Right Wing Hates Wall-E

[Swamp Gas]

Let’s see…according to these critics environmentalism, vegetarians, love of animals, and being a humanist is fascism, but corporatism, war, pollution, torture, cruelty, and law breaking is normal.

These Cro-Magnons should really take up farming, trinket making, caring for the sick, and art, and stop bashing in heads and eating brains.


thinkprogress.org/2008/07/01/right-wing-hates-wall-e/#comment-5063520

[KNOWTHIS]

Oh my God. First of all, why are these douche bags watching and critiquing cartoons anyway? It’s one phony controversy after the other. Every single one of these assholes should be forced to have their own backyards turned in to landfills. Then they can go outside everyday and worship the mess that they seem to love so much. You see, these elitist conservatives would never allow their own personal property to become a dump. The rest of the planet can go to hell in a hand basket though as far as they care.

[Swamp Gas]

Well, these dolts want to be able to teach the children their insane philosophy.....Corporate Rule, War, Oil Economy, Pollution, and Fundamental Religion. This is another chapter in the "kill the hippies" idea, that Wall-E is promoting. The Warrior culture is directly opposite to the Hippy/Psychedelic Culture, and we must be aware at every turn who is for what.

Tough.

Get used to it. You crackpots are in the minority.

[Swamp Gas]

Here is a series of the Right Wing Corporate types and what they think of Wall-E.

Barf Bags ready?

corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODBmN2FmNjIwNmUxMDBkZDc5MjUxYWIwYjBjODExNzQ=

Monday, June 30, 2008

WALL-E, No thanks [Shannen Coffin]

Yes — I must have watched a different movie than Frederica reviewed here. I took my family to see WALL-E this weekend. I have been a huge fan of Disney Pixar's movies. Parents are usually just as entertained as their kids are. With WALL-E, that's probably true only if you thought An Inconvenient Truth was Oscar-worthy. As for me, Pixar's latest offering was Godforsaken dreck. Mankind has had to abandon the earth because there is too much garbage. WALL-E is the only remaining garbage compacting robot in a metropolis of garbage skyscrapers. And his only living companion is a cockroach, described by a Washington Post reviewer (who doubtlessly thinks very highly of the Nobel Committee) as cute, but pretty much just a cockroach. Really charming stuff for my three-year old, who was asking to leave about fifty minutes in. When we finally see the humans, they are corpulent, lazy slobs who move around by robotic deck chairs on a giant space cruiseship. Oh, and let's not forget the mega-corporation that runs everything (ironically, the ship looked a little like a Disney Cruise ship in the year 2800). From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind. It's a shame, too, because the robot had promise. The story was just awful, however. Nice to see that Disney and Pixar can make mega-millions off of telling us just how greedy, lazy, and destructive we all are. There's no hope for mankind. Hand over your wallet.

[Swamp Gas]

planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTYxNmIxZjNiYzRhZDYyYWVhODI1YzVmMGQ0ODViMGQ=


Sunday, June 29, 2008

The Hypocrisy of WALL-E [Greg Pollowitz]

I saw WALL-E with my five year old on Saturday night. It was like a 90-minute lecture on the dangers of over consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment. All this from mega-company Disney, who wants us to buy WALL-E kitsch for our kids that are manufactured in China at environment-destroying factories and packed in plastic that will take hundreds of year to biodegrade in our landfills.

Much to Disney's chagrin, I will do my part to avoid future environmental armageddon by boycotting any and all WALL-E merchandise and I hope others join my crusade.

[Swamp Gas]

Then there is Glen Beck, the corporate mouthpiece, along with Limbaugh, Coulter, and all of the other Global Warming deniers, are in such a pitiful minority.



www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/11941/


Glenn Beck: Wall-E


June 27, 2008 - 3:00 ET

GLENN: Stu, stop the music. This is important stuff. Is it possible, do you know, is Wally starting this weekend?

STU: I believe it is starting this weekend.

GLENN: Oh, I can't wait to teach my kids how we've destroyed the Earth.

STU: Well, it's not you teaching as much as a robot.

