Philadelphia Weekly

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There are two things noticeably missing from Pixar's latest wonderful flick Wall-E, and they surely wouldn't be missing were this not Pixar.

One is an opening crawl, introductory montage or disembodied talking head � la Zardoz and Dune�--something that awkwardly and superfluously tries to catch us up with the story so far. Wall-E just drops us into its world sans explanation.

The other is language. Our titular protagonist, a clunky robotic trash collector, speaks only in bleeps and wheezes. Its robotic love interest, a sleeker and more advanced model sent from space, does about the same. (The "voice" work for Wall-E comes courtesy of legendary sound designer Ben Burtt of R2D2 fame.)

So how are we supposed to infer this film is set on a post-human earth 700 years in the future, that Wall-E is the last "living" creature on the planet and other such particulars? I dunno, perhaps by watching?

Save for the occasional cameo from a recorded human voice (our hero's one videotape is Hello, Dolly!--hell on earth indeed), the first half of the movie is essentially a silent film on the order of F.W. Murnau's intertitle-free The Last Laugh--pure cinema. Wall-E trusts, perhaps foolhardily, we can pick things up through a combination of visual context clues and good old-fashioned patience. Roughly half of Wall-E's target audience may be children, but the film doesn't treat its viewers that way.

As it turns out aggressive societal coddling is an idea that takes up the film's second half, which sends Wall-E and its beloved across the galaxy to a massive ship carrying humankind. Not to give too much away--the film's steady doling out of information is one of its chief pleasures--but think Idiocracy meets An Inconvenient Truth by way of a Ralph Nader anticorporation tract.

Wall-E should make Michael Medved hopping mad, and that's good, but its biggest strengths are its assured visuals and Chaplinesque wit. The images of Earth are impressively, almost disturbingly realistic (famed cinematographer Roger Deakins is credited as a visual consultant), as is Wall-E himself--you can almost smell the rust on his Johnny-5 peepers.

The early section of the film, with Wall-E rummaging through and experimenting with the remains of a deserted planet, is frankly too short--it could be a whole movie on its own--and the ending is unimaginative and message-y. And yet even with such faults Pixar hasn't been this strong since Toy Story 2.

Director Anand Tucker's floridly overshot adaptation of Blake Morrison's best-selling memoir is belatedly turning up in town a couple weeks late for Father's Day, no doubt saving dozens of well-meaning sons from some awkward postmovie conversations. Colin Firth stars as Morrison, already a successful writer at the film's start but still bristling with unresolved rage at his old man, played here with the kind of sly charm we can always count on from the great Jim Broadbent.

Drifting in and out of Kennedy-era flashbacks, When Did You Last See Your Father? sketches the elder Morrison as a pushy blowhard philanderer who was a constant source of shame and humiliation for the lad--often inadvertently yet on some occasions acting out with what seems like malicious intent. But once Daddy dearest is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Blake begins to dig his way through repressed family conflicts, a largely internal journey cinematically presented as Colin Firth staring into the mirrors all the time while wearing a constipated expression on his face. Occasionally he masturbates.

Lacking even the mawkish deathbed catharsis one would expect from this sort of male weepie, David Nicholls' stilted screenplay doesn't do Blake Morrison many favors. The author comes off as a self-pitying heel, and Firth's uptight turn doesn't do much in the way of suggesting the necessary roiling inner torment. He mainly just ignores his family and mopes around his old hometown, even trying to have another go with the sassy Scottish housekeeper (the delightful Elaine Cassidy) who deflowered him so many years ago. Broadbent's disreputable daddy might be a liar and a cheat, but there's at least a twinkle in his eye and an easy charisma that's missing in his dour offspring.

Tucker overcompensates for the tale's lack of forward motion with wildly ostentatious camera movements, shooting every possible scene through so many mirrors and reflective surfaces that any possible thematic points he might be trying to make are upstaged by their sheer self-consciousness. Even Tucker's attempt at a three-hanky finale--an internalized, largely unmotivated change of heart from our protagonist--is laughably literal, complete with swirling 360-degree crane shots and bombastic, heavenly music cues. It all comes off as so silly and self-regarding, it's no wonder this dude's old man used to rib him so mercilessly.

A project as massive as China's Three Gorges dam--a 17-year hydroelectric undertaking so enormous that it's reshaping the landscape of a nation, leaving some scientists worried that the end result might perhaps muck with the earth's rotational axis--is probably just too damn big for a single movie. Some 2 million people have already been displaced, and as the Yangtze River continues to rise, flooding countless farms all along the countryside, credit director Yung Chang for thinking small.

After a bit of wannabe early-Werner Herzog fumbling with ominous music and a bit too much coffee-table-book photography, Chang locates the meat of his story in a bizarre side industry. Luxury tourist cruises--nicknamed "farewell tours" by the locals--offer one last chance to glimpse rural Chinese villages before the dammed-up Yangtze swallows them all forever. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these trips are going over like gangbusters.

The brutal irony of it all becomes comes clear in the sad tale of Yu Shui, a teenage daughter of illiterate farmers who must leave her squalid riverbank shack and support her family by working on the "Victoria Queen." Before long she's called "Cindy," wears garish eyeshadow and is hustling her way up the service industry ladder. Phony smiles are all-pervasive on deck, as the obsequious staff kowtows to the whims of rich folks enjoying shuffleboard and cheesy lounge acts while paying tons of money for a front-row seat to watch poor folks' ancestral homelands drown.

One noisy heifer tips 30 American bucks and then thanks her valet for being "less obtrusive than expected." Meanwhile our Cindy gets a makeover and heads for the shopping mall as her sad-eyed father struggles uphill carrying a wardrobe on his back. His agonized groans pierce both the soundtrack and your heart. The omnipresent lookie-loos just keep snapping photos.