Toy Story
4-Disc Blu-ray 3D
DIRECTED BY: John Lasseter
WRITTEN BY: Andrew Stanton, Joss Whedon, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow
STARRING: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, John Morris, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Annie Potts, R. Lee Ermey, Laurie Metcalf
Disney*Pixar
RELEASE DATE: November 1, 2011

It feels like only yesterday that Toy Story first came out and changed the world of movies as we know them. A fully-animated feature film? Absolutely unheard of! And it almost never happened, with numerous issues putting to the test the young Pixar Animation team trying to make it. But it did happen, eventually, and computer animated movies have become a staple of modern day cinema.

The movie, for those who have somehow never seen it, follows a young boy’s collection of toys led by the once-favorite, a cowboy named Woody (Tom Hanks), who’s trying to come to terms with the boy’s impressive new favorite toy, the highly sought after Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) action figure.

This is fairly old news, but things have been a little slow lately, so why not.

As we impatiently wait for all of the MGM financial drama to be settled so that they (or someone) and New Line Cinema can deliver us The Hobbit, other movies are being set in motion to pass the time.

It’s being reported that New Line has begun development on a brand new live-action/CGI hybrid adaptation of the popular Looney Tunes character Speedy Gonzales. The studio has hired writers Alec Sokolow and Joel Cohen to pen the script. The duo started strong working on Toy Story but have since done titles like Cheaper by the Dozen, the Garfield movies, Evan Almighty, Daddy Day Camp, and the upcoming Walter the Farting Dog (I can’t WAIT to see the trailer for that bad boy).

A Serious Man – *1/2
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Lennick, Peter Breitmayer, Fred Melamed
Release date: October 31, 2009

The Coen Brothers‘ catalogue of films displays verification, in the grander scheme of things, of how meager and unimportant human life actually is. Verification also of our incompetency as humans to realize what awaits us. To quote a line from the Coens’ film No Country for Old Men, “you can’t stop what’s comin’.”

Joel and Ethan Coen love to show their characters being submissive to the realms of evil; accepting what is coming to them regardless of the outcome. The perilous paths they travel down usually have connotations resembling desperation, greed and envy, all of which can lead to death. Acting against these overt connotations becomes imperative to the characters, almost to a point where discerning them becomes a natural instinct to ensure the longevity that life offers us. By not taking any action against these explicit sins a logical story cannot bloom, leaving an audience in dismay at what they just watched.

Stiffened in the fate that causes him to question his entire being, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a middle-aged man married with two children in suburbia Minnesota circa 1967, is falling through a portal of infinite darkness, plunging full throttle into this pool of black and not possessing the slightest will of halting this bleak voyage.