Wall-E

While Wall-E is a feast for the eyes and ears, it's, first and foremost, a treat of good, old-fashioned filmmaking. If you see it in the theater, you will undoubtedly be bombarded with previews for other 3D computer-animated films featuring animals that scream, jump about, and act as obnoxious as the four-year-old sitting next to you. Though they leave me with the impression of having lukewarm high-fructose corn syrup drizzled onto my head, I know that these films have their place and provide some measure of enjoyment for undiscerning children and obnoxious adults (I, myself, was quite fond of the wretched Transformers: the Movie at a young age and am glad to say I grew out of it). Everything in these trailers is played big and loud--all the better to milk laughs from the audience--so, it's doubly refreshing when the feature attraction begins and nobody talks for a long, long time. Wall-E develops its story and characters with a minimum of dialogue, relying, instead, on the much more satisfying (and hundreds of years old) convention of editing meaningful bits of visual information together and letting the audience fit the puzzle pieces together.

Whenever I see a film use these tried-and-true cinematic conventions (usually it's when watching a well-made silent film, but there are other modern examples), I feel as if my brain is being flossed of the detritus of more pandering, shallow entertainments found on TV and in the multiplex. It's no different here; the opening passages of Wall-E are delightful for the elegant and earnest way they ladle out the exposition for the the titular main character and the world he inhabits. Wall-E is set in a distant future where the Earth has become a giant landfill, uninhabitable due to the heaps and heaps of garbage wrought by human industry. Humanity itself has taken to the stars in a giant spaceship named The Axiom, leaving the Earth to the care of a robotic cleanup crew. Wall-E is the last surviving member of these robots, and, some 700 years after the evacuation, he's still dutifully following his programming. Every day he gathers garbage, compacts it into cubes, and stacks the cubes into giant piles, some as tall as skyscrapers. As he undertakes the Herculean task of cleaning the Earth, it becomes clear that this robot has more to his existence than work. He has a penchant for collecting; while sifting through the garbage, something strikes his fancy--an egg beater, a Rubik's Cube, and, one day, a single stalk of plant life poking through the muck--and he takes it to his home where he places it amongst other treasured possessions. One of these is a VHS tape of an old musical, and, as he watches scenes of romance unfold, it becomes clear that this is one lonely robot. He yearns to dance and hold hands with a paramour of his own. All of this is revealed with an expert eye towards efficiency. The details of the world are tucked into the frame as we watch Wall-E on a day's work, until slowly the entire picture is clear. The animation is gorgeous to look at and evokes such a powerful feeling of loneliness and isolation, that it's almost a bummer when another robot named EVE shows up from outer space.

EVE is a probe, sent to find signs of life. At first she's as oblivious to Wall-E as he is smitten, focusing only on fulfilling her mission. But soon, they meet, strike up a budding romance, and, just as it seems Wall-E may have found a dance partner, they are swept away to the deliriously satiric confines of The Axiom. It's here that the film (inevitably) finds its way to a more conventional, yet incredibly endearing Chaplin-esque story rife with sentiment and good-natured comedy. If the second half of the film doesn't quite live up to the timeless, soulful quality of the opening moments of Wall-E's solitude or his courtship with EVE, it's nevertheless suffused with wit. As Wall-E begins to explore The Axiom, he finds that the humans onboard are entirely dependent on robots. They can't move around without assistance from robotic chairs, feed, much like babies, from cups with giant straws provided for them, and live lives dictated by well-timed advertisements ("Blue is the new Red"). They continuously watch television, and they don't even seem to know where they are or the history of how they got there. It's not so much different than watching people in a shopping mall on a Sunday afternoon. It's not the most brilliant or inventive satire of modern times I've ever seen, but it's certainly funny and has a deafening ring of truth to it. Wall-E, bumbling through this world, brings with him the promise of a real life--a home planet with work and problems and, above all, plants. It isn't long before the captain of the ship, delighted to learn of his history, is up all night asking the computer to tell him everything there is to know about this little planet named Earth. Even hoedowns. This leads to a revolution, of sorts, as passengers aboard The Axiom awaken to a larger purpose and reclaim their dominance over the rigid, unbending automatons that run their lives.

