Wall-E is now officially a political football, with conservatives attacking it for it the premises of its environmental messages.

Patrick Henry Press News aggregates some of the commentary. (Link via Hollywood Elsewhere); Dan Abrams, on MSNBC, had a segment the other night on it as well.

The objections seem to be that the film portrays humans as having been responsible for filling the earth with trash. (Glenn Beck, waxing sarcastic: “I can’t wait to teach my kids how we have destroyed the earth.”) The Washington Times goes farther:

[…S]uffice to say the film treats our capitalist system as the Earth’s ultimate sin.

On balance, the attacks strike me as legitimate; the film is a polemic, about a Wal-Mart-like company that fills the earth with trash and then takes the remainder of the human race on board a flying spaceship, on which it induces them to lie back and watch videos and grow ever fatter. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing a film whose political premises you disagree with.

The Abrams show, however, was more interesting. He was ridiculing what he called the “paramoid far right” for their criticisms, but he was doing it on the basis that it was crazy to accuse a family movie of having such themes: “This is a movie, primarily about a robot in love, seven centuries from now,” he said incredulously.

You can watch the video from a link on this page; look for the link, “Wall-E’s hidden agenda?”

Abrams, like the critics I wrote about in my two previous posts, is part of the degraded middlebrow majority who would do anything to pretend that art doesn’t mean anything, in between decrying how culture today isn’t like the good old days.

—————

Previously in Hitsville:

The critical conundrum of “Wall-E” 

What if Pixar released a ferocious broadside attacking the American way of life and the movie reviewers didn’t notice? 

Slate’s Erik Lundegaard deploys a lot of calculation and a spreadsheet or two in an attempt to quantify the effect good reviews have on the bottom line of film box office:

It’s almost a given these days that movie critics are elitist, while moviegoers are populist. When the highest-grossing films get panned by critics, what good are critics? As publishers across the country dump their reviewers, this is not exactly a rhetorical question.

Believe it or not, though, critically acclaimed films generally do better than critically panned films at the box office—if you measure their performance in the right way.

I think he makes his case, though it is to some extent tautological. (I mean, of course published articles in papers across the country saying, in effect, that people should go see a particular film will induce people to do just that, just as the amount of ad money spent on any particular film will do the same thing.) The issue is also made murkier by the way film criticism is actually practiced at most mainstream print outlets*.

But there’s a gem in Lundegaard’s piece, in the penultimate graf:

If I were a publisher, though, I’d hire the best critic I could find and have him or her write two reviews: a short one, to be printed the day or week the movie opens and that gives away little of the plot but tells readers whether it’s good or bad (the service aspect); and a longer, more in-depth review that discusses the entire film, to be posted online (the critical aspect). Then I’d put a message board beneath the in-depth review and sit back. Most people don’t want to hear about a movie before they’ve seen it but would love to discuss it afterward. Boy, would they ever.

This sort of thing is becoming more prevalent, as increasing numbers of daily critics take up blogging, but isn’t it a smart idea to institutionalize some variation on Lundegaard’s scheme as part of the paper’s struggle to remain relevant in the sphere of covering national cultural product? As I’ve written before, why should residents of a particular town pay any attention to the local film critic, who is going to suck in comparison to the national-level criticism now easily obtainable through the web?  A local critic, however, who is the de facto arbiter of the film discussion in a particular town, who could provide some kind of personal response to commenters and could even salt the comments with local references, might be a potent tool for a particular paper to hang on to some part of the readership it will inevitably lose for coverage of non-local art events.

* By which I mean a couple of things. For one, in local dailies, still a powerful force, critics long ago gave up giving blockbuster actioners bad reviews. Faced with the prospect of reiterating, week after week, “Well, here’s another frenetic, senseless action movie” and the resulting suicidal tendencies, critics eventually give in, looking for a few nice promotional things to say and saving the (tepid) criticism for the last grafs. (”Joe Blow’s screenplay won’t win any Oscars, but it’s serves its purpose here. …”) Secondly, even when the reviews for a big-budget film are unequivocably bad, the papers typically undercut the criticism with front-page refers (complete with little photos of the film’s star, be it monster or human) and big play on the fronts of the entertainment sections, all with headlines that as a rule give little hint of the opinions in the review.

