Movie Nation

“World War Z” has the most feverish fanboy interest, and the fact that this movie was labeled “Damaged goods” last year when its release was delayed has worked against it. But the counter-buzz that hey, it’s pretty good, should come as a relief to fans of the undead.

Decent reviews for this one, overall.

I’d say “Monsters U.” is the weaker of the two new wide releases. Few laughs, limp college fraternity comedy re-hash, “Revenge of the Nerds/Sydney White” and their clones were its antecedents. But it’s pre-sold, a guaranteed blockbuster. And it’s better than “Epic.” “Turbo” may yet be THE animated film of the summer, but “Monsters U.” will make the most dough. And it is getting decent reviews, overall. The tomatometer skews things when I get the sense that most critics regard this as an “OK” shrug. That includes the guy for Time Magazine, who has been in the bag for Pixar since the ’90s.

Limited release movies are earning the BIG plaudits this weekend. “A Hijacking” is a decent Danish thriller about a high seas hijacking, the negotiations with the Somali hoodlums, and makes a decent preamble to the more action-packed Tom Hanks film about the Maersk Alabama hijacking and subsequent rescue — “Captain Phillips.” That’s due out this fall. A 100 percent approval rating on Rottentomatoes for “A Hijacking.” 

And 100% approval also turns up for “The Attack,” a Lebanese/Israeli film about a much praised Palestinian doctor who discovers just how little the Jews of Israel accept him when his wife is suspected of having been a suicide bomber. Fascinating spin on the standard Israeli drama about terror.

This is one TMZ report (repeated, elsewhere) that I hope is bogus.

James Gandolfini has died of a heart attack in Italy at the age of 51.

I just talked with the guy over Christmas. Pleasant, enjoying life, working. A LOT. He based his character in “Not Fade Away” on his own dad. “You look like you just got offa the BOAT!’ I heard that from my parents, growing up.”

“I remember when I realized my dad was a man, like other men,” Gandolfini said. “He had dreams. He had a life that was completely separate from his family. As a son, if you see and feel that, your relationship with your father gets better. You realize that he’s not just stopping you from some dream of yours. He’s showing you that you have responsibilities …

“So this guy, like my dad, was saying, ‘Get as much of the other stuff in as you can, but life isn’t always going to be that way.’ That makes you appreciate that this guy gave up stuff for you … It’s a pretty big moment in a son’s life, I think.”

Gandolfini paused thoughtfully, remembering James Joseph Gandolfini Sr., a brick mason from Borgotaro, Italy. “He talked about ‘The War’ late in life … There was so much I didn’t know. You can have a vision of your father, but it can never be complete. He’s not just the guy who drove me around when I was a kid, and yelled at me for not doing yard work.

“That’s something I owed to my father, and it was my way of playing him.”

He dismissed talk of “technique” and preparation, declared his devotion to David Chase and marveled how he’d continued to find work — “Zero Dark Thirty,” film after film.

And now “The Sopranos” star is dead? Hard to get one’s mind around.

He was in “Violet & Daisy,” which opened mere weeks ago.”The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” just before that. He dressed up the terrific “In the Loop,” and couldn’t save “Where the Wild Things Are.” “Welcome to the Rileys,” all those indie films, all that work in the works. And gone? Seems impossible.

Remembered for “The Sopranos” but great in films like “Killing Them Softly,” “8mm” etc. A wonderful actor, and at 51, gone too soon.

The Farrellys are a decade removed from being hitmakers and comedy tastemakers.

Jim Carrey has turned up in a lot of movies, good and bad, of late, but has shown a pretty serious loss of box office clout.

And Jeff Daniels isn’t young and freshfaced, but older and jowly-er.

All reasons for Warner Brothers to pass on the Farrellys long-cooked-up “Dumb & Dumber” sequel, almost 20 years removed from the original film.

But Universal still sees gold in that brand and in that combination. They’ve picked it up.

“Monsters, Inc.” may be the most original and under-rated film ever to come out of Pixar, an inventive spin on the professional bogeymen hiding in kids’ closets and the reasons they’re there in the first place. It’s their job, and a fully realized alternate universe is utterly dependent on their work.
“Monsters University” is a prequel that is far more conventional, not nearly as witty or clever as that original. The 3D animation takes the art form to a new level, a few sentimental moments connect and the climax is a hum-dinger. But with the bar set so high by the first film, this “Mike & Sully: The Fraternity Years” can’t help but feel like a let down.
“University” takes us back to Mike Wazowski’s childhood, when the smallest, shrimpiest-voiced monster on the bus resolved, after one school field trip to Monsters, Inc., to become a “scarer.” It doesn’t matter many people tell him, then and later, that he’s not scary. He figures that just by wanting it and working harder for it, his dream will come true.
Years later, at Monsters University, Mike (voiced by Billy Crystal) rooms with Boggs (Steve Buscemi), a mousy chameleon trying to fit in, still years away from becoming Mike’s nemesis. The REAL enemy in college is frat boy slacker James Sullivan (John Goodman).
Everything the tiny, one-eyed Mike must study and study for, Sully seems ordained to achieve  simply by genetics. He’s bigger, louder. He’s a “legacy” scarer. His dad was a legend. He doesn’t study, doesn’t apply himself and gets on Mike’s nerves at every corner — UNTIL they’re both dropped from The Scare School and forced to work together with members of a fraternity of outcasts to win their way back in through The Scare Games.
So that’s our plot, a sort of “Animal House/Old School/Revenge of the Nerds/Sydney White” retread of every frat comedy to come down the pike, with a Hogwarts (supernatural school) twist. Sully steals a competing school’s mascot, fraternities bicker over the most desirable pledges and Mike and Sully find their way from hate to the friendship that we see later in “Monsters, Inc.”
Helen Mirren voices the dragon/scorpion-like dean-of-the-school, Alfred Molina’s a popular teacher and Nathan Fillion is the sneering leader of the Roar Omega Roar fraternity. Sully and Mike are stuck with the Oooze Kappa boys (“We’re OK!”).
It’s too long, the jokes aren’t as funny, but the sight gags are doozies. And the film’s gorgeous 3D sheen shows just how far computer-generated animation has come since 2001.
But aside from the adorable live-action-plus-animation short attached to the beginning (“The Blue Umbrella” shows the hazards of two umbrellas meeting and finding love in the big city) and a real horror movie tribute finale, this “University” comes up a few credits shy of a degree.

