Film review - Pixar go meta with Lightyear

I had goosebumps when I saw the first trailer for Lightyear, last year. It's the bit where David Bowie singing Starman kicks in that just gets me. Now, having seen the film, I have had some thoughts. 

This post contains a few spoilers below the video for the trailer, so maybe watch the trailer and then go off and do something else if you don't want to read any spoilers before seeing the film yourself. 

So, the headline meta stuff about this film is that it is meant to be the movie that inspired the Buzz Lightyear action figure who is one of the main stars of the original Toy Story film. In Toy Story, a little boy called Andy is given a Buzz Lightyear figure as a birthday present. In the Pixar universe, this is the film Andy saw in the cinema that made him so excited to get his own Buzz Lightyear.

As a way of extending a successful franchise without continuing an established storyline, this struck me as genius. It's as creative as anything in the movie and starts things off on a clever footing. It's also not really a kids' film - but it is the film for the people who were kids when Toy Story came out 25 years ago! 

The opening few scenes include Buzz exploring an alien planet and saying lines of dialogue that will be immediately recognisable to anyone who has watched the Toy Story several times. That cracked me up. The dialogue worked in the film even if you weren't aware that it was lifted practically verbatim from the first movie. But knowing how those phrases will be repeated in Andy's bedroom by action figure Buzz after Andy's birthday party just filled me with joy.

So, on to the story. Buzz causes an exploration spaceship to crash, marooning 1,200 people on a planet, without any hyperfuel to get home. He wants to make amends and starts repeatedly testing potential hyperfuel compounds, trying to find the one that would enable the ship to leave the planet. Unfortunately, when he tests the fuel by slingshotting around the nearest sun, he experiences time dilation, skipping forwards years compared to the people he leaves behind. Each time he returns a few hours older from a mission, everyone else has aged a few years. 

There's a thoughtful core to that idea, of someone so depserate to make amends for their mistake, they actually end up missing out on life. While his friends and colleagues find love and start families, and live happy, fulfilled lives, Buzz singlemindedly perseveres on his quest to redeem himself - a quest that nobody asks him to undertake. 

Driven by failure and guilt, Buzz doesn't share in his friends' big moments, as they celebrate births and graduations and anniversaries. And in a heartbreaking scene he misses saying goodbye to his best friend and supporter as he returns from a mission after she passes away from old age. I found the scene where he played her recorded goodbye message in her room that now lay empty very emotionally moving. 

That idea gave core meaning to the film, with the question of what really makes a person a hero. There is a grace in accepting the situation and making the best of it - in this case raising a family to be proud of while founding a functioning society on a new planet. 

Then, of course, Buzz lands after one final trip to find the colony city under siege from robots that all say the word "Zurg" and the adventure part of the story kicks in. Buzz and some new friends have to save the day in a way he never expected. 

So, in summary, this felt like Pixar have rediscovered a bit of their soul after a real mix of duds and delights lately. I realise I am one of the few people who really did not like Toy Story 4 and am on record as saying I never needed another Toy Story film. But this isn't a Toy Story film. It had something different to say and said it well, which leaves me feeling like I would be interested in seeing another Lightyear movie.

My mounting Blood Bowl "pile of shame"

My dad used to say that the problem with buying books is that you think you are buying the time to read the book as well! Despite knowing this, he still bought books. (Lots and lots of books!)

I am heading down a similar path with Blood Bowl teams. I recently heard of a website called Pile of Shame, which invites people to list their unbuilt kits and unpainted armies with the aim of 'encouraging' people to get on and build and paint stuff. It's sounds like self-inflicted nagging to me. But maybe I need it.

This is my current inventory...

A few years ago, as a reward for handing in my MSc dissertation, I bought the Blood Bowl starter set - this came with two teams and various equipment bits like measuring rulers. The teams were humans and orcs. I've built both teams aand they are partially painted.

I already had a team of skaven players (skaven are giant man-sized rats), which had been a Christmas present from my friend Bryan. I then bought an ogre player. All the skaven and the ogre are built and painted. 

The ogre was an essential addition because the skaven got heavily stomped on by their opponents in the few games I'd played.

Then in the middle of last year I bought the Blood Bowl Second Season set, which came with loads of stuff. There were two teams that were different to the ones in the other starter set, two 'star players', an ogre and a troll, and two referees. All of this is still unbuilt and unpainted. (The guilt starts!)

Through gifts and trips to the hobby shop, I've acquired a team of lizardmen (pictures here), a team of wood elves, a team of "necromantic horrors" like werewolves and ghouls, and a "treeman" player to bolster the ranks of the wood elves. I've built half of the lizardmen and necromantic horror teams. The rest of them are still sitting there pristine, waiting to be snapped off their sprues and stuck together.

