Wonder, Heroes, and Trash: WALL-E Review

What more can be said of Pixar’s ability to make wonderful stories that rake in mounds of cash? The animation studio has put out the most consistently original and entertaining films of the past thirteen years and each film has been a commercial success. Even the animated shorts they play before their features have more creativity, heart, and humor than most of the films released. They’ve explored the worlds of toys, monsters, cars, fish, superheroes, bugs, and even a rat with great culinary talents. They’ve given us amazing characters like Buzz Lightyear, Woody, Boo, Elastigirl, Edna Mode, Dory, and Remy. Perhaps the one thing that can be said of Pixar is that no matter how predictable it is that their next movie will be very good or excellent, we still leave the theater surprised, enraptured, entertained, and even enlightened. Pixar’s films defy the animation genre; they don’t make just the most technologically advanced cartoons, they make some of the best films, period.

With the release of their ninth film, WALL-E, Pixar extends their successful streak to nine. They also continue to break new ground by giving us both their first science-fiction tale and date movie. Writer-director Andrew Stanton has fashioned yet another iconic character in WALL-E, the last working robot of thousands created by Buy N Large — a giant retailer that has taken over providing humanity with nearly every need or desire — to clean up the Earth after humans’ consumption and waste has made the planet uninhabitable and devoid of nearly all vegetation. We meet him 700 years into the future and he’s still working away, compacting the trash into cubes and placing them in stacks as high as sky-scrapers. All the while, WALL-E collects some of the interesting pieces of garbage — rubber duckies, Christmas lights, a Rubik’s Cube — and brings them back to his shelter. WALL-E does not talk per se, but he communicates clearly and his curiosity and wonderment at the world around him are contagious. It also helps that Ben Burtt made the sound design for the film. Burtt previously gave “voices” to R2-D2 and ET, two of the most wonderful and articulate communicators in cinema despite the fact that they don’t speak any human language. Like all Pixar films, WALL-E looks gorgeous, even the early sequences depicting the desolate Earth. Like all Pixar films, however, WALL-E’s beauty resides primarily in its story and characters. The amount of imagination the filmmakers and animators possess humbles the audience.

“Lot of water under the bridge, Lot of other stuff too.” I’m Not There Review

On his music blog, “List of the Day,” on Yahoo!, Rob O’Connor recently wrote of Bob Dylan, saying, “No matter how much is written about the man, he never becomes any more known to any of us.” Writer-director Todd Haynes takes this fact of one of the most well-known and most enigmatic public figures of the past fifty years and makes a whole film exploring Bob Dylan given what we have of him. That film, I’m Not There, is a fascinating if uneven piece of art that defies categorization. It is no biopic of an artist like Ray or Walk the Line. Rather, Haynes’ film looks at the understanding of Dylan as it already exists in the public eye. Before seeing this film, it’s probably best if people go watch two documentaries: D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back and Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home. These films will help people understand how Haynes plays with the legend of Dylan. It goes without saying that I’m Not There has a wonderful soundtrack.

Haynes chooses from the outset to avoid the conventions of the biopic since he’s not playing with that genre; he’s playing with notions of artistry and celebrity. Most notably, Haynes has chosen to portray Dylan as six different characters embodying different popular notions of Dylan, played by six different actors. Some of the characters have obvious connections to the singer/songwriter such as Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), the social critic of Dylan’s early career and the born-again Christian in the late 1970’s. Or Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), the version of Dylan who plugged in an electric guitar and alienated a large swathe of his fan base on albums such as Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Other embodiments of Dylan are more confusing, such as the young African-American adolescent (Marcus Carl Franklin) stowing away on trains, playing guitar, and telling anyone who will listen that he’s Woody Guthrie.