Paradise Falls. I knew this would hold my son's attention for a bit longer, even if it had been flagging to that point. And it did hold his attention, though his attention hadn't seemed to be flagging.

Strangely enough, it was right at about the point that Kevin was ready to appear that he finally stopped being interested in the movie. And maybe he's just my son in that regard. He knew that the movie was on track until that point, and that it kind of starts to meander once Carl and his rotund boy scout stowaway Russell land near Paradise Falls. Maybe he, like me, thought it was a curious choice to shift the action from their wondrous airborne adventures, to their adventures lugging around the house like an overgrown kite, followed around by an annoying bird and an idiot dog. 

He did show limited interested in both Kevin and Doug, but by then, he had other jobs around the living room that needed his attention.

Me, I kept watching as long as I could. I missed big chunks of the third act while preparing his birthday pancake breakfast, but I still felt that it "counted" as a viewing, and recorded it in my lists as such.

When my wife decided to show him Toy Story in the afternoon, I caught little bits, but mostly decided to stay out of it. I watched about 20-25 assorted minutes and decided that this did not "count." (Besides, we just watched Toy Story earlier this year, and I didn't want to have my enjoyment of it ruined by another viewing so soon afterward -- especially since my most recent viewing was the least enthused I had felt about it in any of my half-dozen viewings.)

But if my son's childhood is anything like the childhoods of my friends' kids, I'll soon have my appreciation of plenty of terrific animated movies ruined.

Maybe I'll just strategize to buy him only the crappy ones, so I won't care if I start hating them.

Was I the fool?

I'm not going to use this April 1st to discuss famous April Fool's-themed movies (there aren't many), nor to perpetrate some long and elaborate hoax on you. But I do like to recognize the passage of the day, just as I try to wear green on St. Patrick's Day, red on Valentine's Day, and some kind of costume, however lame, on Halloween.

So I'm going to use today to introduce to you a new feature on my blog: "Second Chances."

A couple weeks ago, I re-watched Up after we got it as a present for Christmas. I liked Up when I first saw it, but I didn't love it, like most of you did. Receiving it as a present thrust it into my path again, a place it probably wouldn't have gotten again on its own, at least not for ten years or so. And I liked it better the second time.

So it got me thinking about other movies that I may need to give second chances, movies where I may have "been the fool" for liking them so much less than the average person liked them. In fact, I recently went through my list of movies seen, searching for movies that fit that criteria. I came up with a good list, and now -- possibly starting this weekend -- I'm going to begin the task of going through them, and hope that it won't feel like a task. (I wanted to have the first ready in time for this post, but I've had a busy week. Besides, I'll probably blather on for a couple hundred more words about nothing here anyway, so might as well introduce the series now, and write the first entry later on.)

I'm not going to present the list here -- that would spoil the fun. Instead, I'm going to write one "Second Chances" post a week, probably on Tuesday (don't hold me to that), and over the course of weeks and months, steadily examine this list to see if my opinion changes with a second viewing.

This is a big change for me. I've seen about 375 movies more than once, and I'd say that 370 of those were movies I liked -- "loved" might be a more accurate word in most cases. With so many movies to see -- movies I haven't seen, movies I know I love that I want to see again -- it has always seemed like a waste of time to re-watch movies that didn't work for me.

But this project is an attempt to cut out whatever environmental factors may have been in play the first time, as there were in Up, and really concentrate on the movie itself. In many cases, I will probably have my dislike of the movie affirmed. In others, though, the movie's reputation may be rehabilitated. Perhaps it will even become a movie I look forward to seeing a third time, just for pleasure.

So without making a short post even longer, I'll just say happy April Fool's Day. For me, it will be April Fool's Month, or perhaps April Fool's Spring, or however long it takes me to determine whether it was me who was foolish, or you all for liking these movies so much.

Second chances

It's not every day that you felt sort of "meh" about a movie, and then later give it a second viewing. With all the choices out there for movies you haven't seen, never mind the movies you cherish but have seen only once, few of us budget the time to give a so-so movie a second chance.

So that's why receiving one of these movies as a gift really comes in handy.

