I think Cars is sweet. I watched it once after I saw it in theaters, and enjoyed it. But it's a measure of how fantastic most Pixar films are that "enjoyable," "sweet," even "thoroughly entertaining" just do not bring a film into the pantheon of greatness that the great majority of Pixars achieve.

The biggest thing against Car for me is that I absolutely hate Owen Wilson's voice - possibly the only voice that makes me cringe more is Rachael Ray - if I don't mute her in less than 20 seconds, I start screaming obscenities in languages that I don't even know.

Yummo.

:evil:

Is Netflix an option for you? I find it indispensable. I go to the theater about as often as you do, but I see about three movies a week via Netflix.

By the way, you chose very well your one summer movie, n'est ce pas?

Saw the flick this weekend and enjoyed it very much. I never have been one to over-analyze entertainment and I certainly will not start now.

It was fun, it was beautiful and it was surprising. Surprising in that I felt an emotional tug of the heart strings, over robot love. Who woulda thunk?

I did find a good bit of irony in the fact that a large corporation produced something railing against the evils of large corporations. But I shouldn't be surprised by that lack of self-awareness at this point and it didn't really detract from my enjoyment of the film. I did roll my eyes a bit at the beginning with the humans destroy the earth storyline. The beauty of the animation and the robot love got me past it quickly however. Though it could have been done better, they needed some reason for their existence and as ridiculous, preachy, and over-the-top as the notion is, I suppose it is no more ridiculous than talking fish and cars.

The only thing that really did seem to bother me was the Zippo that worked 700 years later. The fluid in mine fully evaporates about 22 seconds after I fill them. What a load of crap! :)

The 2001 references were perhaps a tad too blatant, but fun. The Mac startup sound for Wall-E was cute, though I was again reminded of the giant corporation attacking giant corporations thing. Heh.

I did enjoy a couple stabs of a smaller nature of people ignoring the world around them to spend all their time in the depths of the internet. Hmm.

I suspect the creative folks at Pixar see themselves as "in the corporation , but not OF it." I know that's how a lot of WDI folks would like to think of themselves. (We're creating something worthwhile, even if we have to keep making deals with the devil to do it.)

Ever since seeing this, I now feel some kind of sympathy towards our Roomba. It is just wrong.