————

Previously in Hitsville:

The year of the disappearing film critics

Lots of comments on and criticism of Hitsville’s post on how most mainstream (which is to say, hard-copy) film reviewers didn’t pay much attention to the social politics of Wall-E, the latest Pixar film.

(What if Pixar released a ferocious broadside attacking the American way of life and the movie reviewers didn’t notice?)

Comments here. Observations:

1) I noted that a few serious reviewers did mention, for example, the tableaux of human corpulence in the last half of the film. (n.b.: Here as before, I want to disassociate myself from making fun of overweight folks per se; but I think it’s fair for social commentators to take the issue on without being judgmental in the individual sense.) (n.b.b.: This does not apply to SUV drivers, however.) Sean O’Connell comments that I missed this comment from Variety:

“One can’t help but speculate about the perverse prospect of plus-sized multiplexers laughing while digging into their popcorn and slurping their sodas.”

That insight is a testament to the overall quality of Variety’s reviews, but it still qualifies as little more than a passing mention. As I responded in one of my comments, we hear constantly about the degradation of culture these days. But here’s a case where a work of pop culture is built around a transparently discernible social broadside of no little irony. More reviews should have taken explicit note of it—specifically (as the NYT and Variety but not too many others did, and again I’m talking here about mainstream print reviewers, not bloggers) the fact that the future didn’t look too much different from a typical movie-theater crowd.

2) Anne Thompson in her Risky Business blog has this to say:

Meanwhile, Hitsville runs down various critics who are are avoiding dealing with what happens to the human race in Wall-E. Bill Wyman seems to be missing the fact that some critics decided to keep back some of the reveals in the last part of the movie. What happens to humans in Wall-E was a big surprise when I saw the movie; I didn’t know that part of the story, so I was delighted and amazed by much of what I was seeing.

O’Connell makes a point similar to Thompson’s:

Consider this. Maybe critics were protecting some of the film’s second-half secrets? Virtually all of WALL-E’s promo material (trailers, commercials, etc.) reveal the scorched-Earth first act. Because the social commentary arrived once on the Axiom, maybe some critics wanted to leave a lot of that to be discovered by opening-week audiences?

I’m sure more articles will surface with deeper discussions of Pixar’s political and social statements in WALL-E. I, for one, didn’t want to let too many cats out of this overstuffed bag. I wonder if others writing about the film felt the same way.

(He’s referring to his review of Wall-E at filmcritic.com, which is here.)

That’s a fair point but it also is a bit convenient. (“I didn’t want to really get into all the prison stuff in The Gulag Archipelago because it gave away too much of the plot.”) It’s a reviewer’s job to take on the meaning of the film. I’m more radical about this than most people; critics should have something interesting to say and the chops to say it with, and that is where their responsibilities to audience or artist end.

Sometimes criticism involves discussing the plot in detail, and the internets spoiler police can bite me.

I’d argue, though, that the phenomenon I discuss in my original post hasn’t really anything to do with this. Many reviewers mentioned the portrayal of humanity; they just didn’t bother to take five seconds to think about it or engage with the ideas (too much of the time critics make references to “themes” or “ideas” in films and then never explain what they are), or if they did they didn’t want to make their audience uncomfortable.

3) O’Connell and Thompson are seconded, with vigor, by Lou Lumenick, film critic of the NY Post:

What a self-serving crock. Any careful check would reveal lots of critics, including me, who didn’t “ignore” the fat people/Wall-Mart angle. Anyone who suggests this should have been in the lead in reviews in mainstream papers doesn’t understand the function of movie reviews.

I didn’t give the Post the time of day in my original survey of the reviews, which was a mistake; Lumenick, in his take in the paper, stresses the film’s dark side as few other daily critics did:

Every time I think the studio that gave us “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille” can’t possibly top itself, Pixar comes up with a masterpiece like “WALL-E,” which smuggles barbed political satire into a charming, hilarious robot love story aimed at the entire family.

