Less Gru, more Minions, please

In revisiting my review of the original Despicable Me, I rediscovered my closing line: “But will children like it? Of course, because it has a fart gun that will make your 8-year-old howl with delight.”

I bring this up, because there I was in Despicable Me 2 and, sure enough, out comes the fart gun. My watch read something like 12 minutes into the film. And then, as if that weren’t enough, a 21 fart-gun salute for a retiring super-villain sidekick. “I counted 22,” the retiree says. “Oops,” a character blushes.

If this sort of thing interests you, then fear not: Despicable Me 2 is more of the same. If you find yourself traumatized simply by the very discussion of flatulence, including the weaponized variety, then let me recommend the rest of this fine newspaper, which is fart-free.

To everyone else, you bathroom humorists, let me reiterate that most of my complaints about the first Despicable Me — poorly designed plot, Steve Carell’s agonizing voice acting, the film’s defective rationale for villainy, fart cannons — are all returning here in this more upbeat, more effervescently sweet sequel. I didn’t love it, but it had me continuously smiling. Mostly because of those little yellow pill-shaped minions, cleverly called Minions, with their Captain Nemo diving goggles and their Spanish-French-Polish dialects of jibber-jabber.

The Minions are the Oompa Loompa-like helpers to supervillain Gru (Carell), who learned to be an upstanding suburbanite after he adopted children in his scheme to steal the moon in the first movie. The moon was eventually returned and Gru warmed to his three adopted daughters. When we pick up with him he’s still maintaining that burdensome abstention from crime, though only barely.

Gru is asked to help an anti-villain agency that has tracked a supervillain to a nearby mall, where Gru and special agent Lucy (Kristen Wiig) are given undercover jobs as trendy cupcake bakers to gather information on the suspects. There is a romance, espionage capers, spy gadgets and a double-switch with the villain — pretty standard stuff.

This is where I admit a guilty pleasure. The Minions … I simply love them. Without them the movie would be unbearably dull, but with them it becomes something deeply and outlandishly sillier. This sequel has hundreds of them, bouncing around and making cheery little non-sensical babbling. Several of them get names — Kevin, Bob, Dave, Stuart — and they’re given more prominent roles, though I could barely tell them apart aside from their most basic costumes: Minion in French Maid Costume, Minion With Jar Stuck On Head, or Minion In Traditional Golf Garb.

They largely serve Gru and his various schemes — jams and jellies in this film — though the Minions also wander about in their state of perpetual surprise and wonder. Early in the film, there’s a gag with a bunch of them in medieval costumes. One misplaced spiked mace later and they’re all brawling in a whimsical little pile on the lawn. In another sequence, a fire is started on Gru’s desk and a Minion fire brigade crashes through the door: one is blindly swinging an ax so fast he hacks through the wall, another isn’t strong enough to work the fire hose and, finally, another serves as nothing more than the siren as he wails into a bullhorn. These are disposable gags, but they’re just what the movie needs.

While the Minions may serve infants, younger children and this wayward movie critic, they can’t sustain Gru’s unpleasant spy plot, which repeatedly dips its fat toe into uncomfortable racial stereotypes. Italian and Chinese characters are lampooned heartily, but none as bad as a Mexican character named Eduardo. He owns a Mexican food restaurant that has a “loco” guard-chicken named Burrito. Eduardo’s vault is a Mayan pyramid. The code to the vault involves salsa dancing to the tune of “La Cucaracha.” The jokes are light and carefree, but altogether questionable in a children’s movie. Another scene is even worse: Gru, annoyed that a neighbor is ringing his doorbell, mimes pointing a gun at his head, pulling the trigger and then falling over dead. How do you explain a suicide gag to your little ones?

If your children liked the first movie, they’ll adore Despicable Me 2, though they (and you) won’t find it as rewarding or magical as a Pixar movie or any other children’s movie lacking a fart cannon.

Me, I went for the Minions. And I’ll keep going back for the Minions. They’re that good.

The Burden of Zombie Dreams

Zombie Ishtar lives!

And better yet: Zombie Ishtar, aka World War Z, is great. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s hardly the disaster that the Vanity Fair article, the one that drew comparisons to Warren Beatty’s Moroccan mess Ishtar, seemed to suggest. I will say this, though, about the troubled production: I would love to a see a Burden of Dreams-style behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of this movie. Something tells me more work went into making this presentable than we’ll ever realize.

