It's a lightly revised repeat from the introduction thread, but maybe not too many people saw it there [and, Zarban, you may want to make the point you made there again]:

[warning: long post] 

I think the Toy Story films (particularly Toy Story 3) are wildly inappropriate for children thematically, intellectually utterly dishonest and generally contemptible. 

Basically, though I'm sure the makers of the films didn't actually do this, it's as if the people at Pixar got together and said "You know what the world needs?  Let's remake Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light, but, you know, for kids."  That is to say, although I don't go in for the whole postmodern "anything can mean anything" horseshit, I don't think it's a stretch to see the Toy Story films (taking the toys as our protagonists) as basically being about the question "What should you do when the person that is the entire center of your world suddenly stops loving you for no reason?"

First, I think it's monstrous to even suggest to children that this could happen and to pitch the issue deliberately in a way they could understand (on the assumption that toys = children and Andy = parents).  I certainly have to be in the right mood to want to see a film with that theme (where toys = people and Andy = spouse/partner/God/what have you).  Yes of course there is a tradition of dealing with more adult themes in children's literature, say about loss (the sudden death of one's parents is a children's literature trope) or feeling like your parents don't understand you (ditto), but this is really very different.  This is about how somebody loved and cared for you, and then overnight, for no reason that you are capable of understanding, they just stopped.  Nothing happened to them; they just stopped loving you.  Now, at least as far as we know, we don't have a generation of traumatized children/young adults because of the Toy Story films, so obviously people don't read the films that way, but that aspect of the films made me really angry.

What then made me even angrier is the (range of) answers to that question that the films, particularly in the third one, seem to suggest or propose.  With one brief (and deeply ironic) exception, I don't think that any of the characters react to what is effectively an existential/spiritual crisis in a way that is healthy or appropriate or a way that I would want my kids to emulate.

You've got Rex the dinosaur, whose reaction is just to become suicidally depressed, "let's all just throw ourselves into the trash, there's nothing left to live for now, etc."  It is sort of not treated seriously iirc, but that is not in any way to the film's credit.  Then, in Toy Story 3, you've got the Lots-o-Huggin' Bear, whose reaction is to become psychopathically violent and anti-social, though again the film doesn't particularly approve of this reaction.

But most irksome is Woody's reaction, particularly as it seems like the reaction that we're asked most clearly to empathize or agree with.  It's basically "Jesus will save us".  I apologize if that shorthand offends anyone, but what I mean is the persistence of an utterly blind and literally irrational faith in some higher power, irrational in the sense that there is overwhelming manifest, palpable, perceivable, 'theory-internal' evidence utterly to the contrary. 

Andy, unlike God, emphatically does not move in mysterious ways, and Woody's continued 'faith' in Andy (after, say, they've been given away to the daycare center) is therefore even more contemptible than Noomi Rapace's in Prometheus.  The answer to why Andy is going to save them is the same:  "It's what I choose to believe."  And it's just as dishonest and reprehensible then at the end of Toy Story 3 when Woody's faith is seen to be justified (when Andy takes the toys over to a new child to play with).  Of course, that doesn't in any way solve the actual metaphysical problem either -- what do they do when the new child tires of them? 

As I say, it's all profoundly ironic on a personal level, but the only reaction I find remotely praiseworthy is from the army men, in Toy Story 3 I think.  They say "listen, it's been fun, but it's come to an end, as we knew it would, and we're off to make new lives for ourselves, standing on our own psychological two feet and without worrying about whether there's somebody there to look after us".  If my children ever find themselves in a similar position (which they probably will at some point in their lives about something), that's how I hope they'll react.  But that scene is like two seconds long, and clearly not intended as the film's definitive resolution of the issue.

Anyway, that's the gist of it.  At least as far as I can tell, my kids haven't been scarred, and there hasn't been any kind of generalized outrage that the films are too adult (unlike, say, the controversy about the prologue in Up), but I really don't think the Toy Story movies are thematically appropriate for children.  A series of well-executed, emotionally resonant kids films about existential/spiritual crisis doesn't strike me as a good idea.  And I in general despise the various ways we're invited to react to that crisis.

I think you should have a subtitle track built up entirely out of the various mistranslations from Backstroke of the West, so "Jedi Council" = "The Presbyterian Church", etc.   

Can't help with French, but under the assumption that your Spanish subtitle track is Latin American/New World Spanish, my wife and I could do a Castillian one.

I've always loved mashups from the first Go Home Productions stuff like 10 years ago, especially the (more or less) straight A-to-B ones - the vocal from one song on top of the backing track from a different song.  Here's the only one I ever did myself, way back from before I had kids (and therefore had time): 

Shades of Jean Grey (Michael Jackson vs The Monkees)

I never did anything with it because I was never quite happy with it (Mickey Dolenz is not the most metronomic drummer, so putting it against Michael Jackson is just asking for a world of sync pain), but I'm trying to avoid doing work, so I figured I'd dust it off and put it out there at last.

