Scott Tobias | The Verge

Toy Story 4 lowers the stakes and ramps up the whimsy

2019-06-21T12:07:43-04:00

Forky is the most prominent of the new characters in Toy Story 4, the latest in the flagship franchise that launched Pixar Animation Studios and eventually won it a Best Animated Feature Film Oscar. Forky is the name of a spork that a kindergartener rescues from the garbage and adorns with pipe-cleaner arms, googly eyes, and popsicle-stick feet. It takes a long time for this dim, flimsy thingamabob to accept his own sentience. He believes he belongs in the trash.

Forky is also a symbol of a company that’s struggling to give its audience something new. Pixar was once associated with original animation, expanding the limits not only of computer renderings (those clouds of dust in Toy Story 2, the animal fur in Monsters Inc., the photorealism of The Good Dinosaur, etc.), but of a more sophisticated emotional palette, too. But seven of the last 11 Pixar films have been sequels, most a notch or two worse than the original, and all reflecting a parent company that’s more focused on paying off existing properties than dazzling audiences with unfamiliar, audacious ideas. As the only examples of Pixar sequels that have added richness and depth to the series, Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 earned a little faith in a fourth go-around. But Forky? Really? Is a filthy, glued-together spork worthy of the franchise of Woody and Buzz Lightyear?

And yet Forky (Tony Hale) is kind of brilliant, precisely because he’s so counterintuitive. The makers of Toy Story 4 could never hope to create a character as beloved and mythologically loaded as Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear, who each come with full backstories and three films’ worth of psychological dimension. To go the other way with Forky — to make him a crude, pea-brained, semi-suicidal hunk of plastic — sends the message that the stakes may be lower in this Toy Story iteration, but the whimsy and absurdity will be amped up. There’s some quality grown-up material here about the virtues of getting lost, and some Forky-specific insight into the attachment children can have to their own unsanctioned, unmanufactured, uncommercial creations. But Toy Story 4 seems content with its Forkiness, and that lack of pretension is mostly an asset.

It doesn’t entirely beat back the familiarity of the Toy Story formula, however, with its toggling back and forth between Rube Goldberg action setpieces and aggressive yanks of the heartstrings. The opening sequence, for example, is sheer boilerplate, flashing back to a time when the toys’ owner Andy was still a boy and Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), and the gang banded together to rescue a wayward remote-controlled car from an evening rainstorm. All that frantic action sets up a scene where Woody parts ways with Bo Peep (Annie Potts), the sheep-tending doll he adores, and tables a future where he, too, will get shipped off in a cardboard box to destinations unknown. It’s a heartbreaking moment for him, but it also hints at a time when detaching himself from Andy might lead to an equally satisfying phase of his life.

In the present, though, Andy’s toy collection has been bequeathed to Bonnie, the kindergartner who makes Forky on her first day of orientation, and quickly relegates Woody to the closet. When Bonnie and her parents pile into an RV for a mini-vacation before school starts, Forky opts to throw himself out of an open window, and the ever-loyal Woody does the noble thing and goes after him. Woody does his best to rehabilitate Forky and convince this glue-caked Gumby of his own value, but the wispy thing soon gets itself into more trouble involving an ominous set of characters, including an unloved 1950s pull-string doll named Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks) and a coterie of creepy ventriloquist dolls.

Toy Story 4 adds more merchandisable characters to the collection, too, including Bunny and Ducky, two plush carnival prizes voiced by comedy duo Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key, and Duke Caboom, a Canadian daredevil voiced by Keanu Reeves, whose patriotism is equalled only by his consistent ineptitude as a stuntman. Duke’s previous owner was a boy let down by the toy’s failure to live up to the promise of his TV commercial, and the melancholy sticks with him, just as it sticks with all the Toy Story characters who’ve had to grapple with abandonment. As much as the Toy Story series has been about friendship and adventure, it’s also been about obsolescence and loss, that inevitable turning of the page.

Because the second and third Toy Story films have taken the audience to this bittersweet place before, Toy Story 4 occasionally feels redundant, settling into a verse-chorus-verse formula where sequences of group heroics are followed by mordant existential reflection. While it falls short of its predecessors, the film is generally more confident and inventive than any of the non-Toy Story Pixar sequels.

