Indiana Jones And The Effective Marketing Vehicle

I figure its better not to explain why I haven't reviewed a movie in nine months (law school ensure you will do less of everything than you think, except study), and just to start again. Without further introduction...

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (Steven Spielberg, USA, 2008, B+)

How do you know when you're in the hands of a competent? The title credits roll over a scenic desert landscape, Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" blaring in the background, with two greasers and their accompanying bobby sockers driving a muscular Ford V8 convertible on a lonely two-lane road, whistling at a caravan of Army trucks in their vapor trail. So far, nothing out of the cinematic ordinary... until the caravan turns out to be a cadre of KGB agents who break their way into Area 51 by mowing down the security guards (this, it seems, is the Russians solution to most every problem in the film). Oh, and they have Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) stuffed in the back of a sedan. Spielberg understands that the distinguishing feature of an action flick, and especially an Indiana Jones flick, is, well, action, and he's savvy enough not to bog us down in a boring and useless backstory before whisking us into the heart of it. It's as sumptuous as the first ten minutes of an action film gets.

That comes as close to a litmus test for determining whether or not you'll like the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones saga as anything else I could provide. After Indy escapes from the Commies and survives a nuclear test by hiding himself in a refrigerator (!%#@#$), the MacGuffin (crystal skull of unknown origin has to be returned to remote Amazonian enclave) is laid out, Indy meets a new sidekick (Shia LeBouf, with a coat (and a hairdo) he borrowed from James Dean), and he's off to Peru to follow the trail of his friend Ox (John Hurt, looking a lot like he did in THE PROPOSITION).  The principle villain, a "psychic warfare" officer played by Cate Blanchett, possesses the requisite series ingredients of being a little too smart for their level of craziness.  After that, most of the twist and turns are eminently foreseeable but never anything less than eye-popping (cavern searches, kidnapping scenes, and, of course, the fantastic car chases, which were always the highlight of the first movie for me, an updated version of the train chases in Keaton's THE GENERAL with Ford's dry wisecracks standing in for Keaton's stonefaced stoicism). The encounter with Marion (Karen Allen) also comes as no shock. She and Indy re-ignite their tempestuous love-hate relationship, and I'll forgive Spielberg for the predictable revelation that comes out in their early conversations.

But... is it a great film? It is certainly a good film. The action sequences speak for themselves--you cannot be talked into liking the film if you have problems suspending disbelief or if you're turned off by CGI, but if you're into high speed thrills and general goofiness, you won't be disappointed. The dialogue doesn't crackle like the first Indy film, or like Han Solo's dialogue in the first two STAR WARS movies (Ford's "gold standard" as far as I'm concerned), but it isn't unbearable, and the few Marion / Indy scenes are probably the best in the film (for all of those re-upping their membership to the "George Lucas Can't Write Dialogue" Facebook group, relax, Lucas only provided the "story"--Spielberg would never have made a script like the new STAR WARS films).

Given that INDIANA JONES is meant to be escapism, it's also surprisingly erudite, at least as action films go. Some critics have complained about the time spent belaboring the archaeological puzzle the film centers around, which is a bit like going to Taco Bell and complaining that the menu is dominated by tacos; the whole ethos of Indy is that knowledge, more than strength, speed, and an incredible ability to jump between cars (which has not diminished in a quarter century, apparently) is the real power in the world. This theme ties the piece together, and it doesn't really become corny until the end (when Indy intones that the "real treasure" of the civilization they found was knowledge--he could have been doing an ad for a library). It is also a warning about the possibilities of abusing knowledge--that the movie begins with a nuclear explosion and a "Red scare" episode, and ends, in typical INDIANA JONES fashion, with destruction because a character sought to know more than they deserved to (from a society that sought to know all and see all) is no accident. Certainly, Spielberg didn't try to make A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME--and I think that when people look back on Spielberg's career they will take him to task for continuing to make so much mindless entertainment when he is clearly talented enough to make things like SCHINDLER'S LIST, SAVING CAPTAIN RYAN, and MUNICH--but he cannot be accused of making something totally vacuous.