There's an underlying message here, of course, about waste and the ecological responsibility of the common man and moving beyond mere survival to something more fulfilling, but, thankfully, the movie avoids the hypocrisy of having a Disney film hammer home a didactic screed about the horrors of disposable junk. Wall-E is more interested in telling the story it wants to tell, and it does this with a deftness that looks deceptively easy. It's pretty much a perfect film, one that accomplishes everything it sets out to do. It scrapes the surface of greatness at times, but it never quite achieves this. I find this is often the case with films as tightly constructed and written as Wall-E; it's like they're powered by clock springs and, as such, there's delight and surprise and magic, but not enough spontaneity or, if you will, life to them. This is just a quibble, though, and a very minor one at that. This is a wonderful film. It earns its laughter and sentiment through quiet, thoughtful honesty about its characters. You will believe a robot can love.

Would Make a Good Double Feature with: Modern Times

This review can also be viewed at: news14.com

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Thanks to DVD technology, I've been making my way through the first and second seasons of Saturday Night Live, and if watching these early episodes reveals anything, it's that, even at the pinnacle of its relevance, the show was always an uneven muddle. These early episodes are eminently enjoyable to watch, if only for their time-capsule qualities, but seeing Gilda Radner do Emily Litella for the fortieth time lays bare how eager the show was to go for the easy joke and how readily it wasted the talent of the comic actors at its disposal. I'm not all that interested in adding my voice to the plethora of words which debate the merits of SNL, but watching Walk Hard reminded me of seeing the great John Belushi or Jane Curtin hamming it up to eke out laughs from a poorly-written parody of the latest hit film.

Walk Hard is a terrible comedy, unfunny and uninspired. Chronicling the rise and fall of singer-songwriter Dewey Cox, it aims to lampoon the treacly artist biopic film, but the jokes are so incredibly obvious, on-the-nose, and overplayed (triple-O adjective score!) that the result is more Scary Movie than Airplane! Its idea of mocking the conventions of the genre seems to consist of stating that these conventions exist and winking. When Dewey Cox realizes he's abusing drugs and alienating the people he loves, he moans, "What a dark period!" 'Cause, you know, all these movies like Ray or Walk the Line feature the artist going through a dark period, so if we state it outright, that's comedy gold!

At the center of this mess are the wasted performances from comedic actors who deserve better. John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox seems to have borrowed Will Ferrell's acting toolbox for much of the film, but he's more charming than Ferrell and is able to earn some laughs through the sincerity of his performance alone. Tim Meadows has a nice turn as Cox's drummer, and a few more characters on the periphery of the story manage to spin gold out of nothing. The songs that Cox sings are funny too, particularly the ode to Little People sung during the Bob Dylan phase of the movie, but these things do not a movie make. If only the novelty music market wasn't in the stranglehold of the Yankovic monopoly, the filmmakers may have been more open to the idea that the best realization of their impulses was a solidly funny album.

It's odd that, for all the comic pedigree attached, Walk Hard commits the worst sin a comedy can: it begs for laughs. All throughout this movie, I felt like a man in a loud Hawaiian shirt was saying, "Huh? Huh?" after every (presumably) funny line and rolling on with his act in defiance to my indifference. When Cox, who lost his sense of smell after a childhood trauma, regains the ability to smell things, he goes around joyfully smelling everything in sight. When he gets to a pile of horse manure, he lingers on it, remarks upon how bad it smells, and then lingers some more. And it goes on and on, like the filmmakers thought that smelling shit never stops being funny. And, oh, how I would have agreed with them just an hour or so before I saw this remarkably unfunny, hammy moment.

