UpVoices: Edward Asner, Jordan Nagai, John Ratzenberger
Similar to Wall-E, this is a two-part movie. Except in Up, the first part is very brief and very touching – describing how a married couple met (as children), lived their lives up through the death of the wife.
The husband (Asner) decides to take the adventure he and his wife had always wanted; this is complicated by the addition of a scout, a talking dog (long story) and a giant bird. Oh – and a flying house.
Brilliant animation (as usual for Pixar) and a good story. Not my favorite Pixar film (probably the first Toy Story), but I’ll probably pop the DVD in occasionally just to watch Part I.
Here in Illinois, we have a couple of really tight races: Governor and the Senate seat formerly held by President Barack Obama. Both are leaning Republican, but both are close to polling’s margin of error.
Needless to say, these two races – as well as all the other races – are saturating the airwaves (mainly negative ads, of course), clogging our snail mail box and accounting for the vast majority of the phone calls we’re receiving (robo-calls and pollsters).
I’ll be glad to see an end to this – for about a year or so, when the 2012 election starts cranking up.
Nationally, it’ll be interesting to see how the Tea Party fares – both in the 2010 elections, and if they continue to gain momentum, lose steam or become amalgamated with the standard Republican party.
No, there aren’t any significant Tea Party candidates in Illinois this year, but still – the Tea Party has been one of the biggest stories of this election cycle. Joe Miller in Alaska, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and more. Pretty wild.
It’ll be an interesting election night, both here in Illinois and across the country. There’s a lot of crazy stuff going on: elections that were safe no longer are, those that were lost causes suddenly are not. It sure seems like you would have needed an Ouija board to have predicted, a couple of months back, where things sit today, on the cusp of the election. Maybe that’s because of the 24-hour news cycle (i.e. it’s always this messy; we – and not just the wonks – now know this).
Hard for me – a non-wonk – to say if things were always this quirky, but politics has seemed to get a little stranger (to be generous) over the last two (2008/2010) elections.
One more day: Tuesday are the elections.