WALL-E

There’s no earthly reason why a studio of Pixar’s heft should make a film like WALL•E.
Luxuriously in the black on every film they’ve ever made, they have many delighted
shareholders and a new boss to keep happy now that they’re officially part of the Disney empire,
and a trusting audience whose largest complaint to date has been that some of their films have
failed to be instantly classic and merely managed to be very, very good. In the animation world
they’re unparalleled in witty dialogue and nice shiny textures, and everyone would probably be
happy to devour more of the same for years to come. Well, thank goodness that Pixar appears to
have lost some of its business sense, and made a film that’s like nothing we’d expect, except in
its quality.

To any other animation studio - and this is why Pixar can make a fair claim to being the greatest
in cinema history - WALL•E would not make sense as a mass-market movie. It’s an idea that can
only have come from passion and inspiration, not focus groups and marketing meetings. Here we
have a robot with a vocabulary that never stretches beyond three words (and all of those are
pronounced with an android lisp); a best friend who’s a mute cockroach (ick!), and an obsession
with a VHS of Hello, Dolly! (what’s Hello, Dolly! grandad? And who’s VHS?). On top of that,
he brings a message about being nice to our planet and the evils of big corporations. He would
typically belong, at best, as a secondary character, to fall over or pop a wingnut when the plot
looks like getting too romantic.

Andrew Stanton, who with Finding Nemo proved himself a fine director of Pixar’s traditional
mismatched-buddy movie with a twist, has taken these elements and combined them with
amazing elegance into a film of faultless grace, breathtaking sweep and more adorability than a
basket of baby bunnies. He opens with supreme confidence on a future Earth composed of dust
piles and great skyscrapers of trash reaching toward a permanently overcast sky. It’s a
gorgeously nihilistic backdrop that could easily have come from the mind of Ridley Scott or
Stanley Kubrick (whose 2001 is playfully referenced throughout), and the most beautiful scenery
Pixar has created. You wouldn’t want to live next to it, but it’s awfully nice to look at. Dotted
about this wasteland are signs for Buy N Large, a corporation that, we can deduce, has become
the supplier of every product on the planet and swiftly scarpered with the population once the
rubbish started piling up. The task of clearing up has been left to our hero, a cute little collection
of manky hinges and half a Tonka truck. In a rather dark aside, we see a number of ‘dead’
WALL•E’s flopped around the landscape. He is the last.

WALL•E scoots happily around the dilapidated planet to the musical stylings of Michael
Crawford in the aforementioned Hello, Dolly!, crushing the detritus of humanity into little cubes.
He does his job quietly and diligently and, once the work is done, indulges his obsession with
man’s trash: one man’s garbage is another robot’s treasure. Wall•E is a character of genius, as
pure and wondrous an example of the possibilities of animation as you will ever see. He’s an
encapsulation of all the medium’s ability to give anything personality. He has no eyebrows,
mouth, language, thumbs, or any of the humanistic elements that a cartoon generally requires to
mimic emotion. Yet everything this little fella feels is perfectly palpable and genuine.
 Cars 3
The conventional reviewers’ wisdom about Pixar’s “Cars” movies is that they are colorful
and engaging but hardly as breathtaking as much of the other output from that
animation studio. There are some who think Pixar should aim for awe-inspiring every
time, because why not? Then there are crankier critics who will point out that driverless
talking cars just aren’t terribly interesting, and can be a little goofy.

“Cars 3,” directed by Brian Fee from a script by Kiel Murray, Bob Peterson and Mike
Rich (the story is credited to a whole other pit crew that includes Mr. Fee), isn’t going to
win any converts among those with an animus toward talking cars. But if you can roll
with it, the movie is both breezy fun and a pain-free life lesson delivery vehicle.

It begins predictably, with the cheerful, cherry red Lightning McQueen (voiced with the
usual winning pep by Owen Wilson) about to zip across another finish line in first place.
Except he doesn’t win — he’s beaten by a new, sleek, black-with-purple-highlights racer
by the name of Jackson Storm. This brash rookie, who is voiced with apt smarm by
Armie Hammer, oozes, “I can’t believe I get to race Lightning McQueen in his farewell
season.” Lightning notes that it’s not his farewell season and … well, you get the idea.

