Toy Story 4 (3/5 Stars)

The first scene in Toy Story 4 takes place nine years before the main plot. Woody and the gang are still Andy’s toys. Andy’s family gets a visit from a neighbor/friend who is in the market for household items. Among a few other trinkets, Andy’s family gives away the Bo Peep lamp because Andy’s sister has grown out of it. Bo Peep, you may remember from the first two films, is the romantic interest of Woody. Before Bo Peep is packed up in a box and shipped away forever, she and Woody have a sad moment. And for some reason, I’m sitting there weirdly reminded of that scene in slave movies where the mother is sold down the river.

In the first two movies, the audience wasn’t asked to explore existential questions about the “human condition” of these toys. The third movie had serious undertones, parodies of political science and at least one scene of toy adultery but didn’t ask questions that made me feel weird. Toy Story 4 ventures there. To a certain extent, I am fine with this, but I have to ask: would a child like this film?

When we last left off, Woody and the gang had been bequeathed to a cute little girl named Bonnie. She’s a good kid, but unfortunately for Woody, isn’t as interested in male cowboys than Andy had been. (She’s likes playing with Jessie more). Woody is left in the closet most days where he becomes increasingly lonely and increasingly desperate. On Bonnie’s first day of kindergarten, she uses some arts and crafts to make a new toy out of a spork, some popsicle sticks and some googly eyes. She names him Forky, writes her name on his feet, and, incredibly, the toy comes to life (Forky is voiced by Tony Hale). The toy is essentially born before our eyes and I’m sitting there weirdly thinking “Frankenstein’s Monster”. This Forky is an ugly abomination of a toy.

Forky knows this. He has an immediate suspicion he is not a toy and should not have been created. There are several scenes of him declaring himself trash and trying to throw himself away into various trashcans. And I’m sitting there weirdly thinking Forky is attempting suicide over and over again. The situation is played for laughs, and it is definitely funnier that what I’m making it sound like here, but the existential implications are unmistakably there.

Bonnie’s family goes on a road trip. They stop over at a place with a traveling carnival. Here, against all possibilities, Andy meets Bo Peep. Bo Peep is a lost toy now. She is homeless but does not seem all that bothered about it. After all, she ain’t working on Maggie’s Farm no’ mo. She likes kids but no longer measures her worth by how much she is loved by one. The arc of Toy Story 4 is essentially Woody realizing that he doesn’t need Bonnie and that there is a world elsewhere: the Emancipation of Woody.

Are these just toys? Woody has thoughts, feelings, friends, and an interest in romance. Isn’t he essentially human in the ways that count? If he’s human, shouldn’t he have rights? Shouldn’t he be getting paid for the work he is doing for that kid? Why does he just blindly do whatever he is told? When he states with certainty that there is nothing more noble than being a child’s toy, doesn’t he come off as brainwashed? The more Toy Story 4 explores the “human condition” of these toys, the weirder the franchise gets.

Do these toys ever die? If Forky can come alive through a child’s imagination, shouldn’t he die through the inverse of that situation. Wouldn’t it make more sense for lost toys to once again become inanimate objects. Maybe that would instill the fear of god in these toys and create that sense of fear that would bound them in perpetual and desperate servitude to their child masters. Just something I was thinking about when I left the theater. Are the children pondering the same things?

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2/5 Stars)

“Don Quixote” is a very old book. So old that it is often forgotten to be two books. The first book published in 1605 by Miguel de Cervantes is a purely comic work about a crazy person and his simple sidekick roaming the countryside on a quest to bring back the lost age of chivalry. The first book proved to be enormously popular, so much so that Cervantes had to write a sequel if only to circumvent the copycats that were pretending to write sequels in his name. One of the more fantastical conceits of the second book is that everyone in it has either read or at least heard of Don Quixote’s adventures from the first book. The result is that Don Quixote is looked at by the people he meets in a completely different light in the second book. He’s still crazy, but he is also famous and his fame lends him a weird credibility. It is not uncommon that an observer in the second book will relate that they cannot tell whether Quixote is crazy or very wise. But Quixote has not changed. It is only the observer’s view of him, clouded by fame, that has changed. Unfortunately, this interesting facet of Quixote has never been developed by any movie or TV show that has adapted the story.

