Friday's cinema releases

23/07/2010

Something for the weekend

Toy Story 3
(U) Lee Unkrich

Pixar tugs the heartstrings again with this instant classic 

At the screening of Toy Story 3, the publicist introducing the movie made the point that most of the audience weren’t born when the original was released. Woody, Buzz and the rest of the gang made their first appearance 15 years ago. I can’t think of many other films from 1995 that have as devoted a following among four and five year olds: the other big animation that year was Pocahontas. Remember that?

The warmth, wit and visual flair of Pixar’s groundbreaking digital  animations ensure they remain fresh. The latest – surely final – Toy Story instalment has these qualities in abundance, but there’s something else: taking a cue from the melancholy of Pixar’s last two films Wall-E and Up, Toy Story 3 is infused with a sweetly-sad recognition of the passing years.

Andy, who was the toys’ owner in the original, is now practically a grown-up, about to go to college – which leaves the toys ignored and unplayed with, left to contemplate retirement from the bottom of an unopened hamper.

“He held me, he actually held me,” says Rex, the neurotically self-obsessed plastic dinosaur. They’ve seen better days, this lot – Mrs Potato Head is missing an eye, and the troop of plastic soldiers who performed so valiantly in the first two films are now reduced to
a paltry three. The tempo ups considerably once the toys, resigned to retirement in the attic, are mistakenly chucked in the trash, then escape to a nursery called Sunnyside.

It’s not so bad there, at first. The place is run by a seemingly benign old teddy bear Lotso, and there’s the promise of unlimited play with the centre’s many kids. But Lotso’s fluffy fur, strawberry scent and honeyed reassurance about the virtues of the unattached nursery life – “No owners means no heartache” – hides his true nature. With his two associates Barbie doll Ken (sporting a shocking array of DayGlo-coloured outfits) and a huge, grunting, half-naked plastic doll (Pixar at its most grotesque), Lotso runs the place with an iron fist, protecting the interests of long-term residents and consigning the Toy Story crew to the carnage of the toddlers’ room.

They endure being stamped on, covered in drool and buried in sand – so together they hatch a plot to escape. The action is as frenetic as the last two movies but punctuated with spry and sophisticated comedy. But all the time the poignancy of the opening moment niggles away, as the toys contemplate a future without Andy. Is it life, ignored in the attic? Or the brutal, every-toy-for-itself proving ground of nurseries like Sunnydale? Or, worst of all, the rubbish bin, and the plastic-melting extinction of the trash incinerator?

At the risk of making this sound too bleak, the film’s sadder moments are likely to chime most with older viewers who have grown up with the Toy Story movies. Younger viewers will be less concerned by the ruminations on toy mortality and can simply enjoy the heady imagination and exuberant joy of this instant classic.

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The Rebound
(15) Bart Freundilch

Zeta-Jones falls for a young nanny

In The Rebound, Catherine Zeta-Jones is a 40-year-old suburban housewife who moves to New York following a messy divorce with her husband. Finding a job, she employs 24-year-old Aram to nanny her two kids. Pretty soon they fall for one another, but is the relationship just a rebound? The answer’s pretty obvious in this well-oiled rom-com, and the jokes are too. But Zeta-Jones and Justin Bartha (as the younger man) are genuinely appealing leads, and this is a charming movie.

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Splice
(15) Vincenzo Natalli

Too much of a Frankenstein creation

In the medical chiller Splice Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play two scientists who create a Frankenstein baby by fusing human and animal DNA. The film itself feels like a genetic match between early David Cronenberg chillers and an old-fashioned monster movie: but without the intellectual rigour of the former or the guilty thrills of the latter.