There’s a way to measure how well an animated film takes over your imagination. Do you forget, during the movie, that you’re even watching animation? Do the textures and settings, the fantasy-land characters, become — for lack of a better word — real? That, or something close to it, is what happened to me during WALL-E, the puckishly inventive, altogether marvelous new digitally animated feature from Pixar. The movie sets us down in a rusty, postapocalyptic urban desert, all glaring sun and junk-heap skyscrapers, where the only living thing, or at least the only thing that moves, is WALL-E, a cute, squat robot with droopy binocular eyes whose name stands for Waste Allocation Load-Lifter Earth-Class. That’s a very fancy way of saying that WALL-E is a roving trash compactor — and, in fact, he’s the last of his breed. Hundreds of years after humans fled the earth, he’s still doing what he’s been built to do, molding scrap metal into bricks and piling them into neat towers.

For a while, WALL-E is nearly wordless, and the director, Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), stages the early scenes with a gentle, unhurried mystery that is unabashedly Spielbergian. He forges a world that’s casually amazing in its tactile metallic grandeur. In Toy Story, computer animation perfectly reproduced the waxy sheen of plastic playthings, and here, in a comparable way, you feel as if you could reach out and touch all the metal detritus. As a character, WALL-E is like R2-D2 gone Charlie Chaplin in the land of The Road Warrior. Almost everything he does is something he’s been programmed to do, but after centuries he’s developed stubborn wisps of individuality, like his penchant for plopping in a scratchy videotape of the 1969 Hollywood version of Hello, Dolly! WALL-E uses several of that film’s musical numbers (in particular, the gorgeous ”It Only Takes a Moment”) in a way that’s at once tenderly romantic and almost Kubrickishly eerie.

After a while, a spaceship lands, and WALL-E meets EVE, a frictionless white pod with cathode-ray eyes who’s been sent to earth to search for organic life. (Her name stands for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator.) These two don’t talk, exactly, but they hold hands and burble each other’s names. It’s love at first digital bleep. WALL-E is a movie you want to discover, but without giving too much of it away, I’ll just say that the early ‘’silent movie” section, quietly enticing as it is, is merely the prelude to an eye-boggling future-shock adventure. WALL-E himself is the movie’s mascot and unlikely hero; it’s up to him to save a spacebound colony of humans who’ve ”evolved” into hilariously infantile technology-junkie couch potatoes. Yet even as the movie turns pointedly, and resonantly, satirical, it never loses its heart. I’m not sure I’d trust anyone, kid or adult, who didn’t get a bit of a lump in the throat by the end of WALL-E, a film that brings off what the best (and only the best) Pixar films have: It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own. A

Abel Ferrara, whose past films includes the anguished cult classic “Bad Lieutenant,” premiered his documentary on New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel at the Cannes film festival Friday.To make “Chelsea on the Rocks” he even moved in to the hotel whose residents have included scores of artists and writers such as Bob Dylan, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Sid Vicious.

Actor Jamie Burke, who plays Vicious in a brief fictionalised recreation of his turbulent stay, said the hotel is “an artistic tornado of death and destruction and love and broken dreams.”

The recreation centres on the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, the Sex Pistol singer’s girlfriend, in one of the hotel rooms.

Ferrara’s film interviews past and present residents including actors Ethan Hawke and Dennis Hopper, cartoonist Robert Crumb, and film-maker Milos Forman as well as the hotel’s long-time manager Stanley Bard.

Bard encouraged artists to move in to the hotel’s apartments and often let them go for long periods without paying rent if they were struggling financially.

But the hotel’s new management is trying to oust the long-term residents and turn the Chelsea into an upmarket hotel, according to Bard.

Ferrara has made a series of strange, off-kilter movies since his 1979 debut with the slasher film “The Driller Killer,” including “King of New York” with Christopher Walken, “Bad Lieutenant” with Harvey Keitel and “Snake Eyes” with Madonna.

Aiming for the summer blockbuster status it will surely achieve, the fourth Indiana Jones movie piles the action on.

“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” hangs nearly non-stop chase and fight scenes from the most skeletal of plots. A rollercoaster doesn’t have a plot either and that’s essentially what the fourth Indiana Jones film is.

Rather than mess with success, director Steven Spielberg and co-writer, co-executive producer George Lucas follow their Indiana Jones blueprints precisely. For instance, “Crystal Skull” replaces the Holy Grail-hunting Nazis of 1989’s “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” with America’s Cold War foes, the Soviet Communists.

The year is 1957 and the Russians, led by imperious KGB agent Irina Spalko, tenaciously track Jones and his new, young sidekick, Mutt Williams. As the sword-wielding Spalko, Cate Blanchett lords it over men under her command and her captives, which, at one time or another, include Jones and Williams.

Harrison Ford, looking older yet fit and ready for more adventure, returns as Jones. In the acting department, Ford doesn’t do anything fancy. His character is all about getting the job done. There’s no emoting and only the briefest acknowledgement of the dearly departed. Which is to be expected. The movie’s incessant action doesn’t leave much time for acting.