There have been several adaptations of the original work, none of them particularly good or definitive. Orson started and failed to finish a Quixote movie. John Lithgow starred in a TV version in 2000. The most well-known is the musical “Man of La Mancha” from 1972. I don’t believe any of them were particularly funny, which is too bad because the first book of Quixote is hilarious. All of them instead dwell on the mistaken notion, only found in the second book, that there might be more to Quixote’s madness that lets on, that he may in fact be wiser than the rest of us. Terry Gilliam’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” falls into this trap too and once again we have a movie that errs on the tragic side of Quixote. “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is about a present-day movie director (played by Adam Driver) who discovers that an actor he hired to play Don Quixote in a student film has since turned madman and now believes he is Don Quixote. This movie assumes the audience already knows everything about the books and many allusions are made to instances from them. However, most people won’t have read the books and there does not yet exist a definitive movie adaptation of them. Why didn’t Gilliam just make a straight adaptation? That would almost certainly have been a good movie in his hands. This one is a jumbled mess of irrelevant themes and distorted reality. And now we still don’t have a good Quixote adaptation.

It would be hard to describe the plot. The best parts involve Don Quixot. Jonathan Pryce plays the actor turned mad man with characteristic fervor and gusto. Less fun or interesting to watch is Adam Driver as the director. Movies about people who make movies belong to an oversaturated genre characterized by self-important indulgence. This one is no exception. Here, the director is beset by some sort of creative crisis and takes a vacation from an active movie shoot. He finds the madman who believes the director is Sancho Panza, a few implausible things happen, and they find themselves roaming the countryside as knight and squire.

Adam Driver is a terrible Sancho Panza. Unfortunately, this movie does not have anything that resembles a Sancho character. I say there will not be a good adaptation of Quixote until someone treats Sancha as an equally important character. To the extent they are filp sides of crazy. Quixote is a nobleman who spent way too much time reading fantastical books in his study and his ideas about the world are completely abstract. Sancho is illiterate, has never left his hometown, and thinks and acts in the most literal way possible. The odd couple relationship between Quixote and himself are the strongest comic element in the tale. What we have in “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is a journey involving two people who think in the abstract, Quixote and a movie director. There is nothing funny about their interactions.

Where the movie falls furthest from the books is in the character of the Peerless Dolcinella of Tabaso. In the books, she is just a regular woman who works on a farm. This is really all she should be because Don Quixote, if you can remember, is a crazy person. Here, like previous movies, the role has once again been given to a tragically beautiful woman. Once again, this renders the comic potential of Quixote’s madness ineffectual. Much of the plot involves this Dolcinella and her interactions with the possessive jerky men in the film. I couldn’t really understand what was going on except to say that where it went hardly seemed related to where it was going. There is a memorable moment of cruelty that was as out of place as it was uncomfortable.

I guess something has to be said about Gilliam’s thirty-year effort to get this film made. Sometimes the story behind the movie makes watching it more interesting but this generally only happens when the movie’s backstory reinforces the themes of the movie itself. It helps watching Fitzcarraldo, a story about an obsessive person trying to do an impossible thing, with the knowledge that the director Werner Herzog unnecessarily went into the jungle to recreate this impossible thing because he too is an obsessive person. Do the horror stories behind the making of this movie make it more interesting? Well, not really. I could not point out in this movie where the influence of all the dramatic delays could be felt. In ways, the fact that it took thirty years to make this movie makes it worse. You’d think with all those delays, the script at least could be cleaned up and made coherent.

