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Up and Up Yours

June 3, 2009 11:35 PM

e went and saw Up this weekend. It was really good, but surprisingly adult oriented. It was definitely the most adult Pixar movie I've seen, which I guess isn't too surprising considering that it's rated PG. There are spoilers in this review.

You sort of know that this is going to be a fairly grown-up movie right away. It starts by introducing a young Carl Frederickson. He's a cute little kid who enjoys watching newsreel footage of adventurer Charles Muntz, who's off in South America trying to clear his name or something. Carl immediately meets Ellie, a little girl who shares his interests. A montage of their lives quickly follows: they're friends, they get older, the date, the get married. At that point, I realized where this was heading: the movie's about an old man, not an old man and his wife. They were gonna fucking kill his wife!

The montage continues, and it's really very touching. The couple keeps trying to save money to head down to South America, but they keep having to spend their money on other things. Then Ellie has a miscarriage. Or they find out that she's infertile. Something. In any event, we see them--after Ellie silently makes it clear that she wants lots of kids--at a fertility doctor of some sort, and Ellie's crying. Carl makes her feel better, and the montage continues. Carl buys tickets to South America, and then Ellie dies. This is about ten minutes into the movie, and you're already invested in Carl. It's really effective and touching, I thought.

What follows is what you see in the trailers: Carl decides to head to South America by tying a million balloons to his house in order to set it aloft. He's joined, unexpectedly, by a little scout guy named Russell. We eventually learn that Russell's parents are divorced, that his dad is seeing another woman, and that Russell misses his dad, who's doing a poor job of staying involved in his son's life.

The South American portion of the movie is pretty satisfying. There are big, colorful characters and loud, exciting chase scenes, but there are also quieter moments that are really very well done. The movie goes in a direction I didn't expect--Carl and Russell have to save an endangered female bird named Kevin from Charles Muntz--but it was a lot of fun, anyway. And all the while, Carl and Russell are tethered to Carl's floating--but increasingly less buoyant--house. The man is literally dragging his entire life around.

There's eventually a conflict between Carl and Russell: Carl wants to get his house to its destination but Russell wants to abandon that mission in order to save Kevin. Russell unties several of the balloons on the house and goes flying off on his own. Carl realizes that he's been being an idiot and that he has to go after him, but the only way to do so is in his house, which now doesn't have enough balloons to keep floating. So he goes into the house and throws everything that isn't bolted down out of it. He's literally throwing his old life away.

As a metaphor, it's a little heavy-handed, but as a set up for a fun climax, it's perfect. Carl and Russell--with the help of Dug, a talking dog--face off against Charles Muntz and his pack of talking dogs in an attempt to save the giant, colorful Kevin, who just wants to get back to her children. The whole thing is exciting and fun, but the end is also surprising: Charles Muntz dies by plummeting thousands of feet to his death. I didn't see that coming: a villain in a Disney movie actually dying, and in a rather painful and terrible way.

Anyway, the movie rocks and I would recommend it. Also, seeing it in 3D is the way to go.

The other thing I wanted to point out was that after seeing the movie, I checked it out on Rotten Tomatoes. It has a 98 percent freshness rating. That made me wonder what kind of reviewers gave it a negative review and what those people had to say, so I started reading one. I was about two sentences in before I got extremely outraged, and then I realized why: the author of this review was none other than my old friend Armond White. Here's what he has to say about the montage I liked so much:

Even the montage showing Carl's marriage to childhood sweetheart Ellie (their wedding, companionship, childlessness, then Ellie's illness and death), is over-sentimentalized.This silent interlude (which first seems to stretch the genre into seriousness) is no more daring than the utterly conventional Wall-E: It concludes with Carl, alone, holding a blue balloon at Ellie's funeral. Sheesh.

This is a montage in which we come to genuinely care about a character before we see her go through a good amount of pain and then die, having failed to achieve one of her greatest dreams. In a children's movie. How is that not daring.

But any credibility that Mr. White might have had is thrown away when he refers to Wall-E--a robot love story that is essentially silent for almost half of its run-time and whose main character cannot speak more than a few syllables--"utterly conventional."

What a fucking tool.

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