Aces Full of Links

Today's Ramble: Disney, Wall-E, etc.

Oh no! Disney is planning to close the Adventurers Club at Pleasure Island.

Maggie and I have such fond memories of the place from our honeymoon. I guess the advantage of going to, say, Rome on your honeymoon is that nobody threatens to close Rome.

Speaking of Disney, we went to see WALL-E today (trailer). I thought it was a great movie. I can see why it has conservatives are so excited about its depiction of a glorious market-driven Utopian future. Wait... what? Conservatives are complaining about the film has a liberal bias. Gee, and I thought it was just a good film. Well, what are they saying?

This may well be the fifth or sixth movie this year to depict our government as taken over by a corporation - as though that would be a bad thing.

Well,

1. Glad to see somebody's keeping count.
2. Oops, you've got a little corporatism on your... no, a little to the left. No, down. On your chin. There, that's got it.
3. It's an entertaining kids movie.

One thing that is fascinating me lately about the Republican blogosphere is that it has split into two factions. We have the Blame Bush First crowd of people who doesn't realize their bad ideas screwed up the country, it's all Bush's fault (after they spent 7 years telling us to put our faith in the president).

The other faction are the people who still call any criticism of the president "Bush Derangement Syndrome" as if you have to be deranged to criticize the president. The reviewer above is in the latter category, and is disappointed by this film.

I do agree with him, though, when he calls the human characters "flat." And I think that's precisely the point. It's something I've thought about for a while, the possibility that the things we build will preserve we today recognize as humanity. This may be true even if humanity and society change.

I keep remembering what some people told me about the Azores vs. mainland Portugal. Portugal populated the Azores, and continued to "evolve" through its contact with the rest of the world while the islands were preserved in an old-fashioned society. I think the same might be true for intelligent machines of the future, who may be built to interact with humans of the time. Until machines evolve, we may find that our built tools become a sort of snapshot of our society.

In any case, a richly textured film allows for musings in all sorts of directions, and I think that Pixar has created another such film, but much darker than any other they've offered. It may, in the end, prove less endearing but possibly more thought provoking. I found myself thinking a lot of Silent Running which wasn't nearly as good a film as this. I have to think that Silent Running lent some inspirational spark.

One remarkable thing about the movie is how little dialogue is in it, and how expressive the robots are without much verbal language. That's a great achievement for the animators.

I highly recommend the film.

Forget the politics and the bickering and just see Wall-E.

Now I'm off to work on my woodshed some more. This thing is taking me forever. If I remember, I'll take some pictures.

Technorati : disney, wall-e