..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

WALL-E
with Friday Reviews To Come...
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

WALL-E (Four stars)
U.S.; Andrew Stanton (Pixar/Disney)

The new Pixar CG animation extravaganza, WALL-E, is a wonderful movie, and I mean that literally. A longtime Pixar science fiction comedy project about lovable little robots, written and directed by Andrew Stanton -- the filmmaker who gave us that oceanic delight, Finding Nemo -- this movie actually ignites our sense of play, and of wonder. Even if you’re way past childhood’s end, as an adult or in your mature years, the film has some of the dreamy intoxicating effect of the Disney feature cartoons of the late ‘30s through the mid 40s, that fantastic run from Snow White; through Bambi, especially if you saw them as a child.

WALL-E is a huge, high-technology project, involving hundreds of filmmakers, actors and film workers. But, even with all those people milling around, it has a heart-lifting buoyancy and wit, an entrancing screwball sense of fun. I’m sure audiences will love it, not because the filmmakers made the right financial calculations and pushed the right buttons, but because the Pixar guys seem to have genuinely loved WALL-E as they made it -- and also because these moviemakers are so great at what they do. Their movie, charming and entertaining as it is, also has serious themes that engage and provoke us more deeply.

One of the great gifts of childhood is that priceless ability to anthropomorphize toys: to turn them into living beings infused with what a kid owner sees as heart and soul. That‘s part of what Pixar has done with its star characters here: two small but very resourceful robots named WALL-E (for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class) and EVE (for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator.). WALL-E lives in the big city on an earth devastated by waste, greed and probably warfare, in a barren, burned-out New Yorkish place where time is out of joint and where some of the skyscrapers are piles of compacted waste that little WALL-E (who resembles, but improves on, the cute robot, No. 5, in Short Circuit) has been gathering and piling up for the past 700 years -- ever since he was accidentally left behind when humankind blasted off in survival ships from their dying earth.

EVE, by contrast, is a sleek white and black flying ovular-looking robo-chick, with a deadly laser blaster that demolishes men and cities. A visitor to WALL-E’s city and a stranger in a strange land, she comes from and lives aboard a spacecraft, the Axiom, in a hothouse on-board world loaded with other robots and with the remnants of humanity and the dispossessed -- who have evolved into somnolent, pleasure-loving tubboes and space merchants, lazing in a couch potato world where they’re indulged by flying easy-chairs and mechanical servants -- all run by a sinister robot computer with a very familiar circular red light and bossy disposition, whom we instantly recognize as the double of 2001's psychotic computer HAL-9000. That ship has dropped EVE on the urban ruins on a scouting expedition to learn whether Earth has become habitable again. She (somehow we know EVE is a she and WALL-E a he) runs into WALL-E, who has exactly that proof, a little delicate leafy plant he found amid the rubble.

Boy robot meets girl-robot --and Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics aren’t enough here. He’s about to lose her -- but, when she reboards the ship, with the stars her destination, he follows her -- there to discover the weird vegetative state into which humanity has evolved, or devolved, and the psychotic machines that want to keep it there, flying forever, like the unknowing passengers on the ship of Heinlein‘s “Universe.” There are Slan-like battles and chases, jokes and gags-- everything you’d except in a child‘s cartoon adventure fantasy. And there’s a happy ending, where the good robots become, in their way, human, or more than human.

Partly they’re inspired by what seems to be the sole fragment of human culture left in New York and in WALL-E‘s hands: not the Guernica, or Hamlet. or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or Don Quixote, Lord of the Rings and Huckleberry Finn but a little tape of a musical number from Gene Kelly’s 1969 movie of Hello, Dolly! -- and not even the Barbra Streisand or Louis Armstrong numbers but the Yonkers babble-ballet “Put on your Sunday Clothes“ and the love ballad “It Only takes a Moment,” sung with leaping naivete by Michael Crawford.

It’s a nice touch: that sweetly goofy suggestion that art is valuable not just in its noblest or most prized-by-the-elite manifestations, but because of those pieces of humanity, if only scraps, that it preserves. Some may scoff at the end when the little robots touched mechanical fingers. Old sentimental human and citizen of the galaxy that I am, that touch of the hand touched my heart.

But the movie has something more: a real sense of the fragility of humankind and the horrors that may face it, inspired by futuristic nightmare movies like 2001, Alien and Blade Runner. WALL-E is partly an ecological fable, as you’d expect. WALL-E’s Earth has been devastated, turned into a planet of demolished men and cities in flight by pollution and by the all-enveloping greed of a long-vanished multi-corporation. Now, ashen heaps of waste and blighted landscapes stretch out around little WALL-E, who keeps piling up those skyscrapers in a routine enlivened only by his cockroach pal, by those snatches of “Hello, Dolly!” and by the arrival of EVE. This is Stanton and Company’s obvious comment on the mess we’re making right now.

No doubt this political-social theme will send the same rightwing TV commentators who went nuts over the global warming message in Happy Feet into more of their loud nasal tizzies. But, like all apocalyptic warning fantasies, from H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, to Orwell’s “1984” to Arch Oboler‘s “Five” to Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” to The Twilight Zone’s “Time Enough at Last” to the recent Will Smith movie of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend,” this one affects us strongly because we know the nightmare is built on specks of plausibility. We suspect that we will pay the piper somehow, and that the foundation and empire may crumble. This is just one extrapolation.

