What the Manolo Is…
Manolo says, it is Tuesday, time to see what the Manolo is…
On the one of the hands, the Manolo must say that he found this new cartoon movie
Wall-E mostly entertaining and largely satsifactory. On the other of the hands, it was not all that.
You may count the Manolo, among those who think the Wall-E movie was beautiful to look at and sweet, not especially moving, and mostly inconsequential.
Indeed, more than anything else the movie made the Manolo desperately want to see Hello Dolly!. (Now there is the movie filled with life and consequence, full of entertainment and meaning.)
Frankly, robot love does nothing for the Manolo, who prefers that his lead characters be mammals, or at the least cute fish or smart bugs. And by the show of hands, who thinks that the sentient beach umbrella is the good idea? And that is the problem for Wall-E, for when the most utilitarian of machines begin to develop too much personality it is time for the rebooting.
For the Manolo, Ratatouille is still the best Pixar movie of all time. Here was the movie that presented complex questions about artistic drive and critical responsibility with seriousness and good humor. Truly the adult movie disguised as the kiddie cartoon.
By comparison, Wall-E lacks depth, and the important questions it raises are eventually pushed to the side by the mechanics of the extended chase sequence. In the end it is fine entertainment for the few hours, but will quickly fade from the memory, leaving behind little of importance.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
omg, you linked to Lileks. It’s like my online world is collapsing into a singularity
July 8th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
“Indeed, more than anything else the movie made the Manolo desperately want to see Hello Dolly!. (Now there is the movie filled with life and consequence, full of entertainment and meaning.)”
Manolo, you’re my arbiter of all things elegant, but here you’re dead wrong. “Hello Dolly,” which I saw a couple of months ago on PBS, is a bloated mess in which every song, including the tender and intimate love song “It Only Takes a Moment” featured in “Wall-E,” was turned into an overdone production number with a cast of hundreds, if not thousands. The costumes, the musical arrangements, the dancing, the squeaky-clean Disneyland-style sets (supposedly in New York City!) were uniformly overly elaborate and over-produced. Even the signature song “Hello Dolly” was performed three different ways in succession, with poor old Louis Armstrong trotted onto the screen from nowhere and sandwiched between two enormous production-number versions of the song involving singing waiters, singing restaurant guests, a singing Barbra Streisand, and singing everyone else.
Streisand herself was badly miscast (she was an oversized 27-year-old ox supposed to be playing a middle-aged widow in a role originally created on Broadway for the petite flibbertigibbet Carol Channing). Nonetheless, the vibrant Streisand is the only living thing in this otherwise dead movie whose other characters are utterly free of personality. When Streisand isn’t onscreen (which is a lot of the time), the film lapses into a persistent vegetative state, sort of like Eve after she grabs the plant in “Wall-E.” Walter Matthau was another monumental miscast as Streisand’s supposed love interest. Instead of coming across as a charming curmudgeon like, say, Rex Harrison in “My Fair Lady,” Matthau comes across as merely grumpy, unlovely, and unlovable. There isn’t a molecule of chemistry between him and Streisand, which figures, because the two loathed each other in real life.
You might want to take a look at the two lead reviews of the “Hello Dolly” DVD” on the Amazon page you linked. The reviews explain one thing that puzzled me when I saw the movie on TV: why it was that a stylish, good-looking New York Jewish girl like Dolly Levi set her cap on a homely, aging, ill-tempered Gentile hayseed like Horace Vandegelder. Weren’t there any prosperous Jewish widowers in New York for her to marry? The answer: When Streisand got the part, “Hello Dolly”’s makers not only subtracted 20 years from Dolly’s age but they changed her ethnicity as well; she had originally been “Dolly Gallagher Levi,” Irish, penniless and living by her wits, the kind of woman to whom even Horace would have looked like a good catch. That’s just one example of the ill-conceived venture that the 1969 film version of “Hello Dolly” was.
July 8th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
I have not yet seen “Wall-E”, but the best Pixar film is “The Incredibles”, in my opinion. That said, Pixar has yet to make a bad film (although “Cars” was a bit off).
July 8th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
I was disturbed by the age difference between the two robots but, other than that, I enjoyed it.
July 8th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Wow. This is an “oversized ox”? I’m astonished.
That said, I’m not a fan of Streisand’s — I don’t like being yelled at all that much — and haven’t seen seen the movie, so I couldn’t speak to her performance or the casting. Though I have no doubt it’s all very dated. (And Carol Channing is rather famously tall, I’d thought.)
I love Pixar in their sweet Ratatouille mode, and love them less in their “Ain’t we cool?” Cars mode, which it sounds like WallE may fall into. But they make great movies all the same.
July 8th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Charlotte, honey - chill. It’s just a movie.
July 8th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Oddly, I found the apparent “message” of Wall-E to be “recycle and don’t be a fatass.” But the robots talked cute.
