Up

We saw Up today: it isn't a perfect movie, but it was beautiful (and it made me cry at times). The introduction had almost no dialogue, and was a wonderful portrait of love. The primary story was an adventure story, and pretty predictable (but still enjoyable).

Much like Wall-E, the concept and the setup were brilliant. Also like Wall-E, the introduction was just brilliant storytelling: the rest was certainly funny, charming, and entertaining, but was not as brilliant. I had two nitpicks: one, the soundtrack was way too loud --- the dialogue was fine, but the music was annoyingly loud (and the choices of music were too schmaltzy at times). The second was that the primary story was a story about boys: there were female characters, but always in the background --- the primary "actors" were all male. I'm not sure why that bothered for this movie in particular; perhaps it was because the story was ostensibly driven so much by Carl's love for his wife. Was it just pure irony that the only other female character in the film was a bird named Kevin?