Since I love The Princess Bride so much....
Okay, quick question: What is one characteristic of a really gripping, extremely well-crafted story? Details. Would we believe that Star Wars took place in a galaxy far, far away if Tatooine didn't have two suns? Would we appreciate the tale of David and Goliath as much if we didn't know that David gathered five stones from the riverbed or tried to wear King Saul's hopelessly-too-large armor? We wouldn't understand Maycomb County as well without knowing the little things Scout Finch takes for granted. The Arables' kitchen smells of "coffee, bacon, damp plaster and wood smoke from the stove", providing us an idea of exactly what Fern's family's house is like. That we learn J.C. Hogan's wife left him in 1978, because it's referenced by him and Mule Skinner as "the year the Chicago Daily News went belly-up" and "the year the Cowboys beat the Broncos in the Super Bowl 27 to 10." (Further wonderful detail is that neither of these tidbits help Father Tim understand what year his friends are talking about in the least.)
Well, that's just barely scratching the surface of what I mean here, only covering George Lucas, the Bible, Harper Lee and Jan Karon. This post is concerned with the brilliant detailing of the satirical abridgment of S. Morgenstern's satirical history of the Florinese royalty known as The Princess Bride, written by William Goldman. First off, as the narrator highlights, the full title is The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, he points out that you've got to love somebody who calls his own book a classic before it's been published or anybody else has had a chance to read it. And you do, just for the audacity of the deed. Furthermore, the extensive, extremely dry and entirely fictitious prologue explaining how the book came to be abridged is a masterstroke of Sicilian-level genius. Anyway, there's so many wonderful little details hidden all throughout the prologue and the book itself; creating an entirely plausible world that a lot of people would love to visit. I mean, the very first sentence has a hook that fuels a ferocious desire to find out what happens next: "This is my favorite book in all the world; though I have never read it." (Jaw drops in admiration for his writing skill. Isn't that just a wonderful beginning?) I named this blog after a passage from the sword-fight scene. So, much like the one about the little-noticed details of "The Big Green", this post takes a look at the terrific details fromThe Princess Bride(the book version.)
This sentence - the writer casting himself as the narrator describing his childhood - could have totally been written about my growing-up: "Basketball, baseball, marbles - I could never get enough. I wasn't even very good at them, but give me a football and an empty playground and I could invent last-second comebacks that would bring tears to your eyes." And he continues in the next paragraph with this: "I seemed busy, busy, busy, but I suppose, if pressed I would have admitted that, for all my frenzy, I was very much alone." And that's just on the first page!
That the narrator's radio is a Zenith; and it was a fall Friday in 1941 when he caught pneumonia, trying to catch the Northwestern-Notre Dame football game over the airwaves. And that his father was a Florinese immigrant whose English always stayed ridiculously immigranty; he worked all his life as the number-two-chair barber at the least popular barber shop in Highland Park, Illinois. His father died in that barber chair, and it took an hour for the number-one-chair barber to realize this because he thought the corpse was taking a nap.
S. Morgenstern had a head shaped like a giant balloon.
"Does it have any sports in it?" "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and pain and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truth. Passion. Miracles." "Sounds okay."
I've always read the prologue in the voice of The Wonder Years's narrator. Only recently I just realized that's probably because Fred Savage plays the Grandson in the movie.
THE BOOK -
All these side notes about who the most beautiful woman in the world was and why she yielded that position...the first sentence of the actual book begins: "The year Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette." Can you get a much more fairy-tale opening than that, not using the whole "Once upon a time..." cliche?
Anyway, Annette worked in Paris for the Duke and Duchess de Guiche, and it's not long before the Duke discovers that someone extraordinary is polishing the pewter. The Duchess notices this, and begins studying Annette for some flaw in her character(or appearance would be close enough). Annette's Achilles heel is chocolate, which the Duchess plants in strategic places all throughout the castle, and Annette grows from delicate to whopping inside a season. That takes care of the whole "most beautiful woman in the world" thing. She marries the pastry chef afterwards and they both ate a lot until old age claimed them.
And when Buttercup was ten, the most beautiful woman was an Indian woman, the daughter of a Bengali tea merchant, with skin of such dusky perfection unseen for eighty years. Then smallpox came, and that took care of that.
And when Buttercup was fifteen, the most beautiful woman was Adela of Sussex-on-the-Thames, who had 104 suitors, and one night worried her perfect complexion away over the fact that she would not always be young and beautiful.