GLENN: Yeah, I know, as much as, you know, Pixar is teaching. I can't wait. Just, this is great. You know if your kid has ever come home and said, "Dad, how come we use so much styrofoam," oh, this is the movie for you. I love that. "Dad, how come we don't recycle as much as we should?" "We do recycle." "Well, teacher says we don't recycle enough." "Oh, really? Is that what teacher is saying? What's the teacher's phone number?" I'm becoming one of those people, I really am. I am this close, and I haven't said anything on the air. I've said it in other states during the stage show, what's been going on in my life under the surface, all kept quiet, bottled up inside since January, but I'm coming this -- I'm about to spill the beans. You know, within three weeks if there isn't something changed, oh, I'm going to become one of those people.

Stu, I actually am thinking about building a gigantic billboard -- I'm sorry. A gigantic fence which I can build at any size on my property as long as it's 60 feet away from the road, I'm thinking about building a giant fence that I paint once in a while, little slogans like "This town council sucks" or "Bad neighbors 50 feet ahead," things like that.

STU: You're having some problems with your property, aren't you? It's like eminent domain except they don't take it, they don't let you use it.

GLENN: The law says I can do what I want to do. The law says it but they won't hear of it. They are trying to convince me that, well, that doesn't matter. Excuse me? What do you mean the law doesn't matter? I told them, yeah, I did. Two days ago when I was heavily medicated and on a lot of medication and in a lot of pain, the city decided to show up at my house. I backed them down the stairs into the street. Wasn't really pleasant. I wasn't really in a good mood that day.

STU: And you are saying these people are giving you a hard time?

GLENN: Yeah, yeah. Well, I never -- no, I was pleasant at first. I was very pleasant at first. I was just trying to understand. And then when they started to get into, well, that's, sure that's what it says, but there are a lot of people on the council that just don't want this to happen. Well, I don't really care now what they want. I'll see you in court. I'm becoming one of those people. I really am thinking about painting maybe my house black because I can, black with purple and orange shutters. Oh, yeah, yeah. You worry about property values? Oh, you have no idea.

STU: What's the town ordinance on lighting, Glenn? Because I don't know if you can -- I mean, if you have a light --

GLENN: Can't, can't. I already thought.

STU: Really bright lights pointed at your neighbors?

GLENN: Can't, can't.

STU: Lasers?

GLENN: Looked that one up, yeah. Because I was thinking about the bat signal.

STU: Yeah.

GLENN: You know what I mean? Really, seriously, Stu, I really did think about, you know those giant arc spotlights, the kind for movies?

STU: Yeah.

GLENN: I actually thought about -- I'm not kidding. If it were legal, I looked it up. I wanted to have one in my side yard, went it for like a week and like at 3:00 in the morning, just start her up and just have that thing burn right into my neighbor's window. Anna was out walking the dog with me yesterday and I'm walking the dog and the neighbors are out in their backyard and I just raised my hand and I said, hey, bad neighbor, and they just looked at me. And they had company over and they were barbecuing. They're like (laughing). I said, yeah, good to see you, bad neighbor. Bad neighbor, bad neighbor, bad neighbor! My daughter just laughed. She said, you're insane, Dad. I said, oh, yeah. You haven't begun to see my insanity.

STU: Well, you have to look at it. Washington D.C. wanted to ban handguns. They did for quite a long time and then someone stepped in and said there's a higher order here. There's the Constitution, there's the Second Amendment.

GLENN: Yeah.

STU: And I think, you know, there's a really famous smart guy that said let there be light, and I think you can kind of maybe use that argument to say, look, I've been reading this fancy book and it says let there be light, so there was.

GLENN: Light there shall be. And on the first day, on the first day... there was light. I want an arc one, too. I don't want any new kind of fangle -- I want the one that's actually burning carbon to be able to light it up. I in fact would like carbon lights for my entire house if I could get it. You know, you just have to go out and replace the little carbon sticks? I'm burning actual carbon to light my flower beds. How do you like that? I'm going to find out -- I haven't done this yet, but I'm going to try to find to see if there's any way I can put an oil rig on my property. You know those -- what are those called, those things that go up and down? Are those oil derricks? Does anybody know? Pumps.

STU: Yeah, pump it right out of the ground.

GLENN: Yeah. I don't have any oil. I'll pretty sure I don't have any oil. I'll going to drill for it. What the hell. I might find some. I just want a big -- I mean, you're worried about property values, really? How do you like the big huge house with the oil rig on it, huh? You like looking at that one? Yeah. Hello, bad neighbor. Okay, I'm sorry. We were talking about Wally. Stu?

STU: Yes, Glenn. Very highly reviewed, by the way.

