Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Forgot to Mention


IMG_3294, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

I forgot one movie: we watched Monsters Vs. Aliens, and it was good. The movie ads were very careful not to mention that the main character is a woman, because we all know that girls have cooties and little boys will suffer from estrogen poisoning if they see or play with anything girl-related.

But: the main character, on her wedding day, is hit by a gigantic meteorite that is imbued with some glowy substance that turns her into a 40-foot giant. She's captured by the military and imprisoned with a bunch of other monsters including a man-cockroach mad scientist, a missing-link fish-ape, and an idiot blob of goo.

Aliens invade, looking for the glowy contents of the meteorite, and the military makes a deal with its monsters that if they stop the aliens, they will be freed.

Besides the thousands upon thousands of in-jokes that b-movie fans will enjoy, I enjoyed that the heroine grows from a shallow bride to a real human being, so to speak, and learns to appreciate her freakishness (and her monster friends).

Dreamworks has dropped the animation ball many times since Shrek II, but in this case: More like this, please.

2 comments:

Helly said...

"We have a Code Nimoy! Repeat, a CODE NIMOY!"

I loved that movie. The video game was great too - lots of funny comments from the characters, particularly Bob.

Alan Bowman said...

Helly and I went to Best Buy as soon as she got home the day Monsters vs Aliens came out on DVD, and watched it that night during and after dinner.

On the one hand, I was sort of disappointed that they didn't release a 3D version, because the movie made such good use of all the campy 3D effects you'd expect from a movie that was sort of spoofing on all those old 3D monster movies.

But on the other hand, the RealD technology isn't available for home viewing yet, or at least not at our price range, and the old-style 3D they're using for these DVDs just doesn't really cut it.

We bought Coraline when it came out on DVD (after seeing it four times in the theater) and I was looking forward to watching it in 3D at home. But thanks to the old style 3D they had to use, the colors were too dull and washed out. The 2D version on the DVD is much brighter and more vibrant.

I will say, though, that movies like Coraline, M vs A and Kung Fu Panda have totally justified buying an HDTV and Blu-ray player. That was money well spent.