Movie Reviews: Anton Chekhov's The Duel, Toy Story 3, I Am Love

GO  TOY STORY 3 Fifteen years after ushering in a new era of CGI animation, and 11 years after a colossally successful pre-millennial sequel, the Toy Story franchise returns to a changed world. Its irresistible conceit and snappy good humor remain largely intact, though now it also hauls a saltier and more anxious sensibility. Inanimate figurines don't age, but they do get nicked up and discarded, and that tension between immortality and irrelevance remains the central conflict in Lee Unkrich's Toy Story 3. Andy is all grown up and about to drive off to college, leaving the fate of his toys uncertain. Will they be stored in the attic, left on the curb for sanitation pickup, or delivered to the local day-care center? All of the above, it turns out, as the whole gang gets caught in an odyssey of compounded indignities. Fears of the unknown, of neglect and abuse, are gradually eclipsed by the threat of disposal. Identifying with plastic figures has always been essential to the series' playfully perverse, aptly adolescent allure, but here, that empathy mutates into macabre existentialist dread. How many kids' movies lead their protagonists to the precipice of a flaming pit of hell? (Eric Hynes) (Citywide)

WAH DO DEM A couple days before cashing in on a free Caribbean cruise for two, dorky Brooklyn hipster Max (Sean Bones) is dumped by his girlfriend (Norah Jones, in a tiny cameo) — perhaps because he has no personality and his mouth hangs open like half an idiot — but takes the trip alone anyway. Strutting around the ship's senior citizens in a daze, he barely talks to anyone, and eventually docks in Jamaica, where he naively gets in a car with the first stranger who smokes weed. Through a series of increasingly dumb-ass decisions, Max loses his money, passport, clothes and his boat ride back home. Meanwhile, TVs and newspapers in the background hint that Obama is about to win the U.S. presidency, but our superficial hero can't be bothered to notice in filmmakers Ben Chace and Sam Fleischner's glorified vacation video. The two wrote this slight, handheld-shot drama around a free cruise Ben won, then upped their indie cred with supporting players from Yeasayer, MGMT, Suckers, and the Congos. If Max had been knifed to death for his oblivious behavior (the threat does exist), the film might've been a critique of ugly Americans embarrassing themselves to indigenous folks, but methinks we're meant to actually feel sorry for this privileged twerp in neon sunglasses. (Aaron Hillis) (Egyptian)