New on DVD: Wall-E's silent portions are sublime

By Chris Kaltenbach

November 18, 2008

Wall-E

With the voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight. Directed by Andrew Stanton. Walt Disney Video. $29.95, Blu-ray $35.95 ****

Few moviegoing experiences in recent memory are more sublime than the first half of Wall-E, an exercise in cinemagic from Pixar. This tale of an automated trash compactor, abandoned on a garbage-choked Earth with only a cockroach and a VHS tape of Hello Dolly! to keep him company, mixes childlike wonder with human frailty in a tale of love, loneliness and heroism that successfully plays to all audiences, ages 8 months to 80 years. And for the first 45 minutes or so, it does so without saying a word.

There are so many wonderful moments in Wall-E, it's unfair to isolate just a few; personally, I'd start with Wall-E's confusion over whether a spork should go in his box of spoons or his box of forks and end with how the relationship between Wall-E and his reluctant robotic companion, Eve, ranks right up there with the screen's most poignant love stories.

A three-disc special edition ($39.95) includes a downloadable version of the movie, plus more than two hours of fascinating extras that provide hints of how all that magic ends-up on-screen.

Also out today David Lynch: The Lime Green Set (Absurda, $179.99) includes more than 12 hours of films personally selected by Lynch. The feature films included are Eraserhead, Wild at Heart, The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet.

Other releases Eight seasons of sisterly witchcraft, featuring Alyssa Milano, Holly Marie Combs, Shannen Doherty and Rose McGowan, are on display in Charmed: The Complete Series ( Paramount, $249.98); Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Magnolia, $26.98) offers Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney's take on the maverick journalist who never met a rule he didn't ignore; The Who at Kilburn: 1977 ( Image Entertainment, $24.98) offers the seminal English Mod rockers in one of their last live performances before the death of drummer Keith Moon.