Monsters University - Funny, charming, but ultimately unnecessary. It has a good amount of heart, but since you know how it ends, there is a bittersweet aftertaste all through it that just made me wonder why they chose to tell this story. That, and it was sadly SQUEEKY clean for a college fraternity movie. Not that I would have wanted it to be full of CGI monster boobs or something, but it just seems poorly thought out to tell a story in the part of character's lives where they would be experimenting and truly going crazy at the first time of true independence.
As a person who (by my own choice) had a very uneventful college experience, and regrets it every day of my life, I feel an odd and uncomfortable connection to it that the filmmakers clearly did not intend.
This Is The End - Now THIS was funny! Everybody here plays a great exaggerated version of themselves, and it is so much fun to watch them interact. The CGI creatures here are BADASS, and I just love that there is no doubt in this whole thing exactly what is going on. They are not apologetic that this is the real deal Christian Rapture, yet it doesn't devolve into evangelical bullshit.
I am sure it will pale in comparison to At World's End later this year. But I am more than happy for this to be the appetizer to Edgar Wright's full meal.
World War Z - I liked it. I've never read the book, which I've heard nothing but good things about. But also that this movie is nothing like. It's also NOT a horror movie. But I went in knowing that, and I think that helped. I am glad they used the word zombie, which a lot of movies awkwardly go out of their way not to do. But more importantly, they are ACTUALLY DEAD. It may be an infection of some sort, but they say that the people are genuinely dead, which I appreciate. That, and I do like the plan they come up with, I thought it was creative, especially since it wasn't a true "cure".
That being said, it makes no sense once you realize how many MILLIONS of people all over the world (specially areas like Africa that they have said are completely lost) would have some disease that the zombies would avoid. Huge areas would go practically unaffected and they would have already figured this out.
But overall I did like it. Watching the trailers, you get no sense of it meaning anything that they are dead people. They might as well be alien bugs or something. But in the movie you do. Yes, the larger swarm scenes they are just CGI sprites that might as well look like anything. But there are some scenes where you do feel that weight. So in the end, it's just going to go down as an action movie, and not a particularly smart one. But it's not nearly as stupid as I thought it might from the trailers.