Just after Christmas I impulse bought a Dungeon Bowl set. This is an evolution of the standard Blood Bowl game, set in a dungeon, where first your teams have to find the ball hidden in a treasure chest, and then carry it to the other end of the dungeon to score. The back of the box sort of explains it. 

Again, the starter set comes with two teams and various other bits, like the treasure chests, to build and paint. I haven't made any progress with that at all yet, let alone played the game. 

And the pile of shame keeps growing! For my birthday, just gone, I received a kroxigor figure - this is a super-strong reptilian player to add some bulk to the generally lightweight and pacey lizardmen Blood Bowl team. I was super excited when I opened the present, then felt the twinges of "unbuilt guilt" about the other teams I have that I need to get on and sort. 

I do enjoy building the figures, and painting them in various coloured uniforms. I also enjoy playing the game. Those things take time though, whereas purchasing new additions to the pile of shame is much less time-consuming. The trade off between fun and work is much less. 

And Games Workshop, the company that makes Blood Bowl, keeps on releasing new teams. The most recent team is a "Norse" themed team of players that look like Vikings. This team comes with "Beer Boars" that bring the player much needed revitalising refreshment during the game.

 

I really don't need any more Blood Bowl teams. But... beer boars! 

I already know I will be buying this team. I just wish I could buy the time to build and paint it.

When all our cells change why do we expect to stay the same?

This post has been sitting in my draft folder since January 2017. Given some recent conversations I've had, I feel like it's worth an airing (with a few minor edits).

I find New Year quite melancholic. It's a time to reflect on what's happened and look back on stuff. (In 2017, for various reasons, I ended up looking back a bit further than normal. This is mainly because of reconnecting with some people I had been in school with over two decades previous.)

I journal offline as well and reading old journal entries, or my old blog posts on here, sometimes makes me feel like I'm reading about a different person. Douglas Coupland warns us that nostalgia is a weapon and sometimes I can turn that weapon on myself by thinking about the past and about how much has changed.

The thing about change is that it's rarely in huge increments. Yes, some are life-changing and can happen over a few short days (for example, diagnosis of a chronic illness), but most of our changes - in attitudes and priorities - happen slowly.

I read somewhere that all the cells in our bodies are renewed every ten years or so. I've been in a relationship over 25 years. I'm a whole new man. In fact, I'm the second whole new man to have been in the relationship. An entire version of me has died off and been replaced. And we didn't even know it.

Or did we? I'm not the same person as I was 25 years ago. Experiences and achievements, wins and losses, have made their mark. I feel a lot less certain about some of the things I was so certain about back then. Things that were once important don't matter and things that never used to matter to me suddenly seem important. How much of this is just the weight of living pressing down on me and how much is actually physical? Feelings of attachment and abandonment originate in brain cells that change like any other cell. As my cells change does that have an effect on my opinions?

There's a couplet in an Avett Brothers song that goes: 

I want to have friends 

That I can trust 

That love me for the man that I am 

Not the man that I was. 

I really like that lyric because it shows how we can be perceived as the person we were in the past, even though we have changed. That can be a battle if we have grown up, if we react differently now, if we have different priorities. When people assume we will always act a certain way that can be constraining and they may not like it if we do something they don't expect.

There's also a danger in such expectations. If we know we are loved because of what we were when we were first loved then it's hard to say we have become something different. We become inauthentic versions of ourselves, afraid to admit what we really feel or think or believe at this point in time, in case it turns out the people who love us love us because of who we were then, not who we are now.

It's hard to see people for who they have become. If we have friends and loved ones who do see us for who we are and not who we were, then we are very fortunate.

A little piece of wisdom and hope

I am re-subscribing to a load of people's email newletters that I used to subscribe to in my old job, and I came across this little piece of wisdom from the Communicatrix herself, Colleen Wainwright:

I have good days and I have bad days. But these days, even the bad days I’m starting to recognize as good days, because they are DAYS, baby.

They are DAYS…

I like that.

New Year's Day

I got annoyed with the new year coverage on the BBC yesterday. Suddenly New Year's has become a major focus for life-changing-ness hype. "This is it, get ready to wipe the slate clean, here comes a brand new year" etc. etc. in the overstated tone of a match of the day style commentator.

As if we aren't going to face all the old foibles, faults and failures in this new year. And what really gets me is that it's so arbitrary. We've decided that this month of a certain length will, when it ends, herald in a complete new sequence of 12 months of irregular lengths. What exactly are we celebrating? Humanity's capacity to impose some sense of quantifiability on eternity? I guess if we can't control time, then at least we can measure it and pretend to have the upper hand.

That all sounds rather brooding and pessimistic. So, on a less navel-gazing note: I had a better New Year's night than my friend Chezza who got back to her house (Chez Chezza) in the wee small hours to find water pouring down the inside of her window. Here's hoping she gets it sorted soon.