Arguably the darkest animated feature ever released by Disney (after “Pinocchio”) and certainly the most political, “WALL-E” presents a bleak and brilliantly detailed vision of the future that puts most post-apocalyptic live-action movies to shame.

Later he takes on the implications of the film’s message as well:

This is a hugely ambitious theme for a G-rated family flick, and “WALL-E” takes risks that must have given Pixar’s consumer-oriented corporate overlords at Disney pause.

Foremost is a Swiftian take on the future of the Wal-Mart nation (no, I don’t think the movie’s title is a coincidence), where everyone has grown hugely fat and lazy, literally unable to walk as they pass their days in a semi-catatonic state at a resort/shopping mall aboard the spaceship.

(He’s also the only critic I noticed who forwent the clumsy Chaplin comparisons of Wall-E’s first forty or so minutes for the much-more-revealing reference to Tati, whose balletic and blithe wordless choreographies are the obvious inspiration for Andrew Stanton’s in Wall-E.)

4) Still, I stand by my original point: Wall-E will be remembered for a caustic worldview the implications of which few of the first-line mainstream reviewers addressed. It should have been in the ledes. Finally, I think this is true as well: If, for whatever reason, Pixar had decided to base its publicity campaign around the social satire issues in Wall-E—if the EPKs and junkets had featured Stanton ruminating on the themes of the film—it would have been in the lede of every review.

If Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone, or, God forbid, some effete French director, had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don’t you think there’d be some sort of notice taken?

But Pixar does it and …

… the reviewers barely mention it. The new Pixar film, Wall-E, does indeed, as you have heard, tell the story of an adorable robot working alone on a depopulated earth. There’s an obvious ecological lesson here, and this has been duly noted, along with mentions of unspecified “themes” and “messages.”

But what was rarely analyzed in the reviews is that the earth is deserted because a Wal-Mart-like company called “Buy n’ Large” has filled it up with trash, and the departed humans, expanded to Big Gulp size, are contentedly gorging themselves amid the comforts of a flying Club Med, where they slide around on those carts, on which they watch TV continuously without even having to sit up completely. While some of the better reviewers mention the beglotted humanoid forms, I found it odd that most mainstream reviewers didn’t bother to point out what the film was saying.

I’m no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in front of our field of vision.

(And not subtextually, either; as my friend Michael Sragow says about such obvious material in films, “It’s not subtext. It’s text text.”) What what are those wide-bottomed, view-screen laden SUV’s that cog our highways these days but early versions of the portly trams of Wall-E? I don’t want to be judgmental about people’s lifestyles, but it’s hard to look at the rotund, popcorn-barrel-toting silhouettes in a typical suburban movieplex and not notice that Stanton’s vision of the future isn’t all that exaggerated.*

The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t even mention the human sequences**.

Entertainment Weekly breaks the news gently and doesn’t discuss the implications***:

WALL-E himself is the movie’s mascot and unlikely hero; it’s up to him to save a spacebound colony of humans who’ve ”evolved” into hilariously infantile technology-junkie couch potatoes. Yet even as the movie turns pointedly, and resonantly, satirical, it never loses its heart.

Roger Ebert, too, goes easy on the bad news:

We meet a Hoverchair family, so known because aboard ship they get around in comfy chairs that hover over surfaces and whisk them about effortlessly. They’re all as fat as Susie’s aunt.

This is not entirely their fault, since generations in the low-gravity world aboard the Axiom have evolved humanity into a race whose members resemble those folks you see whizzing around Wal-Mart in their electric shopping carts.

Claudio Puig in USA Today mentions the engorged humans, but doesn’t make the obvous connection.

Joe Morgenstern in the WSJ mentions the trope in passing late in his review:

But I will tell you that humankind’s evolution, as foretold by Mr. Stanton and his colleagues, is a blissfully inspired reductio ad absurdum—or more accurately inflatio ad absurdum—of the ethos of consumption that now sustains the economies of prosperous nations.

Ken Turan tangentially mentions the humanoids. He’s better on the corporate angle:

Not to put too fine a point on it, our planet is a disaster, a bleak and disheartening ruin where every available surface is covered by towering skyscrapers of trash. It got so bad that Buy n’ Large, the conglomerate that has somehow taken charge of the planet, leaned on the entire human population to leave with a “space is the final fun-tier” campaign that featured slogans such as, “Too much garbage in your face? There’s plenty of space out in space.”

