Concepts and artwork for the new Routemaster.

Via the indefatigable Tory Troll.

A man is banned from having sex with his partner on account of noise. Had neither court nor couple heard of the gag?

Less than half weddings are now religious there. And so the importance of religion diminishes yet further.

And I am interested in good relations between the United States and Russia. But in the twenty-first century, nations don’t invade other nations.”

John McCain, while not even joking.

An email to Andrew Sullivan which is well worth reading. The tendency of humanity to divide and distinguish sections of itself from the rest claims yet more carcasses. This does not legitimise Russia’s involvement in the slightest, but without the strife that broke there (which can only partially have been manufactured and fostered by Moscow) the Kremlin would have been denied even the scanty figleaf of pre-text which it presently grasps.

After Doug’s reference to Dan’s Mises link I thought it timely to share with you this. For those who haven’t seen it already its Lenin losing it and calling The Dark Knight a “the most obviously fascist of films”. Despite the fact that Batman refuses to kill…

WALL-E is, above all else, a testament to the fact that Pixar have no reached the stage where they can do whatever they please and get away with it. Even a consideration of the films It’s half set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, half in some space-bound remnant of humanity space ship capitalist set up and both are excellent but conceptually dark surroundings. Earth has been choked to death by human waste, while the space dwellers live a hollow consumerist facsimile of actual life. Either is a surprising choice: after the carefree romp of Cars, during the publicity of which all questions concerning global warming were laughed off, the Earth that WALL-E inhabits is very clearly wrecked by unsustainable living. WALL-E is left in the futile role of trying to clean up the mess left by billions of careless, callous humans. Meanwhile the banal lifestyle offered to those living on the ship has led to everyone being scantily boned blobs who can not exist without their machinery. A machine tells them across vast screens that they should “Buy blue. Blue is the new red.” and at a flick of a switch their colours change. They are carried everywhere by floating pods, without which they are effectively cripples.

But the film by no means wallows in dystoptopianism. Indeed the mood is usually one of amusement in the face of adversity: the eponymous protagonist faces numerous mishaps throughout the film but, like his cockroach best friend, is nigh-on-invinsible and always endures the most humorous of slapstick calamities. More importantly still Wall-E breaks from his programming in delightful ways: he is instructed to compound all of the world’s rubbish into cubes (his name standing for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Axiom class), which he then stacks systematically. However he decides that a few select items are not rubbish at all, and retains them in his metal box home. This provides him with the remnants of human culture, ranging from light-bulbs to Christmas tree lighting. It is effectively V’s Shadow Gallery compiled by a naive robot with less to work with.

The film begins with WALL-E’s routine, him going about his affairs before being disturbed by the arrival of a new robot from space, named EVE. She is seeking out plantlife, but WALL-E has beaten her to it and when she discovers this and returns to her sender along with the bloom he is forced to pursue her on the grounds that he feels holding hands with her will complete him, inspired by a slock Hollywood film he once found. This, of course, makes perfect sense within the film and it is a testament to the power of Pixar that they managed to make a pair of characters who are only mildly more eloquent that Pokemon have the strongest chemistry I’ve seen on screen this year.

WALL-E infiltrates EVE’s spacestation home and then the two of them are forced to attempt to thwart a plan hatched by robots aboard the ship who do not want the vessel to return to Earth. It is at this stage that the first humans in the film appear and it is strange how harder they are to connect with than the robots. This is despite them being the only characters in the film that can actually properly converse (the robots that do speak use single word sentences, besides the ship’s auto-pilot). As you might imagine, this leads to linguistic silence in the majority of its scenes. Pixar manage to work around this constraint marvellously, using a machinistic mime. WALL-E communicates through his swivelling eye and occasionally his settings, compacting himself into a box when scared. EVE has fine voice acting that manages to draw rich feeling into her highly limited vocabulary, as well as having lit eyes that vary depending upon mood. All of the robots have a carefully crafted soundtrack that uses the apparently incidental whirr and buzz of motion and function to convey feeling. This led to its creator dubbing it “R2-D2 the Movie” and it certainly works as well as that would. Emotional attachment is formed despite the lack of speech, indeed the robots are characters far easier to empathise with than the humans. But then, while robots have become far more sophisticated than the ones we encounter today, humans have become far more simple: before knocked from their chairs by WALL-E a pair of residents failed to realise that the ship had a pool, the ship’s captain spends hours infront of the space-age equivalent of Wikipedia requesting it define phrases such as “Ho-down” and words such as “Soil”.

