In this video from Thursday, she's playing with her new Toy Story cowgirl doll ("Jessie. She love me,") and helping me sing the anthem of a couple of murderous cowboys who shoot at each other over a woman. As I'm sure you know, you the story wraps up with an inebriated doctor performing a botched surgical operation.
This was not the darkest storyline she's was exposed to this week, as we just took her to see Toy Story 3 which, I can attest, provokes mass audience sobbing.
Her time in the theater went kinda like the video above: With her engaged but also doing her own thing. It was a pre-noon show, so she could switch seats two dozen times and dance on the stairs as needed.
As for the movie: It'll bake your noodle. I was just thinking about the last 30 minutes of it and I kinda went off into space. Those Pixar guys aren't just great storytellers -- I've watched the first two at least 6x each with Bug, and as far as I can tell the series has always been about making peace with loss and the inevitable -- but with this one they really leveraged the fact that you can probably remember who you were when you saw the first one, and what's changed in your own life in 15 years since.
On that front, it completely shames a piece of hackery like the Star Wars prequels. The film itself was preceded by some ugly moichandizing commercials -- one for a video game that Pixar executives actually had the cynicism to come on screen and claim that "This game really lets kids play with toys the way kids play with toys," and one for a set of Toy Story-themed sticker book that would have fit right at Al's Toy Barn -- something I don't think Lucas was ever crude enough to do.
But the movie (Spoiling. Spoiling. Spoiling.) hit its climax in a volcanic wasteland that will be familiar to anyone who saw the third Lord of the Rings movie or Episode III. All three of these movies tried to evoke the end of all things, and only the animated one really made you look at the abyss.
If I was Brett Ratner staring into that abyss and I'd just call it a career.
... There were a two bits -- the worst bits in the movie for me -- that were derivative of other digital animated movies. Ken had a montage of outfits that set to "Le Freak." According to the internet they used the song in Shrek 2, but even beyond that -- and I may have been in a humorless mood because this was the approximate moment when Bug went from sitting to a full sprint toward the screen and managed to grab the curtain skirt below it before I was able to grab her -- the comic timing of the whole thing was pure Shrek: quick cuts, irony on steroids.And then they went to the stock character of Aughts digital animation, the muy caliente sidekick, previously played by Antonio Banderas in the Shrek franchise and by Robin Williams in the god damned dancing penguin movie.
Again, unoriginality aside, I thought we were done with the whole cartoon ethnic humor thing.
I would have enjoyed the whole thing more if they'd abandoned the whole Buzz-goes-loco subplot once they realized that Tim Allen's limited range would require them to hire an entirely different actor to play "Spanish Buzz."
(I'll be editing and adding to this piece all day, I'm sure.)