The only mainstream review I saw that made the obvious point (emphasis added) was A.O. Scott in the NYT:

Rather than turn a tale of environmental cataclysm into a scolding, self-satisfied lecture, Mr. Stanton shows his awareness of the contradictions inherent in using the medium of popular cinema to advance a critique of corporate consumer culture. The residents of the space station, accustomed to being tended by industrious robots, have grown to resemble giant babies, with soft faces, rounded torsos and stubby, weak limbs. Consumer capitalism, anticipating every possible need and swaddling its subjects in convenience, is an infantilizing force. But as they cruise around on reclining chairs, eyes fixed on video screens, taking in calories from straws sticking out of giant cups, these overgrown space babies also look like moviegoers at a multiplex.

They’re us, in other words. And like us, they’re not all bad. The paradox at the heart of “Wall-E” is that the drive to invent new things and improve the old ones—to buy and sell and make and collect—creates the potential for disaster and also the possible path away from it. Or, put another way, some of the same impulses that fill the world of “Wall-E”—our world—with junk can also fill it with art.

I disagree with his point, but it’s his perogative to make it. But why was he the only reviewer to take the film’s message at face value and address it head on?

————-

* Compare, for example, the trenchant comments of Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells: “I understand the impulse on the part of director Andrew Stanton to call it a robot love story and leave it at that, but it’s a lie, of course—a disinforming of pig-trough moviegoers who might think twice about going to a ‘green’ movie that satirizes their lie-around, fat-ass lifestyle.”

** The standards of the Hollywood Reporter, incidentally, seem to be declining week to week. The review of Wall-E, by Kirk Hunnycut, is a piece of utterly mundane writing and doesn’t appear to have been edited. This is the review’s second graf:

The film is so clever and sophisticated that you worry, slightly, that it might be too clever to connect with mainstream audiences. But like those worries last year that having a rat for a hero in “Ratatouille” might throw off audiences, surely “WALL-E” will make that connection. It’s so sweet and funny that the multitudes undoubtedly will surrender to its many charms.

*** Owen Gleiberman in EW, incidentally, finally goes completely off his rocker into Spielberg lapdogism:

For a while, WALL-E is nearly wordless, and the director, Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), stages the early scenes with a gentle, unhurried mystery that is unabashedly Spielbergian.

Yeah, the beginning of Wall-E is a lot like the beginning of War of the Worlds: Outside of the fact that the former is deeply moving, cinematically poetic, daringly political, gracefully imagined, and executed with such taste and grace it makes you want to cry, and the latter is a loud, heavy-handed, mind-numbing, senselessly plotted crapload of thuddingly unsubtle filmmaking mechanics, they are very similar.

Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott of the NYT, in a joint bylined article from Cannes, give a shout-out to those disappearing film critics. Speaking of the fest, they say that “the excitement is tempered by a sense that those films are facing unusually difficult prospects back in the United States.”

Tempered excitement on the Riviera! Those poor people. Anyway, here’s one of the things doing the tempering:

The number of film critics writing for traditional print outlets has thinned dramatically in the last year as media companies face shrinking revenues and uncertain futures. Whereas big-budget commercial releases can almost always buy a solid opening weekend at the box office with wall-to-wall publicity and advertising, smaller films depend greatly on the support of critics to find their audiences. That’s especially true these days, with so many films opening theatrically — more than 600 titles in 2007—and competing for a seemingly shrinking audience.

The disappearing film critic is one of those memes that’s been floating around for the past year or so. But all the commotion about it doesn’t make sense. There are a number of things going on.

1) Critics have been disappearing for a long time. Dailies across the country have been cutting back on both film-writer positions and film coverage newsprint space for a decade. The New Times chain, now totaling nearly 20 alternative papers, has moved almost entirely to national critics. (I helped set up the beginnings of that system more than 10 years ago.) Yet art films have been doing quite well in that period; look at the Academy Award nominations for the last three years.

