Post: The Incredibles
Thursday the 1st of August, 2024, posted at bedtime.

I watched this back in January and reviewed it here but the post was lost in the great hack of ‘24. So…

I could strive to tell you something smart about a twenty-year old superhero movie other than that it intersected through my life in a string of coincidences over the last month so much so that I opted to open up my Disney account and watch it again all these years later. I could strive to have some kind of intellectual commentary this movie, or ask if it has stood up to the test of time or has competed in a film landscape of a million other more modern takes on the superhero genre. I could even strive to say something about the quality of Pixar animation, especially considering that not three months ago I was standing at the gate of their main campus in Emeryville, California snapping pictures through the fence and longing to be on the other side. I could, but rather I’ll just say that there is always going to be something timeless about a parenting story, a story about a dad in a mid-life crisis, or a story that lurks on the fringes of social commentary about the role of exceptionalism versus inclusivity. I was more drawn into this movie than I thought I would have been, again, even twenty years later (having seen it in the theatre on the big screen nearly two decades ago now.) It’s not perfect, and Moore’s Watchmen comic will always have tackled this plot in a more nuanced, adult way, but for a movie which is now known as much for the rollercoaster themed after it as for the story, it's not a bad rewatch.

Post: Inside Out 2
Saturday the 20th of July, 2024, in the morning.

We went to the theatre last night in an effort first and foremost to escape the heat into somewhere we could sit in there in an air conditioned building for two hours. I like #pixar films. I mean, a few weeks ago I was walking around Pixar Pier in Disneyland and high-fiving costumed characters, so there’s no sense in denying it, right? Those folks have clung onto the storytelling vibe that made them famous. I mean, people think it’s the computer animation aspect, but let me tell you—they are really a storytelling company with a unique animation approach: the CGI thing would have been a gimmick and it would have blipped by with less notice had a movie like Toy Story not actually been first and foremost a good story. Inside Out was a good story. As a parent, it was like, these are the feels. I went to the sequel thinking it was gonna show me the next set of feels, appropriately so because I’m now the father of a late-stage teenager and it’s all about the feels these days. So that was my bar. Me, a dad, sitting there next to my sixteen year old daughter, wondering was this story about girl bodychecking into puberty and the storytelling the swirled around that: was it handled with the care it needed? Did it feel the right vibes? And—yeah. It did. I think. It was a good story. Was I sad that the parent role was so realistically side-lined in this: minor spoiler, but the bulk of the movie takes place at a weekend hockey camp so all these things the kid is going through happen in the absence of her parents and it becomes this battle inside her own head between her classic kid-emotions and these new confusing and sometimes irrational teenager emotions who just kinda take over. And the parents—the character who I most personally related to—made a wink-wink sex joke to his wife as they sped off ditching the kid, and was then absent in the plot until the end credits. The growing up aspect didn’t quite hit me as hard because of this—and that’s fine, but it took me some time to roll that around in my brain. It is a kids movie for kids after all. My kid loved it.