For the week of October 29th, Disney and Pixar Home Entertainment are releasing Monsters University on Blu-ray. With the exception of Toy Story 2, Pixar was once committed to developing and producing original content, but the last few years have seen a spate of sequels from the venerated animation studio. In terms of quality, Monsters University falls in the middle of that spectrum - it's not as good as Toy Story 3 but is far more accomplished than the crass, uber-commercialized Cars 2 - and maybe that's because, technically, it's a prequel. If Monsters, Inc. showed Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and James P. "Sulley" Sullivan (John Goodman) at the height of their scaring powers, this film takes us back to their college days, with Mike an eager know-it-all and Sulley an arrogant party animal who's coasting on his family's reputation. For all of Pixar's innovations in technology and narrative, it's a little surprising to realize that this time around, the studio is offering a pretty traditional variation on a "slobs versus snobs" frat comedy: think a G-rated version of Animal House or Old School, complete with a lovable group of raucous misfits (in addition to Goodman and Crystal, the standout voice actors behind the underdog Oozma Kappa fraternity include Dave Foley and Charlie Day), their hateful rivals at Roar Omega Roar (Nathan Fillion voices their chapter president with perfect, Ted McGinley-esque smarm), and a stuffy, by-the-books dean (the great Helen Mirren). What gives Monsters University what little resonance it has, though, lies in the dynamic between Mike and Sulley. While best friends in Monsters, Inc., the two couldn't be more dissimilar in character and manner here, and those differences put them at odds for a good portion of the movie. Prequel logic dictates that by the end, all wounds will be healed, but it's still deeply satisfying to watch Mike and Sulley negotiate one another's quirks and find an enduring bond - through sheer force of empathy and will, Goodman and Crystal manage to wrest the center of the film from the slobby fraternity hijinks to their own personal dynamic.
Kenneth Brown wrote that "there's also plenty of laughs to share, plenty of playful sequences to enjoy, and plenty of memories ripe for a young fan's picking. Children old enough to bear with the film's (admittedly minor) pacing mishaps will have a blast; more so than their parents, who won't be quite so enamored with the prequel's stutter-stop payoff. The flipside being that many of those same kids won't get half of the gags in the film (spot the Carrie nod for extra credit), most of which are aimed squarely at mom and dad. Is Monsters University fun? Sure. It'll make for a great family movie night this holiday season. Is it all that it could be? Does it live up to its potential? Was a prequel even the right way to go? No, no and... maybe. If the film followed Mike and Sulley in their early days at Monsters, Inc., perhaps after opening with a montage of the duo's school days, it might have been something more (The all-too-brief montage that runs prior to the end credits plays like a storyboard pitch of the prequel I wanted to see). Instead, it starts small and stays small, rarely living up to the hilarious, larger than life adventure-comedy that is Monsters, Inc. The irony being Cars 2 was criticized by some (myself included) for going bigger; so big it abandoned the smalltown heart of its predecessor. The lesson? If the Toy Story series has taught us anything, it's that the animated sequels that work are those that expand their worlds, embrace ambition, deliver poignancy and enhance core character relationships, to infinity and beyond. Tall order, I know."
If Monsters University ranks as a solid single or double-play, then Universal Studios' action-adventure R.I.P.D. is a major whiff. A failed attempt at creating a supernatural buddy-comedy franchise à la the Men in Black pictures, R.I.P.D. was most notable for being one in a string of high-profile, high-budget blockbusters to tank at the domestic box-office this summer - see also: After Earth, The Lone Ranger, Pacific Rim, White House Down, and The Wolverine. But whereas one could argue that those other films deserved better than their box-office fates dictated, R.I.P.D. is pretty much a misfire, through and through. Whatever inherent interest lies in its premise - Ryan Reynolds' Boston-area cop dies and becomes a new recruit in an elite, undead police force - can't make it to the screen. RED director Robert Schwentke doesn't have a feel for staging action and comedy around all the cheaply rendered CGI mayhem, and his great cast (Kevin Bacon, Mary Louise Parker, Stephanie Szostak, Robert Knepper, and James Hong, among others) can't muster up any engagement past, "When this is all over, I get to cash my check." Worst of all, R.I.P.D. wastes Jeff Bridges as Reynolds' crusty partner, who - try as he might (and Bridges pulls out all the stops, giving his Roy Pulsipher the voice and demeanor of his Academy Award-nominated Rooster Cogburn from True Grit and pausing for all sorts of bizarre improvisations, like a mid-film song co-written by T. Bone Burnett) - isn't able to pull the movie out of the doldrums all by his lonesome.