But the film’s attitude towards humanity is far from blank misanthropy. It is far more interesting than that. Humans live within a system which is based around a space-ship economy apparently devoid of money and based around ultra-sophisticated technology. This allows them to communicate with each other and obtain whatever they desire. It also renders them drones watched over by machines. There are also lots of ship robots, who are largely antagonists or light relief.

WALL-E is notable for the lack of pop-cultural emphasis. Unlike cinematic carrion such as Shrek 2 the importance of external references is highly limited: anyone watching will know what a light-bulb is and find it remarkable that it lights up when EVE holds it. If the blobs of huamnity plunging down the ship is not recognised as a reference to Titanic, or the music that quickly follows to Space Odyssey 2001, then it does not matter in the slightest. The scenes are still fine ones and those are the only occasions I can recall where any outside work was mentioned.

Instead the film is highly original and filled with ideas, a rich seam of enjoyable characters, events and goals appearing from nowhere. The closest Pixar film to it is Finding Nemo, which predictably shared a director, Andrew Stanton. He aimed to show that Pixar was capable of setting a film in space after the success of setting one in water but only a limited time is actually spent in Zero Gravity conditions here. That which is, though, is one of the most enjoyable scenes of the film: WALL-E and EVE travelling around and then into the ship, her using motors and he the propulsion of a fire extinguisher. Stanton is clearly a highly intelligent man and the quantity of thought given to his characters is considerable: WALL-E has such sentience solely because of the prolonged amount of time he has been engaged in a role. EVE is initially cold and dismissive of his affection (their early encounters involve a plasma rifle) because she has not had this history, and required interaction with him both to expand herself and come closer to him. Stanton even went to the measure of adding “Imperfections” into the film’s camerawork to make it seem closer to live action, something which I was unaware of when viewing but in hindsight was a complete success.

WALL-E has been labelled “Pixar’s Ninth consecutive wonder” and without having seen every one of their last films I can not comment. But it is certainly a superb piece which uses the restrictions it set itself to create a fresh and fascinating work. It defies description and I would urge anyone who has not yet seen it to do so and doubt that anyone who already has will require encouragement for a repeat viewing.

As monotonous as this has become it seems that another post on Miliband is necessary. I had assumed that Ali’s original post on the matter effectively said all that there was to say but it seems that even he disagreed with me. Because we must now not only write on the article itself, but the drama surrounding it.

Curiously though, the two seem almost entirely disconnected. For all the furore the actual article in question is modest: heavy on the praise of New Labour achievements and vicious towards Cameron instead of Brown. This is no offensive, overt or otherwise.

So why have things reached the stage where Miliband is being called an “Immature, self-serving traitor”? Why has the once vaguely hazy and mildly distant prospect of a leadership contest become suddenly sharp, immediate? Why is Denis MacShane salivating?

So far as I can tell this is part the obvious: desire amongst the media for a story as we enter silly season, desire of marginal MPs to preserve their careers through whatever means necessary (desperate thrashings made especially pathetic by their obvious collective uncertainty as to what path, if any, will lead them towards salvation) and basic knives-out for Brown motion from his enemies and knives-out for Miliband from Brown’s allies.

But there is, perhaps, something more here: the shock to the system of somebody actually staging a decent counter attack against the Tories leaving a distracting but significant aftermath. For despite all the non sequiturious blather surrounding it his piece was in fact related to the Tories and how Labour could defeat them, rather than Brown and why he should be deposed. Miliband’s suggestions consisted of emphasising Cameron’s nature (personally I find him more mindless opportunist than instinctive conservative, but his case is convincing), emphasising Labour successes (such as they are) and finding a new platform to keep mutation of the Labour brand ahead of Tory antibodies.

Of these three methods only the final truly relates to the leadership at all. But together the three constitute a fine list of suggestions for destroying the Tories electorally. As the aforelinked MacShane suggests it could simply be a matter of contrast between the implicitly poor Brown and the masterfully executed rallying cries of Miliband (one wonders whether Denis has an eye on a new cabinet position, if so he has almost certainly calculated wisely) but I would suggest that Miliband’s tone is part of a distinctive and winning form of political dialogue: assertive leftism.

More shall be written on this point later but for now suffice it to say that Miliband has marshaled this technique in a fashion which the dreary present leader of the Labour Party and the harridan misandrist who is apparently going to become his challenger are streets behind on. It is just a pity that his skill has led to an ironic cloud of purely Labour related dust. The Tories should not grow complacent, though: they have escaped unscathed for now; but his attacks on them and refusal to accept their subtle agenda-setting are bound to draw eyes towards their grimy underbelly soon enough.

“The Labour party never does mad things.”

David Miliband