Akira is the anti-thesis to Disney in any way you can think of.

In other words: you can take almost anything except animation and the negative version is Akira. Where Disney is easy to understand, Akira is hard to understand. Where Disney is fluffy, Akira is hard as a brick. Where Disney animates people as if they are bad over-acting actors, Akira is about realistic animation. Where Disney is “for children”, Akira is for adults etc etc pp ad nauseam, I think you get the picture.

I really can understand that Akira, at the time of its release in 1988, blew the mind of western audiences.

Basically this is also the reason you have to watch Akira, even if you don’t like anime or animation. Even with all its flaws Akira is not called a landmark animation, even a classic, for no reason.

You have to be prepared, though, because Akira really wastes no time to get started. In some ten minutes or so we get introduced to so many plot elements that you get dizzy. Heck, even after a second watching I got confused and had problems understanding all that’s going on.

Moreover, its story is so packed full of characters you get even more dizzy. It’s not only that there enough main characters to fill a whole series (Kaneda, Testuo, Rai, Rei, the Colonel, the shriveling kids, the scientist and so on). No, there are enough to fill a whole stadium since there a tons of minor people in this flick which seem to play a bigger role in the two-thousand page manga but get only some seconds or minutes screentime in the movie. I almost started to play a drinking game.

Here’s my initial rundown: the ex-army kind-of type leader of the Clowns, the strange religious cult leader, the shrimp of a politican (although he played a bigger role here) and the cute little Akira (who casually kills millions of people in some mere minutes - way to go brat!!). I am sure I forgot to mention some other guys here, so be free to add them in the comments.

As the story moves on it at least gets a little bit more understandable but at the end the shriveling kids could have used some more time to spoiler us their plan. I have a feeling of what they did, but some confirmation would be so awesome you almost won’t believe it.

Seriously! Where other movies and series go over-the-top, Akira doesn’t even bother us with some more detailed explanations. Well, at least, it’s enough information here to let the people get started with interpretations. And there still is the manga. But I am lazy after all…

On the other hand the overall atmosphere Akira builds up is fantastic and almost unmatched. Sure, we have Blade Runner and its companions but Akira doesn’t go for melancholic or depressing but for eerie, massive, cold and technological. I think it’s mostly the contrast at work here that makes the atmosphere so unnerving.

On the hand one we have a super-mega-city with buildings as massive as you can think them. On the other hand you have a sleazy and derelict feeling at every corner. It’s as if the city is on the verge of falling apart and therefore a perfect metaphor for the society. I certainly wouldn’t want to live there. I think I would hang myself after two months max. Or even earlier considering that Neo-Tokyo very often feels like a ghost town since there are no people around. Budget limitations certainly have their advantages.

But that doesn’t mean they had no budget. It’s quite the contrary because…holy shit the animation is fantastically, epically awesome, even decades later and even though you sometimes can see the limits of analogue recording. Akira even gets some bonus points from me for animating technical stuff like weapons, vehicles and so on without.any.hiccup.whatsoever. Not to Disney: watch it, learn from Akira and start the mea culpa route please.

Effects animation? On of the best I have ever seen. Explosions look beautiful as does smoke and even shards of glass! I get the feeling the animator of the glass shards must have committed suicide afterwards because he couldn’t do anything else anymore. In one scene at the beginning you see literally thousands of them moving smoothly. It’s short but utterly amazing. Again, at that time anyone else wouldn’t have animated it and today anyone would use 3D but they wasted even one life to go full force with it.

The same can be said about the background art which you simply can call Background.Art.Porn! Almost every single shot is wallpaper material and I think I could pause any second and ooze at the detail they went for. I even remember the moment when as a kid I reached for the VHS case to confirm I didn’t watch a live-action movie. It is that fucking amazingly detailed. This especially holds true for the city and its enormous buildings. Basically behind every single fucking window you can see something. What do you think? How many people did they waste for that? I believe it had to be fucking hundreds. (Do I use the word fuck too much?)

Fuck yeah, Kaneda being badass. By the way: the other guy was in fact driving his bike…

Akira has its flaws as I already stated. But seriously, if you are even slightly interested in animation go watch Akira now! If you are sick of the usual kiddy-shit you get served, go watch Akira now. If you want to start looking beyond Disney, Dreamworks and Pixar: Go. Watch. Akira. Now!

By the way I still stand by my word that the opening shot of Akira is still one of the best ever.

