Wall-E for president
Movies seen winter/spring 2008.
Originally written: October 2008
The Simpsons has just received its tenth Emmy for outstanding animated series. In the same week Wall-E started playing the cineplexes in Australia. The coincidence of these two events raises an interesting and curious question. How come cartoons have been relegated to their own ghetto and are not considered against the best live action material when consideration is given to the "Best" categories at the Oscars and the Emmys? After all the difference between Wall-E or Happy Feet and The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is only a matter of degree. In the case of the cartoons, they include live action footage; in the case of the 2004 Best Production at the Academy Awards, a fair percentage of the movie, including most of its pivotal dramatic scenes, is the product of animation (CGI), not live action. So where do you draw the line (pun intended)? Why should not The Simpsons be competing against 30 Rock and Two and a Half Men for the title of Best Comedy series? I know which would get my vote. Yet not once, since it started in 1989, has the series been nominated for the top prize (although in 2003 the mævens of the Golden Globes, which has no separate cartoon category, nominated it for "Best Television Comedy or Musical": it lost to Curb Your Enthusiasm). A few years ago, the Oscars created their own ghetto. Any of the winners of the Animated Feature Oscar since 2001 (Shrek, Spirited Away, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Happy Feet, Ratatouille) would have been worthy of consideration for the Best Production gong, albeit they are not the usual serious and pretentious twaddle favored by the Academy voters. Wall-E certainly fits well within the group of outstanding animated features - it may be the best of the lot, in a genre that has seen more creativity and invention in recent times than any other. In my view, a perfect (or near perfect) animated feature (or, indeed, action-adventure or superhero flick) is worthier of nomination that a run-of-the-mill drama. But it is unlikely that the Academy voters will overcome their own prejudices and their desire to reward "serious" film-making.
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A very British robbery
The Bank Job is not quite your classic heist movie. Far too little time is spent on the intricacies of the robbery, and far more on a series of connected sub-plots that boil over into violence after the eponymous job has been completed. The McGuffin is that there are some compromising photos, in the possession of an early 1970s British black power advocate, and crook, in a safety deposit box and the spooks want to get them. They in turn force Martine Love (Saffron Burrows) into acting for them in putting the heist together, and she involves an old flame Terry (Jason Statham), a used car dealer with a few money troubles. An eclectic gang of would-be crims is drawn together and the job set up - without the tea-leaves knowing that they have been set up: they think they are after money and jewels and have no idea that Martine and her control have ulterior motives. The heist is no great shakes - the old tunnel-in-from-the-shop-next-door trick - and goes pear shaped when a ham radio operator overhears some of the two-way radio conversations between Terry and his look-out. Soon there are lots of other interested parties: some with material in the same vault as the photos, including a vicious crook and a high-class madam; a plethora of cops, some more than slightly bent; and the upper reaches of the security services, as the plot becomes unstuck. As the person around whom the events unfold, Statham does a serviceable job with an unwritten part. Stephen Campbell Moore, so good in The History Boys, and Daniel Mays make an impression as Terry's offsiders and Richard Lintern as the controlling spook is very good. David Suchet, a veteran who played Poirot in countless Agatha Christie adaptations, dominates as the thuggish crim. Directed by Roger Donaldson, the movie is good, without being great, and contains some fairly confronting violence, for which there is little warning. Statham suggests that he is best in support roles and is not quite good enough to carry a movie.