And it does allow Woody to grow in at least one crucial respect. Rather than feeling repeatedly stung by loving and losing one child after another, he starts to see the value in independence, which is not only part of being an adult, but part of getting over a relationship with an expiration date. With this third sequel to Toy Story, Pixar has gotten away with pushing its own expiration date on the series. But those tiny spork tines won’t hold it together much longer. It’s time to get lost.

High Life baffles audience expectations for a space thriller

2019-04-04T13:44:26-04:00

Claire Denis’ grotesque, mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind new science fiction movie High Life opens with a series of peculiar images. A lush garden covers the floor and walls of a spaceship greenhouse. A toddler cries from an improvised playpen. An astronaut tries to console her from outside the ship, and accidentally loses one of his tools, which drops down into the void below him — emphasis on down, as it appears gravity is still asserting its will far outside the Solar System. All these elements exist in defiance of what most audiences will assume about both cinematic and real space travel, where humans adjust to unnatural conditions and subject themselves to the punishing rigors of astrophysics. For Denis, baffling the audience early on is an efficient, confounding statement of purpose.

A French director making her English-language debut, Denis has for decades been one of cinema’s great sensualists, known for elliptical treatments of love, like Friday Night and 35 Shots of Rum, or colonialism, like White Material or Chocolat, or something in between, like Beau Travail, her film about the erotic tension between French legionnaires in Djibouti. Her last shot at genre filmmaking, 2001’s Trouble Every Day, converted a story of flesh-eating vampirism into a metaphor for consuming erotic desire. It’s never been in her interests to abide by convention, and if breaking the mold means thoroughly upending the laws of space and time, she’s certainly willing to drive the Neil deGrasse Tysons of the world into certain catatonia.

With High Life, Denis bends science fiction to her will, colonizing a spaceship with roughnecks and chaos agents who couldn’t be further from the sterile, calculating brainiacs who usually get launched into orbit. (To that end, the film would make a fascinating double feature with the Luc Besson-produced action movie Lockout, aka Space Jail, though there’s an exceptionally narrow audience for both.) Though her philosophical approach to the genre places the film firmly in the abstract realm of classics like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris or 2001: A Space Odyssey, Denis thoroughly rejects those films’ sterility. Her ship is alive with emotion and conflict, and it practically oozes with organic material — blood, sweat, semen, and spit.

The enigmatic center of the storm is Monte (Robert Pattinson), who opens High Life as a survivor of a space mission gone awry. The other survivor is the child, who was born on the ship under circumstances Denis takes her sweet time to explain. In one of the film’s most haunting sequences, Monte gathers the bodies of his fellow passengers and jettisons them into the void. Denis stages their descent through vacuum as if they were snowflakes in a gentle deep-space snowfall.

As usual for Denis’ work, High Life volleys nimbly back and forth in time, but she eventually fills in the missing pieces. Monte and most of the co-ed crew are death-row inmates who have been sent to space on a long-shot quest to find an alternative energy source for Earth. He seems determined to keep his head down and do his time, as does fellow gardener Tcherny (André Benjamin). But other crew members, played by Mia Goth, Claire Tran, and Ewan Mitchell, stir up considerably more trouble. And none of them seem deeply engaged with the ship’s mission: investigating the Penrose process — a real-world theory devised by physicist and Stephen Hawking collaborator Roger Penrose — which says an abundance of energy could be extracted from a black hole, potentially saving the planet.

There’s no expectation, of course, that the crew will come back alive from this mission, which dramatically affects the mood on the ship. For people already prone to violence and rebellion, the combination of close quarters and their status as guinea pigs on a suicide mission naturally leads to discord. Much of the tension builds around the diabolical Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), who has been collecting semen samples from the men on board and trying to inseminate the women, to little avail. When Monte refuses to participate and takes a vow of celibacy, Dibs’ obsession is piqued, and she takes dramatic steps to get what she needs.

Dibs’ interest in engineering a baby on a ship destined for oblivion is one of the many confounding mysteries of High Life, which Denis is content to leave unresolved. Though the film stands to be her biggest ever in America, with a major star, the backing of distributor A24, and no language barrier, it’s also among her least accessible, because she so steadfastly balks in the face of reason. But her previous work is a clue that she considers the messiness of human desire paramount, even in an environment that functions to suppress it.