GLENN: Is it? What a surprise. This is about how man destroyed the Earth.

STU: Well, I haven't seen it yet, but yes, that's exactly what it's about. It has to be.

GLENN: I saw the preview. I'm sitting in the movie theater. This is, I don't know how many months ago. And I just see Wally and he's on the Earth and he's cleaning stuff up and I looked at my wife and I said, it's a frickin' global warming movie, it is how we destroyed the Earth.

STU: Yeah, you actually called this one on the air and you were 100% right on it in that it appears to be Wally is the story of one robot who was a trash collecting robot and there's apparently a lot of these. The spaceship -- because they couldn't -- unfortunately the robots weren't efficient enough to clean up the Earth before it was going to kill all humans. So the humans had to leave in a spaceship but Wally gets left behind to clean up the trash that's still there.

GLENN: I think that would be great. They got a big enough spaceship, let's all get on board. Come back, we'll all party until it's 2099, get back on the spaceship, let the robots clean everything up, come on, kind of what we do with stadiums, isn't it? Why don't we -- I mean, we don't live in the trash in stadiums. We go, we have a good time, we have, you know, some drinks, we leave, get in our cars. Why don't we just do that with the Earth, get in the giant spaceship.

STU: Yeah, let a couple of Roombas go around, we'll come back, they go to the edge of the continent, turn around and come back.

GLENN: Let me tell you something. The Roomba is going to change the world.

[Swamp Gas]

dirtyharrysplace.com/?p=2127


UPDATE: ****Welcome fellow National Review fans, and my eternal thanks to John J. Miller for helping you find my new home. Hope you’ll take a look around, consider a bookmark, and come on back now and again. You’ll find 2-3 movie reviews a week, a lot of classic film pimping, and the 24/7 effort necessary to keep track of Hollywood’s pro-abandon-the-Iraqis-to-terrorists lunacy.

In the next couple days, I’ll be reporting on my few moments with the stars and director of Wall-E — including more on that “Stay the course” shot. Thanks again, John. ****

On to the review…

For all its charms and wonders, one moment sticks in my head and, well, craw. It also confuses me. Why? Why go there? Other than the dark chuckles from the liberal critics around me, what’s to gain? And other than a lack of self-control or hubris on the filmmakers’ part, there’s no explaining it. But they did it. They actually had the President (Fred Willard) say about his failed mission, “Stay the course.”

Have we lost Pixar? Have we lost the wonderful studio who brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille to Bush Derangement Syndrome? Here you have a winning streak going back ten-years, enormous amounts of public goodwill, equal amounts of credibility as serious storytellers, and they stop things cold, yanking you out of the story with the liberal nonsense. Quite a disappointment. Anyway…

walle81.jpg

800 years in the future Earth has been abandoned by all but a single, small, resourceful, expressive, and oh-so lonely garbage compactor named Wall-E, who diligently does his job cleaning up — one square-foot at a time — the mountains of garage that eventually forced mankind to flee into space hundreds of years earlier. Powered by the sun and with only a cockroach and a VHS copy of Hello Dolly for company, Wall-E longs for someone to love, a hand to hold.

After centuries alone, Eve arrives. She’s a sleek, white probe with a deadly streak sent to look for any sign of life. Immediately smitten, Wall-E dodges her laser blasts until he earns her affection. It’s the small plant he offers her that takes them both on a journey into the faraway universe.

walle10.jpg

The first forty-minutes are magical. The introduction to Wall-E and slow reveals of his routine and world are mesmerizing and almost completely without dialogue. Eve’s arrival, their courtship, and those first moments in outer space are equally wondrous. It’s only when we get inside of the ship and meet the human beings that things become routine in that frantic kind of way that hopes to cover for a lack of any real story.

The human characters (and robot supporting characters) are terribly underdeveloped. Much of the latter part of the second-act is spent with the ship’s captain, voiced by Jeff Garlin, but he’s flat, only there to move the plot along. As the plot turns towards the fate of the human characters, Wall-E and Eve are left to chase the Maguffin with a cast of “whacky” robots. Eventually this results in third-act numbness and you just bide your time until it’s over.

walle9.jpg

At first there’s not much of an environmental message. The piles of garbage covering our planet come off as nothing more than a good idea to set up a cool alt-version of our world and the lead character. Unfortunately, this doesn’t last. The humans are introduced as meaty, lazy, chair-bound consumers who live in a world run by a large corporation. The message about our consumerism, sloth, and addiction to visual stimulus is eventually beaten like a drum.

