Up

By tying thousands of balloon to his home, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America. Right after lifting off, however, he learns he isn't alone on his journey, since Russell, a wilderness explorer 70 years his junior, has inadvertently become a stowaway on the trip ... A friend missed the ending of Up when the disc stuck irretrievably. She'd liked it and wanted to know what happened to Carl's schoolboy friend.

I scratched my head, but forwarded the IMDB synopsis, and she then revealed she'd thought the mad professor with the dogs was the schoolboy friend. She'd never realised that the friend became Ellie, Carl's wife. Now, all my friends are very intelligent, one could say quick-witted. I mean, they'd have to be, wouldn't they? Which led me to a Psychology 101 conclusion -- all of us, especially the quick-witted, make assumptions about a movie's plotline and try to force the movie to live up to our understanding of it.

The mesmerisingly beguiling slide-show depicting the life and death of Mrs Carl could still be appreciated by my friend, and she might well have completed watching an unstuck version of the movie feeling saddened by Carl's murder of her supposed schoolfriend.

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One small footnote -- how many US movie critics identified Russell as an Asian-American boy, probably of Korean origin? I suspect some thought it might seem racist to not think of him as an all-American boy. Others may have feared it would be off-putting for white American film-going families to be told that the young heroic figure was Asian. But Pixar very obviously decided to make Russell a chubby close-to-obese, nerdish Asian-American nagger. He's totally credible and ends up totally lovable, to Carl and to their audiences. That Pixar initiative should be celebrated, not downplayed or ignored.