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Month: September 2008

Review: Wall-E

Published by NiteMayr on September 16, 2008

Wall-E

A Walmart Brand robot develops a personality and deep emotional problems after 700 years of cleaning up world-covering garbage that appears to have miraculously avoided all advertising and signage

My rating: 2.5 stars
**1/2

Wall-E is one of those movies that people love to gush over; where a cute something with no voice of it’s own falls in love with the notion of love and then overcomes everything just to get his limited groove on.  Sometimes there is dancing, sometimes there is singing, sometimes there is some chaste kissing; however it is always stulifying and boring.  Great for the kids, right?

Let me summarize Wall-E for those of you who have not seen it or refuse to do so, as you are principled people who don’t need Cartoon Robots to feel good about

Hello Dolly Song !

Fly-in through Garbage

There’s alot of Garbage

More Garbage, set to Hello Dolly Tune

Big Wall-E! Big Wall-E

Fat People all over the place

Fat Babies!

More Garbage

Hello Dolly Tune

End.

I don’t know if that is what some people took from it, but that’s about it for me. There was no there, there.  Even for a kids movie, this was pretty pointless.  Pixar has been pretty good about avoiding the “Song And Dance” methodology of Disney flicks, but only through having soundtrack montages and so on.  It’s still a baseless little story about a crazy robot who wants nothing more than to “hold hands” with someone.  It’s like American Pie, without the Stiffler or the Shannon Elizabeth.

The empty story is dressed in some nice clothes, but it’s fairly empty.  I know the guys at Pixar worked very hard to build pathos for Wall-E; but in the end he is just a malfunctioning robot who has become obsessed with fulfilling his own dreams.  Wall-E isn’t saving humanity, that’s not even in his scope, he’s obsessed with achieving the one thing that he has built up over years of watching Hello Dolly over and over, holding hands.  At least Eve focuses on her actual function over self-gratification.

The Animation is passable, but it’s not ground-breaking for 3D animation and does little to further 3D movies as an artform or medium.   I didn’t find any portion of the film to be breathtaking (save breathtakingly stupid or vapid)  and I couldn’t get over the details that ruined the whole premise.  Why would the robot repair all of the advertising but not dig up all the garbage from around it?  Why does the robot “go back” to his house rather than move to closer to his work site? Why didn’t the robot build a wind-proof baffle around his little home so that he could leave the door open?  Why didn’t he build a shelter for Eve? These little things detracted from the experience, it’s just poor storytelling when you can actually visually build anything and don’t simply solve these little logical problems right there on film.

Wall-E is a film about garbage that barely rises above it’s oeuvre.  I’d say it’s okay for the kids, but only the youngest seem to want to watch it over and over.  Go watch Monsters Inc. or Iron Giant instead, there’s a movie with real heart and emotion.

Twitter Updates for 2008-09-15

Published by NiteMayr on September 15, 2008
  • Ever since I was moved from the Shack I have been really unproductive…. lacking resources will do that to you. #
  • Digging out? Maybe? #
  • Tonight I sort through Christmas/Boxes from 5 years ago. We have almost moved all of the boxes we left in Canada in ’02 to our new place #
  • Last night I found my Copy of “Kingdom Come” which has been in a box at my parent’s house since 2002. I wonder where I thought it was? #
  • I know it seems insane to ask “aloud” what *I* thought, but I must have given it up as lost at some point, and I forget when. #
  • I have a Google Reader Subscriber, finally. Now to add several thousand more #
  • To Do: Create “Viral” Video. #
  • iPod on Random: American Band – Grand Funk | You don’t rock like this at work without BoB FM and not by choice. #
  • Up next: Dethklok -Thunderhorse | What a mix, Grand Funk, Dethklok then Chemical Brothers #
  • Dethklok fans, what about that season Finale? Great stuff, eh? #

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Poem: For an Immoral Bottom Dwellor

Published by NiteMayr on September 12, 2008

I am now totally going out on the streets with a BAN DUFFY NOW placard. I would *love* to have a poem written because of me. What a memorial!
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 9:38 AM on September 12

oh what a beastie is this, when winds are blown from o’er it’s rump?

For it sighs in repose and calls for censure and retort from no cause and no strong tort.