The film stars Brad Pitt as Gerry, a husband and father of two who’s caught up in a global zombie invasion. Before you start rolling your eyes and huffing out “Ughh, another zombie movie,” World War Z takes a different approach. First of all, Gerry is some kind United Nations panic guru. When bad shit goes down, he’s the boots on the ground to make sure people are evacuated, protected, fed, clothed and otherwise safe. So when an advanced rabies disease starts sweeping through Newark, N.J., and everywhere else, Gerry knows exactly what to do: he walks up to the first abandoned RV he finds — the one that might have starter trouble and some bald tires — so he can ferry his family out of the city. Oh, the RV has no acceleration and the turning radius of tramp steamer … oops. In all fairness, Gerry never needed an RV in the Congo or that time in Pakistan or when that dam burst Thailand, so we can cut him some slack.

I’m being hard on poor Gerry, although I’m not sure if it’s because he picks bad zombie-proof cars or his name is in direct violation of that quasi-secret Hollywood pact that specifies “always Jerry, never Gerry.” The thing is, Gerry is a gnarly dude. He’s cool under pressure, he knows all the angles of government diplomacy, he can handle a gun and he can perceive important details in the chaos. In one scene he counts in his head the number of seconds it takes a bitten man to “turn,” zombie parlance for “register with the Zombie Party of America.” (It’s 12 seconds, by the way.) In another scene, Gerry witnesses a wee human child get swept up, but never bitten, in the zombie wave.

What does it all mean? Well, leave it to Gerry, who saves his family and then hops on a military plane to jet around the world to investigate the earth’s single largest crime scene. He starts in South Korea, where some soldiers found a doctor with a strange disease. Gerry is walked ominously into a room filled with ash and burnt corpses, some of them still wriggling. “Mother Nature is a serial killer,” someone says. He gathers leads and heads off to Israel, which has braved the zombie swarm remarkably well behind 80-foot walls built during the Biblical ages. An Israeli agent launches into a Jewish history lesson about why Jews were destined to overcome the zombie horde, and then they’re overcome by the zombie horde in a spectacular wave of undead that act more like army ants than humans.

I appreciate that Gerry is smart enough and calm enough to work his way through problems without being a blubbery mess. I think AMC’s Walking Dead, a once great but slowly failing zombie drama, needs a Gerry character to spirit the cast away from Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes character and all his hopeless inner turmoil. If I hear him say “for the good of the group” one more time I might lose it. To contrast Grimes’ wrecked psyche, look at a stupendously awesome sequence in Z: When an airplane’s entire economy class is zombified mid-flight, Gerry makes a carry-on suitcase fort between economy and first class. Ever so slowly, the wall goes up and up as quiet as possible to not alert the feeding frenzy in the rear of the plane. It’s a terrifically thrilling sequence and it ends with Gerry making a hasty, but necessary decision involving a hand grenade. Walking Dead would have labored with these split-second decisions for entire episodes, but here’s Gerry detonating hand grenades in commercial airliners.

Pitt’s Gerry has a number of other remarkably simple, but entirely unique, scenes that will add further footnotes to the zombie encyclopedia. Once after getting zombie blood dripped on his face, he stands on the edge of a tall building counting to twelve to see if he’ll turn. In another scene, he has a Pepsi at the worst time to have a Pepsi; the audacity of his beverage craving is almost worth the product placement. He chops off arms, injects himself with random vials of Ebola and typhoid, and gives butterfly kisses to a lipless zombie. Best of all, the character is framed within a zombie detective thriller, which gives it another original edge.

Much of the movie is spent looking for Patient Zero, that first poor chump who was gorging himself on infected tapir meat and contracted the zombie plague. And this is where much of the plot falls to pieces. Gerry jets around the world looking for Zero, and just when I thought he was getting close — and just when the mystery had relentlessly consumed me — the film switches gears. It’s all Patient Zero, Patient Zero, Patient Zero … hey, let’s find a cure. Now, the cure is interesting, especially how it is applied, but I wanted to finished that Patient Zero thread out. Instead, World War Z cut it completely. So when the end of the film rolls around, everything seems a little rushed, as if frantically ending the movie with open plot holes was better than the original ending, which was apparently a plot-killing mess. Again, though, I would love to see the other versions of this movie, to know if this Patient Zero plot was ever resolved. By the way, this movie is based on Max Brooks’ popular novel, which also had a limp, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ending.

Another frustration are Gerry’s children, who are so incompetent — even by dumb movie-children standards — that they seemed to be thrown into the movie to serve as some kind of new birth control device. “Look at what unprotected sex will do to you!” the movie screamed at you every time one of the little twerps ignored every instinct to survive. One kid won’t crawl out of a car that’s being swarmed by zombies, so there Gerry kneels coaxing her out. Any other dad would break her arms prying her out; better than having a zombie daughter, right? The other one just screams in empty hallways, which alerts every Zeke (that’s what they call the zombies sometimes) along the eastern seaboard. The wife isn’t much better: she knows he’s in the field, possibly around zombies, so she decides to cold call him on his satellite phone with its ringer apparently plugged into wall of Van Halen amplifiers.

