Nicholas Thurkettle

Toy Story 3
Director: Lee Unkrich
Writers: story by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, and Lee Unkrich, screenplay by Michael Arndt
Producer: Darla K. Anderson
Featuring the vocal talents of: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Don Rickles, Michael Keaton, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Estelle Harris, John Morris, Jodi Benson, Emily Hahn, Laurie Metcalf, Blake Clark, Teddy Newton, Timothy Dalton

I really do hope this is the last one. Toy Story 3 has a scene where young Andy (voiced by John Morris) is emptying his childhood bedroom, preparing to leave for college, and his mother sees the bare floor and walls and is overcome with emotion. And we remember right in that instant that this very bedroom, back in 1995, is where we as moviegoers first met Woody the cowboy (Tom Hanks), Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and all their joyfully neurotic toy friends; but also where we first met the animation company Pixar, and the whole concept of a fully-digital animated film.

For a long time, Toy Story was the only world Pixar re-visited, the only movie in its acclaimed roster to get a sequel. That is about to change, with the likes of Cars and Monsters, Inc. now set for the franchise treatment. Andy’s departure as a grown-up young man could truly mark the end of the first generation of Pixar – no longer a rambunctious start-up but the industry’s dominant creative and financial institution.

Their latest film finds them re-trenching on safe ground after more daring spectacles like WALL*E and Up. For much of its running time it is charming, it is imaginative, and it is beautifully rendered by the artists, who take full advantage of the resources purchased by 15 years’ success without violating the aesthetics established by the episodes made in more primitive times. We meet new toys, and enjoy some fast-paced laughs and thrills. But it feels mostly like a succession of gags and adventures featuring characters we already love rather than anything urgent or fresh. It’s only in its ending that Toy Story 3 becomes a very good story, and I will talk more about that in a moment.
(continue reading…)

Originally posted 12/4/04

The Polar Express
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writers: Robert Zemeckis and William Broyles, Jr., based on the book written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg
Producers: Steve Starkey, Robert Zemeckis, Gary Goetzman, William Teitler
Featuring the physical and vocal talents of: Tom Hanks, Michael Jeter, Nona Gaye, Peter Scolari, Eddie Deezen, Daryl Sabara, Isabella Peregrina, Jimmy Bennett

Maybe it’s that the warm and inviting illustrative paintings of Chris Van Allsburg never should have moved, or talked. Or maybe it’s that the simple story, a wisp of a fable, was not the stuff to support a 100-minute movie. This problem also plagued Ron Howard’s bloated and horrifying adaptation of Dr. Suess’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Or maybe it’s that the “performance capture” technology used to put human movement and spirit inside animated figures is still so new that its power to entrance is not yet readily within grasp.

Whatever the reason, and it may be parts of all the above, this feature adaptation of holiday classic The Polar Express, while imaginative and frequently arresting, is too inconsistent to be honored in my memory with the same fondness I hold for the book. It is usually my philosophy that adaptations of books must be treated as movies first, and criticized on their own terms, but the filmmakers have labored so mightily to bring what we love about the book to life, it is difficult to ignore where it falls short.
(continue reading…)

Originally Published 7/5/04

The Terminal
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, from a story by Andrew Niccol and Sacha Gervasi
Producers: Laurie MacDonald, Walter F. Parkes, Steven Spielberg
Stars: Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride, Diego Luna, Barry Shabaka Henley, Kumar Pallana, Zoe Saldana

One of the dangers of The Terminal, Steven Spielberg’s slight but irresistibly sweet little trifle of a movie, is that you can want too badly for it to be Saying Something. It’s true that, in the story of innocent well-meaning Eastern European Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), who finds himself forced to live for months in the international terminal of a New York airport, words like “fable”, “allegory”, and “microcosm” do apply.

But to focus on that while watching the movie is to miss its many charms, which lie not in its symbols but in its very recognizable, very human quirks. One woman seated near me chuckled at the appearance of a Dept. of Homeland Security logo, like it was meant as some kind of sight gag about the relative intelligence of the security personnel. But that shortchanges the character of Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), who runs the security detail at the terminal.

In a lesser movie he would have just been the villain, a simple, scowly killjoy, well within Tucci’s range and willingness to ham things up. If you watch carefully, though, you’ll see that little aspects of his inner life are still revealing themselves up to his very last scene. This is not some incompetent autocrat, this is a man who finds comfort in a system of rules and is actually very good at his job, but finds himself alternately bamboozled, confounded, charmed and frustrated by Viktor Navorski’s refusal to behave like the cynical sneaks his system is designed to deal with.
(continue reading…)