MPAA Rating: G
Cast: The voices of Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Helen Mirren, Nathan Fillion
Credits: Directed by Dan Baird . Disney/Pixar release.
Running time: 1:47

“World War Z” promised to be some sort of ultimate zombie movie experience, and it’s hard to call it that. But the first 25 minutes or so of this “Contagion” meets “28 Days Later” thriller will leave you breathless. And the rest of it serves up novel and often entertaining solutions to the various “zombie problems” that this over-exposed genre presents.
Marc Forster (“Quantum of Solace”) hurls us straight into the action. Barely five minutes into the film, Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), his wife (Mireille Enos) and two kids are trapped in Philadelphia traffic when all heck breaks loose. Whatever hints there have been about this “rabies” outbreak on the news cannot prepare them for the melee a tidal wave of the undead unleash.
They dash through an onslaught of zombies, streets of mayhem, stores filled with looters. Parents act like parents (To the kids, “Be NINJA quiet!”) and Gerry lets on that he knows more than we realize as he armors himself against being bitten and takes suicidal precautions when he is exposed.
Gerry has special skills. He was a researcher/trouble shooter for the U.N. His old U.N. boss (Fana Mokoena) says “I need you,” and that’s his family’s source of rescue. As cities fall and governments collapse, the “useful” and the powerful find themselves ferried to an offshore flotilla of survivors where the military and the U.N. help them regroup and start looking for answers.
“The airlines were the perfect delivery system” for a virus, we’re told.  “Attention, D.C. has gone dark” a public address system aboard their safe haven aircraft carrier announces.
And then begins Gerry’s long, deadly search for clues, for “Patient Zero,” the first place this epidemic broke out and the “crumbs” that will point to a solution.
An awful lot of the budget — that not reserved for special effects — must have gone to Pitt, as the supporting cast is seriously low-wattage, only a few name players in bit parts. David Morse has a chewy, toothless scene describing how North Korea may have saved itself. Mathew Fox and James Badge Dale are swaggering soldiers improvising their way through Armageddon, making sure they “get Zekes (zombies) on the ground.”
Pitt’s Gerry Lane doesn’t swagger. He doesn’t panic, but Pitt never lets on that his character is sure of the outcome even if giving up is no option. “Gut up,” he tells a soldier. Pitt lets us see Gerry take his own advice.
Forster keeps the gory stuff — bitings, bloodlettings, amputations — discretely off camera. But he rarely lets the tension dissipate. Whatever message might be carried in the way fortress states like Israel and North Korea resist the virus is undercut by the best-laid plans of the Living Dead.
Who are, by the way, fast-moving, twitchy and just scary enough. Their tooth-clicking glee at pursuing new victims is a sure laugh, but the movie rarely becomes a “Mow them down” video game — slaughter as a punchline.
The “Contagion” vibe clings to it, with science straining to find an answer and the last vestiges of government grasping at a Hail Mary pass to save them all.
So no, “World War Z” isn’t the ultimate zombie movie. But 11 years after “28 Days Later,” it’s re-assuring to see the human race put aside its differences and share a little brain power to defeat those who — tradition and George A. Romero always told us — prefer their brains fresh and juicy.

(LINK: Roger Moore talks with WWZ director Marc Forster about the film’s troubled history and what he did to “fix” it.).

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for intense frightening zombie sequences, violence and disturbing images
Cast: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, David Morse, James Badge Dale, Mathew Fox
Credits: Directed by Marc Forster, scripted by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, Damon Lindelof, based on the Max Brooks novel. A Paramount release.
Running time: 1:56

Crowdsourcing lures another big name as James France sets out to film his “Palo Alto Stories,” based on his own short stories, through $500,000 through Indiegogo.

He’s taking some of the sting out of “rich movie star uses indie film donations to make movies” by pledging profits to charity. But truthfully, this smells even more like a vanity project than some of the earlier big-name/crowd-financed films. Surely his accountant could find a way that self-financing “Palo Alto” would help on his taxes.