Shia LeBeouf, like some teen idol riding shotgun with John Wayne in a vintage western, joins the 65-year-old Ford in “Crystal Skull” for riddle solving, tomb raiding and epic chases. LeBeouf, resembling Marlon Brando in the 1953 motorcycle gang drama, “The Wild One,” makes his entrance on two wheels. He provides weak comic relief, an excuse to fill the soundtrack with ’50s rock ’n’ roll and a link to Jones’ past that will come as no surprise anyone.

Blanchett, Oscar-nominated actress though she is, doesn’t make her KGB agent more than a cartoon character. But there’s no need to be flexing blue-chip thespian skills. The actress’ great cheek bones and cool, cruel eyes will suffice. Again, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” ain’t Shakespeare.

The same applies to Oscar-nominated actor John Hurt’s co-starring role as Professor Oxley. A friend of Jones, Oxley has gotten himself into historic trouble in Peru thanks to his quest for the legendary Crystal Skull of Akator.

It’s easy to accuse “Crystal Skull” principals Spielberg and Lucas of a lack of imagination. Despite a change of accents, the movie’s villains are an encore of earlier bad guys. Among the action scenes, for example, there’s nothing new about helpless characters plunging over waterfalls. And despite a relocation to the Peruvian jungle, the collapsing ruins there are old hat, too.

But this new Indiana Jones episode, filmed from a story by Lucas and Jeff Nathanson and screenplay by David Koepp, compensates for lack of imagination through bigger, louder, even more lavish execution. The filmmakers give the series’ followers exactly what they’d given them before, but this time the same old Indiana

Dancing with the Stars castoff Shannon Elizabeth probably left about one week too soon but she made the most of her time on the show, snagging a red-hot romance with hunky professional dancer Derek Hough and raising her profile again just a bit. That has landed her a sexy cover on Maxim magazine

Nineties heartthrob Sandra Bullock has narrowly escaped death after her car was hit by a drug-crazed female driver.

The drug in question is the one which is responsible for more deaths each year than cocaine, heroin and crack combined.

It is the one which is smelt on the breath of 40% of reported violent criminals, 78% of assaulters and 88% of criminal damagers.

Worst of all, it is the drug most responsible for the current record-breaking human-population on earth.

It’s alcohol - obviously.

Sandra Bullock and her husband, Jesse James (a celebrity in his own right but, as you’ll no doubt understand, not quite worthy of a mention in the headline), being driven by 55-year-old Mark Hussey (not a chance) were hit by a drunk driver in Gloucester, Mass., on Friday evening.

According to People, the driver of the offending vehicle has been identified by local cops as Lucille P. Gatchell, a 64 year old from Gloucester.

Police said Lucille’s gray Subaru station wagon jumped lanes on East Main Street and crashed into the front end of their private car but, staying true to the celebrity-car-crash form-guide, not a sausage was injured.

Luckily Hussey had been driving at just 20 mph at the time. And we all know what would have happened if they’d been traveling at double that speed!

(Now, at this point, we have the choice of two comedy avenues to skip down; the first being a reference to that girl in the ‘if you hit me at 40 mph I’ll get mangled by a tree, but if you hit me at 30mph I’ll just piss myself a little’ adverts. And second, of course, is the ‘it would trigger a bomb that Dennis Hopper will explode if you go under a certain speed’ avenue)

(Both have their merits, but have been done and redone over the last 24 hours by publications less reputable than this, and we can’t be seen – at least – to be delving to their level, so rather than wasting your time we’ll just leave you with the following dilemma, before hurriedly moving on: If you were driving the Speed bus and that girl from the advert walked in the road, would you leave her wetting herself, or holding up that tree? It may happen one day)

The real star of this whole shebang, however, is, without a shadow of a doubt, Gloucester Police Lt. Gerry Cook, who commented:

It’s unfortunate, but it shows you that no one is immune from drunk drivers, no matter how famous you are.

Now that man does deserve a mention in the headline! Finally someone is brave enough to stand up to the brainwashed masses who believe celebrities harbour special powers making it impossible for drunk drivers to collide with them.

You idiots! Wake up and smell the reality!

Lt. Cook continued:

They were shaken up, needless to say, But they were fine – he was hugging her. Jess and Sandra were hugging. They said they were fine, they didn’t need medical attention. There were quite a few people snapping pictures of them…”

Lucille P. Gatchell was given a field sobriety test by officers. She blew a .20 on the breathalyzer (two and a half times the legal limit). She was arrested and booked for driving under the influence of alcohol and failure to stay in marked lanes.

She was later released on her own recognizance (recognizance: n. an obligation of record that is entered into before a court or magistrate, containing a condition to perform a particular act, such as making a court appearance) and shall be arraigned (arraigned: tr.v. to call (an accused person) before a court to answer the charge made against him or her by indictment, information, or complaint) on the charges this (this: pron. used to refer to the person or thing present, nearby, or just mentioned) coming Tuesday.