Pixar's most sentimental and surreal film yet. While it didn't meet the heights of their last two features, it is still the movie of the year thus far. And as everyone has been saying, the first ten minutes -- as much as the scene of Proustian remembrance from Ratatouille or the extravehicular dance in WALL-E -- are as rich and moving as anything else in recent cinema.
zombeaner wrote:Spoiler
The infertility bit would probably go over their heads, but really is not necessary for the film to work.
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The kids seated behind me at the matinee I attended today were really disturbed by it -- and one of them confidentially and proudly told her siblings, "the baby inside her died!" Fortunately, a) this was the only genuinely inappropriate outburst of the afternoon (once again proving the point that kids are as captivated by Pixar as any of us are) and b) dad quickly corrected what happened for the younger siblings.
I absolutely loved this film, but my favorite aspect was the children's reactions throughout. These two next to me in particular were really interesting. They were absolutely silent, stunned throughout the opening montage. I thought it may have gone over their heads.Spoiler
But then when Carl hits the man over the mailbox and has to go to court made them burst into tears, I thought they may have needed to go out for a second. I've never seen children react to a movie that way before.
Can someone give me the rundown on the 3-D specifics? First of all, what type of glasses are they handing out to use: paper or plastic? And will a glasses wearer like me have a hard time viewing it (it always seems like a crap-shoot) with the specs they give out?
Second; how is the 3-D vs 2-D experience? I've read many say it doesn't matter (and knowing Pixar, story is king), but I thought that they had produced this picture with the intent of it being shown in 3-D (I know someone will correct me if I'm wrong).
I lean more towards Domino's mindset; I've been so disappointed by the "3-D" in 3-D pictures that I don't care if I ever see another one again. But, the Pixar people have earned my interest. Oh, and Avatar too. Oh, and ](*,)
I saw it in 2D. Things still moves in a three dimensional space on screen, so I'm not sure what there's to miss, maybe a few frights. I saw Coraline in 3D (plastic glasses, you can keep them, works with other glasses behind) and that's all I needed to know about this extra dimension, all that comes out of the screen is translucid and the glasses are shaded, making colors a bit duller.
I saw it in 3-D but, as with Coraline, I didn't think the 3-D presentation was essential. The 2-D version should be fine--but see it projected digitally, if you can.
As someone who's never watched a movie in 3D before, it was kind of interesting, but really just a gimmick. Unfortunately I couldn't find a 2D showing in Manhattan so I had no choice. The glasses over glasses wasn't too bad, although if you've a small nose, you'll probably find yourself holding them in place for the whole movie, which my wife did. That said, I'd have to say I think I care about 3D even less than I care about surround sound.
I feel guilty for not loving UP and here's why: Spoiler
I didn't like the dogs. At all. If Muntz is supposed to be a great adventurer, when did he invent the dog-translator-thing? I know it's a fantasy and I may be nitpicking, but it just didn't seem necessary or true to the character. It felt like there were two strains of script that got Frankensteined together -- Muntz the adventurer and Muntz the inventor -- and it threw me out of the magic of the story.
Thought it was very good, touching, surreal/realistic in turn, for all the reasons others have stated. A fine achievement in terms of detail.
Glad to see someone who thought the same about the dogs. It seems the script went through a lot of changes, Muntz was suposed to look after some kind of fountain of youth and initial designs made him look very old, like he's suposed to.
There seem to be a lot of areas in the film that were really undeveloped. I guess my biggest disappointment about this film was the lack of development as well as plot developments coming out of nowhere.
For instance, the dogs. Personally I loved them and I thought that they were really interesting, but why did Muntz create the dogs? I guess it could be implied that he needed someone to take care of him and he had his dogs so he needed a way to communicate with them. But since this invention is so unique where are the other ones? And why was Muntz so obsessed with the bird? I understand that he wanted to prove himself after his medal was taken away, but he must have been searching for 50, 60+ years.
I feel that the Muntz character was almost criminally underdeveloped. Within 10 minutes or less of meeting him, he becomes the villain.
The movie calls for a lot of stretches of the imagination. There are two kinds of stretches: one that is established within the context of the story and ones that are unestablished that we are forced to accept. An example of the first would be the house. That's not hard to accept. An example of the second would be Muntz's age, the fact that Carl suddenly has the physicality of a 25 year old, how Russel managed to climb onto the front porch. It's just kind of annoying.
They also seem to abandon the house about 1/3 of the way through. At first it was the focus, but then they lose it. To me, I found the Fitzcarraldo aspect of the film to be the most intriguing.