Life finds a way on this ship, in spite of a crew of prisoners tethered to a suicide mission, and further penned in by the seemingly sterile restrictions of outer space. There’s still room for love and compassion, and rape and murder, and violent masturbatory sessions with a “Fuckbox” — a small room that’s like the Orgasmatron in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, if it were designed by George Clooney’s character in Burn After Reading.

And yet for all the effort Denis puts into demystifying outer space, she’s utterly transfixed by it, too. While there’s plenty of evidence that the black hole will crush Monte and the child, Denis isn’t in any position to say for certain, and stands in awe of the celestial beauty they encounter along the way. Though the superb sound design, and the music by Tindersticks lead singer and longtime Denis collaborator Stuart A. Staples, both thrum with eeriness and dread, High Life isn’t so swamped by oppressive emotion that all hope is eclipsed, too. At a time when the Earth itself seems to be hurtling toward doom, the presence of genuine wonder and new life in the film carries a sliver of optimism. In the face of the void, in the farthest reaches of outer space, humanity persists.

High Life opens in limited release in New York and Los Angeles April 5th, and expands to wider release on April 12th. Check the official ticketing site for more information about local screenings.

The academy’s attempts to fix the 2019 Oscars reveal a deep contempt for the awards show

2019-02-20T10:55:02-05:00

In the Stephen King novel 11/22/63, school teacher Jake Epping discovers a portal in a pantry at the local diner that can transport him back to the year 1958. He decides to use this wrinkle in time to track down and kill Lee Harvey Oswald before Oswald can assassinate John F. Kennedy — a cultural inflection point that knocked the country decisively off course. Yet the closer Jake gets to Oswald, the more time and history pushes against him, growing into as much of a mortal threat as any other monster in King’s books. The past doesn’t want to be changed, and it’s determined to punish anyone who tries.

The Academy wants some elusive formula that will fix its plunging ratings

This is what’s happening with the Oscars this year, except the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the awards show’s producers aren’t attempting anything so noble as changing history for the better. They’re definitely trying to change history for the shorter. They’re seeking to cut back on laborious pageantry that may please the guilds and flatter the famous, but that consistently leads to poor reviews and the most thankless hosting job on the show-business calendar. And most of all, they’re searching for some elusive formula that will reverse the trending plunge of their TV ratings. They want to win over a younger generation that continues to tune out. Yet the harder they press against hidebound traditions, the more intense the backlash becomes — and the deeper the embarrassment goes.

When the 2019 Academy Awards ceremony airs on Sunday, February 24th, it will almost surely be a fiasco of historic proportions. Over the weekend, the producers’ plans to give out four awards during commercial breaks were reversed after a mutiny by prominent academy members. (It was a particularly misguided effort, given that two of the categories, Best Editing and Best Cinematography, are the two art forms that separate cinema from any other medium.) And that was just the latest in a series of embarrassing academy gaffes committed in the public eye this year, including the selection of a host in Kevin Hart, who had to withdraw after a PR kerfuffle over homophobic tweets, and a brief moment when 2018’s winners in acting categories weren’t invited back as presenters.

But the original sin, the one that set this entire rolling catastrophe into motion, happened back in early August, when the academy announced a new award for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film. It established what has been a consistent pattern of behavior: an ill-considered, hastily vetted decision, followed by an inept public rollout, followed by overwhelming disapproval from all corners, and ending in retreat.

Beyond sounding like the award Montgomery Burns invents to avoid a lawsuit over radiation poisoning on The Simpsons, Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film was a raw statement of intent: the academy could not continue to avoid the disconnect between the mid-budget critical favorites it’s been honoring, and the world-conquering box-office behemoths that people are actually seeing. So it’s trying to make more decisions geared directly toward winning back multiplex viewers, whose interest in fish-fucking period pieces was perhaps limited.

The brain trust behind the hastily withdrawn Popular Film award and other decisions — including academy president John Bailey, CEO Dawn Hudson, show producer Donna Gigliotti, co-producer / director Glenn Weiss, and Disney’s Bob Iger, among others — didn’t think through the obvious pitfalls. Popular films are already “awarded” by receiving hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. “Popular” is not an aesthetic criteria. And even Most Popular film winners would feel, rightly, that their work was being given a participation award, and openly placed in a less-respected arena than any Best Picture nominees.

