Inside Out (5/5 Stars)

Imagine a movie that is at once wholly original and also completely familiar, startlingly simplistic in its scope yet containing multitudes of creativity and cavernous depths of emotion, and that can also make you laugh routinely, thrill you unexpectedly, and move you to near tears consistently. You would be describing Pixar’s newest feature “Inside Out,” a journey inside the mind of an 11-old-girl from Minnesota who has just moved to her new home in San Francisco. She endures a first day at a new school, a disappointing hockey tryout, and vegan pizza. Little stuff it seems to grown ups but to Riley it is the greatest obstacle she has gone through in a life that hereto had been filled with consistently joyful days. It is also the greatest obstacle her brain trust has ever handled. And by brain trust I mean Pixar’s anthropomorphized metaphor for her mind: a team of emotions that help Riley out from a mission control room in her brain.

The emotions have been perfectly cast from the broad and ever more productive landscape of quality television entertainment. At the center is Joy, voiced by the ever effervescent Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation), Disgust, an appropriately snarky Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project), Fear, a fever pitched Bill Hader (SNL), Anger, Lewis Black (The Daily Show) as himself, and finally Sadness, Phyllis Smith (The Office) in all her humble muted Eeyore-like glory. They function, in a tribute to Pixar’s ability to have it all, as part comedy team, part tearjerk squad, and part science lesson. (If their was an emotion left out, I would posit “desire” which would be the antithesis of Disgust much like Anger and Fear or Joy and Sadness play off of each other so well. Perhaps “Desire” shows up at 13).

This is the sort of movie that transcends movie-ness. Instead of talking about whether the movie looked good or was funny, you want to talk about how the movie was about what it was about. After all, everything that is shown onscreen corresponds to something everybody has experienced but does not really understand. We have these unconscious bodies that operate seemingly disconnected with our consciousness. What connect the two are our feelings. But how do those work? Pixar probably is not that far off. The emotions experience Riley’s life through her frontal lobe (this is a bit like the front windshield of a starship). They can’t tell Riley what to do, but they do color her experiences as they form memories (represented by luminous balls). If it is a happy memory, then Joy turns it yellow. If it is a fearful memory, Fear turns it purple. At the end of the day before the colored balls are shipped off to long-term memory (which apparently is consistent with what really happens when we are asleep), if the wall of short-term memory balls are mostly yellow than the team feels that they have had a good day. Their mission is to keep Riley happy. This presents a problem with the character of Sadness whose presence and efforts to help generally disrupt the mission. At one point Joy draws a circle around her and tells her to not leave it as a way of doing her job correctly. Psychologists have a word for this I believe. It’s called Repression. That’s a rather heavy topic for an animated movie to tackle, but Pixar goes even further. Near the denouement of this movie they will tackle the big D. Depression. And the way they do it will probably make you cry and afterwords you will probably think about why you cried and find a very plausible explanation in the way Pixar has portrayed the workings of the emotions in your mind. And you will probably feel better in an enlightened way because feeling sad is sometimes the most healthy way to respond to external stimuli. Psychologists would call that Emotional Maturity, an attribute that the marketers in our modern society have a habit of scorning. Fear it, they say, and buy this thing that will make you happy again. No, says Pixar, Sadness is there for a reason and the wise person would understand its utility. This is the sort of thing that Pixar has made a children’s movie about. To do that as perfectly as they demonstrate is to be a masters of emotions themselves. I tell you this: not since Hitchcock has a moviemaker been so in tune with what the audience is experiencing moment to moment.

But I get too serious. Let’s talk about comedy and how Pixar does not waste a moment in the entire movie when a joke can be somehow shoehorned in. First of all, the brain trust with all their distinct personalities form as good a comedy troupe as there can be. Through a mishap Joy and Sadness are stranded in Long Term Memory and need to find their way back to the control room.  Their journey takes them through several wonderful set pieces as Imagination Land, Abstract Thought, and Dreamworks Productions that has among other things a unicorn as a movie star.  They meet many comic characters. My favorite are the brain beureaucrats. One team works at Long Term memory and “forget” any balls that are rarely used. For instance they take away all of Riley’s piano lessons except “Heart and Soul” and “Chopstix”. But the really funny part is what they keep: a commercial jingle for ‘Triple Dent’ gum which they reuse again and again as a practical joke. Riley is destined to never ever forget it. Another good example is the two guards in front of the door of the subconscious (which hides an angry clown) that perform what sounds like an Abbot and Costello routine about whose hat is “my hat”. Then another time Joy knocks over two boxes, one of Facts and the other of Opinions. As she tries to put them back she exclaims how similar they look. And I haven’t even mentioned the imaginary friend voiced by Richard Kind who is the best part along with everything else.

