and there are storms we cannot weather
i just watched the video of susan boyle singing ‘i dreamed a dream’ again for her final performance for britain’s got talent, and it brought a tear to my eye. i mean, the song always does, for some fairly inattributable reason to me – i think it’s the “and there are dreams that cannot be” line, it gets me every.fucking. time. – and sung by the likes of ms. boyle, well, there you have it. and then after all that she needs to go to the hospital for stress and exhaustion? shit, i haven’t suffered the slings and arrows of overnight international fame, and i often seriously think i could use a little medically-induced R&R. poor woman.
anyway, it reminded me that i went to see the new Disney/Pixar movie “UP” in 3D a week or so ago, and i want to recommend it to everyone. it’s one of the extremely few movies that have ever made me cry in a theatre. and by extremely few i mean that i can recall 3: Fahrenheit 9/11, Finding Neverland, and now UP. many of my friends (girlfriends, mostly) where shocked to hear this when i stated it. “you’ve only cried at 3 movies?! how can that be?!” well, the thing is, fiction doesn’t usually do it for me. i guess i don’t have much of suspension of disbelief. i don’t get carried away by characters. most of the movies that have really moved me to tears have been documentaries, about real people who suffered real things. The Real Dirt on Farmer John almost made me cry, and so have many other docus. but i don’t ACTUALLY cry very often. same with weddings. eyes get a little misty? yes. actually cry? no.
but UP? well, i don’t want to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it, but in classic Disney form, a parental figure dies in the first 10 minutes, setting the audience up with all kinds of sympathy and/or empathy for the main character who has to overcome some kind of adversity. and since, in this case, the character reminded me SO MUCH of my grandfather, well, there were waterworks.
besides that personal connection (which i’m sure i share with millions of others; that wasn’t a coincidence), it was just a great film overall.
But what thrills me the most about Pixar movies is that the filmmakers take very simple themes and riff off them, like fine jazz musicians, revealing new and sublime layers of complexity. The basic message of Up has to do with how the pursuit of our dreams may seem important (after all, that’s one of the things America is all about, isn’t it?), but it’s our relationships with other people that shape and contribute to our lives in sometimes mysterious and mostly unquantifiable ways that even the fulfillment of a lifelong wish cannot match. Cram all that into the image of a man carrying his house (his American dream) on his back, while you draw parallels to the current recession, and you’ve got heady stuff for a cartoon.
and it was heady. so heady i would feel weird taking a child less than 10 or 11 to it, because it seemed almost too mature. maybe they’d be distracted by the amazing 3D effects and not really think too much about the actual story, but i think it’d be a tough to explain to them if they did ask that yes, sometimes, there are dreams that cannot be, but if you live your life right, maybe that’s ok.
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