MaryJanice Davidson: I went to see 'Inside Out' for Lewis Black; Amy Poehler was fine, too

You'll have to bear with me, I'm trying something new: I'm reviewing a movie I didn't hate. (Me: "What's the opposite of a hate review?" My husband: "A review, honey." "Oh.") I took a break from blowing things up over the Fourth to see the latest Pixar nonsense (and I mean nonsense in the very best way) and came away with remarkably little to complain about. Of course I have a few issues. That's how you know it's really me writing this, and not one of my clones.

Minor spoilers to follow.

Is revealing a Pixar movie had a happy ending even a spoiler? It's a Pixar movie. For kids. Of course it had a happy ending. Spoiler alert!

So this movie is about a little girl, Riley, and her emotions: Joy, Anger, Disgust, Fear and Sadness. And I'll cough up the bitter truth right now, at the risk of losing my Feminism Club Decoder Ring: I didn't go see Inside Out for Amy Poehler, though she's terrific. I went to see my dark prince, Lewis Black.

I love that grumpy jerk. If I were 40 years older, and a cardiologist would be with us at all times, I would definitely go for it. It's not even what he says: "One of the most important things when you're leaving school is to realize you're going to be dealing with a lot of idiots. And a lot of those idiots are in charge of things. So if you're in an interview, and you really want to tell the person off, don't do it." It's how he says it: "One of the most important things when you're leaving school is to realize you're going to be dealing with a lot of idiots. And a lot of those idiots are in charge of things! So if you're in an interview, and you really want to tell the person off, don't! Do! IT!!!!!"

Anyway, he's Anger, and we first see him when 3-year-old Riley refuses to eat her broccoli. Disgust, who looks/sounds like every popular girl I went to school with, except she's green from head to foot, was quick to weigh in: "That is not brightly colored. Or shaped like a dinosaur." Tiny Riley: "Yuck!" She slaps the bowl away. Her dad gets stern. "Riley, if you don't eat your dinner, you're not gonna get dessert."

Cue my grizzled prince, Lewis Black. He goes from zero to screaming in a nanosecond. "So that's how you want to play it, old man? No dessert? Oh, sure. We'll eat our dinner. Right after you eat THIS. Yaaaaaah!" His head literally catches on fire. Before, I always had to picture it. No longer! His gorgeous grizzled head goes up in flames a lot in this movie.

The other emotions are great, too, and casting Phyllis Smith as Sadness was brilliant. She was Phyllis from The Office, one of the characters I genuinely disliked. I mean, they were all various degrees of terrible, but Phyllis and Angela were The Worst. The only thing I liked about Phyllis was that she didn't like Angela.

Anyway, Sadness is the droopy annoying girl who always, always brings the room down. We all know people like this, but we're too cowardly to cut them out of our life, so we just tolerate them. Like plantar warts.

Anyway, Riley is a happy well-adjusted 11-year-old girl with a wonderful life, because she lives in Minnesota. Having nice parents helps, but the fact that she's full of joy (the abstract, not Joy as played by Amy Poehler) and lives in Minnesota is more than a coincidence, I think.

They move to San Francisco. Everything is awful immediately: Because of the insane housing costs, they move into a cramped, beat-up, old, dirty (dead mice!), tiny house crammed between two other dirty, tiny houses. The pizza place down the street serves only vegan broccoli pizzas. The moving van gets lost so they have nothing to wear, sleep on, eat on or sit on for the first week. There's no hockey, and they all love hockey.

Cue an orgy of sadness (the abstract, not Phyllis). Riley actually cries when introducing herself at school, and that sets all her other emotions and core memories into a tizzy. We find out when Sadness touches a previously happy memory, it's tinged permanently blue with sadness because Sadness is The Worst. Joy tries to fix it, and a bunch of stuff happens, none of it good. What with one thing and another, Joy and Sadness find themselves cut off from Headquarters (Riley's conscious mind), and have to make a long trek back through Imagination Land via the Train Of Thought (an actual train, which was cute) because somehow Joy ended up carrying Riley's core memories, and unless they get back to HQ in time, Riley won't be able to feel anything ever again, and when is Lewis Black going to do something funny? I mean, it's a Pixar film. It's going to work out fine. Bring back Black!