“The racing world is changing,” a friend advises Lightning, and our hero makes a small
effort to adapt. Hooking up with a new corporate sponsor, he starts his off-season
training at a top-tier site where, apparently, newbies such as Jackson Storm tone up.
There, he’s introduced to a plucky performance coach, a yellow car named Cruz Ramirez
(voiced by Cristela Alonzo). She responds to Lightning’s frequent angry, pessimistic
outbursts with an instruction to “Use that!”

For a while, the movie is content to poke mild fun at America’s enthusiasm for trendy
self-help bromides and computer-age enhancement technology. There’s a mild paradox
that this entirely digital movie waxes so nostalgic for analog-age stuff: Art Deco diners,
big-knob radios, funky garages. Lightning frequently flashes back to the advice and
companionship of his old mentor, Doc Hudson (voiced by the great Paul Newman in the
first “Cars” movie in 2006, two years before his death, and who is again heard here).
Acting on those memories, Lightning eventually persuades Cruz to get out and train
with him, old-school style, at a nearby beach.

It’s here that the movie’s pedagogic mode starts, gently, to kick in. Lightning begins to
realize that maybe he really is too old to be a champion on the track anymore — so
what’s next? And Cruz reveals her thwarted ambition to be a racer, a dream she
abandoned out of fear the first time she was told to take her shot. In a quiet but
ultimately forceful way, “Cars 3” makes a case against sexism and for the joys of
mentorship. Because the “Cars” franchise has been Lightning’s story, the male lead is, by
that logic, the initial force moving the female-empowerment theme. That may strike
some as a little patronizing. But the Cruz-Lightning dynamic eventually evolves into a
genuine friendship that has a lot of appeal.
 The Boss Baby
The animated feature “The Boss Baby” has some hilarious moments. If, that is, you’re a
grown-up.

It’s a movie whose story is aimed at the siblings of newborns — the 8-and-under crowd,
more or less. They’ll follow the plot for most of the way; they just might be puzzled by
their accompanying parent’s reactions. “What’s so funny, Dad?”

That’s because the title character is voiced by Alec Baldwin, and all of his various past
personas, especially the one from “30 Rock,” somehow make hearing his distinctive
voice coming from a cartoon infant all that much funnier.

The story, based on a picture book by Marla Frazee, is told from the viewpoint of Tim
(Miles Bakshi or, when he’s in narrator mode, Tobey Maguire), a 7-year-old only child
who is not happy when his parents (Lisa Kudrow and Jimmy Kimmel) tell him a brother
is on the way. Tim has a vivid imagination, and in his eyes the baby arrives wearing a
business suit, bosses his parents around and has dubious intentions.

