Ah, summer. A season of overblown budgets and extravagant productions. For movie goers everywhere, this three and a half month stretch is what they have waited for all year. So as always, the prediction for this summer is: Hollywood makes oodles of money. Over these next few months, this column will be examining the phenomena of counter programming and how well it stacks up to the popcorn flick of the week.

[SDYT]fCcCZOSAtxA[/SDYT]

[SDYT]a57QqemrZmM[/SDYT]

This Week: Wall-E vs. Wanted

Wall-E (Morbid’s take)

Director Andrew Stanton and the team that delivered Finding Nemo help Pixar knock another one out of the park with their latest movie detailing the adventure had by an extremely lovable robot named WALL-E. In the film, we see that humans created so much trash on Earth that it can no longer sustain life and a plan was hatched that had the human race take a vacation into space. During this time away, a troop of robots called WALL-E’s (Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth class) will clean up all the mess we made and upon completion, we can return to the planet and do it all over again. The problem is that we never came back, and for some reason, the clean-up initiative was abandoned, leaving Wall-E alone. For 700 years, WALL-E continues his duties, his only companion in the form of a Twinkie eating cockroach, cleaning up the mess we made.

But WALL-E, being a very curious robot, has become fascinated with some of the items he has found during his duties, and rather than compacting them into cubes of compacted refuge, he saves them, using them to decorate his dwelling inside a large repair vehicle. Rubik’s Cube, lighters, sporks, bobble-heads, a wall fish that sings “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and one of his most treasured possessions, a video tape of the musical “Hello Dolly!” that he watches so much that he learns the dance moves. This VHS tape expands on a feelings that WALL-E has growing in him every day as he goes about his mundane duties; loneliness and the need for companionship. But WALL-E soon gets a visitor in the form of a sleek, weapon-toting robot named EVE who, aside from looking like an Apple product, has been dropped off on the planet and is hell-bent on accomplishing her directive which has her searching the landscape for something in particular. She is initially cold towards WALL-E, all but ignoring him after she almost destroyed him, but WALL-E is utterly infatuated with her and his persistence for her attention pays off in the form of some slight bonding between the pair while taking refuge from a wind storm. But before WALL-E can make his big move, the ship that dropped Eve off on the planet comes back to retrieve her. This leads to WALL-E latching on the ship, determined to follow EVE wherever she is headed and win her heart.

This is the first 2/3 of WALL-E and it is, without a doubt, a classic and harks back to the classic silent films of Charlie Chaplin. Aside from a few scenes involving some billboards that still function on Earth, and clips from the movie WALL-E watches incessantly, no verbal communication is used throughout this part of the movie. Using audio designed by sound designer extraordinaire, Ben Burtt, the man responsible for the audioscapes for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, and the expert animations from the people at Pixar, the audience is never in doubt as to what Wall-E is expressing or feeling throughout the film. Curious, happy, scared, anxious, love, sad…all the emotions done with non-verbal sound and visual cues. This portion of the film is as close to perfect a film can get. The animation is amazing and extremely detailed. From every bolt in WALL-E’s construction, to the post-apocalyptic vision of Earth’s landscape. The fact that WALL-E remains 100 percent engaging during this portion of the film, even with no dialog, is a true testament on just how well WALL-E works.

While the second half of the film does not equal the same classic film making as the first, it is still one of the more entertaining Pixar films ranking alongside The Incredibles and even Toy Story. This final act shows us EVE’s world, a complete opposite environment WALL-E is accustomed to. consisting of a plethora of robots and humans existing together in a pampered life aboard the cruise ship-ish Axiom. We see that for the last 700 years, the human race has grown fat and lethargic as they live out their days in hovering chairs equipped with displays hovering inches in front of their face, while robots cater to the every want or need. This is when the film moves into conventional territory and relies more on the comical situations one expects from a Pixar film and introduces us to a few more of the main characters.