For Christmas, my sister bought me Up and Inglourious Basterds. My wife had told her I was interested in adding to my DVD collection, which is true -- with the new asterisk that I may have to back off for awhile in anticipation of switching to BluRay. Whatever the format, though, I do want my collection to grow. I've mentioned in this space that for reasons of personal financial restraint, I no longer want to buy movies myself, but exclusively receive them as gifts. However, what I really mean is that I want a little person in my brain sending smoke signals to the giver, telling them exactly what I want -- I don't want them just blindly selecting movies they think I'll like, if they don't discuss film regularly with me and have a good sense of a) my tastes and b) what I already own. I'll risk saying this because my sister doesn't keep up with my blog: It's kind of like a grandmother who says "Oh, I hear little Johnny likes those newfangled action figures," and proceeds to buy you toys from whatever line of toys she thinks is popular, even if those aren't the toys you play with.

But I'm really being too critical, because my sister actually did a very good job. Objectively, she did an excellent job, in fact, as both Up and Inglourious Basterds ended up being nominated for best picture. But for me personally, it was only a 50% success rate, with Tarantino's movie the only one I was actually looking forward to inserting into the DVD player.

Until last night.

Last night was my wife's birthday. She was always on board with Up -- not 60% on board like I was, but most of the way to 100. So I magnanimously suggested that we watch it for her birthday, and she was excited by the idea.

I had my arms metaphorically crossed, though of course she saw nothing but smiles from me. It takes a heartless basterd indeed to openly oppose the wishes of one's wife on her birthday. But as the movie rolled along, I mentally uncrossed them -- not grudgingly, but willingly. And though it's still not in my top five Pixar movies -- which, you will agree, is acceptable, given the overall quality of Pixar -- I think it may have leapfrogged Ratatouille and Wall-E to take the seventh spot. (See here for my original Pixar rankings, posted the day after I saw Up, which, granted, didn't give it much time to stake its claim.)

Then again, that could be because I've given Ratatouille and Wall-E only one chance as well.

What troubles me about my initial impression of Up was not so much where I ranked it relative to other Pixar films. Pixar films are a top-notch breed, so even if you call something the ninth best Pixar film out of ten, you could still think it's a terrific movie. No, what troubles me is where I ranked it compared to other 2009 films. In fact, I ranked it #62 for the year -- out of 113 films. That means comfortably in the second half of films I saw this year. To give this mea culpa the full qualify of a confessional, in which I flagellate myself with all I've got, why don't we look at a nice little list of the inferior films that I ranked higher than Up, just under three short weeks ago. And keep in mind, I'm listing the funniest ones only:

Surrogates
Knowing
Crank High Voltage
The Proposal
He's Just Not That Into You
Old Dogs

(Okay, kidding about that last one -- I did not actually see Old Dogs, and hope never to, for reasons stated here.)

Granted, those are all movies that I like more than I thought I would for one reason or another. But better than Up? In just a few short weeks, that seems like a very short-sighted decision.

And yet that's the power of a second viewing. My judgment about Up was based on how I really felt after one viewing: disappointed, relative to how I wanted to feel. But the second viewing theoretically eradicates the environmental factors that might have influenced you the first time around. When I first saw Up, there were two in particular that bothered me: 1) I was running late to meet my wife for the movie, so instead of the proper dinner we hoped to eat, we wolfed down a gyro from a street fair, and the rushed frustration of the scenario lingered with me; 2) The 3-D glasses happened to be really bothering me, especially since Up does not appear to have been designed to optimize 3-D (unlike, say, Monsters vs. Aliens or Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs). With neither of those factors in play last night, I was more free to concentrate on the story and appreciate the visuals, without expending mental energy on cursing the traffic, or wondering why the 3-D wasn't popping off the screen more than it was.

Of course, I still have concerns about the actual story. I still would have spent more time in the air before reaching Paradise Falls. I still would have spent less time with the characters carrying the house around like a balloon in the Thanksgiving day parade. I still think the talking dogs are a little silly, especially since the guy who invented the technology could have gone home and been heralded for that achievement instead of getting murderously obsessed with proving himself by locating a rare bird. And I still find that bird a little silly as well, though I was more charmed by Kevin this time around. But on my second viewing, I allowed myself to become more invested in the human characters than I was the first time, and more importantly, I was able to put the complaints listed above in their proper place: minor quibbles within an otherwise highly entertaining and aesthetically beautiful movie.

