The Conical Glass: Double feature of the future

Monday, July 14, 2008

Double feature of the future

First of all, I haven't been blogging this time because I've been extremely busy with a client that holds a two-week confab every July. The meeting is held in Los Angeles and involves a tremendous amount of celebrities -- read this post if you want to see a partial rundown -- but I am not hanging out with the stars; I am sitting at home, often until 11 o'clock at night, adding fresh content to the organization's web site and troubleshooting whatever problems come up. So unfair that I can't hang out with the likes of Carson Kressley (I love Carson!) and Florence Henderson, but that's life.

Joe & I did manage to sneak out yesterday morning for an early, kiddie-matinee showing of "Wall-E." If you haven't seen "Wall-E," I strongly recommend that you wait until it's available on DVD (I'm sure it will look great on Blu-Ray) and pair it with Mike Judge's "Idiocracy." The latter is a film that came out a couple years ago, but never quite made it into the theaters, despite the fact that Judge's "Office Space" became a monster hit after its bungled theatrical release. "Idiocracy" is not nearly as good as "Office Space" but it's still worth seeing. It takes place in 2505, and the future populace is beyond stupid; for instance, the top rated TV show is the self-explanatory "Ow! My Balls!" Here, I will pause to note that "Idiocracy" came out in 2006 and one of the top rated shows of 2008 is ABC's "Wipeout," which is just a tiny bit less sophisticated than "Ow! My Balls!"

Here are some of the interesting similarities between "Wall-E" (which is set 700 years in the future) and "Idiocracy":

An out-of-shape, dimwitted populace is glued to its video screens, which are festooned with garish, flashing ads that never go away.
The Earth has become a wasteland, a place where nothing green can grow; the landscape is dominated by towering piles of garbage.
The future society is essentially controlled by giant corporations (Brawndo in "Idiocracy," Buy N Large in "Wall-E"; even the president or government figurehead is associated with a corporation.
Warehouse stores (a la Costco) have grown REALLY huge.

I assumed this was not a particularly original idea and I was right -- after composing the above list, I Googled "idiocracy +wall-e" and found a lot of blogs where people are making the same argument. So maybe I should just have linked to those and saved myself some time. I will add that "Wall-E" is heartwarming, which is a word that one would never apply to "Idiocracy," and I did enjoy it, although the final chase scenes aboard the spaceship go on and on, almost as if someone was trying to pad the film to a standard 90-minute running time. (The 5-minute cartoon short "Presto," which precedes "Wall-E," is so good that it's almost worth the price of admission on its own. Perhaps Pixar should throw in an extra cartoon if the main feature runs short?)

Speaking of Blu-Ray, the high-def DVD format which I mentioned above, I was browsing in a video store a couple of weeks ago and was surprised to see that the documentary "Helvetica" is available in the format. The film, which is an interesting (if you're a font geek) look at typography and visual design, is not exactly the sort of feature I expected to see released in Blu-Ray. (Not that it matters to me... we don't have a Blu-Ray player, and I wouldn't say that it's high on our list of shopping priorities.)

posted by 125records @ 4:30 PM

6 Comments:

At 5:06 PM, Tim Walters said…

Idiocracy in its turn owes a lot to C.M. Kornbluth's 1950s short story "The Marching Morons" (and its rather better sequel "The Little Black Bag").
At 5:10 PM, 125records said…

People commenting on this blog post also suggest that "Wall-E" borrows from E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) and "Deep End" by J.G. Ballard. There are no new ideas... and that includes no new ideas for blog posts, apparently!
At 6:15 PM, Michael said…

I've now seen WALL-E twice (before anyone assumes I have an obsession with the film, I should point out that we just hosted an eleven-year-old house guest), and despite the fact that I was predisposed by the critics to find the chase scenes superfluous and overly long, I actually thought the whole thing flowed quite nicely, much like The Incredibles…and very much unlike this sentence.

Although I think the head-to-head contrast with Idiocracy (which I haven't seen) sounds interesting, I would also recommend seeing WALL-E while it's on the big screen. In particular, the opening act of the film, in which the protagonist goes about his lonely routine on an abandoned Earth, is quite poignant in the large format. I don't think the imagery will be as powerful in a home-viewing setting, even in high definition.

By the way, I also enjoyed the cartoon short Presto immensely. It's so nice to see someone aim for the kind of inspired zaniness found in the Warner Bros. classics (including—gasp!—"cartoon violence") without falling woefully short of the mark.
At 8:03 PM, Tim Walters said…

While I'm touting Kornbluth I should also mention that the "I'd buy that for a dollar!" running gag in Robocop was a direct lift from "The Marching Morons."

I'm looking forward to seeing Wall-E quite a bit at this point, despite my usual aversion to non-Brad-Bird Pixar.
At 8:08 PM, 125records said…

Michael: I am always in favor of seeing movies on the big screen (unless it's something like, well, "Helvetica"), but I suspect that a lot of adults will wait 'til "Wall-E" is out on DVD so they don't have to deal with hordes of kiddies. Granted, going to an 11 AM matinee (as we did) is just asking for it (though it was necessary in this case because of my work schedule), but even seeing a 'toon at 10 PM is no guarantee that the theater will be kid-free. "Wall-E" did hold the tots' attention, but there was a little kid in back of us who kept asking questions through the whole movie: "Are they going into spaaaaace?" and the like.
At 7:25 PM, yellojkt said…

At our showing of Wall-E we had a two year old climb the steps for twenty minutes before mom took him out. That is the price of seeing a G-rated movie.