...In which our heroine reviews "Up"

Pixar, you did it again. I had no expectations for Up, and if the passes weren't free, I wouldn't have gone. But I'll be damned if I was wrong again, just like with Ratatouille, and you've made another fantastic film. I was crying within the first fifteen minutes and then three times after that - a new record for tears shed at a cartoon.

I really had no interest in this film. The premise seemed goofy - hey, let's attach balloons to our house! The cute little boy helps a persnickety old man! Look a talking dog! - but I can assure you the film is far more complex than the trailers. As with Drag Me to Hell, the way Disney promoting this film is very different from the tone that it creates.

This is by far the most grown-up of the Pixar flicks. I can honestly say that I appreciate their films much more as an adult than I did when something like Toy Story first came out. Something about the themes they explore - in Up we follow an old man who has to learn that there's life to be lived after loss - in such an innocent way tears me up inside. 

However emotionally affecting Up was for me, it wasn't I would categorize it as a good but not great Pixar film, so it's better than most everything else out there. Plot-wise, it feels like they took this big idea about love and loss and how we deal with it...and then remembered that it was a movie for kids. Even my precocious eight-year old self wouldn't have appreciated a lot of the subtlety in Up, especially on the emotional front. I don't know, something about the tones didn't quite match up for me. I still really enjoyed the film, I just thought the story was a little too complex for the intended audience.

Also, I saw it in 3-D, which honestly didn't add much. Coraline used the technology far better, and with the emotional intricacies in Up, I think it's a little distracting. 

So I've reviewed two really good films coming out this weekend, Drag Me to Hell and Up, you should go see one. I enjoyed Hell more, but that was almost guaranteed.

This trailer for Werner Herzog's remake of Bad Lieutenant is probably the funniest thing ever. I can't believe their remaking the Harvey Kietel/Abel Ferrara film in the first place, but this "re-imagining" starring everyone's favorite emotionless actor, Nicholas Cage, looks epically shiteous. There are no words for how terrible this is. The trailer alone is full of enough what the fuck moments to cement a terrible, terrible film. Enjoy: