Monsters University (2013)

What is it with rehashes of Revenge of the Nerds lately?  Monsters University is the second movie I've seen in the past month (The Internship being the other) that borrows heavily from Nerds.

Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) was inspired at a young age to become a scarer.  He studied harder than everyone and eventually got accepted to Monsters University.  Despite knowing the ins and outs of scaring, Mike has a lot of doubters that don't believe he has the innate ability to be a good scarer.  Jake Sullivan (John Goodman), on the other hand, comes from a well known scaring family and has all the physical attributes you'd want to have.  Mike and Jake start out at odds, competing to see who's the better scarer.  Sully thinks Mike just doesn't have what it takes, and Mike thinks Sully is just relying on his family's name and natural ability to get by.

Their competition gets the better of them though, and both are eventually kicked out of the scare program by the Dean (Helen Mirren).  Their only chance back in is to win the Scare Games, a series of contests that pit all the various fraternities and sororities against each other.  Mike and Sully are forced to put their differences aside and join the fraternity full of castoffs in order to compete in the Games.  Nobody thinks their fraternity has even the slightest chance, but Mike thinks he can whip them into shape.  Sounds all too familiar, eh?

Even though it follows a familiar format and contains familiar themes, I still enjoyed Monsters University.  This is one of those times where I wasn't bothered by all the reused tropes and plot elements.  I tend to enjoy underdog stories, even though they tend to be predictable.  It's also a prequel that works.  I liked seeing how Mike and Sully started out and eventually became the friends we know from Monsters, Inc.  It also serves to make them both more sympathetic characters when you see the issues they had to overcome.  Although one of the issues with doing a prequel so long after the fact is that many of the characters we spend time getting to know in Monsters University aren't mentioned or seen in Monsters, Inc.  There are a few common characters like Randy (Steve Buscemi) though.  On the other hand, it really won't matter what order you watch either of these films.  There's nothing really spoiled or ruined by watching them in a particular order.

If they ever do decide to do a third film, I'd like to see them do something far in the future.  Maybe base it around Boo as a college student herself, whose long forgotten her adventure with Kitty and and Mike Wazowski.

The humor is pretty standard and definitely geared towards the family.  Most of the families sitting around me all laughed at various points.  I didn't find it particularly funny myself, but not because it was childish.  Just not quite enough bite for my tastes.  However, there's a great sequence at the end that fans of horror films will really appreciate.  I don't know which of the three writers wrote that section (Robert L. Baird, Daniel Gerson, and director Dan Scanlon), but it was a smart sequence that was best part of the film for me.

As you'd expect with a Pixar film, the animation is top notch.  When you compare this with Monsters, Inc. it really is amazing to see how far it's come.  There are times where things are so realistic looking - particularly with the short film before the main feature - that you may think real sets are used with the characters added in after.  It truly is beautiful, and worth watching just for the animation if that's your thing.

Monsters University is one of the rare examples of a prequel that's on par with original, and I actually enjoyed it a little more than Monsters, Inc.  While it's definitely not Pixar's best work, and dives a little too deep into familiar territory, it's still a fun and engaging film that the whole family can enjoy together.  Easy matinee recommendation for this one.

3.5 (out of 5) Death Stars

Parental Guidance (2012) - Movie Review

If Billy Crystal had played this movie as Miracle Max then we might have been on to something.

I honestly don't have all that much to say about Parental Guidance.  The whole movie felt dated, as if it's been sitting on a shelf somewhere for a good decade or so. Perhaps it did sit on a shelf for a while, as it's so forgettable that I nearly forgot I watched this last week.  It's not an insulting or offensive film, but it totally wastes the comedic talents of Crystal and Bette Midler.  They are both better than this.

The weird thing is, much like The Guilt Trip, you might go into the movie thinking the parents are the bad guys, but it becomes clear very early on that they are the only sane ones in the film.  Their daughter Alice (Marisa Tomei) and her husband need to take a trip for a work event, but are reluctant to call Artie and Diane (Crystal and Midler) to watch their kids.  Diane has issues with her parents, but it's never really clear what they are, other than she disapproves of their 'old school' parenting methods.  You know, crazy things like telling them 'no' or punishing them for bad behavior.

For a moment, you think the movie might be a strike against this new age, ineffectual parenting that has bred a generation of soft, neurotic kids that have entitlement issues and too much self esteem.  There's even a point in the movie where they attend a little league game where no outs are recorded and there's no score, so nobody's feelings are hurt.  They attend classes and therapy sessions where the instructors are either overbearing or don't actually work on the issue they are actually there for.  The movie doesn't have any teeth about, and it misses the opportunity to actually say something.

This missed opportunity wouldn't have been so bad if the movie was actually funny.  Everything about it is so tame and there's nothing witty about it.  I guess it's a little ironic that a movie named Parental Guidance doesn't actually require any.  With a PG-rated movie it's not like I was expecting edgy humor, but Lisa Addario and Joe Syracuse's script desperately needed some punch-up.  What made my viewing experience so painful was that I was sitting in front of someone that thought nearly every line of the film was funny. Even casual lines of dialog that were not meant at all to be funny would still generate a laugh from this person.  I know this isn't the fault of the movie, but imagine my annoyance level rising with someone laughing in my ear at things that aren't funny.  That's really the audience of the movie, people that either laugh at everything or enjoy really light, toothless comedies.

One of the reasons why the movie felt dated was it had a theme about a family bonding over baseball.  Artie's job is a broadcaster for a minor league team, so there are lots of callbacks to old baseball games, references to playing catch, actually playing catch, and then there's Artie's reaction to the aforementioned little league game.  Billy Crystal is a huge baseball fan, so I almost wonder if he agreed to do this movie if they'd throw more baseball stuff in the movie.  I did actually enjoy the parts where he playing broadcaster though.  If Crystal hadn't gone into acting, you can see how his calling would have been to become a baseball broadcaster.

Another part of the movie the really bugged me was that Alice's husband Phil (Tom Everett Scott) is getting some award for this home automation technology he's developed.  However, when you see it in action, it's just not something that exists yet, unless Phil has a Tony Stark level of intelligence and financial resources.  When I see something like this in a movie, I usually assume that the director of the film isn't actually all that in touch with current technology.  Then, I see this was directed by Andy Fickman, who directed the inane You Again, a movie that started by showing you a YouTube video created several years before it existed and taken with a camera that also didn't exist yet.  When you couple the lack of realism with regards to technology with characters that don't act like normal people (true in both these films), you have a lazy movie that just doesn't care.

I will give the film credit for having a few Star Wars references, which I always appreciate, so there's that at least.

Parental Guidance is a safe, run-of-the-mill family comedy that doesn't have a single joke or idea you haven't seen in a ton of other films before.  It wastes a good cast with material that's better suited for the ABC Family channel.  You could take both your grandparents and kids to this movie, but I think your grandparents will like it more.

1.5 (out of 5) Death Stars