Hacker Cinema
Monsters vs Aliens
2009 · Film · 94 min
Directed by Rob Letterman, Conrad Vernon
AnimationFamilyAdventureScience Fiction
When Susan Murphy is unwittingly clobbered by a meteor full of outer space gunk on her wedding day, she mysteriously grows to 49-feet-11-inches. The military jumps into action and captures Susan, secreting her away to a covert government compound. She is renamed Ginormica and placed in confinement with a ragtag group of Monsters...
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9 comments on Hacker News
Good old Shrek. There was a large cardboard cutout of Shrek right outside of the entrance of the lighting department at the PDI [1] building in Redwood Shores. PDI animated the first version of Shrek after an attempted motion captured version by DreamWorks didn't meet expectations.
The cardboard Shrek was holding a bucket of cash and I would always laugh at the crassness of the image. Whenever times got tough at DreamWorks, it was time to for PDI to make another Shrek! Our punishment for making movies like Over the Hedge, Bee Movie or Monsters vs. Aliens was another Shrek movie to fill the coffers again. When the fourth installment of the Shrek franchise was announced, I remember Jeffrey Katzenberg stating "We decided that the Shrek story still has more to tell." What he really meant was that the bank account was empty, the stock price was low and Shrek could be counted on to bring in another decent box office result. Good times! How I miss PDI.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Data_Images
Fresno has housing prices roughly "average" for the nation. It's one of the lower cost cities in California.
"Average" for the nation isn't exactly cheap. There's no place with a genuinely low cost of living anywhere in California that I can tell. Fresno and Victorville are some of the less insanely expensive places and they both more or less serve as retirement communities for the more expensive coastal cities.
Fresno is routinely listed as having some of the worst air quality in the nation. You rarely hear anything good about it. In the movie "Monsters vs Aliens" it is more or less the butt of the joke as a place no one would wish to live.
Monsters vs Aliens is not a pixar movie but fit well between Bug's Life and Monster Uni...maybe something bigger...I hope anyone try to put this as the "new bible" :p
I've been confused by Netflix's business strategy for a while. I'm not much of a business guy, so maybe I'm just missing something.
I've made do for movies with the channels that came along for the ride when I subscribed to the minimal cable TV package that got me the nerd channels (Science, Discovery, Nat Geo, History, and so on). I've got quite a backlog of movies I'm waiting for.
Recently, I caught a movie (How to Train Your Dragon) on TV that I liked so much that I simply had to go buy a copy on Blu Ray. This also necessitated buying a Blu Ray player. I picked a Blu Ray player that also plays streaming content from the internet and supports pretty much everything other than iTunes.
I then started researching the streaming services (both subscription and rental), seeing how well they covered the movies I'd seen in the last couple of months on TV (HTTYD, Star Trek, Kung Fu Panda, District 9, Watchmen, Shrek Forever After, Happy Feet, Tangled, Bolt, Despicable Me, Monsters vs. Aliens, Fargo, Fantastic Mr. Fox), as well as how well they covered movies still on my backlog, plus assorted movies I'd like to rewatch.
Here's what I found. Neither Amazon nor Netflix subscription streaming provided good coverage of the movies I'd recently seen, the movies on my backlog, or the movies I want to rewatch.
The streaming rental services were a bit better, but still missing a lot.
Netflix's disc subscription service, on the other hand, covered pretty much everything.
So here is where I get confused. Netflix seems to think their future is in their streaming subscription service. This seems to me to be a pretty risky basket to put all their eggs into, because it seems to me that Amazon will have an easier time fixing their weaknesses compared to Netflix than Netflix will have fixing their weaknesses compared to Amazon.
Amazon's weakness compared to Netflix is that Netflix apparently has more content (that's what people tell me, although for the movies I'm interested in they seem about the same). To fix that, Amazon just needs to make some licensing deals. They don't have to build out a lot of new infrastructure or enter a new line of business or anything like that. It's a "write a check" problem for them.
Netflix's weakness compared to Amazon is that Amazon subscription streaming is part of Amazon Prime--and there are good reasons to have Prime besides the streaming. I got it for the shipping savings, and I'm also enjoying the Kindle lending library. (Brick and mortar retailers, like Barnes and Noble, and Best Buy, seem to be doing their best to drive people to Amazon, and so I see Amazon Prime becoming more and more common--but this is best left for another rant).
This makes the question for a lot of people "Netflix in addition to Prime?" rather than "Netflix or Prime?". That's a much harder case for Netflix to make. As I said, for the movies I've checked there are very few on Netflix that are not on Prime--it would cost me less to simply rent those movies. As Amazon closes the gap on content, "Prime plus rental" will become a better choice than "Prime plus Netflix" for more and more people.
It seems to me that Netflix's best weapon against Amazon is their disc subscription service. It provides the most content (both recent and older). It provides the highest quality content. It provides extras (commentary, deleted scenes, and all the other nifty things that come on disc besides just the movie).
Yet Netflix treats their disc service almost as if it is an embarassment. There's no link on their main page for it. It only seems to be mentioned in their FAQ, where they imply that it is an add-on service to the streaming service, and give no link to details.
I definitely noticed the distracting nature other comments have mentioned of having a constantly available Internet connection today. I saw that FX was showing "Monsters vs. Aliens" late last night. I had not seen it, so DVRed it. I started watching this evening.
