ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Today my boyfriend and I went to the matinee showing of WALL-E, which in case you just came out from under a rock you were living under for the last year, is the new Pixar animated film that just came out.  The main character is a small robot working as a trash compactor on planet Earth, which has been evacuated due to pollution and garbage and so on.  When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was Short Circuit, so WALL-E brought me back in touch with that a little bit.  Obviously the two robots share only a limited physical resemblance, and their levels of technological sophistication are very different, but I was reminded of Johnny Five mostly because it was my childhood robot true love. Judging by the small children in the audience who gazed lovingly at the screen and repeated the name “WALL-E” to themselves over and over, I think a new generation has found their robot true love as well.

Another major difference between the two is that WALL-E is in a children’s movie and can’t say the word “shit”.  When I was young I thought it was the height of cool for a friendly, peace-loving battle robot to say “shit”.  So really, I’ve always been like that.  Oh, and Steve Guttenberg had nothing to do with WALL-E.

We liked WALL-E and decided it was possibly even our new favorite Pixar film.  The only bad part of the movie was everything that came before it.  We saw a trailer for this utterly horrific looking Eddie Murphy movie where he plays an alien from outer space who is piloting a human-looking shell also played by Eddie Murphy, which is probably not going to be as bad as The Love Guru, but is that really saying much?  The trailer lost even more points for saying, “Eddie Murphy…IN…EDDIE MURPHY!”  To me that sounds like rape, which is what this movie already is anyway.  Right after that we saw the trailer for a movie called Beverly Hills Chihuahua which, kindly put, is like if Look Who’s Talking Too raped Legally Blonde and someone kept their aborted fetus in a jar and charged people to see it.  It literally almost brought me to tears.

Coming away from our WALL-E experience, I have two reactions, which don’t have anything to do with WALL-E itself, and are more related to the fact that I consider humanity to be in a state of rapid decay.

One, if I have children one day they may beg to see films like Beverly Hills Chihuahua, because children are stupid and tasteless, and I will have to make the difficult decision whether to eat a bullet that very day or to wait for the movies themselves to slowly kill me with the cinematic equivalent of neurosyphilus.  Although I suppose I could just say no, under no circumstances will mommy take you to see this tragic accident that someone thoughtlessly presented as entertainment.

Two, almost all the trailers I’ve seen recently look not only undesirable, but make me feel vaguely ill.  I kind of think the pathetic dystopia portrayed in WALL-E is not that far-fetched in light of the fact that someone not only conceived of, but also created Beverly Hills Chihuahua. I thought it would be hard for the human race to hit a lower point than the Holocaust, but I think we’ve finally reached it.  I’m now waiting for the superior alien race to come and exterminate us for our own good.

BRAH-VO, HOLLYWOOD!