So, I think I have talked enough. Now it’s your turn. Did you already watch Akira? Do you like or hate the movie? Let us know!

Watching a movie DVD is simple.

In theory.

Since this technology is so brand new and complicated, only a few chosen people are able to use them so called DVD players.Although my parents warned me to engage in such a dangerous task I didn’t waste one second to help you people out of your misery.

Therefore after many decades full of experiments (and some dead assistants) I can finally present you a paper/manual that truly tells you how to watch a DVD.

1. Rent, buy, steal or - worse - download your DVD. Important: Read the package beforehand, so you know what you are watching later.

2. Head home or be happy to still be at home. In the latter case: be prepared to be sued by Hollywood.

3. If you are a man and want to watch Chuck Norris, give your wife one thousand dollar. This should keep her in the shopping district for a while. If you are a woman and want to watch Titanic, give your man one thousand dollar. This should keep him in the stadium for a while. In case of kids: kick their iPods down the hills. This should keep them searching for a while, but be prepared to be sued by Apple.

4. Turn on everything that remotely looks modern and electrical. Don’t bother if some objects suddenly start making noises like a mixer. This is simply a sound test. Be prepared to be sued by your neighbors, though.

5. If you finally found the DVD player (see Wikipedia for a detailed description about the looks), open the tray. Please refer to the manual to do that. In case of a bad translation done by a Chinese: you have my deepest sympathy. You can sue them if you like.

6. Put the DVD in the tray. Important: the colorful side needs to face you, not the floor. Some people tend to mistake this every time. Close the tray. Normally, this should work by using the same button you used to open it. If you are not sure: test it to be sure.

7. If you did everything correctly the movie should start now. Which means you will first see dozens of other things such as movie trailers or stuff about being sued by Hollywood for daring to watch their intellectual property. Don’t be scared, this is completely normal.

8. After some hours you should slowly notice that one trailer keeps repeating itself over and over again. This is the main menu. To start watching the movie, press every button possible on your remote. Most of the time it is the best to start pressing in the middle of the remote. If you are lucky it works. If not, head back to step 6.

In case of blackness:

9. Re-check if everything is properly turned on and connected. For example: did you really turn on the TV? Or did you mistake it for a strange all-black painting?

10. If the screen still is black after checking and confirming everything you need to stay absolutely calm. Chances are that you tried to watch a DVD using your toaster. Be prepared to be sued for arson by your neighbors.

Since I was more or less sued by everyone in the vicinity of my laboratory I had to stop here. Because of those “circumstances” I’d be glad to hear from you, my fellow researcher, if I missed some important steps in my experiments. Please refer to the standard comment form below to add your results to this paper.

I have just found the new Predators teaser poster on the Internets and…well… the idea itself is great because we all love and fear those nasty bastards. So putting them on the sheet alone tells you everything you need to know.

But on the other hand the execution of the idea is mediocre at best.

Let’s take a look at the original teaser poster (click to enlarge):

What really messes the result up in my eyes is the fact that there doesn’t seem to exist one clear axis. For example, the “Predators” title floats on the right side of the teaser as if the designer couldn’t find a better place for it. Additionally the tagline doesn’t line up with the movie details section on the bottom.

The tagline “Fear is Reborn” is, well, not the best one either and placing it up there somehow doesn’t really help it.

Moreover our beloved Predator (I gladly call him “The Butcher”) looks too big on this teaser. I understand that the designer wants to imply dominance and terror but some “white”space (in this case blackspace) is never bad.

With this points in mind I loaded the original teaser into my photo editor of choice and messed around with it a little bit. Here is the result I came up with (click to enlarge):

Basically I re-sized our beloved butcher to let it breath some fresh air of blackspace while placing him/she/it a little bit further to the left since it looks to the right. I also decreased the size of the movie information. Then I moved the title below the sword-thingy. This way, everything you read is below the Predator. Since he/she/it is reaches the top of the teaser it hopefully gives an increased feeling of dominance and terror.

The rest are some additional tweaks. For example, I moved the hand a little bit further down the image because I constantly had the impression the lower arm was too short. Moreover I increased the contrast a little bit to give it a harsher impression. Oh yeah, the tagline is gone for good…Oh yeah the second: I also increased the lightning on its jaw a little bit.

This is it. My take on Predators after twenty minutes.

What do you think? Is this version an improvement of the teaser poster or should I have kept my fingers from it? Tell us what you think!

Thank god for YouTube’s recommendations because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have found this extremely funny scene  from the anime Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei (Farewell, Mr. Despair).