All these wonderful asides to the audience(but of course, this was before audiencial asides.) It confuses you so much as to when this story takes place, but at the same time adds to the heightened realism. (This was before ulcers. And before Voltaire. After mirrors, obviously. They had acres then, and arguments too. It was before Europe, but after Paris. And after taste, too, but only just. This was before glamour. It came after stew, but so does everything else; and long after spats. This was after taxes, but they were here even before stew. This was after blue jeans, which were invented considerably earlier than most people suppose. It was just after America, but long after fortunes. It was long, long after hairdressers. This was before trains, but well after carpenters. It was before emergency wards, but not before doctors, although in Turkey doctors hadn't started setting bones yet - that was the domain of the milkmen. Golf balls were around already, but this was before "The Lady or the Tiger", remember.) And the game of golf, as everyone knows, was invented by Brandobras Took, the only hobbit ever big enough to ride a horse, slicing off a goblin's head, which sailed through the air for a hundred yards before dropping into a rabbit hole. The game spread at some unknown time from the Shire to Scotland, and then to the rest of the world. (Okay, I went off-topic there and brought in some Lord of the Rings elements....back to Goldman now.)
The parenthetical statistics given at every available opportunity: (There have only been eleven perfect complexions in India since accurate recording began; Adela Terrell had 104 suitors; Buttercup's parents were having their 33rd spat of the day when the Count and Countess drive up. Originally "jealousy" was a term solely relating to plants, which is how the term "green with jealousy" came to be, and Buttercup's current case was a close fourth on the all-time list. There have been five great kisses since its accidental invention in 1642 B.C., and while no one completely agrees on the exact formula, they all agreed that those five deserved perfect marks.) There are far more parenthetical statistics given throughout the rest of the novel, but as it's taken me a couple months to re-read it again for the sixth(ish? Possibly more) time, I forgot to keep a lookout for stats past this point.
The Countess settled permanently in Paris at some point to indulge her passion for fabrics and ran the only salon of international consequence, naturally.
Buttercup's parents did not exactly have what could be called a happy marriage; as all they ever dreamed about was leaving each other, but they died within a week apart. Her father is described as "a tiny mutt of a man, a terrible farmer, and not much of a husband either." Her mother was "a gnarled shrimp of a woman, a terrible cook and an even more limited housekeeper."
After the wonderfully odd cow-feeding scene, Buttercup spends almost three full pages thinking about the Countess and Westley and how people don't look at each other that way because of their teeth. And then at dawn the next morning she tells him that she loves him, in one page-long paragraph, words rushing out incoherently in an onslaught of emotion, and then does the bravest thing she'd ever done; looking him straight into his eyes. And what is his response? "He closed the door in her face. Without a word. Without a word."
Buttercup's hair is the "color of autumn", which is a great way of expressing it - but I'm still having trouble seeing her as a redhead.
Another great hallmark of William Goldman's writing, specifically this book, but also in a couple of his others, is the use of repetition, and then snapping into an analogy that makes you pause and think a minute before going on to the next sentence. Prince Humperdinck was shaped like a barrel, with a big barrel chest and big barrel thighs, and he walked like a crab sideways so that if he'd wished to be a ballet dancer he would have been doomed to an endless life of miserable frustration.
Sixty-six pages have been edited out of Chapter Two, The Groom, because they were irrelevant history of the Florinese monarchy. The resulting chapter is about three and a half pages long.
Queen Bella was shaped like a gumdrop, colored like a raspberry and was easily the most beloved person in the kingdom; but as the only stepmothers Humperdinck had ever heard of were evil, he always called her "Evil Stepmother", or "E.S." for short.
The chapter names and lengths, all choppy and mixed up from the typical formula. Prologue: 26 pages, Chapter One, The Bride: 23 pages. Chapter Two, The Groom: Three pages. Chapter Four, The Courtship: Seven pages. Chapter Four, Preparations: Zero pages, as it was entirely deleted. Okay, well, technically it's one page long, because the narrator has to explain why he took it out. Chapter Five, The Announcement: 92 pages long. Chapter Six, The Festivities: 52 pages long. Chapter Seven, The Wedding: 33 pages. Chapter Eight, Honeymoon: 16 pages.
Florin and Guilder have mainly stayed alive by warring near-constantly on each other. There's been the Olive War, the Tuna Fish Discrepancy(which nearly sent both nations into bankruptcy), the Roman Rift(which did send them into insolvency) and the Discord of the Emeralds, where they both got rich again by banding together and robbing everyone else within sailing distance.
Chapter Three, The Courtship, is possibly one of the best places in the book. The abridger slashed out 56 1/2 pages of packing, and leaves in these brilliant two paragraphs: "At 8:23 there seemed to be every chance of a lasting alliance forming between Florin and Guilder. At 8:24 the two countries were very close to war." Which is followed by three pages describing exactly what happened in those sixty seconds and the aftermath, and then by far the best courtship passage ever written in all literature.
From a narrative point of view, in all 105 pages of Chapter Four, Preparations, nothing happens.So it can basically be summed up by the sentence, "What with one thing and another, three years passed." (Buttercup is made Princess of Hammersmith, since Humperdinck can't possibly marry a commoner, and is trained in the art of being a princess. Also, both her parents die during this time.)
