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If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend Pixar’s new film, Up.  It is one of the best of recent memory.  I continue to be impressed with Pixar, not only because of their technical prowess and writing skills, but because of their dedication to the art form of animation.  Having seen Disney lose touch with this and degrade animation for so many years, it’s refreshing to find a company with as much respect for the style as Pixar.

Up’s plot is very original, which is probably the first reason that it’s intriguing.  That said, originality isn’t enough; I found Ratatouille to be lacking in terms of how compelling the plot was, although original.  There was no reason to care.  Up avoids this neatly.  The plot is funny, both juvenile and mature at the same time, and extremely compelling.  The story speaks to many generations at once.  The more childish element urges children to do what they love, and to live what they love.  All of the characters embody this from minute one – young children hungry for adventure, idolizing famous explorers, and a Boy Scout with a complicated family past who seems to take pride in actually doing important things for other people for no other reason than it’s all has.  But the movie is really about growing up.  I found the first fifteen minutes, in which we meet the main character as a small child, are introduced to his future wife at the same age, and then experience a montage of their lives together, ending with her death, to be sweet, touching, and sometimes tragic.  It sets up the rest of the movie elegantly; we understand this old geezer better than any other character like him.  We know what he was like as a kid, we know how he grew up, and we feel the way he feels about Paradise Falls.  The montage also allows the plot to pick up immediately, without lagging around waiting for the backstory to develop.  Twenty minutes into the film, he’s already tied balloons to his house and is floating away.  That’s a pretty good record, in terms of the amount of things that have to happen to get to that point.  Pixar is to be credited with keeping the movie moving without sacrificing any important information.

As the movie progresses, we see the characters change.  In my opinion, that’s really the most important part of a movie or play.  Why should we care what these people go through?  We need to empathize with them.  Up is very good at this – because of our knowledge of the characters’ backgrounds, we empathize very strongly with them, and we see them change in a way that seems natural and almost personal.

The conclusion of the movie is heartwarming enough that it could be written off as canned or unoriginal, but I found it to be a perfect ending.  This is because it doesn’t just end the plot, it ties it together.  We see what it is that the characters have been missing, and they finally find it.  Mr. Fredericksen’s house is finally at rest by the falls, and Russell and him form an somewhat familial bond.  It’s sweet to have a movie remind you that being driven doesn’t mean ignoring others, that you can do good while still getting what you want.  Up is a very good movie for right now, when, societally, people feel a lot of pressure to either prioritize themselves or others.  We’re made to feel as though we either need to become more insular and care about ourselves only, or we need to be so selfless that we intimidate others by our virtue.  Up strikes an ideal balance between these two extremes.  We’d do well to mimic that philosophy of worldliness.

I saw Star Trek last night.  To cut straight to the chase, I loved.  It was completely clear how much the writers and director loved the original stuff.  I think people complain about remake movies of this kind way too much.  They often don’t accept that people appreciate different things than they do, and make a different movie than they would.  That being said, I didn’t think it was perfect.  Parts of the plot didn’t seem to make sense to me, and some of the acting was a bit overdone.  But I did not get the feeling that the movie was created with the sole purpose of extending the franchise.  It stands on its own, and is a good piece of film even ignoring its predecessors.

Also, I really want to buy this and one of these (for when I get my laptop).

Tonight is my school’s prom.  I am wearing tails.

We got fifth place at the Greenfield tournament yesterday.  It was an awesome day.  Very tiring, but very fun.

I just got back from Sin Nombre at Amherst Cinema.  It was really good, but extremely scary.  I would not recommend it to anyone who can’t stomach violence.  That said, I didn’t find the violence to be gratuitous.  I dislike movies where the violence is for no purpose other than to sell, and I didn’t feel that way at all about this one.  It was a scary story, and one that needed to be told in the way it was.  I think I will write a longer review of it soon when I have more time.  Tonight I need to finish a paper for school tomorrow.

Also, I now am the owner of a megaphone.  Very useful.

