Weekend Movie Forecast: Up or Drag Me to Hell

The big release this weekend is obviously Pixar's latest confection, a lavishly animated adventure called Up, which nominally concerns an elderly man who tries to escape the mundane via balloons, and the cheerful boy who unexpectedly tags along for the ride. Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells says, "It's about as good as this sort of thing gets. And yet it's a fairly square and tidy thing as the same time. It's not meant as a putdown to say that Up is too immersed in buoyant punchiness and mainstream movie-tude, which basically boils down to Pixar's always-front-and-center task of giving the family audience stuff to laugh at and go 'oooh' and 'aahh' about, to finally matter all that much. It's too entertaining, in put it another way, to sink in all that deeply.

"And yet it's almost too good for the family market. You just know there's a significant sector of that crowd that will be saying to each other after they see it, 'What's with the old guy? Where was the truly-over-the-top fantastical stuff? Where were the cheap junk-food highs? Why didn't it throw in a little toilet humor to round things out? Why didn't they go with a manic-nutso chase sequence of some kind? You know...why didn't they thrill-ride it a bit more'

"I'm not saying that people who like lowbrow entertainment talk like this (if they did they wouldn't be lowbrow) but if they did they'd probably continue the thought by saying, 'It's not like we don't appreciate quality-level movies but Up is almost too nutritious for us. It's good stuff—bright, funny, lots of fun and amazing-looking—but it feels like it was made by people who went to college and eat vegetables and exercise two or three times a week, unlike us.'"