The other emotions, without Joy there to constantly buck them up, pretty much fall apart. They try their own version of WWJD, with appalling and hilarious results. When Riley's mom tells her she's found a hockey league with tryouts the next day, Disgust says what Joy would say: "That's great! Sounds fantastic." But it comes out in Disgust's dripping-with-sarcasm cool-girl sneer. Riley's dad calls her on it: "I do not like this new attitude." And Anger answers the call: "Oh, I'll show you attitude, old man!" And it escalates to Anger roaring, "You want a piece of this, Pops?"

Riley gets sent to her room, and things get progressively more dreadful. Finally, Anger has an idea: They were happy in Minnesota, right? (Duh. It's Minnesota!) Riley needs to make new memories, right? So: Let's go back to Minnesota! Even though this makes no sense to anyone over the age of 12, it's easy to see why it makes perfect sense to an 11-year-old's emotional state(s). They steal money from Mom's purse and are off to Greyhound.

Joy and Sadness eventually get back to HQ by doing stuff.

An aside: I would have liked to have gotten into Mom's and Dad's emotions more. Which reminds me, one of the best parts is the closing credits, where we get to see the emotions of random people and pets. This movie perfectly and permanently explains why cats are so weird.

I get that the story was Riley's, but it would have been fun to see her mom's emotions when dealing with newborn Riley: up half the night, having time to eat or shower but not both, wondering how a newborn turned formula into whatever the hell that smell is coming from her diaper, etc. Show me a new parent's Revulsion, Horror, Shock, Dismay, Despair and Exhaustion. Exhaustion's an emotion, right? Well, it ought to be.

Anger's terrible take-a-bus-back-to-Minnesota plan is foiled by Joy and Sadness' in-the-nick-of-time return. Riley hops off the bus — it's as easy as that, too: She leaps to her feet, shouts, "Stop the bus! I wanna get off!" and the Greyhound driver obligingly stops and lets a fifth-grader off, alone, in what looks like a terrible part of San Francisco. She runs home unmolested. Her worried parents — I imagined their emotions, Worry and Fear, having to restrain Rage: "I've been worried sick you were dead! Now I'm going to kill you!" — are thrilled she's back. Riley confesses that Minnesota was awesome, and San Francisco sucks. They agree. The end, mostly. The last scene shows she's made lots of friend and is on the hockey team, and her parents are supporting her by painting their faces in the school colors, which mortifies her, as it should.

One of my favorite non-Anger parts was at this point. She and a boy about her age bump into each other, he drops his water bottle, she picks it up to give it back. He freezes at the sight of her, and we see inside his head. Klaxons are clanging away, all the screens are lit up with GIRL! in dark ominous letters, a voice on the P.A. keeps shouting in alarm, "Girl! Girl! Girl!" The emotions are losing their minds, and Fear is whimpering from his fetal position, "What do we do? What do we dooo?" The whole scene is exquisite.

Anyway, except for not seeing more realistic emotions from the parents, and Greyhound's alarming lack of regulations about lone fifth-graders taking a bus halfway across the country unaccompanied, it was pretty great. I went for Lewis Black, but I stayed for the rest of the gang ... even Phyllis. My emotions — Sloth, Gluttony, Vanity ... wait ... those are deadly sins — thought it was wonderful. You probably will, too.

MaryJanice Davidson is the international bestselling author of several books, including the Betsy the Vampire Queen series. She has published books, novellas, articles, short stories, recipes, movie reviews and rants. Readers can contact her at contactmjd@comcast.net, find her on Facebook, Twitter (@MaryJaniceD) and her blog. She lives in St. Paul, Minn., and has been sentenced to a husband, two teenagers and two dogs.