WALL-E

WALL-EYear: 2008Rating: GLength: 98 minutes / 1.63 hours In the history of Pixar films, I feel the pinnacle of their filmography is none other than WALL-E (2008). By this point, their technical prowess had an impressive track record, and their stories were proven to be quite heartfelt. Still, some of the earlier films have not aged quite as well as this masterpiece. And the ones that come after have been fairly hit-or-miss. The planets aligned to make WALL-E an achievement of storytelling and visual splendor that has stood the test of time. While Pixar worked around the uncanny valley with the human characters being bloated versions of their former selves, everything else in this movie looks so beautiful and real. Perhaps it's even the techniques they used where it almost feels like the whole thing is actually shot on camera instead of entirely in a computer that gives it that sense of grounding. Because there's personality in a little robot that's rusting...

Hello, Dolly! Year: 1969 Rating: G Length: 146 minutes / 2.43 hours In WALL-E (2008), the one surviving movie in this post-apocalyptic future was a VHS version of Hello, Dolly! (1969). Does this mean Hello, Dolly! is any good? Hardly. It’s merely the only movie to survive. If anything, Hello, Dolly! is your standard 1960s musical. There are many superior musicals from this decade, and it’s clear that this one is on the tailing end of the fad. Sure, it has its moments, but it’s so cookie-cutter in its plot that the only thing special about it is Barbra Streisand’s performance. It’s no surprise that the few musical numbers that made it into WALL-E were some of the better ones in this movie. “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” is endlessly catchy, even if “Love is Only Love” is your standard love song. Of course, the title song, “Hello, Dolly!” works and is a bit of a bookend to the musical's start with “Call on Dolly.” As I mentioned before, Streisand’s performance in...

Tag: WALL-E

MOVIE: WALL-E (2008)

MOVIE: Hello, Dolly! (1969)