Vizzini is described as "dark". Sorry, but that just doesn't work....not complexion-wise, at least. Maybe he meant that as far as character goes? Also, he has the gentlest face, almost angelic.
The Cliffs of Insanity were not actually impossible to scale; two men had been known to climb them in the last century alone.
Inigo was raised by his father Domingo in the small village of Arabella in the mountains of Central Spain high above the city of Toledo, and he learned to cook from the age of six.
Yeste the swordmaker's fame grows so great that though he raises his price by twelve times there's still a line of royalty waiting for three years to obtain one of his weapons. He is very heavy; he has the only fat thumbs in Madrid.
Inigo searches for the six-fingered man all over Spain and Portugal; France, Italy, Germany, the whole of Switzerland, all of the Balkans, most of Scandinavia, he'd visited the Florinese and the natives of Guilder, gone into Russia and down step by step throughout the entire Mediterranean.
Perhaps thirty men in all the world were the equal of Inigo when he fought left-handed; perhaps as many as fifty, perhaps as few as ten.
Turkish hospital records list a total of eleven children who weighed over twenty pounds at birth, and ninety-five more between fifteen and twenty.
In the book, the Battle of Wits takes place at night. Vizzini always carries a knapsack around with him, and out of this he takes out a small handkerchief on which he then places two goblets of wine, along with some cheese and some apples.
And this exchange: "I cannot compete with you physically, and you are no match for my brains." "You are that smart?" "There are no words to contain all my wisdom. I am so cunning, so crafty and clever, so filled with deceit, guile and chicanery, such a knave, so shrewd, cagey as well as calculating, as diabolical as I am vulpine, as tricky as I am untrustworthy....well, I have told you that there have not been words invented yet to explain how great my brain is, but let me put it this way: the world is several million years old and several billion people have at one point or another trod upon it, but I, Vizzini the Sicilian, am, speaking with pure candor and modesty, the slickest, sleekest, sliest and wiliest man who has yet come down the pike."
Humperdinck's four whites were snowy, tireless giants, twenty hands high. He rode them all four at a time, bareback, leading the other three at full gallop, leaping from one to another at mid-stride so that none of them would have to bear his great bulk past the tiring point. Very clever, really.
"You think this is a trap, then?" the Count asked. "I always think everything is a trap until proven otherwise," the Prince answered. "Which is why I'm still alive."
The way the narrator slices into Morgenstern's criticism of his wife's criticism about deleting the reunion scene.
The largest known fire swamp in the world is, of course, a day's drive from Perth. It's over twenty-five miles square and completely impenetrable. The Florin-Guilder Fire Swamp is barely a third of that size, and nobody knows whether it's impenetrable or not.
Buttercup is 18 when this story begins, when the Count and Countess visit and she realizes she loves Westley and he sails for America, etc. What with one thing and another, three years pass, so she's 21 now. Based on their conversation about nightmares heading into the Fire Swamp, Westley is somewhere between 21 and 23 years old.
Nobody had ever explained to the cook of the Revenge the difference between table salt and cayenne pepper until Westley took the trouble, much to the Dread Pirate Roberts' relief.
Of course, he wasn't really the Dread Pirate Roberts; no, his full name was Felix Raymond Ryan, who inherited the ship from Cummerbund, who inherited it from Clooney, who was first mate to the original Dread Pirate Roberts, who had been retired somewhere between fifteen and twenty years by then and was living like a king in Patagonia.
It took them seven hours to walk through and get out of the Fire Swamp, and that first hour was by far the easiest. However, those following six hours are irrelevant to this story, so they're passed over in a sentence. WHAT. A. DAY. Whew....
Chapter Six, The Festivities is pretty much about just that; going on for 44 (deleted) pages as Humperdinck grows more interested and mannerly towards Buttercup. Then in a handful of quick flashbacks Morgenstern gets back to the real story. Inigo hates the Thieves Quarter; everyone is so big and dangerous and muscular; and he looked like a skinny Spanish guy it might be fun to rob. We also miss a six-page soliloquy from Inigo about fleeting glory.
A full page of elaboration on a three-word sentence(those seem to be the most mysterious and powerful of all sentence structures, don't they?) Anyway, the three-word sentence is this: Life isn't fair.
Buttercup's nightmares in Chapter Six are horrifying. Just....terrifying and awful.
Count Rugen has spent eleven years constructing The Machine, which appears to be an great conglomeration of soft-rimmed cups of infinitely varied sizes, together with some glue and a dial and a lever.
The average Florinese male lives to about 65, and the Count sucked away ten years of Westley's life during the week that Yellin was assembling his Brute Squad.
The narrator's retelling of the moment he learned that Westley died while Humperdinck lived. "I buried my head into the pillow and never cried like that again, not once to this day. I could almost feel my heart emptying onto my pillow. I guess the most amazing thing about crying is that when you're in it, you think it'll go on forever, but it never really lasts as long as you think. Not in terms of real time. In terms of real emotions, it's worse than you think, but not by the clock."
