Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List

Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #343: Monsters, Inc.

The writers at Pixar have this ability to take ordinary concepts or objects and turn them upside down. What if children’s toys sprang to life when you left the room? What if cars could talk? With “Monsters, Inc.” (2001) they asked the question “what if the monsters in your closet were average guys trying to make a living?”

I first saw Pixar’s fourth film while living in Lima, Peru, with my brother and my mom. American movies in South America are usually released in English with Spanish subtitles, but they make an exception for kids’ movies and dub them in Spanish. I would have preferred to hear the voices of John Goodman and Steve Buscemi, but as with all Pixar films this is more about story and visuals than dialogue. Besides, once they get to that scene where Mike and Sully enter the room with a million doors, who cares what language they speak? Only one word comes to mind: WOW!

In the city of Monstropolis, power is generated by capturing the screams of little children who live in our world. To capture this power, monsters cross a portal into houses all over the world and walk into children’s closet to scare the screams out of them with their best scary faces. This could be a low-rent horror movie, but director Pete Docter and many more writers at Pixar designed theses monsters as mostly cuddly and very colourful.

James P. “Sulley” Sullivan (voice of John Goodman) is employee of the month at Monsters Inc., but not that scary in the daylight. A gigantic purple creature covered with fur and with horns on his head, he lives with his best friend Mike Wazowski (voice of Billy Crystal) a one-eyed volleyball whose job is to make sure Sulley stays at the top of his game. When Sulley crosses the door into our world, Mike is on the other side to make sure Sulley makes it back and to make sure the door is sent away. It is a dangerous job, since the monsters are convinced little human children are toxic to them. Imagine that: the big scary monsters are scared of two-year-olds.

One day the unthinkable happens. Sulley finds an unattended door on the factory floor. Out of it comes Boo (voice of Mary Gibbs) a toddler who does not fear Sulley but sees him as a big stuffed toy. Sulley on the other hand is initially terrified and wants nothing more than to send her home, but the door is gone and he has no option than to take her home to Mike. Inside their bachelor pad the monsters panic since by now the authorities know there is a human in Monstropolis and teams of soldiers in biohazard suits are roaming the city to find her.

The film’s villain is Randall Boggs (voice of Steve Buscemi) a lizard-shaped monster with the ability to blend into different backgrounds. In addition to being Sulley’s bitter rival at Monsters Inc., Randall has a nefarious plot involving Boo and has no qualms about squashing any one who gets in his way.

The rest of the equally colourful cast includes Celia (voice of Jennifer Tilly) a receptionist with snake hair, tentacle legs and one eye. Perhaps because of the singular eye, she is also Mike’s girlfriend. James Coburn voices the aptly named Henry J. Waternoose III, a spider-like creature and CEO of Monsters Inc. Then of course there is Pixar regular John Ratzenberger who cameos as the most famous monster in the Himalayas.

Another star of the movie is the animation. Technology has made many leaps forward since 2001, but back then the fur on Sulley’s body was a major achievement, as each hair had to be individually animated. Then there is the climactic chase scene in the door vault, where Mike, Sulley, Boo and Randall navigate a massive room filled with millions of doors who can send them to any place on planet Earth.

Also noteworthy is the enduring humour of the script. I have an uncle who almost never goes to the movies, yet the Pixar films are one of the few that can capture his attention for an hour and a half. He especially enjoyed the blooper reel at the end of the movie that the animators created just to add more jokes once the credits started rolling. His favourites involve the ones with Roz (voice of Bob Peterson) the slug-like (female) administrative clerk with a raspy voice.

I thoroughly enjoyed the ride to Monstropolis as a 14-year-old and if the movie plays on TV today I find if just as funny and imaginative. Hopefully this year’s “Monsters University” will prove to be just as enjoyable for both my uncle and I.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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