The contrast between the helpless-infant stage of life and corporate-speak is funny but
fairly high-concept for a kiddie movie, and the plot grows denser as it goes along and the
baby and Tim reluctantly join forces to stop a conspiracy by which puppies would corner
all the love in the world. The film, directed by Tom McGrath (“Megamind,” the
“Madagascar” movies), is also full of homages and such that no young child is going to
get. Psst: Hey grown-ups, no need to tell the kids that; just let them squirm while you
enjoy the adult flourishes.
 SAN ANDREAS
San Andreas is a natural disaster film that hit theatres in May 2015.
Directed by Brad Peyton, the movie stays true to its definition of a natural
disaster film, and is a natural disaster itself. The film includes cinematic
shots of buildings flying across the screen, and some background
information about the San Andreas fault. At first glance, the trailer
for San Andreas looks promising. Action packed clips, and a rescue of a
damsel in distress, leaving viewers sitting on the edge of their seat,
waiting to see what will happen next. However, the film is literally the
trailer repeated ten different times in ten different locations.
The movie opens with a typical teenage girl listening to Taylor Swift
before she promptly drives off the road and hangs on the side of the cliff.
There, she waits in suspense until finally Raymond “Ray” Gaines arrives
in his trusty helicopter, pulling off a dramatic rescue and saving the day.
This is the first damsel in distress. The film then jumps to a Caltech
seismologist named Lawrence Hayes. Him and his colleague Dr. Kim
Park are at the Hoover Dam doing research with a fancy earthquake
detector machine when an unknown fault nearby suddenly ruptures. This
fault triggers a 7.1 magnitude earthquake that causes the dam to
collapse on itself. In a sudden turn of events, Dr. Park decides to become
a martyr and risks his life to save a young damsel in distress. The girl is
swept away by her mother without a scratch or a second glance at Dr.
Park. Spoiler alert, Dr. Park does not miraculously survive and reappear.
Throughout all this commotion, Hayes somehow manages to save his
trusty earthquake machine, and returns to his office to reveal that the
San Andreas fault is shifting. His magical detector says that there will
soon be a huge earthquake that will cause mass destruction along the
cities near the fault line. At this point in the film, the director decided to
have his own take on a famous Jaws quote and had a random assistant
pop up and ask Hayes, “Who should we call now?” Which Hayes replies
with, “Everybody.”  Only twenty minutes into the movie and we have
already reached the climax of the film. However, the film doesn’t end until
two more damsels in distress are saved. One from a collapsing building,
(where Ray manages to swoop in with his helicopter and save the day,
again.) and the other from a trapped car. There are scenes from famous
landmarks in California, including the Hollywood sign falling down and
the golden Gate Bridge breaking into pieces.
 Train to Busan
It might be a strange thing to say about a zombie movie, but there’s a lean beauty to
Train to Busan. It’s difficult to imagine this film done more efficiently, or more
effectively. Take the opening three minutes. It’s a common monster movie trope—the
anomaly in nature that hints at impending disaster—but what distinguishes this
sequence is its economy. A truck transporting livestock is halted and sprayed by men
in protective suits; they say there’s been a leak at a nearby plant. On the highway,
distracted by his phone, he hits a deer, killing it. As he drives away, the animal
suddenly seizes and stands up. The camera zooms in on its eyes, which are an
unearthly white.
In the 10 minutes it takes to get from deer-zombie to the titular train, we’re introduced
to Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) and his young daughter, Su-an (Kim Su-an). He’s a fund
manager, divorced, a conscientious but distracted father. They’re headed to Busan to
drop Su-an off at her mother’s. Their fellow passengers include a hilariously spiky
married couple, Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok) and Seong-kyeong (Jung Yu-mi),
members of a baseball team, a loathsome CEO, two old sisters and a disturbed-
looking man who mutters “They’re all dead" to himself over and over again. There’s
also a young woman who climbs aboard, limping, with a bite wound on her leg.
The moment the woman’s eyes turn white and she bites the attendant, the film shifts
gears. Within minutes, our protagonists are being pursued across the train by the
deadly (if not very intelligent) undead. Seok-woo and Sang-hwa become de facto
leaders; when running is no longer an option, they start taking the fight to the
zombies, whose number now includes most of the train’s passengers. With each
successive encounter, we learn a little more about what these walking dead can do
(shuffle quickly, spread the virus by biting) and can’t (run, open doors).
Director Yeon Sang-ho, who’s worked mostly in animation before this, displays a by-
now recognizably Korean talent for sustained, dynamic filmmaking and controlled
mayhem. Unlike Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer—another kinetic action film set aboard
a train—there’s little social comment, apart from the one scene that seems to comment
on the plight of immigrants.
 Transformers
The Last Knight

The “Transformers” films, as befitting a series spun out of a Hasbro monster-truck toy system
designed to connect with the inner worldview of nine-year-olds, started off, in 2007, as
exceedingly wholesome. What a difference a decade of baroquely semi-coherent robot-fury
overkill makes! “Transformers: The Last Knight,” the fifth film in the hugely popular, critically
reviled franchise (has there ever been a movie series that put the red state/blue state divide
between audiences and reviewers like this one does?), is also the most extravagantly brutish and
lurid. There’s still a PG-13 gee-whiz-ness to the proceedings, but the towering, swivel-socketed
machine men now seem like they’ve been around the block a few times, complete with pit stops
at the race track and dive bars.