Max had married Valerie eighty years ago when they were both at Miracle School, she was a potion ladler, not a witch; but at that time every miracle man had to have a witch, so he called her one in public since she didn't mind, and she had learned enough of the witch trade over the years to pass herself off as authentic under pressure. In the old days, before Max was fired, the hut was where they tried experiments...and now it was their home. When Inigo and Fezzik bring Westley in, it's almost midnight, and Max was in the middle of reading a very-well-written article on eagle's claws. Valerie is described in the "Humperdinck! Humperdinck! Humperdinck!" speech as "an ancient tiny fury". (Isn't that just a wonderful description?)
The narrator clips about twenty pages and thirteen hours' worth of unnecessary action while Max and Valerie are concocting the miracle pill, as it was all too "Wizard of Oz"-like, apparently.
Switching swiftly back and forth minute-by-minute describing what action is taking place simultaneously all throughout the castle in Chapter Eight, The Honeymoon.
In the book, the wedding is performed by the Archdean(as opposed to the movie's Impressive Clergyman). His full amount of speaking lines: "Mawidge. Mawidge-" (Interrupted by Humperdinck) "Mawidge is a dweam wiffin a dweam...the dweam of wuv wapped wiffin the gweater dweam of everwasting west. Eternity is our fwiend, wemember that, and wuv wiw fowwow you fowever. (Interrupted again) I'm not there yet. (Interrupted by a now-furious Prince) Man and wife. You're man and wife."
This is the narrator's ending: "That's Morgenstern's ending, a "Lady or the Tiger" type of effect(this was before "The Lady or the Tiger", remember). Now, he was a satirist, so he left it that way, and my father, I guess I realized too late, was a romantic, so he ended it another way. Well, I'm an abridger, so I'm entitled to a couple ideas of my own. Did they make it? Was the pirate ship there? You can answer it for yourself, but for me, I say yes it was. And yes, they got away. And they got their strength back and had their share of adventures and more than their share of laughs. But that doesn't mean I think they had a happy ending, either. Because, in my opinion anyway, they squabbled a lot, and Buttercup lost her looks eventually, and one day Fezzik lost a fight and some hot-shot kid whipped Inigo with a sword and Westley was never able to really sleep sound because of Humperdinck maybe being on the trail. I'm not trying to make this a downer, understand. I really do believe that true love is the greatest thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpy-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."
This is how I spend my weekends when snowbound by sleet, snow and negative wind chill. It was a fun project that took quite a while, recording all these little bits....I wonder if I could make an essay or speech based off it somehow? It worked for fairy tales...
If you've never READ the book before...well, hopefully this didn't spoil it too much. But you really should, you'd enjoy it. But as LaVar Burton always used to say, "Hey, don't take my word for it..."
It's a snowy day here in January, and as Sunny Day would have said, "It looks like a winter wonderland!" And with the ranking of Pixar movies and the NHL's Winter Classic both happening recently, that naturally led to reminiscing about the "Backyard Sports" video games, and a fake-news post about what they might be up to now, sort of like this post somebody wrote about the Wishbone cast. (This BuzzFeed article totally applies to my life, haha.) "There are those friends you've known forever and talk to nearly constantly. And there are those that you don't hear from often, but are still in contact with. Then there are the type that just seemed like they fell off the face of the earth, and you wonder, "What happened to them, anyway?" The last option is why we decided to catch up with the Backyard Kids and see how they were faring in their young-adult lives. Everybody remembers Sunny Day, the polished, loquacious announcer of the neighborhood ball games. She stopped calling the games just after the skateboard craze to focus on school and went on to major in broadcasting at Tech State University, serving as radio voice of the Fighting T-Squares' hockey games. She could not be reached for comment on this story, but sent a polite email saying that she was very busy developing a TV series about Spy Fox. Her longtime color commentator, Vinnie the Gooch, can often be found hanging out at Mark's Burger Joint, where Dante Robinson and Kimmy Eckman work, or riding motorcycles with Tony Delvecchio. They hung out a lot together in high school, and more or less graduated. Angela didn't have this problem at all, she took valedictorian honors her senior year, giving her speech with her tassel constantly flopping into her face. She retaliated at the cap by throwing one of her fireballs with it afterwards, spinning it neatly into the aisle where she picked it up on the way out, almost tripping over it. "Ricky Johnson continues to play soccer and football in his spare time, and also took up skateboarding. He now works at Mom and Pop's Skate Shop. "Annie Frazier is currently working as a cashier at Weasel Barn while she is studying for her bachelor's in education, she stated that she will be interning at Scheffler Elementary next fall. "There are a lot of the kids