3D lends Up’s imagery an entrancing vibrancy, providing even more visual depth to Pixar’s literally and figuratively deepest offering yet, a masterful tale of longing, regret, dreams and happiness wrapped up in a colorful, rollicking adventure-yarn package. Channeling Werner Herzog (specifically, The White Diamond) as well as his own prior, superlative Monsters, Inc., director Pete Docter’s film has a lightness befitting its central object – a house floating from urban development hell to South America via a bounty of brightly hued balloons – and a profundity at once subtle and piercing. Docter captures the exhilaration of exploration, the wonder of cinema and the thrill of young love in an immaculately realized opening, as young Carl Fredricksen, decked out in an aerial cap and goggles, stares in awe at newsreel footage of his adventurer hero Charles Muntz, and then during an imaginative stroll discovers a kindred spirit – and lifelong partner – in Ellie, whom the subsequent decades-spanning silent-film montage reveals as his beloved wife. It’s a wordless sequence that rivals any put to film this year (or in last year’s WALL-E), conveying an aesthetic nimbleness and richness of mature feeling – of the joy and pain of adulthood, specifically regarding the way life can unpredictably rebuff, and force us to reconfigure, our aspirations for the future – that’s simultaneously elating and heartbreaking.

Read More...

In Parts One & Two of this list, we presented The Screengrab’s consensus picks for the Top 5 Hits of Summer 2009.

Herewith, our individual picks and honorable mentions...

Andrew:

Top 5

1. Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince
2. Star Trek
3. Angels & Demons
4. ICE AGE:  DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS (July 1)



C’mon, now...who don’t like Scrat? You’re telling me that, given the choice between a tried and true animated franchise and Ed Asner, kids aren’t going to choose dinosaurs?

5. JULIE & JULIA (August 7)



I can’t think of a better film to fill this summer’s Meryl Streep niche than an actual Meryl Streep film...especially one that fulfills that other great summer blockbuster counter-programming niche: foodie films. All that plus Amy Adams, and I’m about 1000 times more likely to see this than Transformers...and I’m a dude. Add my wife, her mother, my mother, my Dad getting dragged along and all the other wives, mothers, mothers-in-law, dudes getting dragged along and PBS geeks out there, and we’re talking serious sleeper hit potential.

Read More...

Pixar Animation Studios has sort of a funny relationship to its parent company, Disney: in terms of artistic and critical repute, its the company's prestige boutique line, yet it's also one of Disney's greatest cash cows. Last year's WALL-E was the fourth of Pixar's nine animated features to win the Academy Award, an achievement that is even more impressive when you consider that Pixar's first three features were made before the Academy bothered to create a category for Best Animated Feature. But last month, Richard Greenfield of Pali Research came up with an unusual way of celebrating the impending (May 29) release of the tenth Pixar feature, Up: he downgraded the company's stock. As Brooks Barnes reports in The New York Times, this was part of an overall expression of concern from "two important business camps — Wall Street and toy retailers" - about the commercial prospects of Up. The movie, which was directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, and is to be released in 3-D, is about a 78-year-old man (voiced by Ed Asner) who, widowed and threatened with being moved to an assisted living facility, sets out for South America in a flying house powered by balloons, with an eight-year-old stowaway in tow. The naysayers fear that young audiences will find the aged protagonist and the lack of a prominent female character a turn-off. And the businessmen are expressing their lack of faith in the movie in a way that other moviemakers with strong critical reputations, such as Martin Scorsese, don't have to sit up nights worrying about: they're not lining up to produce lines of toys based on the film. "Thinkway Toys, which has churned out thousands of Pixar-related products since 1995’s Toy Story,” Barnes writes, "will not produce a single item."

This sort of talk pisses Pixar off, partly because they've heard it before.

Read More...

Brian (Paul Dano) is a single 28-year-old who sells luxury mattresses out of a sparsely furnished Manhattan loft. He likes to get together with his elderly dad (Ed Asner) and older brothers (Ian Roberts and Robert Stanton) at a forest cabin to drink shroom-enhanced tea and wander about the woods. And ever since he was a little boy, he’s dreamed of adopting a Chinese baby to call his own. He’s oh-so-very odd, and so too is Gigantic, a borderline insufferable trifle that dispenses quirkiness with its every gesture and breath. Apparently weaned on little more than Sundance-style indies, director Matt Aselton proves a prime practitioner of eccentric pap, from Brian’s first encounter with flighty, peculiar Harriet (Zooey Deschanel) – whose faux-adorable nickname is Happy, and who falls asleep on one of Brian’s establishment’s beds after coming to pick up a $14,000 mattress for her wealthy dad (John Goodman) – to a climactic family reunion, Chinese tyke included, in which Harriet is told that normality is an illusion right before she takes some whacks at a Muammar al-Gaddafi-shaped piñata.

Read More...

Hello again, and welcome back to the sixth installment of the Screengrab's trip through some beloved (and some not-so-beloved) holiday film fare, the 12 Days of Christmas Marathon.  While, technically, the twelve days of Christmas extend all the way into January and culminate in Epiphany, I'm sure you'll all be too hung over by that point to be able to deal with any Christmas cheer.  Plus, most of us will be back at work by January 6th, and we don't want to be the movie-blog equivalent of that one guy on your block who annoys the whole neighborhood by leaving his Christmas lights up long after the joy and wonder of the holiday has vanished.  So we've got a lot of movies to get through in the next three days.  Let's start with the 2003 Will Ferrell vehicle Elf, which is now general considered a canonical new-classic Xmas flick.

In the spirit of full disclosure, and to further reinforce my reputation as Bob Cratchit and Scrooge inhabiting a single body, I'll admit that, as big a sucker as I am for Christmas movies in general, I didn't think much of Elf when I first saw it in a theater.  I was in a bit of a lousy mood at the time, but that doesn't alter the fact that there really is a lot to dislike here:  the delicate balancing act between po-faced sincerity and winking, snarky sarcasm, for one thing, doesn't always work, and the movie's tone can come across as artificial.  The pace is a bit manic, the premise is undersold, and Ferrell's performance is unneccessarily called upon to carry the entire movie, which is a shame, given that he's surrounded by tons of extremely capable actors.  And Jon Favreau's direction can be charitably described as 'clunky'.

The story of Buddy, an orphan child who crawls into Santa's bag one lonely Christmas and ends up the only stranded human at the north pole, gets some early-running gags -- some predictable, others hilarious -- out of the notion of a normal child (especially one as hulking and clumsy as Ferrell) being raised among the elves.  Not enough time is spent on this appealing notion, which is especially regrettable given that Buddy's father is played, in a rare screen appearance, by one of the absolute masters of awkward comedy in the person of Bob Newhart.  But one of the appealing things about Elf, which becomes much more clear on repeat viewings, is how economical it is:  it's constantly making a dollar out of a quarter, milking the script's gags for more than they're worth and making the most out of Ferrell's screen presence.

Read More...

Hey look, a new Pixar teaser.

Read More...