Up

After Where the Wild Things Are, my two companions, faces streaked with tears, resorted immediately to mocking me in an attempt to restore their manhood. "Look at you, Todd. You weep through Up and then this movie leaves you totally composed."

Upon reviewing the latest Pixar masterpiece, released last week on DVD, I am forced to confront what it is about this movie that so completely ruins me. I saw the film in theaters with the same pair and, knowing full well their tendency to correlate an inverse relationship between masculinity and lachrymosity, I self-consciously held it in. At home, I allowed Up to affect me to its full potential and found myself snot-nosed and hacking, a catharsis of tears. If my friends thought I was weeping in the theater, they have seen nothing.

Objectively, Wild Things is the more devastating piece. In my review of the same, I discussed the similarities between the two: both are about the shattering of families and dreams. In Up, our heroes find salvation. In Wild Things, Max is left high and dry, newly cognizant of his mother's fallibility and utterly alone. Up conveniently thrusts together a son without a father and a father without a son. As a set up, it's kind of obvious. It works because the storytellers at Pixar are such experts.

Up begins with a ten-minute prologue in which Carl and Ellie meet as young children with imaginations of adventure. As they bond over a shared desire to jet off to South America in a blimp, a smash cut brings them immediately to their wedding ceremony, and they are off on a life lived together in the same run-down house where they first met.

They share two dreams. One is that they will someday take that trip to South America. The other is that they may someday be parents. The former is crushed through a series of accidents that eats up their travel fund, the latter through miscarriage in what has to be the most devastating half-minute of any Pixar film yet (and they've had a few).

Ellie and Carl grow old together and Ellie dies. Carl, faced with losing the house that is his last tie to his wife, inflates several thousand helium balloons and flies the whole damn thing to South America, discovering in midair that the nosy, talkative kid trying to get his 'Assisting the Elderly' merit badge is stowing away on his porch.

In the precisely executed adventure fantasy that ensues, what happens is this: Carl suddenly has a family. We will recall from the prologue Ellie's silent affirmation that she wants not just one baby but several. Twenty-something Carl was shocked but delighted. Now, in attempting to fulfill his dead wife's one dream he ends up with her other, as well. Carl must wrangle with the needs (mostly emotional) of the fatherless child, the unloved puppy and the hunted bird. The avian mother (who is, subtly, a transgressive symbol of progression, named 'Kevin' in spite of her gender and colorful plumage), sought for her rarity, wants only to get back to her children - another separated family restored through the heroism of our protagonists.

Other than the obvious heartstring-tugging of the prologue and the emotional nakedness of Dug the Dog ("I have just met you and now I love you!"), the film's greatest moment of heartache comes as Carl's third-act reversal. Having anticlimatically reached the final resting place for his house and wife (and life) at the precipice of the great waterfall, Carl has cast off his castaways and settled into his easy chair to drown himself in the hazy fog of memory. Until this moment, Carl has been living for the past, ignoring the opportunities for self-worth presented in the dog, bird and kid, interested only in achieving a dream that died with his wife. He picks up her adventure scrapbook, assembled in her childhood and left mostly blank, with pages and pages that she was supposed to fill in with mementoes of adventure and excitement. Carl discovers now, at Paradise Falls, that Ellie did fill in her book: it has become a photo album of their life together, ending with the note: "Thanks for the adventure. Now go have a new one!"

In this moment, Carl willingly assumes his role as patriarch to the unconventional modern family. "I was hiding under your porch because I love you," says Dug, tail between his legs, previously seen moping away after being called a bad dog. Carl welcomes him into his house and life for the first time and they sail into the sky to save Russell and Kevin. They will, of course, and in classic Disney-movie fashion (the villain's fall-to-his-death the most obvious nod to the Movies Walt Used To Make). Kevin will be reunited with her kin and Carl will take Russell's absent father's place at the merit badge award ceremony.


Up reveals Pixar's Pete Docter to be a real watchmaker of a dramatist. The thing is, what moves me so in his films aren't the tragedies and broken connections but the redemptions, the reunion, the salvation. When Sulley, in the end of Monsters, Inc., is reunited with Boo and his face lights up ... man, that kills me. It's not the miscarriage that Up is about, devastating as that moment is. What makes this a masterpiece is the story of Carl making up for that loss and its disguise as an action-adventure. Where The Wild Things Are is a brilliant study of the breaking of a boy, but Up is about making up for your losses. The tears brought out by this are of joy; I am made wholly vunlerable by the beauty of this family portrait.

17 Again

The most surprising thing about 17 Again - other than the extent to which I enjoyed it - is that the movie it most reminds of isn't one of the gaggle of body-swapping, shape-shifting teen-coms (Freaky Friday, 13 Going on 30, Big) behind which it gets in line. No, the movie to which is owes its biggest debt is Back to the Future.

This is most explicitly apparent when Zac Efron (playing a middle-aged malcontent recently shrunk back to his teenage self for a little spiritual redirection), in an attempt to prevent her from giving up her virginity to the worst possible guy, inadvertently causes his daughter-cum-classmate to fall in love with him. In the complicated process of breaking her off from a rapist-in-training boyfriend, Efron gets his lights knocked out, and wakes up cooing softly, talking about a dream he's had that he was a teenager again, believing himself to be lying in the lap of his beautiful wife. One double-take later, he realizes he's with his own daughter, and she's throwing herself at him like he's a Jonas brother.