The majority of these characters are the robot variety, but like WALL-E and EVE, they are some of the most memorable robots since Star Wars. Some standouts are the ships navigational system, OTTO (pilot), a robot fashioned after a boats steering helm, who is also the films main protagonist. Another is M-O, a tiny robot whose main function is to clean foreign contaminants and spends the majority of the film obsessively cleaning up WALL-E’s tracks throughout the pristine halls of the Axiom. There are humans in this film, and while most of them are shown as fat lemmings being whisked away from one point in the ship to the next before going to sleep, there are a few that take center stage and are integral to the plot. John (John Ratzenberger)and Mary (Kathy Najimy) are two of these characters who through a small series of events triggered by WALL-E, are “awakened” when the monitors in front of them are turned off. And then there is the Captain (Jeff Garlin). He is the current captain of the Axiom and is jarred from his mundane, predictable routine by EVE and WALL-E. These likable characters play a very important role in the sub-plots of the film, and another reason that WALL-E is so endearing. He really is oblivious to the impact he is making on the people around him, concerned only with gaining EVE’s affection and her safety. This crude robot, with his persistence, resourcefulness and ingenuity, affects everyone, and everything, he comes in contact with.

The underlying theme of the dangers of pollution and destroying the environment are there, but thankfully they are not at all heavy-handed. There is also a bit of social commentary on corporations and humans becoming just a bit too bombarded with all the technical gadgets that make life easier and keep us connected without actually being connected…which is kind of ironic considering the source of this message is Disney. The humans and robots aboard the Axiom had become so reliant on protocol and convenience, they are suffering from loneliness even though they are surrounded by each other. They are just too distracted to notice it. That is the a lot of the pleasure you will derived from the film, watching how WALL-E’s pursuit of EVE, and his seemingly simple actions like waving at another robot, or even just introducing himself, have massive effects that ripple throughout the ship, helping to wake people from the media induced coma they had fallen into and lead them all to chart an entirely different course.

WALL-E is the best film I have seen this year, hands down. They did such an amazing job with WALL-E as a character, that you just cannot help but root for the little guy almost immediately after meeting him. It is a wonder in film making and I give kudos to Andrew Stanton and the rest of the Pixar team who made me, a non-softie who usually resists having his emotions blatantly toyed with when watching a film, feel his rusty heartstrings being pulled effectively whenever things go WALL-E’s way. An EASY 9/10 and a film I cannot wait to watch again.

Wanted (Horrorholic’s take)

I’ll admit that I’m a bit ignorant when it comes to comics in general (especially since most of my knowledge of superheroes comes from cartoons), but I consider Wanted to be one of the best modern series. The comic tells the story of a Wesley, an ordinary and seemingly unimportant man who discovers he is the heir to a fortune, amassed in the name of evil. His father, whom he has never met, was a super-villainous assassin, who helped rid the world of superheroes and brainwash the common man into thinking they never existed. Under the guise of The Fraternity, super villains secretly rule the world. That is, until Mr. Rictus, one of the men belonging to The Council of Five (who acts as a villainous government), decides he wants to start a mutiny and go public.

One of the things that makes Wanted work so well is that unlike most comics, the protagonists are completely and utterly amoral, using their powers for egocentric, selfish purposes, rather than to help better the world. It is a completely different beast than most comics out there today. The rogue gallery of characters is the other reason why Wanted is so prolific. They’re completely over the top, on both their appearance and mannerisms. Where else are you going to find a super villain who was once a pillar of the Christian community, only to die for a few seconds and discover there wasn’t an afterlife, thus removing his moral conscious? A character named Fuckwit? Shithead?

To see these characters and the nihilistic nature of the comic realized as a film could have been one of the most startling things every put to celluloid. The producers of Wanted, though, had other ideas.

James McAvoy stars as Wesley, who discovers his father just died at the hands of a rogue assassin named Cross. His anxiety attacks he’s been having his whole life are actually just surges of adrenaline, which enables him to slow down time and, in turn, do things very precisely at high speeds, like shooting the wings off of a fly. Or, at least, thats what Sloan (Morgan Freeman) tells Wesley. Deciding he’s had enough of his humdrum life, he decides to join the assassin group, The Fraternity, and train his ass off to face his father’s killer under the guidance of Fox (Angelina Jolie).

I’ll be honest: the change from super villains to assassins really turned me off from the beginning. When I heard about it during pre-production, I was very worried but Mark Millar, the creator of Wanted, gave it his blessing after the ending was rewritten. Millar must hate his fans since his blessing of Timur Bekmambetov’s abomination is as ludicrous as Stephen King renouncing Kubrick’s The Shining.

It’s as if writers Michael Brandt and Derek Haas read the first few pages of Wanted, got a feel for the sense of humor and decided they could take it from there. The questions at hand is no longer “What kind of movie would Wanted be if they changed the super villains to assassins?” but “What kind of movie would Wanted be if they only had changed the super villains to assassins?” I guarantee it still would have been terrible but, I’d take that over this film, which is probably the worst adaptation I have ever seen.