If it has a major, overriding quality that I don't like, it is sterility; INDIANA JONES is a good time, but it is too prepackaged and preordained to be anything more than a good time. Like an attempt to recreate a great party or trip, there's enough in common with past experience to make you feel as though you haven't wasted your time, but ultimately, it never quite feels the same. Certainly, it is the work of an adept, but for a movie about a man who takes unnecessary and dangerous risks, it seems paradoxically safe and cautious. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK was a great movie because it was fresh, inventive, and unlike anything else that had ever come before it; a digitally enhanced sequel can recapture thrills, but only so much.

More distressing is the movie's final scene, which hints that LeBouf is being primed to take the reigns from Ford when he's no longer plausible as an action star. Which leads to my biggest question, going forward, about action movies in general--can RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK be made again? Not in the sense of literally making that movie again, but will there ever be a new, wholly original universe like STAR WARS or INDIANA JONES that captures the imagination of audiences?  The modern Hollywood economy doesn't seem to dictate it.  The risk involved in backing a new, original story is too high, given the costs of a bomb.  Backing the continuation of a classic series, or basing a new series on something that already has significant cultural cache (NARNIA, THE LORD OF THE RINGS) are the safest options from a business sense--in addition to making significant returns at the box office even if they are putrid based on prior goodwill, they provide substantial opportunities for marketing and licensing that ensure the studio will turn a profit.  Of course, those risks didn't stop George Lucas in the seventies and eighties; perhaps success has taken the Indy out of him.  

Plan of Action

For the few that read this site, you may have noticed a drop-off in production as of late--and by “drop off”, I mean no posts. The reasons for that are mixed. Returning to Notre Dame for law school was definitely part of it; studying is a pretty massive drag on my time (as bad as engineering, certainly) and is necessarily taking away from free time for other pursuits. The campus may be the same, but making new friends and becoming a part of the law school community, and it was right for the first few weeks to use my free time to get to know other students rather than sit alone in my apartment and write movie reviews--not to mention that the money spent on movie tickets is better applied to beer when you've done nothing but read for an entire week.

However, part of it was that I simply didn't feel like watching movies, much less writing about them, for a while. The reasons for feeling that way aren't reducible to a single sentiment--lack of anything constructive to say, discomfort about the long-term ramification of the things I was saying, and doubts about whether the gain from staying on the cutting edge of modern cinema was a net benefit to me or to other people in a holistic sense (whatever the morality of morally challenging material in a given film may be, I should add that if I'm not scandalized or tempted by such material that I always find it troubling), and maybe I needed to go a little while without watching movies to give myself a little separation from the problem.

I feel like this sentiment is drawing to a close. I now have a grip on my time constraints, and don't think that a movie review once a week would seriously strip away opportunities to study. Beyond that, I continue to feel a need to write about film because of all the kind things people have said, and continue to say, about my writing. I do not mean to kid myself about my limited talents as a critic; my role is not an essential one, (although, if you think about it, no critic's role is essential, just as art is, in some limited sense, non-essential), and unless there is a dramatic change of course in my life, I won't be anything beyond an avocational critic, slipping the occasional review in between my case briefs and memos. However, I was once taught that burying a gift in the sand, regardless of size, was an insult to the one who gave it, and so I find myself impelled by some small sense of duty to help promote a serious discussion of the arts motivated, as everything should be, by a Christian perspective.

The plan going forward, as of today, is a review per week (anything's fair game--new, classic, contemporary, or something overriding like a discussion of a great director or general kulturkampf observations), with whatever quick bloggy bites I can throw in between classes. I've set up my desktop's note-taking client to post stuff on the blog, so it should be easier and more efficient to throw up a link or post. I should have the links updated by fall break, another three-four weeks away (a lot of people have changed addresses, there are some great new sites that should be pointed out, and I probably need to update the sidebar for last year's top 5; it's doubtful whether I will have see enough 2007 films to put a list together this year, but we'll see what happens).

That's all for now; watch this space...

The Dream Ended

I haven't blogged in a while, but I would be remiss if I didn't offer a few words about the news of Ingmar Bergman's death. Bergman's career of over fifty years produced a truly unique body of work that raised him up from the obscurity of his origins in coastal Sweden to the forefront of global cinema. The article from the IHT mentions him in the same breath as Fellini and Kurosawa, and the grouping is not unwarranted--these three men, more than any other directors from outside of America with the possible exception of Jean Renoir, did more to legitimize cinema's status as art than any other group of directors.

