I’m killing myself on a crushing magazine deadline so I won’t be around much today. But I need a break and I’ve been meaning to say something for a week. I just loved Up. I thought it was one of the most touching and entertaining films I’ve seen in a long, long time. It has a brilliant balance between melancholy and nostalgia on the one hand and joy on the other. If anything I thought it exceeded Wall-E’s brilliant first 30 minutes. And, as a dog lover, I thought big stretches of it were simply hilarious. The 3-D struck me as unnecessary but essentially harmless. While I rarely disagree with John Podhoretz about movies, and when I do it’s usually over a matter of emphasis, I completely disagree with him that Up was in any way “boring.”

And now, back to the case for more domestic oil drilling.