I'm moving - and in answer to your next three questions, I don't know, no I'm not, and September 1st. This has kicked off a purge that will make all prior purges look like wussy little boy purges, a purge whose tally already rings five full contractor-grade garbage bags of stuff thrown away and two recycling bins; and this purge has only gotten started. The toys that I still own are now the survivors of a genocidal fire that has claimed fully 70% of their civilization, and makes tremble my books, DVDs, and comics, all of whom are also about to see Black Plague-level deaths. The short version: I (used to) have too much stuff.

Somewhere amid the rubbish, the bags upon bags of shattered CD-Rs, Episode I frisbees, and creased photographs of old girlfriends, are the VHS tapes. Lots and lots and lots of VHS tapes. They are the soul of the thing in a weird way - for the first time in my life, VHS tapes are beautiful. They are so goddamned odd-looking, the WALL-Es of home theatre, anachronous boxy-forms of pure functionality, before things had to be functional and pretty. (I hate Mac.) The tapes break at the drop of a hat (or a tape, down a flight of stairs, as at least one of my old Star Wars cassettes discovered today); they're also oddly indestructible in a way: I found a copy of Raiders with the back door broken clean off, which I had apparently continued to use faithfully for years. It still played fine, even this afternoon; I have factory-spec DVDs which lasted a tenth as long. Old VHS doesn't actually look too bad on the Bravia, and the warble of electronic noise is comforting and serene once worries about reference quality have been banished from one's head. And yeah, if I may indulge in being the last person to jump on the analogue bandwagon, there's something about the trundling hum of a pair of reels being slowly revolved while their thread of mylar slowly unveils its electrons that goes straight down to the heart of me. At the end of it all, film fetishism is not for me - I was a VHS baby. Streamers of celluloid run pale next to the taste sensations of that first Canon VHS video camera, whose recording deck hung saddle-bag like at my side while the camera itself had to be supported (with difficulty) with the other hand; the floor-to-ceiling library of tapes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (commercials painstakingly edited out); the beaten-up copy of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves that was, in fact, my first home video purchase. (I do not have the heart to replace it.) I have the theatrical cut of The Phantom Menace in VHS only; it will never exist in any other medium. I have decks of Tom Snyder and Letterman and Bob Ross; an episode of Young Indiana Jones where Old Indy still appears; two blissful camcorder hours on the back lot of Universal Studios in 1993. It's all wreckage, but it's still here.

Inevitably, this brings us to WALL-E. Officially, I no longer need to review films, because the Village Voice does it for me. (Other recent instances of "they said it better than I could say it myself" include The Last Mistress and Indy IV.). Unofficially, WALL-E is so much about
1) how obsolescence is a lie;
2) great, great, great movies;
3) love. Stupid, gorgeous, I-wanted-someone-to-hold-my-hand-and-now-she's-doing-it, love. And that's all I'll ever need from it, or anything else.