Monsters University and Macbeth

Today was a movie double bill - or in Mummy's case, triple bill, adding Pacific Rim onto the front - for the whole family.

First up was Monsters University, the prequel to Pixar's hugely successful buddy comedy about monsters. The beats of the college buddy movie are pretty well established - the odd couple, the big competition, the rivals, the lessons learned - so the film has to work for some freshness, a lot of which comes from the casting of monstrous protagonists in essentially mundane roles.

We get a twist in our story early on, as we first meet Mike, a small monster whose dream is to be a great scarer, and are then introduced to Sullivan through his eyes. From the original movie, we know Sully as a big, sweet guy with a heart as big as outdoors, but we meet him here as a lazy jock, coasting on natural ability and a family name. In addition, Randy - the dragon of the first film - comes in as a nervous geek and initial friend of Mike, setting up immediate tensions.

What follows is a struggle for our protagonists not only to establish themselves as scarers through the legendary 'Scare Games' and therefore prove themselves to the fierce Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren bringing the awesome), but to forge the enduring friendship that will form the foundation of Monsters Inc. The beats are, as noted, pretty well tried and true, but as with Pacific Rim they feel fresh. In particular, the end of the film holds some actual surprise, and reflects a whole new light back on the action that goes before it.

After dinner, we went on to see Macbeth, a National Theatre Live performance starring and co-directed by Kenneth Branagh. Other notables in the cast included Alex Kingston (and despite playing the protagonist's dangerous, slinky missus, there was not a trace of River Song in the performance), stalwarts John Shrapnel and Jimmy Yuill, and the up-and-coming Alexander Vlahos. Ray Fearon was a new name to me as Macduff, but was one of the standouts in an excellent cast. The performance was in a deconsecrated church and the space was amazing, with the bulk of the performance taking place in an aisle between two sets of stalls, with a more open space at the altar end and a raised platform and three hatches below it in the wall at the door end.

It was not a perfect performance, but it was certainly very good. Notable problems, for me at least:

• The witches were overdone. The basic Wyrd Sisters models are the classic crones and the more modernist muddy hot chicks, and this went with muddy hot chicks with the attendant running around and acrobatics, but delivering their lines in full-on, batshit crazy crone cackles. For my money, they would have been better with the dialogue dialed back a bit. As Hannah noted, it would have made for a more credible source, rather than a trio who, if you met them on a blasted heath, your first instinct would be to avoid eye contact with them.
• Both Kingston and Branagh hammed it up something raucous for their final descents into madness, and again I think this would have been better played down.
• Camera angles and close-ups are not the friend of stage fight choreography. I suspect being in the front row would have been terrifying.

But that being said, the things I liked:

• The witches appeared throughout the play as spectres of doom and their own prophecy, which was done very well.
• In the earlier part of the play, Kingston and Branagh played the Macbeths as a couple very well, with a lot of affection on top of the obvious scheming, and overall their performances were both top-notch. If anything, they seemed weaker on their own than when able to bounce their performances off each other or the other actors, with both showing the most significant weaknesses in their soliloquies.
• Macduff's meltdown on hearing of his family's demise was fantastic, and the leads could have taken a note or two from Ray Fearon.
• The design was amazing.
• In general the production was done with great skill and acted brilliantly.