For the week of November 2nd, Pixar and Walt Disney Home Entertainment are bringing the sparkling animated comedy Inside Out. For once, I won't bury the lede: Inside Out belongs on the short list with Toy Story 2, Ratatouille, and Up as Pixar's finest achievement. Whereas many of the studio's recent efforts have concerned themselves with sequel duties (Cars 2, Toy Story 3, and Monsters University), Inside Out ventures outwards by looking inward. Nominally, it's the story of young Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), a girl struggling with her family's move from Minnesota to San Francisco, but we spend far more time with the controlling emotions inside Riley's head: Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Joy (Amy Poehler), the latter of whom acts as the de facto ringleader through her endless positivity and brutally boundless energy (besides Leslie Knope, this is the role Poehler was born to play). However, when Riley's external situation goes out of control, Joy and Sadness get exiled into Riley's long-term memory, and so we follow their struggle to return to Riley's primary memory banks alongside the remaining emotions' Hail-Mary attempts to help Riley achieve inner stasis. The level of invention reaches an all-time high (and for Pixar, that's a very big deal - Inside Out is more experimental in its depiction of the mind than even Christopher Nolan's Inception), but as you might have guessed from the cast list, the vocal talent is so unique and specific that we always sense a clear human through-line, especially once Joy and Sadness try to return to their positions with the aid of Riley's former imaginary friend Bing Bong (the great Richard Kind, giving a heartbreaking vocal performance). In its broad strokes, it's probably most similar to Up, not that the two look remotely similar in terms of plot and character; rather, director Pete Docter cultivates the same air of why-not imagination to both projects. Wanna make a buddy comedy about an old man and a Boy Scout in a flying house? Why not? Wanna detail the inner workings of the teenage-girl brain? Why not? The logistics never intimidate Docter, and he brings both a madman's gift for free-association as well as wholly earned sentiment to both projects. In the best sense, these movies feel like they're making themselves up as they go along - how else to explain the wild shifts from comedy to tragedy, or how both extremes always feel earned? At times, people criticize Pixar for its seeming stranglehold over the animation market, but when the results are this good, it's kinda hard to care. Inside Out is one of the year's best films.
And then we come to Warner Home Entertainment's Vacation reboot, which is as dispiriting and unpleasant as Inside Out is affirming and brisk. For many (this reviewer included), the first National Lampoon's Vacation is a comedy classic, a cynical and appropriately deranged look at the pitfalls of the family road-trip, but it's also not a completely unimpeachable touchstone - iconic performances from Chevy Chase and Randy Quaid aside, the first Vacation could withstand a contemporary update, provided the film fell into the hands of a capable enough farceur (Judd Apatow, Paul Feig, Adam McKay, or Edgar Wright would crush this material). Writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein are not those filmmakers. As promising as their core concept is - the film centers around Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms), son of Chase's Clark Griswold, as he takes his own family (Christina Applegate, Skyler Gisondo, and Steele Stebbins) on a cross-country trip - Daley and Goldstein squander any potential for laughs under a series of crass escalations. The fun of the first Vacation was watching Chase's family-man ambitions crumple under his own insecurities, but here we've substituted that delicious squirm comedy for shock comedy involving a sewage bath, suicidal tour guides (Charlie Day, overacting manically), and Clark's lascivious brother-in-law (Chris Hemsworth, upstaged by a massive genital prosthetic). By the time the film ends up redoing the original's Walley World finale, we've lost the mad desperation of the 1983 conclusion (and its great John Candy cameo) for a bunch of frantic physical comedy, but considering by that point, the film has already wasted the likes of Helms, Chase, Day, Keegan Michael-Key, Hemsworth, Leslie Mann, Tim Heidecker, Nick Kroll, Kaitlin Olson, Michael Pena, and the woefully underused Applegate, a dud ending seems the least of its sins. What a waste.