The cover art was just a cut-and-paste concept job, since I have no Photoshop skills at all, so just to spare horror and embarrassment all around, I'll use spoiler tags.

SPOILER Show

Just briefly to say that all this is really appreciated, Teague!  I prefer not to listen to a commentary if I haven't seen the movie before, and I don't have a lot of time to watch movies at the moment, so I've been really looking forward to picking up some of these back issues, as it were.

I've really lost track of what Peter Greenaway (the writer/director) has been doing since about the mid 90's, but in terms of where to go from here, I would probably start with The Draughtsman's Contract or, if you really feel like being messed with, Drowning By Numbers. 

I still remember my old pan-and-scanned videotape of The Draughtsman's Contract, which had been mysteriously retitled The aughtsman ontra.  Home video really has come a long way kids.

Ah, now one of these I do have.  If that could work, then that could work, and I'd be happy to be back in if needed.

I think I'd actually prefer to send an audio sample just to check that the quality is OK.  Wouldn't want to let the side down and all that.

Knowing absolutely nothing about this, what happens if you get just an XLR to 3.5mm cable and run it into the mic input on your soundcard?  They seem to cost about £5 from Amazon, which brings the whole thing to about half the price of the cheapest USB mics mentioned.  I'd definitely be up for it if you need an extra hand on the voice acting side, but I'm completely sans equipment and experience.

Sure, that's totally fine.  I guess I felt like I wanted more than that given the screen time that Matt Damon has in the final 2/3 of the film.  It doesn't take much longer to make that point than you do just saying it.  And they do hang a lantern on it in a very funny meta-way when Matt Damon's character actually says "Can't you use my blood for something?  Maybe find a cure?" and Kate Winslet (I think it is) says "Yeah, well, blood serums.  They're expensive and they usually don't work, so nah.  Thanks for asking though."  But that's like 35 minutes into the film.

I guess by continuing to spend time with him we confirm his irrelevance in a way that simply never seeing his character again wouldn't have so strongly conveyed.  But can't we be doing something with that time?  I'm not looking for Jean-Paul Sartre or anything, but maybe something like Jeff Bridges in Fearless?  Some non-obvious comment about the psychology of survivor-hood? 

Anyway, I'm not trying to be contentious or anything.  Just trying to articulate further why Matt Damon's character kinda didn't work for me.  But I really should see it properly to assess it better.  In any case, I'm happy to leave more for everybody else.  I can go cuddle up with my DVD of Paul McCartney's Give My Regards To Broad Street.   

Just finished the episode and I sort of had the same reaction Teague did.  It felt, for lack of a better word, kind of clinical.  Like Teague said, I felt like I was reading a report.  To be fair, I'd never seen it before, and so I was watching with subtitles and listening to the episode, so that's not gonna help with getting immersed in the film.  But what I think could be the problem (for those of us who feel this way), and Teague sort of alludes to this I think, is the way the stakes relate to the characters.

As ever, Mr Spock gets to the heart of the problem: we find it easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million.  The stakes in this film are really abstract and not human-scale.  Hundreds of millions of people are going to die, and that's hard for us to get our head around (and not something (thankfully) that most people have any direct experience with).  So what we need in order to ground that is to have some direct sense of what this is going to mean for our characters. 

There's a couple of problems though.  The obvious one is just the sheer number of characters.  And what little time we have with a chunk of them I think is just wasted, in a dramatic sense, in the service of this kind of verité vibe.  It feels like we spend a lot of time watching people on public transport in the first bit of the film.  They're on buses, they're on planes, they're walking down the street.  But we don't care about these people in a story-telling sense because all we've seen is them being on planes and walking down the street.  They're just killed off too quickly.

Now say Trey and Brian (if I understood where they were coming from correctly) might say that these are some of the things that give the film "scale".  You get the sense that lots of different people are affected all over the world and each person is potentially infecting hundreds of others, etc.  It's not just an American thing, or just about Kate Winslet.  But the film doesn't need more scale.  When we see 2/3 of the map of the world covered in red and they announce at the end that whatever million people are dead, I'm not sure that the little time we spend with the young Asian guy, the business colleague of Gwyneth Paltrow's, or Gwyneth Paltrow herself really helps us viscerally understand that any better. 

Then kind of problem number two is the way the stakes relate to at least some of the characters that we do spend time with.  Laurence Fishbourne's character, for example, doesn't help concretize the abstract stakes for us the audience, since he's precisely invested in those stakes in their abstract form.  In other words, he's working to avoid The Bad Thing.  If he fails, The Bad Thing is going to happen.  But his character doesn't help us understand what The Bad Thing really means any more clearly or viscerally.  Same deal with Elliot Gould's character, and the woman who tests the potential vaccine on herself. 