The desperate, flop-sweat drenched writing in the film is shameful. It's like they shot the first draft of the screenplay before realizing that they only had enough material to support a longer-than-average sketch. Worse, the movie's observations about the genre are about as tired and trite as the films it's targeting. Frankly, I don't need Walk Hard to make fun of these conventions for me, particularly as it's got nothing more to say than any reasonably intelligent person. If I'm watching something that's predictably chronicling the rise and fall of an artist, I can be trusted to turn to my friends and intone, "What a dark period!" at the appropriate moments and then nudge them to make sure they got the joke all on my own, thank you.

Day 78: Weekend

This is the movie equivalent of Cain, that preacher from the last two Poltergeist movies.  On the surface, it's relatively unthreatening, though the creaky old voice is a bit alarming, but when it grabs you, it stares at you with burning, ghoulish eyes and sings "God is in his holy temple," over and over and over, refusing to let go until JoBeth Williams comes to save you.  Weekend has one upped the demonic preacher in that it posits there aren't any JoBeth Williamses to save you, and as it turns out, it's right.  The question becomes, how many times will the preacher sing the same tune over and over?  The answer: A lot.

While that's the feeling I take away from Godard's Weekend (I described the experience of watching Alphaville as feeling like I was being poked with a stick… I think creepy ghost preacher is a step up), I cannot deny that the movie's laden with fantastic stuff, sequences that will live on in my memory for ages to come.  As such, I'm glad I've seen it and I'd like to see it again in twenty years.  Rather than clutter up the internet with random attempts to pin down Godard or the people who unabashedly love him, I thought I'd just ramble about what I liked.  (Because I just finished watching the thing and I'm very tired.)

The traffic jam in the movie is superb and, so I hear, famous.  It features a camera tracking down an interminable stretch of traffic and an ever-increasing cacophony of blaring car horns.  The length of the sequence and the pace of the camera movement, in addition to the aural displeasure of so many car horns honking, creates a disgusting, amusing suspense.  Every time a break appears between cars, a sense of hope that this brilliant sequence might soon be over pops into one's head.  And then it continues to its hilarious conclusion: bodies strewn everywhere from a nasty wreck.  The characters (and we) are so glad to be out of the traffic, we don't care at all about the dead.

I don't really care to get into the plot as I'm still not sure what was going on in many parts of the film.  Suffice to say: The movie follows an unhappy and somewhat wealthy couple as they attempt to go somewhere.  As they travel, the decaying bodies of dead or dying are cars scattered everywhere, smashed-up, flaming wrecks covered in the blood of their drivers.  The imagery is creepy and apocalyptic; it's also a dynamic way of foreshadowing the end of civilization, a subject the movie eventually reaches.

I enjoyed the bourgeoisie couple and the pointed attacks against them, and, I enjoyed the literary digressions Godard makes here and the characters referencing the movie they're in (what an awful movie, the man complains, all we meet are crazy people), and there's a poetic statement at the end of the film set to drums that had me both tapping my feet and wanting to shake my fist in triumph when it ended.  I also liked the way the movie seemed to subtly shift from being about the awfulness of the bourgeoisie to the awfulness of revolutionaries.

I'm not sure I'll ever fully enjoy a Godard film, but, then, after seeing this, I’m pretty sure they're not made to be enjoyed or even talked about.  I think they're made to be experienced as the deadening, soul-crushing, acerbic and funny little things that they are.  And I think they're supposed to make me as mad and ashamed as I feel now that I can cross another one off the list.  But time and technology have played a joke on Godard:  I purposefully ate fast food while watching this movie.

Day 65: The Wicker Man

The Wicker Man illustrates two things that are becoming increasingly clear to me.  The first is that Christopher Lee is really, truly, no foolin' a fine actor, whose typecasting in villainous roles is as inevitable as it is unfortunate.  The second is that island cultures are generally depicted, to put it generously, as a bit odd.