Michael Reuben wrote that, as the film "keep[s] throwing in one desperate gag after another, [it] only make[s] you realize how much you miss original writer John Hughes's ability to infuse cruel jokes with an affectionate touch and the loopy chemistry between Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo as the original Griswolds. Chase and D'Angelo make brief appearances in the new Vacation, but it's too little and too late to salvage it...Vacation can't possibly stand on its own, because so much of the plot exists for the sole purpose of echoing the 1983 original. Thus, even though Rusty works as a pilot for a bargain airline and could easily get the whole family cheap flights from their Chicago home to Walley World in Southern California, he decides they should drive there, because that's what happened in the first film. He acquires a ridiculous vehicle for the trip, because that's all that was available on short notice, which is (more or less) what happened to his father. Named the 'Tartan Prancer,' the minivan is described as 'the Honda of Albania,' and its numerous quirks, including an electrical plug for hybrid operation that resembles a corkscrew, supply a steady stream of sight gags. As in the first film, the family gets 'tagged' by vandals, robbed of all their money, stranded in the desert, and abused by a local at the Grand Canyon. They keep encountering the same pretty girl along their route, but this time she's a teenager named Adena (Catherine Missal), and it's James, the elder son, she has eyes for. The younger son, Kevin (Steele Stebbins), is both too young and too obnoxious to attract female attention, and Rusty's flirtation with this film's 'Ferrari Girl' (Hannah Davis, in the role originated by Christie Brinkley) is mercifully brief."
From Olive Films comes the family adventure Roar. Actually, "family adventure" makes Roar seem so much more normal than it actually is; at its core, the film documents as pure and unadulterated a slice of madness as I have ever seen. Ostensibly, Roar aims to present a loving, Disney-esque study of the relationship between man and lions, watching as a group of lions bonds with a young family (Noel Marshall, Tippi Hedren, John Marshall, Jerry Marshall, and Melanie Griffith) in the African wilderness. Here's the thing, though: Noel Marshall was a noted big-cat enthusiast in real life - if you haven't seen these terrifying photos of the Marshall-Hedren-Griffith family home, then prepare to be amazed - and he was so committed to capturing this unique union on film that he sank more than $17 million into the project over an eleven-year period. It's a testament to Roar's singular brand of lunacy that an amateur filmmaker getting more than a decade and a healthy budget to shoot his glorified home movie is one of the least insane things about it. No, in addition to the comically extended shooting schedule and financial drain, Marshall and the entire cast and crew found themselves quite literally at the mercy of an actual lion pride. You watch these extended sequences of lions "playfully" chasing the family around the home, and what should be whimsical and fun takes on the tenor of the most well-produced snuff film you've ever seen. Minus Noel Marshall, everyone seems terrified of the big cats, and with good reason: at some point, all of the actors were mauled or otherwise injured by the animals (yes, even Hedren and Griffith found themselves grievously wounded, with the teenaged Griffith needing serious facial reconstructive surgery after an attack). Not that the lions discriminated - I suspect the shooting schedule dragged on for so long because the crew kept getting attacked (Jan De Bont, the cinematographer of Die Hard and the director of Speed, was literally scalped by a lion). You watch Roar, and the film achieves the exact opposite effect that it intended; instead of feeling the commune between man and nature, you want to stay the hell away from these frightening beasts for as long as possible.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "most of Roar's fairly brief running time details a comedy of errors of sorts, as Hank (Noel Marshall) lives in peace with a houseful of (large) felines, helped by his native African acolyte Mativo (Kyalo Mativo). Hank's family is due at his reserve, and he and Mativo take off to retrieve them from a bus station, but unbeknownst to Hank and Mativo, wife Madeleine (Tippi Hedren) and her three children (Melanie Griffith, John Marshall, and Jerry Marshall) have already arrived and basically cross paths with the two others, getting back to the big cast infested house first, completely unaware of the 'situation.' That then devolves into one of the film's longer set pieces, where Madeleine and the kids repeatedly try to escape from the cats, while Hank has his own issues trying to get back to where he started from. This is a loose knit story arc at best, and it only fitfully supports what is the film's real drawing card, the often phenomenal scenes of (as the film itself calls them) 'untrained' animals going about their business. That gives a visceral intensity to many scenes where the human actors seem to be behaving in a rather cavalier manner around these beasts of the wild. That may also be why it turned out to be the humans who were the real threatened species on this shoot, while (per that great Humane Society imprimatur) no animals were harmed."