2) This doesn’t take into account the tsunamis of writing about film on the web. Some of it is silly, but a lot of it is substantive, but by any measure there are oceans more intelligent writing about film available to normal people than there was ten years ago.

3) With the rise of companies like Amazon and Netflix, more indie and art films are available to more people than ever before as well. (And let’s not forget the effects of the intermittently useful reader reviews on Amazon and elsewhere.) But of course, that (and No. 2) brings up the difficult issue of …

4) … consumer choice. Life is great for movie fans… you can get the movies you want when you want them, and there’s a lot of places to get advice on what to watch. What Dargis and Scott are talking about is one teeny-tiny slice of the pie right now: The slice, from the studios point of view, that used to feature folks in de facto monopolistic positions (i.e., daily newspaper film critics) speaking to voluntary recipients of hegemonic information delivery systems (i.e., daily newspaper subscribers) via actual recommendations published on pressed paper pulp (i.e., free publicity on newsprint).

Yes, those days are indeed gone, but who cares? Indeed, as the pair say in that same paragraph, there are oceans more traditionally released films in the U.S. as well. Kind of a puzzle, isn’t it? You gotta figure the distributors are trying to make a buck; it’s counterintuitive that they would they release more movies if, as Dargis and Scott imply, the audience is shrinking. (I’m sorry— “seemingly” shrinking.)

This really comes down to a minor marketing problem for the folks in the art film publicity game. Tell them to call Starbucks; over time they will learn how to market their films effectively to an empowered audience. The rest of us are doing fine.

——–

Previously in Hitsville:

The year of the disappearing film critics
More on the disappearing film critics 

There’s a certain species of critical comment that combines ennui and sophistry. When a critic can shake his head at the terrible state of things these days, he is happy. Anthony Lane, in an appreciation of Davin Lean on his centenary, notes that Jon Stewart had made a joke at the Oscars about watching Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone; Denby continued:

The glory of Lean was that, with “Lawrence,” he summoned his earliest memory of awe and, perhaps for the last time, restored our illusion that a mass medium could be a miracle. And the sadness of Lean is that he went on clinging to that belief while the rest of us watched it drift away. He died in 1991. Thank heaven he was not around for the iPhone.

I doubt I’m the only person under the illusion that there has been a scrap or two of miraculous mass media since 1963. But let’s think about that iPhone remark. Twenty years ago, we watched Lawrence, if at all, on a 20-inch TV, panned and scanned by a sociopath at Columbia Home Video. Today, we’re well on our way to making widescreen TVs available to most folks; they can easily approximate something close to the quality of the experience of watching a good film in an auditorium.

I didn’t say it would replace that experience—just that, for the first time ever, most films can be enjoyed by most people in a way that largely preserves their aesthetic integrity. It’s a fascinating development—I can’t imagine Lean, who did indeed believe in mass-market miracles, wouldn’t agree—and one too little noticed by those who wax reflexively nostalgic about the good old days that weren’t necessarily.

David Carr in the NYT weighs in on the case of the disappearing film critics. Given the oceans of film writing available on the internets these days, he moves quickly beyond the weepiness to get to a more interesting issue:

Given that movie blogs are strewn about the Web like popcorn on a theater floor, there are those who say that movie criticism is not going away, it’s just appearing on a different platform. And no one would argue that fewer critics and the adjectives they hurl would imperil the opening of “Iron Man” in May. But for a certain kind of movie, critical accolades can mean the difference between relevance and obscurity, not to mention box office success or failure.

That’s a fair point—in the context of the traditional model of the art-house favorite playing in the hip theatres in just a few top-tier cities. But that model, too, is changing. As film and DVD day-and-date approaches, new publicity models will be available to distributors as well, through Netflix, the iTunes store and other digital movie providers.

Indeed, it’s incontrovertible that, despite the downbeat tone of most of the folks Carr speaks to, there are more good movies available more easily to film-lovers today than there were ten or 15 years ago—more by possibly an order of magnitude. The real issue here is slightly different.

