"Up"
[The following is a short excerpt from my full review of the movie; no spoilers are in this version. You can find the rest of the review here, on my website.]
Prior to walking into the movie theater, all I knew about “Up” was that it was about an old man (Carl Fredricksen) who begrudgingly goes onto an adventure with a boy (Russell), and somehow a dog is part of it. So what I expected was a whimsical journey around the world, while the old man and young boy struggled to deal with their generation gap. Nowhere did I predict a flimsy storyline, weak villain, random filler characters, and forced humor to plague the entire movie.
“Up” leaves more of a “Cars” aftertaste in my mind, where I could never quite connect to any of the characters past the basic familiarity level. I believe that the main problem with the movie’s structure was that in the beginning scene, it gave the impression that the entire movie centered around the whole aspect of having Mr. Fredricksen finally fulfill his wife’s dream of travel and adventure, and once that was done within the first hour of the movie, everything after that seemed to be the unwanted “side effect,” or price, for Mr. Fredriksen wanting to simply settle down. While I do understand that by having to deal with Russell, Kevin, Muntz, and the talking dogs, it fulfills the “adventure” part of the journey for Mr. Fredricksen, but they all never seem quite dedicated to their purpose, and in the end they all pale in sincerity to Ellie had last wrote to Carl in their scrapbook.
On a side note, I saw this film in 3D. The effects were rather sparse, and didn’t run far from the screen. I was expecting something along the lines of that Disneyland/Disneyworld show “Jim Henson’s Muppet*Vision 3D.” Maybe perhaps not
that zany of effects, but just more pronounced. At least I got to keep the glasses; they cost three dollars each!
Beecher and Schlesinger are still my two favorite characters.
yeah i know what you mean, it can be a bit squeamish in that regard
Wall-E is great.