I thought he invented the collars as a way of coping with the insanity. He needed something to communicate with. I found the character on the whole to be very tragic and brought down by his obsessions. Somewhat like a mirror to Carl. There was, for me, a sadness to the whole affair.
I was really amazed at how touched I was by this film. One question... Spoiler
Was Russell imagining the events with his father/was he an orphan? I found this to be a particularly sad part of the movie, especially at the end/credits.
It seemed more like his mum was divorced, you can see her in the crowd at the end, and the man does not have much custody. I thought it was a nice subtle touch. Very rare for a childrens movie to even broadly tackle the issue.
Jack Phillips wrote:I saw it in 3-D but, as with Coraline, I didn't think the 3-D presentation was essential. The 2-D version should be fine--but see it projected digitally, if you can.
I'm definitely going 2-D. It's almost certain to be the first film I take both my kids to in a cinema, and I think 3-D would probably be overkill given that they'll be pretty overwhelmed by the experience anyway. They're massive Pixar fans (we're talking roughly one of their films a day going back years) so it's a pretty safe bet.
Michael, speaking as one who recently survived epic battle with a four-year-old during a 3D screening of Coraline, that would be a wise decision. And this is a kid who's favorite film is The Nightmare Before Christmas! We went 2D this round and he was utterly tranfixed by the 110 minutes of Up.
I thought the film had some really great elements but also some pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. The overall direction of the story for instance, is a pretty typical Pixar formula in that it begins as an adventure, chase, plot/villain twist, rescue type story that's typical of many previous Pixar films. But, the film's biggest positive is basically the character of Carl, where they could appropriately mine and manipulate audience emotions with basically a character's whole life to work with. You take away Carl, put any other Pixar lead in here and you'll get a pretty ordinary Pixar film.
Oh, and 3D is completely useless to me, it makes my eye sore, I hate wearing oversized glasses over my "real" glasses, and the colours suck when wearing them. I didn't even see a reason at all that this film would be showing in 3D.
I never got emotionally involved in this film. The opening montage of Carl and Ellie's marriage didn't make me feel any sympathy for either one of them. It was so lightly sketched in that the audience has to project a lot to fill in the gaps. Many audience members evidently have no problem doing so, which is fine for them, but not for me. My somewhat jaundiced view of marriage, long or otherwise, comes out of my own checkered experiences, so I'm not someone to sit there and get all sentimental because Carl keeps looking at Ellie's friggin' scrapbook. And that drawing of the house on that ridiculous plateau. What if they'd actually moved there? Where were they gonna get food, water, supplies, transportation, telecommunications, air-conditioning, etc.? Not a particularly well-thought-out ambition, was it?
Plus, I've never been one to get excited by someone suddenly "living their dream" when they're too old to enjoy it. Carl and Ellie could have sold that house and begun to travel at any time. They could have quit those dead-end jobs at the zoo and done something else with their lives. They didn't. Too bad. I'm supposed to cry for him? They're building high-rises all around him and offering him cash on the barrelhead for that wreck of a house. Take the money and get the hell out of there, you old bastard. And give that annoying little kid a good kick square in the ass on your way out.
And these are the parts of the film that actually interested me enough to think about them. All that ends less than a half-hour into the film when they land on that jungle plateau and start chasing birds and fighting off talking dogs and encountering a villain and lugging the house around through the jungle. It just got silly. Another formula animated family comedy. All the praise heaped on it utterly baffles me.
The 3-D was interesting, but I'd prefer to see state-of-the-art effects like that applied to a decent story.
Vic Pardo wrote:What if they'd actually moved there? Where were they gonna get food, water, supplies, transportation, telecommunications, air-conditioning, etc.? Not a particularly well-thought-out ambition, was it?
Doctor has said that Carl is basically going on a suicide mission. He's just doing wish fulfillment and probably wants to die.
Vic Pardo wrote:Plus, I've never been one to get excited by someone suddenly "living their dream" when they're too old to enjoy it. Carl and Ellie could have sold that house and begun to travel at any time. They could have quit those dead-end jobs at the zoo and done something else with their lives. They didn't. Too bad. I'm supposed to cry for him? They're building high-rises all around him and offering him cash on the barrelhead for that wreck of a house. Take the money and get the hell out of there, you old bastard. And give that annoying little kid a good kick square in the ass on your way out.
The movie is about giving up that sentimentality. By the end of things I'm sure Carl would agree with you.
Vic Pardo wrote:I never got emotionally involved in this film.…
Wow, Vic. You are clearly not the target audience for this film. Still—I wonder how you become engaged in any film, given your quickness to judge and your reluctance to let yourself be pulled in or relate to a character's flaws, foibles, emotions, and fantasy. Do you only enjoy films about hard-working righteous people living out realistic ambitions and receiving their just deserts?
