Category: Pixar

VIDEO REVIEW: WALL*E


I really needed to see the new Pixar film WALL*E because the first two people I know who saw it really disliked it. Given its otherwise high critical praise, this was a real motivator. I also decided to see if I could, for the first time, have my daughter watch a full-length movie; we’ve failed with Enchanted, Stuart Little and a couple others.

So, for that first 20 minutes, I was a bit distracted. I was taken in by the charms of the cleaning and collecting robot but would the child be like-minded? Actually, she was OK until EVE came and started blasting all over the place. And when she started blowing things up in the vicinity of our hero, that was the end of that. For her.

For me, it’s when it really started getting interesting. Sure it has those somewhat heavy-handed apocalyptic imagery. Ultimately, though it was a story of heroism, changing from a state of inertia to a state of action. And of course, it was a love story.

In this economic climate, the fact that we ARE producing so much garbage, and that we should think about consuming and producing less of it, is a timely lesson that I got without feeling as though I’d been ho=it over the head with it.

I “get” the less than enthusiastic early reviewers, though. Perhaps too intense for some younger kids, though other kids really like it. On the other hand, animation is not just for kids, and perhaps never was.

ROG

ROG

MOVIE REVIEW: Ratatouille


In the mid 1980s, I lived in this apartment in Albany where there was a big field in the back. I suffered the most virulent mouse invasion I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t just mice in the low cabinets and along the floor boards. It was beasties in the upper cabinets. I remember putting a box of elbow macaroni on top of the refrigerator and discovered that a live mouse was still in it. Ultimately I set traps, usually four each night for about three weeks before the mouse hotline alerted its fellow travelers that this was not a safe house to be in.

The very premise of a movie about a rodent, a RAT, no less, preparing food was, to say the least, unappealing to me. Still, I went to the parlor of my church a couple Tuesdays ago, and saw Ratatouille with eight other adults, and no children. In fact, I may have been the youngest one there. I was totally captivated by this film. Among other things, there are scenes that are laugh-out-loud hysterical.

Establishing Remy as a sympathetic iconoclast foodie allows the rest of the story to flow, from Remy finding the once-famed Gusteau’s restaurant in Paris to saving the young man Linguini from culinary disaster to what follows. There is a frantic wonder in that early kitchen scene that was breathtaking. If the movie isn’t quite up to that level throughout, it’s still high on my list of favorite films for the year.

This is yet another PIXAR success. In addition to the wonderful writing and direction of Brad Bird, and luscious artwork, I loved the voice actors, including Patton Oswalt as Remy and Lou Romano as Linguini, plus Ian Holm, Brian Dennehy, Peter Sohn, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo, Will Arnett, and Peter O’Toole as the food critic Anton Ego.

ROG

ROG
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