"Up" is a similarly freewheeling adventure. With a few dozen bushels of helium balloons, Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner, whose full name appears in crosswords more than you'd think) steers his airborne house to the Amazon Basin. Russell, a very round and earnest kid, accidentally stows away on the flight. "Up" has a lot of fun with the setup and with what Carl and Russell find when they arrive.
Initially, the meet a Rain-Blo-colored female bird that Russell names Kevin. Kevin has the temperament of a few different kinds of birds--ostrich, flamingo, chicken, turkey--combined with the physical genius of Donald O'Connor. She's an utterly original creation. Kevin and Dug, a talking dog, get the biggest reaction from the audience.
An ostensibly tear-jerking preface opens "Up" in the wrong direction. Carl's mostly silent life-story is a carbon-copy of similar, more effective sequences in earlier Pixar movies. I'm thinking of Jessie's abandonment in "Toy Story 2," the look back at Radiator Springs's heyday in "Cars," and even the first two acts of "Wall•E." Carl's old age, so forcefully introduced, is regularly contradicted: he can't walk down stairs, but he can hike over a mountain for days while dragging a floating house? Maybe writer-director Pete Docter feels a Pixar movie can't be simply fun. The brand demands pathos, no matter how corny.
In trash like "My Bloody Valentine," 3-D is an excuse to thrust stuff at the audience as often as possible. Pixar has wisely made a solid movie first and then thought about 3-D. Pete Docter, the director of "Up," says, "We’re showing you a story, and the 3D should be in support of that, not the opposite."
After the initial excitement, the 3-D in "Up" is forgotten. During the film, I kept pushing my Carl Fredricksen-style 3-D glasses down in order to see the actual film. Through the glasses, it's as if "Up" has been projected through a glass of rainwater. It's a tragedy for a film this vibrantly illustrated. Of course, I had to make do with the glasses; watching without them may be brighter, but it's also blurrier.
Shocking 3-D is annoying and subtle 3-D is unnoticeable. Conclusion? 3-D is a joke. It's not the future of movies. Here's hoping the fad dies out faster than Hollywood thinks it will.
4 comments:
I saw "Up" with brother-in-law John Loy, who is in the end credits as "John Robert Loy." I guess that'll be his official professional name from now on.
What about the physics? I could not get over the fact that the house could hold up the two main characters, but they were enough to weigh it down in the next second.
I agree with a good deal of your review... although I disagree with the opening- I bawled. I didn't care when Jessie was abandoned in Toy Story because I didn't like Jessie to begin with. Cars looked boring and I didn't want to watch a movie about hot wheels, so I skipped that one and can't compare. I thought the opening scene was one of their best in the emotional strings being pulled kind of way.
Other than that though, I hope they get rid of this 3D fad because I'm tired of being charged extra for hokey crap. Some of the scenes in Up weren't even 3D, I took the glasses off and they were crystal clear, wtf?
Things in "Up" that are *actually* 2D--the newsreel at the beginning, photographs in the diary, etc.--are not projected in 3D. It's somewhat perverse that Disney/Pixar embraces 3D so fully and then opens the movie with a sequence almost entirely in 2D.
The aging montage worked better upon second, regular, viewing. Those glasses are worse than I thought.
Post a Comment