Or was it simply the case that somewhere you didn't quite connect with the film and the rest of the repulsion just built up from there (and in response to ever-present enthusiasm for the film)?
Vic Pardo wrote:What if they'd actually moved there? Where were they gonna get food, water, supplies, transportation, telecommunications, air-conditioning, etc.? Not a particularly well-thought-out ambition, was it?
Man, you need to use spoiler tags or something. I had thought this film was 100% reality-based, but now my dreams are crushed. Next you're gonna tell me that dogs can't really fly biplanes. Anyone wanna buy, like 50,000 slightly used balloons?
Vic Pardo wrote:I never got emotionally involved in this film.…
Wow, Vic. You are clearly not the target audience for this film. Still—I wonder how you become engaged in any film, given your quickness to judge and your reluctance to let yourself be pulled in or relate to a character's flaws, foibles, emotions, and fantasy. Do you only enjoy films about hard-working righteous people living out realistic ambitions and receiving their just deserts?
Or was it simply the case that somewhere you didn't quite connect with the film and the rest of the repulsion just built up from there (and in response to ever-present enthusiasm for the film)?
Since I'm a big fan of Jason Statham's CRANK films, I'd say the former doesn't apply, so it's more like the latter.
(And I like the concise, perceptive way you put it, too. )
I also have a fairly skeptical view of marriage in general and the overly rosy/mainstream depiction of marriage in this film can make some people scoff. And really, Carl's life really wasn't so bad. His first 30 years were a helluva lot better than mine, and I don't see any tear jerking montages for me.
But, I'll admit I bought into it and shamelessly let Pixar manipulate my emotions, even though I was completely aware how blatantly done it was. This is one of those films I'll have to wait a while to see if I feel the same way about it down the line, because in many ways it really would be very ordinary without Carl's backstory established.
True, but we are only capturing one piece of Carl. I see the opening montage as the marriage as filtered through Carl's reflections. My grandfather's reflections of my grandmother are very similar, even though to the rest of us, she was always sort of insulting him and blaming him and rarely seemed really happy. Yet if he were summarizing their marriage (actually, he did, in a short book), it would be a very different picture. One of the reasons my wife liked the film was because it reminded her of that book, and of my grandfather's sentimentality towards her in general. I'm almost afraid that if he watches the film, that when next I visit him, the house will be gone because of some uncompleted promise he'd made that I never knew about.
I don't think we are meant to think that they had an ideal marriage—just that he, in his later years, has come to idealize that marriage. I also don't think we are meant to feel that Carl had a bad life. On the contrary, if he had had a bad life, we would be relieved at the close of the opening montage. It's the fact that he had what he remembers to be a good life, but he really misses his wife, and is in a really bad place, that we are meant to sympathize with him. That and the fact that they'd never done the one thing they'd always dreamed of doing, but that wouldn't have been an issue if they had had kids, or if she'd still been around, or if he'd moved on with his life after she died.
I think we are meant to see that he has sort of let his life turn in a very bad way because of his attachment to his life with her. He can't let go of the house, he can't let go of anything, and that's why he has that problem. When he finally does let go, he becomes really free, and seems happy at the end of the film. All this sort of gets lost in the jumbled adventure story, unfortunately.
Even if Carl's marriage was overly sentimentalized, I think it was used quite effectively to drive home what I thought was the movie's most relevant statement: that we shouldn't be so quick to force the elderly into nursing homes. People far too easily write off anyone of Carl's age and situation as obsolete (that sounds like a really terrible word to use in relation to a human being, but from my own experience, I think it's accurate). Problem is, this is one of those issue that I think everyone agrees on and gives lip service to and then calls it quits. By leading the audience to empathize with Carl on more profound level than the average character in a children's film, I think the movie made us feel genuine concern or even anger at how society treats the elderly, rather than merely admitting that there's a problem.
And also:
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I think this is why the movie showed us that the couple couldn't have children. It was not merely a tear-jerking device. If there were children involved, then the burden would be on their shoulders and not ours.
Highway 61 wrote:Even if Carl's marriage was overly sentimentalized, I think it was used quite effectively to drive home what I thought was the movie's most relevant statement: that we shouldn't be so quick to force the elderly into nursing homes.
Right, don't force the elderly into nursing homes, send them aloft in rickety old houses held up by helium balloons headed for Venezuela where I'm sure Hugo Chavez is waiting with open arms. Sounds like a plan.
Anyone wanna buy, like 50,000 slightly used balloons?
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