As the title suggests, the series is about a teacher who often is trying to kill himself (or on the verge of being absolutely in despair) and his group of eccentric female students.

Now, if you wonder how eccentric they are: this scene shows you what happens when someone who is extremely fixated to do everything perfectly prepares to cut a cake when people start flooding in.

The solution of this problem is as simple as hilarious:

The moment she snaps. Oh boy, the moment she snaps is so amazing. You even hear the string stretching and snapping. And her gasp in that particular moment…*lol*

Normally, I would hate this kind of exposition-for-the-stupid. This time, though, I suspect the producers knew all along that the scene would end up on YouTube. Hence they directed it that way that every piece of information necessary is there.

The Oscar Show has finished and I again did not watch it. So it’s business as usual.

Well, almost.

Turns out that while I was sleeping soundly Avatar got seriously pwnd. And for once I applaud the men behind the scenes for having the guts to do what they did.

Because instead of honoring some big bullshit effect spectacle with characters so flat you think they’re 2D animated, the Oscar jury gave the most important Oscars to The Hurt Locker. A small independent flick about the Iraq with bombing and some serious message. It was a truly brave move - and it was about time.

Although I don’t really care for the rest of the bunch it is a nice feeling that the most successful movie of all time doesn’t get all the Oscars just because of this fact. I really hope this puts some reality back into James Cameron who - judging by the reports - seemingly didn’t expect or like this outcome.

Good effects don’t make a good movie. Period!

And who’d have thought that one actress not only would win the statue of shame but also the statue of honor. Way to go, Sandra Bullock. Both of your movies are now on my Have-To-Watch-List.

So how about you? Did you like the outcome of the show? Where there any big surprises for you or didn’t you care at all?

It seems that Hollywood is getting more desperate by the minute to find new stupid reboot ideas to ruin our daily nerves. In case you didn’t know Hollywood plans to reboot the reboot of Superman, wants to reboot Spiderman and reboots Fantastic Four, RoboCop and so many other franchises and wannabe’s.

I think we can all agree that this situation is slowly but surely getting out of hand. The best example truly is Superman which didn’t even scratch the surface of a true trilogy before a new reboot.

But this situation doesn’t have to go on forever. After some thinking I found a simple and straightforward yet ultimate solution to all this reboot madness coming from Hollwood:

Any director or writer can direct or write only one movie to realize his vision or take of a certain franchise. No more, no less.

In other words: every franchise would henceforth consist of a bunch of movies, which have no continuing stories as you might expect from a trilogy or sequels. Each movie creates its own universe and its plot gets wrapped up by the end of its run.

It’s a constant reboot!

No movie would be like the other before it or after it. You wouldn’t need the same actor, or even the same team working on it. Considering this everyone involved could have way more creative freedom in their doing since…hey, what could they possibly loose when it’s only one movie each time?

Of course each studio could lose some good amounts of money, but this problem could be solved immediately by incorporating one single rule: the budget depends on the quality and scope of the script. The better the script more money they get, the bigger the possible audience, the more money they get.

So, if someone wants to make an intimate movie about Superman there should be no problem. Since the scope is small but the script is wonderful, the studio ‘only’ invests $50m. Then the big blockbuster take afterward has a budget of $200 million. And so on.

The studios even could do some surveys or “battles” by which they let the audience decide which script should be filmed next. They could even to multiple versions at the same time, from one independent take to one with the usual big budget…Damn, I am dreaming again…

What do you say? Would you like to see such constant reboots? Or do you have a cooler idea to stop this silly reboot madness?

I really have to thank Mr. Deeds, I mean, Mr. Sandler for this movie. Thanks to him I found a new form of reviewing. I call it the Endureview which is a combination of “endure” and “review”. Basically this means I will review a movie up to the point my brain exploded from stupidity and I turned off. So, let’s get started…

Oh boy. This movie is not hard to swallow. It’s impossible to swallow. After 15 minutes I couldn’t continue to watch this shit and ruin my life by wasting my time on it.

One of the most amazing aspects of this finding is, by the way, the fact I once completely watched Mr. Deeds - and didn’t hate it. WTF? Either I was completely wasted at that time or my mind didn’t really mind it. Perhaps I wanted to watch this shit. Oh well…

So what can I possibly write about Mr. Deeds after only 15 minutes. It’s easy because using the sensitive elegance of a sledgehammer the director slams one single - if not the single - cliché into our skullcap: small towns are “yay” while cities are “ugh” filled with morons. The first part of Mr. Deeds starring our much beloved Adam Sandler basically is about nothing else…

Admitted, this particular director/writer was not the first one to introduce us to this shit kind of movie thinking. Just some months ago I was truly blessed to endure such gush in my movie theater of choice (it was a romantic comedy by the way…so much for surprises).

