Steven M. Finkelstein

This past weekend, I had occasion to go to Baltimore with Megan, to help out with our homegrown company, Metropolis Soap. For those of you who aren’t regular readers of the blog, Megan has been pursuing Metropolis as a sole means of income for the past few weeks, and I’ve been doing whatever I can to assist in the promotion and distribution of her products. This time it meant taking the weekend off from work to help put up and take down the displays, help man the booth, and generally try to get the word out. It was a busy weekend, but an enjoyable one, and I think it can be counted as largely successful. I also got a good look at Artscape, which is billed as being the largest independent arts festival in the country. In addition to arts and crafts, it features food, music, performers, and an impressive collection of freaks, geeks, queers, and oddballs. Saturday was my birthday, and I got to see Gov’t Mule, the headliners of the festival; they were great, as always. Warren Haynes is a musical idol of mine. His voice is just so big; regardless of the size of the venue, whether it’s a tiny club or a sprawling mountainside, it just seems to grow and resonate and spread out and out, and the depth and soul in evidence is just an incredibly moving thing. This is a man who feels the music as he sings it, and the audience can’t help but feel it too.

Artscape also gave me an opportunity to get a good look at Baltimore, a city where I’ve had limited past experience. I remember getting lost there once with my friend Tiffany some years back, and sort of driving aimlessly around for a few hours, through neighborhoods that looked increasingly more dicey at every turn. This time we were sort of in downtown, I guess…we were right by Camden Yards, where the Orioles play, and whatever the hell the stadium is called where the Ravens have their home games. As I mentioned, the area where the event itself was taking place seemed to be bustling with life. There were several clubs and restaurants that were still in full swing when we packed up at ten o’clock, and it seemed like even if the festival was officially done for the night, things were just getting started. Of course, we were too exhausted to do much but go back to the hotel and crash. The whole place seemed to be very gay friendly, which I liked. I saw many male and female couples making the rounds with no bother, the same as in New York. But with that being said, I also saw many homeless. Stopping at red lights on the way to and from the event, panhandlers shuffled about among the parked cars, some of them very aggressive, holding their hands out right up against the windows. Though I’ll sometimes give if I’m in the right mood, rolling down a car window in traffic to try and help someone out seems like a bad idea for a variety of reasons. But what really struck me about Baltimore (it’s probably wrong to pigeonhole based on observances of just a couple of neighborhoods, but still, there it is), came as we were driving back to New York Sunday night. We’d made our last few sales, loaded up the car, and the G.P.S. was sending us back to the highway via the most direct route. The route it gave sent us cruising through a neighborhood that I remember thinking at the time looked like images of war-torn Baghdad. There were blocks after blocks after blocks of boarded up tenements, all of them looking condemned, broken glass and piles of trash in vacant lots. There were no businesses open, except, and I’m not even kidding here, a couple of liquor stores and fried chicken restaurants. But even in the buildings where most of the windows were boarded up, there were a few lights on, and there were people sitting on the steps of some of them, in some cases smoking weed right out in the open. I’ve been through some pretty rough neighborhoods in my life, but this was just another level…it was the ghetto, plain and simple, and it was incredibly saddening to me that people had to live in a place like this. What struck me the most was just the lack of commerce. Where there are no businesses neighborhoods can’t really thrive, and that seemed to be the case here. I wondered if things were like this before the economic collapse and the hard times of the past couple of years, or did the condition of this area predate that significantly?

Overall, I had a really nice time over the weekend. I enjoyed my birthday, spending time with Megan, and seeing a new city that I didn’t know a whole lot about. I’d like to go back to Artscape next year, if I get a chance, and there’s no reason to think that we wouldn’t, as it was profitable. There seems to be a lot about Baltimore to recommend it. But I also could hardly turn a blind eye to what, to me, appeared to be a city in financial trouble. I know that economics are cyclical, and what the condition is today may be different in a year, or five years. I just hope that the city can ride out the bad times, because what I saw was sobering. It was not desperation that I saw in some of the faces I passed. Rather, it seemed more like resignation, which is what comes when all hope is truly gone.

The newest sequel with the Predator theme, starring the dredlocked creatures that first appeared in the Schwarzenegger original, is exactly what was advertised: a bloody return to the series’ roots, with much of the same brooding menace that made the first one a success. People discount Predator 2 as being inferior to the original. I thought it was every bit as good, just…different. The unlikely substitution of Danny Glover for the musclebound Governator worked surprisingly well. Then came the Alien vs Predator and Alien vs Predator: Requiem films. They were watchable, but not great. I attribute it to two problems: one, they went with the PG-13 rating for the first one, which eliminated the possibility of most profanity and excessive gore, and pretty much killed it dead before they even got started. Even though the second was R rated, it was a fairly lifeless outing, with the plot seeming phoned in and no name actors to speak of. Two, there was such build-up over the years for the clash between these legendary movie monsters that anything less than Citizen Kane with Aliens and Predators was going to feel like a letdown, and both of these surely did. They were lackluster, and the box office gross reflected that. But this time around, Robert Rodriguez promised to do things right and recapture the spirit of the first installment, and I’ll give the guy credit where it’s due. I would have liked to see him direct, rather than Nimrod Antel, but hey, you can’t have everything.

