Toy Story 3 (2010)

We saw this weeks ago, before the downtown fireworks, so I'll try to reconstruct. Though we found it a bit slow in the first 15 minutes or so, it picked up and we enjoyed ourselves. Plenty of gags for the adults, including, but not limited to, complex Rube Goldberg mechanisms, (Jack caught) the Cool Hand Luke reference (when Buzz is policing the "jail"), the Ken and Barbie first meet-up (which is in the trailer, plus I saw Michael Keaton talking about it on Letterman), and nice use of the Randy Newman theme (including in Spanish to comic effect--in fact the Spanish sequence may encourage kids to read the subtitles). We figure this will get some Oscar nominations (and it had a nearly unprecedented 99% on rottentomatoes) so we made sure to see it in 3-D. Yeah, I got a little teary when Andy went off to college--it's only been two years for me--but can't say that it was all that. The big baby doll was ka-reepy! That and a scary scene near the end make me wonder why this gets a G (here's what imdb has to say about its rating), but perhaps I am no longer qualified to judge. I saw the first Toy Story (1995) but not the second in 1999, and Jack says he liked this without having seen its predecessors. If you haven't seen it yet, go ahead and look up the actors who do each of the voices, or do what I did and check on your smart phone while the show is going on. They're all just fine. I'm not going to write about them now, as I have 2 more movies to blog and plenty more to see in the next few days! If you loved either or both of the series, you'll love this. If you have to take a kid, it's not going to be painful.