now in coaching; Jocinda Smith is coach of the Hammers basketball team, Stephanie Morgan leads the Hornets in the Backyard Baseball League, Chuck Downfield is staying involved in the gridiron action as an assistant for the Bombers, Ricky and Annie both coach soccer, for the Wombats and Fishes, respectively, and Buddy Cheque is is trying to teach the Polar Bears how to play hockey out on Duksana Pond. Some moved away over the years, like Pablo Sanchez. "He just kind of disappeared one day, nobody's exactly sure what happened to him. We sure miss him, he was a good guy, and a fantastic athlete," said Kiesha Phillips. "The Webber twins were going after careers in pro tennis last I heard. They were great people, even if I did have trouble telling Ashley from Sidney. Mikey Thomas moved during fifth grade." According to Frazier, a lot of people attended Billy Jean Blackwood and Marky Du Bois' wedding last summer, music was provided by the Khan brothers' band. "It was fun to see everybody again, great to get to catch up and see how friends were doing." . Always known as Jabberjaw growing up, a trait for which most people tried to avoid her, Gretchen Hasselhoff's bubbly personality is now put to use in her job as a tour guide at Shark Belly Shores amusement park. "Oh, yeah, I haven't heard from a bunch of people in a couple years, well, more like three or four, actually, but, anyway, there's Facebook and Twitter and all that stuff. The Boss is in management at our sister company Walter Weasel World, actually....it's a pain sometimes, but what're you gonna do, you know what I mean? "Kenny and that science-y kid put their super-smart brains together and built more robots like Mr. Clanky, pretty awesome if you ask me, that company is probably gonna get super rich, and here we were growing up with the original! "Course, not everybody's doing quite as well. Kimmy sort of got into trouble a few years ago, she's working at that restaurant in town, I think. And there was Ronny's whole deal..." The field that once was Eckman Acres is now mostly a flower garden, and Dirt Yards is no more, briefly becoming the Paveway and now housing the Squirrel Creek Shopping Center. This well-documented construction is still looked upon with disfavor by many. Pete Wheeler works as a groundskeeper for the Parks Department, mowing the grass, mainly. He's set a local record as the only person to get a speeding ticket on a Snapper lawn tractor. The police officer who gave him that ticket? None other than the Mad Dog herself, Lisa Crockett. The gang occasionally gets together for a pickup soccer or baseball game, but those times are rare; everyone is busy going their separate ways and with their lives. Some have kids, some are in college, some have done well, others have had harder times. But they've all been part of some great memories, and provided countless thousands of hours of highlight clips on the Junior Sports Network and YouTube. We can't let their performances on the field define their entire lives, though; instead they ought to have a chance to be ordinary average citizens of the community."
...Okay...I'm gonna try this. A ranking of Pixar's films from the absolute, ultimate, surpassing-all-other-movies peak of computer-generated cinematic animation excellence, to the merely very good(well, okay, there are a few exceptions that can be labeled "very poor"). Updates to come as new films are released. They started, of course, with Toy Story in 1995, followed by A Bug's Life in 1998, Toy Story 2in 1999, Monsters, Inc. in 2001, Finding Nemo came along in 2002, The Incredibles burst onto the scene in 2004, Cars fired its engine in 2006, Ratatouille in 2007, WALL-E took orbit in 2008, Upwas in 2009, Toy Story 3 FINALLY came to theaters in 2010, much to high school and college students' delight; Cars 2 was in 2011, Brave in 2012 and Monsters University was the Class of 2013. These are just my opinions, feel free to argue and lobby for different arrangements if you wish. And if I included all the wonderful quotes and cross-references and everything, this would be a 400-page Word doc, so I'm going to (try) to limit myself to just one from each movie. Although I'm groaning like Andy, "...Just ONE?" They make us laugh a lot, they make us cry often, and they make us think. There's sarcasm and frustration, loneliness and pleasant times, races, fights, sharks, disguises... I'm thinking if I have time, I'll gonna have to whip up a bunch of individual posts. Okay, here goes: 14 - Brave - A frizzy-haired princess named Merida outshoots a bunch of would-be suitors and thus escapes being forced to marry somebody(or anybody) for now, accidentally turning her mother Queen Elinor into a bear somehow involving an enchanted cake while trying to get her to understand her point of view. A real bear that chomped off her father's leg is eventually killed and her mother returns to her human self after the curse is repealed by repairing a tapestry. It's a beautiful film; as far as the scenery goes, and it has a brilliant score or soundtrack or whatever you call the musical section, all Irish-Scottish and all, but there's no plot. It's clear as a diamond where this is going in the first ten minutes, and you can't understand a single thing anyone's saying. And even worse, there aren't even any good one-liners to redeem it even slightly.Grade - 64, D- 13 - Ratatouille - A culinary-minded Parisan rat teaches a young