Early in the movie, a character is excited about the chance for an anchorman job at a Fresno TV station. His fiancée says she thinks Fresno is a top 50 market. He tells her it is #55.
It took a tremendous act of will on my part to not hit pause and grab my iPad to check to see if they got Fresno's rank right.
Actually, I thought I had added additional information about technical proficiency in that same post but I got it mixed up with something else I argued some weeks ago on here.
The only way to accurately compare the two would be on a technical proficiency and currently, Dreamworks edges out Pixar in that department, but by such a small margin that it's almost negligible.
If we were to do a year by year comparison, UP and Monsters Vs Aliens were very similar (although some of the lighting in UP was fantastic, Jeremy Birn does some great stuff, I've read his book, fascinating stuff)
Last year though, Kung Fu Panda was simply astounding from a complexity issue. Fur + Cloth and having cloth interact with that fur, especially when you're considering the fact that the character rigs have to do very complex manouvers to perform the kung fu moves... that's simply astounding.
Even moreso when you consider that when the cloth was interacting with fur, it would flatten it when it would move over, with the fur springing back up afterwards (eg, master shifu) - Cloth + Fur are typically the hardest things to do in 3D, so having both work, plus on the scale that some of the scenes did (the revealing of the dragon warrior + the crowd) shows just how amazing the film was.
There's a bit of the whole Dreamworks vs Pixar thing.
Monsters vs Aliens was cute, timely, and throughly enjoyable. UP was downright brilliant and clearly timeless. Pixar consistently produces a form of the art that is simply higher than Dreamworks can even approach.
We see this in stand up as well. There are comedians who are topical, or who test social norms. And then there are comedians like Brian Regan who tell jokes which appeal to everyone and always will. And then there are comedians like George Carlin who tells jokes which are topical, test social norms, AND manage to age well.
There's nothing wrong with telling jokes which don't age well. It's easier. If you're going to do a show which runs every night, or every week, for many many seasons: for goodness sake, tell some jokes with short shelf life! You'll never make it otherwise.
If you make a great animated film, and people pay to come see it, and they walk out with a smile on their faces, and that's what you set out to do: you have succeeded. If you wanted to make sure they were still smiling, after the 100th viewing, 20 years from now... well... then you're going to produce fewer movies, and you're going to work harder to do it. And maybe you go home more fulfilled at the end of the day. Or maybe you don't. shrug
I still disagree with this :)
Well, I guess my argument is really based off watching all of the films from all studios with the directors commentaries turned on and taking notes of what they emphasise and then looking at all of the information in aggregate. There will always be cases where there are outliers.
I'm working on a version of a 3D animation startup of my own to apply with to YC later this year so I take notice of these kinds of things (and actually have many pages of handwritten notes when studying animation in detail as a hobby).
Anyway, that's neither here nor there
If you want to watch some good Dreamworks Animations, I would recommend the Madagascar's (very reminiscent of the traditional cartoon style, squash and stretch is prevalent in these films), Kung Fu Panda (visually stunning) and Monsters vs Aliens (just plain funny)
I think that can be said about most stories with a non-tragic hero.
Except that it's relatively unique to the animation field.
The thing is, Pixar's process is more story focussed than other studios, A typical Pixar film usually has a 4 year production cycle in which the first two of those are spent primarily on writing and rewriting the story to get the "feel" right. Even then, they have no problem with changing the story at the 11th hour.
Case in point - WALL-E's ending was originally very different with WALL-E originally saving EVE from the trash compactors (essentially larger versions of WALL-E for irony). After the film was complete and was screened in Portland, Andrew Stanton changed the ending to what it is today. The story flows better.
Compare that to something like Dreamworks or Blue Sky Studios. Dreamworks focusses on making films which are more technically proficient and aimed at children (Kung Fu Panda was astounding from a technical standpoint) and something like Horton Hears a Who or Ice Age are heavily stylised films.
Dreamworks are more focussed on the business side, rather than the entertainment side of the process.
I first saw Toy Story as a child. Looking back on it as an adult, I remembered that I had a pretty good grasp on the plot and characters as a kid, so I was assuming it had been a simplistic film. When I watched it again, I saw lots of things I didn't notice as a kid.
That's Lasseter's influence as one of the Pixar co-founders. This style has permeated throughout the whole studio. Creativity comes first at Pixar. Ironically, he was actually fired from Disney in the 80's for trying to introduce 3D to their production pipeline and Disney ended up buying Pixar for billions...
They've built up a pretty solid momentum now, and it would take a series of bombs (like Disney after the mid-90s) to shake it.
Funnily enough that's a result of Katzenberg leaving Disney after a disagreement with Michael Eisner (then CEO of Disney) and he ended up co-founding Dreamworks.
(Though I'm kind of on the fence about Cars.)
Yeah, each of the studios has those little outliers. Monsters vs Aliens has very many adult jokes in it that children just wont get. If you haven't yet seen it, go see it.
For example: This is a quote from one of the US Military Advisors says to the President in a secret strategic meeting to deal with a giant alien robot.
"We need our top scientific minds on this project... Get India on the phone!"
I absolutely laughed my ass off at that joke and I'm sure most people didn't "get it".