This may well be the fifth or sixth movie this year to depict our government as taken over by a corporation – as though that would be a bad thing.

One very odd aspect was Fred Willard as the ’stay the course’ President. He’s actually Fred Willard. Not a cartoon and not a computer rendering. Every other human is a cartoon and cartoony. He’s only seen via historical footage, but still…

walle3.jpg

Wall-E the character, however, is amazing. The imagination behind his creation, how he moves and expresses himself, is quite a thing. I could watch that dumb little robot do his dull job for hours. It might’ve actually made for a better movie.

Whatever you do, be sure to show up on time so you don’t miss Presto, the cartoon-short that opens the show. At just a few minutes, Presto is a small masterpiece. Energy, humor, personality… It takes you back to the best of the old Warner Brothers’ cartoons when The Mighty Chuck Jones was at the height of his powers.

[Swamp Gas]

Of course hippy-hating Alex Jones can't be left out.

infowars.net/articles/july2008/030708Wall-E.htm

I think he is jealous that he was a rabid Right Wing Redneck Republican BABY during the 60s, and missed the cool things that happened.

Stick to 9/11 and The Police State Alex.

You are a buffoon and fool when it comes to everything else, especially social and technological issues.

[Swamp Gas]

Mr. McCain should be required to see “Wall-E” to learn just how far adrift he is from an America whose economic fears cannot be remedied by his flip-flop embrace of the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) and his sham gas-tax holiday (for everyone else). Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner’s complacency. Americans should see it to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America’s patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president.

www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/opinion/06rich.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


Wall-E for President

By FRANK RICH

Published: July 6, 2008

SO much for a July Fourth week spent in idyllic celebration of our country’s birthday. This year’s festivities were marked instead by a debate — childish, not constitutional — over who is and isn’t patriotic. The fireworks were sparked by a verbally maladroit retired general, fueled by two increasingly fatuous presidential campaigns, and heated to a boil by a 24/7 news culture that inflates any passing tit for tat into a war of the worlds.

Let oil soar above $140 a barrel. Let layoffs and foreclosures proliferate like California’s fires. Let someone else worry about the stock market’s steepest June drop since the Great Depression. In our political culture, only one question mattered: What was Wesley Clark saying about John McCain and how loudly would every politician and bloviator in the land react?

Unable to take another minute of this din, I did what any sensible person might do and fled to the movies. More specifically, to an animated movie in the middle of a weekday afternoon. What escape could be more complete?

Among its other attributes, this particular G-rated film, “Wall-E,” is a rare economic bright spot. Its enormous box-office gross last weekend swelled a total Hollywood take that was up 20 percent from a year ago. (You know America’s economy is cooked when everyone flocks to the movies.) The “Wall-E” crowds were primed by the track record of its creator, Pixar Animation Studios, and the ecstatic reviews. But if anything, this movie may exceed its audience’s expectations. It did mine.

As it happened, “Wall-E” opened the same summer weekend as the hot-button movie of the 2004 campaign year, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Ah, the good old days. Oil was $38 a barrel, our fatalities in Iraq had not hit 900, and only 57 percent of Americans thought their country was on the wrong track. (Now more than 80 percent do.) “Wall-E,” a fictional film playing to a far larger audience, may touch a more universal chord in this far gloomier time.

Indeed, sitting among rapt children mostly under 12, I felt as if I’d stepped through a looking glass. This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex’s walls.

While the real-life grown-ups on TV were again rebooting Vietnam, the kids at “Wall-E” were in deep contemplation of a world in peril — and of the future that is theirs to make what they will of it. Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel, and you’ll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters?

Almost any description of this beautiful film makes it sound juvenile or didactic, and it is neither. So I’ll keep to the minimum. “Wall-E” is a robot-meets-robot love story, as simple (and often as silent) as a Keaton or Chaplin fable, set largely in a smoldering and abandoned Earth, circa 2700, where the only remaining signs of life are a cockroach and a single green sprout.

The robot of the title is a battered mobile trash compactor whose sole knowledge of human civilization and intimacy comes from the avalanche of detritus the former inhabitants left behind — a Rubik’s Cube, an engagement ring and, most strangely, a single stuttering VCR tape of “Hello, Dolly!,” a candied Hollywood musical from 1969. Wall-E keeps rewinding to the song that finds the young lovers pledging their devotion until “time runs out.”

