The Trib (41 page)

But none of this would come as a surprise to Wall-E. In his world, set in the distant future, humans have long lost the ability to look after their own planet, let alone manufacture heart-rending entertainment. Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) is the last robot on earth. He was built 700 years ago as a trash compactor because earth was being consumed by mountains of rubbish. This was before humans gave up on the planet and jetted forever into space. All these years later, he diligently keeps going at his work. For what is a lonely robot supposed to do?

Wall-E has a boxy torso, but is resiliently quick on his tracks, and his wide-spaced eyes are not unlike that other great flat-head of the cinema, E.T. And Wall-E is just as wholesome: he is so unfettered by anything other than a desire to do good, it is impossible not to take him into your heart. Yet if he could talk, instead of beep, he would tell you all he wants is a heap of junk to squash in his chest cavity and for someone to squeeze his little robot heart.

This comes in due time with a white droid called Eve who is sent to earth by space-shipped humans to rummage for plant life. And Wall-E, in the kind of reckless but gallant bravery beknown to love-lorn men throughout the ages, follows her back into space. Their love affair develops in a flurry of electronic beeps and a magical pas de deux in space that involves the use of zero gravity and a fire extinguisher. The moment would make Nijinsky look like he had flat feet.

And amid the techno hair-chase that ensues, one can detect a gentle homage to Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey
. But the real nod here is to Charlie Chaplin: were it not for snippets of human talk, Wall-E could be a great silent film. This is not something you see at the movies very much, though recently Paul Thomas Anderson had a masterful and silent fifteen-minute opening sequence to
There Will Be Blood
. There are few films where you could turn the sound down and understand what is going on: telling a story visually without the crutch of dialogue is the calling card of cinematic greatness. But to do it with robots who cannot talk and have limited facial gestures? Wow.

Director Andrew Stanton, who made
Finding Nemo
, achieves in
Wall-E
something of the pathos of Chaplin's tramp, a hapless yet poetic physicality and that low-slung dignity. How poignant is the sight of this lone robot caterpillaring through the rust and dust of toppled cities, collecting rubbish, which he compacts into giant trash skyscrapers like monuments to mankind's once towering status? Or the sight of him gently rocking himself to sleep?

When he's not building junk cities, he collects human trash, searching them for signs of what made us human: an old bra, an engagement ring, a Rubik's cube. Here is a robot whose curiosity unknowingly keeps alive the last vestiges of humanity. He watches a clip from an aged VCR recording of the 1969 musical
Hello, Dolly!
and Wall-E learns something that can't be learned from the detritus of human objects – what it is to touch another person, what it is to feel. He sees how humans used to love one another and Stanton later uses this to stunning effect.

The director of
Wall-E
insists he had nothing in mind other than a love story. I wonder who he's trying to kid? The lives of his space-trapped humans are controlled by a dystopian corporation. They are fat and indolent: space has crippled them with bone-loss; and they are only able to travel strapped into hovering armchairs with mini TVs wired inches from their face. Watching this it is hard not to think of the present, when
Wall-E
is more likely to be watched on micro-screen iPods, or at home on TV, with the complete loss of awe and scale you can only find in the cinema. And underneath all the whizz and bop of a future imagined is the tone of an elegy: that we are destroying our planet and destroying ourselves.

With their previous film
Ratatouille
, Pixar set the bar very high. Here, they take the limitations of the family animation and launch them into space. In 700 years' time, when the remnants of our culture are being excavated and studied by historians for clues as to what we were like, I hope a little piece of
Wall-E
survives.

Radio reviews

Fianna Fáil set sail for the high seas of absurdity.

23 January 2011

T
he ‘Not a Heave in the Classic Sense' tour rolled into town last week, and what a blast it was for Heave Heads. There were bootlegs, T-shirts and dancing bears, and you were never more than five minutes away from a radio interview with group leader Micheál Garcia Martin.

The tour was tugging a parade of metaphors behind it (to which I've just added another. Curses). Best of all was the one from finance minister Brian Lenihan, who described himself on the
News at One
as being too busy in the ‘engine room' to have time to think about a coup.

So you've got the finance minister as black-faced urchin, shovelling coal below decks (‘More steam please, Mr Lenihan!'). You've got Brian Cowen in the wheelhouse, loaded to the gunwales, singing, ‘If you'll give me some grog, I'll sing you a song. Way, Hey, Blow the Man Down.' The Greens are on the poop deck as usual, talking about where best to position their solitary deckchair (aka the Climate Change Bill). That leaves only one actor to play Roger the Cabin Boy, so it has to be Micheál Martin.

