Hollywood Unoriginality Ratio: WALL-E

June 27th, 2008

WALL-E was so cool! Incidentally, I went and saw WALL-E on opening night with some friends at, uh… damn, I have no idea what theater we went to, as someone else bought the tickets. I do know I was in San Mateo though! That ought to count for something.

WALL-E was so cool! This very well may be my favorite Pixar film to date, and that’s saying something. Any critics complaining about the lack of dialogue probably weren’t paying attention to the movie. It expertly conveyed emotion and backstory with minimal spoken lines. So yeah, critics are dumb, and WALL-E isn’t.

Perhaps I’ve become a little too attached to the HUR portion of this blog, but at least some of my pre-film excitement revolved around seeing a set of trailers from a rarely-explored genre: kid and family films! Let’s see how that went, shall we?

Bolt
I was a little confused with this trailer. Though the computer graphics looked to be of a similar quality to Pixar’s works (the human character models in particular look like they were directly ripped out of The Incredibles), Pixar’s logo and name were nowhere to be seen; the movie was branded as a solely Disney affair. Perhaps Pixar did have some involvement (not an unreasonable assumption, since Disney owns them, and they seem to basically run the animation department now), but it doesn’t show in the writing. ORIGINAL, perhaps, but it also looks a bit boring.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua
AAAAAAAAAAH!!! I caught a glimpse of the teaser for this film awhile back when the RiffTrax blog brought it to my attention (presumably because they hate decency over there), and my brain died for like a week. The film did not redeem itself to me upon repeated trailer-viewing, no matter how ORIGINAL it may be. What inspired this movie exactly? The fact that numerous soulless celebrities carry around small dogs in purses? Is that the audience we’re pandering toward now?!? (EDIT: OH GOD HE’S POSTED ANOTHER REMINDER THAT THIS FILM EXISTS. THERE IS NOT ENOUGH SANDPAPER IN THE WORLD TO SUFFICIENTLY SCOUR THE SURFACE OF MY BRAIN AND REMOVE ALL TRACES OF MEMORIES ASSOCIATED WITH THIS MOVIE)

The Pink Panther 2
Steve Martin is dead to me. SEQUEL of a REMAKE of a once-good film series starring a once-funny comedian.

The Tale of Despereaux
Sucks to be you, Universal! The definitive rodent movie came out like a year ago! Your ADAPTATION of a children’s novel has no effect on us. Mostly because it looks kind of saccharine.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
I could feel my entire group cringe when they started playing that horrible “I Like To Move It” song. Then animal asses started swaying on the giant screen. It all went downhill from there. A SEQUEL I may just miss.

The Longshots
Am I too hard on movies made for kids? Because this ADAPTATION of a true story doesn’t look appealing in the slightest to me. I try to argue that kid movies were a lot better when I was a kid, but am usually accused of viewing my childhood memories through rose-colored glasses. Then I punch the other guy and win the argument by default. Ice Cube is annoying!

Fly Me To The Moon
0_o Bad pun title. Poop-eating jokes. Tech college commercial-caliber CGI. ORIGINALity cannot save this waste of hard drive space and processor time.

TOTAL: 57.14% (4/7)

Let’s rock-talk: as of a June 27th screening of WALL-E in San Mateo, CA, Hollywood (or at least the part of Hollywood that little kids care about) was primed for 57.14% unoriginality. I had expected a much higher value, since kid movies are so often grabbed wholesale from books about witchcraft or wizardry or lions or witches or wardrobes. That said, the “original” films seen here were generally pretty derivative. My biggest disappointment stemmed from the fact that we didn’t see a trailer for Pixar’s next project; I can’t remember the last time that happened, and hope this doesn’t indicate the Next Great Film from That Totally Awesome Animation Studio will be a long time coming.

WALL-E was so cool!!!

[discuss]

One Response to “Hollywood Unoriginality Ratio: WALL-E”

  1. […] -Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa SEQUEL […]