Pixar is not Stanley Kubrick. Though “Wall-E” is laced with visual and musical allusions to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” its vision of apocalypse now is not as dark as Kubrick’s then. The new film speaks to the anxieties of 2008 as specifically as “2001” did to the more explosive tumult of its (election) year, 1968. That’s more than upsetting enough.

Humanity is not dead in “Wall-E,” but it is in peril. The world’s population cruises the heavens ceaselessly on a mammoth luxury spaceship that it boarded in the early 22nd century after the planet became uninhabitable. For government, there is a global corporation called Buy N Large, which keeps the public wired to umpteenth-generation iPods and addicted to a diet of supersized liquefied fast food and instantly obsolete products. The people are too bloated to walk — they float around on motorized Barcaloungers — but they are happy shoppers. A billboard on the moon heralds a Buy N Large outlet mall “coming soon,” not far from that spot where back in the day of “Hello, Dolly!” idealistic Americans once placed a flag.

And yet these rabid consumers, like us, are haunted by what paradise might have been lost. How can they reclaim what matters? How can Earth be recolonized? These questions are rarely spoken in “Wall-E,” but are omnipresent, like half-forgotten dreams. In this movie, a fleeting green memory of the extinct miracle of photosynthesis is as dazzling and elusive as the emerald city of Oz.

One of the great things about art, including popular art, is that it can hit audiences at a profound level beyond words. That includes children. The kids at “Wall-E” were never restless, despite the movie’s often melancholy mood and few belly laughs. They seemed to instinctually understand what “Wall-E” was saying; they didn’t pepper their chaperones with questions along the way. At the end they clapped their small hands. What they applauded was not some banal cartoonish triumph of good over evil but a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out.

You have to wonder what these same kids make of the political show their parents watch on TV at home. The fierce urgency of now that drives “Wall-E” and its yearning for change is absent in both the Barack Obama and McCain campaigns these days.

For me, Mr. Obama showed signs of jumping the shark two weeks back, when he appeared at a podium affixed with his own pompous faux-presidential seal. It could have been a Pixar sight gag. In fact, it is a gag in “Wall-E,” where, in a flashback, we see that the original do-nothing chief executive of Buy N Large (prone to pronouncements like “stay the course”) boasted his own ersatz presidential podium.

For all the hyperventilation on the left about Mr. Obama’s rush to the center — some warranted, some not — what’s more alarming is how small-bore and defensive his campaign has become. Whether he’s reaffirming his long-held belief in faith-based programs or fudging his core convictions about government snooping, he is drifting away from the leadership he promised and into the focus-group-tested calculation patented by Mark Penn in his disastrous campaign for Hillary Clinton. Mr. Obama’s Wednesday address calling for renewed public service is unassailable in principle but inadequate to the daunting size of the serious American crisis at hand. The speech could have been — and has been — delivered by any candidate of either party in any election year since 1960.

What Mr. Obama has going for him during this tailspin is that his opponent seems mortifyingly out-to-lunch. Mr. McCain is a man who aspires to lead the largest economy in the world and yet recently admitted that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, the one modern tool shared by everyone from the post-industrial American work force to Middle Eastern terrorists to Pixar animators. Getting shot down over Vietnam may not be a qualification for president in 2008, but surely a rudimentary facility with a laptop is. What Mr. McCain has going for him is a press corps that often ignores or covers up such embarrassments.

The Republican’s digital ignorance is not a function of his age but of his intellectual inflexibility and his isolation from his country’s reality. To prove the point last week, he took a superfluous, if picturesque, tour of Colombia and Mexico, with occasional timeouts for him and his surrogates to respond like crybabies to General Clark’s supposed slur on his patriotism.

For connoisseurs of McCainian cluelessness, the high point was his Wednesday morning appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The anchor, Robin Roberts, asked the only important question: Why in heaven’s name was Mr. McCain in Latin America when “the U.S. economy is really at the forefront of voters’ minds”?

“I know Americans are hurting very badly right now,” he explained, channeling the first George Bush’s “Message: I care.” As he spoke, those hurting Americans could feast on the gorgeous flora and fauna of the Cartagena, Colombia, tourist vista serving as his backdrop. “It’s really lovely here,” Mr. McCain said. Since he can’t drop us an e-mail, a video postcard will have to do.

