Over the last week or so, my lady friend and I ventured out
to our local movie houses to see a pair of kids’ movies.
First
up was “Monsters University,” Pixar’s prequel to its 2001 hit “Monsters, Inc.”
“Monsters,
Inc.” was never really all that high up in Pixar’s catalogue for me. It’s not
particularly low either, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of the middle.
I’ve seen it once, thought it was fine and don’t plan on seeking it out or
avoiding it for that matter.
And
that’s kind of pretty much exactly how I feel about “Monsters University.” It
was fine. Occasionally it was very funny, but the story suffered from the
prequel curse of predictability.
It’s
essentially “When Mike met Sully.” Spoiler alert … seriously … They don’t start
out as best friends. In fact, they’re kind of enemies. Mike is the lovable
underdog out to prove himself to the world, Sully is the kid from the famous
family. They both wind up in MU’s famed scarer program, start competing with
each other and run afoul of the dean and get kicked out said program.
Of
course, there just so happens to be a major scaring contest coming up and Mike
bets the dean that if they win, they can rejoin the scarer program. The only
catch is they need the help of the dorkiest, least scary frat on campus in
order to win.
Can
Mike and Sully turn their lovable bands of doofs into terror machines? You’ll
just have to watch the movie to find out.
If
there’s one lesson I learned from “Monsters University” --- see what I did
there? --- it’s that Charlie Day needs to be in everything. The fact that he’s
not the most in-demand comedic actor out there right now is one of our nation’s
greatest shames.
Day
makes everything better. He plays a lower case “n” shaped monster that’s in
Mike and Sully’s frat. Not surprisingly, Day can lay claim to nearly all of the
movie’s biggest laughs. Without him, I’m not saying this could have been “Cars
2” territory, but who knows? I won’t say it officially, because I never
actually saw “Cars 2,” but I heard stories.
“Monsters
University” doesn’t live up to some of Pixar’s heavyweights, but it’s OK. I
think my lady friend liked it more than I did.
It’s funny enough and well-paced enough
that, even though it’s predictable, it never crosses over into boring. Also,
Billy Crystal and John Goodman are back as the main monsters and they’re pretty
awesome too.
But
Charlie Day, ya’ll. Charlie Day.
Not
long after we saw “Monsters Unviersity,” we checked out the sequel to a movie
we both really loved, 2010’s “Despicable Me.”