Those kinds of movies always use the same patterns which are in fact that much alike that even a nerdy Star Wars geek wearing glasses of epic proportions would have problems to spot the differences. On the one side we have the big city filled with moronic yuppies. They are smart, good looking and therefore astonishing assholes while wearing the well known “I’m with stupid”-t-shirt pointing to its wearer.

On the other side we have - of course - the small town. The small town is filled with the exact opposite. Here we have a bunch of idiots or weirdo’s of any kind and color but with a heart as big as the Milky Way. Everybody loves everybody. The small town is one big fluffy hug.

Mr. Deeds now not only incorporates this cliché. Mr. Deeds intensifies it to a level by which a multiplication of Jack Nichsolson would be regarded harmless: in a matter of minutes the movie manages to show us every.single.damn.inch.on.an.atomic.level of this goddamn cliché!

Adam Sandler of course is the titular Mr. Deeds who is so self-sacrificing and nice and loving and never angry that I thought at one time that I was watching a bad Scientology promo vid. The rest of the town is filled with the already mentioned usual suspects. We get the lusty bunch of seniors, a convict of some kind and a guy who wants to be an actor or a police officer. Of course everyone else is the same loving bunch of $&%!Ӥ.

The big city morons are - of course - the total opposite so I save you the description of them. Just one hint: one of them is a bad female reporter who survives the day by buying shoes. I believe she ends up as the girlfriend of Deeds. So not very surprising…

Sigh.

Okay. Of course the plot doesn’t play out completely in the small town since Deeds is not a millionaire but a billionaire - so he has to leave. Now the moment when Adam Sandler is preparing to leave his Huggy-Town almost reached the level of urge called “turn this shit off” because basically the whole damn city was coming to see him off. It really was borderline.

The moment when the urge to turn off this shit really hit me was the gracious moment of Adam Sandler singing some cheesy Bowie tune. Not only did he do it for no reason at all (I don’t take “I am flying” as an excuse!). No, even the pilots started singing. Why? I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t waste any second.

I turned off this bad cliché in moving pictures.

Did you have the power to endure it completely?

Aaaah. Help me, help me! The horror is too much! My brain!!!!

…

The good old movie cliche. It is as old as the movie itself. Heck, they even produced cliches during the silent movie era before they even knew it. Of course it has not become any better. Movies rip off cliches from the classics and use them until the brain of the viewer takes a nap in the nearest bar - or worse.

Do you want to want to feel the agony again? Here are the Top 10 Worst Movie Cliches any director can come up with.

10. Languages? Is there more than one?

It doesn’t matter if it’s Star Trek, Star Wars or Stargate. Any franchise beginning with “Star”, what am I talking about, every goddamn sci-fi movie or series knows only one goddamn language: English. So if you ever have to go to space beyond our reach don’t worry. All aliens talk and behave like normal American people. The difference? Boy, of course, it’s the costumes!

9. There is no “Man of Steel”. There are Thousands!

if you can rely on nothing else, you can rely on the fact that in an Action Flick For Men™ there will be a Manly Fight To The Death™. So, the hero of the movie and the villain of the movie beat the crap out of each other for days, if not even hours . But even though they Fight To The Death™ there is one single problem: they never loose any blood and have only minor scratches. I know the human body can sustain some awesome amount of injuries. But I never knew that skin is made of steel.

8. Be a Hero! It’s important to Survival!

This is - with very rare examples - the major of rule anyone trapped in a disaster: be the leader! You have to be it, even if it kills you. Because otherwise you will be killed for sure. Whenever you are trapped in a disaster with some bunch of walking cliches (i.e. a old couple, an artist, a dog etc.), be their President. Otherwise you are doomed. It’s the Iron Rule of The Movie.

7. Look at that. Look! How cuuuuuuuuuuuute!!!!!

Animals - dogs especially - almost never die or even get harmed. An asteroid can vaporize the whole earth, a big explosion reduce any city to ashes - but the dog survives. It even gets better: The dog shows up out of the debris, wags its tail and barks as if nothing happened. And we all go: Aaaaaawwwwwww…. how cuuuuuuuuuuuute. With twelve ‘u’. And don’t even forget that dogs are everywhere in movies. Because…shall I repeat it again? They are so cuuuuuuuuuuuute. With twelve ‘u’!