Long gone is the amazing gallery of villains and an intricately crafted back story, complete with several epic showdowns. Why include what made the comic so great into the movie? What we’re treated to instead are people with a physical defect that causes their hearts to beat at over 400 BPM and, hands down, the worst plot/exposition device I have ever seen in a movie. What if I told you that the assassins take the names of their hits from a rug loom that spits out binary code in the form of cross stitching? You’re either completely turned off to this movie or you’re searching your welcome mat, desperately looking for the name of your mother-in-law. And if that wasn’t enough, the third act introduces a plot twist so cliche, I think Shyamalan would find it too obvious.

If the action had been fun at the very least, it still could’ve worked as a popcorn movie. But, it manages to get that all wrong too. Sure, Bekmambetov’s style is complimentary to the film, making the action look polished, but the repetitive nature of the violence completely destroy the fun quotient. It makes the slow-motion and freeze frame sequences of last year’s 300 look tame in comparison. I completely understand the need to establish the character’s ability to slow down time but after I see bullets collide in mid-air for the umpteenth time, it’s not entertainment anymore. It’s overkill.

Wanted presents a new breed of comic book movies; ones whose only relation to the source material is the name on the poster. It’s akin to someone making a Spiderman movie about a guy who gets stung by a radioactive spider and fights crime… as a giant spider. If you’re going to make a mindless popcorn movie, make it fun and if you’re going to adapt a comic with a cult following, do more than read the first few pages. But if you want to do it like Wanted, whatever you do, don’t make a sequel.

Wanted (Morbid’s take)

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is pathetic loser living a pathetic life. His day to day existence consists of working a miserable job as a desk jockey in a sea of cubicles. After being consistently berated by the boss who hates his guts, he returns home to his skank girlfriend who constantly demeans him while fucking his best friend behind his back. He then goes to bed, only to wake up to do it all over again. Wesley probably echoes a lot of people out there, to varying degrees, living their lives secretly wondering if they shouldn’t be doing something else, yet too afraid to make that first action to break the pattern they are living, or wishing someone or something would intervene and just do it for them. Wesley experiences the latter, while buying his ant-anxiety pills at the local drug store.

He is approached by a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie)who informs him that the father he never knew was a member of a 1000-year-old group of super assassins called The Fraternity. She tells him that his father was just recently murdered by a member of the group who went rogue and is now out to kill Wesley as well. Obviously, that is a lot to swallow, but Wesley barely has a chance to absorb the information before he is involved in a shootout in the aisles of the store. Fox saves Wesley, whisking him away to The Fraternity hideout via one of the films car chase sequences, where Wesley learns that he has inherited superpowers that his father had, but that they are currently dormant. He, like the rest of the Fraternity members, has the power to control his adrenaline in ways that give him super-human speed and agility, allowing him to pull off mind-bending actions that seem to defy the laws of physics. Wesley must make a choice of returning to his pathetic, yet predictable life or joining this group of assassins, unlock his powers, and ultimately avenge his father’s death.

Wanted is an over-the-top action film directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the man who also brought us the excellent Night Watch and Day Watch movies. The film is based (barely) off a Top Cow comic of the same name, written by Mark Millar. But be warned that if you have read the comics, writers Derek Haas and Michael Brandt made so many major changes adapting the series to the screen, very little of the comic was left intact. This was disappointing as the source material was a very dark story in which the main characters operated with no morals, and could have made Wanted an extremely controversial film. But while this may not be the film fans of the comic were hoping for, it still succeeds as a brainless action movie. Bekmambetov does not disappoint anyone looking forward to his visual flair as Wanted has a plethora of scenes that focus on what is unfocusable. From the flying keys of a keyboard dislodged by the impact of being slammed into someones face, to the slow-motion gun play that includes scenes of projectiles curving through the air or being shot out of the air. You will even follow the impossible path a of a bullet as it traverses through the obstacles of an urban landscape. There are a couple of comic book logic car stunts as vehicles jump, flip and perform the kind of acrobatics usually reserved for kids playing with their Matchbox cars.