I've kept one of the sublime images from Bergman's films on my sidebar since the very beginning of this blog. It's from THE SEVENTH SEAL, and shows the main character, a soldier returning from the Crusades, in a chess match with Death over his soul. I find it emblematic of his work as a whole, brooding and mystical, even dreamlike, but painfully aware of the fragility and cruelty of the world. His work struggles with faith and doubt in a genuine way, always aware, as Benedict XVI wrote when he was much younger in his "Introduction to Christianity," that while the believer may feel as though he is a "clown" in the world, the unbeliever struggles with many of the same fears, minus the reassurance of Divine care. It's probably not a surprise, then, why not one but two of Bergman's films were named to the Vatican Film List (SEVENTH SEAL and WILD STRAWBERRIES, both made fifty years ago).

In short, Bergman represented the very best in art, our weak human attempts to come to grips with ourselves. "The dream ended, the music went quiet that night on the island of Faro," said Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, in eulogizing Bergman, but perhaps he spoke too soon. Let's hope that those dreams and music Bergman's career represented do not fade away upon his death.

The Wrong Man

SiCKO (Michael Moore, USA, 2007, C+)

"The health care system is badly broken," my dad told me as we drove back from the movie theater after watching Moore's critically acclaimed polemic for socialized medicine. My dad agreeing, at least in part, with the director of BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE and FAHRENHEIT 9/11, is a fairly remarkable event--as a gun-owning, pro-life, self-employed conservative pragmatist, he has little use for most of Moore's ideas. But he's also a doctor who's frequently exasperated by the health care bureaucracy, and inasmuch as Moore is critical of the failures of America's HMO system (unique in the Western world), people like my dad can nod their head in agreement with the American left's favorite documentarian.

Indeed, in the hands of someone less polemical, SiCKO could have become one of the transcendent political films of our age; when Moore sticks to the story of how America's massive, third-party medical insurance bureaucracy works to crimp costs at the expense of their customers' well-being, he is immensely affecting. The exploitation and self-promotion of his earlier work is effaced by a problem that jumped into his lap almost by accident (he claims a post on his blog asking for stories about the health care industry prompted over 20,000 e-mailed responses). He abandons the style of his earlier films by letting the victims take center stage--a man who has to choose which finger he wants reattached to this hand when they're cut off in an accident with a skill saw, a woman who's daughter died of a high fever because her insurance didn't cover the hospital the ambulance stopped at first (a seemingly impossible scenario that my dad, who works at a children's hospital, confirmed as plausible), and a former insurance company employee who testifies before Congress about denying legitimate reimbursement requests because her bonuses were determined by how few claims she approved. He's also harshly critical of the American political establishment, both left and right, for failing to hack into the HMO machine. Moore has especial scorn for Hillary Clinton, one-time backer of socialized medicine, who now gleefully takes campaign donation checks from the same insurance companies she once set out to dethrone (along with many other members of Congress).

Even in the most effective parts of the movie, however, Moore's credibility is occasionally shaky. He correctly highlights President Nixon's complicity in the creation of the HMO systems, but forgets to mention that the primary sponsor of the bill in the Senate was none other than Teddy Kennedy (who somehow seems to be linked to every single piece of bad legislation ever passed in the United States). One of Moore's stories, about a cancer patient who was refused an experimental bone marrow transplant, would have had little chance of success and was almost certainly a correct judgment by the insurer. (David Gratzer's NRO review is a good corrective to some of Moore's distortions, but he's being unfair when he tosses off all of Moore's "hard luck stories" as "unverified.")

But there's at least two other sides of Moore in SiCKO, not counting the one I just described, that cripple whatever credibility Moore might have with mainstream America. Moore as the sober, darkly humorous, righteously indignant critic of the HMOs is appealing on some level; Moore as the manipulative socialist daydreamer, trekking to Paris and London to show just how much better life is over there, is not too far removed from the man who embarrassed Charlton Heston as he was on the cusp of Alzheimer's induced dementia. Moore is incredibly disciplined about showing the 5% of his opponents case that looks the worst, and the 5% of his case that looks the best. His presentation of socialized-everything in Europe is so reverential and so lacking in any intelligent criticism (he mentions, once, that Europeans pay "taxes through their nose," but counteracts that with repeated musings on the beauty of "free, universal health care") that he doesn't even realize he has become a parody of everything his opponents fear about socialized medicine. In the most telling of the "French" scenes, he follows around a government-employed "nanny" who helps new French mothers (not many of those hanging around if you follow the childbirth statistics) adapt to the first few months with their new baby, doing cooking, laundry, and other tasks. Earlier in the film, Moore tries to quell the fear that socialized medicine is a way for the "nanny state" to gain a foothold in American life, as Ronald Reagan argued from very early in his career; he doesn't seem aware of the irony of promoting this symbol as an argument for getting mainstream America to embrace national health care.

