He picked up market chatter about relics found around the Kabul area. He read the Greek historians on Alexander. In particular, he decided he would locate the Alexandria ‘beneath the mountains’: a city in the shadow of the Hindu Kush, established as a retirement/convalescent camp for Macedonian soldiers and being written about more than 1,000 years later by Chinese travellers. He was neither an especially hardy traveller nor a brilliant linguist, but he discovered two crucial things about himself: a capacity for fleshing out the bare bones of the truth (not least in order to tell people what they wanted to hear), and an increasing passion for Afghan history and the travels of Alexander the Great. He emerged out of the Thar desert, at Ahmedpur (in present Pakistan), a changed man - starting with his name, which was now ‘Charles Masson’. The only good news was that it was too hot for tigers. ‘This is a story about following your dreams,’ says Richardson but ‘had he known what was coming, Lewis might have stayed in bed’.įor one thing, he was now on the run, highly visible and unacquainted with the languages of India and the cholera-ridden countryside. An intelligent but poor enlister from the ‘fetid’ heart of London, he’d spent six sweltering summers watching the officer class get rich, and frankly he’d had enough. So finding one would be ‘a world-changing achievement’.Īt dawn on 4 July 1827, Private James Lewis of the East India Company’s Bengal artillery walked out of the Agra fort and into history - or at any rate into some amply trodden historical terrain. Moreover, the prevailing scholarly view was that there remained ‘not a single architectural monument of the Macedonian conquests in India’ - let alone in Afghanistan, which had, ‘for more than 1,000 years… been a blank space in western knowledge’. Again, if you can handle "Bambi," this film should be a breeze.‘Everyone knows the Alexandria in Egypt,’ writes Edmund Richardson, ‘but there were over a dozen more Alexandrias scattered across Alexander the Great’s empire.’ By the early 19th century, though, very few had been identified. UP is only the second Pixar feature to get a PG rating, only for mildly intense imagery and action – nothing off-color in the least. The moneymen should just shut up, hand over the money, and trust they'll get a product that will appeal to everyone. Pixar Studios has gotten to be one of those movie icons that shouldn't even have to deliver a premise to get funded anymore. There aren't many (or at least not enough) live-action movies that are engrossing as this cartoon. There's surprising, heartfelt emotion, vivid imagery (you can almost touch the landscapes and skies), and a music score by Michael Giacchino that's practically a character in the movie – particularly in a thoughtful montage that takes Carl from childhood to widowhood. Then she becomes a real enough character that – at least in the audience I was in – when she's injured, she elicits screams of fright worthy of Bambi's late mother. There's a huge, awkward bird that is a big laugh-getter at first. There's a dog who's the leader of his pack and in menacing beyond measure, until he opens his mouth and gets one of the movie's biggest laughs. Beyond that, I can only offer you some enticing clues about the characters. This gives you a pretty good idea where the ostensible hero Muntz stands in the scheme of things. Cartoon historians know that Walt Disney started in the cartoon biz by creating Oswald the Rabbit for producer Charles Mintz, who then greedily stole the rights to Disney's creation. This is another in-joke that's even vaguer than the first one. Also, part of the plot involves Carl's long-held wish to meet a Lindbergh-type adventurer named Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer!). One is a gag that is a take-off on a famous painting – perhaps too inside of an inside joke, but typical of Pixar's cheery attempts to appeal to viewers of all ages. I'll also mention a couple of other items that can gauge your potential interest in the movie. Soon, he finds himself reluctantly sharing his ride with a short-attention-spanned kid named Russell. The one clue I can give away – because it's the movie's heavily hyped premise – is that Carl Fredrickson, a gruffy old widower (voiced with gruffy old charm by Ed Asner), miraculously inflates enough balloons to use his house as an aircraft. But how do you go about extolling the movie's virtues without giving away its surprises? Like the kid at the beginning of the movie, you don't try to conquer the immovable force you work around it. UP, Pixar's latest animated feature, is just delightful.
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