Monsters, Inc.

Pixar's latest attempts make Monsters, Inc. look really good.

I didn't enjoy the movie when it first came out.  This was less because of the movie itself than how it compared to its then-spectacular Pixar brethren, but after swimming through Dreamworks, Cars 2, and others, Monsters struck me as rather charming.  The story is strong and well-integrated: all elements of the plot knit back into each other in creative and (literally) colorful ways, especially the quirky and delightful ending Randal chase.

When I first saw Monsters nearly a decade ago, there was an important factor out-of-play: I had never needed a pre-verbal toddler to like me.  Now that my brother has a baby who is very much her own little girl, I have more sympathy for the leading monster and his struggle to situate a strange infant in his life.

I think where the movie loses points is in its focus: quintessentially, Monsters, Inc. is a movie about trust.  At its opening, we see monsters training to violate children's faith in the safety of their environment, e.g. scare them in bed.  The monsters don't trust each other--the titular company has its secrets--and a turning point in the movie involves a perceived breach of trust between the two main monsters.  Sneakiness and concealment is a prime factor in moving the plot along.

The issue, as I see it, is that breaches in employee trust fail to reconcile with the infant's trust in her monster guardian.  The infant-monster connection is the most prominent instance of trust in the movie, but it is never made to play ball with the movie's other examples of trust, betrayal, or doubt.  It's very much like the monster and his infant create their own movie, irrespective of other characters or occurrences, and this failure to connect to the whole hurts the overall movie experience.

It's hard to see how this could have been fixed.  Work-life balances (or business/toddler-raising balances) are difficult to strike in the real world.  The ending of Monsters is a beautiful cop-out more than anything else: the monster gets the joy of seeing his girl while also retaining his station in work and society.  A cleaner ending would have seen the monster reconciled to the peaceful end of his adventure, rather than popping up a miracle ending which raised more questions than it settled.

The struggle for the company, which is essentially finding ways to interact with kids, was built with the atmosphere of classic middle-management myth and stereotype.  In spite of this, the movie is about an employee who forms a visceral relationship with a baby.  The cog-in-the-machine setting never finds a place to put the loving-family paradigm.  This keeps most of the movie oddly impersonal but forces the unlikely ending to be absolutely, illogically, beautiful.

Unfriended

I hate to say it, but I liked this movie.  As a frequent computer user and denizen of social media land, I found that the terrible plot was adequately counterbalanced by the movie's creative format.  The video of a computer screen was a novel and interesting way to tell a story, seeing as how that's the way I receive most of my stories, and the stereotypical cast of teenagers were diverse, surprising, and amusing enough to carry the 'ghost' narrative with relative competence.

It's definitely worth mentioning that this movie pandered to several of my guilty pleasures.  The first is teen screams.  It's more fun watching teens than adults, because teens are crazy anyway and can be more easily shoehorned into stupid or implausible situations.  The other is ghosts--an active and malignant ghost, none of that sneaky, whispery haunting nonsense.

If you like horror, teen mayhem, computers, and ghosts--if you like movies like Paranormal Activity and V/H/S--then this will certainly float your boat.

Spectre

I liked it a lot!  Great opening sequence, intense WTF musical intro, loads of action, standard drunken Bond womanizing shenanigans--all touched off perfectly by Daniel Craig's reflexive self-loathing.  He always says in interviews how much he despises the James Bond character, which is part at what makes him so excellent at playing the feral maniac.

Regrettably, the villains have no real part to play at all.  They are a little too abstract for their own good.  In Spectre, Bond is confronted with endless troupes of evil thugs rather than a single villain with an immediate, concrete goal.  Even at the end of the movie, it's not clear what the villains were going to do with all the leverage they planned to acquire.  Bond's task is basically to stop a group of crooks for getting the potential to cause 'trouble.'  This makes for a less-than-compelling plot-based menace, but a rather compelling foil for Craig's Bond.

Bond movies are all about the bombs, the cars, and the babes, but Daniel Craig brings the fun of a fly-by-night alcoholic to the mix.  Traditionally, James Bond has moved in a world that caters to his own sexist, hyper-masculine style.  He gets the girl, shoots the guy, and is never short a witty remark or a commanding swagger.

Craig's Bond, on the other hand, is full of ironic reminders that his character is trapped in a hollow unreality.  He drinks carelessly and speaks with a fleck of narcissism that regularly disgusts other characters.  In on-screen dialogue, Bond even suggests that he is hunting baddies more from psychotic compulsion than from duty to queen and country.  Unreliable to his friends and an animal to his enemies, Bond's proficiency at hunting and killing is not always a feather in his cap.  The net effect is a 'sensitive' side to James Bond.  He may wear a tux on the outside, but Craig reminds us that chunks of humanity are missing on the inside.

Although it's easy to argue that irony is best left to Oscar nominees, I like the new Bond.  His character flaws make the movies more immersive than they were under Pierce Brosnan.  The stunts are just as badass, but there is a heightened thrill from knowing a little more of the man behind them.  Brosnan and Connery may have been the manly gentlemen, but Craig's action sequences have an aura of the animal about them, like a shark chasing the smell of blood or a lioness taking down prey.  You get the idea that Bond is doing it from instinct and reflex, which doesn't hurt the sexy factor one bit.

It's because of all this that "Spectre" works so well as a movie.  The villains' main strength lies in numbers, through which they have influence.  Put another way, they are a massive evil social club.  Bond, on the other hand, has no friends and just a few work buddies, who he frequently endangers.  For this reason, it matters less that the villain has a week plot presence because Bond's own self-constructed hell is entrancing enough to make up for it.

Anyway, I recommend it.  The stunts are amazing, Craig is priceless, and for all the post-modern irony, the women are still hot.