Mr. McCain should be required to see “Wall-E” to learn just how far adrift he is from an America whose economic fears cannot be remedied by his flip-flop embrace of the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) and his sham gas-tax holiday (for everyone else). Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner’s complacency. Americans should see it to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America’s patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president.

[Swamp Gas]

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91894500



Wall-E,' Speaking Volumes with Stillness and Stars



Wall-E rids the planet of its trash.


Evolutionary thinking: Wall-E may have started out as a glorified trash compactor, but he's learned how to look to the sky. Pixar

Wall-
* Director: Andrew Stanton
* Genre: Sci-Fi
* Running Time: 97 minutes

Rated G: Big-hearted and full of wonder, but too smart to be saccharine.


“The first hour of Wall-E is a crazily inventive, deliriously engaging and almost wordless silent comedy of the sort that Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton used to make.”


All Things Considered, June 27, 2008 · The camera descends, at the start of Wall-E, from outer space to a landscape that looks eerily familiar — and sort of not. The sun filters down through a brownish haze. What seem at first like skyscrapers turn out to be neatly stacked mountains of trash. Stillness is everywhere, broken only by the unlikely sound of a song from Hello, Dolly! — and a solitary figure zipping around a junk-strewn cityscape.

Apparently, humans never changed course on pollution and consumerism, and sometime in the 22nd century they were forced to leave a planet they had turned into a giant garbage dump. But they left without turning off a robot they'd left behind. He's basically a trash compactor on treads — a Waste Allocation Load-Lifter: Earth Class, or WALL-E — who has, over the course of 700 years, developed a personality.

He tries to puzzle out what mankind's detritus was for (a Rubik's cube, a spork, a fire extinguisher), and he saves a few items — an alarmingly fresh 700-year-old Twinkie, say, for his pet cockroach.

But most of the trash he compacts and stacks, in a routine that is interrupted only when he falls head-over-treads for a sleek robot from the stars: EVE (for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), whom he watches from afar so he won't be incinerated.

Eve has an itchy trigger-finger, it turns out.

The first hour of Wall-E is a crazily inventive, deliriously engaging and almost wordless silent comedy of the sort that Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton used to make. Things turn more conventional in the last half hour, when pudgy, machine-dependent humans make an appearance, but the glow of that first part will carry you through.

That and the majesty of the filmmaking: Wall-E's world, in all its epic decay, looks real. You can almost taste the dust. And it's emotionally real too — enough so that a cautionary tale about the environment, and about big corporations that don't take care of it, and about getting so caught up in our gadgetry that we forget to look at the stars all take a back seat to romance.

So do some specifically cinematic subtexts. Director Andrew Stanton and his animators have slipped in nods not just to Hello, Dolly!, but to Star Wars and Blade Runner, An Inconvenient Truth and the comedies of Chaplin and Jacques Tati. More than just a nod to Chaplin, actually: Wall-E, with his workaholic scruffiness and his yearning for someone to hold hands with, might as well be Chaplin's Little Tramp.

There's actually a nice parallel between this largely silent film and Chaplin's first sound film, Modern Times. In that one, the silent clown used the soundtrack mostly for music and effects, not for speech, just as Pixar does here. Chaplin only let you hear a human voice a couple of times, and only on some sort of mechanical contraption — say a closed-circuit TV screen — to emphasize its artificiality. It was his way of saying to the sound world, "OK, everybody's doing this talking thing now, but look how much more expressive our silent world is."

For the first time in a Pixar movie, Wall-E's filmmakers give a nod to the world of actual actors and cameras — and make them artificial in the same way: by only letting you see them on video screens, where they look flat and washed-out compared to the digital world around them.

But there's one difference. Chaplin knew he had lost the battle: Silence was finished; sound had won. In today's Hollywood, digital is what's taking over — in special effects, in green-screen work, in animation. And Pixar's animators, bless them, are at the forefront, insisting that imagery created on computers doesn't have to be soulless. Wall-E's images are filled with emotion, just as silent film's images were — even though its characters look like they're made of metal and plastic, and can't say a word.

Wall-E is being sold as a futuristic fantasy, of course. But I have to say I'm just as gratified by their look back 70 years to silent movies as I am by their look forward 700 years to a silent planet.

[KNOWTHIS]

Don't these idiots know that all of this controversy only serves to generate more interest? It's free advertising.