Technically, WALL-E is a typical Pixar corker. Computerized animation has rarely been used, even by Pixar, with such verve, wit and imagination. From those early visions of the devastated city to the vast metallic stretches of the luxury space ship, to the many little aside, allusions and jokes (Strauss’ Kubrickian “The Blue Danube,“ the little R2-D2s, and the Rubik’s Cube that WALL-E keeps and Eve easily masters.) Even the voices are ingenious. The ones we can recognize are Jeff Garlin as the blobby ship‘s captain, Sigourney Weaver as the computer, Fred Willard (voicing himself) as a fatuous TV announcer (excuse me, as the Bushy CEO head/president) and John Ratzenberger and Kathy Najimy as two other Axiom humans, John and Mary. The ones we don’t recognize belong to WALL-E's legendary sound designer Ben Burtt and Pixar’s Elissa Knight, electronically distorted into something more suitable for cute robots.

Stanton, producer Jim Morris, executive producer John Lasseter, production designer Ralph Eggleston and the whole Pixar company deserve the touch of our hands here. But we should also mention the movie’s great prelude and its socko aftermath. The show starts with just that opener we used to love and expect: a short cartoon, here called “Presto,” which presents an egotistical magician, a bottomless top hat, a wascally wabbit and lots of high-energy gags worthy of Mike Maltese and Chuck Jones. And it ends with a wow of a credits sequence: a grand progression from cave man drawings through great painting (impressionists and all) to today’s omnipresent computer images, climaxing with a little love-blip of WALL-E and EVE. I was moved also by these credits: with the suggestion art keeps evolving and growing again in many forms, just as we humans do, or can. Bravo, Pixar.




MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASE

Belle Toujours (Three and a half stars)
Portugal/France; Manoel de Oliveira, 2006 (New Yorker)

Portugal’s magnificent nonagenarian de Oliveira (b: Dec. 12, 1908) -- who may yet direct a movie past the age of 100 -- offers a very personal sequel to “Belle de Jour,“ the perversely erotic masterpiece of one of his favorite filmmakers, Luis Bunuel. This jewel-like film, which reunites the characters of Parisian wife/hooker Severine and bourgeois client/creep Fusson, played by Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli in the original, suffers from the absence of Deneuve (though she’s surprisingly well-replaced by Bulle Ogier). But Piccoli is, as always, superb, and so is the ageless master de Oliveira. (By the way, 99-year-old Manoel has directed four more films since “Belle Toujours“ and has two more in production.)

CLASSIC RELEASES

Caravaggio (Three and a half stars)
U.K.; Derek Jarman (Zeitgeist)

Jarman’s passionate, lurid, bare-bones picture of Caravaggio, painter of flesh and fire. As in Ken Russell’s artist/composer bio movies, this as much about the emotions artists arouse as their work and lives. And powerfully so


The Furies (Three and a half stars)
U.S.; Anthony Mann, 1950 (Criterion)

The great link between Mann’s ‘40s film noirs and his ‘50s westerns, this neglected black and white classic mates the two genres into an exciting hybrid -- with Barbara Stanwyck as a vengeful range vixen, Walter Huston as her Lear-like cattle czar father and Wendell Corey and Gilbert Roland among her conquests. Based on a novel by Niven Busch (“Duel in the Sun”); the extras on this primo western noir include an interview with Mann, a commentary by Jim Kitses (“Horizons West”) and a complete paperback edition of Busch’s original novel.


Before the Rain (Three and a half stars)
Macedonia; Milcho Manchevski, 1994 (Criterion)

The first and still best film produced in tiny Macedonia. Made while the Bosnian war was raging, this visually stunning three part portrait of the horrors of warfare and intolerance, was that year’s Golden Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival, and a remarkable debut feature for Manchevski. With Gregoire Colin, Katrin Cartlidge and Rade Serbedzija.

 

BOX SET

The Ruth Rendell Mysteries (3 discs) (Three stars)
U.K.; Matthew Evans/Bruce McDonald, 1997-2000 (Acorn Media)

Good, gripping adaptations of two short stories and three novels by the British mystery writer sometimes called (along with P. D. James), Agatha Christie‘s logical successor. Includes: “Going Wrong,” “Harm Done,” “The Fallen Curtain,” “The Lake of Darkness” and “You Can’t Be Too Careful” (best of the bunch).

 

- Michael Wilmington
June 26, 2008

June 19: Get Smart, The Love Guru, The Duchess of Langeais, Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts, Up The Yangtze, The Passion of The Mao
June 12 : The Incredible Hulk,War Inc., Shotgun Stories, It Always Rains on Sundays
June 5 : Kung Fu Panda, You Don't Mess With The Zohan, Mongol, 'Tis Autumn, At The Death House Door
May 29: Sex & The City, The Strangers, Irina Palm, The Fall
May 22: Indiana Jones 4, Postal, Contempt
May 15: Prince Caspian, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Vacation, DVD: Indiana Jones Collection
May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

.