Smile Pinki (2008)

"Slumdog Millionaire" was not the only India-set film to win an Oscar this past year. SMILE PINKI won the Oscar for Documentary Short Subject. During the course of this quick and simple film, the audience learns that in India, there are over one million children born with cleft palates. SMILE PINKI documents the efforts of an Indian hospital specializing in lip and facial reconstruction in finding these affected children in the far corners of India, and having them treated at their facility.

The title of this film comes from the name of one little girl, Pinka (or, Pinki), who is among those who's parents are approached by a doctor/spokesman who roams the Indian villages, asking people if they know any children with a cleft palate. When he finds Pinki's father, the family is understandably suspicious of the man's offer: free surgery. All the family has to do is get to the hospital. Pinki, however, is neither the central figure of the film (no case is, really), nor is she the most severe of the cases--and it is natural that the audience would feel even greater emotional connection to the worst of the affected.

In many ways, watching SMILE PINKI is like watching one of those late-night commercials where you see children in Africa who are malnourished and have flies swarming around them. I say that not to sound insensitive, but to admit that SMILE PINKI was, from a filmmaking standpoint, no more special than a good piece for a show like "Dateline NBC." It was a news report, and in no way artistically done.

And for my money, there was a missed opportunity in not further diving into the struggle each impoverished family encountered just in getting their child to the hospital to be operated on! To me, this was the most harrowing and effective part of the story. Each family is required to provide transportation to the hospital and pay for their food during a seven-day hospital stay. In Pinki's case, she and her father must travel on foot because there isn't enough money to get them there. When you consider that this three hour-plus walk is undertaken on the good faith presumption that the offer for free surgery is legitimate, the journey is that much more inspiring.

SMILE PINKI doesn't seem interested in the in-depth or providing any answers, such as: who is funding these operations...so numerous that when the children arrive, they must take numbers and be assigned a surgery date? It seems content in simply telling viewers that this condition is a serious one in India and that there is a hospital that is trying to do something about it. I prefer documentaries that take things a little deeper than that.

If you ask me, the Academy's excitement over all things India caused them to overlook the far superior short: "The Witness-From the Balcony of Room 306," a gut-wrenching, intellectual and spiritual first-hand account of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. This is not to say that SMILE PINKI won't affect you, won't move you, won't make you sad for these families (who, by the way, all feel cursed and punished by God when their children are born this way). It's just that this well-intentioned film could have said a bit more.

2.0 out of 4

Up (2009)

One of the most striking things about UP, Disney Pixar's latest triumph, is its pervasive sense of melancholy. While I never felt quite as emotionally overwhelmed as I did when watching "Wall-E," I was much more consistently filled with sadness and longing.

And therein lies the continued genius of the Pixar films, because my children laughed and were frightened and were alert and attentive to the film as though it was made just for them, while my wife and I got something completely different out of it: missing our grandpas and taking a new look at profound depth of companionship in a marriage. I daresay that every married couple needs to see this movie. While I haven't seen "Fireproof" yet, (the Christian film lauded for its impact on refocusing one's marriage), I could easily make a case for UP as its secular equivalent.

All of the adventure and excitement in UP is derived from sadness. Carl Fredrickson, the central character, is as unwilling to budge from the home he made with his now-dead wife as Walt Kowalski/Clint Eastwood was in "Gran Torino." You almost expect Carl to say "get off of my lawn" when construction crews pillage everything around his lot and wait for him to leave, but Ed Asner's take on the character is a much more sweet sort of grumpy.

When Carl does finally give in and move, it's because he can no longer secure the safety of the home and grounds he created with his wife. They are what's left of her, so he attempts to relocate them to an entirely different continent by uplifting the house with balloons. (Isn't animation great?) It is at this point that Carl gets a boy sidekick and some animal friends to keep the kids interested. They are needed foils for comic relief, because the film has two nemeses that are among Disney's most frightening: Carl's former childhood hero (played deliciously by Christopher Plummer) and mortality itself.

The visuals of UP are as stunning as we've come to expect from Pixar. And while I did not see the film in 3-D because I hate 3-D, please believe me when I tell you that you do not need it. You don't need pop-out gimmickry to interfere with what's important, and that's the storytelling.

What I liked best about UP, though, is the final message it left in my mind. Ultimately, I found this to be a film about how we place such value in objects and how, ultimately, our experiences and memories hold more value than any object ever could. It is the destruction of an object at the beginning of the film that pushes Carl over the edge. And over the course of the film, Carl's rough adventure causes him to damage or lose many other artifacts that either belonged to his wife or reminded him of her. In the end, he realizes that she was always with him, material possessions or not. And this is what finally frees Carl to move on to the next adventure. UP might just offer viewers the most useful lesson ever written into Pixar's magic.

3.5 out of 4