The Decepticons — the fey gangsta Mohawk, the goofy bikerish Nitro Zeus — look as if they
might be auditioning for “Suicide Squad 2,” and their leader, Megatron, skulks around with the
angriest possible attitude, his face marked by a blood-red splash. The good-guy Autobots come
off nearly as wasted: Bumblebee is introduced by getting blasted to pieces, and even the stalwart
superhero Optimus Prime has slipped over to the sinister side. He has made a deal with the alien
sorceress Quintessa, who looks like a very expensive hanging necklace, to salvage the Autobots’
dessicated home planet, Cybertron, by sucking the life out of earth.

There is, in addition, a medieval backstory that returns us to the days of King Arthur, but even
this potentially stodgy premise is staged in a heavy-metal Stonehenge-meets-bloodshed way that
puts the dark back in Dark Ages. All of which makes “The Last Knight” the first “Transformers”
movie that could actually be characterized as badass. Which isn’t a bad thing. It may, in fact, be
better.
 The Last Naruto the Movie

Movie (2014) is the seventh and most effects-heavy feature based on the

popular Naruto Shippuden series (it’s
the 10th film in the overall Naruto
continuity). Naruto Uzumaki (Maile Flanagan), everyone’s favorite ninja and
knucklehead, has grown up. Now in his early 20’s, he’s teaching at the Academy
where he used to goof off and cut class. The lonely orphan has adoring students
and fans. While Naruto may have grown older, he hasn’t exactly matured. He’ll
never be the sharpest kunai knife in
the arsenal, but he retains his kind heart, his mastery of arcane Ninja skills
and his ferocious loyalty to his friends.
All those qualities are put to a monumental test when the
ghostly Toneri (Robbie Daymond) kidnaps Hinata’s younger sister Hanabi
(Colleen
O’Shaughnessey). Toneri plans to destroy the Earth, which he sees as the corrupt,
debased embodiment of the failed plans of the Sage of the Six Paths. Toneri
interferes
with the orbit of the moon, causing meteors to bombard the ninja villages,
presaging a collision between the celestial bodies. To complete this grandiose
plot, Toneri needs the Byakugan, a magical power that resides in the eyes of
members of Hinata’s clan.

Naruto and Hinata (Stephanie Sheh) set out to rescue Hanabi,

joined by three of the Hidden Leaf Village’s most skillful warriors: medical
ninja Sakura (Kate Higgins); Sai (Ben Diskin), who creates magical creatures
from his drawings; and Shikamaru (Tom Gibis), who can use shadows as
weapons.
In the course of their mission, the ninjas travel to the moon via a
supernatural cavern. During that voyage, Naruto revisits many of his memories
of Hinata and director Tsuneo Kobayashi uses flashback sequences to fill in the
backstory of Toneri’s mad plot.

While the inhabitants

of the ninja villages try to destroy and/or escape the terrible rain of
meteors, Naruto and his friends are fighting to block Toneri’s machinations.
Kobayashi
pulls out all the stops in a series of over-the-top battles that involve
explosions, murderous dolls, bursting meteors, a stone warrior, explosions, blasts
of chakra energy, moonquakes, Sai’s magical brushstroke figures and more
explosions.
 Finding Nemo
has all of the usual pleasures of the Pixar animation style--the comedy and wackiness of
"Toy Story" or "Monsters Inc." or "A Bug's Life." And it adds an unexpected beauty, a use
of color and form that makes it one of those rare movies where I wanted to sit in the
front row and let the images wash out to the edges of my field of vision. The movie takes
place almost entirely under the sea, in the world of colorful tropical fish--the flora and
fauna of a shallow warm-water shelf not far from Australia. The use of color, form and
movement make the film a delight even apart from its story.
ADVERTISEMENT