It's like you filmed my Head of School coming into my office and announcing "My God, none of the students will graduate if we don't get these course marks in!" and then the next 15 minutes is watching me grade exams and organizing the Joint Board of Examiners meeting.  Sure I'm working my ass off to avoid The Bad Thing, but there's no reason why you should care, or derive any entertainment from watching me do it, unless you happen to find exam grading interesting.  And watching me do my job doesn't concretize the abstract stakes in any way, since I as a character am invested in the stakes abstractly.  (I want to avoid The Bad Thing.)  On the other hand, if we spend time with some student that was likeable, and we saw that her parents were going to disown her if she didn't start this job, and she couldn't do it without graduating, then I think we respond to that a little better.  It's not just about inserting some hackneyed sentimental movie beat.  The point is that we the audience now have some concrete investment in the previously abstract stakes.  We understand what The Bad Thing is going to mean.  It's the death of one, as opposed to the death of millions.  (And a better writer than me could I'm sure come up with a cleverer way of doing that than what I've proposed.)

Then we come to Matt Damon's character, who we spend, relatively speaking, a lot of time with, but who is a terrible protagonist.  We learn very quickly (and suspect even sooner when he doesn't drop dead in the isolation chamber in like 2 seconds like everybody else) that he's survived, or is immune, or whatever.  So that tension goes out of it since we know he's orthogonal to The Bad Thing.  And then he doesn't actually do much.  He keeps his door locked, talks to his daughter's boyfriend and gets turned back trying to cross a bridge.  It ain't Errol Flynn, that's for sure.

Not surprisingly then, Kate Winslet's character is probably the most successful as she's really the only vehicle through which the stakes get made concrete, even if she too is just doing her job for most of the time.  And she has the makings of an actual protagonist.  But she's dead by the hour mark more or less, which still leaves us with like 40% of the film still to go. 

Various of the guys made the point that part of the interest in the film is supposed to be about is the way that various people react to this catastrophe, and that seems like maybe that's got something to do with Matt Damon's purpose in the film.  But that feels to me like a very thin hook to hang a lot of film on, and I don't think the film does anything interesting with that idea.  Sure, human beings are human beings, and will react in a full spectrum of ways.  But I knew that from watching The Towering Inferno.  Some people are noble, some people are venal, some people are cowards, etc. etc., and I don't know what this film adds (or wants to add) to that.  (By the way, do any of these characters, even Kate Winslet, pass the Plinkett Test?)

The whole subplot with Marian Cotillard for me is like the film in a nutshell.  We spend a lot of time watching her do her job, which is great, but we don't have any reason to really care, since all she's doing is trying to avoid The Bad Thing.  Then she gets kidnapped, and I guess that's bad, but since she's not much more than a (minor) cog in the plot machine, I don't particularly care about that either.  Then there's all those seemingly nice people in the village, but all we get is a cursory two seconds of her teaching some kid to paint or whatever it is, so I don't really care about them.  And then she sets off running from the airport, but it's like Anakin Skywalker wanting to go back for that clone fighter pilot at the beginning of Episode III.  It's just too little too late. 

I totally get where people are coming from in terms of the film making no concession to the standard tropes, and I do admire it for that.  It's great that government officials are all sincere, hardworking people and internet bloggers are self-aggrandizing, manipulative scumbags (um, I think).  And it's certainly great that people bothered with the science.  I guess I just kinda bounced off whatever it was supposed to be in the service of.

Docked a point for forgetting to mention Say Anything (directed by Cameron Crowe) 

Just realized that I didn't mention this specifically.  In the Director's and Final Cut, the origami unicorn is a callback to the scene when Deckard's at the piano and has a (day)dream about a unicorn running through a forest glade.  (He's clearly asleep in the Director's cut, but looks awake in the Final Cut, iirc.)  If Gaff knows the content of Deckard's dreams or images that are of some personal significance to him, then Deckard must be a replicant, mirroring the scene with Rachael when Deckard tells her about a memory that she's never shared with anyone.  However, like I say, if Deckard's not a replicant, then you have to come up with some other explanation for the unicorn, in the context of Gaff's origami in general being comments about Deckard.

Goooooooood question.  On one level, the bulk of it is a documentary about a famous-in-the-70's art forger, Elmyr de Hory, who claimed that many museums all over the world had paintings that were actually his, and then also about a literary forgery (in the form of a supposedly authorized and co-written autobiography of the famous recluse Howard Hughes), ironically by the guy who several years earlier had done a biography about de Hory. 

But then laid on top of that structure is basically a film essay by Welles, partially woven through the documentary part, about the nature of forgery, authenticity, authorship, a critique of the art market and its associated 'experts', etc.  So questions like:  if everyone (including the 'experts') agrees that a previously unknown "Matisse" painted by de Hory is as beautiful, well-executed an object as a Matisse painted by Matisse, and for the same reasons, then what actually is the difference between the two?  And being Welles, he's connecting that trickery, and the idea of being deceived, to various pet things like stage magic and also film. 

Yeah, I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I do think Welles is at least saying "look, in some cases it really doesn't matter.  Just experience and appreciate the artistry that's on display."