(SPOILER WARNING, OBVIOUSLY)
I don't watch that many films compared to certain people I know (until last week I hadn't seen Titanic) and so it's not very often that I watch more than one on the same day. The exception was one day when, on a bus travelling through France, I saw no fewer than 5 movies, which can be summed up in two words; The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (inadequate adaptation), Fantastic Four (utter tosh), Wedding Crashers (seen before), Old School (fitfully amusing), and The Village (fucking Shyamalan). Seriously, if you have to do a 30-hour bus ride, make sure you bring enough reading material. But there is a difference between being subjected to multiple films in a day and going out of your way to do so, and it just so happened that two flicks I was very excited about have popped up at the same time. And I'm very lazy and didn't fancy walking to town and back twice when once would do, so here come a pair of reviews, each of films I saw today. Enjoy.
Monsters University: I can take or leave Disney films as a whole (usually the latter), but I bow to nobody in my adoration of whatever Pixar has to offer. After all, they made my favourite movie of all time, the by turns heartbreaking and exhilarating Up. The pioneering CGI studio has, as of late, been putting their energies into new instalments of previously existing franchises, which is a double-edged sword. While Toy Story 3 made my shrivelled heart dance with joy, did we really need a Cars 2? Hell, did we really need a\Cars 1? So when I read that Monsters University was on the way, I thought that while I loved Monsters, Inc. and certainly wouldn't mind seeing more from such an engaging cast of characters, I didn't think a prequel was strictly necessary. And it isn't. But is it good? Absolutely.
The first thing to say is that it's a Pixar film, and so of course there's a huge array of striking visual details; God only knows how much time went into designing all the different monsters that populate the strikingly verdant and picturesque campus (York University it ain't). And the full effect of this colourful panoply of sights only becomes truly apparent in the scenes where the characters visit the human world. The original Monsters film was subversive in that it had the monsters appear just like regular guys, and the cute human child appear as something scary to them. The human world in the prequel is genuinely scary to both characters and audience, and the animators do a great job of making it seem foreboding. The darkness and dinginess of the settings in those scenes really contrast effectively with the general good-time aura and brightness of the realm of the monsters. In a film that is fairly whimsical, it's nice that the Pixar team had the visual flair to really bring home what's at stake for the characters.
I'm referring in the above paragraph to one of the climactic scenes, and the film, up until then, is primarily concerned with an age-old frat-movie trope. Namely, the protagonists screw up, and their continued presence at university depends on their victory in a competition, a la Revenge of the Nerds or Up the Creek. Said competition involved scaring, so it tied into the movie, but the structure did seem fairly inorganic; there were a number of challenges, each with their own rules, and each had to be surmounted for Mike and Sully to survive (well, avoid expulsion). This made the plot seem more on-rails than most of Pixar's output. Call it Triwizard Tournament Syndrome. Speaking of something like Revenge of the Nerds, Monsters University made use of all the usual archetypes of the frat-movie genre; jocks, nerds, peppy cheerleaders, goths, and even a 'crusty old Dean' (copyright Homer J. Simpson). This isn't to say that it didn't do it well, but again, it made the film feel fairly safe. There weren't a huge amount of surprises plot-wise.
But really, it's hard to find something to criticise about Monsters University. I've already mentioned the visuals, but many other departments shone for me. The voice acting was predictably great (although I can't listen to John Goodman's Sully without thinking of Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski), and it was laugh-out-loud funny on many occasions, my particular favourite gag being a slug who's late for class and desperately trying to get there as fast as he can, only he's...well, a slug. As A Bug's Life proved, slugs are a rich vein of comedy gold. Mike is the main character as opposed to Sully, and he makes an excellent underdog hero. And I doubt that many children seeing this movie will have been to university (or at least have watched Animal House), but as a student - albeit a British one - I appreciated all the higher education jokes. I don't think Monsters University is the equal of Monsters, Inc., but it's certainly a very worthy addition to the series, and best of all, didn't ride on the coattails of the much-beloved last film. Previous antagonist Randall Boggs was present, but in a minor role, as was gravel-voices secretary Roz, but the fanservice was used sparingly, unlike some sequels I could mention (Star Trek: Into Darkness, how ya doing?), and didn't detract from the expertly-rendered and equally memorable cast of new monsters, especially salesman-turned-mature student Don. In terms of Pixar's canon, Monsters University doesn't crack the Top 5 as far as I'm concerned (and even Top 10 is pushing it), but that really is more a reflection on the exceedingly high quality of Pixar's output than it is on Monsters University. If you see it, you'll have a great time, and come out smiling. And really, what more could you ask for? Rating: ***3/4
The World's End: And now for another instalment in a popular series of films. It really must be summer. This is the third celluloid collaboration between director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, after the modern classics Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Like the previous two films, it's what I'd call an 'action comedy', and synthesizes the main concerns of the other parts of the trilogy. Namely; impending apocalypse, sleepy towns hiding dark secrets, and, of course, pubs. Five old schoolfriends seek to recreate a pub crawl (aborted before its conclusion) from their halcyon days. Four of them (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan and Martin Freeman) are successful professionals, and the fifth (Simon Pegg) is a loser alcoholic whose life hasn't moved on since that night. They find that the people of their old hometown have been replaced by semi-robotic doubles by a higher alien intelligence in the name of, to quote the villains of Hot Fuzz, 'the greater good'.
