Nerve Endings Firing Away

It is summertime and apart from furiously compiling my final datasets for my dissertation research and running mundane SAS programs at work, catching movies at the local theater has been my only leisure activity. If you are wondering why am I not enjoying the beautiful summer weather and spending more time outside, you clearly have never lived in Texas. New York, Chicago, and other northern cities have beautiful summers; Texas merely has insanely hot summers where even the nighttime temperatures hover around 85F. Ash’s parents aren’t moving to Houston until mid-September so any chances of helping them settle in during the summer are shot. So basically we head out every weekend for a movie after a long week at work. Thankfully the movies have been tolerably good. Last weekend we saw two movies – Wall·E and Wanted; both of which had 70+ ratings at Tomatometer (our Baradwaj Rangan for Hollywood movies).

Wanted honestly was disappointing. The action sequences were definitely awesome but if it didn’t have the excuse of being an adaptation of a graphic novel, it was mind-numbingly stupid. The action sequences are relentless and violence involved curving bullets and bashing guys for training (you’ve a wax-like bath later to help you recover). Angelina Jolie looked horribly anorexic and James McAvoy still has some distance to go in order to convincingly play a badass macho killing machine. Our weekend would have been a downer hadn’t it been for the other movie we watched the previous night – Wall·E.

Pixar has achieved the epitome of not only animation but also adept story-telling. How else would you explain the brilliance of a movie focused on the love story of two robots that have a two-word vocabulary. Ash rightly said that their relationship was like that between a slickly-designed (with smooth edges) highly-efficient Mac (Eve) and a clunky weird but cute PC (Wall·E). Seth Godin says it perfectly when he points out that Pixar rightly chose between doing a great movie versus a movie with merchandising potential. That said, I’ll not be surprised if we seee Wall·E and Eve toys. The magic of Pixar as I mentioned is not just in the superior animation that they manage to surpass themselves with each new movie but also the immense attention to the fine art of story-telling. The intonations and modulations used by Wall·E and Eve in calling each other to reflect various emotions are more enough to reflect the mischief and love between the two. I’ve been going Evaaa and Eeeeva ever since I saw the movie. I had already been blown away by Pixar’s animation capabilities but found their plot lines and story lines weak (apart from Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story, of course). But the Wall·E eliminated those doubts.

Wall·E’s character as a lonely robot who dutifully goes about his job of building skyscrapers of compacted trash on the abandoned Earth yet being desperately lonely for company after watching Hollywood musicals is enough to make anyone with a heart go awwwww. Some of the brilliant sequences in the movie include Wall·E’s silent following as Eve goes about hunting for organic vegetation and his subsequent care as she locks herself down upon finding Wall·E’s plant. The musical number serenading each other outside Axiom complete with an extinguisher-powered flight is equally cute. Of course, aside from this love story Pixar carries the message of environmental conservation and anti-commercialization. Yet the message is very subtle and it doesn’t try to ram the preachings down your throat and stays faithful to the central characters and its storyline (but of course, the killjoy right-wingers disagree). It had shades of Idiocracy with its dystopic future bereft of vegetation and powered by fluid food. If you haven’t yet seen this movie, go out and see it even if it is the only movie you’ll see this summer. And yes, stay and watch the closing credits (and come early to watch the opening short).