B-Grade B’s been travelling, so I’ve been occupying myself in the evenings by going to see movies she’s not interested in. First up, World War Z. I don’t know if Brad Pitt means to have a career in movies about devastating global plagues, but he does a good job of being sane in this one, and resourceful. The movie’s not scary, not a horror movie at all, really; it’s a medical drama. No, really, although none of the doctor characters seem to be notable at diagnosis or developing a treatment. What the movie’s really good at is getting across what it feels like to be in the middle of a mass panic. I can well imagine what it would be like to be under attack without knowing where the next blow will come from or if it will come at me while watching this movie. It’s also good at conveying just how baffling disease can be, how impossible to stop, much like Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, even if it is at the same time and throughout less medically realistic. It’s a better movie than zombies would lead you to believe. Last night was monsters, big ones: Pacific Rim. I can see now, without having to ever bother about seeing them, why the Transformers movies would be fun. But I went to see this because it’s Guillermo Del Toro’s tribute to the rubber suited Japanese giants that occupied Saturday afternoon monster movies so ubiquitously in the sixties and seventies. Del Toro does monsters so very well, and he gets to do big ones here. The movie hits every stereotype, every stock speech (except “some things mankind was not meant to know”) and reprises dozens of alien invasion tropes, but it’s still big entertainment. If you want a quiet movie, this isn’t it. There’s enough tension to be satisfying, even though you know the outcome already. It really left me wishing Del Toro had been successful in getting Lovecraft’s “In the Mountains of Madness” green-lit.