Waltz With Bashir was excellent.  I am going to do my best to review it here, briefly summarizing the plot and what I thought of it.  WARNING: plot details most definitely follow:

The movie is an animated documentary, focused around the recollections of the filmmaker, Ari Folman, about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.  He was in the IDF at the time, and has only dim recollections of certain events.  It begins when a fellow soldier tells him of a nightmare he has been having, and Folman then begins to have his own vision of a massacre he knows occured, but knows little of.  He seeks out other veterans, including one who he sees in this dream, and tries to learn more of what went on there.  As he uncovers more and more details and personal stories, the film transitions between different animation styles as we travel through the memories of these people, and come to understand the whole story through these fragmented viewpoints.  At the very end of the movie, it suddenly snaps to about forty-five seconds of live authentic archival footage, and then ends.  This is extremely jarring, and I was at first a little ticked off at that they had abandoned what had until that point been a purely animated feature for the sake of dramatic impact, but I am coming to understand why they did this more.  It was certainly effective in terms of impact, but the question is whether or not it serves the film’s interests.  I think it ultimately does.  It is almost as if the animation represents the fact that these memories are all fragmented, subjective, and limited to the perceptions the soldiers had at the time of the events’ occurring, and then at the end when Folman comes to understand what actually ocurred, and the role he had in it, we see the footage, reminding us that there are in fact concrete records of these sort of things, that it is a matter of contextualizing them.

One theme the film treats especially well is that of ignorance.  Character struggle with the concept of blissful ignorance, and how certain people might have shut out certain stimuli to keep themselves happy or sane.  This is served especially well in a scene with the psychiatrist.

There is also one particular veteran who routinely offers very interesting analyses to Folman (who is a character in the movie) of Folman’s own viewpoints.  At one point, he says that perhaps the reason Folman is so interested in discovering the details of this massacre is that his own parents were in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, and this idea of massacre has been with him all of his life.  Now he is seeking to understand the situation in which he unwittingly took the role of the Nazi (to a lesser degree, but a definite parallel).

That particular exploration reminded me of a part of Maus in which Art is talking to his psychiatrist, Pavel, who says “Does the world really need another Holocaust story?  Maybe they need a bigger and better Holocaust.”  It seems to me that a lot of the art that comes out of trauma and tragedy, like the Holocaust or this particular military conflict / genocide, is focused on the idea of awareness.  When will humanity finally get to the point where an understanding of genocide or human suffering is not limited to retrospect?  When will we no longer be afraid to call these things what they are?  It seems that Arik Sharon knew about this particular massacare, at Sabra and Shatila, and let it occur anyway.  When will the world understand these things well enough to at least grant them classification?  From this will follow action, inevitably, but we must take that first step of recognition.

Overall, I really liked this movie, and found that it explored these themes very effectively.  The artwork was beautiful.  The first scene, which is a dream that a veteran is having, and subsequently describes, is particularly striking.  It starts with a dog running, and then more join it, finally coming to a halt underneath a window, which they bark at, where a man stands.  The veteran then tells Folman that there are twenty-six dogs in the dream, and that they are the twenty-six dogs he shot during the invasion.  As his unit approached Lebanese villages, the dogs would bark and awaken everyone, so his commander had him snipe the dogs before they entered, because they knew he was too afraid to kill a person.  For some reason, this veteran describing the fact that he remembered the faces and the wounds of every single one of those twenty-six dogs struck me as completely tragic, and I lost it.  Even at the end of the film, faced with the gruesome archival footage, I wasn’t as deeply affected.  That first scene really set the tone.

I highly recommend this movie to anyone in the mood for a though-provoking and contemplative theater-going experience.  If you’re looking for easy entertainment or something you can just walk away from and not think about, look elsewhere.  Waltz With Bashir is not to be taken lightly.

We are going to see Waltz With Bashir tonight!  I am so excited!  I have been waiting to see it for a while.

Ron Silver has died.  I have seen only Reversal of Fortune, but he was fabulous in that.

Due to the fact that I got less than three hours of sleep last night, I am pretty exhausted.  But it was worth it.  Watchmen was fabulous.  It is not perfect, but I am SO glad I went, and it is definitely a movie to see.  The CGI was also really really good, especially in the scenes on Mars, for anyone who knows the plot.

I would have liked to see more of The Comedian, especially as a younger man; his acting was great.  In general, I was most impressed with the historical development of the characters.  Most of the credit for this goes to the original authors of the comic, but I credit the director with doing a good job preserving this most important aspect.

I did dislike the gratuitous and graphic violence.  The comic book is violent, to be sure, but the movie took it over the top.  There were subtle changes to scenes that were more conservative in the book, and just shots that didn’t have to be included, for the purpose of selling the violence.