Up still would not have cracked my top 20 for 2009, but top 30 shouldn't have been a problem.

Up has also inspired me to wonder what other films I should give second chances. Writing about Gangs of New York yesterday made me think I needed to give this one another watch. At 168 minutes, that's a significantly tougher one. A History of Violence is another movie I hate that other people love.

And even though it could siphon off my other viewing priorities, it's exciting to have developed a new enthusiasm for giving movies second chances. It's all part of the fabric of being a film fan, a fabric that has been on a steady path toward greater dynamism for me. Once I was just interested in seeing as many new movies as I could. Then in the last couple years, I've placed a greater emphasis on re-watching movies I love, to deepen my familiarity with them. This, it would seem, is the next logical step.

And not only is Up getting a second chance, but I'm getting a second chance as well. A second chance at credibility, with you guys, my readers. I have the blog to thank for that. Actually, I have the blog to thank for needing the second chance in the first place, as it was here that I first said I rooted for James Cameron, and here that I first said Up came up short for me. With the benefit of time, I've now been able to repudiate both of these misinformed perspectives. It's like a newspaper printing a correction -- they are both now part of the official record, each adding to the total story.

Because that's part of being a film fan, too -- re-watching, reconsidering, making market corrections, changing your mind. Cinema is a living entity, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Even if it means I have to screw Up every once in awhile.

Animation indiscrimination

Why did I see Astro Boy on Sunday?

I was asking myself that question even when it was Sunday, when I was sitting in the darkened theater waiting for the movie to start. I had this itching sensation that I didn't really want to be there. I was seeing this movie out of some rote diligence to a principle in my head, a principle that states that animated movies must be seen on the big screen in order to soak in the fullness of their grandeur.

I felt even less enthused when a line full of six boys came in and plopped themselves down next to me, in that spasmodic way that spills them over into your personal space. I'd selected my seat -- on the far left of the first raised row, the one with the bar in front of you -- for its relative isolation, especially in a theater that was only a third full. I never imagined that I'd be sitting not only close to, but directly next to, an eight-year-old boy. Yet there he and his friends were. I should add that they were completely commendable audients, with the notable exception of this one random moment when one kid stood up on his seat and yelled something to his mother, two rows back. But that incident was over pretty quickly.

The fact of sitting next to the boys was not, in itself, anything more than a colorful environmental detail that sounds sort of funny in the re-telling. I didn't question why I was at Astro Boy because I thought it made me look like some kind of predator, a 36-year-old man attending a 2:35 Sunday afternoon screening and sitting next to a line of six boys. (Hey, I was sitting there first!)

No, I questioned attending Astro Boy because I didn't have any specific reason to think I would like it. I had only a sense that its anime-influenced computer animation looked pretty polished, and that the character design seemed reasonably good. I didn't have any idea about the pedigree of the writers, the history of Astro Boy as a Japanese entertainment property, or even which studio was releasing it.

Yep. Animation indiscrimination, pure and simple.

And I should have known better. In my piece ranking Pixar's ten films earlier this year -- in which the most recent three occupied slots 7 through 9 -- I came face to face with the realization that animated films weren't casting the magical spell over me that they once did.

So what do I go and do? Yep, I see 9, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and now Astro Boy in the theater. An attempt at a market correction.

In fact, that makes a total of six 2009 animated films that I've seen in the theater, ranked as follows:

1. Monsters vs. Aliens
2. Coraline
3. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
4. Up
5. 9
6. Astro Boy

So I guess you could say my viewing of Cloudy did have the intended effect, to some degree. At least I liked it better than Up, and yes, I do expect to be cast out of the Pixar fan club after admitting that. Yet its overall ranking out of the 53 films I've seen this year is not very high, somewhere around 23. This from the guy who once regularly ranked his favorite animated film in his top ten each year -- and currently has two animated films ranked in his top ten all time (see sidebar), with Toy Story ranked at #1. (Monsters vs. Aliens currently stands at #15 this year, but will probably be pushed significantly downward by the cavalcade of high-profile releases coming out between now and late December.)

