journal features

movie review - Monsters Inc

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Vancouver, 2001.11.20

This is an animated flick from Pixar. It stars the voices of John Goodman and Billy Crystal as monsters who work for the power company. Their job is to travel to the bedrooms of human children (via closet doors) and scare them. The cries of the children are then captured and converted into energy in the monster's world.

All is well with this setup until a devious colleague (Steve Buscemi doing his second 'voice' role this year, after Final Fantasy) cooks up a scheme to really bolster flagging scream supplies.

This flick is quite well done, in the same vein as Pixar's other work.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton