Monsters vs. Aliens short review

(…with no plot summary, because I’m burnt out.)

There was a scene halfway through Monsters vs. Aliens when the monster protagonist was battling the alien antagonist, and the monster was clearly advantaged. It’s this moment when I was at the edge of the seat, hoping that the “bad” would be at the mercy of the “good” and that the movie would work its story from there. Alas, that didn’t happen. Just one minute after that, the alien would incapacitate the monster with a conveniently placed weapon, and the remaining time of the movie would be devoted to rescue missions. Had it chosen a different outcome, the movie would’ve been unpredictable, and maybe less forgettable.

The word forgettable just about sums up most of DreamWorks Animation (DWA) recent works. It’s like they’ve been riding in the success of Shrek for far too long that they have yet to stray from its formula. Their common threads include misfits becoming unlikely heroes, and, more irritably, having myriad pop references. Shark Tale is like that. Madagascar is like that. When Kung Fu Panda came along I thought DWA had finally ditched the pop culture name-dropping like it was an embarrassing phase in college. But Monsters vs. Aliens evidently showed that they haven’t grown up.

I forgot to mention that every DWA movie has a novelty song young viewers can torment their parents with. She’s livin’ la vida loca! Everybody gets kung fu fighting! I like to move it move it, I like to move it move it, I like to move it move it… repeated until barf. Monsters vs. Aliens also has one, I just don’t happen to remember what it is, which means I’ll be sane for the next few days. And no, I don’t have kids yet.

To its credit, the main characters from Monsters vs. Aliens were a marked improvement over those from DWA’s past offerings. I never warmed up to Shark Tale’s and I hated those sassy animals from Madagascar. At least Monsters vs. Aliens had a sympathetic group helping each other overcome their self-doubts. That is quite unlike DWA’s other movies where everyone was just smart-assing their way throughout. It’s just too bad that they’re stuck in movie with a very generic story.

Reaction Paper Blues

A college freshmen friend of mine was upset by the way I reacted when I saw him writing a reaction paper. When I walked into his room, he was in front of a monitor showing an almost-blank Word document file, and it was apparent from his body language that he was in mental agony. Both his hands pressed against his temples with such forcefulness you’d think that he was trying to poke his brains out.

I let on to him that I was aware of what he’s doing, and that’s composing a reaction paper. He whiffed, as if relieved that, at last, there’s someone in his room who understood his troubles and who would smile and nod and say comforting phrases like I understand what you’re feeling or I’ve been through the same predicaments before if he vented his frustrations. And then he vented for a while, after which he told me how he intended to be honest, by writing down how he didn’t care much about the seminar the paper meant to recount. That put me into a derisive laughter.

Reaction papers are undesirable to me because I get this vibes that they’re professors’ darling way to blackmail students into part­icipating in activities. I initially meant to say that they’re carrot-and-sticks, except I can’t ever recall a time when they offered any carrots or any real benefits besides coercing students into caring about the things that brought them, and that does not sound like a benefit either. It’s probably an easy feat to compose them when they deal with experiences that provoke emotional responses (like movies or novels), but it’s just excruciating when they’re about experiences (like factory visits or technical forums) that are tantamount to watching a paint dry. If I may add, watching a paint not your own dry. And if those are not bad enough, you can’t be truthful and say that you were bored because your professors would think that you were not paying attention, which is reason enough for them to deduct your grades. As a result, you’re forced to tire yourself out in being insincere, racking your brains for flatteries that would pad your paper. It’s a catch-22.

Now before you start saying, “But they’re no big deal! We write reaction papers from activities anyone from our courses love anyway” I’d just like to point out that I was an engineering student, as is my freshmen friend. We don’t major in literature, political science, philosophy, or even in business. We don’t watch documentaries about Marcel Proust. We don’t get pep talks that inspire us to Nietzschean-quote our way out of debates. The stuff we study are not communication-driven. They’re so technical, so cut-and-dry, that I’d like to think that we’re more motivated to get the hands-on with them than to listen to people talk about them. You don’t go to coffee shops and hear someone converse about bandwidths, torques, gears, and capacitors, do you? Well, what’s bad for us is that when we get too caught up in our field, we become jargonistic speakers, and we don’t realize how boring they are until we hear them ourselves, which is what happen in our factory visits and tech forums.

One of my professors had a face that would look exactly like the mascot of Pringles had he twirled his mustache. He was doomed from the moment he stepped into our class to incite a running gag about what flavored Pringles he is, depending on what colored shirt he’s wearing. When in green, we call him Sour Cream & Onion. When in red, he’s Original. When in orange, he’s the Cheeze ’Ums. This flippancy never seemed to bother him, but I wonder if the difficult exams he gave us were his ways to get back at us. Everytime we get our test results, there would be mock-cries followed by pleadings to ease up the next exam, and he would respond with only a grin.

He has always been an enigmatic figure to me, but I will never forget an assignment he once gave my class. Accordingly, we had to go to a hotel and attend its symposium for Asian award-winning thesis. And of course, we had to write reaction papers too. I was in my fourth year then and, despite still having months to go, was dying to graduate. Though exhausted to the point where I just didn’t care about thesis presentations or breakthroughs anymore, I admit that in my anticipation of this hotel-stint, I was excited to the level of teenagers at their most hormonal. I imagined banquets, grand ballrooms, and string quartets, and I fancied sipping martinis while having sophisticated discussions with elegantly dressed beauties.

It was when I was nearing the hotel that my spirits began to dampen. Located near the city’s edge, it had no scenic places nearby, and what killed me is that it failed miserably in such an obvious task of standing out amidst the unremarkable. Just looking from outside, I could already predict that it’s anything but grand. Forget about the banquet then, I thought, but there might still be cute Koreans or Singaporeans inside.

Minutes later, I was in a conference hall, listening to a guy talk about an image-processor that’d turn a 2d portrait into a 3d face.  He stood on a podium facing us, and we were seated on rows of monobloc chairs. Something was wrong with that scene. We were in a hotel and the best seat we had were monobloc chairs! The speech wasn’t bad but the speaker compounded my fear that this would be a very long day, as he seemed like the only person with an active social life.

I scanned around the room and noted that just like outside, nothing in the building struck: not even the female receptionists, as they looked bored in their job and wore expressions that said, “Please don’t remember my face”. Well, at least I forgot what they looked like in spite of their slacking: they didn’t bother to give us snacks—not even the cheap appetizers like cheese on toothpicks or roasted peanuts. Their only services were preparing stomach-turning coffees that, at least, awakened us, if only so we could dash to a toilet. I wonder if anyone wrote that on their paper (“As I sat crapping, I pondered if the image processor could turn 2d pictures of my waste to 3d”).

Apparently, the cute Koreans or Singaporeans stayed home, and the ones who came here looked like adolescents who played Starcraft until 3 in the morning, depriving them of hygiene and communication skills. Staring at them in horror was my only way to tell them, “For the love of all that is Holy, please don’t talk.” That’s when one of them stood on a podium and spoke about his research. It was about a soccer-playing robot called “Mirosot” or something that sounded like a counterfeit of Microsoft with few letters knocked off its name to avoid infringing copyright. I don’t know if it was his broken English, but I couldn’t comprehend what he was babbling about, and my classmates fared no better because they nodded off five minutes into it. And that speech went on for two hours. Some time in the middle, my professor turned to me and asked, “How do you find the conference?”

I said, “I like it. It’s very, uh, uplifting. I can envision a future when we’ll be seeing World Cups played by robots, and that excites me to no end!”

Snickering, my professor said, “Uplifting?”

The conference was concluding when I felt a finger poke on my shoulder. Behind me was a guy I used to have lunch with two years ago before our place got taken down, and we didn’t see each other ever since. “Dee!” I exclaimed, “It’s been so long! How are you doing?”

“I’m, uh… hey listen,” he said, “could you do me a favor, and e-mail to me your reaction paper this weekend? I gotta go somewhere. Bye!”

I submitted my reaction paper in my next meeting with Dr. Pringles. In there wasn’t any of the angers and frustrations I had from our assignment. Instead, it was filled with voluminous praises that I must have quoted from gush handbooks. My favorite line was, “They’re so revolutionary they make my head revolve!” Did Dee copy that too?

In all the writings, the lone insight I got was that reaction papers may not be insidious after all. They’re more of the first lessons you actually apply on work, that when you’re in company functions, you should silence your discontentment but voice out approvals until you look like an acquiescent sheep.

Whenever I start doubting the axiom of honesty being the best policy, I get mental pictures of Dr. Pringles grinning.