Morris Up for “Up”?
Review of Up
By Morris T. Pevensey, The Movie Critic Who Hates Everything
Hello, Morris-minders! It is I, Morris Tiberius Pevensey, The Movie Critic Who Hates Everything, back for another tilt at the Hollywood windmill. Nothing makes your avuncular avatar Morris madder than a bad movie! Nothing! And after recently emerging into the torchlight of a June afternoon from the enervating chill of the Loews Megaplex, Morris is good and stinking MAD!!! Why? Read on!
Of all the noxious trends to infect the entertainment-industrial complex, there are two that really make old Mo see a sea of boiling red.
The first, and most venerable: The Walt Disney Corporation. Morris hates Walt Diznee with a festering sickness. These ghouls have taken every great work of children’s literature ever written – Alice, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, Snow White, The Black Cauldron, The Sword in the Stone, The Rescuers, Winnie-The-Pooh – and ground them all into the same saccharine mush. If you don’t believe me, go and read the originals. Pinocchio in its original incarnation is a hilarious dark Grand Guignol morality play, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a surreal and satiric exploration of language and logic, The Black Cauldron an epic high fantasy with a Welsh flavor, The Rescuers a wholly believable suspenseful adventure story starring mice. Now watch the Disney versions and try not to retch. Disney sugars them all with its tiresome Borscht Belt sense of humor and scours them clean all hint of what made them distinctive. Now it’s Walt Disney’s Winnie the Pooh (shorn of its hyphens) Walt Disney’s Peter Pan (whither the bittersweet meditation on childhood and Time that made Morris cry as a child?) Walt Disney’s Alice (shorn of anything that smacks of cleverness) Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (and where is the scene where Pinocchio sees four black rabbits carrying his coffin?). And it’s all our glassy-eyed tots ever see of imaginative effort. The rationale: anything that makes children think, or exposes them to something new, or that is the least bit frightening, would damage them. “It’s too scary, it’s not suitable for newborns” runs the Concerned Guardian mantra. I liked being “damaged” in this way as a kid; it made my imagination work, and made me think.
The second, recent, trend that makes Morris run screaming for the Jujube counter is the profusion of Computerized Graphical Animation (CGA as it is called by Those In The Know.) I have yet to follow the plot of any children’s movie extruded by the loathsome digital sphincter of CGA. All I ever catch sight of are bulbous, bug-eyed blobs of marshmallow zipping about the screen in a hyperkinetic blur, shouting “Over here guys!” and making fart jokes.
It was with a heavy heart, then, that Morris went to see a film that combined two of his beastliest Bête Noires, a CGA “film” shat out by the Walt Diznee Megacorp: Disney-Pixar’s Up.
Nice title! UP? How is that supposed to entice the hyperstimulated midget hordes, eh? Up?!?!
Morris sat down with an ENORMOUS frown. First came a short ‘cartoon’ that, much as I hate to admit it, was rather charming and clever, despite being CGA’d. And when was the last time the hucksters would let you see anything before the film other than ads ads ads ads and more ads? Pleasant surprise!
Then the film started. Morris is wise enough to immediately look for the marketable gee-whiz main character. Woop, there he is! Little fat shit with glasses. Cute! Oh, and he meets a little gap-toothed girl with a “golly gee” demeanor. Cute! Ugh. I’ll be sure to paw through my Happy Meal for the miniature plastic versions of these two and hurl them at the wall.
What usually follows in these dreary rote exercises is that Cute Boy and Cute Girl go on a Big Adventure. Sure enough! They’re going to go to South America. Yawn. Commence hi-jinx in 3-2…
I swear that what happens next in this movie surprised even a slightly cynical old coot like me. Instead of going on their Cute Kid Adventure, the two main characters do what you might realistically expect. They grow up. They get married. They buy a house (and paint it like a rainbow). They dream of going on their Big Adventure, but, as told through a montage stunning in its economy and pathos, they never make it. He’s a balloon-salesman you see, not a terribly lucrative career, although milked for just the right amount of whimsy. The money in the jar labeled Big Adventure gets used for new tires, home repairs, hospital bills.
And they get old! Old! In today’s market-friendly kid movies? How can this be allowed to happen?
And the montage continues. And by the end, I admit it freely, Morris-mites. Old Morris was bawling like a waterworks. The old man finally gets enough money to buy two plane tickets to South America. He tries to surprise his wife with them on a picnic…but climbing up the hill, the girl…now old and stooped…collapses. And dies in a hospital bed. This is the most moving thing Old Morris has ever seen in a kids’ movie. It is a well done, and brilliantly understated, and so so touching.
How did they allow a children’s film, in this day and age, to touch on old age, and sorrow, and death?
And then the movie gets going in earnest. The old man goes on living in the gaily painted house, now sadly faded. Around him sprouts the excrement of Mall Culture. The green hill and the tree-lined street are gone, replaced by skyscrapers and restaurants with names like Pronto Sushi. The corporate goons want his house. They aren’t mean-faced, but rather nice, smiley..and totally pitiless. They sympathize, but they have a job to do. Orders from on high. Sorry old man, but you know…
And the city condemns him to a rest home. And the kind, pitiless men in blue pajamas come for him.
And then, the twist. Somehow, overnight, Old Man inflates a milion or so helium balloons, which, when released, rip his house from its foundations. Steering it using the same ropes-and-pulleys device we saw the little girl use in the opening moments for playtime, he steers his airship towards South America.
In tow is a very un-marketable and awkward fat boy in hilariously reimagined Cub Scout regalia. Old Man is kind of mean to him, and the rest of the film covers their exploits among the buttes and crags of South America, where a villain awaits, and talking-dog henchmen, and peril, and a mother cassowary in distress.
I confess, Morris-minions, that I found the remainder of the film somewhat more by-the-numbers and less believable, although it was certainly clever and diverting. What Old Man wants to do in South America is never very palpable, and his relationship with Fat Kid follows a predictable arc.
It does not matter. Morris is hopping mad..because he IS the Movie Critic who hates Everything…
And Hell-E-Wood has delivered to him a movie full of the things he hates…that Morris CAN NOT HATE! Who would have thought this day would come?
So be it. Morris applauds this film for taking risks, for daring to give today’s jaded, formula-fed mobs of kidflesh something challenging, and for doing it very well.
Is this a new day for kids’ movies? Could we even say that things are looking…UP?!!!
Chortle chortle! This is an unusually happy Morris T. Pevensey saying “Land ho!”
Related posts:
- Does Disney Now Own God?
- Hurt Locker Fails to Capture World War II Experience
- Thor
- Milking the Milk Movie
- Half Blood Prince is Empire Strikes Back of Potter Movies
Morris, you’ve been cracked! Truly, yet another seal on the media apocalypse has been broken. Just like when I saw Lair of the White Worm and actually liked a Hugh Grant movie. Heaven help us.