As I was waiting for Astro Boy to start, it occurred to me how perfunctory this trip to the theater was. And as I watched the trailer for Planet 51, due out in a couple weeks, I wondered if I'd be back here for that, maybe in this very seat, wondering the same thing:

What am I doing here?

Astro Boy was not terrible. It had its moments. It had its cool robots (along with its stupid ones), and its cool action set pieces (along with the ones that seemed too intense for kids -- but more on that in a moment). But it's the first animated movie in a long time that I would actually give a thumbs down. I hemmed and hawed about it as I was leaving the theater, but by the time I got home, I put my foot down. Go with your convictions, Vance. Thumbs down.

I guess I didn't want to be reminded of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence that many times when watching a kids movie. For starters (spoiler alert!), the Astro Boy of the title is a robot, not a flesh-and-blood human. You probably knew that already. But what you might not know is that he's a robot designed to look like the son of his inventor, who gets vaporized when trapped inside a military experiment gone wrong. That's right, you meet Toby, the model for the eventual Astro Boy, for about ten minutes at the beginning of the movie before he basically blows up, leaving only his baseball cap behind. I'm not saying you see chunks of little kid raining from the sky, but the fact remains -- this little boy gets killed at the start of the movie. Heavy, and not in a good way.

What follows is a dreadfully formulaic story of the robot simulacrum getting cast out by its creator (and how mean is that, character voiced by Nicolas Cage?), then trying to find his way in the world in the hopes of eventually trying to win back the love of his "father." Along the way Astro Boy meets a handful of precocious kids (who are being looked after by a Fagin-like character, in the umpteenth Oliver Twist reference I've seen in a film recently), and crosses paths with a bunch of British-accented robots who belong to the RRF (Robot Revolutionary Front). Booo-ring. Didn't really want to be reminded of 2005's Robots while watching this, either. Another thing we tend to count on in animated movies, in addition to the visuals: that the script will be good. But the dialogue was almost totally without cleverness, the story irredeemably trite.

And the visuals themselves? Those have to be the saving grace, the trump-all, the real reason I decided to buy a ticket -- right?

Good but not great. A little washed out.

Maybe I'll wait for video on Planet 51.

Disagreements hurt

The best high -- one that comes naturally from discussing film, that is -- occurs when you discover that the other person loves a certain film just as much as you do. If you love the movie for the same reasons, even better. Sometimes, I'll admit it, I even get goosebumps.

The same can happen for films you both hate with equal intensity. I've always thought that my best friends were people who hate the same things I hate. As long as you agree, it can be intoxicating.

Unfortunately, the reverse is also true.

When you disagree vehemently about a film -- especially with someone who usually shares your tastes -- it can feel like you're "breaking up." It can feel like you'll never again be able to find common ground on future movies, and may make you hesitant to even discuss certain films for fear of further heartache.

I should know. I've been in two sizable film disagreements with the same person inside of two weeks.

This in itself is not "newsworthy," in the sense that I felt like I needed to come write about it in my blog because it was so shocking. I've disagreed with this lifelong friend plenty of times before. We've called each other idiots (jokingly, of course) and moved on. Disagreement is inevitable when you watch as many films as we do, and feel as passionately as we do.

However, for some reason, the last two disagreements have carried a particular edge to them.

About 10 days ago, I finally saw Rachel Getting Married, one of my friend's favorite films of last year. Not only did I not like it as much as he did, but I of course felt compelled to dissect its problems in ways that verged on the sarcastic. Hey, I'm a writer -- I'm not accustomed to blunting my own tools. I usually say what I feel. Unfortunately, in a quick email analysis forged during down moments of the workday, I probably didn't show enough sensitivity to the fact that he loved the movie, and would obviously not be convinced by my quickly tossed-off nay-saying, which only half-said what I really wanted to say.

Then this week, I saw Away We Go. He liked Away We Go about as much less than I did as I liked Rachel Getting Married less than he did. Which is to say, we both liked the other's movie, but had definite criticisms close to the surface, just scratching and clawing to get out. And so it was that I was still on my bubble of entrancement after seeing Away We Go, when my friend's pointed critiques popped that bubble.

