At every turn, Pixar messed up the marketing of their new movie. It has a hard to spell name, no furry characters, not nearly enough dialogue (the first 45 minutes is almost silent), no nasty (but ultimately ridiculous) bad guy, hardly any violence and very little slapstick. Wall-e didn’t get a huge Hollywood PR campaign or even a lot of promotion, it doesn’t feature any hot stars and as far as I can tell, the merchandising options are quite limited. ...And yet, instead, they make a great movie. A movie for the ages. A film, not 90 minutes of commerce.

Maybe you've seen this short film. The first thing that made me smile was how willing Caine was to do his art regardless of how the world responded (it didn't). Caine didn't care. The goal wasn't to be accepted, the goal was to do it right. The second extraordinary thing is easy to miss. Around 3:30, you learn Caine's folk-arithmetic trick of using square roots to validate the PIN numbers on each fun pass. Extraordinary.