restaurant employee how to cook. The evil owner of the restaurant nearly kills the rat and fires the boy, but doesn't; and the unpleasant food critic is won over, mice in the kitchen is unsanitary, and everyone winds up living happily ever after. Pllyeahhh. It was the first Pixar movie released after the takeover by Disney, and it feels like a cheap, badly-made Disney CGI-animated flick. And the soundtrack is in French.Grade - 64, D- 12 - Finding Nemo - (I've got a feeling this will be an unpopular selection for this spot.) After his wife and most of their eggs are killed by a barracuda, clownfish Marlin is a little bit overprotective of his son Nemo. Okay, a lot overprotective, the sort of dad that makes Danny Tanner look ordinary by comparison. Nemo explores out to the drop-off his first day of school, getting picked up by a Sydney dentist named P. Sherman and installed in the office fishtank. Marlin sets out across the Great Barrier Reef to find his son, meeting a neurotic blue fish named Dory, who suffers from "short term memory loss", or perhaps has anterograde amnesia, a condition where new memories can't be formed. Nemo escapes from the tank, Marlin and Dory eventually find him after a host of adventures, and thanks to a group of sea turtles, they're reunited. This is a very serious movie, more aimed at parents than kids. As such, I can't really appreciate it as well as ought to be appreciated. Also, I don't really know (or care) much about fish and ocean wildlife. Though I do like the Australian accents. Quote: The Tank Gang's incantation of "Sharkbait! Ooh ha ha!" makes a great volleyball rally cry. Grade - 74, C
11 - Monsters, Inc. - A gigantic 8-foot tall monster named James P. Sullivan and his small green eyeball pal Mike Wazowski are scarers at Monsters, Inc., the city's biggest energy-collection company. And they're some of the best at terrifying children, which is how their world gets energy. It's a high-risk job, since children are toxic, but...well, somebody's gotta do it. A little 3-year-old human girl named Boo somehow gets trapped in the monster world, and Mike and Sulley have to take care of her and foil the schemes of Sulley's rival scarer Randall and CEO Mr. Waternoose. No one particular shining quotes, but many, many, wonderful Billy Crystal one-liners in response to something somebody else said. Grade - 78, C because of the rushed pacing. The entire plot takes about 36 hours from the start to the plot's climax. Great music, though.10 - The Incredibles - This is the only Pixar movie to not have the Pizza Planet truck somewhere inside, but it does have a cameo of Doc Hudson. Anyway, it has loads of superhero references scattered throughout; the story is of the family of retired superheroes Bob and Helen Parr and their children Violet, Dash and Jack-Jack. They have to band together to thwart a real villain's schemes, and hopefully not kill each other in the process. It's about the importance of family, even if they are hard to deal with sometimes. Quote: "I know, I know....freeze." Frozone rolls his eyes and then makes the police officers arresting him into ice sculptures during a vigilante mission with Mr. Incredible. Grade - 84, B 9 - Cars 2 - After winning his fourth Piston Cup, Lightning McQueen returns for the offseason in Radiator Springs, only to get drawn into the World Grand Prix, a transcontinental race featuring some of the best racers in the world, including sports car Jeff Gorvette, Brazillian and Japanese Le Mans cars, a French rally car and Italian F1 champ. Meanwhile, Mater accidentally gets drawn into a world of espionage working with British agents Finn McMissile and Holley Shiftwell. It's not perfect, but it's fun. And there's a ton of great music. Quote: Mater is talking to Holley: "For a second there, I thought you were trying to fix my dents." She says she was. "Well, no thank you. I don't get these dents buffed, pulled, filled or painted by nobody. They're way too valuable." She expresses surprise. "I come by each one of 'em with my best friend Lightning McQueen. I don't fix these. I want to remember these dents forever." Grade - 87, B
8 - Toy Story 2 - Woody's arm is ripped while playing a little too rough, leaving him at the house while Andy goes to Cowboy Camp. Trying to save a fellow toy from a yard sale, he gets picked up by Al of Al's Toy Barn, who intends to ship Woody and a bunch of other collectibles to a toy museum in Japan. Once in Al's apartment, Woody discovers he was the star of an early 50's TV show called Woody's Roundup, and begins to get to know his fellow castmates Bullseye the horse, Jessie the cowgirl and Stinky Pete the prospector. Meanwhile, Buzz, Slinky, Rex, Mr. Potato Head and Hamm all go on a rescue mission to save Woody and get everyone home again before Andy gets back. The weakest of the trilogy, but still, that's a pretty high bar to set. More of the favorite characters we love, and it features Geri the cleaner from the chess game in the short before A Bug's Life(also appearing are Flik and Heimlich, and Al's car looks an awful lot like Flo). Quote: Woody: "You're right, Prospector....I can't stop Woody from growing up. But I wouldn't missi t for the world." Grade: 87, B
