LOVE STORY - MOVIE REVIEWS UP (PT. 2)

MOVIE REVIEWS UP (PT. 2)

The raves kept on coming from critics today (Friday) for Disney/Pixar's Up. But they are not completely without fault-finding. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times remarks that in its opening, " Up flies high, borne aloft by a sense of creative flight and a flawlessly realized love story." Nevertheless, she goes on, "the movie remains bound by convention, despite even its modest 3-D depth. This has become the Pixar way. Passages of glorious imagination are invariably matched by stock characters and banal story choices, as each new movie becomes another manifestation of the movie-industry divide between art and the bottom line." Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News says that while it "can't quite one-up WALL-E, it offers soaring highs that are bound to enchant viewers of any age." Mick LaSalle comments in the San Francisco Chronicle that the movie "has a moving opening and a satisfying finish, but too much dull stuff in the middle. The movie more than survives -- it even thrives -- but that extra padding, there as a concession to kid-movie formula, should have been tightened up or thrown out altogether." But praise from other critics is undiluted. Tom Maurstad writes in the Dallas Morning News "It propels the viewer up, up and away in an experience combining smart, imaginative storytelling with dazzling dreamlike visuals, creating an experience that is the special province of animation - at once utterly convincing and completely impossible." In the Boston Globe , Ty Burr remarks that the movie "is pure vaudeville a loopy flyaway fantasy that's hysterically funny if only to keep the darkness at bay. It's a wonderful movie -- fit for the whole family and for once I mean that as praise -- but it doesn't seem designed for a higher purpose the way, say, Wall-E did. Up is a breather, a respite, a romp, but one with infinite shades of feeling." Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan notes that "Some films are an obligation to write about, Up is the purest pleasure." And Lou Lumenick in the New York Post writes that the movie is "the best directed and written film I've seen thus far in 2009, and quite possibly this century."

29/05/2009