In Which These Are Just Robots That Broke My Heart Before I Met You

The Week in Film

by R.B. Glaser

As I sit here, clad in mismatched carpal tunnel wrist braces, typing on my newly purchased ergonomic keyboard, I can tell things are changing.

Yesterday I saw my first paper clip buffet. Do you know what I'm talking about? (At a Staples near you.) Sunscreen makes me look like some drama school mime. Every physical feat (female Olympic hurdles tryouts, Nadal running on awnings) sends my friend Seth and I to an instinctual trek outside, to give our bodies the chance to puff up with muscles, our Nikes to remember what their commercials showed.

But usually the most natural thing we can do is end up at the movies, blushing and stressed as we attempt to sneak in, then back-peddling at the sight of any uniform, feeling for the ridge of credit card letters, numbers. I haven't been going to an artsy theater either. This theater would rather play Indiana Jones on three screens than have us struggle with some title we can't pronounce. I'm not complaining. The movie starts with an inspirational CGI of a dancing cat with boobs and her lover cat "Front Row Joe":

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=w3fCGrGqCxM]

Wanted is a delusional, cheesy version of "Fight Club," but with more bullets, and cuter bullets. The best shots were seeing bullets kiss close-up and naked people wake up in wax. Nothing else made sense. One of the most baffling inclusions was a loom that spells names in thread. Then the names have to be killed. This idea was familiar to me, because they have one at the Rhode Island School of Design where I did my undergrad. Textile girls would wander the hall with machine guns, just fate-hungry to kill.

what a polite bullet!

Hancock we had to see because there is a a twist in the movie people didn't like. People were complaining. Ebert had shaved his eyebrows off perplexed. It's somewhat amazing to see a movie throw its plot far right, then try and catch up, shift tonally, add eye liner and try to stay afloat. Hancock lands a little cockeyed.

Both movies capitalize on our love of seeing cars, windows, and buildings smashed and destroyed, the most sensual aspect of movies today.

Everyone's seen a kiss a million times, but who knew how many shards a window could create, who knew the computer geeks of ten years ago would have mastered the explicit effects of computer graphics, how WALL·E was better "shot" than any live action I've seen recently.

blonde kryptonite

The computer graphics of destruction was one reason we watched the 9-11 attacks so awestruck. It took the impossible, violent, visual action tendencies from movies, and turned them on ourselves. Did you ever want to destroy your hard-built city in SimCity? Just to watch pixels turn to flame, to read about it in the SimPaper the next day?

Though the reality swam in hordes through accounts and loss and grief and life-change and world change in the days and years that followed, initially seeing that clip was confusing, any action movie watcher wants the helicopter wings to ruin the Frank Gehry building. It brings modern relief.

WALL·E is the best movie I've seen in months. Beautiful opening sequences with WALL·E and his cockroach whirring around trashed Earth. What a complicated kind of affection we feel for him and his hobbies. A weird humany love for human behavior exhibited after human life. Like we the audience has died, and we're listening to something talk about us.

I won't get into the major themes of this movie, it should be seen in real time. A people free planet, the purest kind of romance. Notice the after-viewing work it does on your brain leaving the theater, surrounded by the objects that clog our world, the design of the manufactured.

R.B. Glaser is the senior contributor to This Recording, and a writer living in Amherst, Massachusetts.

THE FUTURE IS NOW

"Birds Fly Backwards" - Ed Harcourt (mp3)

"Futures & Folly" - Blitzen Trapper (mp3)

"Future 740" - Zainetica (mp3)

"Future Myth" - Akron/Family & Angels of Light (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Notes from a weekend.

Alex Haley and Justin Timberlake.

Bernie on the iPhone.