“Inside Out” is one of Pixar’s best movies. And I say one of the best because I happen to believe “Wall-E” is one of the best movies ever made. So is this movie. When Wall-E (and “The Dark Knight”) failed to get a Best Picture nomination the Academy expanded the field to ten pictures the next year. That should easily include “Inside Out” this year and I’m not saying it should win (I can’t because I haven’t seen all the other movies) but I would be totally fine with the possibility.

Jurassic World (2/5 Stars)

Nerd Pandering

If I had made a spoof of the Jurassic Park franchise, it might have been remarkably similar to “Jurassic World.” This movie is not too far away from being a total joke. Take two main plot points. First, the theme park “Jurassic World” is not growing in attendance because people are bored with the same old dinosaurs and the investors are getting anxious. Say what? A theme park with dinosaurs is losing its appeal after only ten years in existence? Surely that is one of the most absurd scenarios in the history of movies. But whatever, in reaction to this scenario the theme park is training velociprators like bloodhounds and creating a newer, bigger, more dangerous dinosaur. You see their focus groups suggest that giant carnivourous dinosaurs tend to draw larger crowds. These new attractions have gotten the attention of the U.S. Military which brings us to the second plot point. A contractor named Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) exclaims “Imagine what we could have done with these guys in Tora Bora!?!” I can actually answer that question. An Al Queada soldier with a sniper rifle would take down the raptor from about 500 yards away. And that’s if the beast could actually be transported to Afghanistan in the first place. And these absurdities are what drive the main plot conflicts of the story. Really. This movie just made a record 200 million dollars in one weekend. The silver lining to that I guess is that this movie would not have made nearly enough without the enormous goodwill garnered by the first two very good Spielberg films. So, at least in this instance, critics can be assured that bad movies don’t come out of nowhere and make tons of money. They stand on the shoulders of actually good movies and also in this case a pretty good book.

Let’s talk about the dinosaurs. They are relatively deficient from past movies in their capacity to provoke wonderment or thrills. The lack of wonder has much to do with the movie’s insistence via the characters that the dinosaurs are not so special. In the first movie you followed the reactions of paleontologists whose every dream came true when they saw their first living dinosaur. Contrast that with the two kids who visit the park in this movie. One of them, a child, is sufficiently excited. The other, a teenager, is more interested in girls. I felt like smacking him upside the head for most of the movie. It matters less what is on the screen than what the characters think about it. The experience of movie going is a vicarious one. If the characters don’t care than the wonder is not extended to the viewer. The fact that “Jurassic World” had one of its main characters not be all that impressed with dinosaurs really undercut the whole reason to see this movie: i.e. that it had fucking dinosaurs in it.

These dinosaurs are less thrilling than the ones in the original movie. Now I’m going to make a distinction in the technology but keep in mind that there is actually no particular reason why computer images could not do both. Think back to the original movie and pick out some of the more visceral moments, perhaps the Velociraptor in the kitchen tapping its big claw, or the water vibrating, or Wayne Knight’s death, or the girl being sneezed upon. None of these little things employed computer effects. It would be absurd to use computer effects for them, as they were not needed. However in the new movie, as far as I can tell, the dinosaurs are completely computer generated even for the moments when it isn’t needed, i.e. closeups on faces. And those dino faces look unnecessarily weird to me compared with the first movies. But as before it is not really the problem that the dinos are almost entirely computer generated. The real problem is that there are not really any moments that do not call for computer generation. There are no little moments. All the moments are big. And this is a problem because you need little moments to create suspense (i.e. water vibrating) and also to explain things.

