Short Takes

WALL-E Planet Earth is a smoky shade of decay, its cities a wonderland of trash and rubble tended to by a compact compactor who, 700 years after humans ruined and abandoned the planet, is kept company by the last surviving roach. WALL-E (a Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, voiced by Ben Burtt) is the sad creature charged with piling up all the detritus; he is Legend, and all he wants is someone to hold hands with, like they did in 1960s musicals. Then he is joined by EVE (an Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, voiced by Elissa Knight), who arrives in what looks like Boba Fett’s ship to scour the earth per her “directive” and ultimately, accidentally, provides the little dude with some company. Cobbled from so many familiar spare parts—from Star Wars to Buster Keaton to Tron to the Marx Brothers—the film feels, here and there, formulaic: Lonely boy and sexy girl meet cute, fall in love, save the planet. But such reverence for movie history in general and sci-fi in particular is vital to WALL-E’s story, because it’s what ultimately gives the film its wow factor and its weight—this reinvigoration of the past on the way to the future of filmmaking. Charlie Chaplin…in space, both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate. —Robert Wilonsky (Opens Friday)

A BEND IN THE RIVER While it’s neither a wallow in sensational cellblock horrors nor a Scared Straight-style sock in the gut, this FilmNashville documentary shot in 2006 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution offers quiet, solemn and persuasive evidence that prison is the last place on earth anyone wants to end up. And for those whose paths brought them to Riverbend—like the subjects of Andy van Roon and Jeffry Gordon’s film—at least there’s Project: New Beginning, a program that leads inmates through a curriculum of classes in finance, personal responsibility and dealing with authority figures in hopes of curbing recidivism rates on the outside. In well-spoken but at times cautious interviews—most elide the crime that got them behind bars, and the movie doesn’t ask—the program’s participants describe childhood brushes with drugs and other fateful missteps: Almost to a man, they can trace their jail time back to one bad decision that slammed the door shut on their future. But with the program’s help, some of the subjects have found their voices as rappers, artists and musicians along with new peace, and their testimony is lucid and frank. One sequence, in which an inmate known as Booker lays out a razor-sharp rap explaining how any street-corner Superfly already has the skills to run his own business, should be required viewing in any MBA program. “I feel charged up every time I visit those guys,” Gordon says. “Not because, yippee, I get to leave, but because I get so filled with hope.” He concedes that the movie is mostly talking heads, but so what: “I find what they’re saying really compelling.” The 7 p.m. screening June 26 at the Belcourt is a benefit for Project: New Beginning (projectnewbeginning.net): among the guests are program co-founder Larry Simpson, who appears on camera, and two of the film’s subjects, Reggie Williams and Farid. Tickets are $25. Click here for the expanded version of this story. —Jim Ridley

NOTE BY NOTE: THE MAKING OF STEINWAY L1037 Given rapt attention and care in the framing, there is no more engrossing subject than man at work. The proof, yet again, is in director Ben Niles’ chronicle of the production of a single Steinway concert grand—a 9-foot beast that requires a plank the length of an anaconda, a year of assembly, and a small army of blue-collar technicians whose skills are as minutely focused and compartmentalized as a safecracker’s. Niles gathers testimonials from a variety of pianists (from Hank Jones and Harry Connick Jr. to Lang Lang and Hélène Grimaud) to describe and demonstrate the variances of sound inherent to each Steinway, among the last of the handcrafted pianos. But they’re distractions from the drama in Steinway’s Queens factory, where a single slip of a “pizza wheel” wire stretcher or an imbalance of a few thousandths of an inch could ruin a $25,000 instrument. Niles and cinematographer Ben Wolf scrutinize each step as if it were Rififi’s climactic heist, offering moments of fixated strangeness and wonder—as when a burly Croatian “belly man” installs perfect rows of teensy little notches in the bridge, using a swift, unhesitating repetition that seems more magical than robotic. The movie may sell the Steinway supremacy a bit insistently—no wonder a film link turns up on the manufacturer’s website—but as a study of stubborn artisanal tradition in the Pro Tools age, Note by Note is a stirring symphony of specialized labor. —Jim Ridley (Note: Director Ben Niles and a Steinway Factory representative will attend the 7 p.m. screening July 2 at the Belcourt, and the evening will also feature a Steinway Concert Grand performance by pianist Marilyn Shields-Wiltsie, founding president of the Steinway Society of Nashville. Tickets are $12. The film closes July 3.)