But there's also a third Moore, the one that makes him unpalatable to so many people, including some liberals: Moore's need to be the star of a self-created drama to save the nation from its inner demons, a chubby little hero wearing a baseball cap and a t-shirt. In the much-discussed sequence where Moore takes a band of 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba to receive treatment from their ostensibly fabulous socialized health care system, SiCKO transforms into something that's not really drama or documentary, but some combination of the two that is more manipulative than either of the two could be on their own. These scenes are anything but cinema verite; they are acted, not recorded. The best shot in the movie shows one of the rescue workers crying in close-up as the Cuban doctor explains what they are going to do for her, while we see an out-of-focus picture of her children in the background. Now, I suppose that the shot's perfect framing could be a total coincidence, but I think that sells Moore short as the master propagandist he really is. When we finally come to Moore's seminal "gotcha" moment--he anonymously pays the medical bills for a man who runs one of the web's leading anti-Moore sites--it feels so calculated and false that it might as well have come off a screenplay.

I'd like to close by offering Moore a piece of advice: for your own sake, stop making documentaries. Moore clearly wants to be a director of social drama, but perhaps he's afraid that he would be less influential if his stuff could simply be dismissed as fiction. Unfortunately, I'm afraid he's tapped out the potential of this sort of documentary style. If he wants to be convincing, he either has to become a better journalist, or totally sell himself over to fiction filmmaking, and he seems to be leaning more in the latter direction. This middle ground is no longer persuasive to anyone who isn't on Moore's fringe of the American political spectrum. There are some compelling models that would work well for him--perhaps he could become a more political Albert Brooks, or try something along the lines of what Richard Linklater did recently in FAST FOOD NATION, by turning a piece of muckraking journalism into a fiction narrative. In the meantime, he's further poisoned a necessary debate over health care reform, and alienated people like my dad who folks like Moore will need in order to craft a realistic solution.

Quickly Now...

Because I do have a blog, after all...

RATATOUILLE (Brad Bird, USA, 2007, B-)

You know what Pixar needs right now? A total bomb. I mean it--their recent productions has been good enough to drag the crowd back in, but not bad enough to inspire the sort of critical rebellion that would inspire them to a higher artistic plane (this is the "post-watching TOY STORY again" Mike speaking). The whole movie comes off as smug; it seems to have been deliberately crafted as a parable for Pixar's values system (we don't sell out, we think critics are self-serving and that the audience is the ultimate authority, we're like the home cooking you got when you were little, etcetera). The story arc practically telegraphs its punches, down to the inevitable break-up between heroic mouse and foppish human, and their eventual reunification. The problem is that for all it's internal problems, the animation quality remains unparalleled--how the heck were they able to animate all those individual mice and give them all separate movements, fur colors, and faces? Water and fur have never looked more realistic in an animated film, either. It's so good, in fact, that it can sort of distract you from the feeble screenplay, at least for a little while.

WAITRESS (Adrienne Shelley, USA, 2007, C+)

I'm intrigued to see a story like this presented as comedy, nay, as chick flick, but disappointed in the execution--it's fairly easy to impress people with a sad, weighty story about an unhappy marriage, divorce, and the choice of single motherhood. I'm thus disappointed by the final result, which is stuck between a "gritty" Southern Gothic tale of woe and the latest episode of "Scrubs"--funny and charming in an "aw-shucks" kind of way at times, but too prissy and cheaply sentimental at others. The end of the film is pre-ordained, almost within fifteen minutes, leaving no real suspense about the moral decision Keri Russell's character has to make. Noah Baumbach would have done wonders with this material if the script had located the characters in Brooklyn rather than Biloxi.