July 8th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
But she’s right. A great show on paper, and on stage, a big cinematic cheeseburger. And Michael Crawford sucks.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I’m afaird Manolo and I don’t have similiar musical taste…
July 8th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
The Charlotte is totally correct. “Hello Dolly” the movie is an overproduced abomination directed by the fine dancer Gene Kelly, I believe, who was without the clue in how to translate the stage musical into the film.
The Manolo, as always, is also correct in his estimation of “Ratatouille” as the Pixar summit, “the adult movie disguised as the kiddie cartoon.”
July 9th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Bridey: I meant no insult to the divine Streisand, but she’s not petite, and in the heavily petticoated, elaborately decorated costumes she had to wear during most of that that terrible movie, she gave the impression of a bull in a china shop, ever in peril of knocking over the bric-a-brac. The script calls for Dolly to chatter away a mile a minute, which worked for the dainty Carol Channing but not so well for the solid and down-to-earth Barbra.
Phyllis: Do you really think it is wrong to criticize movies? Are they really “only” movies? Don’t they sometimes aspire to be works of art, sometimes succeeding magnificently (”Ratatouille”), and sometimes failing miserably (”Hello Dolly”). A lot of major talent went into the making of “Hello Dolly”–Streisand, Matthau, Gene Kelly, Jerry Herman–but it didn’t work. Nonetheless, Herman’s beautiful ballad “It Only Takes a Moment,” ridiculously overproduced in “Hello Dolly,” is pitch-perfect in “Wall-E.” Aren’t people entitled to point that out?
July 9th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
While I liked Ratatouille, wasn’t the Manolo a little horrified at the scene where all of the rats came running out of the kitchen en masse? Yes, it was a cartoon, but still skeeved me out, none the less.
July 9th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
In the point of fact, Hello, Dolly had its first incarnation in the 19th century in John Oxenford’s 1835 English play, A Day Well Spent. It was transformed into a German play, Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen, by Johann Nestroy. It found its way back into English via Thornton Wilder’s Merchant of Yonkers, which Wilder revised and polished up by adding the character of Dolly Gallagher Levi; it then became The Matchmaker, and was much more commercially successful, starring Ruth Gallagher; so successful, it became a movie (also called The Matchmaker), starring Shirley Booth. The part of Dolly on Broadway was originally written for Ethel Merman, not the Carol Channing; Ethel turned it down, as did the next choice, Mary Martin (each of whom did play the part later, though). Carol Channing played Dolly on Broadway, but it is really not correct to say that the part was “written for her.” Many other ladies have successfully played Dolly on Broadway and off, and as for the Barbara Streisand, to whom La BellaDonna is utterly indifferent (La BellaDonna’s revered Papa once referred to Ms. Streisand as “the second-ugliest woman in Hollywood”), as for Ms. Streisand in her heavily petticoated, elaborately decorated costumes in that movie? Ms. Streisand, physically, was PERFECT for that period; the period of the junoesque, goddess-like Gibson girl, a period that believed, for the ladies, to be short meant that one would never be a beauty (ask the Anne of the Green Gables if it was not so).
I would also point out that the ability to chatter a mile a minute is not limited to the petite, or even the female, amongst us.
As for the play itself, it is having a new incarnation, thanks to the Tom Stoppard, who polished up the German variation again and served it forth in 1981 as On The Razzle.
July 9th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
BellaDonna, you are so learned! Thanks for all the “Hello Dolly” background, especially the information that the part was originally written for Ethel Merman.
My father never much liked Barbra Streisand, either–perhaps it was a generation thing, because I’ve always thought she was gorgeous and utterly charming, despite her politics, which are not my own. But I don’t think she carries off Dolly. That chatter sounds completely artificial–something she memorized and practiced over and over but never managed to integrate into the character she was playing, or into her own self. The trick of the actor is to persuade the audience that he is the character he is playing–and Streisand in “Dolly” never managed to persuade me that she was doing anything but reciting dialogue that someone else had written. She never even persuaded me that there was such a woman as Dolly Levi and that “Dolly Levi” was anyone other than Barbra Streisand in period costume. Better direction might have helped, for Streisand can certainly act (think of her in “The Way We Were,” where she absolutely becomes that character), but in “Dolly,” something fatally failed.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Hola to the Charlotte! La BellaDonna is perfectly prepared to believe that Ms. Streisand fails to persuade her as a viewer. The question to La BellaDonna was only in the matter of the historical accuracy as she knew it concerning the life of the play-musical, and the physical appropriateness of the build and size of Ms. Streisand for the part, the character, and the time. As to Ms. Streisand’s failure to convince the Charlotte that she was Dolly Gallagher Levi, or that she could chatter with conviction, that, fortunately, lies outside the powers [and inclination] of La BellaDonna. [The other truth is that La BellaDonna would play the part HERSELF - but she would be forced to play the part in The Matchmaker, because La BellaDonna cannot carry the tune if you put the handle on it.]