{"id":3485,"date":"2013-10-06T10:22:35","date_gmt":"2013-10-06T14:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/?p=3485"},"modified":"2016-09-26T21:04:11","modified_gmt":"2016-09-27T01:04:11","slug":"monsters-university","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/monsters-university\/","title":{"rendered":"Monsters University"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>{4.5\/5} &#8220;If you&#8217;re not scary, what kind of monster are you?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Mike is attending Monsters University so he can become a scarer. His roommate is Randall, who can disappear. Mike studies a lot, but no one thinks he&#8217;s scary. On the other hand, Sully is scary looking but he doesn&#8217;t study at all. They don&#8217;t exactly hit it off but they end up having to work together. They make a bet with Dean Hardscrabble that will see them return in triumph to the scare program or leave the university in disgrace.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Monsters University<\/strong> was released earlier this year. It&#8217;s a prequel to <strong>Monsters, Inc.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Prequels are tricky, but I thought if anyone can do it Pixar can &#8212; and I was right.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not as brilliant as <strong>Monsters, Inc.<\/strong> but that would be nearly impossible. This is a great movie &#8212; there is some silliness, but lots of genuine laughs.<\/p>\n<p>The ending is inevitable but it&#8217;s certainly earned &#8212; you don&#8217;t get there the way you expect.<\/p>\n<p>One clever aspect is the scare cards &#8212; like baseball cards except for scarers.<\/p>\n<p>The music is fun and catchy &#8212; I especially liked the beginning and the end. I didn&#8217;t detect any themes from <strong>Monsters, Inc.<\/strong> even though the composer is the same &#8212; Randy Newman (<strong>Toy Story<\/strong>).<\/p>\n<p>Billy Crystal (<strong>The Princess Bride<\/strong>) and John Goodman (<strong>King Ralph<\/strong>) reprise their roles of Mike and Scully from Monsters, Inc. Steve Buscemi (<strong>Ghost World<\/strong>) also returns as Randall.<\/p>\n<p>Helen Mirren (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/gosford-park\/\"><strong>Gosford Park<\/strong><\/a>) voices Dean Hardscrabble. There are a few other voices you might recognize.<\/p>\n<p>The movie was directed by Dan Scanlon (the mockumentary <strong>Tracy<\/strong>).<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t usually pay too much attention to movie studios, but I do pay attention to Pixar. I&#8217;ve seen every Pixar movie except <strong>Cars 2<\/strong>. They&#8217;re all worth watching and my favourites are <strong>The Incredibles<\/strong>, <strong>Monsters, Inc.<\/strong>, <strong>Toy Story<\/strong>,\u00a0<strong>Toy Story 2<\/strong>, and<strong> WALL-E<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>{4.5\/5} &#8220;If you&#8217;re not scary, what kind of monster are you?&#8221; Mike is attending Monsters University so he can become a scarer. His roommate is Randall, who can disappear. Mike studies a lot, but no one thinks he&#8217;s scary. On the other hand, Sully is scary looking but he doesn&#8217;t study at all. They don&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[68,9,6,5],"class_list":["post-3485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","tag-animation","tag-fantasy","tag-movie","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3485"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9207,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3485\/revisions\/9207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}