This last was actually quite a valuable experience for me. The way it worked out, his criticism of Away We Go came within only an hour or two of my seeing it. (I came in to work early but then learned I had to work late, so I took off at lunch to see the movie in order for my hours to work out correctly). And so it was that I got to feel how my wife feels when I can't hold my tongue whenever we exit the theater.

The most natural instinct for people upon leaving the theater is, of course, to talk about the movie they just saw. This works out great when you both loved or both hated a movie -- or even if you both felt lukewarm about it. But when there's a decent discrepancy in how you felt, and you still feel compelled to discuss it, someone's going to get their feelings hurt.

And so it is that about once every couple months, I harsh my wife's buzz after we see a movie she liked better than I did. This happened for us most recently with Up. Instead of allowing her to float out of the theater on those balloons in the movie, I quickly popped a couple of them with my complaints about it. "Why is that guy still obsessed with finding that extinct bird if he's invented a dog collar that allows dogs to talk? Why did they spend half the movie walking around with the house lashed to their backs? Wouldn't it have been better to spend more time navigating to South America? How come the 3-D wasn't better?" I wanted answers to all these questions. She just wanted to bask in the afterglow.

You don't want to censor yourself and keep your true feelings about something a secret. There's nothing less interesting to me than a person who nods along with everything you say for fear of bruising your fragile ego. But there definitely has to be some kind of balance, not to mention a brief moratorium on unwanted criticism that lasts for at least the first hour after leaving the theater. There are ways to criticize a movie without making it seem like an act of war.

And so with my friend these past two weeks, we probably hauled out heavier artillery than we really needed. We like to express ourselves, and it goes without saying that we think we've made astute observations. But these observations also have the power to cut, and sometimes we have thinner skin than we like to imagine we do.

But I'd like to vow to make my own skin thicker. If someone doesn't like a movie I liked as much as I liked it, it doesn't mean they're calling me a bad person. Except we take it that way, don't we? We think the other person is implicitly saying that only an idiot could like the movie as much as you liked it. It's like they're saying that if you missed such obvious flaws, your whole ability to render judgments has now been called into question.

But it's not true. We film fans are a strange bunch. We like and hate things for totally bizarre reasons. It seems to me that the really important thing is to agree on the really important films. But then again, who is to say what fits into that category? Is there a film out there that's so unquestionably good, or so unquestionably bad, that if someone disagreed with you on it, they would lose all credibility with you? Okay, to take an extreme example, if someone came up to me and said that Citizen Kane was a bad movie, I'd probably have to say that they were stupid. And I'm sure there are plenty of other Citizen Kanes out there that would inspire the same reaction in me. To list them here would miss the point.

The important thing, really, is to love film -- to love talking about it, to love watching it, and to love the reasons you love and hate it. The biggest enemy of the film fan is not the film fan with different tastes -- it's the non-film fan. The person who can't appreciate the medium in any way, shape or form. That's a person I really find myself incompatible with.

So love what you love, hate what you hate -- just never stop talking about it. And if you do that, I'll always be interested to be on the other end of that conversation.

Ranking Pixar

What's wrong with me?

What's wrong with my inner child?

When I left the theater after Up last night, I felt ... well, not underwhelmed, but let's just say, less whelmed than I wanted to be. And this is the third straight Pixar film I've left feeling that way: generally impressed with its storytelling, certainly impressed with its animation, and recognizing I'd seen a quality film, but without that sense of wonder a Pixar film is supposed to instill in me. Which Pixar films used to instill in me without fail.

For most people, the triumvirate of Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up represents Pixar at its absolute finest, which is why my current Pixar funk is all the more troubling. I don't usually mind being out of synch with popular opinion, but it does make me wonder why I'm out of synch -- are they wrong, or am I? Am I just getting older? Does it take transcendence across the board to really transport me?

