saw: up
Pixar finally devotes an entire feature to its animators' longstanding fetish for cantankerous codgers. As such, Up is an efficiently calculated, if somewhat trite, meditation on aging, loss and—aw fuck, it's a bunch of pet jokes wrapped around an animated short's worth of plot, drizzled with Michael Giacchino's almost diabetically treacly score. As much as I enjoyed its surfaces, the movie left me somewhat unsettled. It's basically the sentimentalized story of a friendless shut-in who becomes violent once his wife's no longer around to share his codependence. When his increasingly erratic behavior prompts the state to institutionalize him, he flees the country—accidentally kidnapping an ADHD-addled Boy Scout along the way. The two journey to Donkey Kong Country—I mean Paradise Falls, South America—where they proceed to murder an elderly explorer (voiced by Christopher Plummer since Peter O'Toole already did Ratatouille) and steal his zeppelin—returning Stateside just in time for the boy to receive some merit badges and the old man to face no consequences whatsoever for his crime spree. At least the 3-D wasn't super-obtrusive. Grade: B