Martin did so many radio interviews on Monday that listeners will have begun to suspect cloning. After all, it wouldn't have been that hard to get a clone to do some of these interviews. You just programme it to say ‘not a heave in the classic sense' and ‘fire in the belly' over and over. On Newstalk's
Breakfast
, he introduced a few inept metaphors, but none of them stuck, certainly not once they had been outdone by the vastly superior Captain Pugwash series. He could have ‘walked off the pitch', he said. There was talk of ‘sacrificial lambs' and the usual economic ‘tsunami' stuff. At one point Ivan Yates even went so far as to liken the Taoiseach to ‘a pinball'. But in the end all parties pulled themselves together and settled on a nautical course.

Lamenting the fact that Brian Cowen had been more reactive than proactive, Martin said ‘there comes a time when you have to push the boat out and be commanding the air space'. Shiver me timbers, tis not a ship at all, tis a seaplane. No wonder they can't agree.

Later in the morning, Martin appeared on
The Tubridy Show
(2FM). Some of his colleagues may have been wondering why he bothered, with one TD quoted in the
Irish Times
as saying that not many Fianna Fáil deputies listen to
The Tubridy Show
, but Martin would probably find that hard to believe, considering how many Fianna Fáil TDs are on Ryan Tubridy's Christmas card list.

Tubridy advised Micheál Martin to resign if Brian Cowen won the confidence motion. ‘I think it's untenable for you to remain in cabinet with no confidence in the Taoiseach,' he counselled. Give it a rest, Tubridy, will you? Avast!

Then, weirdly, he began asking Martin about the death of his daughter, a line of questioning that seemed ill-timed, unreasonable, even cruel. Soon we saw the reason for it.

‘I was wondering, as a father myself, how you would pick yourself up after that. Because I know that I wouldn't ... I would have to disappear, probably for a long time,' said Tubridy, relishing the chance to talk about Tubridy.

Micheál Martin said he didn't think the questions were appropriate but offered to talk about it another time. He was very gracious about it. I'd have keel-hauled Tubridy, the scurvy son of a biscuit-eater.

Then, on Tuesday's
News at One
, Brian Lenihan was accused of having spotted the iceberg long ago. Various backbenchers had seen the finance minister snooping around amid ships with a spyglass, despite his protestations about being in the engine room the whole time.

‘I'm certainly getting plenty of muck on my hands but it's very important that I work in that engine room,' said Lenihan. His first duty is to the country, etc etc. Under no circumstances should personal ambition prevail over the interests of the country and so on. I tell you, sanctimonious wasn't in it with him: Master Bates promotes his mission of self-love.

8 March 2009

‘O
n this drivetime show, we not only give you talk, we give you music,' announced Tom McGurk on his first programme for 4FM. Now whose idea was that, I wonder?

The people behind 4FM, the new multi-city radio station aimed at older listeners, must never listen to the radio themselves if they honestly think there isn't enough Tina Turner on it already. They also clearly believe there's a vast ‘demographic' of listeners who like nothing better than a bit of Elton John in the middle of a serious interview. Presumably these listeners also ask for a side of ice-cream with their salmon or beef, and draw little cartoons in the margins of their tax returns.

There are some serious things that can reasonably be interrupted by music – funeral masses come to mind – but current affairs is not one of them. RTÉ tried the same thing years ago on
Tonight with Vincent Browne
(a minute's silence please) and it was just as idiotic as it sounds. Browne would break off from filleting some petrified public servant for a recording of
Kathleen Mavourneen
, and no-one knew where they were.

At any rate, McGurk's musical interludes, combined with his own softly-softly approach, meant that his interview on Monday with Taoiseach Brian Cowen was more like
Desert Island Discs
than
Drivetime
. Think Sunday morning instead of rush hour.

In case you've been finding lately, reader, that you're getting just a teensy-weensy bit sick of the sight and sound of Brian Cowen and the rest of the whole godforsaken lot of them, we won't retrace the whole interview here. But there were one or two highlights worth revisiting for comedy's sake (since laughter, unlike music, is entirely acceptable in the midst of current affairs).

McGurk thanked the Taoiseach for coming in, and squeezed in a plug, speculating that Cowen's presence was a signal that he wanted ‘to recognise that 4FM, despite all the economic devastation, is up there and is going to succeed'.

The Taoiseach responded with the following stream of consciousness, as if bent on forging, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race: ‘I think it's a great indication of just the sort of people, the can-do attitude that we need in this country to be honest, and the faith that people have in the project and the concept that they've devised and that they've worked on ... if I may say so a very strong presentation team which shows I think a great degree of confidence in the professionalism of those who have, uh, worked so hard to bring this day about.'

Cowen also used his new favourite quote, lambasting those commentators who say the economy was never anything more than ‘a building site with a flagpole on top'. Love that. He'll never get rid of that one now.