pixar

Jeff’s Five and Dime is not your typical top-five list. Then again, what’s typical about Jeff? In this weekly column Jeff will bring you a top-five list meant to amuse and on the rare occasion, make you think.

For the first time in a few weeks, we have new reviews to talk about, with Disney's A Christmas Carol and The Men Who Stare at Goats in theaters. Up is headed for DVD/Blu-ray this week which has us excited.

This week it isn't the movies that are in theaters that have us excited, but the movies we're looking at for our continual Artist of the Month discussion. Sure, we have reviews of Couple's Retreat and the Toy Story / Toy Story 2 double feature, but we also look at Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and Psycho.

Disney/Pixar is working really hard at building buzz around Toy Story 3 without revealing anything. First we got the entertaining teaser trailer, which pretty much just says a third movie is coming while continuing the friendly rivalry of Buzz and Woody. Now we get a teaser poster which reveals… well, pretty much just the logo, which we’ve already seen.

You may have heard me mention on last week’s podcast, when discussing Disney’s purchase of Marvel, that Pixar people were particularly excited about the business deal - so much so that some grumpy exec had to tell them to calm down at a meeting because they were so excited over the possibilities. One of the rumored possibilities was that Pixar had their eye on doing an Ant Man movie.

One of the movie releases I’m looking forward to this year is a movie I’ve already seen in theaters. Something I’ve seen two or three times, actually. Disney is re-releasing Toy Story and Toy Story 2 to theaters for two weeks with a little bit of a twist - the movies will be in 3-D.

If last weekend was a mediocre weekend for releases, this weekend was a tremendous one. Both Rafe and Margaret offer up reviews of Pixar's Up and talk about a bevy of remake and prequel news to hit this week, including Alien, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tomb Raider, and other fan favorites.

One of the things I was looking forward to with Pixar’s Up was the rumor that a trailer for Toy Story 3 would be attached to the film. Unfortunately, the trailer didn’t show up at my showing of Up (rumor is it’s only on digital screenings, according to Slashfilm).

I think we’ve all been waiting for the day when Pixar puts out a movie that doesn’t live up to the high standards of quality we’ve come to expect from the studio’s brand. Every great director has had his dud, and no studio has a perfect batting average. Cynics will have to keep waiting, however, because Up isn’t a dud for the studio.

We’re only a few days from the release of Pixar’s newest film, Up. Preliminary reviews are positive, which is always a good sign. Even if you don’t like the movie, you’re bound to meet a couple of characters you’ll like though. That’s because Pixar’s philosophy is to start with solid characters and build the story from there.