7 - WALL-E- I've only seen this once, but it was amazing. It's almost a completely silent film as far as dialogue goes, yet it's so powerful and compelling... In 2805, Earth has been vacated for centuries due to toxic levels of pollution and trash, with (apparently) only one trash-compactor robot left and a cockroach. Meanwhile, humans are living in spaceshipssuch as the Axiom and are basically controlled by robots, as they've lost the ability to think for themselves and regressed mentally to an infant state while becoming morbidly obese. This lone WALL-E-class robot finds a little plant growing, which is later found and captured by EVE. She and WALL-E return to the Axiom, the Captain decides to turn the ship around to Earth again, which the Autopilot refuses to comply with, having previously been ordered to never return. Eventually humans repopulate the Earth, and the seedling grows into a mighty tree(that possibly could be the one on Ant Island). Grade - 94, A
6 - Monsters University - Mike Wazowski has always known the fringes; not quite cool enough to hang with or scary enough to be admired. When he goes off to college at Monsters U, well....it's college. So it's pretty awful. In fact, he gets expelled after his freshman year. Sulley coasts through his Scaring 101 class, relying on his natural talent and family history in place of studying. He predictably flunks the course, and in a last-ditch effort to redeem himself, he teams up with a reluctant Mike as they make friends with a bunch of goofy, utterly un-scary frat guys who live in the basement of one guy's mom. Oozma Kappa surprises everyone in the Greek competition of the Scare Games, though, of course, Mike and Sulley are expelled from school and go to work in the Monsters, Inc. mail room. Captures pretty well the feel of a college campus, which is equally amazing and awesome that they could do that reasonably-accurately and still keep things clean. It doesn't end happily ever after which is great. Because life doesn't usually end that way. And sometimes you do all you can, and it still isn't quite enough. The minor characters are even better than usual(which is saying something), and the scenery is breathtaking. You kind of have to have experienced college life to fully get this movie, which captures this basic truth of campus living: College is harsh and hard to deal with. Quote: From Art when sneaking onto the lot of Monsters, Inc.: "I can't go back to jail!" Grade - 87, B
5 - A Bug's Life - A colony of ants is terrorized every season by a grasshopper gang, forced to gather food for the oppressors every year before gathering their own supply. Eccentric outcast Flik is evicted from the community for his inventions causing trouble all the time, and on his travels in the city comes across a troupe of recently-fired circus performers in a bar. Misunderstanding their role in a fight, Flik thinks they're a band of warriors, recruiting them to save the colony from the grasshoppers. This deception leads into further mishaps, leading into the climatic showdown. Quote - Rosie the black widow, looking at the Blueberries' mural of the circus bugs killing the grasshoppers: "Oh! Look at all the...beautiful...colors of the blood." There's a lot of great quotes from this movie. Grade - 95, A+
4 - Up - Carl Fredricksen knew that "Adventure was out there...somewhere." One day this quiet boy meets Ellie, a talkative and imaginative girl, and they become friends, eventually get married, and never quite have the money to go to Paradise Falls, which has been where they've wanted to go for always. Just when they're about to leave, Ellie grows ill and dies. A grieving, crabby widower now living alone in their house, one day Carl accidentally injures a construction worker, forcing a court to order him moved to a retirement home. To avoid this, and also to keep his promise to Ellie, Carl turns his house into an airship with thousands of balloons, intending to go to Paradise Falls. A young Wilderness Explorer scout named Russell is brought along by mistake, but they eventually get close and encounter a giant bird named Kevin and a talking Golden Retriever named Dug. Dug's master turns out to be Carl and Ellie's childhood hero Charles Muntz, obsessed with finding a live bird of the same type as the skeleton his reputation was ruined on. That live bird turns out to be Kevin, and so then Carl, Russell and Dug have to protect her(as Russell finds out incredulously, "Kevin's a GIRL??") from Muntz and his pack of dogs. Muntz falls to his death in a chasm, the house is left sitting at the Falls, and Carl gives Russell the "Ellie Badge", a bottle cap he'd kept all his life, which she gave him the day they met. This is just an absolutely brilliant movie, about grief, about how to go on with life, about how to grow up, so many different things. Quote: There's lots of great dialogue all through, but the best line is from Ellie: "South America...it's like America, but south!" Grade - 98, A+