When a pious, Christian policeman arrives at a small island off the coast of Scotland investigating the disappearance of a young girl, he's confronted by the insular and Pagan ways of its inhabitants.  As he tirelessly seeks out the missing girl, the open sexuality and irrational beliefs of the denizens shocks and offends him.  Unmovable in his faith and seemingly unable to understand the notion that there could be different cultures in the United Kingdom of the 20th century, he scolds the locals for taking no interest in Christ.  As the mystery unravels, it becomes clear that the locals, led by an effete, charming Christopher Lee, believe human sacrifice is necessary to preserve their way of life, and the noble policeman foolishly believes he can stop it.

Though at first the culturally narrow policeman character, nicely played by Edward Woodward, is as unlikable and unwelcome as a Bush voter at a gay pride parade, by the end of the film, I was surprised to find that I found him much more sympathetic than any of the Pagan islanders.  The reason for this is that he's in the minority, as much a victim of religious persecution as a witch in colonial America, maligned solely for being The Other in an insulated society.  

Not so much a horror movie as it is an exploration of the necessary consequences of institutionalized religion, the movie begins with the hippie commune feel of Zardoz and, as it progresses, creepily drifts closer to the tone of an Italian cannibal film.  There's a great deal of singing and dancing in the film (and a good deal of it done by ladies in the nude), so much so that I thought it was a musical at first.  But with the exception of the siren song of the innkeeper's daughter, the singing and dancing are nice expository devices, bringing us into a rich culture.  And, boy oh boy, do the musical elements pay off at the end in a strikingly horrific scene.  The scene is all the more horrific due to the bright and sunny way it's captured, with very little artifice to hide the brutality.

The movie's a clunky affair overall, with odd, distracting choices in the score and a great deal of awkward staging and editing.  There's far too much monologuing at the end, lending it the impression of a bizarro-world Scooby-Doo ending with the villains of the piece explaining their motivations and plans to a solo, outnumbered good guy.  But even with these flaws, the movie cleanly explores the clash of two very different and absolutist cultures in a logical, allegorical way and it's got a horrifying gut-punch of a finale that simply must be seen.

Day 38: Who’s That Knocking at My Door?

It’s all there.  In Martin Scorsese’s debut feature, everything that would earn him great renown in the future is on display, rough-hewn, but still mesmerizing.  The impeccable use of music tracks, the camera tricks, the virgin/whore guilt inspired by rampant Catholicism, and the jocular, macho kidding around that leads to unexpected acts of violence: it’s all there.  I felt a similar sort-of joy watching Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and witnessing the birth of the Spaghetti Western.  But aside from the delight in watching the emergence of a world-class director, the movie itself is great.  It’s less sophisticated than later Scorsese, but no less entertaining for it and whatever lack of sophistication exists is easily redeemed by the movie’s artistic purity.

Who’s That Knocking at My Door focuses on yet another drifting, aimless young man.  J.R., in a similarly sublime debut from Harvey Keitel, has no job and spends most of his time hanging out with his two best friends.  When he begins dating a young woman (another case where the female lead is billed as Girl [and in both cases the anonymity of the name represents the worldview of the movie: Walkabout’s a political allegorical worldview and here a case where the girl represents all women to the main character]), things go well until she informs him of a time she was date raped.  This throws him into a panic since his shining virgin has now been sullied and he’s unclear as to whether or not he can “forgive her” (despite his own sexual proclivities).

The movie draws a viewer in with a hypnotic spell, due in large part to the way music tracks are used both to highlight emotion and play counter to them.  There’s a flashback to the date rape and the scene starts with a doo-wop song on the radio.  As things turn violent, parts of the music are looped over themselves, creating a jarring dissonance and an effective counter argument to 50s-era nostalgia.  Religious iconography is piously photographed, but scored with a cheery, uplifting song.  A montage of J.R. in bed with women looser than his girlfriend is set to the music of The Doors, climaxing with J.R. scattering a deck of cards over one of his paramours in slow motion.  All of this is beautifully photographed on location in New York City (and one brief jaunt to the country) and edited with a fine ear for the rhythms of dialogue and music by Scorsese regular Thelma Schoonmaker.

