Friday movie roundup - June 27
Whoa! Technical difficulties last night at EricDSnider.com headquarters. The server went down at the worst possible time — Thursday night when I’m posting reviews and sending out “In the Dark” — and prevented me from getting a lot of things done. But here we are now! We are OK. We have each other, and that’s the important thing.
Unsurprisingly, Pixar has knocked another one out of the park with “WALL-E,” an animated sci-fi love story that raises the bar yet again in terms of technical excellence and storytelling technique. I dare say it’s brilliant, easily the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. My review is at Film.com.
Then there’s “Wanted,” starring Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy as assassins. My review of this will be posted shortly is at Cinematical.
In limited release: “Stuck,” a horror-comedy about a woman who hits a homeless man with her car, then drives home with him still alive and embedded in the windshield; and “Expired,” an abrasive comedy from Sundance 2007 about two parking-enforcement officers in love.
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June 27th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Hey Eric, just wondering why you felt better about WALL-E than Cars. Here’s a quote from your Cars review:
“So what’s the problem? It’s hard to feel affection for the characters. They’re machines. Pixar films have often attributed human qualities to non-human things — fish, monsters, bugs, toys — but at least they were biological creatures (or, in the case of “Toy Story,” playthings in the shape of biological creatures). Cars are just cars. Even with eyes on their windshields and front grilles that look like mouths, and despite having personalities and ambitions and quirks, they’re still just machines.”
So what did WALL-E do better to allow you to feel affection for the talking machines? Is it the fact that they’re not real-life machines, or something else?
June 28th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
@richie - (not that I could answer for Eric)
My guess is that WALL-E is much more anthropomorphic than the cars in Cars. That is, it is easier to empathize with some aspect of the characters appearance, actions, or situation.