There is a story, though, one of those Pixar inventions that involves kids on the action
level while adults are amused because of the satire and human (or fishy) comedy. The
movie involves the adventures of little Nemo, a clown fish born with an undersized fin
and an oversized curiosity. His father, Marlin, worries obsessively over him, because
Nemo is all he has left: Nemo's mother and all of her other eggs were lost to barracudas.
When Nemo goes off on his first day of school, Marlin warns him to stay with the class
and avoid the dangers of the drop-off to deep water, but Nemo forgets, and ends up as a
captive in the salt-water aquarium of a dentist in Sydney. Marlin swims off bravely to
find his missing boy, aided by Dory, a blue tang with enormous eyes who he meets along
the way.
These characters are voiced by actors whose own personal mannerisms are well known
to us; I recognized most of the voices, but even the unidentified ones carried buried
associations from movie roles, and so somehow the fish take on qualities of human
personalities. Marlin, for example, is played by Albert Brooks as an overprotective,
neurotic worrywart, and Dory is Ellen DeGeneres as helpful, cheerful and scatterbrained
(she has a problem with short-term memory). The Pixar computer animators, led by
writer-director Andrew Stanton, create an undersea world that is just a shade murky, as it
should be; we can't see as far or as sharply in sea water, and so threats materialize more
quickly, and everything has a softness of focus. There is something dreamlike about the
visuals of "Finding Nemo," something that evokes the reverie of scuba-diving.

The picture's great inspiration is to leave the sea by transporting Nemo to that big tank
in the dentist's office. In it we meet other captives, including the Moorish Idol fish Gill
(voice by Willem Dafoe), who are planning an escape. Now it might seem to us that
there is no possible way a fish can escape from an aquarium in an office and get out of
the window and across the highway and into the sea, but there is no accounting for the
ingenuity of these creatures, especially since they have help from a conspirator on the
outside--a pelican with the voice of Geoffrey Rush. The picture's great inspiration is to
leave the sea by transporting Nemo to that big tank in the dentist's office. In it we meet
other captives, including the Moorish Idol fish Gill (voice by Willem Dafoe), who are
planning an escape. Now it might seem to us that there is no possible way a fish can
escape from an aquarium in an office and get out of the window and across the highway
and into the sea, but there is no accounting for the ingenuity of these creatures,
especially since they have help from a conspirator on the outside--a pelican with the
voice of Geoffrey Rush.
Despicable Me 2
Despicable Me 2 is a 2013 American 3D computer-animated comedy film and the sequel to the 2010
animated film Despicable Me. Produced by Illumination Entertainment for Universal Pictures, and
animated by Illumination Mac Guff, the film is directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, and
written by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio.

While Gru, the ex-supervillain is adjusting to family life and an attempted honest living in the jam
business, a secret Arctic laboratory is stolen. The Anti-Villain League decides it needs an insider's
help and recruits Gru in the investigation. Together with the eccentric AVL agent, Lucy Wilde, Gru
concludes that his prime suspect is the presumed dead supervillain, El Macho, whose his teenage
son is also making the moves on his eldest daughter, Margo. Seemingly blinded by his
overprotectiveness of his children and his growing mutual attraction to Lucy, Gru seems on the
wrong track even as his minions are being quietly kidnapped en masse for some malevolent
purpose.

The first Despicable Me was a wonderful film, so while there is the worry of whether a sequel would
work you can't help wanting to see it anyway. Despicable Me 2 was just as good as the first one,
maybe not as fresh in terms of plot but what worked so well in the first works equally well here. The
animation, also having the advantage of staying true to the style and look that the first had, is
bursting with vibrancy and colour without looking too over-saturated as well as having a lot of detail
to it. The retro-futuristic designs and gadgets are inventive and very striking to look at, while the
music has rousing energy and is also memorable. Despicable Me 2 in the writing and gags is
peppered with humour, and this is of the laugh-out-loud hilarious kind, though because there's a lot
and that you may be laughing so hard you may be at a risk of missing something. To counter-
balance the hilarity, the film also incorporates a message, it is a heartfelt one and doesn't feel
cloying and out-of-place. For what the story may lack slightly in freshness in correlation with the first,
it more than makes up for it in wit, heart, excitement and how briskly it moves without feeling rushed.
Having more of the minions- one of the best assets of the first film- was a masterstroke also, and
their subplot also gave the story an increasing sense of jeopardy and threat(though theirs is a little
more interesting than that of world domination). Gru is a lovable character, whether a villain like in
the first or not, and adds a lot of charisma and energy to the film. The top-notch vocal talents of
Steve Carrell, Steve Coogan, Kristen Wiig, Benjamin Bratt and even Russell Brand are a further
advantage. All in all, like the first Despicable Me this sequel is fantastic family fun and equal to it.
9/10 Bethany Co