In an age of splintered audiences, there’s no easy, slapdash fix

The same kind of logic dictated the initial decision to hire Kevin Hart as host, which wasn’t about finding a good fit for the show’s mix of light irreverence and heavy gravitas, and more about casting the most popular stand-up in America, and hoping he’d lure in on-the-fence viewers. This desperate gambit had the “Hail Mary” quality of John McCain recruiting Sarah Palin as his running mate: no vetting was done, obvious red flags were missed, and the candidate’s personal flaws and poor reaction to criticism made a bad situation worse.

The conflicts the Oscars ceremony is facing may be unsolvable. How do you produce a more popular broadcast without alienating the artists you’re supposed to be honoring? Is it possible to keep impatient younger viewers from getting siphoned off by streaming services and other niche entertainment that’s much more directly designed toward their interests? Years of unwieldy shows and low-profile winners have accounted for some of these losses. It’s no coincidence that Titanic won Best Picture in the highest-rated Oscars show, while the least-watched broadcasts honored films like No Country for Old Men and The Shape of Water. This is an age of splintered, specialized audiences that rarely recognize appointment TV, and that are more interested in skimming headlines than committing to a four-hour ceremony. Luring those lost millions of viewers back to the Oscars seems as plausible as reopening shuttered Rust Belt factories. There’s a fundamental sense that they’re simply not coming back.

As we head into Sunday, the academy is offering a show with no host, the usual 24 awards and speeches, award-winning actors giving awards to other actors, a running time that will eclipse the hoped-for three-hour cap, and a stage that’s been likened to a giant vulva and Donald Trump’s hair.

I think we can all agree that the world is filled with TOO MANY straight lines & square thinking. For the #Oscars this year I have designed a world based on the idea of inclusion & warm welcoming shapes that stretch out & envelope not only the audience but everyone watching. pic.twitter.com/uStpUiDnFX
— David Korins (@DavidKorins) February 18, 2019

Even the one certain showstopper, Lady Gaga performing the Oscar-nominated “Shallow” with Bradley Cooper, will be an echo of Gaga’s recent Grammy performance, when she was surrounded by some of the biggest names in music, rather than the nominees for directing the Best Live-Action Short. Every indication says the 2019 Oscars will be a no-frills affair that will settle into a stupefying rhythm earlier than usual: “We were hired to deliver a shortened show,” Gigliotti told The New York Times. “How do we do that so you’re not seeing award, award, commercial, award, commercial, award? So boring.”

This year’s changes have seemed like an expression of contempt for the Oscars

Perhaps there’s some future assemblage of academy talent that can thread this thin needle of producing a more broadly appealing show without alienating those who care about it the most. But this year’s model has seemed, from the start, like an expression of contempt for the Oscars. It’s as if someone believes that abruptly tossing out 90 years of tradition, and replacing it with a faux-populist conceptual abomination, could somehow serve both the traditionalists and the audiences who didn’t care in the first place.

In a sense, though, that apathy from the public is the price Hollywood is paying for its own longstanding behavior. If sequels, remakes, and other nine-figure franchise blockbusters are its core business, then the academy shouldn’t be surprised when smaller movies gobble up all the awards attention. The chances of popular hits aligning with critical favorites have become more and more remote as the gaps between their budgets, marketing, reception, and audiences all widen.

But trying to force an awkward handshake between those poles clearly isn’t the solution. People reflexively dismiss and decry change, especially on social media, which amplifies all the most immediate knee-jerk reactions to new events. But people can get used to changes that seem well-considered and well-intentioned. This year’s haphazard attempts to revamp the Oscars are neither, and they’re doing more to drive away potential viewers than to ease them back into the fold.

The 2018 Tomb Raider movie dials down the franchise’s tackiness

2018-03-14T13:00:05-04:00

Released in summer 2001, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was an ungainly attempt to level up the art of cinematic Raiders of the Lost Ark knockoffs. It grafted the cutscene mythology of the popular video game onto an adventure that rappelled down the Uncanny Valley of early-2000s special effects. Director Simon West (Con Air) found a glimmer of possibility in the material by casting Angelina Jolie in the lead — not just because she fed the lust of male gamers and gazers, but because she brought in some of the sly unpredictability that won her an Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar for Girl, Interrupted two years earlier. Under better circumstances, Jolie could have offered her version of Harrison Ford’s knowing smirk through exotic locales and spring-loaded traps. But the script held her back, making her fight the stiff headwinds of an Illuminati conspiracy plot, gross objectification, and the comic stylings of actor Noah Taylor.

