RECENT VIEWINGS: Pixar + Woody Allen

Up (Docter, 2009):  Nostalgia is a commodity for Pixar. With every film, the studio's reliance upon viewers' shared past to earn emotional authenticity becomes more deliberate and meticulous. The first act of Up is more of the same, with adult-themed animated storytelling. The opening tale that explains the background of hero/curmudgeon Carl Fredrickson (voiced by Ed Asner) is rich and nicely rendered, but nonetheless yet another dip into the archives for Pixar. It is essentially an expanded variation upon the "When She Loved Me" segment in Toy Story 2.  And when the story literally sets sail, it lands in what appears to be another film altogether, with bizarre birds and talking dogs (though the running "squirrel" gag is funny). The uplifting conclusion is fine, but inevitable.


Whatever Works (Allen, 2009): Woody Allen surrounds his Allen stand-in (Larry David) with a cast of mainly Southern yokels to great comedic effect in a solid exploration of typical Allen subject matter (love and death, etc.).  Davis is Boris, the storyteller and self-proclaimed genius, fighting neuroses post-divorce. Into his Manhattan world sashays a dim-bulb pageant survivor from Mississippi, Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood). She is the shallow pastiche of almost everything Boris is not, a crude caricature and cliché to bend and shape. Melodie is a sounding board for fear and desire. Allen via Boris deals in ridiculous, antiquated Southern stereotypes, but with a wink: Woody Allen knows that Boris (i.e. the filmmaker himself) is also a stereotype. The film does not arrive at any grand observations and is perhaps too frivolous in its musings. That is quite all right. With Patricia Clarkson as an evangelical Southern mother remarking that her daughter Melodie is living "like a sharecropper", however, the humor of Whatever Works is undeniable.