Wall-e Chaplin. This weekend I caught Wall-e. Aside from the clear achievements in animation (or whatever you call this now), it's a powerful piece of social satire—I think, a fitting bookend to Modern Times. In that film, 72 years ago, Charlie Chaplin warned of a world in which machines will crush humanity. In Wall-e, the job is accomplished. Humans, who have turned the earth into a huge toilet, have turned themselves into flaccid non-entities. And the one vestige of humanity survives miraculously inside...a machine. Pixar and Andrew Stanton deserve all the kudos they will get for this Bush-era-perfect film.