Fifteen years after Jan de Bont’s sequel, Lara Croft: Cradle of Life, brought Jolie’s exploits to a close, the franchise has been revived as a vehicle for Alicia Vikander, another upstart raising her profile after winning an Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar. The new Tomb Raider is a reboot of a reboot, adapting the 2013 video game by Crystal Dynamics, which was itself searching for a fresh start to a franchise that began in 1996, then foundered over a decade of sequels with diminishing returns. The new alterations to the story aren’t dramatic enough to elevate the series, but they do reflect a post-Gamergate shift in priorities, with an emphasis on Lara’s athleticism instead of her sex appeal, and a plot that sends her into battle on an island of men.

But getting her to the island, let alone allowing her to raid tombs, takes some doing. When Tomb Raider opens, Lara hasn’t even considered becoming a professional adventurer, so the film has to figure out various tortured ways to keep the action beats coming. Seven years after her archeologist father, Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West), disappeared, Lara refuses to concede that he’s dead, which means she can’t access her massive inheritance. So she scrapes together money delivering Indian food by bike in London and sharpens her mixed martial arts skills at a local gymnasium. That gives Norwegian director Roar Uthaug (The Wave) two shake-and-bake action sequences: an MMA sparring match to prove Lara’s mettle, and a bike chase through the streets of London. It’s thin gruel, but for action junkies, it’s sustenance.

The locale shifts to Hong Kong after Lara discovers Lord Croft’s research on Himiko, a sinister Japanese queen who left so much misery and death in her wake that her own generals brought her to the island of Yamatai and imprisoned her in a hidden, booby trapped tomb. Desperate to know what happened to her father, Lara persuades a drunk ship captain (Daniel Wu) to escort her to Yamatai, where she finds an island crowded with treasure-seekers. Chief among them is Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins), a rival archeologist who’s commissioned poor migrants and gun-toting mercenaries to blast through the rock in search of Himiko’s tomb.

Nothing about Queen Himiko suggests unearthing her would be a great idea: not her ominous “power over death,” not the “chasm of souls,” not her poisonous index finger, not the fact that she was deliberately entombed in a place where no one could ever find her. Tomb Raider is like an anti-treasure hunt, a mad quest to unleash a world-ending plague. As Vogel, Goggins steers into the malevolent curve, looking as comfortable fomenting chaos here as he did raising hell in Kentucky coal country for several seasons on Justified. He lusts for power more than money and plausibly assumes that Himiko’s toxic spirit will be compatible with his own.

Vikander doesn’t do much with a character whose chief attribute is earnestness, but Tomb Raider improves once it gets to the island and lets the derring-do take over. Lara faces a treacherous waterfall, dispatches gun-toting henchmen, solves Myst-like mechanized puzzles, and dodges booby traps. And when the time comes for her to throw down with fists and feet of fury, the film has already established that she’s up for that, too. Though Uthaug leans heavily on digitally enhanced images of Lara leaping across impossible spaces, Vikander’s surprising physicality keeps her from reading like a weightless effect. Her slightness in The Danish Girl and Ex Machina, however deceptive, is nowhere in evidence here.

At the same time, Tomb Raider is too busy solving the problem of how to make a Lara Croft movie work to justify its own existence. Though this 2.0 version pares down the Illuminati hokum of the original film, there’s still the requisite need to square elements of the game with the serialized matinee adventures that inspired Raiders of the Lost Ark. The platform and puzzle elements and the secret antechambers and conspiracies all tie back into the game’s myths and rhythms, but they take away from its cinematic flow. The 2018 Tomb Raider does well enough to satisfy a video game and movie franchise simultaneously, but the two aren’t easily reconciled. When Lara is pinned to a stone wall, trying to figure out which colored gem goes into which slot, it can’t help but feel like some offscreen controller is managing her actions. She isn’t a movie character anymore, she’s an avatar.

As a machine-tooled diversion, however, this Tomb Raider improves considerably on the previous films, if only by dialing down the tacky excesses. This Lara doesn’t have the indignity of fighting against training robots or animated stone figures, and she doesn’t make her escape via sledless snow dogs. Uthaug takes a much more conservative approach, bringing the film more in line with the gender-reversed Indiana Jones the series always intended to be. Vikander’s Lara is all business, streamlined and efficient, and the film follows dutifully in kind.