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376. Wall-E – Ani-May 2024 (#59)

Posted on May 12, 2024 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Graham Day and Deirdre Molumby, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.

This week, Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E.

In the distant future, Earth has been abandoned. Towers of garbage loom over a toxic landscape consumed by dust storms. The planet is dead, except for Wall-E, a small service robot assigned the task of cleaning Earth in the hope that the planet might be ready to welcome a returning humanity. Alone and forgotten, Wall-E makes a life for itself among the ruins.

At time of recording, it was ranked 59th on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: Andrew Stanton, animated, cinematography, criterion, disney, environmentalism, imdb, pixar, podcast, robots, Roger Deakins, science fiction, silent movie, sound, The 250, wall-e | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How Film Culture Became Online Culture…

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the publication of the once-in-a-decade Sight & Sound poll last week, it seemed like a good opportunity to dig into the results and consider what they say about modern film culture.

The list has provoked some response online for being too modern and too recent, including films like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Get Out, Moonlight and Parasite. However, it’s part of a rich tradition of updating and modernising the cinematic canon. The most interesting aspect of the list is the way in which it demonstrates how film culture is online, how so many of the films to appear and climb on the list did so by becoming more readily and available, and by being embraced by an internet-literate generation of film critics.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.