Notes on Up.

This is a nearly perfect film, but there are two points I want to address that should have been implicitly pointed out.
Firstly, the villain is weak - why does Charles Muntz want the bird so much? The answer is prestige. He wants his place in society as an old man who is respected. He wants his 'story in life' to be honoured and respected and completed, otherwise he feels like his life has been wasted, and so it follows that he will stop at nothing to get it back. Carl on the other hand, suffers from a broken heart and just wants to live his life with dignity in the face of his mortality, and to live with the chance of achieving his dreams so he can feel like a real person even as society spurns him and death comes a knockin' in the form of a man in a black suit. The infinite sadness from feeling like a failure in the eyes of man, is what fuels both men, and so they are really just mirrors for each other. My only real problem with the film is how these deeper issues are subtly implied and left for you to uncover and think about them, but never made obvious, and so it feels like too cartoonish an ending. You don't feel anything when Muntz reaches his end, when you should be feeling sadness - because he represents a cross section of society who have reached life's inevitable conclusion with nothing to show for it. There are two hands you can choose at that point: the prison of material bitterness, or the joy of service to another's heart.

The second point is that Russell is angry at Carl because he breaks his promise to look after Kevin, though it's to protect the only thing he has left, his house and dream, from burning up. Their relationship is built upon trust, something the younger generation need more than ever, because their families fail them left right and center: abuse, divorce, suicide. Eventually it all comes crashing down: I've been watching Neon Genesis Evangelion up to my appointment, particularly watching the character of Asuka, how her bratty, rude bravery is just a shallow ploy she constructed in the wake of her mother's death, and how that breaks down the moment she reaches the limits of her own skill and faces the void. You have to break self importance and self denial, and, in the words of one of the best Dream Theater songs, 'make amends to fix this dying soul'...and accept that joy and love are enough.
Now that you can see all you have done
It's time to take that step into the kingdom
All your sins will only make you strong
To help you break right through that prison wall.

So what to do with seniors? The old should not be in homes: they should be in nurseries.

Movie plot.

A terminally ill man, through the use of hash oil, goes on out of body experiences and becomes convinced that the planet will collapse due to deep mining of the crust, and attempts to leave his body before it implodes, bringing others with him. He encounters a 5th dimensional fortune teller who directs him to Mahavatar Babaji, who teaches him about spiritual skills: kundalini, remote viewing, DMT experiences, but before his training is completed, evil forces sabotage his work, and our hero must enter his decoded, surreal emotional body and synch his patterns up into optimal again, in order to save an entire dimension of reality. Emphasis on visual psychedelic jump cuts that infer changing channels. The emotional reality has to be directly portrayed.