Filmmakers studying Spielbergian masterpieces such as Jaws and Jurassic Park (as no doubt the director of “Jurassic World” Colin Trevorrow has) continually draw the wrong lessons from them. They assume that if you do not see a monster for a significant length of time that it suddenly becomes scarier. This is not true. The reason why the shark and the dinos are scary in those movies is because they are thoroughly explained. That is to say in “Jaws” Richard Dreyfuss explains in length the nature of Great White Sharks and in “Jurassic Park” a paleontologist explains how velociraptors attack in herds.  It amazes me how these scenes are sometimes the first ones dropped in inferior movies. What you get instead is movie cheats wherein the creature, not being defined, is allowed to arbitrarily gain and lose supernatural powers at the movies whim. Here the new dinosaur is allowed to camoflauge himself amongst the trees. This somehow makes it impervious to bullets, lots and lots of bullets. Or take the raptors, which can be trained to follow orders from Chris Pratt until they don’t want to until they want to again. It also does not help when the ambitions of the movie are so great in scope that a wild animal as a villain just cannot work without it having absurd levels of competence in fighting modern technological war machines. Sometimes for the purposes of thrills that do not insult the intelligence of the audience it is better to have a boat that is not big enough.

Now lets talk about the secondary attractions, the people. There is not much to say here other than how well they play out stock imitations of other Spielbergian characters and tropes, most explicitly the one where an adult needs to stop working so much and spend more time with the kids. Then there is Chris Pratt doing his best ‘Indiana Jones’ impression. Not bad although I think he really should be drinking a beer in his first scene and not a coke (and who drinks coke from bottles anymore?). BD Wong, the scientist from the first movie, is back as a scientist here. His presence is nerd pandering which I will get to next. The same can be said about the characters of Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus the computer nerds in the control room. Again, more on that later. Bryce Dallas Howard plays a vapid corporate dummy who disrepects nature and is too high strung and organized for a relationship with Pratt to work. She has these high heels. Pratt at one point when they are in the midst of nature with danger all around them ridicules her decision to wear them. He is right of course. She shouldn’t be wearing them in this context and high heels in general are rather vain and unbecoming for someone already in charge with nobody to impress. So that’s a good criticism. But then the movie does something else: It insists that Bryce continue to wear the high heels the rest of the movie past many scenes when either a sane person would have ditched them or they would have broken past repair many times. Now given that the character is only wearing the heels because the movie itself (written, directed, and produced by guys) has been intent on making her wear them beyond all suspension of disbelief, is it really okay to make fun of the woman’s character for wearing them in the first place. I would suggest that it is not but this is the sort of thing one generally gets when a movie deems as its mission to above all else pander to nerds. In this particular case nerds like to think of themselves as Han Solo and that every girl is Princess Leia who would fall head over heels for them if only they weren’t so stuck up. Chris Pratt and Bryce Howard Dallas are just another reiteration of that classic type of nerd pandering.

I don’t like nerds. I don’t think there is another group of people who would sit through all sorts of stupid drivel as long as it patted them on the back and made them feel special. But boy do studios love nerds. Make a movie about their favorite comic book and the nerds will feel compelled to show up as a matter of honor perhaps if only for the opportunity to complain loudly about how terrible it was done. So the incentive to make decent movies is lessened right there. What is more is that the nerds routinely react with glee when sequels or reboots incorporate the best jokes and lines of the original movie. “Jurassic World” is no exception. There are a ton of inside jokes and callbacks to “Jurassic Park” (Hell, look at Jake Johnson’s “Jurassic Park” shirt) and “Jaws” that make the plot more predictable and all the action tinted with a sense of déjà vu. There is the ‘objects look closer than they appear in the mirror’ gag, there is ‘the loosening of a giant tooth from a vehicle’ trope, there is the ‘flare baiting of the T-Rex’ scene. The best example of all is the musical score. It isn’t John Williams great score from ‘Jurassic Park.’ It is a similar but inferior version whose best quality is to remind you of how great the original was. The most frustrating thing about “Jurassic World” is not that it isn’t a great movie, it’s that it cynically did not even allow itself the space to be a great movie. It deliberately set out to be a nostalgia piece. And the ones to blame are the nerds because they do not insist that their movies challenge them. (One could perhaps argue that the whole idea of having superpowers is an immature way of escaping real world problem solving). As long as they go and see the next Spiderman reboot every five years why would the studios ever give them something different.