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Friday, June 26, 2015
MOVIE REVIEW
Inside Out (3D)
Sunny, Colorful Melancholy, PG-Style
From left to
right: Angry, Fear, Joy, Disgust, Sadness, in Pete Docter's animated
comedy-drama "Inside Out".
Pixar
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Friday,
June 26,
2015
Few animated films lately have been as inventive and vibrant yet as gloomy and
melancholic as the lively “Inside Out”, Pete Docter’s colorful film. I was
irritated by this multi-colored extravaganza. Never completely settled by
it.
Some strange, strange things were going on in this PG comedy-drama. The PG
rating is apt to have some of the most poisonous subliminal messaging
percolating beneath any sunny surface in an animated lark. In “Inside Out”
two women — one a “rotund” bespectacled blue woman, is labeled “Sadness”.
The other, skinny, blue-eyed and golden-toned, is named “Joy”. The
stereotype evoked by their names -- or at least the “fancied” beauty model (and
destructive) idea is reinforced: “fat” women are depressives, while skinny women
are inherently happy. It’s an overly simplistic and false mantra raised to
a stunning crescendo when Joy actually drags Sadness around on the ground by her
feet. Strange. Bizarre. Weird. I’d expect this kind of
low-down, drag-out behavior on a BDSM website. But Mr. Docter has it in
his pretty little pretty ugly PG film.
“Inside Out”, by the way, is about the synapses in your mind - those electrons
dotted all over the left and right side of your brain that govern your every
reaction, emotion, thought and mood. These neurons and impulses control
you and act before you do. (None of the impulses on display is prejudice or
hate, which would have been really interesting.) Along with sadness and
joy in “Inside Out” come anger, fear and disgust - and I often had the latter
during “Inside Out”, which becomes robotic and repetitive just before the hour
mark.
Each of these color-coded emotions bursts to life within the mind of a sullen
child, Riley, who lives in San Francisco with her parents but is homesick for
her native Minnesota. Riley pouts, she’s ill-mannered -- perhaps in part
because of the rapid onset of puberty.
For those reasons and others, Riley a a character isn’t especially befitting a
film that is only tangentially about her. Indeed, the only Riley worth a
movie stage these days is Riley Curry, daughter of NBA MVP Steph Curry, whose
Golden State Warriors basketball team rode off into the June Northern California
sunlight as NBA champions. The Riley of “Inside Out” is spoiled
and neglected, a want-away being dangled for us by the writers and director like
a carrot, though it felt more to me like stale rotten candy.
"Inside Out" for all its energy feels arrested, stunted and hollow. The
attempted sweetness of her parents feels hokey, so artificial that any sentiment
is washed away by the overbearing malaise of Riley herself, who I couldn’t feel
for. How hard could it be to connect to
Riley? Well, there’s little in the way of a bond between Riley and her parents,
save for the ice hockey she loves playing. It’s her sole source of joy.
At times sadness appears to predominate Riley -- yet there isn’t much in the way
of why. Is Riley depressed? A brat? Or merely irritated by
having to be drawn into this Pixar display or false awesomeness? Are
Riley’s parents ignoring her the way Joy constantly ignores, marginalizes and
patronizes Sadness?
Somewhere in this 99-minute package is supposed to be a lesson about
acknowledging and being in touch with the full gamut of your emotions and
expressing rather than suppressing them. Yet the message is delivered in
such a cloying, insincere way so as to be aggressively manipulative and
annoying. Nightmarish even. “Inside Out” suffocated me and made me
want to bolt the theater for fresh air. Simply put, "Inside Out" wore me
out. And I'm very energetic.
"Inside Out" spends its energy tossing around its gaiety like confetti
but its despair and spikiness torpedo the film's gush of glory and sharp animation,
which the 3D glasses didn't really enhance. Maybe Riley didn’t deserve any
Life Of Riley joy. Or something like that. What-ever. I simply didn't
have the stomach or the empathy to care. And that was long before "Inside
Out" wallowed in self-congratulatory choruses in scenes bordering on
mean-spiritedness. The exasperating scenes late on pile it high, thick and
deep.
Mr. Docter's film, which could have been very good had it sustained,
enlivened and varied its initial
staging of its ideas throughout, became a bore.
After a while absorbing “Inside Out” was like enduring a rough roller-coaster
ride. I couldn’t leave but I just wanted it to end. And finally,
thankfully -- it did.
With the voices of: Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Phyllis
Smith, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Kaitlyn Dias.
"Inside Out" is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association for
mild thematic elements and some action. Its running time is one hour and
39 minutes.
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