I guess these minor complaints all touch on a similar theme: the audience of a zombie movie will always and forever know more about zombies than anyone in the actual movie. We learned about zombies from Walking Dead, George Romero, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later and Dead Alive; the characters of zombie movies don’t have that same education.

In any case, I enjoyed World War Z despite its obvious faults. Stay tuned for that director’s cut. It’s going to be an interesting lesson in film editing. 

Animals House meets Monster Mash

After the Cars 2 debacle, there was some noticeable apprehension among Pixar fans when word trickled out that Monsters Inc. would get a prequel. So I won’t tease a riddle in front of you, I’ll just blurt it out: Monsters University is a worthy and spirited follow-up to a Pixar classic.

In short: Pixar didn’t ruin it. Not that the animation company, now a Disney property, has a habit of ruining things; it’s just dangerous to tinker with the classics, especially considering that Disney is now on something like Little Mermaid 4, Peter Pan 8 and many other direct-to-VHS cash-grabs.

Monsters University takes place many years before the scare-floor events of Monsters Inc., back when green one-eyed beach ball Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and blue mammoth James P. Sullivan were starting college to become professional scarers. (In case you forgot, monsters frighten human children while they sleep to generate screams, which powers the monster world.) They both enroll at Monster’s University, the Harvard of scream. Mike, wide-eyed and book smart, naturally detests Sulley, a natural scarer whose dad left a tall MU legacy. A rivalry blossoms.

Like the first movie, University is endlessly inventive and witty. Invoking the spirit of college, it throws in all kinds of little college humor: hacky sack on the university lawn, reheated food at the union, secret fraternal orders with mysterious initiation ceremonies, that one kid who never took pen and paper to class, and lots of dorm-room horror. Shocker: Mike doesn’t room with Sulley, but with chameleon Randall (Steve Buscemi), who will go on to become the villain in the Monster’s timeline.

Sulley and Mike both enter the difficult scarer program, the most prestigious field of study at MU. Other fields include scare-can design, closet door fabrication and scare theory, but the top students all go on to be scarers, which is why Mike and Sulley compete against each other so fiercely. Eventually they’re booted from the program, though, after humiliating their professor, who looks like one of those terrifying mantis shrimp creatures. The only way they can get back into the program is by competing in the Scare Games, an intramural set of events organized by the fraternities and sororities, including Roar Omega Roar, a bunch of meatheads with popped shirt collars.

The lack of villains and any sort of heavy-handed conflict makes the film especially family friendly and light. There’s a silent fetch game in the library, a review of scare tactics, a maze of unfazed teens, a simulated bedroom with mannequin child, and a team race involving allergy-activating balls of thorns. The entire movie is rather harmless. Even its thrills late in the movie, at an all-girls summer sleep-away camp, are cheery and fun.

I especially enjoyed how the film focuses more on Mike (whereas Inc. more prominently featured Sulley) and his questionable career as a professional scarer. Mike’s a brilliant strategist, but his instincts on the scare floor are terrible. Mostly he’s just not frightening, which is the ultimate humiliation for a monster. The movie makes a case that not everyone can be the star player; sometimes we have to pass the ball to help the team most. It’s an inspirational message for Generation Me so I hope audiences admire the complexity at which it develops across the film’s vibrantly colored and pleasingly paced story. Sulley really drives it home late in the film as he tells Mike: “You may not be scary, but you’re fearless.”

Crystal and Goodman are solid performers, and their Mike and Sulley are two of the great Pixar pairings, right up there with Woody and Buzz. What surprised me most, though, was the rag-tag group of new characters in Mike and Sulley’s frat, Oozma Kappa: the two-headed Terry and Terri, pink sludge and momma’s boy Squishy, and Art, a Muppet-like goofball who will surely be a fan favorite. Squishy’s mother also has a prominent role, though always in the background. There she is doing laundry during the secret frat initiation rite. There she is listening to heavy metal with curlers in her monster do while she waits for her son and his new buddies to sneak into Monsters Inc., the company, not the movie. I found myself continuously howling at the spontaneous gags this movie threw at me.

Go see Monsters University. You will not see a more delightful animated movie this year. And if you ever waivered in your support of Pixar, let it earn it back now with this hilarious gem.

(As usual with a Pixar movie, I'm adding pretty much every photo that was made available to me. Expand the post three photos down to get the rest of the stills. Enjoy!)

Monster's University concept gallery