La Pelicula

The Wall-E on my school notebook is looking at me longingly. I still have not seen his movie. I wanted to, I did! But there was that whole moving to Mexico thing. Once we moved to a place near movie theatres, we tried to see it one night (by “we” I mean Chris tried to humor me), but we could not find it in English.

It is possible, you know, to find English-language movies in Mexico. Most of them are Hollywood movies anyway, and they usually come in one of two forms: English-spoken with Spanish subtitles or Spanish-dubbed. The English-spoken with Spanish subtitles is what I was looking for, of course. But I still hadn’t found what I was looking for. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

After my Spanish-language immersion class, I decided I could go for the Spanish-dubbed. Probably I would not understand everything, but (a) at least I had a little bit now, (b) it’s a kids movie, after all – how complicated can the vocab be? and (c) that adorable notebook had been gazing at me for weeks!

But when I got back…no more Wall-E. He was out of the theatres. You could still find him on street corners, of course, among the millions of other pirated movies costing anywhere from 10-30 pesos (1-3 US dollars), but because it was only just in theatres the pirate copies come from a dude (or dudette) with a video camera in a movie theatre. I learned that lesson after buying a pirate copy of Kung-Fu Panda. It looked like a really funny movie…I could tell by the constant laughter of a hundred children in the movie theatre that inevitably was recorded with the movie. I turned it off after about two minutes. Sigh.

I could see another movie, but there’s really not much out there at the moment. Apparently late August/early September is the time for violent action movies. There’s nary a comedy to be found, at least not at the theatre across the street. There’s not even an action comedy. There’s not even Hancock! I hope something else comes out soon, because I have a definite movie craving that is not about to be sated anytime soon. I mean, the new Harry Potter is at least three months away…

And besides, I really wanted to see Wall-E. It’s going to be a while before I finish off this notebook, and until then I’m going to have to look into those robot eyes every day… Someone mentioned in class (which, after all, is where my notebook spends most of its time) that they heard it was a surprisingly anti-corporate movie. “An anti-corporate movie from Disney?” responded someone else. Sigh. Let them talk. Wall-E still stares at me with his giant puppy-bot eyes…