Spider-Man: Far From Home (5/5 Stars)

“EDITH, is this real?” asks Peter Parker in the denouement of the penultimate scene. Spider-Man has just seemingly vanquished an enemy that was made up of intricate and complex technological illusions, something not unlike what you would see in a Marvel movie. But unlike all those other Marvel movies with spectacular otherworldly dangers, this one was not really there? Or was it? Peter Parker can’t immediately tell. This is a line that could not have existed fifty years or maybe even fifteen years ago. It is very 2019. When the movies can do anything, when video and photography can be so intricately manipulated, how can you tell what is real anymore? We usually say, “I’ll believe it when I see it?” What do we do when we can’t rely on that.

The villainous plot that befalls Peter Parker (played by Tom Holland) on his school trip is way over his head. All he wanted to do with go on a school trip to Europe with his friends. He wanted to buy a gift for his secret crush MJ (played by Zendaya) and give it to her on the Eifel Tower. He really deserves such a trip too. Put aside that he is superhero doing superhero things around his friendly neighborhood of Queens. Peter Parker along with half of his high school class were victims of what is being called the Blip, the five years between Infinity War and Endgame where half the life in the neighborhood vanished and then reappeared. The weight of this happening is deftly lifted within the parody of a high-school news program wherein Iron Man, Captain America, and Black Widow are shown in montage to the tune of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”. A particularly interesting development is that the high school has essentially been held back five years and are now sharing classrooms with kids that used to be five years younger. One of the new kids in the class is a guy named Brad Davis (played by Remy Davis) who seems to have used up all his puberty overnight and is now a competitor in love for the affections of Parker’s girl MJ.

This ability to utilize otherworldy and extraordinary events in the service of minor jokes is the hallmark of two of my favorite writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers returning from Spider-Man: Homecoming. (They are also responsible for Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and several of the best episodes of the TV show Community). What these two very much excel at is finding a heart of the story amidst special effects sequences and making sure that it isn’t being shunted aside or treated as Story B. Spider-Man: Far From Home has two goals here: Save the Planet and Tell MJ How I Feel. The second story is always as equally important as the first.

It is such a relief that Peter Parker does not have a crush on the head cheerleader at his high school. MJ looks like a normal person. She has a personality, albeit a little dark and sarcastic, but it is her own. It is a credit to Peter Parker that he would like her. And it is a credit to MJ that she would be willing to drop her sarcasm for a moment to become vulnerable enough to like Peter back. I have a running critique of high-school movies where I simply do not believe that the put-upon nerd male protagonist is good enough for the hottest girl in the school. This is not that at all. I found both Peter and MJ endearing as fuck and their entire storyline was really sweet.

Our villain of the week is Mr. Quentin Beck aka Mysterio. He is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor who is one of the best at walking the line between affable and super creepy. Mr. Quentin Beck is from another dimension. He does not seem to be aware of the recent Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, but he could have explained the situation by referencing that movie. Mr. Beck says that a powerful natural force called Elementals are afoot and he is attempting to stop it here before it destroys more Earths. Peter Parker is party correct in thinking that he is not qualified enough for this particular mission. He tries to get out of it but the storyline keeps drawing him back in.

Meanwhile because of all the outside forces revolving around Spider-Man, the school trip gets routinely upset by extraordinary events. In this respect, the continuing Marvel saga shows its utility by bringing in many old characters that do not need to be reintroduced. Among them are agents of S.H.E.I.L.D Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) that had large roles in the Captain America movies. There is Happy Hogan (played by Jon Favreau) from the Iron Man franchise. And then there is Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), side-kick Ned Leeds (Jacob Batolon), and Mr. Harrington (Martin Starr). One of the more pleasurable aspects of this movie is watching Mr. Harrington and the newly introduced Mr. Dell (J.B. Smoove) get increasingly frazzled when more and more crazy shit happens on a trip they are ostensibly responsible for all the young lives on.

The one thing to talk about left is EDITH. I was not under the impression that STARK enterprises had this type of technology (basically armed space drones) and that the whole point of Captain America: Winter Soldier was that this type of capability was UnAmerican. Why does a corporation have it now? Why would you will its capabilities to a kid? This isn’t the responsible and democratic Tony Stark I got behind in Captain America: Civil War. Someone should do something about this whole EDITH thing. Maybe break the glasses.