6. Safer Sex played Safe!

What’s a movie without sex! Damn it, it’s the spice of life, so to say. So each bigger male-oriented flick has it. And there is one thing to be sure of: After this obligatory sex scene both of the two characters lie in the bed dressed with something (hey, who wouldn’t). Or the women - when standing up - hide their beauty with a blanket. Because, gasp, their lover could see them *gasp* naked!!!!! Girls and writers: he saw much more than that! There is basically nothing anymore to hide. So, either go the full realistic way, or cut this sex shit out altogether. I’m bored of it since twenty years. Oh, by the way: there is always the mysterious blanket in movies. You know, the one which covers the woman fully but the man only up to his hips. Genius!

5. Because he never stands up again…

Ok. The movie hero has been dealing with a real bad movie villain for almost hours - if not minutes. Or he has been chased by some crazy zombie maniac. Or something completely different. What’s always the same is this: after some intense confrontation (See Fight To The Death™) the hero wins the fight. But WTF for crying out load: What does he do? Of course, nothing. He doesn’t finish him off by shooting all the bullets he has into his head or by beating him to pulp. You know, just to be sure HE DOESN’T STAND UP AGAIN IN THE BACKGROUND. Sigh.

4. Computers for anyone?

Movies love computers and computer geeks. The problem? Either we only get Apple Computers for whatever reason beyond me or we get a teenage hacker breaking into a government mainframe in a mere seconds. If not even milliseconds. Heck, even Apple cannot do that one. Moreover there’s those interfaces. They look so cool it is no wonder they don’t exist in real world: there is shit moving all the time, although they only use the keyboard most of the time. The reason is simple: “Where the hell is the button!!!!!” The first good use of computers I remember was in The Ring. Oh, and there was this Sandra Bullock flick…

3. That’s a $200 Fine! Please Come Again in the Next Movie…

Time or something else is running out and our movie hero is on its way in a car. Sometimes it happens that he has to go into a building. Pffft. No problem. Nothing is more easy in any movie than finding a parking lot on the spot. Right.In.Front.Of.The.Building. It can be anything. From a small shop to the biggest government building on the world. There always will be a parking lot waiting just for him. Damn! I think we all should become the heroes of our own movies so this nerve wrecking search for a parking lot is over.

2. Bullet Reload Time is for Losers.

It doesn’t matter how much our beloved action hero has to shoot. He never sees the need for a reload. Again, what am I writing about: he simply doesn’t have to reload. Reloading is for sissies. So he has endless ammunition. Just imagine he had to reload once. The universe would tear apart immediately because he’d be wearing tons of rounds with him. Therefore he can shoot and shoot and shoot. Isn’t the parallel universe called Hollywood great, or what? This directly leads to the most nerve-wrecking movie cliche of them all…

1.Henchman training suspended for monetary reasons

It doesn’t matter how many henchman a bad guy has hired. They could form their own nation. It doesn’t matter  because when shooting they almost every time miss their target with utmost precision. Think of Star Wars or any buddy cop flick. The hero can stand at point blank range and they still would miss with utmost precision. Perhaps this is the reason those guys are hired as henchman only. The best thing they can do is to be some kind of distraction.

So this is the list of the Top 10 Worst Movie Cliches. Of course there are some other ones out there but they would have been too easy. I call them the honorable mentions:

• the woman always falls down while being chased by The Evil. A car explodes - always, not regarding the reason. The you-fly-through-glass-without-a-scratch-move. Noise in space. The bad guy not simply shooting the movie hero. And the countdown bomb with big red numbers showing the remaining time.

Did I miss something?

Not using this movie blog for some shameless self-promotion is as if James Bond would stop wearing or showing off product placements. Not only would the financial crisis get worse, but also this blog would have one post less to boast on Google.

This cannot happen!!!

On the other hand, is it bad to rely on a double fantasy for men and women to justify ones actions? After I consulted my doctor about it this night (he was thrilled…by my call) and after I asked the buddy cops that arrived some minutes later I knew it: no one gives a shit!

