I’m back home in the UK. I am not best pleased about this, particularly as the arsehole taxman is being… well, an arsehole. But fuck him. I want to talk about the three movies I watched on the plane today.

Toy Story 3

It’s been ages since I saw either of the previous two Toy Story movies and I think it’s high time I watched them again before Disney pull their beyond-stupid “vault” bullshit and prevent you from being able to get a copy until a few years down the road.

The third movie has a bittersweet premise. Andy is all grown up and soon to be off to college, and it’s looking like the toys will be left behind. Through a series of mishaps, they find themselves donated to a local daycare centre where all is not as it seems. To share too much more would be to spoil the plot, but suffice to say the typical Pixar multi-layered humour is present and correct, with the sequences in the daycare centre being akin to any number of “prison escape” movies you might have seen in the past.

One thing that struck me throughout was how emotionally engaging the whole thing was. The characters are so great that you’re with them every step of the way, and at the times where they’re in danger, you really feel bad for them. But this being a Pixar movie, things resolve themselves suitably, and there’s a touching ending. I really enjoyed it—it was by turns hilarious, exciting, heartbreaking and the sort of movie that makes you smile. The quintessential Pixar movie, if you will.

Tamara Drewe

I knew very little about this film save having seen a trailer a few months back and read the blurb in the in-flight magazine. It actually turned out to be a great film, and not your typical romantic comedy that you might expect.

The tale centres around a small English country community which frequently plays host to a “writer’s retreat”, and much of the action revolves around the various characters changing affections for one another. There’s a lot of adultery and cheating going on, and people not being with who they “should” be with, not to mention the titular Tamara herself, who is back in the village of her youth after several years absence, sporting a nose job, a rockin’ bod and a teeny-tiny pair of denim shorts. In one scene, anyway.

There’s a whole bunch of parallel plots running alongside each other throughout this one, and the whole thing is tied up quite nicely by the end, complete with a few surprising twists. It’s not what I expected, and certainly not a typical romcom. It was genuinely amusing, filled with strong characters played by an excellent cast (nice to see Tamsin Greig pulling off a serious role with aplomb) and I’m glad I bothered to watch it.

Going the Distance

This, on the other hand, is a more typical romcom, though they take care to include characters and situations to appeal to both guys and girls.

Garrett and Erin meet in New York and hit it off. But—oh no!—Erin is returning to California in six weeks’ time. They decide to have a long-distance relationship, and discover all the usual pitfalls of such an arrangement. The twists and turns are pretty predictable, though the ending was a little different from what I expected.

Justin Long’s portrayal of Garrett is likable enough, but Garrett as a character just isn’t very interesting for a lot of the film. Perhaps he’s supposed to be a “blank slate” for people to empathise with, because despite his relative boringness, I did find myself rooting for him and Erin to work out by the end of the movie. But then I am a big girl.

It was the weakest of the three movies I watched, but since I was gradually dropping off to sleep throughout the flight, the fact I didn’t have to think about it too hard was probably a good thing. It wasn’t a bad movie by any means. But it was very conventional and utterly predictable.

So there we are. Three different movies, all of which are worth your time for very different reasons. Toy Story 3 was great, but there was never really any doubt that Pixar would pull it off again. So I think the surprise that was Tamara Drewe was actually my pick of the three movies. Worth a watch, particularly if you like seemingly mild-mannered English countryside intrigue with a bit of an acidic twist.