I took my daughter to see Up last night at our local, neighborhood theater. The theater is a chain but this one is a very small theater, it only shows two movies at a time. The building is Art Deco and the interior reflects that style.

I don’t go to that many movies in theaters anymore. The last movie I saw was Shrek and the one before that was Lion King, the first run of it. I took my niece when she was two years old. She graduates from high school tomorrow. I think I may have seen Titanic as well.

The movie house was showing Angels and Demons in the upstairs theater. Briefly, for a split second, I wondered if I could ditch my daughter and run upstairs to see a grown up movie. My parents did this to me when I was kid. They wanted to see The Sting and I wanted to see American Graffiti. We can’t do that now but back then everyone did it. In fact it may have been the reason theaters started to show more than one movie at a time.

I didn’t ditch my daughter. I took out a loan to buy popcorn and pop and then we settled in just as the trailers were ending. We went to the late afternoon showing so there was no trouble getting good seats. Well, not good seats since they were installed a hundred years ago and are covered in all sorts of stickiness but good viewing seats.

Someone brought a baby. A cranky, hungry, loud baby. If someone could explain to me why they would bring a baby to a movie I would love to hear it.

My daughter hasn’t seen too many movies in the theater but she has seen shows on TV of people watching movies. She started “shushing” immediately when we sat down so I gave her the bag of popcorn which cost more than my car payment and hoped that would shut her up.

Up is a great movie, well worth the $75 it cost me. I didn’t know anything about this movie except that the guy who wrote and directed it had some tie to Minnesota. He contributed to Monster Inc and Toy Story. I had no idea what the movie was about or who was voicing the characters. I’m not going to give away the story but it was fun to listen to Ed Asner, from The Mary Tyler Moore show and Christopher Plummer instead of the Jonas Brothers or those twins from The Suite Life of Zac and Cody lend their voices to these darling characters.

There are dogs in this movie and they talk. They talk through a collar that translates for them. So they speak as a dog would speak if it could. This alone made the movie worthwhile. I was the annoying person in the theater who snorts and laughs uncontrollably, the kind people like my daughter “shush”. I couldn’t help it, the dialog these dogs were given was pee-in-your-pants-funny and it didn’t hurt that the main dog looked like Stanley the Bassador.

The movie had a sappy ending, a message and it made me cry at the end. I would gladly see this movie again. I’d like to see it without a crying baby in the front row and certainly without my daughter “shushing” me but I would certainly sit through both of those again. It is a darling movie and if you haven’t gone to one in a while it is a sure thing. You will be entertained immensly.

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