An "UP"itty review
May. 28th, 2009 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamagotchaMy family and I saw "UP" last night, thanks to some preview tickets Clay and I scored last week.
My overall impression is a slightly qualified thumb's-up.
It's got a lot of great things going for it. The framing of the love story at the beginning is fantastic. The development of the main characters is good, especially since we find ourselves liking a couple of potentially unlikeable fellows. A pivotal fight scene between two geezers will be painfully funny to anyone experienced with the aches of aging. The colors and design are fabulous, as we've come to expect from Pixar (the iridescence of Kevin's feathers were especially nice), although the dogs were a little clunky... reminiscent of the Toy Story villain's dog. It was a little bit rough for Linc, but that may have had something to do with the fact that we had to sit in the second row... "Mary Poppins" would have been terrifying that close up. There were quite a few movie callbacks that were snicker-worthy, like the dogfighter pilots' homage to the first "Star Wars" and the Alpha dog's voice reminding me of Eartha Kitt's hilarious Yzma-kitten in "The Emperor's New Groove."
There wasn't a short beforehand, either, which was a bit of a disappointment (I see that it's titled "Partly Cloudy"... oh well, I guess I'll just have to go back and see it again!).
During the credits, there was some mention of the movie being dedicated to the real-life Carl and Ellie Fredrickson. A quick Google comes up with nothing... anyone have any insight here?)
I liked 95% of the movie, a lot. But the thing that I didn't like really set a sour tone as I left the theater, and weighed on my mind heavily in the time since. When I mentioned it to Bill, he said that I'd had the same problem with "Kung-Fu Panda," too... so perhaps I've got a personal quirk going on this particular theme.
Anyway, what I really didn't like was the fact that the "bad guy," who had been shown pretty clearly to have a really good reason to have gone bad (Charles Muntz in UP, Ty Lung in KFP), was killed off with no sense of redemption or resurrection. Both times felt really jarring... the violence up to that particular point each time had been very cartoony. Wile E. Coyote never died, right?
It just felt like lazy story writing to me. It was the same feeling as when Joss Whedon killed off Wash in "Serenity"... he'd given these characters pretty much supernatural protection for the entire series and the rest of the movie, and then sort of randomly and arbitrarily lifted that protection for a moment. It felt like a betrayal of the people who invested in these characters.
So why go to all the trouble of portraying Muntz as a guy with a legitimate reason to do what he's doing? If you really wanted to make him totally worth killing off, he could have been shown to be totally off his nut, completely deluded or twisted far away from his original goal. Or, let him choose death as an alternative to humiliation, go to his fate with the same dignity that he brought to the circumstances that created his situation. But Good and Evil are slippery... does Muntz' desire to exonerate his name really outweigh Carl and Russell's desire to protect their bird friend?
I don't know. Perhaps it's because I'm trying to write stories myself. It's just too easy to kill off someone who is in the way. While I had plenty of beefs with the Star Wars mess, the redemption of Darth Vader felt right to me.
Part of me wants to start analyzing other stories, and another part is saying, "Laundry! Dishes! And if you've got time for this, for Pete's sake, write your OWN damned stories and see how easy it is!" So I think I'll climb down from my comfortable critic's chair and let you go on to draw your own conclusions. But I'm definitely interested in hearing other people's responses to this film.
Re: Please let me know if you learn who the real Carl and Ellie Fredrickson are.
Date: 2009-06-05 07:41 pm (UTC)