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Saw this last night. I have a few thoughts on it that aren’t really related to how much I enjoyed the film. Here goes:

Woody’s arm was better

At the end of Toy Story 2, Woody’s arm was all bulbous and poorly repaired. This was a pretty big plot element because his breakage is what sets off the whole story about the broken penguin Wheezy and is how Woody is found accidentally by Al. Thus the resolution of this at the end of the film ties off the whole adventure nicely. But in Toy Story 3, Woody’s back to normal.

Bo Peep is gone

Woody’s love interest is gone! If, like me, you didn’t think much of Bo, this is probably a good thing. She wasn’t good for him anyway. Who wants to date a woman who’s already got sheep? Woody should find someone younger and have some sheep of his own, right? I personally always shipped Jessie and Woody because I like him more than Buzz but we can’t have everything, right?

If there were a Toy Story 4…

…then it’d be worth it just to have Timothy Dalton and Kristen Schaal playing the new toys. And Whoopi Goldberg as that cool-looking octopus was good, and Richard Kind (that hypochondriac, Harvey, from Scrubs) as the bookworm was a nice touch but I don’t think the new characters really had enough to say. The film could have done with being thirty to sixty minutes longer possibly. I reckon it’s a shame they wasted Kelsey Grammer as the villain in Toy Story 2 because he’d have made a good Lotso. It’s good that they didn’t play out the older-and-revered-father-figure-turns-out-to-be-evil thing for very long before the “reveal” that Lotso was the villain because that was basically cut and pasted from Toy Story 2.

Spanish Buzz was hilarious

but very unrealistic. There’s no way an action figure would contain that much processing power. I’m guessing his developing personality would have to be stored in some kind of flash memory and that his ‘demo mode’ would live in some EEPROM on the circuit board inside along with his default settings for Spanish Mode. Maybe Buzz is running a quad-core i7 processor inside his back? Actually, yes, I’m sure that’s it. And if you unscrew his chest there are 2 USB ports and a DVI out and he’s got two SLi GeForce GTX 480s in his legs and can run Crysis at 60FPS on full settings.

“lol Ken is gay”

Also pretty funny I thought. Though it would have been better had he actually turned out to be gay. Not only would it have been a positive message for kids but it’d probably have the religious right up in arms and “controversy” that sparks off those nutcases is always a good thing.

That’s probably enough for now. I did really enjoy the film (though I think I enjoyed Inception more) so thanks, Pixar, for not fucking up for three whole films. I am sure the Toy Story trilogy will enjoy its place amongst the Great Trilogies. That is until some years down the line someone says “why don’t we resurrect Toy Story?” and then they make Toy Story 4.0 where an evil iPad has taken over the world’s digital infrastructure and Shia LaBeouf has to team up with an aged-looking Woody who’s past his prime in order to take down the culprit by using explosions.

There has been some discussion online about this Julie Bindel article in the Guardian about a book by Gail Dines that’s been going on over the past few days between some acquaintances of mine, and I was reprimanded for making a sarcastic comment about it because of how trivially wrong I felt the main point covered in it was, so I’d like to just write a little thing about it.

The idea raised in this article that I felt was most forceful and most wrong was the claim that watching pornography can make people commit sexual assault.

At this point I don’t think it matters whether one thinks that pornography or the sex industry is demeaning and exploitative to those in it or whether one thinks it’s empowering and freedom of expression or whether you don’t really know or care either way. It doesn’t matter if you’re pro- or anti- pornography, I still feel my exception to this is justified.

I found this point offensive for two reasons: firstly, it diminishes and marginalises the responsibility of anyone who commits a sexual assault on another person by suggesting that there was some reason or justification for it. “I saw it in porno and thought it was okay” would never legitimise any act of violence, sexual abuse, rape, misogyny or misandry against another person and it’s completely irresponsible to even suggest that the ’cause’ of rape is anything but something wrong with the person committing the act. There’s no excuse for it. Nobody would ever excuse a murderer from his or her actions for them using a defence like “I saw it in a video game,” so why should the influence of watching pornography even come into the equation when looking for the motivation of someone to commit rape? It just shouldn’t.

Secondly it greatly exaggerates the impact of the media on people’s behaviour and even attitudes and suggests that some (or most? or all?) people can’t tell the difference between something they see on their TVs or computer screens and what goes on in real life. Maybe my faith in people is misplaced but I’d like to believe that the majority of us do know that on-screen crime/violence/sex is not comparable to reality. I’d like to think we’re more than just suggestible lumps of amorphous clay ready to be moulded into likenesses of whatever is beamed into our eyes. People do know what’s right and wrong behaviour and what are right and wrong attitudes to have.

There are honest ways of highlighting the terrifying and heart-wrenching prevalence of sexual assault without trying to explain it away as a by-product of the sex industry, and I think (again, without requiring anyone to take a stand pro- or anti- porn) that lumping the two issues together is both misleading and unhelpful to dealing with the problem.