Bridging a gap (that I never knew existed) between Godard’s Breathless and Cassavettes’ Shadows, Who’s That Knocking at My Door borrows from both of these films and to good effect.  When a gun is fired, the movie cuts to a series of stills from posters of John Wayne movies accompanied by gunshot sound effects.  I was reminded of the obsession with film that guided the players in Godard’s tale, but felt its effect on the characters and the decisions they made in a less abstract way in this picture.  The use of locations is energizing here as it was in Shadows, but the city bleeds into every frame of Who’s Knocking, while Cassavettes’ film was more limited in scope.  There are a few moments in the film that stumble slightly, but overall, Who’s That Knocking at My Door is interesting as both a historical curio and a good film in its own right.

Day 33: Walkabout: Man vs. Nature 4

White Boy: Well, where are we now?

Where, indeed, to begin with Walkabout?  The fantastic cinematography?  The experimental editing that, while a bit showy at times, more often than not perfectly compliments the aimless wanderings of three young people through the Australian outback?  The effortless, breezy acting?  The fact that there’s a whiny little boy in this movie who is somehow not annoying?  Like all Grrrreat movies (and I mean that capital G and those extras Rs with a capital M) you could write a chapter in a book about each of these elements and, probably, still be frustrated that you didn’t have enough space to write about them (be on the lookout for my upcoming book, Non-annoying Children in Film and the Lack Thereof).  And, like all Great films (extra Rs omitted for brevity’s sake) these elements coalesce into such an intoxicating witch’s brew of engaging and thought-provoking cinema, that to talk about any of these individual pieces on their own does a disservice to the way it interacts with the whole.

(Meta-blog note: you can tell when I am having trouble writing something by the amount of parentheticals I use.  The more parentheticals, the harder a time I’m having [parentheticals make me feel uber-hip and, so, give me confidence through the difficult stretches by amusing me{and when I put many, many parentheticals nested inside one another, it usually means I’m making a half-assed attempt to be witty (not always successfully)}])

So what is the whole then?  On the surface, it’s a tale of two city kids, a teenaged girl and a young boy (billed in the credits as “Girl” and “White Boy” respectively), abandoned in the Australian outback.  As they struggle to survive in this harsh climate, they come across a teenaged Aborigine boy (billed in the movie as “Black Boy”) who aids them on their quest to find a way home.  This aspect of the film is well executed; at first, the outback is depicted as an extremely hostile place with awful, frightening looking bugs, lizards, and snakes under every rock.  Once the city kids meet the Aborigine, the depiction of the outback changes: the hostile environment can now be exploited for basic survival purposes, and thus, appreciated for its beauty.  Additionally, their relationship develops as they spend more time together.  The little boy starts to pick up on the Aborigine language, the sexual tension between Girl and Black Boy builds and builds, and when they do, eventually, reach some vestige of “civilization”, what happens there is delightfully unexpected.

Underneath this is a keenly observed movie about the clash of two very different cultures and its inevitable consequences.  There’s the usual cultural clash stuff with Black Boy finding the clothes of the city kids weird and the kid’s toys amusing, but the movie goes further on each one of these.  The kid wants to go about without a shirt on, like Black Boy does.  Despite Girl’ warnings, he ends up with a horrific, debilitating sunburn.  When White Boy offers Black Boy a toy British soldier, Black Boy is startled by the image and throws it aside in disgust, though there’s never any indication other than this that he’s been personally harassed by British soldiers.  

The sexual politics at play between Black Boy and Girl are just as subtley and realistically portrayed, culminating in a surprising and rich sequence in which he attempts to woo her with a mating dance.  She’s as aroused and curious about him as he is of her, but the movie concludes that these two people (and thus, these two cultures) can never truly coexist.  The film argues that, while the Western culture can take and learn many, many things from the Aborigines, it has nothing it’s willing to offer to them in return.  With its last shot, the movie also makes a case for culture-free, naturalistic utopia that is both a naïve wish of Girl and a satisfying conclusion to the story that’s taken place between Girl and Black Boy.