Thanks to them it’s time again for a little bit of creativity. You know, my creativity. You know, my creativity which I snitched from here and there. A little…

I think the internet watchers new-fashioned-ly call this remix. Well, at least it didn’t turn out to be a reboot Hollywood is so hot for. Have fun watching the psychedelic ride…

I hope you survived and enjoyed the trip. For crazy info maniacs like myself who find background stuff more interesting than a action scene filled with good old Ahnold, here are some information regarding the production:

I tinkered with this short movie for about three or four days fulltime. The visual stuff is from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey (for those people whose knowledge of sci-fi starts and stops with Star Wars), the audio part is from the Fuck Buttons. Yes, they really call themselves the Fuck Buttons. The track I used here is called Colours Move, which gave me the initial idea for this project.

Of course the seasoned special effects viewer of today immediately notices that I mainly worked with an epic amount of layers here. This brought my computer to edge of binary insanity. At times there are up to fifteen layers at work here. Although this sounds nothing for Photoshop freaks like me, doing this stuff for an eight minute long movie is a whole different level of madness.

And now it’s your turn to praise my work of genius in the comments. Don’t hold back. Give it everything you got. Let the Praise of the Mad begin…

Some days ago James added a comment to my review of Pixar’s Up. Well, normally I wouldn’t reply to a comment via a post but by a comment myself but I think that James raised an interesting point about which I never really wrote about: movies and realism. Basically James called my criticism of Up uncalled-for because Up is not meant to be realistic but more about the feelings of the main characters.

Okay. I get his point but he also totally misses my point because…

Since when did I ever care about realism in a movie?

I don’t know if I ever truly wrote it on this blog, but to me a movie is per se not realistic. It cannot be.  It’s impossible. Period.

If you head over to Wikipedia it states that realism in the arts is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life without interpretation. Basically you could call a movie realistic if its characters appear normal and don’t sprout wings or believe they can walk in a straight line.

This definition is quite good and almost reaches the point I am for some years now when it comes to movies. Basically my take is this: even if the characters or the story appear realistic it isn’t because a writer wrote it, a director directed it and so on. To me, on a practical level, a movie ceases being realistic with the first cut since a cut changes either position or time or both.

Of course, there are too many faults in my theory to count and if you want you can gladly point them out in the comments. But you know what?

Thanks to this take, I really don’t give a shit if a movie is realistic or not because to me it cannot be. As a result I care about only one thing: can a movie make me smile about what I am watching? Can a movie surprise me? Or in other words: can a movie entertain me?

In all those years of watching hundreds if not thousands of movies I came to this obvious but basic conclusion with my own formulated theory you read above.

And you know what? With this take I am someone you can basically throw anything at. I take it. I am someone who is a genius at the thing called “suspension of disbelief”. But don’t dare to throw at me the same shit I watched thousands of times already. And don’t dare to throw at me a shitty story that makes no sense.

What’s important here is the strict distinction of the words “realism” and “sense”. With a story making “sense” I basically mean sense in the context of the universe the writer/movie established and fleshed out. For example: a movie can play on a planet without gravity. If the story is great I love this crazy idea. But if at one moment the people start walking it’s a moment where the story officially starts to make no sense anymore. Okay, the example is way beyond bad…

Let me go back to Pixar’s Up to give you a better example. The first twenty or thirty minutes Up established a rather normal universe. I even wrote about this fact in my review. Up is one of the most serious movies up to date in which you can see an old man struggle against the harsh realities of life including lawyers. I also mentioned in my review that they could have made the start of Carl’s house one of the most poetic moments in the history of cinema as a reaction to this lifeless and harsh universe. As you can see, I didn’t care about realism here at all. I totally accepted this idea and wanted the movie even go farther than it did. Such wieners…

But the dogs? Way different story here. The dogs were and still are one of the major faults of Up to me. They simply don’t fit in (neither did this crazy bird). To me, this would have been something completely different if they did one simple thing: establish it early on. At one moment in Up they showed a documentary about the hero of Carl. In this segment they could have added the talking dogs or at least have established the point that the guy was a genius in any way possible who claimed to have succeeded in letting dogs talk. You know, something like that. But they didn’t. And hence, the talking dogs jumped out of nowhere. It’s like watching a comedy in which suddenly Michael Myers jumps out of the bushes. It doesn’t fit. The tones don’t fit. To me this was the point the movie officially began to fall apart.

I could continue to write on, also in regard to James’ comment in my review, but the post is long enough already.  Well, I hope I at least could shed some light on my take on moves and the way I see them.

Do you think there is some truth in my take or is this complete nonsense? Let us know!