3 - Cars - Lightning McQueen is a rookie headed for history: The very first first-year racer to win the Piston Cup. Blown tires ruin that opportunity, creating a tiebreaker race the next week with his two main rivals, "The King" Strip Weathers, in his last year going for one final title, and perennial runner-up Chick Hicks. He gets stranded in a little town off Route 66 called Radiator Springs, and jailed at the impound after wreaking havoc along the main street. He's sentenced to community service by repairing the road, along the way learning to slow down and enjoy the little things in life; wild times with friends, doing things for others, time with that special someone, appreciating history and learning from it. I could go into extremely in-depth detail about the whole thing, but that's certainly another post. It involves racing. It has Paul Newman, Owen Wilson, Darrell Waltrip, Bob Costas and Richard Petty in it. There's music by Rascal Flatts, Brad Paisley and Sheryl Crow. So many tiny little details all adding up into an amazing world; the tire-tracks left by the jets, the VW bugs flying around, the great dialogue, the expression of the characters. Quote: Lightning, surprised to hear Doc's voice on his radio in the tiebreaker. "..I thought you;d said you were never coming back." Doc sighs. "Well, I didn't really have much choice. Mater didn't get to say goodbye." Mater, shouting: "GOODBYE! Okay, I'm good." Grade - 100, A+
2 - Toy Story - Andy Davis' sixth birthday is next week, and his family is moving then. So his mom throws him a party a week early, which all his toys are a little nervous about. There's Woody, Andy's favorite since kindergarten, Slinky Dog, Rex the fearful dinosaur, Hamm the wisecracking piggy bank, Bo Peep and Mr. Potato Head, plus others. Andy gets a new Buzz Lightyear action figure, who quickly impresses the other toys with more gadgets than a Swiss Army knife, deposing Woody as Andy's favorite toy. Hoping to be taken on a trip to Pizza Planet, Woody attempts to knock Buzz behind the desk, but instead he falls out the window. The other toys, led by Mr. Potato Head and Hamm, accuse Woody of trying to murder Buzz and shove him out the window, too. Both toys latch onto the car, getting into a fight at the Dinoco gas station and falling out of the car, leaving them stranded. They jump into the Pizza Planet truck, but then Buzz jumps into a rocket-shaped claw machine, thinking it will take him back to his home planet, instead of aiming for Molly's stroller. Woody reluctantly follows, and they get taken by Sid Phillips. Inside Sid's house, Buzz discovers he is just a toy through a TV commercial, he and Woody becomes allies as they hatch an escape plan. All of Sid's mangled toys rise up and scare the daylights out of him, presumably changing his destructive ways. Woody and Buzz chase down the moving van by riding RC, missing the truck and falling with style into Andy's mom's car. At the new house at Christmastime, the toys listen as Molly gets a Mrs. Potato Head and Andy gets a puppy. Woody and Buzz share a nervous look, and then credits roll. This was the first full-length movie to be made completely through computer animation, and it seems impossible not to love it. My generation grew up with it; no telling how many times I've watched it. How many movies can still have merchandise constantly in production and selling 19 years after they premiere in theaters? How many movies have this much impact on culture? (The Princess Bride, It's a Wonderful Life, The Sound of Music, Star Wars, Napoleon Dynamite,and probably others.) Quote: Mr. Potato Head rearranged his face. "Look! I'm Picasso!" Hamm: "Eh...I don't get it." "You uncultured swine!" Hamm walks away. "What're you lookin' at, ya hockey puck?" Grade: 100, A+
1 - Toy Story 3 - The movie millions of high school and college students grew up waiting for. Andy's headed to college, and he's just going to take Woody and leave everyone else in the attic. The toys haven't been played with in years, starving for attention. They're okay with this plan - well, kind of. It's sad, but they're putting a brave face on things. Mom thinks the trash bag they're stored in is trash, taking it outside instead of up to the attic. Molly was donating an unwanted Barbie to Sunnyside daycare, so the gang decides to escape the trash bag and ride along with her. Woody follows and tries to explain it was all just a big mistake, but nobody really listens. Instead, they're enthralled with Sunnyside, thinking it looks perfect. Woody attempts to get back to Andy, while Buzz, Jessie, Rex, Slinky, Bullseye and the Potato Heads choose to stay. Woody is found by Bonnie, who picks him up and carries him home to her group of improv-loving toys. Sunnyside isn't quite as advertised - Lotso Huggin' Bear is a dictator, imprisoning most of Andy's dissenting toys and resetting Buzz back to his default space ranger mode. Woody learns Lotso's background story, much like with Jessie and Emily, and goes back to Sunnyside to rescue the gang. They escape, accidentally setting Buzz into Spanish mode, but he re-allies with Woody and again falls in love with Jessie, helping them. Lotso and his gang corner them in a trash truck and the fight continues to the dump, the toys resigning themselves to being burned up by an incinerator. However, at the last minute they're saved by the little green aliens, and Lotso is captured to serve as a hood ornament on a bulldozer. The gang catches a ride on another trash truck back to Andy's, where they hop into their assigned places. At the last minute, Andy decides to give them to Bonnie so they'll still be played with, they play together with all the toys in her yard for a while, and then Andy drives off to college. Quote: Andy, to Bonnie: "Now, Woody...he's been my pal for as long as I can remember. He's brave, like a cowboy should be. And kind, and smart. But the thing that makes Woody special, is he'll never give up on you...ever. He'll be there for you, no matter what." And to the toys, driving away, Andy just says, "Thanks, guys." Grade - 100, A+