When Kenneth Brown reviewed the film, he noted that, "pinballing between slapstick comedy, PG-13 grossout gags, poorly implemented action, dead-on-arrival drama, silly chase scenes and an ever-changing set of rules that defy any sense of internal logic, R.I.P.D. is a mess of plot holes and missed opportunities. Worse, its jokes rarely earn laughs, its melodrama barely registers, and each and every twist and turn can be seen coming a mile off. The cast do their best, that much is obvious. Unfortunately, Reynolds is diving headfirst into a shallow pool, Bacon is given little to do other than chew scenery, Parker is handed a triangle and asked to play the same Nancy Botwin-note over and over and over again, and Bridges - refreshing and welcome as his hilarious improvisational skills are - can only do so much. He's having an enormous amount of admittedly infectious fun, but he's no miracle-worker. Perhaps if the film's visual effects weren't lodged six or seven years in the past, if its script were tighter, its afterlife adventure more inventive or its punches less telegraphed, Bridges and his co-stars might have pulled off the impossible. Instead, R.I.P.D. coughs, gasps, kicks and finally, after an unbearably long fight to hold on, gives up the ghost and allows the credits to put it out of its misery."
From IFC and filmmaker Neil Jordan comes Byzantium; this visually sumptuous, Gothic horror tale focuses on two vampires (Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton) as they try to hide out in a small town on the English coast. This subject matter represents a return, of sorts, to one of Jordan's most beloved pictures: his star-studded adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. Whereas that earlier feature adopted an epic scale for its vampire leads (to paraphrase Brad Pitt's Louis, it might not have been the David Copperfield approach, but it followed its characters from country to country over 200 years), Byzantium is smaller, more intimate - most of the film unfolds in the present-day, with the biggest narrative leaps saved for Ronan's storytelling flights of fancy. That limited size reveals itself to be an unexpected benefit. Not only do we get time enough to understand what motivates Ronan and Arterton's very different soucriants -both in terms of their respective lifestyle and feeding habits - but Jordan brings a kind of magical realism to the commonplace world around them, showing how the two women transform both the landscape (the dilapidated hotel that gives the film its title) and the men (Sam Riley, Caleb Landry Jones, Jonny Lee Miller, and Daniel Mays) that enter their orbit. Byzantium is a strange, offbeat entry in the vampire canon, but it's often beautiful (the cinematography by Shame and The Place Beyond the Pines DP Sean Bobbitt is stunning) and, in the end, oddly moving.
Finally, we end the week with the Criterion Collection's La Notte, the story of an unhappy married couple (Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni) who drift in and out of fidelity to one another over the course of one night. For many viewers, this 1961 film is the least satisfying of Michelangelo Antonioni's loosely connected "Alienation Trilogy." While the first and last pictures in the trilogy (1960's L' Avventura and 1962's L' Eclisse) have a decidedly metaphysical bent that only enhances the characters' dissatisfaction and ennui (the strange disappearance that disturbs L' Avventura; the ghostly final sequence in L' Eclisse), La Notte is rooted in the temporal. Moreau and Mastroianni are terribly ordinary, living their lives through various parties and bars, and their resentments seem to have little of the mystery present in L' Avventura and L' Eclisse's fears of the unknown. However, like James Joyce's Ulysses (a work that La Notte definitely resembles on a structural level), Antonioni believes that human desire and yearning contain multitudes - for him, Moreau and Mastroianni are representative of a terrible paradox: how certain people can have everything and still feel like they have nothing. On that level, La Notte is, in some ways, Antonioni's most relatable movie, and the one that is most ripe for rediscovery.
Svet Atanasov calls La Notte, "a slow and notably moody piece that chronicles the final hours of two people who have been slowly drifting apart. During the course of a single night, they discover how they feel about each other. The third important character in the film is the Italian upper-class. During the party, Antonioni's camera carefully observes the seemingly happy guests as they form small groups and entertain each other. They try to be polite and energetic, but many of them look bored. The only time they truly come alive is during a silly game where the men get caught up in a betting frenzy. This is where it is made clear that like Lidia and Giovanni's romantic relationship the upper-class' relationship with reality is irreparably broken. Fluid camerawork and a trendy jazz score make La Notte an indescribably elegant film, but its heart is cold. Yet it is not a pessimistic film, rather one that truthfully captures alienation and the loneliness that comes with it."