About the only problem I have with Lionsgate and A24's docudrama The End of the Tour is the framing device. The film deals with, in part, the media tour that the late author David Foster Wallace (played here by Jason Segel) found himself on after the unexpected success of his landmark 1996 novel Infinite Jest (which, for those readers with the intellectual fortitude, yields an experience like few others - it's the literary masterwork of contemporary American fiction), but screenwriter Donald Margulies and director James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now) felt the need to buttress this experience (based on David Lipsky's nonfiction memoir Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself) with footage of Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) reacting to Wallace's suicide in 2008. For the purposes of the main narrative - Lipsky and Wallace's testy interactions during the Midwestern leg of the Infinite Jest press tour - we don't need the 2008 material, AND it's also a total biopic cliché - our protagonist thinks of a dead associate, and his mind drifts into the past, blah, blah, blah. I harp on this oversight because everything that falls between the framing narrative is top-notch, a intimate, acutely detailed study of not just Wallace, but of the creative passions and challenges that accompany real genius. If anyone deserved that "G" label, it was the polymath Wallace, whose writing could skip from genre to genre and emotion to emotion (with maybe a couple hundred footnotes in between), and what's so remarkable about Segel's performance is that you never doubt his intellectual prowess. Yes, certain critics have taken Segel to task over his approximation of Wallace's physicality (although as an amateur Wallace scholar and a big fan, I can tell you it looks like Segel absorbed hours of Wallace's on-screen interviews), but the bracing intelligence he brings to the part provides its own frisson. Segel is a guy, after all, who got his start playing goofballs and Average Joes, but here, he captures the offhand brilliance of Wallace, the way the author would wend down intellectual digressions in a way that looked free-associative but was actually anything but. You never see Segel working, and his palpable intellect gooses Eisenberg to bring out some of his best work. The film version of Lipsky is deeply ambivalent about his interview subject - he's just talented enough to idolize Wallace while resenting him for possessing depths he'll never have - and that uncertainty gives Eisenberg nice shades of anger and regret to play instead of just shouldering the Boring Protagonist role. Wallace and Lipsky make for such an interesting pairing: I was reminded of Louis Malle's My Dinner with André in The End of the Tour clear focus and love of the spoken word, of the intellectual discourse. Trim off about five minutes, and you'd have a nearly perfect movie.
Finally, Magnolia Pictures is bringing Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville's documentary Best of Enemies to Blu-ray this week. You can't be blamed for missing this one in its first run; its subject matter is the anti-sexy, a chronicle of the ten televised debates - and their various behind-the-scenes intrigues - between conservative writer and pundit William F. Buckley and noted liberal activist and author Gore Vidal that ABC aired during the 1968 Democratic and Republican Conventions. However, Gordon and Neville have crafted one of the year's best films, a sharp, accessible, and very funny look at warring egos and media manipulation. Using skillful editing and a mix of current talking-head interviews (including the great Dick Cavett) and archival footage, Gordon and Neville show how ABC, in an effort to jazz up their presentation of the conventions, orchestrated the Buckley-Vidal debates despite (or, perhaps, because of) both men's well-known antipathy for the other: while partisan squabbling has become de rigueur today, viewers in 1968 had never seen public figures rip into one another with the kind of rhetorical force that Buckley and Vidal evinced. Heck, it's still a bit of a shock to watch the two men snipe back and forth. I can't stress how much both men hated each other, so their already spirited exchanges become even more uncomfortable/awesome when, say, Vidal calls Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" or Buckley calls Vidal a "queer" and threatens to deck him on live television. Yet like year's wonderful Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself, Best of Enemies doesn't exist simply to humble our sacred media figures (I'm thinking of the hilarious bits in Life Itself where Siskel and Ebert go off-book and verbally excoriate one another). It's a stealth character study of two men who disliked each other so much because they were probably too much alike for comfort - Buckley and Vidal were upper-crust, East-Coast intellectuals, and the only thing they regarded higher than being right was their own sense of self-worth (Kelsey Grammer and John Lithgow read Buckley and Vidal's writings, respectively, and they do a terrific job of conveying the two men's roiling egos and raging insecurities). Ultimately, Best of Enemies plays like a cautionary tale that we didn't heed; you look at Buckley and Vidal's vicious tête-à-tête, and you see the birth of the current highly politicized media war. Who needs civility when you're on the attack?