{"id":2145,"date":"2009-06-09T09:12:22","date_gmt":"2009-06-09T16:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=2145"},"modified":"2009-06-09T09:12:22","modified_gmt":"2009-06-09T16:12:22","slug":"up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=2145","title":{"rendered":"Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve read plenty of reviews of Up<\/em>, and talked to plenty of people who have seen it plenty of times.\u00c2\u00a0 I feel like there’s almost no point in reviewing it.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a Pixar movie.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like Metallica albums, even a bad Pixar movie is better than a great effort from nearly any other creative team, and Up<\/em> is not a bad Pixar movie.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, there is something purposefully uneven about the film that might be off-putting.\u00c2\u00a0 There is a very full, resonant beginning to the film and a long stretch of cute fun comprising the rest of it that doesn’t match the emotional core that’s built at the outset.\u00c2\u00a0 There are moments that come close, but they are only callbacks to that segment and not powerful emotional moments in and of themselves.\u00c2\u00a0 And this is exactly what Pixar wanted.<\/p>\n

See, I’ve heard a lot about how this is a film about adventure and never letting go of your dreams, but that’s not what I think the movie is about.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the Pixar version of that John Lennon lyric, the one about life happening to you while you’re making other plans.\u00c2\u00a0 It is far less about the things you do than the people you spend it with, which is what both of our protagonists come to grips with in the end.<\/p>\n

The notion of waiting for life to start and then being shocked when you realize that you’re an adult all of a sudden and you haven’t done anything is not alien to me at all, nor is the Pyhrric aspect of achieving what you hoped for and realizing that nothing fundamental has changed.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the very thing that Elizabeth Kostova is talking about in The Historian<\/em> when she talks about the disappointment of rediscovery: to paraphrase, the narrator talks about searching out a place that you once loved and revisiting it, but discovering that some mercurial thing you loved about it isn’t part of the equation anymore – like going to a place in the company of friends and going back alone, or finding it alone and returning with friends.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is exactly what Up<\/em> is about – the kind of love that makes every day an adventure, and how nothing is the same when it’s gone.<\/p>\n

Of course, there’s also the easy joke about Up <\/em>being an allegory for the subprime crisis.\u00c2\u00a0 So, whichever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve read plenty of reviews of Up, and talked to plenty of people who have seen it plenty of times.\u00c2\u00a0 I feel like there’s almost no point in reviewing it.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a Pixar movie.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like Metallica albums, even a bad Pixar movie is better than a great effort from nearly any other creative team, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[416,198],"class_list":["post-2145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies","tag-pixar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}