For when can a beast from the bottom say when the sun should shine, for it’s own jealous eye can see no light.

Twitter Updates for 2008-09-11

Published by NiteMayr on September 11, 2008
  • I spent a bit of time last night setting some RNC protest videos to some Nine Inch Nails music (cliche, boo) Maybe Atari Teenage Riot? #
  • Still looking for your “My First Gun” or “My first Drug” stories. email them to “stories@nitemayr.com” thanks. #

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Bishop Returns Order of Canada – Keeps on Supporting Child Abuse

Published by NiteMayr on September 11, 2008

From 1999:

Canadian cardinal defends seven accused orders

Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte of Montreal defended seven religious orders implicated in a child abuse scandal involving Catholic-run institutions in Quebec.

“I wholeheartedly defend the devoted religious women who gave 40 to 50 years of their lives working in the institutions. They shouldn’t have to make apologies,” the cardinal said in mid-February.

He spoke after about 150 former residents of the institutions demanded public apologies from the government, religious orders and the medical profession and compensation for lives they say were ruined by a system that falsely labeled them mentally ill.

And more:

The Catholic church and the religious orders that ran the institutions have never agreed to discuss the issue with orphan groups, and has remained reluctant to comment. After several requests for an interview over more than a week, a spokesman for Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, the archbishop of Montreal, said she could not find anyone who was available.

This was from back before he got his promotion, probably for his amazing closing of ranks around the church.  The Church has been complicit in a number of serious crimes in Canadian History, population control for the greater good has never been one of them.

I guess what we should be saying is “Oh Wow, he gave back his Order of Canada I think he’s just trying to maintain the herd on principle.”

Reality is not Subjective, but don't let that stop you

Published by NiteMayr on September 10, 2008

If the “Near Dead Heat” election in the US can teach Non-Tory politicians anything, it’s that the facts don’t really matter to the electorate.  Anyone with a bit of sense can look at John McCain and say “cor, he looks old and he sounds a whole hell of a lot like Pres. Bush, I hate that guy!”

Let me elucidate, I know at least one HARD CORE Bush lover, by hard core, I mean he chose his friends using Love of Bush as a measure.  He HATED John McCain until about 2007,  when he suddenly gave up on his Bush Bro-mance and took on McCainiacism.  The justification being that he finally noticed how awesome John McCain was.

John McCain has always been John McCain, he’s only more OBVIOUSLY John McCain these days and that seems to translate into “Totally Awesome” in the mind of many of the electorate.  I do suspect that there is a good 15-20 percent “I’m not voting for a black guy” thing going on, which may have jumped to 25% after Palin was disgorged from the womb of Alaska, but a race this close doesn’t really make any sense.

Pres. Bush is polling somewhere in Reformed Child Molestor range; McCain is pretty much the Daddy of the party that birthed Bush, why do people believe that “more of the same” is really “change”?  Because the McCain camp simply says it is so.  Whatever the McCain camp says, they say it over and over and never waver, true or not.

That is the lesson the Non-Tory parties need to take; go hard, go again, and again and again.  Keep it simple like “Free Health Care and Education” and “Even Lower Taxes”  and so on.

Don’t bother with nuance or long term care, the majority of the electorate doesn’t look anywhere beyond Christmas in planning, why should the Election be about the future when all that matters to the electorate is how they are going to feed and clothe themselves next week.

Twitter Updates for 2008-09-09

Published by NiteMayr on September 9, 2008
  • Busy. Three things on the go… mounting a “dead” windows drive in linux to copy files to a windows share. #
  • 18 gigs to go… 30 minutes… ouch #
  • Dear Liberal Party, no one who votes (in numbers) cares about the internt. Get your “scandals” on the front page. #
  • And they don’t care about the internet either #
  • Some changes coming down on “Local Blogger” planning move personal twitter/flickr to “author page” and focus site on “blog” rather than “Me” #
  • 21 seconds left in backup #
  • Best command: mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/mount -o force #
  • I think tonight I am going to rain extinction down on some warlike species and nurture some rat-people. How is your Spore game going? #
  • Not updating to iTunes 8 until I am sure that podplayer will play nice with it. #

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