Like I said, it's not that these aren't very good movies, movies worth praising sturdily. But the breathless rhapsodizing about these three films has been out of scale with what I believe they deserve. It's as though a certain segment of the filmgoing population has decided that Pixar is a lifeboat in a sea of animation mediocrity, and therefore, everything that Pixar produces must be heaped with adulation in order to demonstrate the distance between Pixar and its competitors. Well, I'm going to deliver my first (second? third?) of many controversial statements in this post -- I actually liked Dreamworks' middlingly reviewed Monsters vs. Aliens better than Up. (Even if, on some levels, Monsters vs. Aliens probably rips off Pixar's Monsters Inc.) There, cast me out, and never trust my opinion again.

The problem with Pixar is that its films are all basically excellent. This sets the bar way too high, and makes some films suffer when compared to each other, or when compared to the expectations you have for them. I admit it's very possible I liked Monsters vs. Aliens more than Up because I was not really expecting to love Monsters vs. Aliens, but was expecting to love Up. When the former exceeded expectations and the latter came up short, it blurred the strengths of these movies relative to each other, in my mind at least. (Another factor: I found the 3-D extraordinarily vivid in Monsters vs. Aliens, and somewhat subdued in Up).

Then again, why be apologetic about it? The essence of being a movie fan -- any kind of movie fan -- is that you like what you like, and you don't what you don't. Trying to "pretend" you like something more than you do only does yourself a disservice.

So I thought the tenth release by Pixar was the perfect opportunity to post my first list in a long time -- my personal rankings of Pixar films from 1 to 10. I know you don't usually comment, but if you're reading this and you care about this topic, I'd love to hear your feedback in the comments section. Plus your own rankings, though I don't expect you do to go into the same detail I do.

Without further ado ...

1. Toy Story (1995, John Lasseter). The most amazing thing to me about Pixar is that it arrived on the scene as a fully developed entity, totally sophisticated in the animation department and the story department right out of the gates. Pixar's first film will probably always be my favorite -- I can't think of another time when I felt such awe sitting in a movie theater. So much so that I saw Toy Story again ... the very next day. Not only is the concept delicious -- what do your toys do when you're not looking? -- but the characters are wonderfully rendered, with Woody's insecure sarcasm and jealousy providing the perfect counterpoint to Buzz's obliviously optimistic machismo. Sure, the human characters looked a little clunky, but who cares? The moment I saw those little green army men come to life, I knew I'd never seen anything like this, and probably wouldn't again.

2. Toy Story 2 (1999, John Lasseter). Until four years later, that is, when Toy Story 2 nearly did the impossible: outshine Toy Story. Over time I've decided that the original is the superior effort, but the margin is razor thin. The old characters are back, some good new ones are added, and the adventure of saving Woody from an evil toy collector is almost as good as saving Buzz from a sadistic neighborhood brat. Plus the video game opening is just awesome.

3. Finding Nemo (2003, Andrew Stanton). Pixar's best non-Toy Story movie is another epic quest, this time a neurotic clown fish trying to find his sole surviving offspring in a vast ocean full of diverse creatures. What I love so much about this film is that two sets of characters and two parallel stories -- Nemo also must figure out how to escape from domesticated life in a fish tank -- are carried off with equal panache and poignancy. Plus, Ellen Degeneres' performance as the absent-minded Dory is absolutely wonderful -- I say this as a person who's not particularly an Ellen fan.

4. Cars (2006, Joe Ranft). This will undoubtedly be my most controversial ranking on the list, but see my previous comment about surpassing expectations. Cars looked like Pixar's dreaded slumming into total Saturday morning cartoon baby-ishness, its "screw you" to Disney as the final film in the initial agreement between the two companies. But it ended up having huge amounts of soul and cleverness, at least in my humble opinion, and the colors really pop off the screen. The desert looks great, and I loved the affection for cars and for the American southwest on display here. And even though the cars have googly eyes, it doesn't come across as stupid. A pleasant surprise that shot it all the way up to #4. Let the disagreements begin.

5. Monsters, Inc. (2001, Pete Docter). The world of monsters was another wonderful way for Pixar to flex its imaginaton and animation capabilities, and Billy Crystal and John Goodman are terrific as the lead scare-mongers who are anything but ferocious. I loved the giant (albeit Men in Black-style) headquarters where they worked, and I remember being really tickled by the kid who voiced the baby, known as Boo. There are some slow patches here, but this is a winner.