Furthering the culture clash theme, the movie makes some startling digressions from its main plot, following characters completely separate from the narrative at what seem like random times.  But each of these diversions serves to illuminate the main plot, contextualizing the conflicts the three main characters face in terms of the larger culture issues at play.  When we see a man working on what look like ceramic souvenirs and treating his Aborigine helpers like inhuman slave labor, it adds new thoughts and ideas to the relationship between Girl and Black Boy.  These points of divergence never feel apart from the movie, either, tangentially related to the main plot as they may be.  They’re shot and edited within the same style, but, more important to their success is the way they’re edited into the movie at thematically appropriate moments.  Though there’s a dangerous “telling the viewer what to think of the preceding and following scenes” element to these narrative breaks, they’re, on the whole, oblique enough that you can come to your own conclusions.

All of these things are part of theme, just another element at play, like the cinematography or the acting.  I could bluster on for pages (and maybe I’d quibble with John Barry’s sometimes just right but sometimes too-beautiful score), but my abilitiy to convey the delicate, deliberate nature of this film’s rhythms and the jaw-dropping images on display would not improve.  Everything comes together: the theme serves the editing, the editing serves the camera work, the camera work serves the acting, and the acting matches the sound design.  I cannot say this loud enough: see this movie.  On the biggest screen imaginable.  Watch it once a year and remind yourself that within all of us lies a naïve and simple wish to prance about naked in the wilderness, animals free of the fear and madness that culture brings and, yet, still basking in the safety it provides.

Day 20: Who's That Girl?

Madonna: “Hey! A mall!”

This is an early Madonna vehicle of little note. The look of the film is a flat, boring, TV look (the director of photography was Jan de Bont!) and this isn’t wholly inappropriate since the proceedings often feel like one of those awful made-for-TV comedies, the likes of which used to air on Saturday mornings after the cartoons. Madonna’s performance ranges from annoying to flabbergasting. About the only redeeming features the movie has are Griffin Dunne (was he angling for stardom?) and an agreeable silliness that keeps most of the sag out of the shopworn plotting.

The movie is a winker, one that tries to tell us that it knows it’s dumb, and that’s fine; it goes down easier that way. It doesn’t linger too long on the inevitable romantic conflicts, and moves through its plotline at a nice, economical clip. But it’s an old story in which an uptight man is coaxed out of his shell by a wild woman of the world. Dunne plays the uptight man; a tax attorney who’s engaged to his wealthy boss’s daughter and oddly charged by this boss with the task of making sure recently paroled Madonna gets onto a bus to Philadelphia, out of New York. If I tell you that his fiancée is rather uptight and that Madonna’s character believes she was framed for murder by some wealthy corporate guy, can you fill in the rest of the blanks? At a very early point in the movie, the only question I had about the plot was whether or not the movie had enough money in its budget to show the wedding get interrupted at the end, or if Dunne’s character would just not show up for his nuptials and declare his love for Madonna's character somewhere far away from them (for the record, the movie had the money for the wedding, but no one fell into the cake).

The movie draws inspiration from screwball comedies of the past (something that took me longer to realize than it should have) utilizing the age-old “they hate each other at first, but then they fall in love!” arc and borrowing the wild cat from Bringing Up Baby. But, honestly, the last thing in the world I wanted to see was Madonna’s annoying character win the heart of anyone, much less Dunne’s non-character. Dunne coasts on a natural comic ability (he’s the only thing that made me laugh in the movie), but he really has nothing interesting to do but goof on the archetype he’s playing. There are some nice, absurd choices at times (the way the bickering cops end up is pretty goofy and the swordfight is fun and dumb), but, you know, I’m just being nice to the movie. I’ve seen what this movie’s doing countless times and much, much better. It’s Something Wild for the young adult set and, as such, the nuance has been drained out of it to make it more palatable for “young minds”.

