After years and years of raging debate, despite attempts to humanize people like Stalin, Bush and Hitler, the results are in, courtesy of... Wall-E and the New York Times.
I saw the film last night in a funky Koreatown Theater (with Korean subtitles... which appeared even when EVA and Wall-E were speaking gibberish when they first meet, but that's another story) and was completely, constantly enthralled, laughing, feeling, amazed et cetera. Waking up this morning, I circled back to st the Times said about it, and was shocked, then amazed, then mad, then shocked again to see the discussion thread. Here are some highlights:
If I didn't know better the person who came up with this story line had something against "overweigh" people. come on now, the first thing my neice said was Auntie they are all "fat" and floating in chairs sipping on shakes. Isn't that awful.
"The press loves WALL-E because of its environmental preaching. As I sat their eating my Large Popcorn and Large Soda as did practically everyone else in the movie only to be chastised by this presumputous film. Using a future where the world is a trash heap abandoned by humans who have become to fat and lazy to move by themselves and where robots have more emotion than humans, the producers and designers try to brainwash youth to believe that consumerism is a wasteful evil and that obese people are undesireable. This kind of trashy film could only come from the glutonous hypocrites in hollywood who stack their piles of money on the same consumerism that they so self-righteously attack as evil and world destroying."
And my personal favorite:
"This 'movie', and I use the term loosely, is nothing more than an overpriced commercial for all the liberal think-tanks and their false propagation of enviornmental awareness. I certainly would not have paid to see it had I known it was such blatant propaganda. Wall-E is pretty and that is about all that can be said for it. There is nothing subtle about the message this film purports to get across to the viewer. It wasn't funny or interesting enough to hold my attention. Even the ridiculous notion of evolution gets its due in this farce. This is, by far, the worst Pixar movie ever made. Robots with a soul? Really? Come on, Pixar, give us a little credit for having some common sense. It is really too bad that this film will probably program some young children to actually worry that humankind will someday burn themselves up with global warming or make the earth uninhabitable from their own actions. What a bunch of garbage!"
Wow. "False propagation of environmental awareness" How can a person simultaneously produce a relatively complex sentence like that, yet believe themselves all the same? How could a person not be warmed over by this amazing film? No soul.
Not to go on too much, but this begs at something I've wondered for a while about a fundamental difference in people. Thought provoking:
In the experiment college students across the political spectrum were instructed to tap an M whenever it appeared on a computer monitor and to ignore a W that appeared about 20 percent of the time while an electroencephalograph recorded brain activity. Data showed that students who identified themselves as liberal scored higher for accuracy and were almost five times as likely to show activity in brain circuits associated with conflict, suggesting a strong capacity for dealing with change and novelty. Meanwhile, conservative students were better at blocking out distracting new information which may lead them to favor structure and tradition.
