Buster Keaton is God

And I'm not the only one who thinks so!

I rifled through some old, unread newspapers last night and a beautiful, large color image from WALL-E was printed on the front of the entertainment section. It made me pause and as I considered reading the article, my eyes flicked down and immediately caught the words "Buster Keaton is God". For a second, I thought I was having some Freudian-like slip-of-the-thought transference (does that sound like a real psychological turn of phrase?), literally reading my own thoughts in some random phrase like "Burger King is Good".

But, no! I blinked, read again, and it still said "Buster Keaton is God". I didn't even stop to read the rest of the article. I pulled out that section of the paper for keeps and smiled because the writer of the article (Michael Sragow) and a creator of WALL-E (specifically, Andrew Stanton) were relating WALL-E to Buster Keaton and the silent era.

And just like that, WALL-E became a Must-See-In-Theaters-,-Maybe-Even-More-Than-Once movie. I was suddenly twice as excited about the film, and five times more confident that it will (at least) contend with Monsters, Inc. as my favorite Pixar flick.

It makes more sense than ever now how much the scenes in the WALL-E trailer have delighted me. Actually, I feel like I should have been able to make the connection to a silent movie immediately, with all the minimal "dialog" and physical comedy. But, I didn't. In my defense, however, I have been keeping away from WALL-E promotions and articles in an attempt to avoid spoilers and such. I've only seen the trailer for the movie once in its entirety, and so far know only that I like its style, and that it's a movie about a "trash" robot that finds love. And presumably faces some huge challenge that leads to saving her, or the world, or the galaxy.

The movie always looked promising to me. Now, however, it has high expectations to live up to. I sure do hope it delivers.

Recher Mural

I went to a show last week at the Recher Theater in Towson, Maryland. They have a little mural by the entrance. Buster makes it on there twice. Unfortunately, there was some metal stuff in front of half the mural, over one of the Keaton images.