Thoughts that were duct taped to my cerebrum

directive?

Like i said the other day, i would like to put forth another few points about WALL·E, besides it being a great movie in and of itself.

Fun aside, i think it’s really interesting that this movie hasn’t come under more media fire. True, it’s the subject of many blog postings and random online rants across the world wide web, but arguments against it don’t seem to have gathered much momentum despite the fact that it makes a HUGE political statement about America.

First of all there’s the fact that the movie portrays earth as being full of garbage (which is presumably our fault) and that it is practically beyond saving. Maybe we’ll get there one day, but I doubt this will happen anytime soon, much less very easily. (Think about it. Try to fill the Mariana Trench with regular old consumer garbage! Now, if we were littering cruise ships, that might be different.) Anyway, I think if the earth eventually becomes inhabitable, it’d be because of air pollutants and water pollutants, not because garbage filled the entire globe. I also think with the technology the people had in the movie, they should have invented another way to deal with the garbage, because it seems to me that they had already come up with some pretty ingenious ways of making themselves lazier. Therefore the only thing keeping them from finding another solution was certainly not lack of insight; it was probably just laziness, which was almost their undoing in the end (funny how it comes right back to you, huh?).

Then there’s the part about how we all built spaceships to escape the mess we created and zoomed off into space, where we had created our own little lives in a bubble and didn’t have to do anything worth doing, ever. We also got fat, very fat, lost alot of bone structure from laying around in space for several generations, and forgot how to really LIVE instead of survive (which is why those on board the Axiom gradually turned more and more cartoonish than their ancestors). The hoverchair things made it so you never had to get up. The servant-like bot things following people around all the time made it unnecessary to ever deviate your planned course. You could even save yourself the work of chewing and have “lunch in a cup”, for pete’s sake. (Ew.) Advertisement saturation made it so easy to see what was “new” and “different”, and you could simply push a button to make pretty much anything happen. No one bothered making their own choices because it was just so simple to let some computerized thing make them for you.

But, if you noticed at the beginning, the holographic billboards were happy to inform you that the Axiom was meant to be luxury - not laziness. It was supposed to be convenience at its best, but it went bad. For example, the original plan according to the holographic messages included grandma in a hoverchair, and everyone else walking.

I thought this was a strikingly realistic representation of America. The obesity factor is kind of obvious, so i won’t go into that. The illustrations that most readily come to mind when i think of this movie are welfare and caring for elderly family. Let me explain myself. Welfare was meant to be a helping hand in moderation, for those who need it. Now people can live on just welfare dollars and never get a job, just because they qualify for government assistance. Maybe originally they could have held a job just fine, but when all is said and done they will have forgotten how to work or do anything productive, because the government does everything for them. I’ve posted about this before because welfare gets me very fired up.

As far as caring for the elderly, it used to be American tradition to honor your elders and care for your parents when they got older - in fact the Bible tells us to! - but now there are retirement communities full of people being cared for with government dollars instead of by their kids. I realize some older people don’t have family to look after them, and I also understand that places like nursing homes are meant to give medical care that a family might not be able to provide. But there are gazillions of places out there promising “independent living” and designed to be as comfortable as home. It’s great that someone can provide that for the elderly, but they shouldn’t have to. The laziness of the American family feeds things like this and makes them bigger.

At the end of the movie, we see that the only way for earth to flourish again is if the people who return treat it with care and work to get a yield from the earth again (eg. by farming to replenish the soil). Similarly, the only way for the captain to bring civilization back to earth again and make them realize where their home is in the first place is to get up out of his annoying hoverchair and do something about it (never mind that he would be like walking jello at that point). I think this makes a good point about what Americans will have to do if they’d like the country to do well economically again. America was founded on the idea that we have freedom, but we must work for it. Remember “he who does not work, does not eat?” And whatever happened to “freedom isn’t free?” Even when civil rights were a problem way back when, blacks understood that since us whites weren’t getting it, they’d just have to work harder to make a life here. I admire their spirit for realizing that the task ahead of them had to be done diligently, even when racial prejudice was just insane - and terrifying.

If we want America to be better than it is, we’re gonna have to get up out of our “hoverchairs” and do something. Some already are. It also helps to think about how our own personal budget eventually affects the national budget - it’s crazy, but it’s true. If you ask me this also means that how we live on a small scale will definitely affect how America turns out. People who are on welfare but don’t need it are going to have to learn that they don’t need it. People need to earn their living, and that in turn will produce a generation more caring and responsible for their personal property than the previous one, because it’s actually theirs. They sweated for it and protected it and reaped the benefits.

I think we also need to show a little more love/patience and lots of responsibility. We all need to realize that we live in America together, and we’re responsible for each other. In an economic crisis like this, everyone freaks out and blames everyone else, when really most of us are in the same boat. No matter whose fault it is, blaming doesn’t help. We can start being smart with our money, and we can pray the government will be smart with theirs too. For that matter, we can turn back to God as a nation because that’s how we started, and the farther we go from our foundation the more citizens lose out on true freedom.

And we can watch WALL·E, because it’s a cute movie with good morals mixed in.

Alicia <3

Tags: America, economics, elderly, garbage, government, movie, political, WALL·E, welfare

WALL·E is my friend

Yesterday i went with my cousin and younger sister to watch WALL·E at the dollar theater. I heart the dollar theater because usually i can afford a movie ticket (getting concessions there is a totally different story). Anyway, one of my friends went to see it quite a while ago and told me it was cute. The person telling me this happens to be male, so i thought if he dared use the word cute he must really mean it. This really only motivated me further to get myself to a theater before it went to dvd, although my friend probably recalls that i pretended my hopes were completely dashed when he told me -

(SPOILERS AHEAD!!! IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE STOP READING OR IT’LL BE RUINED! or if you don’t care, then whatever. Have a nice day.)

- it’s a robot love story.

NOOOOOOOOOO! not another romance, says I! I only put up with ONE romance movie consistently (that i can think of), and it’s aimed towards an older audience: the newer version of Pride and Prejudice. Only because it is marvelously gorgeous again and again, with virtually no annoying sexual content and characters who have respect for one another even when they’re in love! You don’t find that anymore in modern stuff. As for kid romance movies, I usually have a problem with them. They can make kids think love isn’t serious and whatever else. Anyway, so ends my rant.

Well, my friend happened to be right. Pixar is amazing and my new best friend. WALL·E is positively adorable. We are not big “movie people” at our house, and by that i mean we do not buy movies unless they are a necessity to life. (I love watching movies though, so we usually tape good ones when they are on HBO for future entertainment purposes.) Our “necessary” movies that we have collected so far are things like Finding Nemo, Cars, Monsters Inc., Pirates, the old Disney classics, etc. You know, the ones that are just plain good. And i’m here to tell you that for once in my life, i may actually have to go out and buy a movie, because WALL·E is just such a good, fun thing to watch. My brother can’t quite watch it due to good ol’ Pixar suspense and lots of explosions (yay!), but it is a great family film if the kids are a tiny bit older.

Tomorrow i will write more on WALL·E because i have plenty more thoughts about it, and some much more serious than the ones i presented today (they were more spastic than anything else). So, in conclusion, if you haven’t seen WALL·E you really should. Really. It’s like out of theaters now but you should still watch it when it comes out on dvd. And if you have already seen it, humor me for just a minute - how hard do you think it would be for WALL·E to say “Alicia” if he can’t pronounce “Eve?” Lol.

Alicia <3

Tags: love, movie, Pixar, robot, theater, WALL·E