What's Up: Review to the Rescue!

2038-01-19T03:14:07Z

A few days ago, I told you all about "What's UP: Balloon to the Rescue." Today, I watched it. I was a little nervous, loading up the DVD.. could this awful knock-off possibly live up to my crapspectations? The answer is yes. So much yes. Everything and more. Let's talk about it. The whole movie is on YouTube, so feel free to watch along.

I think it would be a little uncharitable to spend too much time mocking the animation - after all, it was made by five people (plus two writers, and according to the credits NO VOICE ACTORS) on what had to be a shoestring budget. So I'll mention that there were occasional clipping issues, terrifying mouths with free-floating tooth rows, and a skybox out of a 1995 Doom clone, and leave it there. After all, we're in this for the human experience, not the technical one.

The first two acts (kind of an arbitrary distinction, given how episodic the plotting is) hew reasonably close to the source material, at least as far as locations go. The first thing we see in both movies is a newsreel: in Up it's a 1920's adventure piece about a famed explorer, and in What's Up it's a modern-day puff piece about a pair of elderly, ambiguously-gay scientists who chase monsters. I may be stretching the definition of "reasonably close" here. After a couple of minutes we zoom out from the TV to see an obnoxious child humping a couch (this is not an exaggeration: he is stretched out on the back of the couch jerking his abdomen), and it's established that he is the live-in nephew of the Elderly Action Science Couple. Completing the team is his undersexed sister, aged somewhere between sixteen and twenty-five. There are a lot of great moments in the news bit that never get explained, like the scientists making contact with extra-galactic aliens, and something about a "Transmission Antenna," which is adorable.

So, the scientists. They have the arguing back-and-forth of an old cartoon couple, and they joke about how their "camping days are long behind [them]." This is actually a pretty subtle gag, I think, about how it's well past time we start portraying gay couples as actual people and not campy cartoon stereotypes, so kudos to you, "What's Up: Balloon to the Rescue." I just wish you were as progressive in your views about scientists.

The scientists have a magic energy rock that can lift their house! Neat, that saves us some time on exposition. It can also hypnotize people if you say the word "lavender," which I guess goes without saying. Shortly after Dr. Crumb (the optimist and nominal leader of the team, but probably also the bottom) accidentally reveals this on TV, they are visited by a charming Frenchman, who looks like the love child of Aquaman and one of the dolls from "Team America: World Police."

Jean-Pierre wants their help fighting monsters in the Amazon (because that's where the house in "Up" went), but he also stage-monologues that he's going to hypnotize the world. Looks like he didn't take after either of his parents. Everyone wants to ignore him, except for the excitable couch-humper (who is named Guto, which I assume is a joke in Portugese) who hijacks the house and takes them to Brazil. All of the travel takes place between scenes, probably because it would be lame to watch a balloon-less house soar flatly through a cloudless sky. Dr. Zoox, the travel-averse whiny scientist, sums up the experience thusly: "I should never have been in the same house as you! The Amazon... what a horrible idea." Here he describes his mixed feelings about both raising his partner's family and in shamelessly ripping off a Pixar movie. There there, Dr. Zoox.

In the amazon, there are no monsters, but the team gets trapped in an untextured cave long enough for the villain to activate the rock and then drop it, summoning some monsters. There are actually a couple of good gags here - J-P's accent is too thick to say the word "lavender," so he stumbles with that for a few takes, and then a little later Dr. Crumb gets to angrily deliver the best line of the movie: "You numbskull! How can you drop a super-energized rock?! It probably opened a portal to another dimension, and that's the LAST thing we need!!" Dr. Crumb has a real gift for speedy exposition. Nobody suspects Frenchy... FOR NOW.

The rock is temporarily broken, but a guy in a hot-air balloon crashed in the jungle next to the house, so while he's unconscious (and again between scenes), they stick the (surprisingly flaccid) balloon to the top of the house and take off after the monsters. It turns out that flying by house-balloon is very stable, to the delight of Dr. Zoox. It's also kind of a fuck-you to Pixar, who clearly didn't do their research and just wanted to show off how well they could animate turbulence. Well, whatever, losers, if Gaiam Films had a multi-million dollar budget I bet they could have made the house shake a little too. I'm very glad they didn't, actually, because whenever something unsteady happens on-screen (explosion, falling house, etc) the characters have a quick grand-mal seizure that makes one nostalgic for old Star Trek special effects.

Niece Amanda, who has spent most of the movie mooning over Paris, and then by extension Jean-Pierre, gets him alone to whisper sweet nothings out a window. I mention this only to bring up the music, which is basically porno music, but not the kind you think. It's the music they play at the beginning of the porno, when they have some budget to spare, where the female leads talk about their dreams and how they want an adventure - that sort of cheesy, training-video synth-elevator pop with lots of flutes and saxophones and tubular bells. This music plays more or less constantly for the back half of the movie. It's also appropriate, because Amanda clearly needs dick, badly.

Meanwhile, the Dr's figure out that one of the monsters is heading, by Googling "monster" and "attack" and getting a page about movie cliches. Hee! They find the monster humping the Eiffel Tower (again, I wish I was making this up), and shrink it with space lasers, trapping it in a minty green bubble. Also, they hurt their backs because they are old.

Later, everyone who is not a scientist lounges around in the living room. JP feeds couch-humper a Roofie (seriously, he tosses the kid a pink candy and he falls asleep) and tells Amanda that they should fight monsters because they are younger. The scene fades out as they start to kiss, but I assure you, they totally bone each other. In front of her comatose brother. Right after she prickishly corrects his English.

The movie kind of peters out at this point, getting less coherent and more affably racist. Crumb and Guto spend an inordinate amount of time making derisive comments about the French (they smell bad) and about a camera-happy chinese dude they randomly pick up (taunt him with a fortune cookie, Guto!). We see a monster playing hopscotch on the Great Wall (hee!), and a horrifying untextured Guto-booger. Eventually we head back to the amazon to send the monsters home, resulting in a very bland confrontation with JP and the most lethargic chase scene in modern cinema, which needs to be seen to be believed (the chase starts at about the nine-minute mark).

The movie ends with JP getting his comeuppance and being banished off-screen to monsterland, but not before he makes one last impassioned plea to the now disgusted Amanda, asking her to remember that one time that they fucked on the couch... in Paris. It doesn't work, and later the team laughs about how precious the expression on his face was when they tossed him into another dimension, off-camera. Remember, tell, don't show. Finally, we see the monsters playing catch in what looks to be the end of the first Half-Life game, and then snubbing the poor French guy. "What a horrible fate for me...!"

So, I have mixed feelings about this. I mean, it's a terrible fucking movie, which is good, but I wanted more shameless ripping-off. There's a house with balloons on it, but that's the only real resemblance. A few of the jokes were actually pretty funny, but mostly you get the impression that nobody cared. This wasn't a soul-crushing experience for the writers; their souls were already crushed by the time they got here.

If anyone can track down the direct-to-DVD feature where they DO get their souls crushed during production, though, I'll be delighted to watch that one.

What in hell?

What's Up: Review to the Rescue!