Consider what Music City News‘ David Poland says:

Poland […] said he likes reading serious printed criticism as much as the next movie fanatic, but films intended for adults have far bigger problems—namely, too many movies on too few screens—than the number of people teasing them apart. “Losing critics for serious film is like taking away the padding on the crutches of a very sick man with two broken legs and one working eye,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “It’s not going to keep it from limping along, but yeah, it hurts like hell.”

Unfortunately, the real issue is that here is a more limited public interest in certain movies than what you or I might like. In too many mediums there’s always a romantic notion that a little more press, or a few more theaters, will create a Nirvana where Gus Van Sant or Hou Hsiao-hsien beat out the Michael Bays of the world. We don’t live there.

David Ansen has accepted a buyout at Newsweek, one of more than 100 staffers at the newsweekly to do so.* Variety’s Anne Thompson has been surveying the damage:

The current harsh publishing climate has been hard on film critics. Gone from newspaper staff reviewer ranks are The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, Newsday’s John Anderson, The Village Voice’s Nathan Lee, The New York Daily News’ Jami Bernard and Jack Mathews, The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington and The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Eleanor Ringel Gillespie. Some have retired and some have been pushed out.

There’s two ways to look at this, of course; on the one hand it seems like a massive shakeout in the critical corps is going to leave a handful of top and ever-more-influential critics at some national or quasi-national outlets, and then an ever-dwindling number of nominally professional practitioners at the local venues that can afford them.

That’s bad, right? Yes and no. From the point of view of newspaper economics, at a time of massive financial contraction, it’s possible that metro dailies, particularly, don’t need film critics. They should instead invest their entertainment budgets covering the things that only they can do: Local theater, the music scenes, the local performing arts. That’s something the paper can provide that no one else can.

The quality of movie coverage in those papers has always been dicey. First of all, there aren’t enough good writers in the universe to produce decent copy for many hundreds of dailies. Even for decent ones, there’s often pressure not to be too mean about crummy but high-profile films. As for features, it get worse: There’s a tradition for, say, weekend entertainment sections, of simply taking whatever the biggest celebrity face that can plausibly be used and splashing it across the cover. For film, that might be a feature on some new film, which nine times out of ten is based on a junket at which the ostensible subject of the article was interviewed in a round-table setting. (Sometimes the actual writing is done by a stringer the paper might use occasionally out of Los Angeles.) Finally, if the paper deigned to take notice of smaller films, you might find details printed in tiny agate type buried in smudged listings.

It’s pretty sad. Why do they keep doing it? The answer to that question is interesting. The paper is basically just looking for filler to slip around the movie ads, a huge income stream for a typical daily. It’s not often commented on, but over the past five or ten years there was a big movement in dailies to split the weekend art sections in two: Friday, the day of the traditional big daily weekend art section, was given over almost entirely to films and DVDs. The rest of the weekend arts coverage was moved up to Thursday.

That gave the paper two chances to sell movie ads. At the same time, many of them were experimenting with selling folks subscriptions from Friday to Sunday. (”You obviously don’t want to get our crummy paper seven days a week; how about just three?”) The Thursday section gave them something to use to try to coax folks up to four days a week.

Now, note that very little of what I’ve been writing about has anything at all to do with readers—what they might like, or what they might find useful. (The alternative press built their own little financial empire partially out of providing readers better film coverage, both in terms of writing about films and also having comprehensive and easier-to-use listings.)

In the newsweeklies, their main job is to supply the studios with one or two film covers a year; since the concern is solely increased newsstand sales, the only consideration is the film’s blockbuster potential, and to promote cover those, folks like Ansen were trotted out to supply breathless behind-the-scenes detail and carefully not let on that the film in question was dreck.

And the punchline to all this is, of course, that for readers, for folks who just want some good writing on film, the internet is a candy store. The real problem is whether the great critics of the future—the Jonathan Rosenbaums of the next generation—will be vulnerable. Right now, it looks like the digital world will provide them many opportunities.

* The economics of Ansen’s departure don’t seem to benefit Newsweek much. He’s three years from retirement; Thompson says he’s staying on for the rest of the year, picking up two years salary, and a sweetened pension, and getting health coverage until he turns 65. If he weren’t leaving, the mag would get two more years of work out of him for the same amount of money—and not have to fatten his pension.