Funny People (comedy, Universal,7/31/09) — R, “language and crude sexual humor throughout, and some sexuality.” Bruno (comedy, Universal, 7/10/09) — R, “pervasive strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity and language.”

This Michael Fleming story in Variety is nominally about a western called Unbound Captives, which is set to begin filming at the end of this year with Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz and Robert Pattinson in the leads. The heart of the story is about how Madeline Stowe, the once very-hot actress who (no offense) has been pretty much over for the last six or seven years if not longer, not only co-wrote the script but will now direct the feature. Read about her for twice turning down a huge go-away payday and tell me you don’t respect that.

The animated 3D Up (Disney/Pixar, 5.29) is a comic adventure fable of a very high order. Even by Pixar’s high standards it’s a notch or two above the norm. Visually luscious and spunky and intriguing at every turn, it’s an amusing (i.e., somewhat funny), sometimes touching, briskly paced film that’s about…well, pretty much everything that relatively healthy, forward-thinking middle-class people care about.

Like finding your dreams, making a family, dropping your guard, warming your heart, and standing up for your friends, for starters. As well as the finding of courage and fulfillment, the blooming of love, nurturing the past (as well as letting go of it), and embracing the now.

It revels in all this, and in a peppy, delightful and at times Chaplinesque way. (Particularly in a silent sequence that tells the story of loving marriage over the course of seventy years or so.) And without going cheap or coarse. It’s about as good as this sort of thing gets.

The story — a really cranky old guy and a cheery obese kid bond during the course of a balloon trip to a remote area in South America which holds enormous emotional significance for the old guy — is way off the ground. It’s kind of crazy-surreal in a sense, like a weird dream. It makes you wonder if director Pete Docter and co-director and screenwriter Bob Petersen get high at all, or at least used to get high. (Once you’ve turned on you never lose that stoner sensibility.)

And yet it’s a fairly square and tidy thing as the same time. It’s not meant as a putdown to say that Up is too immersed in buoyant punchiness and mainstream movie-tude, which basically boils down to Pixar’s always-front-and-center task of giving the family audience stuff to laugh at and go “oooh” and “aahh” about, to finally matter all that much. It’s too entertaining, in put it another way, to sink in all that deeply.

And yet it’s almost too good for the family market. You just know there’s a significant sector of that crowd that will be saying to each other after they see it, “What’s with the old guy? Where was the truly-over-the-top fantastical stuff? Where were the cheap junk-food highs? Why didn’t it throw in a little toilet humor to round things out? Why didn’t they go with a manic-nutso chase sequence of some kind? You know…why didn’t they thrill-ride it a bit more?”

(l.) Charles Muntz character in Up; relatively recent shot of Kirk Douglas.

I’m not saying that people who like lowbrow entertainment talk like this (if they did they wouldn’t be lowbrow) but if they did they’d probably continue the thought by saying, “It’s not like we don’t appreciate quality-level movies but Up is almost too nutritious for us. It’s good stuff — bright, funny, lots of fun and amazing-looking — but it feels like it was made by people who went to college and eat vegetables and exercise two or three times a week, unlike us.”

Then again they might relate to it due to the lead adolescent character, Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), physically resembling a high percentage of American kids today. I don’t care what anyone says — I think Docter and Petersen knew this would strike a chord out there.

I sure didn’t see it as a metaphor for anything in my life, I can tell you. It’s just a high-strung story with a lot of gee-gosh stuff going on and some recognizable issues propelling the two main characters.

So what am I saying, boiled down? That it’s really quite well made and has an almost stoner sensibility in portions but may be a little too good for the lowbrows and at the same time isn’t really deep and resonant enough to penetrate with quality-cinema buffs? Something like that. I realize what I’m writing (and re-reading) may sound a bit contradictory but there it is.

The only other thought I have is that the face of an old explorer character named Charles Muntz (voiced by Christopher Plummer) seems to have been inspired by Kirk Douglas. Or at least on Douglas’s cheekbones.

Note: The title of this piece means I’m down with this film, that I’m cool with it. That’s obvious from reading the review but some might interpret it to mean, you know, “down” with it as in “off with its head.”

Orange Wifi Cafe inside the Palais, an hour after the finish of 10 am screening of Up (a reaction to which I’m currently banging out).

…which will screen at the Salle Debussy at 10 am.

IFC Films has acquired U.S. distrib rights to Cristian Mungiu‘s Tales From The Golden Age, an omnibus film which wil show in Cannes this week in the Un Certain Regard section. Pic is “a collection of Romanian urban legends from the communist era,” written by Mungiu and co-directed by Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Hofer, Razvan Marculescu, Constantin Popescu and Mungiu. IFC previously distributed Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Palmes d’Or only to be shat upon the Academy’s foreign-language film committee when they declined to shortlist it. Golden Age won’t see the light of a U.S. projector lamp until 2010.

Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez posted a piece last night that asks this question and offers answers in the form of quotes from Emerging Pictures Ira Deutchman, Sony Classics’ Tom Bernard, MCN’s David Poland (a longtime Cannes non-attender), the Sarasota Film Festival’s Tom Hall, an anonymous insider who hasn’t returned this year out of annoyance and frustration, and myself.

“One tried-and-true Cannes ritual is the Tuesday night dinner at La Pizza,” Variety‘s Anne Thompson wrote last night. “With many travelers admonished by their bosses to watch their expenses this year, La Pizza is a relatively inexpensive option. Hollywood Elsewhere‘s Jeff Wells rounded up a gaggle of writers, some print (like the Washington Post‘s Ann Hornaday) and online (MSN and AMC’s James Rocchi) as well as IndieWire stalwarts Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks. Julian Sancton will be blogging Cannes for the first time for VanityFair.com. Lionsgate, Fox Searchlight and Jere Hausfater were in the house, as well as the Alamo Drafthouse’s Tim League.”

HE’s Moises Chiullan on the variable IMAX experiences being offered, and more particularly on the much smaller, low-grade version being shown at AMC and Regal theatres.

A few years back Soshana Bush, the 20 year-old blonde female lead in Damien Wayans‘ Dance Flick (Paramount, 5.22), attended Redwood High School in Larkspur, just north of San Francisco, in the same class as my son Jett. They didn’t run with the same crowd, Jett says, but they half knew each other. So it seems appropriate that Jett should catch a screening of Dance Flick in Manhattan this week and review it for Hollywood Elsewhere.

I’m not sure about my ability to sit down and really watch Watchmen again when it comes out on DVD and Bluray a little more than two months hence. With my full undivided attention, I mean. I suppose I could half-watch it — i.e., write the column while running it in the adjacent living room as a kind of white-noise distraction, eyeballing it from time to time. But I do that all the time anyway.

The Bluray Director’s Cut edition (out 7.21) contains an extra 25 minutes of footage (including “more Rorschach” and “a scene of Hollis Mason‘s death”) for a grand total of 186 minutes. But the big attraction is an expanded capability sidelight called Warner Bros. Maximum Movie Mode along with a live Bluray/Facebook hookup that I don’t want to know about.

The MMM thing, however, includes (a) director walk-ons (i.e., Zack Snyder) with scene analysis, (b) picture-in-picture video from the cast and crew, (c) side-by-side comparisons of the graphic novel and the film; (d) timeline comparisons of our world events to those from Watchmen; plus (e) intersting docs and photo galleries. At least it’s a full-load package. Not bad for $36 and change.

(I would have included art of the Watchmen Bluray, but the wifi in the apartment is so weak and crappy that file transfers don’t work.)