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.