Why Does Pixar Hate America?
The real Bill Wyman—the journalist, not the Humbert Humbert Rolling Stones bassist—asks:
What if Pixar released a ferocious broadside attacking the American way of life and the movie reviewers didn't notice?…
If Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone, or, God forbid, some effete French director, had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don't you think there'd be some sort of notice taken?
But Pixar does it and …
… the reviewers barely mention it. The new Pixar film, Wall-E, does indeed, as you have heard, tell the story of an adorable robot working alone on a depopulated earth. There's an obvious ecological lesson here, and this has been duly noted, along with mentions of unspecified "themes" and "messages."
But what was rarely analyzed in the reviews is that the earth is deserted because a Wal-Mart-like company called "Buy n' Large" has filled it up with trash, and the departed humans, expanded to Big Gulp size, are contentedly gorging themselves amid the comforts of a flying Club Med, where they slide around on those carts, on which they watch TV continuously without even having to sit up completely. While some of the better reviewers mention the beglotted humanoid forms, I found it odd that most mainstream reviewers didn't bother to point out what the film was saying.
More here, at Wyman's interesting Hitsville blog.
As someone who saw Wall-E the day after it opened, I've got a slightly different question: Why didn't reviewers say that the film sucks eggs? The goddamn thing, in my humble and useless opinion, was as bloated, slow-moving, and soft as the fat fucks populating the film like so many twins riding on motor scooters. It even somehow manages to misuse Fred Willard, who is every bit as much a national resource we desperately need to exploit as the ANWR oil reserves.
reason gives thumbs up to Pixar's Toy Story here; fat people here.