Everybody's Got A MIGHTY HEART

A MIGHTY HEART (Michael Winterbottom, USA, 2007, B)

When I see a movie in an empty theater, I always hold out hope that I'm going to see something terrific that everyone else is missing. Too bad that A MIGHTY HEART isn't exactly a hidden masterpiece--it may be hidden, judging from the crowds (or lack thereof), but it's no masterpiece. More precisely, it's a really good movie interlaced with a really bad movie--a fast-paced, wholly engrossing police procedural combined with the painfully maudlin recollections of a woman going through intense personal suffering, portrayed with little decency and less skill.

Granted, Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie) experienced a rare sort of pain in her life when her husband, Daniel, was kidnapped by Al Qaeda operatives as he attempted to secure an interview for the Wall Street Journal. Yet the great bulk of the film focuses not on her suffering, but on the team of American officials, Pakistani secret service operatives, and WSJ journalists who decoded the plot to capture Pearl. Dense and detailed without being confusing, the film moves with a methodical, documentary-like clip, with matter-of-fact titles announcing time and place set against expansive establishing shots (Mariane intones at the beginning of the movie that Karachi, Pakistani is so large a city that they don't know how to count the people, and these shots, set against the eerie citywide call for prayer by the local mosques over loudspeakers, is a constant reminder of the futility of the investigators' task). When the camera does point at Mariane/Jolie, we're treated to sappy flashbacks, heavy-handed imagery, and flat-out bad acting (Jolie's attempt to provide cries of anguish, in full-fledged Oscar begging mode, felt cheap and exploitative). Maybe there's a reason why the theater's empty.

Fantastic Mr. Movie Blog

I'm sure I'm not the first person to report this, but I discovered a rather intriguing new project yesterday while browsing through IMDb--a computer animated adaptation of my all-time favorite book as a little kid, Roald Dahl's "Fantastic Mr. Fox," directed by the one and only Wes Anderson. Anderson is working on the screenplay with Noah Baumbach of THE SQUID AND THE WHALE fame (the two worked together on THE LIFE AQUATIC as well), and it's currently on target for a 2009 release.

To my knowledge, this makes Anderson the second major director of "human" films to try his hand at an animated feature, along with Tim Burton, who directed CORPSE BRIDE. Coincidentally, Burton has been involved in two previous adaptations of Dahl's novels--he directed CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY two years ago, and co-produced an animated version of JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH in 1996, neither of which was particularly well received critically.

I think Anderson may be able to beat Burton's track record. Dahl's work does have a surrealist streak that might seem to favor the man who directed EDWARD SCISSORHANDS and BEETLEJUICE, but the results of their convergence have not been well received precisely because the material offers little in the way of restraint to Burton's worst tendencies. I think Anderson's coy, introspective style will be a better complement to Dahl's books. Like Anderson and his contemporaries (Baumbach, Sofia Coppola), Dahl's books often deal with a main character who is lonely and marginalized (the Big Friendly Giant of "BFG," who lives in a cave and is mocked by the other giants for not being mean, comes to my mind first; James and Charlie are also good examples of this). "Fantastic Mr. Fox" is more of a straight-up caper film than any of Dahl's other novels (Danny Ocean George Clooney is currently slotted as Mr. Fox's voice), but it certainly deals with an iconoclastic group on the outside trying to rise above a repressive authority. I think the coy rebelliousness that runs through Anderson's work will really shine in a story based on Dahl's novel.

That, and the idea of an animated film with lots of Futura Bold titles makes me chuckle.

More to come on RATATOUILLE, WAITRESS, and A MIGHTY HEART...

Travelin' AFI Film List Blues

The American Film Institute rolled out a new edition of its 100 Greatest American Films list last night, and while I would only classify this event as semi-serious, it is very bloggable. So, without further ado, notes and quibbles about the new list:

*Seriously, can we vote another film number one? Does every single film list have to put KANE at the top? I'm not saying it's not a great film, but isn't about time that one of these lists made a case for a movie produced in the last, oh, sixty-five years? That would do more to promote the profile of the AFI list than their TV special. Seriously--can you imagine the media play the AFI would get if their poll put THE GODFATHER or VERTIGO or SINGIN' IN THE RAIN at the top? Everyone would be talking about the film that beat KANE, and it would finally give the moribund AFI some relevance.

*Why does the AFI insist with this focus on domestic films? The British Film Institute doesn't (although, to be fair, the British have a very small national cinema so they're sort of stuck here). If the point of a film institute is to educate and promote film art, why does the AFI act like foreign film doesn't exist whenever it's given a national vehicle for promoting itself? One possible fix: a global "100 best films" list, with a counterpart domestic list to promote specifically American classics.