Overall, though, the movie represents a concerted effort to work with the source material, and it is ultimately successful.  It has been getting really bad reviews.  I think this is because of the critics’ mentality that if a movie makes any concessions from their idealized view of “perfect art”, it is no longer worthy of attention.  I.e., any movie that shows the slightest influence of “culture” or “industry” over a pure “vision” is junk.  This is simply not true.  Movies need inspiration and motive, to be sure, but they are products of the time; they cannot be isolated from the culture.  Too much culutural influence can, and often does, interefere with a film, but this is not the case for Watchmen.

I recommend it to anyone who is not squeamish about violence and superhero sex.

Today was an odd day.  My sister is fifteen.  This is a rather advanced age.  I am still grappling with its implications.

The day did not begin well, however.  My sister (yes, the same one whose birthday it is) was very sick, and was up early in the morning.  I was woken at about four, and was able to fall back asleep, but other members of my family were not so lucky.  My sister did not go to school today.  Then, when my youngest sister went out to let the chickens out of their coop this morning, she discovered that one had been locked out last night, and had been killed by a predator.  This is the first time we have had a chicken killed in the almost two years we’ve been raising them, and it was rather shocking.  My sister was rather traumatized, having just been presented face-to-face with the mangled carcass of a bird she thought she was letting out, and she came back inside sobbing.  My father and I had to clean up, and as the poor thing had been out all night, it was frozen solid.  It was quite a job, and I thus had a very sad start to the day.

School went well after that, except that I did not have enough food, and was thus rather headache-ish and grumpy all day.  We had a rather cold ultimate practice outside, and I managed to go the entire day without eating the four cupcakes I was entrusted with by a classmate of my sister’s who had baked them for her birthday and asked me to transmit them to her.  This was no mean, feat, but I got one after dinner, so I am happy.

Our plans for Watchmen are solidified.  A few members of our extended group have been their since a bit before five PM, and I will be meeting them there within a few hours, along with some other friends arriving from elsewhere.  I will be picking up one other on the way.  The movie is two hours and forty-three minutes long, so it’s going to be a late night.  But it will be worth it.

We won our trial today, and will thus be moving on to the first round of the playoffs on Monday.  We will be playing the winner of Region #16, the Berkshires, which will be either Lennox or Longmeadow; they have a tiebreaker trial.

My plans for tomorrow night are almost completely formed.  I am getting PUMPED!  I am going to go to Ultimate practice before returning home, having dinner with my family, and going back out to the movie.

I am pretty tired from practice today.  We are postponing tryouts until all of this DAMN SNOW has melted and we can actually get to the field.  Until then, we are running outside, and doing workouts inside.  Speaking of workouts, I came up with the most AWESOME workout today.  To begin, I must explain my school’s building.  There are three floors, and there are three staircases, one at each end, and one about 2/5 of the way down the hall.  The workout is that you run up and down a single staircase about ten times to warm up, and then, when you reach the bottom, you open the door, and sprint down the hall to the next stairway.  You run up and down that one, and then sprint to the next one.  Then you run up and down that one, and work your way back and forth again.  It is great because it combines light jogging (down stairs), heavy jogging (up stairs), and sprinting, which are all important in ultimate.  Better still, it gets you used to changing which one you are doing and then going back to another; endurance and explosiveness.  It is FABULOUSLY tiring.  After, we joined up with the people who had been running outside, and had an excellent workout inside.

We have a trial tomorrow afternoon; a tiebreaker in our region.  We are playing Tantasqua.  We have never faced this school before, so we don’t know what to expect.  Also, since we are up to the tiebreaker level now, this trial and all after it are coin flips.  That is, we arrive, and the two teams flip a coin.  The winner of the coin flip determines which side their team will present.  We know which side we will call if we win, but we have to be ready to do either one.  Thus, I will run my closing through a couple times tonight, and then get a lot of sleep.

Having trials on Wednesdays is great for me because it means I have no classes.  Thus, I do not need to do any homework.

I am solidifying plans for Watchmen.  We have an extra ticket because one friend backed out on us, so I will try to sell it to someone beforehand, or at the show, which I imagine will be pretty easy.  The question I am dealing with now relates to the fact that I have discovered that another group of my friends is going to the theater right after school to get on line.  I would go with them, but it is my sister’s birthday, so I will need to be at home.  I am therefore debating the morality of having them save us spots on line.  It would only be four people, so it is not as if we will be doing a huge disservice to the people behind them, but it could result in some pretty serious anger from the rest of the people on line.  I have to consult with my friends tomorrow before making a decision.