[Movie] Wall-E - Page 5

On July 02 2008 07:57 funkie wrote:
ok, you guys got me.

I'm going to watch wall-E .

Thanks a lot for all the people who has been giving their comments and stuff, it really helps someone to finally decide to watch or to not to watch a certain movie.

thanks a lot to everyone.

.

On June 28 2008 16:59 VIB wrote:
I don't usually like talking about movies. I hate 90% of them all because I'm too restrictive. But this one deserves the exception.

I went to watch Wall-E by Pixar Studios thinking it would be yet another kid animation with some fun jokes to giggle at. But it amazed and impressed me more at each minute. At the end the best word to describe it in my head was GENIUS. Whoever wrote that is a fucking GENIUS.

They managed to put together the fine brilliancy and sentiment of the old silent movies, well-thought jokes of Shrek, outstanding graphics of a last-gen scifi animation plus well-tuned political messages! While I usually don't like movies where space-ships makes sound on vacuum, this one justifies it by reaching their target audience right on spot.

10/10 Watch it!

On July 03 2008 13:09 MeriaDoKk wrote:
is this a good movie to watch whit a girl?

On July 04 2008 07:15 EGoldman wrote:
I thought the movie was awful. And this is coming from a guy who writes movie scripts and novels for a living. Sorry, but this is more of the marketing high concept kind of tripe that the masses just seem to guzzle endlessly.

The hilarious part is that the movie is couched in this faux-indie style panoramic/minimal dialog delivery, yet the actual characterization in the story is pure cliche.

Wow, boy meets girl, boy likes girl, world gets in the way, boy saves the day. The only fucking thing different in this equation is boy happens to be semi-retarded, speaks as if he has Turrett's syndrome, and wears a robot suit.

I thought this movie was terrible. I really didn't want it to be, but it was. The "political" message was pathetic. Americans are fat, the world has too much trash, and consumer culture makes us lazy. No shit? Sorry, that message has been harped on since the 60's. Nothing new here, nothing even innovative, or slightly provocative.

Look at how the movie is positioned. It's not a literary movie. It's not a movie with texture. Lilo and Stitch was a much better movie that dealt with much more complex and intriguing character conflicts than this movie. This movie had none. There was a vague, ambiguous evil force that held Wall-E back. Not only is the "bad guy" in the movie ill-defined, it's inconsistent with the plot. The girl in the story is practically devoid of all character. What is she other than an I-pod style diva robot girl that is destructive and conservative? Sorry, walking cliche here. She doesn't seem to have any character conflict outside of following her programming and trying to help Wall-E escape. While there could be great conflict within that, it ended up being crap. Typical scenes of her hiding him from her boss, trying to get him into a jump pod, and some space version of an ice-skate romance scene.

This movie was made to sell kids meal toys and give the plebians sound bytes they can feel good about. And shame on everyone who is wowed by eye-candy, bad to nonexistent dialogue, and cliched modes of symbolism. Iron Man was a better movie than this, and even managed to titillate better in a blockbuster-ish kind of way.

They didn't capture the sentimentality of the old silent films. What they captured is the absolute hokeyness of silent film's cultural mores. There's a reason we don't live in the hidebound Pleasantville of Americana past. (Hint: That time sucked!) This film rests firmly on the crutch of using cute robots to sell itself. Without the animation and the robots this would be a hollow fucking shell of a movie. Just replace the setting and the animation with real characters in a modern setting and over half the audience would gag. The other half would enjoy it because that's just the proportion that will always have bad taste.

Too bad this is why so many good films get put aside for cheap comedies churned by the barrel and weak animated films that play on the same formula of small, slightly vulnerable, curious, and naive characters which translates into everyone's head as "cute" because it resembles some kind of prey animal in the archaic wetware known as our brain. Real science fiction deserves better than this. Asimov's puking in his grave.

On July 04 2008 07:15 EGoldman wrote:
I thought the movie was awful. And this is coming from a guy who writes movie scripts and novels for a living. Sorry, but this is more of the marketing high concept kind of tripe that the masses just seem to guzzle endlessly.

The hilarious part is that the movie is couched in this faux-indie style panoramic/minimal dialog delivery, yet the actual characterization in the story is pure cliche.
tent dialogue, and cliched modes of symbolism. Iron Man was a better movie than this, and even managed to titillate better in a blockbuster-ish kind of way.

On July 04 2008 13:29 d.arkive wrote:
Out of curiosity, Goldman, what scripts and novels have you contributed to?

On July 04 2008 13:21 Tal wrote:


I guess you haven't learned much about scripts or novels then.

The whole point of wall-e is that it is putting a great spin on the cliched boy meets girl story - by portraying it through two robots. With barely any words except each others names, they managed to convey the essence of the typical love story. Thats something which is really fucking hard to do. You try writing a script which can do that with no dialogue, while simultaneously being cute and interesting.

The criticisms you make could be directed at pretty much any love story. Would you say Amelie is a bad film?

Even the anti-consumerist stuff was tasteful - instead of the people being fat idiots, they were made to seem slightly misguided, and basically jolly people.

I can understand criticizing stuff aimed at the masses, but I don't think wall-e is like that. I went expecting it to be ok, and came out thinking it was brilliant. Blending mass appeal and artistry is the challenge most artists miss I think.