*Worth looking into some sublists of things I care about, inspired by the top 100. First, the top American silent films:

(1) [11] CITY LIGHTS (Chaplin)
(2) [18] THE GENERAL (Keaton)
(3) [49] INTOLERANCE (Griffith)
(4) [58] THE GOLD RUSH (Chaplin)
(5) [78] MODERN TIMES (Chaplin)
(6) [82] SUNRISE (Murnau)

THE GENERAL, SUNRISE, and INTOLERANCE were all new to the list, while BIRTH OF A NATION was dropped from the previous list. Silent films did remarkably well in this revision of the list, given how far off the average American filmgoers' radar they are. THE GENERAL was the highest ranked newcomer to the list, and CITY LIGHTS had the highest climb between the two lists of any film save THE SEARCHERS (John Ford's highly debated masterpiece jumped a whopping 84 places to 12th). I think the last ten years of DVD releases and film preservation have been enormously beneficial to silent film. I wouldn't be surprised to see this trend continue when the poll is taken again in another ten years--we need to get Lloyd on this list, and it would nice to see another director of drama other than Murnau and Griffith make the list (possibly Von Stroheim for GREED?).

As for their particular ordering, I, of course, love CITY LIGHTS and will defend it to the death, so I'm gratified to see it go as the highest ranked silent film (although a silent really needs to be represented in the top ten, so I need to keep pushing it). There's always the question however, of what exactly one is ranking with these lists. If it's historical importance we're considering, I might rank INTOLERANCE higher because it was such a landmark in cinematic technique, opening up new realms of possibility for the art form (INTOLERANCE is a classic case of the problem with all film lists--if you're asking me to list the most genuinely entertaining, well-crafted, thoughtful movies, INTOLERANCE isn't anywhere near the top, but if you're asking me to list movies that are important to the history of the craft, it's going to be one of the first five or ten movies I name). You might even rank THE GENERAL asmore "important" than CITY LIGHTS because it gave rise to the modern action film; everyone knows the Little Tramp when they see him, but Keaton has had more of an impact on the average filmgoers' taste.

Second, the best Hitchcock films of all time:

(1) [9] VERTIGO
(2) [14] PSYCHO
(3) [48] REAR WINDOW
(4) [55] NORTH BY NORTHWEST

and... that's it? Really? NOTORIOUS? STRANGERS ON A TRAIN? LIFEBOAT? THE BIRDS? The first three seem like first-ballot films to me; I would have thought THE BIRDS were a shoo-in because it's so ingrained in the popular entertainment conscience, even though I don't like it very much. Chew on this: Steven Spielberg got one more film in the list than Hitch did (SCHINDLER'S LIST, ET, JAWS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN), and his best film was rated higher than Hitchcock's best. Kubrick scored the same number of movies Hitchcock did, but it's worth remembering he made about a third of the number of movies. Hitch at least needs more props than Spielberg--I'd be happy with them taking NOTORIOUS and STRANGERS.

*PULP FICTION at 94? How did that happen? I've never encountered a film critic who didn't have it ranked as the best film in the year it was made and among the best film from the nineties. Tarantino is an enormously influential director. Who did AFI interview to get that number?

*TOY STORY slips in the top 100, representing the massive tide of computer animation that's swept over audiences in recent years. Bravo. I just saw the movie a few days ago with my kid brother and was stunned at how well it held up. Looking back, the animation was actually pretty crude, but the movie still works because it is, above all, a really, really good movie, not just a demonstration of computer power. The plot is lithe, economical, yet seems almost effortlessly executed--I kept wanting to get up and check my e-mail during the movie, but I couldn't bring myself to do it because something important is happening all the time, either in terms of the advancement of the plot or the development of the characters. I was also struck by how adult Woody and Buzz's dilemmas are--it's really a film about mid-life crisis that just happens to be nestled in a children's film. FINDING NEMO and CARS don't even approach it's brilliance (in fact, I'm going to have to revise a lot of my Pixar grades in light of seeing TOY STORY again). I guarantee this film will rise much higher in the next ten years.

*We'll ignore the fact that LORD OF THE RINGS and TITANIC made the list.

OK, enough whining.