Sometimes it's hard to explain just why a movie resonates. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz were successful in large part because they were pastiches of easily recognisable genres. The World's End works mostly because of a successfully constructed sense of the unheimlich throughout. Like Shaun of the Dead, it's actually, despite ostensibly being a comedy, as tense and scary as a lot of straight-up horror films. The action scenes are, in my opinion, even stronger than the verbal exchanges, especially the first fight sequence in which our heroes take on five chavs-cum-replicants in the men's toilets, and which owed more to WWE than anything. Simon Pegg giving a robot the freakin' Rock Bottom through a ceramic sink will live in my head forever (as a wrestling fan, I also counted La Mistica, the Chokeslam, the Shining Wizard, many Axe Bomber Lariats and an Argentina Backbreaker transitioned into an Inverted Gutbuster. I should probably get out more.)
Unlike Hot Fuzz, which (not altogether seamlessly) transitioned from a comedy into a long, climactic shoot-em-up which owed more to its homages to classic action films than the previous verbal cleverness, The World's End gets the preamble out of the way relatively early on, with the aforementioned Rumble in the Restroom. From then on, it's not just a comedy with five men trading barbs and malapropisms in a succession of identikit bars, funny though that is. It's an action film with giant robots and simulants and kung fu and IF YA SMELLLLLLLLLL and diving through windows and exploding heads, and in the middle of all this, five men trade barbs and malapropisms. The characters, while admittedly more human than their adversaries, just don't act the way that normal people would in this situation. Their rationale for attempting to complete their pub crawl even in the face of incredible danger isn't really explained very well. But then, this pig-headed attempt to pretend everything's normal is a consistent source of comedy, especially Pegg's character's increasingly desperate attempts to see off his drink even in the middle of a ruckus, although there's a twinge of pathos with the added dimension of his character being an alcoholic who can't let go of his memories of the good old days. This gives the film an emotional import which could otherwise have been lost amongst all the sci-fi action, supernatural intrigue and comedic dialogue.
Speaking of the dialogue, I found it to be very different to Hot Fuzz, which was a picture in which a good proportion of the lines in the second half of the film were callbacks to lines from the first half. I personally love comedy which is based on callbacks; after all, my favourite sitcom of all time is Arrested Development, which once had an episode that referenced a minor gag from TEN episodes previously. But I feel such an approach may have hamstrung The World's End, particularly considering the often irrational actions and unnaturally mundane-comedic dialogue that the characters engage in, even as the world collapses around them. There's a fine line between writing foolish characters, and making them so incredibly buffoonish and mannered that the audience can't identify or empathise with their plight. I felt that The World's End stayed just the right side of that.
The ending came a little bit out of left field. Basically what happens is that the aliens give up on trying to improve humanity, but in wrenching their support from the planet create a pulse that renders useless all technology on Earth, sending humanity into a new Dark Age. The main problem was that it introduced all sorts of elements into the film that could have done with some elaboration; the formation of post-apocalyptic 'tribes', prejudice against the surviving replicants, and so on. Those ideas were so intriguing that you could even construct a sequel out of them, although Pegg, Wright and Frost on no account should. But this was, on the whole, a unique sci-fi action comedy, which didn't encumber itself by trying to ape Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, and instead carved its own identity. It married effective comedic scenes to visually striking action sequences in a seamless way, and marks a fitting conclusion to the Cornetto trilogy. Thumbs way up. Rating: ****1/4
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