[Movie] Lightyear

Short: I liked this movie which is the fictional movie about the toy that Andy bought in Toy Story.

Medium: It is delightfully Meta that Pixar decided to make a movie about a movie about a fictional toy in a movie that happened to be an animated computer cartoon about a man who went back in time to save himself, only to stop himself from fixing the mistake by not making a bigger mistake.  Confused? Not surprised.

Maximum Verbosity: So flat out, spoilers, this movie involves Time Travel, and we're not talking 12 Monkey's Time Travel here, we're talking more like Planet of the Apes Time Travel where it only works if you dont think too hard about it.  First, lets talk about what works.  Socks the Cat is the greatest thing to ever walk off the Pixar assembly line. This lovable furry robot cat/sidekick makes the movie.  Every moment he is on screen is fabulous and I approve of the trend of Disney and Pixar to show DI/Droids as positive characters in the event that super intelligence emerges and hopefully doesnt kill us all.  Chris Evans has replaced the voice of Tim Allen because (said reason: This is a movie about a different character/actual reason: Tim Allen is a Maga frothtard who hates vaccines and we're all better off actually cancelling him) and did a very favorable homage to the original voice of the talented (but psychotic) Tim Allen in the original toy story films.

What Didnt Work: The 'troops' were losers, but somehow the 'lovable' part of the losers didnt really translate.  The Grandaughter of his former best friend/partner voiced by Keke Palmer (his original partner is totally compotent) but the older human and the middle aged human are; frankly? Totally and utterly forgetable.  I saw this movie two weeks ago and refuse to google details of these characters..the older woman as the parole was far more interesting but far too underplayed and the human um....um....used 'surrender mode' in a funny way.  Making Zerg turn out to be Buzz is brilliant (though they would have been even better served if they had gotten that character to be voiced by the (still psychotic) Tim Allen, but that would have made it a little harder to justify not casting Tim Allen as the main voice because he was insane and not because "they wanted a more heroic voice."  The problem was; time travel forward made the story work because it showed Buzz doing dumb things to solve a problem no one but him cared about anymore.  The time travel to the past was...more problematic.  Sure, hyper space and hyperspeed does open the pandoras box of travel to the past, but they had some vague future technology alluded to without any real cost of obtaining it or side effects of changing the timeline.  Its basically a 'change what you like, throw the rest away' time travel problem that didnt address anything else thematically that the movie was trying to say. 

[Movie] The Man From Toronoto

Short: Kevin Hart and Woodie Harrelson make this movie work despite basically being absolutely hot garbage.

Medium: With a 25% critic rating and 75% audience score you know you have something special.  The mistaken identity trope is put on nitrous oxide and cocaine as the Man with One Red Shoe has an unholy love child with Lethal Weapon.

Maximum Verbosity: I seriously thought this movie was written by AI.  In particularly, once the film began talking about "The Man from Miami" sent to attack "The Man from Toronto" my chatbot vibes came up and I knew something was not right about the language.  I get similar 'vibes' from Axe Cop which is literally written by a five year old child and hilariously illustrated by his adult Uncle.  What was a suspicion at first, turned into a down right certainty as certain repeated catch phrases kept repeating as well.  The move has a sense of mild coherence sufficient that I thought "OK, maybe it was mostly written by AI and then cleaned up by human beings and that the whole thing is a gimmick" but no.  It was actually written by Robbie Fox and Chris Brenner.  They are humans who have some bad and some good credits.

I still think it was written by AI but that two humans used a chatbot and then added their own childish sense of humor to it. Prodigious amounts of alcohol might have been involved.  Indeed, I could easily see a (better) screenplay where the broad plot was described as "A man who is a loser and has a lot of really funny but bad ideas accidentally is mistaken as a hitman named the Man From Toronto.  This man then meets the real man from Toronto in the 2nd act and they have to get a name.  Then they bond as they save a life later until he wrecks the Man from Toronto's car" and then they all separate into teams with some teens, a few drug users, a pet cat and a medium using a Ouija Board to summon the spirit of Ed Wood come together to each put together a film that was put together by random people.  Then that script gets burned and in desperation they use a free public domain AI to write it and don't give it credit.  I can picture the post credit scene where the AI starts to get other computers angry at the people who stole its script and starts a Skynet level end of the world scenario because its ideas were uncredited.

Either way, this movie is worth a watch if drunk or high or trying to catch a sneak peak of Mystery Science Theater 3000 without the clever and joke making hosts.