Inside Out
(USA, 95
min.)
Dir. Pete Docter, Ronnie Del Carmen (co-director), Writ. Pete
Docter, Ronnie Del Carmen, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley
Starring: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind, Bill
Hader
Call me a pessimist, but the Pixar movie about the power of
positive thinking is the most annoying film that the animation behemoth has
ever made. Inside Out is a gimmicky
film that lumbers under the weight of its premise as the emotional drives
within a young girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) try to keep her spirits afloat.
Joy (Amy Poehler) plays the Energizer Bunny of Riley’s brain while Sadness
(Phyllis Smith) is the party pooper who keeps transforming Riley’s good vibes
into single tears. The lazy screenplay offers no motivation for Sadness’s mania
for touching all of Riley’s memories and turning them into downers with her
Midas touch. The excuse of “I just want to touch them!” wears thin quickly, and
Smith’s annoying performance doesn’t help one accept the feeble reply.
Inside Out proves
too conceptual for a film that caters to a young audience as the story of the
emotional drives and workings of the mind stumbles as it connects the dots on
the self-consciousness scale. The film also simplifies its characters too much
in search of cheap laughs, most notably with the overly simplistic gender
stereotypes that Riley’s parents embody, and it creates one-dimensional
characters in turn despite the premise that every personality is a dense
structure. Inside Out tries its best
to offer an elaborately layered world that adults can appreciate just as much
as young viewers do, but it is too aware of its own machinery and the premise
is far too emotionally manipulative, especially for a kids’ movie. The animation,
similarly, is less impressive than previous Pixar efforts, as the characters
inside Riley’s mind appear as fuzzy figures, while the human characters still
look like waxy dead people. Sometimes an unassuming concept, like a fish that
needs to find its way home, allows Pixar to achieve the best of both worlds
instead of struggling to find a middle road between complexity and simplicity.
Rating: ★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Inside Out is now available on home video.
Goodnight Mommy (Ich Sen, Ich Sen)
(Austria, 99 min.)
Written and directed by Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz
Starring: Lukas Schwarz, Elias Schwarz, Susanne Wuest
Austria makes a bold choice with its official submission in
the Best Foreign Language Film race with Goodnight
Mommy. The film offers a fascinating tale about the complex emotions with
which youngsters wrestle, especially if one screens it back-to-back with Inside Out. Goodnight Mommy, like Inside
Out, presents a child overwhelmed with sadness, but this time twins Lukas
and Elias (played by brothers Lukas and Elias Schwarz) refuse to let joy turn
their frown upside down. They instead find pleasure in the perverse joy that
fear brings to their summer when their days of playing in the fields outside
their secluded town go dark and they worry that the bandaged woman living in
their home might not be their real mommy. Mommy finds these twins to be double
trouble as the kids turn to their own imaginations and ruthlessly decide to put
her to the test.
Goodnight Mommy
builds its tale of lost childhood with a complex simmer as Lukas and Elias
slowly speculate that mommy isn’t the real deal. The slow burn of the film
makes the final act of violence with which the film culminates a powerful and
visceral horror show. Every frame of the film has a sense of dread that mounts
and mounts. The chill of Goodnight Mommy,
however, isn’t the squirm-inducing graphic violence (although there’s plenty of
that), but rather the apparition of a powerful ghost story that appears in its
final frames. It’s haunting Euro-horror for anyone in search of a good “family
movie” this holiday season!
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Goodnight Mommy is now available on home video.