The sequence mirrors, beat-for-beat, the moment after Marty McFly gets himself smacked out of conciousness by his own grandfather's car and wakes up in his teenaged mother's bedroom in his underwear, his jeans over on her hope chest. It's a twisted moment - though Michelle Trachtenberg, as daughter Maggie, is phoning it in here and can't hold a candle to Lea Thompson's effortless sexuality. But for disposable teen fare such as this, there are worse movies to emulate.

Also twisted (in a different way) are the leering shots in the film of Efron without a shirt. It's pornographic in a way that doesn't really jive with the messages of abstinence and family values imparted elsewhere. I get the impression that this is a kind of transitionary project for lil' Zac; he's trying to shed his school-boy image but he still only has one demographic interested in him and their Catholic parents are paying too close attention for him to try anything really risky.


This, by the way, is why Efron will remain marketable long after someone like Robert Pattinson has gone the way of the pog. You see Zac without a shirt and you think maybe he just wants to help you with your garden (he does do some wholesome gardenwork in the movie). He's kind of asexual, which is just what we want for our prepubescent daughters to have on their walls. If Efron really wants to bust out of any molds, he best start getting photographed in his underwear like Jessica Biel did.

In the meantime, Zac is content to distract us from his six-pack by flexing his comic muscle. He's actually got some stuff. That whole timing thing is down pat, and his willingness to embarrass himself earns a lot of points (it's also, I must imagine, totally adorable). He gets slapped across the face probably ten times in the film, and it's not the ensemble doing the smacking that makes me chuckle. It's the Efron deadpan.

I can't believe a movie with Trachtenberg, Melora Hardin, Jim Gaffigan, Leslie Mann and Matthew Perry would let Zac Efron be the best thing in it. His talent is not to be denied, and I only hope he gets to prove it to the doubting masses someday instead of going off the deep end like so many other child stars who sold their youths to Disney.

Letter to the West Coast

Clocking in at two minutes and ten seconds, John Vanderslice's "Letter To The East Coast" might easily be dismissed as the disposable opener to the mid-career album of a not-very-well-known singer-songwriter. It's a tonal thing, opening JV's fifth studio album short and bittersweet, placed so to earn the analog 'explosion' of track two, "Plymouth Rock".

The reason I bring it up is that I happen to be sitting in a Starbucks and the song just played. I've been killing some time here and have paid some attention to the in-house music. The only word I can think to describe the mix I've heard over the course of the night is "eclectic", and not in the KCRW way. If there are any genre-leanings in my coffee shop, favor is paid heavily to easy listening pop vocals.

Mixed in with the soft jazz, I've heard at least two Bob Dylan tracks and a Neko Case song, though I can't at this point remember which. There was also some post-Peter, Bjorn and John dreck and a viciously unnecessary cover of Beck's "The Golden Age" sung by what sounded like the female bastard child of Norah Jones and Diana Krall.

When "Letter to the East Coast" came on in the store, it immediately made me think of one specific incident: probably a year-and-a-half ago, I was in a Starbucks and "Letter to the East Coast" came on. I excitedly asked the two baristas if one of them was a John Vanderslice fan (we JV fans are few and far between, you see). I received some gentle mockery and the promise that nobody working at a Starbucks has any say in the music you hear.

I have worked in retail. I've experienced the Pavlovian gag-reflex at the house muzak you have no choice but to hear over and over while working for the man. Now, months and months and months go by and I hear the same slow and pretty song by one of my favorite dudes in two different Starbucks - in two different states, no less.

It's bad enough that my John Vanderslice (and my Neko) are getting lumped in with this music-that-was-made-to-be-ignored. But if there's so little variety in the Starbucks in-house playlist (which, so far as I can tell, doesn't mirror their slightly superior in-house available-for-purchase list) that I can randomly hear that same song twice - that song that I can easily say I have never heard anywhere else ever that wasn't either cued up by myself or played live at a show - is it safe to presume that all over America there are Starbucks employees psychologically conditioned to cringe at the sound of this beautiful piece of music?

I'm sure Starbucks' playlists are all built around the idea of being non-invasive. The corporate higher-ups want people to feel comfortable here, like a home away from home. Since you can't let the customers pick the music (well, you could: it's called a jukebox), Starbucks must provide inhouse sounds that breed quiet conversation as well as the ability to tune out and read a book or study for your exam. But I suggest that for every person that can ignore this stuff there's got to be at least one other (like me) that cannot help but listen very closely to this terrible music and wonder, "Why?"

For one of my favorite artists to be included on this playlist bothers me personally. For these playlists to exist in the first place, though, bothers me on a deeper level. Starbucks has been earning some negative publicity, by the way, for mishandling of its physical media. With the Hear Music label, Starbucks seemed poised to monopolize the only remaining demographic that buys CDs (old folks) thanks to exclusive new Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell albums. They fumbled the ball, though, and passed the label on for someone else to go bankrupt with.

But my point is: somebody in Seattle is making deals for certain music to get played all over the country. I'm sure the idea is that you pay Starbucks for exposure and then hopefully somebody buys your record after hearing it over a caramel machiatto. If they weren't making money, there wouldn't be any reason for the company to exert the control it does over the music. It's just like the horrible commercials that play before the previews: it's ubiquitous, we can't ignore it if we are at all sensitive to the stench of shit, and it's making the wrong kind of money for the wrong kind of people. I wish John Vanderslice wasn't a part of it.

As I finished this tirade, "Fake Plastic Trees" came on. Oh, it wears me out.