This time around the hero is Royce (Adrian Brody), a mercenary stolen from Earth and airdropped onto a foreign planet, along with six other assorted combat vet/assassin types, plus That Seventies Show’s Topher Grace, presumably as Predator bait. The most recognizable of the other actors is Danny Trejo, who finally, after putting in twenty years as a Hollywood set piece, will get his long overdue starring role in Machete, due out soon. It doesn’t take long before Royce and the crew figure out that the planet is a game preserve, and they’re being hunted by interstellar baddies. They band together, but human nature being what it is, there’s tension among the group due to different priorities, mindsets, etc. It’s a bit formulaic, borrowing from “The Most Dangerous Game” short story and about two dozen other Hollywood action flicks roughly based on it from the past three decades. Still, what makes things work pretty well here, for the most part, is the sense of anticipation built up before the appearance of the first creatures (they don’t show up for close to an hour), fine cinematography, and the ability to avoid overly cheesy dialogue. Adrian Brody isn’t exactly miscast as Royce…everyone keeps saying he’s “playing against type” in this film, but does Brody really have a type? He’s a chameleon, and he tackled an action role successfully in King Kong, lest we forget. Still, having him growl into the camera and act like a tough guy feels a bit strained at times…I’d like to buy it but I just can’t…and having him take his shirt off in the last few minutes of the movie, presumably to show off his chiseled abs, wasn’t doing me any favors either. Sex symbol this man is not. But aside from these minor gripes, everything progresses swimmingly. There’s a Predator vs yakuza fight sequence that pretty much makes the movie, we get some new insight into Predator mythology, we’re introduced to their canine-like attack critters, and they’re packing some fun new technology. We even get a great cameo from Lawrence “Morpheus” Fishburn, who must not have had anything to do some weekend.

If you’re a fan of the action and sci-fi genres, bottom line, you’re probably going to like this. I felt like the last third of the movie probably suffers most (I especially thought the last twenty minutes could have used a good re-write), but there’s a lot more working here than isn’t. The sense of a human protagonist fighting something that is so alien to us and so frustratingly superior that dominated the Schwarzenegger classic is back again, and taking it back to the jungle, albeit on a different planet, was a wise decision. Is this high art? No, and it wasn’t meant to be. Let’s face it, if you go see a movie like this, you know what you’re getting yourself into. If you don’t think too much, and you’re looking for violent, testosterone-laced entertainment, this is the way to go. My rating: 6/10.

Although it had been eleven years since the release of Toy Story 2, it could be argued that Pixar really needed to do this one right. After all, this was the franchise they pretty much hung their hat on; the original pioneered the sort of animation that would become typical of the studio, and the follow up was just as successful as the first. With that in mind, it was necessary for the creative team to fight through the “franchise exhaustion” that often comes about at the end of a trilogy, making the third the weakest installment. It has happened with so many other trilogies, regardless of genre, and they also were faced with another challenge: coming up with a successful vehicle for Tim Allen, a man who hasn’t had a credible big screen endeavor in several years. But even with the deck stacked against them, Pixar came through. Toy Story 3 is a visually stimulating, thought provoking, and touching film that stays true to the spirit of the original two.

This time around, transition and the finding of one’s place in the world are the over-arching storylines; though these themes were touched on in the first two films also, it avoids feeling redundant. Andy, the owner of the principle toys, Buzz LightYear (Tim Allen) and Woody the cowboy (Tom Hanks) is going off to college, and the toys are wondering what’s planned for them. Mistakenly sent to a daycare center when they were intended for the attic, they encounter a sinister toy conspiracy headed by a rotund pink Care Bear lookalike named Lotso. Lotso was lost by his owner years before, but feels that she abandoned him. Bringing some bullying lackeys around to his way of thinking, he uses them to control the daycare center with a fuzzy fist, forcing the new arrivals into playtime with the youngest child denizens, who batter and bash them mercilessly as toddlers are apt to do. Buzz and Woody launch a plan to escape, with help from Mr. Potato Head, Barbie, and the various other principles from the first two. It all leads to a trip to the town dump in the third act, where the wayward playthings come this close to toy purgatory, in a scene that is as frightening and emotionally disturbing as anything the adult “horror” genre has produced lately. This movie is really anything but lighthearted, and although the animation is as bright and shiny as everything Pixar produces, the themes remain as profoundly adult as those in Up and Wall-E. There are some harsh lessons to be taught here: abandonment is a very real possibility, even for innocent, trusting toys, a warped mind is sometimes simply beyond redemption, and sometimes the best of friends can outgrow you. But it all turns out alright in the end, and the rescued toys are given a good home, with a young girl whose sensibilities and creative spirit mimic Andy’s own.

The most important lesson to be learned from these movies is actually an inadvertent one, though. The lesson is, it’s a damn good thing that toys don’t have feelings, and souls, because if they did, then each and every one of us would be doomed to hell for abandoning them and breaking their hearts as we grew up. I found myself thinking longingly of toys long forgotten during the course of this movie, and even though there’s a happy ending, I was left feeling as saddened as I was nostalgic. The only real fault I can find with it is that at times it went just a little too far tugging at the ol’ heartstrings. Pixar is shamelessly manipulative; they even sort of mute the colors at the particularly sappy bits to cue you in on the parts where you’re supposed to be tearing up. But with that being said, this is in every way a successful venture, funny, frightening, and colorful: what every good playtime should be. Not as original as the first of the three, which still gets my nod as one of the better animated kids movies I’ve ever seen, but absolutely worth seeing on the big screen, whatever your age. It’s all the stronger because it comes in a summer that’s been largely devoid of legitimate blockbusters. Recommended. My rating 7/10.