Dads the summer just got a little shorter with a good movie to take the kids to and something that will interest you as well. Today marks the theatrical release of Pixar Studios (Toy Story,The Incredibles and Ratatouille) "WALL-E", a film inspired by the musical "Hello Dolly". You thought Streisand did some strange matchmaking, this story has a robot fall in love with and extraterrestrial.The summer is long enough when the kids are home for about three months. And let's not even think about the drama at my house since I am hard pressed for summer camp money. So to entertain the little ones and enjoy the movie theater's air conditioning instead of paying to chill our home all day, off to the movies we go. Usually the kids watch and mom and I sleep, but with WALL-E we just might stay awake.
Falling in love with "WALL-E" is easy to do. This latest achievement from Disney's Pixar Studios rotates around a rusty little robotic hero who's built, as the movie is, with such emotion, brains and humor that whole universes exist in his whirring tones and binocular eyes.
For the first half-hour, WALL-E (short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class), doesn't actually make much noise. Skittering across the planet's polluted surface some 750 years from now, he silently does his job turning junk into stackable cubes as his unkillable cockroach pal looks on. In a big storage shelter, lonely WALL-E organizes his finds - does a spork go with spoons or forks? - and pops in a VHS tape of "Hello, Dolly!"
As he watches the old movie musical, WALL-E sees people holding hands, something he wants to do with EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), the probe who lands in front of him to search for signs of sustainable life. It seems several centuries earlier, humans abandoned Earth for a giant spaceship after garbage from the conscienceless Buy-N-Large corporation - provider of food, gasoline, vehicles and everything else - buried the globe in muck. When love-struck WALL-E sneaks aboard EVE's return trip to the stars, he finds our TV-addicted, helplessly bloated descendants, along with the ship's captain (voiced by Jeff Garlin), who hopes to turn things around and head home.
Read the full review from Joe Neumaier at the Daily News