Really, this is a middling, bad movie, aimed at teens that probably aren’t aware of how many clichés are being recycled. An unscientific survey at work and among friends revealed that this movie was a milestone for many people of my generation. This movie wasn’t part of my landscape when I was growing up, but it reminded me a lot of another movie that was: the Weird Al Yankovic movie, UHF. I liked UHF a lot when I was a kid, but recognize now that it’s middling at best. Both movies are vehicles for iconic 80s singers who have long since outstayed their welcome and have a screen presence that tends to be grating. Both have similarly uneven writing, bursts of inspiration in the casting (Who’s That Girl? has Dunne, UHF has Michael Richards and The Kipper Kids), and boring, TV-style cinematography. And both have an agreeable silliness, a breezy quality that makes it impossible to think about them seriously. The tone pushes the movie into and out of your mind before anything can register, erasing the memories of all you have seen and felt while watching them. I can’t say I don’t like this movie, because it’s too insubstantial to make such a claim. I can’t say I like it or hate it, because that would require it inspiring passion. I can say that at times I was mildly entertained by the film, but also bored by it. I’m bored writing about it now. Though it does make me want to watch Bringing Up Baby, a movie I’ve only seen segments of.

(By the way, this is the second movie in a row that featured a cast member from ALF! All That Jazz had Max Wright a.k.a. Willie and Who’s That Girl? had Liz Sheridan a.k.a. the nosy neighbor next door on ALF and also Jerry Seinfeld’s mother on Seinfeld. Who from ALF will appear next?)

Day 8: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

br/>Walking out of Wallace & Gromit, I had a big grin on my face that I’d been wearing for the duration of the movie. It’s a delightful movie watching experience, perfect in nearly every way. It works as a clever, original animated comedy, as a spoof of horror movies, and even, at times, as a serious werewolf movie.

If you haven’t seen any of the previous Wallace & Gromit short films, you’re doing a disservice to yourself and those who love you. It’s been scientifically proven that watching any of the Wallace & Gromit movies makes you a better person. Really. Science.

Here’s the basic setup: Wallace is an inventor who lives with Gromit, his dog. Gromit never speaks, but is animated with such care that you always know what he’s thinking. Wallace creates Rube Goldberg-like inventions that tend to go awry or have consequences different than they’re intended. Gromit is often tasked with taking care of the cheery, optimistic, and, accordingly, short-sighted Wallace. Their relationship is charming and feels as rich and wonderful as that of any Classic Comedy matchup you can think of.

This is supposed to be a “family” film, no question about it, but it is written, directed, voice acted, and animated so well that it avoids the pandering and restrictive tone that has become so commonplace in movies that children are supposed to watch. The movie is unafraid to explore fear, sorrow, and anguish in this movie and it’s refreshing to see that amidst the usual hyperkinetic imagery that one finds in Animated Films for the Whole Family™ these days. It is a spoof of many horror films, but it also takes its plot seriously and never betrays its characters to make a joke. Thus, when things get just a little serious, it’s easy to take them seriously. Even after a vast amount of zaniness, late in the film, Gromit makes a sacrifice to save Wallace and, as he does, their friendship becomes even more resonate than it was earlier. And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the pathos of lycanthropy (I guess I should say lepusanthropy here) realized so well. But, here I’ve gone on about how serious it is when it’s mostly a very funny movie.

If anything, the movie has the feel of the great comedies made between 1940 and 1960, movies like Some Like it Hot or The Lady Eve. It’s a solid piece of work through and through with characters who make sense, a storyline that’s at once funny and engaging, and a genuine sweetness to it that’s rare to see these days. It’s a brilliant use of the medium of claymation. I wish someone could give an award to Gromit and his animators for one of the very best animated performances I’ve ever seen. I can’t think of a single person I would not recommend this movie to. So, in other words, go see it. Remember… Science.