For a film that is action heavy and dialog-lite, James McAvoy still does a good job with Wesley, starting convincingly as a shell-shocked, cuckolded man and quickly evolving into a stone-cold, bullet-curving assassin. Jolie takes the less-is-more approach foregoing a lot of pesky lines but still coming off formidable while gorgeous, using mostly her facial expressions throughout most of the movie. Morgan Freeman, who plays the leader of The Fraternity, Sloan, pretty much plays Morgan Freeman. This is not a bad thing if you are a fan, and he does have a line in the film that had the audience howling with laughter and even repeating it when the lights came up. McAvoy and Jolie both handle the break-neck action scenes very well, no matter how ludicrous these scene can get. Bekmambetov should also be credited for filming some of these scenes so that they never become such a confusing mess that you have a hard time figuring out what in the hell is going on. Along with all of this action is a pretty good body count and more than a bucket full of blood. Most of this blood-letting is reserved for bullet damage inflicted on the assassin’s targets as well as the final showdown that is reminiscent of the lobby scene in The Matrix.

You also have a couple scenes of bullets burrowing out of foreheads, with all the gor spiraling behind it. Wesley’s training involves him having his face turned into a bloody pulp while tied to a chair and getting into knife fights with a man called The Butcher…a man who can use his knives to knock bullets out of the air as easily as someone swatting away flies. Ocverall, some of the bleak commentary, mixed with the gravity-defying, splattery action sequences make Wanted feel like Fight Club mixed with The Matrix. It’s during these scenes, if you are not put off by the absurdity of some of them, that Wanted works pretty well. When the action stops to take a breath, the film’s flaws become a little more visible.

As is usually the case with action films such as this, if you stop and really take a look at the surroundings, the adrenaline rush you may have gotten previously could result in a hard crash from the sheer dumbness of it all. Motivations are not fleshed out and just quickly glanced over and some of the plot devices in the film are admittedly ridiculous, including a Loom of Fate (come one, no one questioned this?) and some third act antics involving rats, but Bekmambetov keeps the pedal of this vehicle mashed into the floor the majority of the time, keeping the movie at such a break-neck speed that all the razzle-dazzle makes these things easy to overlook. There is also the nonchalant way in which collateral damage is handled in the film. While the assassin’s operate under a code that was created to protect the innocent, they do not seem to show any regard towards people killed or injured during their exploits. This is very noticeable in a train derailment scene, in which the innocent people these characters are supposed to be indirectly protecting, are treated worse than the people they are in charge of assassinating, mostly because these innocent people are completely disregarded, ignored by the characters and Timur Bekmambetov himself.

Even with the deviation from the source material, time spent on some of the absurdities would have been better spent dealing with Wesley’s beginning targets as well as the moral dilemma he faces killing people purely because he was told to do so. This would have made for a more satisfying, and believable build-up of watching Wesley get a grip on his powers as he heads towards his ultimate goal of killing the man who murdered his dear, old dad.

But in the end, Wanted is the definition of a brainless popcorn flick that brings comic-book actions in a real-world setting instead of vice-versa. It also has the same theme running in it that seems to be running in other films of late, asking the viewer to stop and evaluate their lives and ask themselves if they are truly content with the way things are, or should they be taking the steps to ensure that their lives are as close as possible to the way they think it should be. While the central plot of both the comic and the film are not original, the tried-and-true formula of the average guy becoming something special (see Luke Skywalker, Peter Parker, Neo, etc), the comic was far edgier and the final pages were a nice middle finger to the people reading it. While the film adaptation doesn’t quite have the final sucker punch the comic did and even with the far-fetched plot additions, Bekmambetov and his team keep Wanted hyperkenetic and fun, making Wanted a Summer film I would recommend watching at least once.

Verdict: Even the column is late this week and Pixar has already had their biggest opening day yet, Wall-E would’ve been my choice regardless. Audiences have shown a lot of love for Kung Fu Panda this summer and their dying for another excuse to drag the family out the movies again this summer. Especially since the gas to go on vacation alone will cost them quadruple what it would to buy three or four tickets. Wall-E will have nice long legs and when push comes to shove at the end of the summer, it should have earned the top spot. Even though I hated Wanted, its an R-rated action film and we haven’t had one since Rambo came out earlier this year, to moderate success. With a big cast and an up and coming director at the helm, expect it to make a sizable splash, though not one that’ll be able to tango with Indy or Iron Man. But really, who the hell would want to watch an old man, an alcoholic and Mr. Tumnus hit the dance floor?