6. The Incredibles (2004, Brad Bird). The Incredibles is much beloved -- even by me in a sense, as I ranked it #9 out of 59 movie I saw that year. But compared to some other Pixar films, I think it comes up short in the story department. Love the idea, love the character design, love the world it creates, love a bunch of things about this film -- but I don't love the script. I didn't think it was the best idea for what to do with the characters, and I think the narrative suffered as a result.

7. Wall-E (2008, Andrew Stanton). What I like about Wall-E is what I think most people like about it -- it is the most different from other Pixar films. I'm not suggesting Pixar needed to vary from its winning formula, or that it even really has a formula. Just that it was incredibly bold to set a "children's movie" on a dystopian post-apocalyptic Earth where all humans have evacuated, and those of the species who still survive are blobs flying through the universe on the spaceship version of a cruiesliner. But it doesn't mean that this film didn't leave me feeling a little cold and lonely. I was bombarded by other people's affection for it, but I just couldn't bring myself to their level. I liked the love story but didn't love the love story.

8. Ratatouille (2007, Brad Bird). My my. Paris looks absolutely wonderful, and the animation is as lovingly detailed as in any Pixar film. However, I must say, I thought the plot meandered, and the result was an over-long movie. I like the message of finding your creative bliss, and there were a lot of things about this movie that really impressed me, but in the end, I left the theater with my socks firmly on.

9. Up (2009, Pete Docter). I don't want to say too much about Up because many of my readers won't have seen it yet. I will say that I had a bad hour leading up to showtime, so it's possible that colored my impression of it. And I also felt myself clawing at the 3-D glasses a bit, so there's that. And since I only saw it 24 hours ago, it might end up deserving to be higher on this list. But let's just say that outside of a couple terrific passages -- the opening marriage montage is classic Pixar -- this is a weird movie full of curious decisons, some of which are downright head-scratching. There's something very abstract, even European, about the idea of a house carried away by balloons. Up needed more of that vibe.

10. A Bug's Life (1998, John Lasseter). And here's where there's a real drop-off. I agonized over some of the other decisions on this list, but not this one. Pixar may not have known that it would eventually be able to create one brilliant film per calendar year, but it still seems strange that this was the best the three years after Toy Story could produce. I don't give A Bug's Life an actual thumbs down, but I do have to think about it for a moment. Certainly there's some good stuff in it, but the story is boring, the character design is lacking (the ants are blue?!), and it's just not very memorable. For me it also suffers in comparison to Dreamworks' Antz, which came out the same year and was a more satisfying realization of the concept, though I know I'm in the minority on that one.

As I just performed this exercise, it was difficult, because Pixar is so good that it feels uncharitable to call any of their movies even relatively bad. (Except A Bug's Life, that is). And I'm struck with the notion that I really need to revisit some of these films, especially the ones people love much more than I do.

But I do think there's probably a reason that four of my top five choices are four of the first five movies Pixar made. Not that they got worse over time, but that I got older. That I became more jaded and less receptive to the flights of fancy that are Pixar's bread and butter. My generation is the first to come of age with a wealth of different animated movies to choose from. The older generation had one Disney movie a year (or maybe every other year), and that was it. Us? We have animated favorites ranging from The Secret of N.I.M.H. to The Iron Giant, not to mention all the movies in Disney's 1990s revival. And so it is that many of us have proudly carried our love of animated movies into our adulthood, determined to never lose our ability to love children's movies. It's what keeps us young, keeps us from admitting that we're actually adults.

But we are adults. And it's only logical that our affection for these movies would deteriorate just a little bit, even if we'd rather not acknowledge it.

I guess the proof will come on June 18, 2010. If there's anything that can cure my Pixar blues, maybe it's the release of Toy Story 3. After 11 years, Pixar's best two films will finally get their long-awaited, long-discussed, once-destined-for-a-DVD-release sequel. And if that can't do it for me, maybe nothing can. (Oh, except possibly Cars 2, scheduled for release in 2011. See? Other people liked Cars too. Hence, Cars 2. See what I did there?)

Here's hoping I'm still a kid.