Bottom of the weavers
Adapted from a series of comics, Wanted is one of those movie that raises the question of the distinction between the animated and the live. Certainly the actors playing in tis film are seen in body as well as heard in voice, but so many of the shots are CGI that it becomes a moot point as to whether it is more real than cartoon. On the other hand, there has rarely been a cartoon as mindless and stupid as this action-adventure. Although rated "R", it should be rated "Max-13" - not recommended for anyone who has reached maturity. Briefly, the plot (for want of a better word) involves an office drone named Wesley (James McAvoy) who is picked up by a fox named Fox (Angelina Jolie) and taken to a textile factory where he is told by Morgan Freeman that he is the son of a famous assassin and destined to avenge his father's death. But first he needs to go through the inevitable, and interminable, training sequences. This involves the usual assortment of fighting techniques, death-defying stunts, serious injury and resurrection via some sort of restorative chemical, and learning to shoot around corners. [Alert! Spoilers follow.] With equal credibility we learn that the fraternity of assassins was not started by rabid marijuana users in the eastern deserts, as we have always been led to believe, but by the guild of weavers. Yep, Bottom and his crew were apparently getting inside to take out Theseus and Hippolyta. Not only are they descended from weavers, but their targets are selected by reading a binary code in the pattern of cloth weaved on the "Loom of Fate". Just when you think it cannot get worse, after these revelations, and a series of assassinations during which it has become clear that the weavers have repealed the Law of Gravity, Wesley is sent off to Europe to complete his mission, only to run into a full Darth Vader-Luke Skywalker scenario. Naturally, his only choice is to single-handedly take on the entire coterie of the weaver/assassins guild, a group that has individually killed him off a fair few times in training, but which he is going to take on collectively. McAvoy is wasted. Freeman and Jolie are slumming. Even Terence Stamp turns up to dirty his reputation. To me, this an empty and stupid movie, but it has found an audience and taken nearly $US300 in world-wide gross, so it is likely to spawn sequels - in spite of the pile of bodies at the end. I may be coming picky in my old age but I still insist that movies like this make at least some sense, and that they have a consistency, even within the confines of their own universes. Wanted, directed with van Gogh's ear for dialog and movement by Timur Bekmambetov, doesn't.
Another brick in the ...
Wall-E may be the best film I've seen this year. It is as good an SF film as Dark Knight is a superhero flick. It also happens to be a computer-animated film from Pixar. While there are four purely animated films on my favorite film list, none have made it to 'best film of the year' status. This latest Pixar entry may well break the duck. In its previous cartoon, its last independent production, Pixar left behind people, talking toys and animals, and started anthropomorphising the non-living, in that case, Cars. Pixar has since been bought by Disney and absorbed into its structure. John Lasseter, the brains behind Pixar's success, is in charge of the production for both companies. At the time of the take over, I wondered how Lasseter and his offsiders would perform as a part of the mouse factory. Based on this movie, the first approximation is - very well indeed. Written and directed by Andrew Stanton, the creator of Finding Nemo, Wall-E may be the best Pixar movie yet. Like Cars, the central, and eponymous, character is anthropomorphised, in this case a garbage robot, the last apparently still carrying out his duty some 700 years after humanity has abandoned the planet. Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth-class) is a small square machine with a built-in compactor, forever cleaning up the remains of his former masters' mess, making new skyscrapers of rubbish, and finding the occasional piece of treasure to be stored in his living quarters, all the while talking to himself and his one friend, a surviving cockroach, in a series of intelligible whistles and sounds, engineered by Ben Burtt (the sound engineer behind R2D2, inter alia). Into his life comes an exploration rocket, which deposits Eve (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), bright, shiny and ovoid, an iPod among robots, who greets Wall-E by activating her defence mechanisms - and opening fire on him. It's love at first sight - as far as he is concerned. The discovery of surviving vegetation leads Eve back home, to the orbiting space station now housing the remnants of humanity, and Wall-E follows. The main thrust of the dramatic confrontation occurs on this space vehicle as the vehicle's automated systems battle with the aspirations of the main characters to bring mankind home. Like all the Pixar animations, the look and feel of Wall-E is marvellous. In this case, they have managed to wed the look, and the expertise of the computer animation, and the inventiveness of the voice characterisations, with a genuine science fiction story - a post-apocalyptic tale of humanity and its survival. The apocalyse is man-made and a result of enviromental pollution occasioned by the depredations of the last great mega-corporation. The star is undoubtedly the title character, with his combination of endearing characteristics and his heroic resistance to the attempts of the automatons to keep mankind in its sterile isolation. Despite the presence of so many robots in the lead cast, there is plenty of humanity in this film. It even has the voice of John Ratzenberger, the one consistent voice character in all the Pixar films. Wall-E is a great film for both the kids and the adults who accompany them. Thoroughly recommended.
The movie is being shown with Presto, a new Pixar short about a fight over a carrot between a magician and his rabbit. Like earlier Pixar shorts, it complements the film it accompanies.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]