Robots, sopranos and movie stars

There is a growing movement afoot to secure Pixar's "WALL-E" an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture this year. Not Best Animated Feature -- Best Picture, period. Count me in. Released to DVD this week, "WALL-E" is Pixar's finest film to date, and -- not coincidentally -- its most artsy and ambitious.

The story: In the future, humanity has abandoned Earth because of radical pollution problems. The planet's surface is piled high with trash, the atmosphere is choked with smog, and a cloud of orbiting space garbage blots out the stars. Left alone to clean up the mess is poor WALL-E, the last of the sanitation robots dispatched to cleanup duty.

So what happens when the last robot on Earth receives a visitor? Therein lies this particular tale, a nimble cross-pollination of sci-fi, silent comedy and love story. Yes, there is a big fat green eco theme at the center of it all, but the knuckleheads who dissed "WALL-E" on its release as some sort of leftist propaganda flick for kids simply don't get it. Critic Roger Ebert has a nice axiom for this -- a movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.

What is "WALL-E" about, then? It's about as good as it gets, that's what. The first 30 minutes, in particular, are a hymn to the pure exhilaration of cinema, digital or otherwise. They show an entire back story in images and sound, with only dashes of text and spoken word. In fact, its two robotic lead characters have a vocabulary of maybe a half dozen words between them. Everything necessary is communicated through gesture, nonverbal squeals and squeaks, and the characters' remarkably emotive digital/mechanical eyes.

This should be impossible to maintain at feature length, but director Andrew Stanton not only makes it work, he makes it sing -- with all the sophistication and artistry we've come to expect from Pixar. (Is there a more reliable brand name than Pixar these days?)

DVD extras include the new short film "BURN-E," the original theatrical short "Presto," a pair of deleted sequences and a rambling, friendly commentary by Stanton. Because there is so little dialogue in "WALL-E," and because Stanton is such a mellow conversationalist, this may be the least intrusive commentary track in the history of DVD.

But getting back to that "about" question -- here's a pop culture riddle for you: What do "WALL-E" and "The Sopranos" have in common? In a recent interview, Sopranos creator David Chase said the defining aspect of his show was that it addressed the one thing Hollywood hardly ever talks about, the "American obsession with desire and consumption."

Clearly, "WALL-E" has similar thoughts on its mind and does what science fiction is supposed to - takes a notion and extrapolates it out to the event horizon. But like "The Sopranos," it remembers first and foremost to be smashing entertainment, with funny, poignant, occasionally heroic characters. In short, "WALL-E" is about people -- even if some of them happen to be robots.

This week's other big DVD release, Ben Stiller's incredibly strange "Tropic Thunder," goes in another direction entirely. It's a movie about the movies themselves, wrapped in so many layers of neurotic, self-referential commentary it forgets what it's supposed to be doing in the first place.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, at least on the two-disc Director's Cut DVD. Stiller, who directed, produced and co-wrote the screenplay, plays an actor on the set of a big-budget war movie that goes terribly awry. His fellow actors include Robert Downey Jr. as an Aussie prestige actor, Jack Black as a goofy lowbrow comedian, and Brandon T. Jackson as a hip-hop crossover phenom. Through a series of misunderstandings, the acting company finds itself in a real jungle, fighting real bad guys with real guns. Only the boys still think they're in a movie.

From here the movie fires round after round of over-the-top satirical set pieces aimed at puncturing the variously inflated egos of Hollywood types. Some are funny, some are not, some are fascinating in the manner of a highway car wreck. I appreciate no-holds-barred satire as much as the next guy, but who decided the child soldier issue was a rich comic vein?

Still, "Tropic Thunder" qualifies as a DVD (rental) Pick on the basis of pure spectacle. You've never seen anything like it, and the extras add another fascinating level of weirdness. By the time you've reached the making-of documentary -- a fake doc about a fake movie that's a true story based on a fake book -- you've gone down some kind of new Hollywood rabbit hole.

Stiller's mad vision is a lot of things -- a gonzo comedy, a burlesque revue and another comeback showcase Downey Jr. Oddly, the one thing it isn't - a successful satire - is the thing it thinks it is.

Bonus Consumer Advocacy Tip: The movie "Tropic Thunder" wants to be was already made in 1999, anyway, with much less pretension and bombast. It was called "Galaxy Quest." And it was good. Only $7.99 on Amazon. I'm just saying.